by Rosa Liksom
‘There isn’t any vodka,’ the waiter said sourly.
‘Why is that?’
‘Prohibition.’
‘Rules are made to be broken,’ the man said hopefully.
‘There isn’t any vodka,’ the waiter said gruffly. ‘Is that so hard to understand, comrade?’
‘Bring me a bottle of cognac, then. Cognac will do nicely.’
When he’d got his plate of vobla and his cognac he took a long swig, grinned, and bit off some of the dry fish.
‘Now we can order some food,’ he said.
The waiter looked at him wearily.
‘A bowl of selyanka to start with. For the main dish fifteen blinis, shashlik, some boiled tea sausage, salad, and a bottle of cognac.’
Instead of shashlik they got some dry chicken legs and instead of salad some potatoes fried in margarine. The man poured himself a glass of cognac, blew on the top of the bottle as if it were foamy, and said that in Brezhnev’s day two hundred and fifty grams of vodka was considered a single serving.
The girl glanced at the whiskered woman and listened to her square-bearded husband for a moment.
‘In my case the war only lasted five years and we all knew what to aim at, but our marriage has lasted twenty-nine years and I never know what direction an attack’s going to come from …’
The girl soothed herself. What you don’t remember ceases to exist. Maybe it never did exist.
Her travelling companion filled the square-bearded man’s glass and slapped him on the back. Then he said it was time they went back to their compartment. He grabbed the rest of the cognac on the way out.
‘I don’t need a reason to drink, but I never drink alone. We Russians always booze in groups. It’s more fun that way. A man has to suffer, so a man has to drink. Like I’m doing now.’
He took out the bottle of moonshine she’d given him and set it in the middle of the table. He stared at it for a long time with a vexed look on his face.
‘And you, my girl, force me to drink alone.’
He wiped the side of the bottle, set it next to the half-full bottle of cognac, and looked at her with slack curiosity.
‘I lived entirely without money from 1961 to 1964. I didn’t have a fraction of a kopeck, but I still lived. That’s possible here. You can always suck on grass roots or pick the snails off trees, and you can always find vodka. A pig will always find a wallow, as we like to say. It’s harder in the winter. You suck on pine cones and gnaw at tree bark. The nice thing about vodka is that it doesn’t freeze even in the bitterest cold.’
He poured his glass full, took a gulp, and quickly bit off a mouthful of green onion, grunting to himself and glancing at her tensely, an amused look on his face.
‘Are all Finnish women as dry and cold as you? Russian women are the kind of whores that once you’ve fucked them they start farting. I know you’re not like that.’
When he’d emptied the cognac he wheezed heavily, pointed at the bottle that had no label, and said in a muddy voice, ‘Splitting headache. Ought to drink this one, too.’
The girl withdrew into the corridor. The train rattled steadily onward. An old man stood on the roof of a crooked house next to the tracks shovelling snow. A rusty stream wound from behind the house through the expanse of white and disappeared into the darkness of the limp eternal forest. The rugged forest would soon swallow up everything. Someone was yanking roughly on an accordion at the other end of the carriage. The clatter of the train and the sharp, slashing, Slavic sounds of the accordion sent her into a liberating torpor. She imagined the winter landscape as summer, saw a lemon-yellow meadow, a forest’s hot, shimmering outline, birches reddened by a setting sun, cool, dark shadows of fields, a little billowing cloud.
She went eventually, reluctantly, again to the door of the compartment and opened it warily. The man was lying in his own bunk like a corpse.
She tiptoed to her bed and sat down. The air was damp, the constantly brewing tea had steamed up the compartment, made the air heavy. A thick string of slobber oozed from the side of the man’s mouth. His face was tranquil, as if he had forgiven every sorrow he’d had in life. She undressed and got into her bunk, beloved from use. She thought of Mitka, how he cut open an apple with his bone-handled knife and handed her half. Mitka, who smelled of soap and grass. Mitka, who was listless and lazy, but a good swimmer and a chess champion at school.
And the day faded into dusk, and the dark of night froze into the blue of dawn in the window. A yellow moon swept away the last morning star as it made way for a fiery sun. A new day was before them. All of Siberia slowly brightened. The man in his blue tracksuit bottoms and white shirt did push-ups between the bunks, sleep in his eyes, his mouth dry and smelly, the mucousy smell of sleep in the compartment, no breath from the window, tea glasses quietly on the table, crumbs silent on the floor. A new day. Yellow, frosty birches, pine groves, animals busy in their branches, a fresh snow billowing over the plains. Flapping white longjohns, limp penises, mitts and muffs and cuffs and flowered flannel nightgowns, shawls and wool socks and straggly toothbrushes. The night speeds through the dark into dim morning, a dogged queue at the shrine of the WC, a dry wash among the stench of pee, sputum, shame, sheepish looks, steaming tea glasses, large flat cubes of Cuban sugar, paper-light spoons, black bread, Viola cheese, sliced tomatoes and onion, roasted torso of young chicken, canned horseradish, hard-boiled eggs, salt pickles, a jar of mayonnaise, a tin of fish.
Night escapes into a new day. Snow rises from the ground up the tree trunks, the silence fading in their upper branches, a hawk perched on an orange cloud, looking down at the slithering worm of train.
THE RAILS TANGLED, the train rocked wildly, then a screech of brakes like glass scraping against sheet metal. The train stopped in Siberia’s capital, at Irkutsk station. It spent two days there.
The yellow-ochre, white-cornered station building stood barren in its accustomed spot. In front of it the stationmaster stood, stock still, watching the train arrive. The girl turned over on her side and was assaulted by disconnected memories and impressions, people she hadn’t seen in ten years. When she woke up she was wet with sweat.
The man looked at her compassionately and it felt good to her.
‘Another person’s soul is a dark chasm,’ he said quietly. ‘But let the soul be. Let’s go hunting. Hunting for food!’
She dressed quickly, he slowly, with a sort of dignity. He put on an old greenish suit coat, buttoned it tightly, combed his hair back like a dandy. Last, he pulled his shoes out from under his bunk. They were some kind of fur-lined, sturdily made army boots with split tops and hard-edged heels.
They were met on the platform by a mild spring chill, silent snowflakes, and an old dog with a large femur dangling from its mouth, its tail wagging.
It was warm and dry inside the station. Glum travellers loitered in the corners, drifters sat on wooden benches in heavy winter clothes. A quiet hum of talk trickled from the people on the benches. At one end of the station was a café with a round window in the far wall, the winter light pressing through it like raindrops into the samovar-steamed air.
They came out through a low side door. They found the vendors next to the wall of the station among the frost-heaved pavement. The man greeted the old women with a wave of his hand but chose to approach an old man with a brimless cap on his head. The codger’s table was covered in dried mushrooms. The man chatted with him for a moment and then handed him a set of socket wrenches made in China. The older man examined them for a long time before he reached under the table and took out a few cured Baikal salmon and a box of grilled whitefish.
Next they went to the table of a woman in a black scarf. Behind her was a smoking rotisserie of pure white, poorly plucked chicken carcasses. All she was selling was three eggs.
The man counted out a pile of one-, two- and three-kopeck coins into her hand.
They lurked among the vendors a little longer. There was a familiar smell, a combination of ga
rlic, vodka, and sweat. The man bought some tea grown in Irkutsk, sour milk tarts, pretzels and sugared bubliks, the girl bought biscuits from Tula, Gold Label biscuits, and pryanikis.
They went over the footbridge. The airy early spring sun tinged the powdery new-fallen snow with pink, and Irkutsk seemed like a whole city in miniature made of marzipan. The air was sharp and thin; the man was panting. A flock of sparrows flew over their heads, their wings whistling. The man and the girl stood quietly for a long time. By the permanently closed back door of the station a pile of waste was covered in bright white powdery snow where a couple of dozen filthy stray cats capered about. A well-fed owl perched on a rotting cross of wood left on the rubbish heap and followed their movements closely. They walked to the kiosks. The snow glittered on the kiosk roofs and around the bottoms of the lampposts. The girl took off her cap and let her hair fall over her shoulders. She joined the long, cheery queue formed between two railings for the tobacco stand and the man joined the talkative and argumentative queue for newspapers. He bought a Pravda and a Literaturnaya Gazeta. With the change he bought a piece of rock-hard Lolek chewing gum, made in the DDR. After lengthy negotiations, the girl managed to purchase a pack of Primas and some Baikal papirosas. The vendor refused to sell her any Belomorkanals for some reason, although there was a whole shelf full of them. When she gave the Primas to the man he turned them over in his hand for a moment, looking at the spacecraft on the package.
‘Baikals smell like dog piss. Primas taste like horse shit and Brezhnev. Belomorkanals, on the other hand, smell like the real Papa Stalin.’
They walked along the station platform back towards their compartment. A few light spring snowflakes mixed with the smell of smoke in the air. The girl looked up and let the snow fall on her face. The man stared back at the kiosks.
‘I’ve never seen a Georgian standing in a queue before. Now I’ve seen everything.’
They were just finishing cleaning the train carriage. The carriage staff had taken out the carpets; Sonechka vacuumed the canvas-covered floor and Arisa cleaned the WC and wiped the doorknobs and corridor railing with a wet black cloth. The man and the girl slipped into the compartment once Arisa and Sonechka had put the carpet back in place. They spread some of their purchases on the table and started preparing breakfast together.
The man bustled over his samovar. He moved it around unnecessarily, opened the lid and checked several times to make sure the cord was plugged tight into the wall. The sun smoked beyond the rail yard, the universe hummed. He boiled some water, dumped in a mighty portion of the large whole tea leaves he’d bought, and waited. Ten minutes later the tea had sunk to the bottom of the pot. He poured the nearly black tea into his own glass, put in a whole sugar cube like an iceberg, and took three small sips. Then he handed the glass to the girl. She tasted it. It was strong and mellow. He wanted the glass back, slurped at it three times, and handed it to her again.
‘My grandfather was sent to a prison camp in 1931. He was a true thief and kept the secret of the seven seals till the day he died. My father lived the life of a wanderer too, had no possessions but his poor handwriting. He lived in a world where the tavern is your church, the work camp is your monastery, and drinking is the highest form of endeavour. He got nabbed for an honest robbery and murder, and Lucifer’s net closed around him. He ended up in a KGB cellar, then they tossed him into a three-star work camp in 1935, the same year Stalin announced that the life of the Soviet people was happier now. A three-star camp. In other words, a good one. He got sentenced to forty-five years. In those days life in a work camp may have been safer and more bearable for somebody poor and hungry than life in a big city. The old man wasn’t afraid of being sentenced to labour because he was used to even worse. In 1941 Stalin was in deep shit. The Nazis were thirty kilometres from Red Square and their reconnaissance planes were already over Stalingrad. Then the Generalissimo, panicked as he was, decided to finally free any criminal in the work camps who would pledge to go to the front to defend his homeland. Go to the front and you’ll be forgiven and after the war you’ll be a free man. My old man took the bait and they freed him, like tens of thousands of others. All those killers, thieves and other crooks crammed onto prison trains and were carried to the front. It was on that trip, on one leg of the journey, that my father saw my virgin mother, who was in a great hurry to get herself pregnant before every last man was sent to the war, and had a screw when she got the chance, naturally. My old man survived the war, but after the war all those criminals who managed to stay alive on the front were thrown right back into the work camps. The only thing different was that the camps were full of Lithuanians now. That’s where he died, from fever and diarrhoea.’
He licked his dry lips and looked at the girl pityingly. ‘It’s fun to tell you stories, my girl, because you don’t understand a thing. My mother birthed herself a new man.’
He got up and expertly executed fifty-three push-ups. His legs were beautifully muscular and he had strong, firm buttocks.
‘Life prescribes strict rules for all of us. You’ll understand someday. Or maybe not. I was in a Pioneer camp in 1948, right after the war. The boys in the sixth section got to swim in the clear waters of Lake Komsomol. This lake was unusual because the soft sand on the bottom had sudden drop-offs, and there were some of the boys of course who thought it was funny to push the ones who couldn’t swim into the cold, deep water. Little Pioneers like me swam in pond number six. It was a muddy little Pioneer pond with water that was cloudy and too warm. One day when we were splashing in it we heard a terrible boom. It came from really close by. Somebody yelled for help and we saw that there was a great fuss on the shore. We ran right over, of course, to see what it was all about. A tight, noisy circle of people had formed on the sand. I tried to get through it so I could see what was happening, but the older boys shoved me away. Then the gorilla of a camp director came and pushed his way into the middle of the action and in the fracas I managed to slip inside the circle. And what did I see? Jura was lying there, with one leg missing. He was just trembling, no sound coming out of his mouth. The director ordered us to disperse. Someone ran to get the camp truck and another director came with some bandages. The gorilla gave Jura some vodka and used it to rinse off the stump of his leg too. Then the truck came and took him away. The next day nobody said a word about it. The boys had found a mine on the bottom of the lake and thrown it on the shore, where Jura, their little whipping boy, was building a sandcastle. Thanks, Comrade Stalin, for the happy childhood!’
Pallid light poured from the sky. The girl decided to go into town alone. The man stayed on the train to rest. He too wanted to be alone.
SHE LISTENED TO THE BIRDS’ spring silence, the swish of melting snow on roofs, the patter of the dripping drain spouts, the little streams trickling across wet courtyards, the sad peeping of a sparrow on a snowy rowan branch. Twometre icicles grew from the eaves of a warped-walled highrise. There were a few parked cars along the roads, some covered in a soft blanket of fresh fallen snow, others coated in a matte finish of thick frost. A working woman sat at the bus stop with loaves of bread piled in her lap.
In the afternoon the girl sat in a cocktail bar called Great October. The place was full of students arriving and leaving, puffs of frost coming in through the door. She tried a milk cocktail made popular by Premier Kosygin that had spread from the Baltic across the Soviet Union. It was cold and sweet. She glanced at the rusted padlock on the refrigerator door and thought about Moscow, its damp courtyards, the swampy smell of the apartments, the stairwells full of different kinds of doorbells. She had gone to study at Helsinki University as soon as she finished her matriculation exam and she and her friends Maria and Anna had started applying for graduate study positions in Moscow. It took a lot of arranging. Maria and Anna moved into the conservatory dorms, she into the student house at the Teknikum. She had shared a small hot room with a Dane named Lene. Lene studied geology and she studied archaeology.
From
her earliest years of study she had dreamed of how she would follow in the footsteps of Sakari Pälsi, G. J. Ramstedt, and Kai Donner, seek out the same holy sites where those scholars had been. When her thesis was nearly finished she started to fill out requests and applications and gather authorisations, endorsements, and letters of recommendation from Helsinki and Moscow. All her efforts were in vain; those regions were closed to foreigners. Finally Mitka suggested they go together by train to Mongolia, crawling across Siberia in the process. She refused at first, but later got excited at the prospect of reading the petroglyphs found near Ulan Bator by Ramstedt and described by Pälsi.
Then everything went awry.
A cool, late afternoon light pressed against the snowy streets and the gates of the low houses built in the reign of Catharine the Great. There was a carefully stacked pile of firewood in the courtyard of a lovely old house. The fence around the hotel leaned steeply, the windows were filled with ice flowers. She was sitting in the lobby with its sumptuous bouquet of paper flowers. The atmosphere was Oblomovian, the snow of winter still falling. To the right of the reception desk was a hand-coloured photograph bordered in mourning of a sturdy woman wearing two medals on her chest.
The girl waited at least an hour before the young receptionist came sailing out of the back room wearing a muskrat hat, her lips roughly painted red. An elegantly sour cloud of eau de cologne spread around her. She didn’t look at the girl, just paced back and forth as if she were in a hurry. When the girl managed to hand her the hotel voucher the receptionist went into the back room again and stayed there for another hour or two.
Her room was on the third floor. The hallway was stuffed with broken furniture and wooden crates, a beautiful redwood sofa sitting among the junk. On the wall was a print of Repin’s Volga boatmen. An old floor monitor sat at a small table asleep.
The room was hot and cramped. The girl opened the small ventilation window. A spring wind came whirling into the room, grabbed hold of the light yellow curtains and fanned them. The window opened out onto an adjoining park.