by Rosa Liksom
There were pure white starched sheets on the bed, and bedbug spray in a corner of the bathroom. She got undressed and slid into the clean bed. She watched the little plastic satellite swinging between the curtains and fell asleep to the heavy hum of the gas boiler.
When she woke up she moved the bed in front of the window, pushed the curtains out of the way, and lay down. In the centre of the park below was a path surfaced in red sand. Farther off was a little frozen pool, its surface bright and smooth. There was no snow on top of the ice – the winds of April had blown it away. A bronze fish swam stiffly in the middle of the pool; perhaps, in the summer, water sprayed from its mouth. Waxwings twittered shrilly in the branches of the maple trees, waved their yellow-tipped tails, flicked their crests, and flew off now and then to follow the trolleybuses and trams into town. They flew up to the sky and watched the life of the city from there, then returned to the maple branches and the back of the rain-spattered park bench.
After noon, a loudspeaker wired to the gatepost of the park started playing Claude Debussy’s Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faun. Soon old men started to arrive at the park to click dominoes. Then the old women appeared. Each of them put her own cloth on a bench and sat down.
The girl ate lunch in the hotel dining room: borscht, smetana and black bread. She looked at the hundred-light chandelier that hung from the dining-room ceiling, defying all artistic conventions. The waiter, who had a large mouth and small eyes, asked her if she’d like to exchange any money or sell any Western goods.
After lunch she walked through the mild weather to Victory Park and was startled by the metal clang of the tram wobbling past beyond the hedgerow. A black rat appeared beside her. It was sick, and thus not afraid of people. When she stopped, the rat stopped. She felt lonely.
She thought about Irina’s earrings, her tailored skirt, her eyes, with a gaze you couldn’t be sure of. It had been easy to be with Irina. Even the silence had a lightness. Irina accepted her and allowed her into her family, and when Mitka was shut up in the hospital, she and Irina had spent a lot of time together.
Irina had taken her to the monastery town of Zagorsk, whose church clock’s insane, fifteen-tone jangle had rung in her head for a week after their visit; to Pasternak’s dacha in Predelkino with its garden full of crushed eggshells painted different colours; to Konstantin Simonov’s veranda, to Arseni Tarkovsky’s grave, where they ate pumpkin seeds; and to the Vaganskoya Cemetery to look at the mound covered in flowers at Vladimir Vysotsky’s grave. Irina read aloud to her from Marina Tsvetaeva and Osip Mandelstam’s poems and encouraged her to read Turgenev, Lermontov, Bunin, Leskov, Platonov, Ilf and Petrov, and Trifonov.
They got to know each other better and gradually fell in love.
The girl bent down to look at the rat. It was dead. Its soul had abandoned its sick body. She sensed that Irina was thinking about her.
She turned onto a path that took her to a black grove filled with chill mist. Hidden within it was a statue of Pushkin covered in something that looked like seaweed; a handful of rifle shell casings lay among the shards of broken vodka bottles that covered the ground beneath it.
She wandered into an open part of the park where the mist had faded and the air was translucent. Rachmaninov piano music played and the old men clicked their dominoes and the old ladies whispered among themselves on the benches. A light thaw slipped into the park and grew gradually into a warm spring day. An east wind blew the clouds hurriedly west. Somewhere in the distance roosters who’d lost their sense of time crowed. The snow that was everywhere melted into little streams. The girl found an empty bench. She fell asleep in the heat of the sunlight and started awake when a tremendous rushing sound invaded deep into her sleep. A surge of brown water was coming towards her from the other side of the park. The old men and women were gone, but the piano music was still playing. A lame horse was approaching along the path. It stopped when she dashed past it.
She ran to the hotel and straight to the third floor. She looked out of her window and saw water rising at tremendous speed, quickly covering half the park.
She ran back down to the lobby and rapped loudly on the reception desk. The receptionist with the fur hat emerged from the distant back room. The girl asked why so much water was suddenly rising. The clerk explained that the temperature had risen quickly overnight and the ice on the Angara had broken free. She said it was all perfectly normal and that it would recede by the next morning, or the next week, unless it rose higher.
The girl stood there astonished and at the same time relieved. She heard the receptionist talking to someone in the back room.
‘Pavel Ivanovich. The one who’s the district inspector for cultural affairs.’
‘Forty-something? Kind of a wreck?’
‘That’s the one.’
‘The fellow who likes to have three spoons of dill water every day before breakfast?’
‘That’s him. He told Zoya, and Zoya told me …’
In the afternoon the water had disappeared from the park completely and taken all the snow with it, leaving no trace but the dirty ice and steaming, muddy ground.
It was evening. A carmine red tram cut along the edge of the boulevard. The black trees in the park stared at her gloomily, but she paid no attention to them. She was looking higher up, at the stars as they rattled like ice cubes in a green sky, and at the moon radiating its frozen light. The tall buildings nestled in the cold, gleaming along either side of the icy road. The street lights came on with a quiet hiss. They spilled a rattling bluish light for a long time, until the colour turned purplish red.
She turned on a black-and-white television that stood on a table in a corner of the room. It was showing an ad for the Soviet Union.
She thought about Mitka and felt sorry for him. But what if the Crimean rest and treatment healed him? What would she do then? What about Irina? The whole thing worried her so that she started to soothe herself with memories: the times she and Mitka had listened to records on the cute little poison-green record player, sipped tea and champagne, played various board games thousands of times, laughed, rolling and shrieking with delight. They had known how to enjoy life, but then the evening turned to night, summer to autumn, and Mitka had to go to the loony bin.
From the big window in the lobby you could see the eaves, icicles hanging from them like a row of swords ready to slice in two the head of any random passer-by. A longhaired black cat slept on top of a lamppost that spewed bright yellow light. When she told the receptionist that she was going to continue her journey the woman asked her to wait a moment and went into the back room. When she returned she had a cream-coloured plastic model of the Kremlin tower in her hand.
‘This is for you, Miss. A little memento of Irkutsk.’
When she stepped into the compartment the man was sitting on his bunk wearing long army underwear, filing his toenails.
She handed him the stack of newspapers she’d bought, which smelled of petrol. He said the train wasn’t leaving until morning. She wasn’t alarmed at this news.
She sat on her bunk for a long time and smiled. She watched him. He had a tired, cloudy look in his eyes, but that felt homely to her.
Clouds sailed across the darkening sky, colliding with each other. Eventually the night poured heavy and peaceful over the train.
The weightless, quiet morning light of early spring awoke her long before the station bell rang for the third time, the engine gave a heavy sigh, and the train rocked into motion.
IRKUTSK IS LEFT BEHIND; a silent, icebound, springtime city. Irkutsk, the yellow tiles of the university library, the pink onion church, the parks and trees, the noisy, steamy communal saunas, the tired land, the park covered in rusty floodwaters, the classical music in the little loudspeaker at the gate of the park, the soft drifts of snow in courtyard gardens. Irkutsk is left behind as an approaching electric train sways on the next track, house after small, sturdy little house, the white window frames, the flowery shutters, th
e eaves with their whimsical carvings, the lonely nineteen-storey prefab buildings in the middle of fields, the early spring sunshine, the smoking chimneys, the man standing atop a woodpile – this is still Irkutsk – the Russian-blue station building and the jungly, impenetrable forest. The bogs, the stunted trees, the waste, the logging lines – this is no longer Irkutsk. BAM railway tracks swallowed by the swamp, a house collapsed under snow. A few bittersweet accordion notes with accompanying bells drift through the next compartment. The train plunges into nature, throbs across the snowy empty land. Everything is in motion: snow, water, air, trees, clouds, wind, cities, villages, people, thoughts.
The train glided slowly along the lovely rough banks of Lake Baikal, across sudden cuts in the rock, through dozens of tunnels. An island with a bowed back rose up almost touching the shore, its lone tree a pine snag, a sea eagle in its crown watching the moving train. Baikal was as large as the sea, as broad as outer space. The girl imagined the ultramarine water full of hidden rocks, reefs, great islands, sunken vessels, drowned sailors, the bodies of extinct animals. Maybe fish. The ice had already shifted enough that broad cracks had appeared on the surface. She didn’t see any Baikal seals. A sobbing wind blew from the north and stirred the dark water between the sheets of ice. Gnarled, melted old birches grew in every direction and covered the western sky with their branches. Round mounds of ice rose into the air around inlets sheltered by sparse beds of reeds. On one shore was an enormous factory complex, its thick chimneys pushing red clouds into the air. The name of the factory was written in letters the size of trucks on a boulder between two factory buildings: Voroshilov. She thought about Moscow, its cloudy November days, its cold March nights, the Moscow River whose shores she’d walked many times, its frothing waters and fish rotting among the rocks along the banks.
The man opened a bottle of vodka and poured two glasses.
‘Do you know what happened to Gagarin when he was orbiting the earth in his capsule? He realised that the earth is a little piece of shit in a great big universe and it could be destroyed at any moment. When he came back from space, he started drinking, even though he had access to every privilege: the cosmonauts’ base grocery, the party bosses’ sanatoriums, hospitals, Western medicines. Khrushchev even bought him a small plane to cheer him up! But then what happened? Gagarin flew up over the clouds searching for death. He didn’t have to look long – he ran into a mountain and died. A toast to Yuri Gagarin, and to Belka and Strelka, the valiant cosmonaut dogs.’
On the northwest shore of the lake, almost touching the water, there was an onion-domed church that looked like a playhouse. Around the church were several arolla pines. Their limbs were swaying, dripping with sun-melted snow. A wind came up and the long, soft needles of the trees scratched at the tattered church walls. The girl imagined wild, restless stars peeking between the dense pine branches like fireflies once the heavy night descended. Two motorcycles with sidecars were crossing the ice. One sidecar was red and full of live chickens tethered together, the other was painted bright blue. Ice fishers crouched here and there. The train curved closer to the shoreline, its wheels screeching. The girl saw a small carousel buried in snow and children’s climbing bars. The train wound slowly on, then whistled happily and hurried forward into a tunnel cut into the mountain. A quiet dusk descended over everything. The train rattled ahead lazily, then stopped altogether.
It stood in the dark tunnel for a couple of hours. The glaring rays of the compartment ceiling light etched into the vinyl floor. The girl could feel the man’s breathing, the calm beating of his heart. He looked at her through heavy-lidded eyes.
‘Here’s a case from real life, my little berry,’ he said, lounging back on his bunk. ‘There was a fellow named Kolya who kicked it two days before he turned forty. We buried him in the new Moscow cemetery, right next to a beautiful girl named Anna Pavlovna Dorenko, who died young. A year passed and Ascension Day came. A magnetic wind was blowing from the north when I, Vova and Gafur decided to go say hello to our old friend at the cemetery. We took along a couple of bags of food and five bottles of vodka. Vova spread a tablecloth over the grave and Gafur put the food on it. We were offering Kolya some vodka and scattering a few Belomorkanal cigarettes on the grave when along came a sweet gaggle of girls and before the night was half over I was screwing one of those hefty little chickens. This chick was lying on top of the grave with her drumsticks spread and I was staring at Anna Pavlovna’s pretty face painted on the headstone. Anna was looking back at me, smiling. For the first time in my life I thought that there might be something after death.’
The girl opened the compartment door a crack. A little girl with braided pigtails was playing in the corridor with a matryoshka doll. Soon the littlest doll, the one the carver hadn’t bothered to carve completely and the painter hadn’t painted properly, fell out of her hands and rolled down the corridor carpet towards the WC, whose door was open.
The man sat on his bunk in a colourful shirt and looked tiredly out the window. There was nothing to see but the stone wall of the tunnel, with the words Baikal is being destroyed painted on it in red letters.
‘Do you know what a Viennese quadrille is? It goes like this. They take fifty men out of a dungeon and they truck them to the place of execution. When they get there, they order them to line up. They let them count off, maybe by eights. In other words, every eighth man is shot, and the rest are trucked back to the dungeon to wait another night. But but but … the quadrille is the part before every eighth man is shot, when they make them all change places in line six times or more. First you’re third, then you’re fifth, then you’re first, and on it goes.’
The train eased forward and out of the tunnel. The brightness of the spring day stabbed their eyes. Someone cheered. The shores of Baikal spread on either side.
‘Last year at this same time I was looking out of this same window watching a rescue helicopter trying to pick up some frozen fishermen from a drifting piece of ice. It’s the same thing every spring. The fishermen sit on the ice, the ice starts to move, and they’re left drifting on a raft. Some of them drown, some freeze to death, some are rescued. Why in the world do they rescue them? Nobody makes them go out there.’
The rails curved gradually landward. Low dark clouds started to move in from the east. Along the edge of a rolling field abutting the tracks an old willow grouse flapped its wings. Farther away lay a low tumbledown greenhouse with a kolkhoz barn beyond it. In front of the barn was a horse and a load of hay. Two women were busy on top of the hay, one young and one old. They were shoving tufts of hay through the loft window into the barn. A black blanket was folded over the horse’s back and it was chomping the hay, calm and hearty. A sooty old kick sled poked out of a heap of snow. The girl could hear someone walking past the open compartment door saying that Lake Baikal cleans itself.
‘The Tatars have a custom of tying prisoners of war to dead soldiers,’ the man said. ‘Leg to leg, belly to belly, face to face. That way the dead kill the living. You can achieve some things with good, but all things with evil. There’s no point fighting evil. You can’t get rid of it, no matter how much you talk about some god’s goodness.’
The rails groaned through the green darkness. Lake Baikal was left far behind. The girl imagined the strange fishes that dwelt in its secret depths, the flocks of jellyfish floating like clouds deep under the water.
Suddenly the engine braked angrily. The train was approaching a station, stirring up a wind that grabbed the granular snow that had fallen overnight, tossing it in every direction. They stopped at Ulan Ude station.
She stepped lazily off the train onto the platform. Three cats were walking towards her. One had a broken tail, the second was sleek, with a curious smile, and the third had had its ears cut off, and staggered over the clean-swept platform like a drunk.
A raw northeast wind came carrying sharp balalaika notes. Silent, exhausted engines lay on the tracks. The man ran past wearing only his inside shirt, pas
t the street sweeper, towards the station building. The milk-white, fast-falling sky started to throw cold, drizzling sleet on the wind-beaten ground. All of space was filled with a depressing bleakness.
When the man came back he had a jar of smetana and a shopping bag in one hand and a bouquet of chrysanthemums wrapped in a Pravda in the other. He handed her the flowers, winked, and bustled into the train. He had a bottle of vodka under each arm. A local commuter train twitched and buzzed as it moved to the neighbouring track. The crowd emerging from it puffed out a cloud of mingled smells of home. The wind grabbed the cloud and slammed it into her. She got on the train and went to her compartment. The man sat on his bunk with a serene expression and put the bottles down in the middle of the table.
‘Here’s two bottles full of a booze they call vodka. My kind of country. Even though there’s prohibition, they have their own provincial worries here in this valley. You can’t order people around in the borderlands.’
He shifted his gentle gaze to her.
‘Did you know, Baba Yaga, that we are now in the capital of the Buryat Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic? They have a strange, slurring language here and worship Buddha and Jesus at the same time.’
He pointed at her hair.
‘A fringe in front and undone at the back. Not terribly stylish.’ He laughed, laid a fatherly hand over her hand, and gave it a squeeze.
‘We suit each other. The witch and Koschei the Deathless, the devil soul … There are more than a hundred ethnic groups in this country. If one of them, or two or three, are destroyed, it’s a small matter. They herd reindeer in the north and make wine in Georgia. Here we have the northern tundra and endless forests. In the south are the steppes, in the southeast are deserts of sand, and in the Caucasus the mighty mountains, with the pass crawling between them. The wind sighs over the pass and carries big clouds with it. There are the beaches of the Crimea and the swamps of Belarus. There’s dancing the trepak in birchbark shoes along the Volga, screaming Chechen circle games, the Yakuts’ shaman drums, the Chukchis, the Ainus, the Samoyeds, the Koryaks with their reindeer, the Kalmuks with their sheep and the Cossacks with their sables, Tambovian ham, Volgan sterlet, Razan apples. What else … never mind. A Georgian once told me that the history of the Georgians and Armenians was longer and more beautiful than the Russians’. He said the Georgians were building churches and composing poetry when the Russians were still grunting and living in caves. That’s a lie.’