Compartment No 6

by Rosa Liksom

  At eight o’clock there was a stern knock at the door. Before she had time to get up, the door opened and three sturdy men walked in. Her guests’ faces turned suddenly yellow and all five men were gone in an instant. Their steps echoed in the empty hallway. She realised what had just happened and who the three strangers were. She lost all strength in her legs; she felt cold and weak. She tried to go to sleep but sleep wouldn’t come. She remembered a January Moscow night.

  She and Mitka were standing in front of the Red October metro station cursing because they’d missed the last train. They’d spent a long evening at Arkady’s place, a lot of wine and cigarettes. They were cold and had been trying to stop passing cars. Finally a blue Lada stopped. Behind the wheel sat a small dark hairy man who said he would take them home. On the way he asked Mitka if he would like to buy some quality cloud. Soon they were far from home, in some seedy suburb. She and Mitka followed the man into an unfurnished flat. There were a couple of dirty mattresses on the floor, cigarette butts and empty liquor bottles. Mitka made the deal, and just as they were leaving the driver grabbed an axe from behind the door and swung it at Mitka, knocking him unconscious. She didn’t have a chance to scream before the man had grabbed her by the neck and was squeezing so hard she couldn’t breathe. The man was drinking heavily, and in the wee hours he passed out and Mitka was able to drag himself, covered in blood, into the hallway to call for help.

  The girl opened her eyes. There was no sound but the quick beat of her heart and the two-note tick of the clock. She snatched up the clock and put it in her suitcase. She lay awake waiting for sleep to come and free her from herself and her fears. The Mongolian sky was filled with stars; they were bright and near, lighting up the blackness of the sky like summer lightning, but she couldn’t see them from under the covers. The hotel was quiet. Ulan Bator was quiet. The silence of the universe was so deep that all she could hear was the hum in her ears. Terror came and went; sometimes she was filled with fear, then anger, and then something else, something she had to let go of, and finally nothing but a great regret. The darkness pressed down on her head so hard that it turned transparent. Finally the harsh night began to lose its meaning and gradually made way for the weak glimmer of morning.

  She sat impatiently on a sofa in the hotel lobby waiting for the guide. She wanted to talk to someone about everything that had happened the evening before. She heard a strange groan from the direction of the elevator, and when she turned to look, she saw the same three security service workers. They were dragging her guests, beaten unconscious, bruised beyond recognition, across the lobby towards a Lada that waited outside. Blood and dirt smeared over the construction dust on the marble floor. One of the security men glared at her, another grimaced, the third didn’t even look at her. The hotel receptionist continued flipping through papers behind the desk and didn’t see anything.

  When the yellow Lada had disappeared into the bright Mongolian morning, a Mongol granny wrapped in a big black woollen coat and carrying a Latvian tin bucket came up from the basement, cleaned the floor, and went back downstairs.

  At breakfast she told the guide about her guests and how they were taken away and what she had just seen.

  When she had finished, the guide smiled drily and said he didn’t want to hear about the matter again.

  They spent a silent day at the natural history museum.

  The next morning she walked behind her guide through the city and thought about Irina, but Irina seemed to have slipped into the distance somewhere. When they passed the state telephone office she told the guide she wanted to call Moscow. He tried to prevent her, but she went inside and ordered ten minutes on the phone, in a panic. They waited there for six hours, the guide staring at the floor angrily, before the operator announced that Irina wasn’t answering. Of course she wasn’t – Irina and Mitka were still in the south.

  Late that night a fierce wind blew up. It tore at the tin roof of the hotel and sent oil barrels tumbling down the ice-covered streets. The hotel shook in the buffeting wind, creaked, cracked, felt like it would come falling down. The girl was cold. The windstorm was followed by a blizzard of gritty snow from the desert that whipped straight at the hotel windows and melted against the warm panes of glass. She imagined it turning the screws in the window frames, the bolts falling out, nails breaking in two, the cement crumbling, the whole building tilting and collapsing in a heap of sand.

  In the morning she told the receptionist that she was sick and didn’t need her guide, planned to spend the day in her room resting.

  She stood at the window. The indifferent sun moved past from east to west. As evening fell, the sun dropped behind the yurt village and a drear, heavy darkness settled over the city, day changed to evening, evening to night. She watched a satellite that looked like the moon shining hysterically bright over the roofs of the yurts. She missed Moscow and its summer poplars.

  She decided to go out and look for the man. She couldn’t think of anything else to do. The night was bright and cold. She left at a run, glancing behind her as she ran, the green beam of a floodlight throwing itself over the hotel, the grey clouds shuttling their way north. She jumped onto the first bus and rode it out of the city. Lanterns from distant yurt villages flickered in the darkness. The bus passed a group of colourless people walking next to the road, swaying randomly. Some of them had sacks on their backs, some had their arms full of packages and other burdens. The bus veered towards a new building site where half-finished Soviet-style highrises languished. The buildings stood with their bellies open in the middle of the torn-up, ravaged ground. Scaffolding rose up on every side – beams, stairways, floors, canopies, hallways, bridges. Faint lights from a village of builders’ barracks greeted the coming night. An old truck and a battered bulldozer lay collapsed outside the fence. Ruddy rings of lampposts drew trembling ellipses on the black sky, the scaffolds lit with the yellow illumination of evening.

  She walked along a half-built road. The ruts left by the trucks were filled with watery sludge. Swinging lanterns clinked against metal wires at the gate to the guards’ barracks, where a Komsomolets excavator stood out at the front like a guard dog, a one-legged Lapp chickadee hopping along its roof. She knocked on the barracks door for a long time before the sleepy watchman came to open it. Stuffy heat wafted out of the barracks onto her face. The watchman asked in a stern voice what she wanted. He looked at her with his head to one side and smiled.

  ‘I’ve always wondered what young women like you see in that old phoney. The more lost the cause the more interesting it is. You women have no sense of self-preservation. Vadim Nikolayevich Ivanov is staying over there in the barracks, but you can’t go there. Give me your number. He’ll call you if he wants to.’

  She handed him the hotel address and her room number.

  ‘Don’t forget – I warned you.’

  She went back to the hotel, past the nauseating stench of poisoned yurt slums, through the red dark of night, the dismal, frozen silence. All the stars of Orion shone straight down on her, and the snowy moon rose slowly into the sky from behind a concrete wall. Much later a deaf dawn appeared in the east and lit up the low-hanging clouds. A few flakes of snow drifted onto her fevered face.

  Before she fell asleep she listened to the progress of the waking morning. She thought about Siberia’s frosty, spent forests, spread like a wall along the edge of a sea of fields. She thought of the blizzarded, stiff-frozen borderlands, where herds of reindeer wandered aimlessly, lazily looking for food, the impenetrable wilderness, puny hills, uninhabited provinces, snowstorms, swarms of mosquitoes, and autumn’s still, misty damp wrapping itself around a little village.

  He didn’t call.

  The next day she went with the tour guide to Suhbaatar’s mausoleum, Bogd Khan’s winter palace, and the Lenin statue. When they ran out of sights, she tried one more time. She reminded the guide about the petroglyphs. He laughed with amusement and she understood that there was no point in bringing it up again
. She looked out of the grey hotel window at the quiet clouds crawling unhurried to the east.

  When Mitka came home after eight months of psychiatric treatment, she sensed that he had guessed everything. Irina had arranged through her office for herself and Mitka to stay in a citizens’ sanatorium in the Crimea. The purpose was for them to rest, and if his reason returned to its former sharpness, everything would be just as it was before. Irina had prepared her for this, for the fact that it might be as if nothing had happened while he was away.

  Mornings crawled into days, days into evenings, deep nights filled the earth and sky, as long as the life to come, filled with a hum, with the hiss of radiators, the cold dryness of sheets, the dry rustle of gritty snowfall. She paced around her room, looked out of the window at the sleeping city, the greasy, struggling wind sinking into the darkness of the city. She gazed at the nights, the stars coming out so large and pale she could have touched them. She waited for the mornings, the stars twinkling uncertainly for a moment and disappearing. She watched the slow rise and set of the desperate sun, the momentary light of falling stars, and cursed herself. She was tired and empty. Far away from everything. Even herself.

  Gradually, she accepted her solitude and stopped waiting for him to call. She began to bear the continual anxiety, the growing pressure, the pain in her chest, a little better. She learned to listen a little more calmly to her own tense breathing and the restless beat of her overwrought heart devouring her blood.

  One evening he came. He smelled of mare’s milk kumis and mutton fat. She sobbed. As they stepped outside, a rock-hard, heavy southwest wind shoved them along, carrying them towards a yurt suburb. He took hold of her shoulder and pulled her next to him, fatherly. She told him what had happened. She was crying, but the wind from beyond the yurts dried her tears so quickly that he didn’t see them. He listened to her without interrupting, and when she came to the end of the story, he burst into boisterous laughter.

  ‘You really are stupid. I’ve never met a broad like you, and I’ve come across all kinds. Don’t worry. It’ll all work out.’

  He swallowed his laughter. He scratched the back of his head and snarled. ‘I wonder what those guys had been up to, for God to punish them like that? The law here barely recognises manslaughter, fines you about as much as the price of a bottle of black-market vodka. They must be quite the rascals, eh?’

  They walked on in silence. A gust of air blasted around a corner, she swallowed it and coughed.

  ‘When things don’t get better, they get worse, and it’s a short road from bad to good. Don’t worry, my girl, a bit of bad luck can suddenly change to a bit of good. Those bums got what they asked for. No normal Mongolian man goes to a hotel to meet a Western tourist – it’s like suicide.’

  He looked at her pityingly.

  ‘I once had a whore here who I really liked a lot. She had a six-year-old son who always gave me a murderous stare. When I was screwing her I was always afraid he could come up behind me and put a Finnish pen through my skull. I bought him a set of building blocks from Moscow, the kind you can use to build all of Red Square, with the church and Lenin’s mausoleum. When I gave it to him, he threw it in the corner and stared at me like he could have killed me. But when I went to get some pussy later on, the whore told me to look under the bed. There was Red Square in all its glory, handsome as Beria’s dick.’

  She jumped over a pile of horse manure in front of a drinks machine and laughed. There was a snowy amusement park behind a low warehouse where a tired old ferris wheel moped, stiff with cold. He took off, running towards the park. She watched as he slipped through the hanging half-open door of the leaning, abandoned booth and, as if by magic, the light bulbs strung around the park flickered on in faint tatters of light and the ferris wheel creaked into motion, first rattling slowly, then growing faster with a steady whine. She looked first at the man, then at the ferris wheel, then at the outlandish city with its wind-licked, blackened, discarded remains of yurts, strewn over a wasteland. The melting snow smelled like spring. A puddle of greasy black liquid spread from an oil barrel thrown into a snow drift. She thought about Moscow, Malaya Nikitskaya, where she and Irina once walked, the yellow lights gliding through the autumn fog.

  The darkness thickened to a blue mist over the amusement park. He walked her back to the hotel. They could see from a distance a gigantic puddle of oily sludge, a cold red circle of moon shining on its surface. Little children were playing at the edge of the puddle, although it was night. A girl barely four years old, her legs swollen, was gathering oil in a broken bottle. A boy younger than her was wading in the puddle, shoeless, splashing it on himself.

  The hotel was locked. The two of them stood with their backs to the wind and waited. The faint light of the moon shone on the puddles of slush, an indifferent wind whistled around the building. A sullen functionary eventually came and opened the door. The man followed her to the desk in the lobby and handed her a twenty-five-rouble note. She smiled bashfully back at him. He winked at her and left.

  The girl climbed the stairs to her room and collapsed happily onto the sofa. She fell asleep with all her clothes on, at peace, thinking of nothing.

  A HALF MOON STILL HUNG over the yurts despite the concentrated sunlight. Small white clouds scuttled briskly across the lid of sky. Columns of trucks rumbled towards construction sites, shaking the window of her room, horses whinnied and flicked away the burning rays of sun with their long thick tails, old men in lambskin coats puffed cigarettes on the main street in front of the department store, women hurried by carrying milk pails.

  When she went down to the lobby, the man handed her a budding cyclamen and kissed her three times on the cheeks.

  ‘Is this the fellow that’s been bothering you?’

  He pointed disdainfully at the tour guide. When she nodded, he took the man aside. A moment later the guide left without looking back, angry and humiliated, but well paid.

  ‘We won’t have any more trouble from that louse,’ he said with a laugh. ‘Walking around in rags, but still full of himself.’

  A shiny old Volga was waiting for them outside behind a buzzing telegraph pole, its thin, goateed driver dangling an extinguished cigarette in a short amber holder.

  ‘This here’s Gafur, soldier of the Golden Horde and my friend at the construction site. A real Tatar. Not one of these Swabian Protestants. Do you know what kind of fellows these Tatars are? They gave Hitler a gilded saddle as a present, and to repay them Stalin killed the whole nation, millions of them. Gafur’s the only one left alive.’

  Gafur laughed. The man got in the front beside him, the girl in the back. The car smelled of sweat and dandruff.

  ‘Complete dashboard with frame-suspended pedals, four on the column, and built-in radio. And best of all, with very little money you get lots of little extra annoyances.’

  Gafur started the engine with a quick sharp movement of his hand, stomped on the accelerator so hard that the back wheels skidded in the slippery slush, and edged the nose of the car out of the driveway, revving it for all it was worth. The retreating road was covered in a thick layer of dust mixed with sand and snow. Gafur said he’d been with his Tatyana for fifteen years and successfully driven her from Alma Ata to Mongolia.

  Now and then the car bounced over to the right side of the road, then the left. Oncoming trucks rushed by on one side or the other. Gafur suddenly slammed on the brakes, causing the man to hit his head on the windshield, then immediately floored the accelerator so that the girl was slammed against the back headrest. The man pointed towards the Golden Mountains on the horizon, brightly painted with sunshine. They glowed red in some places, white in others.

  ‘Let’s head for the mountains. Some country air and nature will do us good. I’ll sell you to some horse herder who’ll screw your brains out and make you the best goat milker in Mongolia.’

  Here and there trucks idled with steaming water shooting out of them. There were sheep and goats of different colou
rs everywhere. A caravan of camels with full loads undulated in the distance. One of the camels had a gigantic antenna contraption on its back. The Volga lurched and coughed as it roared along, the radio rasping. The black-spotted sun shed its hot rays through the rear window; the girl let her cheek press up against the cool glass.

  She came awake with a hard knock. The car had stopped in the middle of a clear-running river. Gafur cursed and the man laughed.

  The two men took off their shoes, socks, and trousers, and asked her to get behind the wheel while the engine continued to knock, wheeze and sputter. They got behind the car and pushed. She wrenched the transmission into first, gently lifted her foot from the clutch, and pressed the accelerator to the floor. The men shivered in the ice-cold water all the way across the river. Luckily the water was shallow, only knee-deep. She got to the other side and got out of the car.

  ‘I’ll tame you yet, you whore,’ Gafur hissed, hopping back in and furiously seizing the steering wheel.

  The man looked at Gafur and wrinkled his brow. Gafur punched the car straight into second gear, stomped vehemently on the accelerator, and cranked the wheel farther than was reasonable. The Volga flung itself from the slippery bank onto level ground. Feodor Challiapin sang from the hefty vacuum-tube radio built into the dashboard.

  The road ascended into the mountains. The Volga jerked its way up the steep, narrow route. The fiery red sun hung at the edge of the snow-covered sandy steppe and started to set; a pink mist hovered low over the desert. Owls appeared, loitering in the middle of the road and flapping into flight just as the Volga was about to crush them. Sometimes the car stopped and the girl got behind the wheel as the men pushed. Sometimes they stopped along the road to let the engine cool.