by Rosa Liksom
The old woman set the table with a bowl of buckwheat porridge, a pot of steaming fatty borscht, and in front of the man a glass dish of smetana and a handsome bottle of vodka. The girl drank tea, the old woman chai. The man wiped sweat from his brow, gobbling up the smetana and, belching with satisfaction, poured another glass of vodka.
‘Let’s drink to the women of the world. A toast to the wisdom of the old, the intelligence of the heart, and the beauty of the young, to your friendship, dear granny, and to the silver-sided gudgeon!’
After the toast, the man wolfed down some black bread he’d spread with mustard, salt and pepper. He filled his vodka glass and stood up for a moment.
‘Many a citizen has rushed ahead only to end up waiting in some awful place, so let’s not rush. Let’s enjoy each other’s warmth, enjoy this moment.’
When it was time to leave, the man fished a slim Chinese flashlight and twenty-five roubles out of his pocket and handed them to the old woman. She nodded, satisfied, and followed them to the door. The man and the girl stepped out of the steamy hot kitchen into a fresh, frosty morning that lashed their faces like a whip.
The man wrestled the wheel of the Pobeda with heavy hands. On a small straight stretch his head knocked against the steering wheel. The girl suggested that she drive.
Gradually the belly-down, snow-filled row by row of fields changed to the notched beam by beam of a village and the village to a slushy suburb, log houses and prefab highrises side by side. The gardens and potato patches of the log houses stretched as far as the city in one direction and back to the forests and fields in the other. Then the suburb changed street by street into the muddy built-up city of Novosibirsk.
Carp were hung to dry outside the highrise windows. Grey pigeons padded along the sills, back from their winter vacations.
The man gulped back his hangover, which the glasses of vodka hadn’t managed to displace. He was shaking all over, his adam’s apple shuddering.
‘If I could just have a drink from a pickle jar, everything would be all right. Soothe my heart.’
His face was red and he looked so grave that the girl couldn’t bear it and turned her head away.
He asked her to stop at a corner where a blue tanker truck was parked.
‘I’m feeling so awful that I have to stop here and get out.’
He jumped quickly out of the car, took an empty ten-litre can out of the trunk, and went to fill it from the truck container, which had the word KVAS painted in pretty black letters on its side. When he came back to the car with the can under his arm he was humming cheerfully.
‘Toothache.’
He sipped straight from the can, a hopeful look on his face. The sweet smell of kvas pervaded the whole car.
‘No more toothache.’
A Gagarin smile spread across his face.
‘When I fell in love with Katinka, I didn’t have a single kopeck. I’d been flat broke for months, but life still had flavour, and I had plenty of food, pussy and vodka. Then there Katinka was, at the bread-shop door, and I was so drunk that I asked her to come and see me. That’s when the trouble started. Now I was a fellow who had a lady visitor coming, or at least some sort of whore, a fellow who didn’t have any money for bubliks or tea or champagne. So I rolled up my sleeves and got humming. First I asked my next-door neighbour Kolya if he’d loan me five roubles. All he had was three and he needed them himself, he honked. I tripped over to the corner room, to Vovka’s place, maybe he had a rouble or two, but the old boozer was completely broke. I went downstairs to where Sergei lived and begged him for a fiver. I can give you a rouble, he said. So on I went, from door to door. Went through all my friends and enemies, and the next week I had a pile of it, twenty-six roubles and three kopecks. I could feel it all the way down to my cock. Katinka came worming her way in. I offered her champagne and I drank a few bottles of vodka. Everything was set. When it was time to go to bed, I kidded around, shy, undemanding. I got out the camp-bed and made myself a little nest, offered Katinka my bed. And then what happened? I stretched out, my head full of nothing but pussy, and Katinka grabs hold of my cock so hard the camp-bed went crashing. She glues her sweaty cunt to my dick and I let it go. And just as the whole thing’s almost over she coughs up something about marriage. There I am in an ecstasy of cunt, and I say, Why not?’
He rubbed a finger over his swollen lips.
‘That’s not what happened. But it could have.’
They found the crooked-nosed owner of the Pobeda from a phone number kiosk squeezed between two co-op kiosks. The old man was wrapped in a frayed cotton jacket and had arms so long that they reached to his knees. The two men spoke for a moment in murmurs, then he invited them to eat.
They walked shivering to a local communal cafeteria. A sign drooped from the door: THIS FACILITY IS CLOSED. They went inside.
A greasy smell drifted from the industrial-looking kitchen. The dining room was wide and high and its utilitarian furniture was functionally arranged. There were long tables in front of the windows with long benches along either side. They went to the end of the queue that had formed at the food counter. On the main wall of the dining room was a fair reproduction of Ilya Repin’s painting Reply of the Zaporozhian Cossacks to Sultan Mehmed. At the place on the painting where the angry letter is being written someone had used a ball-point pen to scrawl the words: To Stalin. A fan rattled against the back wall; under it was the carcass of a sofa covered in flowered oilcloth.
The girl chose a glass of thick tomato juice and garlic herring from the case and black bread from the counter. She scooped out a bowl of thin peasant stew with sharp bits of bone floating in it from a large pot, carried it to a table on a slimy tray, sat down and tasted the herring, but it was so heavily salted that she left it uneaten. The man slurped his soup with elaborate relish, the crooked-nosed man ate his buckwheat porridge and beets unobtrusively. When they’d finished eating, the crooked-nosed man scratched his bald head doubtfully.
‘As our district professional council representative used to say in times like this, when a gypsy dreams about a pudding, he doesn’t have a spoon, so he goes to bed with a spoon in his hand, and then the pudding’s gone.’
The girl’s travelling companion gave a bored sigh.
‘By which he only meant that history dictates that happiness will eventually come to us either way.’
Her companion spat lazily on the floor.
‘Women are afraid of snakes, Finns are afraid of Russians, Russians are afraid of Jews, and Jews …’
Her companion pressed his lips together scornfully, got up from the table, and walked calmly out of the cafeteria with a slight bounce in his step.
‘That fellow’s a fast talker. A born flesh peddler,’ the crooked-nosed man said, startled and frightened. Then he gave a long, resigned sigh. ‘If I’d known that, I wouldn’t have given him my car.’
The girl handed twenty-five of her companion’s roubles to the crooked-nosed man. He nodded gratefully and quickly slipped the banknotes into the pocket of his quilt jacket. She got up and hurried out.
The light from a CCCP sign perched on the roof of a government building on the main street sliced through the darkness of the night. The man and the girl trudged to the station, gloomy and exhausted. It wasn’t until she heard the whistle of the engines and saw the station yard with its old engines lying forever dead that her mood lightened. The familiar train, the sight of the familiar snouts of stray dogs the size of foals with their tangled coats cheered the man up as well. They stopped at the platform and listened to the train of the tsars snuffling contentedly on its tracks. As they stepped into the compartment the man whistled and sang, ‘Oh Russian land! Forget your lost glory, your flag torn … How does it go again? … Never mind!’
He watched her movements. He had a broad, malicious grin on his face.
‘Thinking about what just happened? That was a rotten-lunged unscrupulous Jewish magpie. I won’t sit at the same table with a Jew because the
Jews killed the Virgin Mary.’
His words made her heart knock in her chest. She counted in her mind: one, two, three … nine … twelve … until she calmed herself. The engine gave a howl and the train jerked into motion.
The plastic speakers start to play Shostakovich’s Seventh Symphony and Novosibirsk is left behind. The noise of suburbs under construction, the smooth, sunny sky. Novosibirsk, the stench of rotting steel pushing in through the open compartment windows, left behind. The faint scent of pale carnations, the sturdy aroma of garlic and the acrid stink of the sweat of forced labour, left behind. Novosibirsk, mechanics, miners, industrial city of lost dreams watched over by sooty, modern, weather-maimed suburbs, the squalid carcasses of thousands of prefab buildings are left behind. The creaking gates, the lights of blind factories sweating in forty-below weather, the corpses of tortured cats near the hotel, the felt boots and brown wool trousers, the consumer cooperatives, the exhausted land, Novosibirsk is left behind. And the industrial area changes to a suburb eaten away by air pollution. Light, bright light, and the suburb changes to something else, light, darkness, a goods train rushing past, long as the sleepless night, and light, the light of a bright Siberian sky, and housing schemes, suburbs, housing schemes, in ever-thicker clusters – this is still Novosibirsk. Trucks on an unmade road, a horse and a hayrack, the Siberian taiga with a red mist hovering over it. The forest rushing wildly past, solitary, a nineteen-storey building surrounded by ravaged fields under drifts of snow. Cascading forest. This is no longer Novosibirsk. A hill, a valley, a thicket. The train shoots towards the unknown tundra and Novosibirsk collapses in a heap of stones in the distance. The train dives into nature, throbs across the snowy, empty land.
THE MORNING LIGHT WOKE HER. The man handed her a glass of tea, put a large lump of sugar in his mouth and stirred his tea with the paper-light aluminium spoon, blowing on it for a long time before taking a slurp. She looked at the landscape outside the window for a moment. There was a little log cabin painted blue, sheltered by a lone rowan tree. In front of it stood an old man with an iron bar in his hand.
‘I belong to the world socialist camp. You don’t. Guys like me have been in all the camps: Pioneer camps, military camps, vacation camps, work camps. They sent me on a shovel crew when I was just a boy; I requisitioned a few cement mixers and carried them off with me. I knew very well that I’d get irons around my neck for it, but still … The worst part was before I got caught, waiting for it to happen. It was like being between Satan’s cogwheels. Then when the worst happens you just think, that’s life. You won’t die of hunger or dropsy. The thing I remember most about all of it is the revolting smell of rotten fish.’
The cold-dimmed dawn painted the ice on a snaking little stream golden yellow. A thick mist smoked among the thickets along the shore. The frosted limbs of the willows reached delicately towards the brightly tinted purple sky. A white-flanked deer ran out of the fog. Its little tail wagged.
‘My son is a born traitor. A boy ought to have heroes like the cosmonaut Aleksei Leonov or General Karbishev, the one the Nazis froze to death. But no. He has dreams of the Yazovists, wants to move to East Germany as soon as he can get enough dollars together from his stints as an errand boy to apply for a passport.’
The man seemed to collapse in a heap. A deep gloom settled over the train compartment.
‘I wouldn’t move to the other side if they paid me a thousand dollars. It’d be just like moving a bird from one cage to another. I love this country. America is a God-forsaken dump.’
The sun sat balanced atop the airy forest landscape. The gloom in the compartment dispersed.
‘At home in Moscow I read the newspaper out loud to Katinka and in Ulan Bator I read it to my workmates. Is it all right if I read? It’s a comfort to me. However slight.’
She nodded.
‘Pile-up on Moscow ring road – five dead and twenty injured; coal mine explosion in Ukraine – three hundred dead; oil rig failure in Chelyabinsk – fifteen hundred reindeer drowned in oil; funicular crumbles in Georgia – thirty-four people dead; another sunk submarine in the Arctic Ocean – seventy-one sailors dead; boiler explosion in an old folks’ home – one hundred and twenty-seven dead; radiator rupture in a kindergarten – forty-four children sprayed with boiling water; passenger boat sunk in the Black Sea – two hundred and six passengers drowned; chemical plant cancels work contract – an entire town wiped off the map; hydro-electric dam collapses in Karelia – thirteen villages underwater and seven hundred people drowned; if a power plant were to break down, a million people would die of radiation sickness.’
He paused and waited.
Straightened his back, turned the page, and took a breath.
‘Soviet pilots lost five cruise missiles on a test flight over Sahkalin Island. That’s what it actually says here.’
He flung the paper under his bed and examined the window frame for a long time.
‘I was in school, maybe in the sixth year. I had a classmate named Grigor Mityakovich Kozinichev. And then there was this talentless teacher, Yarek Koncharov Ust-Kut. Comrade Ust-Kut.’ He burst out laughing. ‘What kind of a name is that? We laughed about it even then. For some reason this Comrade Ust-Kut hated Grigor. Tormented him almost every day. Sent him to the front of the class, cuffed his ears and face, yelled at him, called him stupid. We’d think, Not again! And then he would do it again. But one day Grigor grabbed the pointer and swung it at Comrade Ust-Kut’s face, then threw it on the floor and ran out of the door. This caused quite an uproar. The janitor came in, the principal and the other teachers all agog. The stupid prick just had a little scratch next to his nose and the lesson continued. Then, just before the minute hand clicked to breaktime, the door opened and there stood Grigor Mityakovich Kozinichev in the doorway, and he had a real gun in his hand. He aimed it at Comrade Ust-Kut, and when the comrade realised what was happening, he started to squeal like a pig. Then Grigor shot him. The blood flowed and the creep died. Grigor could very well have shot me or any prick there who’d been bullying him the whole year. But no. He spared us. Back then I didn’t understand yet that the only kind of people you should kill are the ones who are afraid of death. Otherwise you’re just doing them a favour.’
The train crawled forward, as if asking pardon. The sun rose whole in the milk-white sky and lit up the pure white snow. It continued proud for several hours, then was covered by a black darkness for a moment. Siberia disappeared outside the window, then slipped back before anyone could even notice. A wall of forest grew, black and frightening, right next to the tracks. When it had finished, a broad view opened up as far as the river. On the open sea of snow were three houses with a smoke sauna in front of them gushing black smoke. Outside the sauna, surrounded by a cloud of steam, stood a fat naked woman, red and barefoot. The man offered the girl some Pushkin chocolate. It was dark and peppery.
He glanced out of the window and caught a glimpse of the woman.
‘Weak design, but well sewn together.’
The girl smudged and scribbled for a long time before she drew the Siberian village in its endless landscape. The man stared at her, his mouth slightly open.
‘This fellow named Kolya had a joke he used to tell: Guys like us in the army grow iron jaws, iron cheekbones, and an iron will. But the welds between them are such crap that when we get back to civilian life the whole contraption falls apart until the only thing that’ll help is a metre and a half of dirt.’
He broke into such a chuckle at this that he had to wipe his eyes with his sleeve. He knelt on the floor, picked the torn newspaper up from under his bunk, folded it neatly, and slipped it under his mattress.
‘This other fellow named Kolya whose hopes hadn’t come to fruition painted a red sign with white lettering that asked: What’s taking our happy future so long? He took the sign with him and stood on Red Square. He managed to stand there for about three minutes before the militia showed up and took him away. They slapped a twenty-six-year sent
ence on him, the same time our forefathers spent in the army. And he lost his citizenship rights for five years. What’s taking our happy future so long! Even the pigeons in Red Square laughed at that.’
A fire-red afternoon sun spread over the wind-whipped sky. Behind it dripped vast sheets of sleet. The girl rummaged in her knapsack, the man set the table for dinner. They ate slowly and silently, drinking well-steeped tea – black, Indian Elephant tea she’d bought at the foreign exchange shop. After the meal the man would have liked to talk but she wanted to be quiet. He took his knife out from under his pillow and started to scratch the back of his ear with it. She rested with her eyes closed. And that’s how they travelled that whole long twilit evening, each of them sleeping and waking in their own time. She was with Mitka in his room. A Jefferson Airplane song wobbled out from the little blue record player, Mitka flipped through an encyclopaedia from the early part of the century, she lounged on the bed and copied out ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs, Zahar was in the kitchen humming an old Russian romance and peeling potatoes, and Irina was talking very quietly with Julia in the living room.
The swampy landscape silently turned to flat, level land – broken ruins of foundations buried under Siberian snow, caved-in wells, nest boxes hanging from birch trunks, villages where the dead eyes of abandoned houses stared back at the train. A caterpillar-tracked truck extinguished in a pile of snow, a horse wading through a field, its back sagging like an old sofa, pulling a feed rack behind it with two buzzards balanced there instead of hay, stiff with cold, their legs tied together.