by Rosa Liksom
‘My friend, do you know what today is? It’s Cosmonautics Day. And that’s not all. Today is both Cosmonautics Day and the day that our great leader strode into heaven. The Fifth of April. All of us remember that it was the Fifth of April 1953 … no wait, it was the Fifth of March … when Generalissimo Josif Vissarionovich Stalin’s valiant heart made such a fierce protest that only hours later the funerary machine roared into motion. Josif Vissarionovich, that great engineer on the train of history, was a man of such terrible and steely wisdom that he still terrifies. Let’s celebrate Stalin’s death, my girl, even if we are a month late.’
He started furiously rummaging in his bag, digging around and trying to calm himself.
‘It must be here somewhere, it must be. It’s a bottle of vodka, not a needle, and we’re not in a haystack.’
He didn’t find the bottle in his bag. It was under his mattress.
He splashed a generous shot into both tea glasses, pushed her glass in front of her, and lifted his own.
‘Let’s drink to cosmonautics.’
He filled his glass again.
‘Another toast, to the wonderful young woman in our compartment, and to all the other mummified women of Finland. To beauty.’
He filled his glass again and put an official Soviet look on his face.
‘This next toast is to that rabble-rouser, that great figure of world history, the Soviet Union’s great departed leader, the iron papa, the bank robber of Tblisi, the Georgian Jew and the king of the cut-throats, Josif Vissarionovich Stalin.’
He tipped his glass and emptied it, took a bite of black bread, and filled his glass again.
‘Let’s make another toast. Let’s raise our glasses again to the Man of Steel. Thank you Josif Vissarionovich Stalin for making the Soviet Union a strong industrial superpower, for sustaining hope for a better tomorrow and a gradual lessening of human suffering. With a stick in the eye for those who remember the past, and in both eyes for those who forget it … And a toast to General Zhokov, the king of Berlin. Without him the Nazis would have turned Moscow into a lit-up artificial lake and purged the earth of Slavs and other unhygienic peoples, including the Finns.’
He tipped his glass, emptied it, and splashed in one more dribble of vodka.
‘The Jews poured poison in the Great Leader’s mouth, and although I hate the Jews, I’ll raise a toast to them for that beautiful gesture.’
He drank his glass to the bottom and tossed a weightless grin at the window.
‘I remember very well the day that butcher and punisher of the peasants died. I was with Petya in the third year. In school number five. There was no number one or number four. School number one had caved in in the middle of the school day and they stopped building number four before it was finished. One morning when we got to school, our teacher, Valentina Zaitseva, said that the father of all the people was sick. That information didn’t really touch a child’s heart. The next morning the teacher told us that the Generalissimo was lying unconscious and the doctors said there was very little hope for him. So what? We went on playing. On the third morning she sobbed and said that Papa was dead. Some bright mind asked what he had died of. She answered that when a person holds onto life too fiercely his breathing will stop and he’ll die of suffocation … I walked home with Petya, our arms around each other’s necks, the factory whistles howling like ships in distress, some of the men on the street crying, others smiling. When I got home there was something odd about my grandfather, something naked and strange. I looked at him for a long time before I realised that the southern whiskers were missing from his fat upper lip. Now a new life begins, he said, and gave us some bubliks. He was a Party member and one of his favourite sayings was that during Stalin’s time this country was the most dangerous, unhealthy place in the world for a communist to live.’
He rubbed his chin for a moment. ‘There are thousands and thousands of truths. Every fellow has his own. How many times have I cursed this country, but where would I be without it? I love this country.’
The acrid smell of kerosene floated through the compartment. It came from the full vodka glass trembling on the table in rhythm to the rumble of the train. The girl pushed it aside. The man followed the jiggling glass with his eyes.
‘Foreigner, you offend me deeply when you don’t drink with me.’
He bit off a piece of pickle and stared at her with a cutting look in his eyes. She scowled at him and turned her gaze towards the floor.
‘My mother always gave me vodka when I was sick. I was used to the taste of vodka when I was still a baby. I don’t drink because I’m unhappy or because I want to be even more unhappy. I drink because the serpent inside me is shouting for more vodka.’
They sat in thought, not looking at each other. The girl thought about her father and the day she told him she was going to study in Moscow. He had looked at her for a long time with a frightened expression on his face, and then a tear had slid down his cheek. He got blind drunk, barricaded himself in his Lada, and insisted she let him take her to the station.
‘I’ve been sitting here thinking, I wonder if God is Russian. If he is, then that would mean Jesus was Russian, too, because he’s God’s son. And what about Mary? How do you count her? Maybe there weren’t really any Russians before Ivan the Terrible. But when he took up the sabre, heads started to roll. The people were displaced, exiled, destroyed. It’s God’s commandment, roared Uncle Ivan. He backed everything up with God, the fox. He even established the old-time KGB to take care of his purges. Then came Peter the Great who wanted to make us Europeans and built St Petersburg with slave labour. To please you Finns! He licked your arses. A pansy. After that came the German princess, Catherine the Great. That hag had a cunt as big as a wash tub, made Potemkin fuck her, ’cause she heard he was hung like an aubergine. There’s no triumph of reason in Russian history. And what about Nicholas the First? Gave every slob a couple of hundred lashes, and a thousand runs through the gauntlet just to be on the safe side. A lot of them didn’t live through that hell. We’ve always known the noble art of torture.’
He pressed his head against the cold glass of the window and shut his eyes. She thought for a moment that he’d fallen asleep, but he soon opened them again. A slash of orange sky flashed in the window. He looked at her tenderly.
‘It’s time, high time, Ivan the Terrible said, and gave the order to build the Trans-Siberian railway. Or was that Alexander the Second? Without this damned railway I could be lying around in Moscow with my honeybun in my arms. They made the railway like this to torture the poor. It could head straight to its destination in one go, but no, they have to take a piss at every godforsaken village and there are plenty of them in the Soviet countries. But on the other hand, what do I care? It could be worse. After all, we have plenty of time.’
He got up from the bed with a look of apathy on his face. He groaned, shyly put on some lighter clothes, did a couple of drunken calisthenics, sat down on the edge of the bed, and stared at the floor.
‘I work for the Mongols, bringing some good to a country where my people don’t live. It’s not snow that falls in Mongolia, it’s gravel. There are no thick forests there like we have, not a single mushroom or berry. Last year this thing happened on the job site that made every man there shit his pants. There was a comrade – let’s call him Kolya. He was a shithead, but one of us. And then a herd of those mongoloids came to the site and claimed that Kolya had knifed one of them. We told ’em, Get out of here, Russians don’t knife people. When we got to the site the next morning there was a wooden cross at the gate stuck into the ground the wrong way. That was neither here nor there, but on that cross hung Kolya, with his head hanging down. They had crucified him and poured hot tin down his throat. That’s the kind of friends those Mongols are. Their souls are as dirty as ours, though not as sorrowful.’
The train switched gears with a jerk and stopped as if it had hit a wall. They were in Achinsk. Arisa shouted that the train would be st
opping for two hours. The man didn’t want to get off – the fresh air would just clear his head.
The girl jumped onto the platform and headed into a town dozing through its evening chores. She walked along the lifeless boulevard towards the town centre. A heavy sleet was falling. The city was dim and shapeless, damp, silver-grey, the white moon peeping out from a straggling carpet of curly clouds that hung over the colourful houses. She stopped to look in a delicatessen display window. It was like something by Rodchenko, the packages of vermicelli lunging for the sky like lightning. She felt something warm on her foot. A small stray dog was peeing on her shoe.
The dog looked at her with sweet button eyes and barked, revealing a gold tooth. It took a few steps, then stopped and stared at her. She could see that it wanted her to follow.
They walked along the deserted street. She couldn’t hear the sound of her own footsteps though the sleet was quickly changing to a snowfall that made its way lazily along Petrovskiy Boulevard, turned into a narrow side street, lost its strength as it reached a corner bread shop, and dried up. The cold tightened around her. The dog stopped and stood at a cellar window. The window opened and she heard a raspy voice.
‘How many?’
She thought for a moment.
‘You want two? Give Sharik three roubles.’
She took a banknote out of her pocket and, after a moment’s hesitation, handed it to the dog. The dog snapped the note up in its mouth and slipped quickly in through the window. A moment later two unlabelled liquor bottles and a quarter-rouble coin appeared on the windowsill. She picked them up, thanked the empty space, and walked along the clinking, snowy asphalt back to the train. When she got there, she handed the bottles to her startled companion.
He put the bottles into a special vodka compartment in his bag, humming, and went to sleep. When he’d slept off the worst of his blind drunk, he started to arrange some supper on the table.
After they’d enjoyed a long, lazy meal, he opened the compartment door.
‘Let the world in.’
He rubbed his temples and pinched his earlobes. Though she was tired, the girl worked on a sketch of the Siberian colonial town.
He wanted to see the drawing. He looked at it for a long time.
‘This is nothing,’ he said, tossing it back to her. ‘You don’t have any imagination, my girl. First you should draw a little river and then a pretty little bridge going over it. Over the bridge, on the other side of the river, you should draw a path that disappears into the tall grass, then a meadow beyond that, and then a forest. Along the edge of the forest you draw the glowing embers of a spent campfire. And last of all you streak the horizon with the last rays of sunset. That’s the kind of picture I could put up on the barracks wall.’
KRASNOYARSK LOOKED ENORMOUS as they approached from the west. It spread out over the fields, trees, and ravines. It dried up the lakes and whittled the Ice Age stones smooth as it headed east. It tore villages to the ground and begat concrete skyscrapers. The forest of plump trees was logged off, the logged-off land became a construction site, the construction site a suburb, and the suburb fused with the city.
An icy wind raced over the low land, whirled and sent the smoke from the factory chimneys flying. The tracks branched off ever more thickly. The train jerked softly at the switches, the carriage couplings squeaked, the whole machine screeched. Finally a long, gentle braking. They were in Krasnoyarsk, a closed city, a centre of Soviet arms manufacture. It started to snow. Women in grey felt boots stopped their work cleaning the tracks and stared at the train arriving from far-off Moscow. They heard Arisa’s voice in the corridor.
‘No one gets off at this station!’
‘A peculiar city,’ the man said. ‘A prison for experts. But they do get a vacation.’
The compartment door opened. A woman the size of a newspaper stand whom the girl had never seen before glanced at her angrily and then huffed at the man.
‘I’ve been listening to your disgusting talk day after day. You belong in a mental hospital.’
The man looked out the window and puckered his chin.
The woman laughed scornfully. ‘I…’
‘Shut your trap, lard factory!’
The woman jumped in fright and took a step backwards. ‘Shame on you!’ she said.
The girl escaped past her into the corridor. The white curtains of the corridor window fluttered. The man pushed the woman out of the compartment like he would a cow.
Arisa watched the situation intently from afar before squawking at him, ‘I have half a mind to wrap your legs around your necks, the both of you!’
As the train slubbed into motion, a buzzard shot off with a shriek from the roof of a spent engine on the next track. It rose up in the bright moonlight and hovered under a cloud of green. A fleet of planes soared across the blue of the horizon over the round towers of the arms factory. The planes roared towards the centre of the city, broke the sound barrier, and disappeared into the sea of tall buildings. The train filled with the dark smell of hot metal.
The man said he was going to see if the dining car was open, and quickly returned.
‘Nothing fucking there except an old slut with an arse like a cement mixer.’
His cheeks twitched with anger. He had a disappointed look on his face, with a hint of depression behind it. They sat all day in silence, until the purple light of night. Then he opened a bottle, poured a glass down his throat, and said in a hoarse voice:
‘I love vodka, like all of my kind. Once I get going I can drink seven bottles a day. I always drink to the bottom of the bottle. Then Katinka comes with a broom in her hand to fetch me home. A week later I’m a decent man again and I go out and drink on the construction site. In addition to all the drinking I do on the job, I seem able to achieve minimum results in maximum time. If I don’t have vodka I throw a fit.’
The girl was tired. She would have liked to sleep.
‘How do they drink where you come from? You probably live Baltic style. The men revolve around the bottle, the women around the men, and the children around the women. It’s the bottle makes everything go round. It’s the opposite here. We turn the bottle, it doesn’t turn us.’
She looked at him. She didn’t seem impressed. His face turned stony and he looked at her sternly. ‘I ain’t interested in your opinions. You’re just shitwater to me.’
They sat quietly. The girl swallowed.
‘Forgive an idiot, my girl,’ he said with genuine regret in his voice.
She turned to look out of the window. The silent moonlit Yenisei River drifted by. It split Krasnoyarsk in two. Ice fishers, gulls and crows sat on the frozen crust of the river; barges and tugboats lolled on shore, embedded in ice. Dim, distant stars seemed to sleep on its surface.
When the river was left behind, the girl went into the corridor. A hint of spring wind drifted through the train; you could smell it even through the window. A light, silent snow was falling, flakes drifting in great tufts onto the frozen ground. Without warning the train braked sharply, the wheels rumbled, the carriages lurched, soft snow came whirling up from the railbed, and a woman somewhere screamed. The girl hit her head on the window frame and it started to bleed. Arisa shouted from the the end of the passageway in a low, grating voice: ‘Citizens, we are in Taishet. From here the distance to Moscow is four thousand five hundred and fifteen kilometres and it is five hours later than Moscow time.’
The girl went back to the compartment, holding her head. The man was picking up shards of a tea glass from the floor.
He washed the cut on her forehead with vodka, blew her hair away from the wound, and put the bandage she handed him over it. The dirty air of the compartment made her feel sick. She picked up his empty water can and hurried out. The air outside was sharp and smelled of kerosene. The moon escaped behind a red cloud. She circled around the engine. On the next track was an engine that had breathed its last, lying on its side. She hurried past it and found the window of her own co
mpartment. She set the can on the ground, put one foot on it, and wiped the window clean with a dirty sock. When she had finished she went back to the platform and boarded the train again.
The man was in a deep sleep, wheezing like a barrel of moonshine. The girl fell asleep, and when she woke to a new morning she ate breakfast quickly. The man woke up a couple of hours later. His hand moved, then one finger, then one eye. His tongue licked at his lips. A twitch. A stretch. He jumped up lazily, put on a tracksuit, did his calisthenics, and prepared himself a large meal.
They sat until evening. She drew, listened to music, ate, drew again. He dozed, played endless hands of solitaire, and dozed again.
After a lazy silence that lasted from noon to dinnertime, the man suggested that they go to the dining car for something to eat.
‘You should eat in the dining car at least once on the Siberian railway. That’s what it’s for, and it’s even open.’
The girl put on a brown wool dress that she’d not yet worn even once. The man took off his tracksuit and pulled on some polyester pants and a short-sleeved white shirt, took a round mirror out of his bag and set it in the middle of the table, and spent a long time carefully combing his coarse thick hair.
The dining car was full. Travellers were using their elbows to get a seat for themselves. The man rudely shoved his way to a white-clothed table where a feisty-looking couple were just finishing their meal. The man’s beard was a carefully groomed square, the woman’s grew freely. On every table rested a crystal vase full of short pink plastic carnations. The man and the couple started an odd, jumpy conversation that included something about Petrovka … Chipok … Zamoskvorestye … Varvarka … Solyanoi Dvor … Trubnaya … Kuznetsky Most.
The girl closed her ears to the noise, traced the broad windows with her eyes, and thought about a summer morning at the lake. A tired waiter arrived at the table.
‘Be so good as to bring the young lady a bottle of Senator and a bottle of vodka for me, and a plate of vobla.’