by Rosa Liksom
The dense, deserted night gathered around her. The city was inhabited only by the night wind, a hiss of snow. She passed the statue of Khabarov holding a miserable spruce sapling, walked along a boulevard lined with deciduous trees, and looked at the marvellous ornamental carvings on the stone houses. At every crossroads, she chose the smaller street. The houses were dark, with a faint yellow light glowing in just a few of the windows.
Irina had kissed her for the first time in the Lenin Mausoleum. It had happened so quickly and gently that the young soldiers on guard didn’t notice. Or if they did, they didn’t believe their eyes. When they got back home, Mitka greeted her and his mother with a crooked smile on his face. She had to wait a long time for the second kiss, but once it happened, there was no turning back. It happened at the same time that Mitka was lying in restraints in a lunatic asylum. And then the day came when Mitka was set free. It was a day of great happiness, but she and Irina knew that the worst was yet to come for the three of them.
After she’d walked far enough to the south and to the north, she decided to take the tram back to the hotel.
There was a large department store in the middle of the town. A dirty yellow pile of snow loomed next to it, and in front of the entrance spread a puddle of mud the size of a small pond that the customers carefully skirted. A stately gull stood in the middle of the puddle. She climbed to the top of the high, slippery staircase and bought a little bottle of Red Moscow perfume and two chocolate bars. One had a picture of Pushkin on the label, the other a smiling little girl in a babushka. As she finally walked to the station with hurried steps, a wild red star fell behind a rose bush covered in evening frost, the street lights silently went out, and she was surrounded by a growing Asian darkness. She could hear the far-off whistle of the train and see the tracks gleaming in the dusk. A local train crawled up beside her and a flood of workers emerged from within, brushing past her on both sides.
She hurried in the cold to the half-opened door and into the station. The oily floor shone. Drops of light from the crystal chandeliers twinkled in the puddles on the floor. There, under the arched ceiling of the station, she met the man. He smelled of sauerkraut, vodka, onion soup, and the pharmacy. His presence calmed her fearful mood.
‘You’ve probably noticed by now that all the cities and villages are alike. If you’ve seen one, you’ve seen them all. But let’s go get a bite of vermicelli and chicken broth. We’ll be on our way to the land of the Mongols soon.’
THE TALL, THICKSET HEAD CONDUCTOR put a whistle to his lips and blew long on it. The engine howled three times and the train slammed into motion. The engine’s wheels beat sparks from the rails and the rough cheer of Khachaturian’s ‘Sabre Dance’ rang out of the beige plastic loudspeaker.
The man scowled at the speaker’s broken volume knob, an unlit cigarette between his lips.
‘A flock of geese born out of somebody’s arse,’ he said, grabbing his pillow and pressing it hard against the speaker. ‘I don’t enjoy killing a sensitive piece of music, but I have no choice.’
Khabarovsk is left behind, the smoke from the windowless factories and the clouds of spring-melted toxins. Khabarovsk is left behind, the Paris of Siberia, the stone buildings with their ornaments covered in a patina of time. A land killed by oil and heavy industry and discarded, a heavy city surrounded by crumbling slabs of steel-reinforced concrete, where women walk the back streets in high-heeled fur boots, left behind. The decomposing municipal combine built of Chinese steel, the reeking fish cannery, left behind. Khabarovsk, the dimly lit, beautiful city, the tired land, left behind. This is still Khabarovsk: an abandoned industrial strip, a planted pine forest, a stillborn, half-built suburb, the polluted sick forest, the dense larch forest, a woman with a sack of food, the crudely retouched photos of the General Secretaries on the telephone poles. The train picks up speed. The fifth cluster of prefab buildings, which they call suburbs, the little houses defeated in the battle of life, the open land, the Chinese forest, the fallow earth, the lonely nineteen-storey building in the middle of the fields. The last remains of a factory rush past in the distance with the speed of the train, then deep forest, wetland, spruce trees, the mountains of Japan beyond the horizon, sake and haikus. This is no longer Khabarovsk. The train moves on. A collapsed house under snow, a village of two dozen houses among the geriatric underbrush, a glitter of golden lights from a quarry. 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 music gradually went quiet and faded away. The man went to smoke his cigarette in the cold carriage entryway. He took heavy drags, smoking it down to his fingernails. A dense snowstorm whirled over the treeless steppe. In the middle of the plain of snow was a lightless, forgotten village. A lone crow fought against the wind atop a chimney gone cold. The man spread the draughts board on the table. They played silently. He won.
After the third game he snorted, ‘There’s no more stupid game than this, but still …’
They played six more long games, so long that they both were spent. The man went to sleep. The girl missed Moscow. She thought about her last trip, when she and Mitka went to Kiev, sharing a compartment with two young men. One spent the whole trip moping, in his own world. The other was studying to be a machine draughtsman at the design institute, adored anything to do with numbers, charts, columns, sketches, specifications and, above all, coupons. He was flipping through them for the whole trip.
When Irina was seventeen and was pregnant with Mitka, Zahar had sent her to the Caucasus, to her aunt’s house in the Lermontov mountains. While she was there she had fallen in love with a girl like herself, a student named Galina, and brought her home to Moscow. Galina, Irina, Mitka and Zahar had lived together in the same household with some other relatives for seven years. Then Galina moved away. According to Mitka, after that Irina had been with Tonya, Katya, Klasa and Julia, and perhaps others. When she and Mitka met, Julia was spending her nights in Irina’s bedroom, but lived somewhere else. It all happened in secret. The girl didn’t talk with Julia very much, although she saw her many times at the door to Irina’s room or in the hallway. Mitka hated his mother’s girlfriends. Not because they were women but because he wanted his mother all to himself – that’s how he always put it.
Only two stars glimmered in the turquoise sky, very far apart. The heavy clouds nestled low, close to the ground. A cold, powerless desperation crept into her breast. She thought about how joys are forgotten but sorrow and stupidity never are.
A little yellow bird flew out of the bushes and up to the window. It looked in with disbelief, then flew away. An old electrician had climbed up a leaning telephone pole with a tangled coil of wire in one hand and a black receiver in the other. Beyond the electrician a swelling neon-yellow whirl of mist reared like a snake, wriggled upward with a hiss, and rose glittering towards the lid of sky. Then a second burning cloud of mist, and a third, and a fourth. The Northern Lights sparkled against the dome of clear blue sky, painting the snow green and the tail of a Siberian bluebill black. The taiga sucked the Northern Lights into itself and left the sky empty and clean. The taiga changed to a forest, the sea of forest to a sea of fields, the sea of fields to a sea of woodland wilderness. The man slept with an amusingly happy look on his face. She watched him for a long time, dozed off, woke for a moment, then drifted into a deep, deathlike sleep.
The man finished his morning exercises and poured a glass full of vodka. He handed the girl a glass of tea dregs.
‘Let us wish for life and troubles, innocent laughter, crying for no reason, hearty merrymaking, mild hangovers, eternal health and a too-early death. Let’s lift our glasses to the feminine beauty of our compartment and to the guardians of injustice, those sacks of garbage who couldn’t get any other kind of work. And a toast to deception. May we be deceived in a better direction. Long live the militias.’
He tossed the whole contents dow
n his throat in one motion, took a bite of raw onion, and filled his glass again.
‘That’s enough toasting and playing around, time to get drinking! A carriage of vodka, please.’
The glass emptied and was immediately filled again.
‘Katyushka, my little silly head, couldn’t stand fellows like me. That’s why I fell in love with her. But I always say there’s nothing in the world as fucked up as female logic.’
A thick snowstorm raged over the treeless steppe. The shy morning light tried to come out from between two grey clouds, unsuccessfully.
‘Heart and logic. That’s all there is … I’m gonna have another drink or two, then we’ll talk.’
He picked up his knife and scratched his elbow with it. His eyes were glistening as if he’d just been crying.
‘So. Once on the Volga or the Yenisei, somewhere around there, a boy and his mother and father. The boy heard his father tell his mother she had to choose, the boy or him. To which she answered, Don’t worry, he’ll be dead soon, and we can be alone. The next morning the boy said goodbye to his three-legged dog and never came back. He joined others like himself and started living on the street, selling himself for bread. He whispered in the men’s ears, I’m a little boy from Odessa …’
After an hour he opened another bottle. Then he opened a third – his last one – and poured his glass full, but didn’t drink it all, just rinsed his throat a little. He moved the empty bottle from the table to the floor.
‘I won’t waste compliments on you. I’m just going to say it outright, dear travelling companion. Would you give me some, just once? It’s not as if it can wear out.’
A shy smile came over his face. The girl sat up on the edge of her bunk. The snowy ocean of forest spread shoreless, filling the whole landscape. Waves of forest receding to the horizon, dropping into valleys, curving over the flat sides of a hill. Between the slopes wound a little river. Thick red water flowed through its melted depths. The man tossed a haughty, sly look at her.
‘Just let me …’
She looked him straight in the eye. He dropped his gaze and looked at his hands, frozen in thought. The passionate sighs of the engine carried into the compartment.
‘It was there that I fucked Vimma, and everything was right on track. That was my life. But then something came up that offered some money. It’s easy to turn down groceries, but not money. Vimma and I had a difference of opinion and I stabbed her six times with a Siberian knife. I was trying to hit her heart, but evidently God was protecting her and she walked out of our apartment and into the neighbour’s, and that was the last I ever saw of her. Years later I heard from a card shark that Vimma had been seen as a bride at the Karabash camp. She was celebrating a lesbian wedding, singing about how she never wanted to come back to civilian life.
‘Don’t believe everything I feed you, my girl.’
The man was suddenly quiet and stayed quiet for a long time, smacking his dry lips and sniffling.
‘Russian whores don’t understand anything. All you get from them is a rotting cock. The ruined beauty of old whores. It speaks to my dick.’
He grabbed the front of his pants. His face softened into open desire.
‘Just one time. It would make life so much more bright and beautiful, honest it would. It always does.’
The sunset burned itself out. Evening had come.
‘We could start a tab, the way Soviet whores do, or do your people pay with crisp new bills? Money’s not good enough? No, it’s not. Once the desire’s gone, roubles can’t help. You’re from a rich country. You can wipe your cunt with my roubles.’
He stared at her, his head tilted slightly, like a scolded child.
‘One hundred and twenty-five, your highness. Will that do it? I want to see what the difference is between a Finnish cunt and a Russian one. Or should I call it a pussy, since I’m in the presence of a lady?’
He was quiet for a moment, then squinted and groaned.
‘I don’t care if you’ve fucked a hundred hot Finnish boys and sucked their dicks till your cheeks were hollow. I never turned something down because it was second-hand.’
He knelt on the floor and started kissing her knees. She pushed him away. He picked his knife up from the table.
‘Any chick will do it if you give them a little tickle with a knife on the carotid artery. Unfortunately, I’m not that kind of man.’
He slipped the knife under his mattress. Then he got up and flopped right on top of her. He smelled of swamp mist and herring and his heart was beating heavy and fast. After a moment he burst into insane laughter. He coughed up so much drunken laughter in her face that her cheeks were hot.
‘My little whore, I could stick this stump of cock through you like you were made of head cheese. But no. Listen to me – there isn’t a torture invented that a Russian can’t withstand. We can withstand anything. Including the fact that you can’t always get some pussy when you want it.’
His sweaty, liquor-soaked words ran down the steamy walls of the compartment as he got up and sat on the edge of her bed.
‘Now I need a glass of vodka to brighten my soul.’
He sloshed out a glassful, flicked some into his mouth, and looked like he was about to teeter over and lie down, but he got on his feet, swaying. The girl crouched in the doorway, ready to run into the corridor. He tumbled onto her bed again. He sat up with a groan, scratched at his chest hair, emptied his glass in two swallows, and looked at her wearily.
‘Tomorrow, my little slut, I’m starting a new life. The denser the woods, the thicker the partisans.’
He let out a bloodless squeak, fell over again, buried his face in the pillow, bounced upright again, wrenched himself onto his feet, and staggered frighteningly to the middle of the floor. His gaze was dull and muddy, his lips wet with shouting.
‘I envy the flies. Their lives are so easy.’
He hit the compartment door with his fist. It made his body rock. He started to cry, and in the middle of his cry broke out in a defiant laugh.
‘Hit me. Hit me! Beat the old guy till he shits his pants. Give me one right in the mouth!’
He was yelling and sweat was running down his forehead. She sat where she was and didn’t move. He fell on his knees, tried to touch her knees, and said in a soft voice, almost a whisper: ‘At least hit me! Beat the shit out of an old goat, my little whore. My own little sadist. Kick me. Kick me in the kidneys so I can feel alive. Teach me about life and give me some peace. The rottenest Russian whore is better than you. I want to sleep and never wake up. Plug’s pulled out, power’s off … cut the cord.’
He staggered to the door and yelled down the hallway, ‘Tea and a towel! Arisa! Tea and a towel!’
Sonechka soon appeared carrying a tray with two steaming glasses of tea and a clean hand towel. He quickly emptied both glasses. His face shone red and beads of sweat were running down his neck. He wiped away the sweat, wheezed once, and fell into a deep sleep. There were muffled voices in the next compartment.
The hot tea glasses had steamed up the window. Beyond it, snowy shadows of slender spruce trees kept watch over the dead taiga. Across a clearing in front of a clump of bushes stood an abandoned station. The train slid past it, causing such a burst of pressure that the frames around the broken windows fell out onto the frozen ground. Soon the spruces too were gone and a barren, almost desert landscape opened up around them.
The girl searched her bag for her drawing pad and found the gift that the hotel receptionist in Irkutsk had given her. She turned it over in her hands. It was a thermometer shaped like the Kremlin tower. She set it on the table next to the vase.
THE LIGHTS OF THE STATION gave a green tint to the snow and wind-torn newspaper. The girl heard Arisa shout, ‘You can leave when you have permission! Until then everybody stay in your compartments!’
The train stood for a long time at the Naushki border station. The border militia gathered all the passengers’ passports and carried the man away
, limp. The customs officials started their ransacking ritual. The ceremony lasted six hours and ten minutes. They took her sketchbook when they left.
Just before the train gave a honk and started moving, the border guards dragged the man back into the compartment. He was snoring happily, drool running from between his grinding teeth out of the corner of his mouth and onto the pillow stained by his oily hair.
The train bleated, screeched, and leapt happily into motion. Tchaikovsky’s Sixth Symphony flowed from the beige plastic speakers and over the passengers like a tank.
The girl got up, gathered the dirty tea glasses from the table, went into the corridor, and walked to the compartment of Arisa and Sonechka. Arisa asked her to sit down for a moment and enjoy a cup of lemon tea with them.
She nodded gratefully. She sat on the hard bed and looked at the bouquet of mustard-yellow chrysanthemums jutting out of a low vase. Arisa sliced the lemon with a dull knife and began to speak in an agitated voice.
‘In January 1934 a railway official who was living in one of the cubicles in our commune died. The soup started boiling over before the body was even cold. My mother started a pitched battle over who would get the cubicle, and she wasn’t averse to pulling hair to get it. The fight was settled one ordinary day when a woman moved into the cubicle. My mother called her Judas, although our neighbour Nyuta said that this ex-human had once been an important person, the secretary to some Trotskyite bureaucrat. I liked the woman. I asked if I could go to visit her while my mother was at work. My mother strictly forbade it and gave me a good whack on the ear to back up her words. The woman’s name was Tamara Nikolayevna Berg. My father called her Mara, and he gave me permission to visit her when my mother wasn’t home. We lived that way for a couple of years, and whenever my mother called her an expendable person and a Judas, my father shushed her. Then one day the woman was gone. The door to her cubicle was nailed shut. It wasn’t until after my mother died that my father told me that my mother had made unfounded accusations against her and they came and took her away.’