by Anna Tambour
It stuck in her sole.
She bent and pried it out.
Filthy gilt stamped with the face of Motherland Locomotive #1 “New Dawn”, and smeared with sticky red: a button.
With a cry, the Muse grabbed for it, but Galina had it first.
“He’s mine!”
Spies
THE OMNISCIENT watched them both.
So did the chief train driver.
So did Valentin.
Spying had become an epidemic.
The Omniscient watched them because he had run to see where the Muse had run to.
The chief train driver watched them because he was in love with Galina and was going nowhere without her, little did she know his love. He was so shy, he had never so much as given her a warm bucket of coals.
Valentin watched them because he’d decided that the old man as a pimp was ridiculous (how could he pimp when all he did was sit in 3C reading science fiction?) but that maddening beauty in red! She was hard to keep up with. He almost resented her incursion into his life. Such was the strain she put on him, he no longer had time to steal from the people in the carriage under his care, let alone roam the train finding opportunities. On their first encounter she had pushed aside his charm as if he were a stray crumb, so he had been forced to use a sweetener: a whole bar of Red October chocolate.
“What do you want from me?” she’d demanded, so blatantly that he was speechless. “Give it to the cook,” she’d said.
His domain was carriage #1, not 3, and Savva had every right to fiercely defend his own right to whatever #3, including the mysterious and alluring 3C, had to offer.
Only in the smoking section did Valentin have a chance to get close to her. So, because of her, Valentin had been forced to spend time pretending to clean the smoking section (no one’s responsibility), rather terrifying, what with the shaking of the couplings and the wind gusts blasting through that doorless space between the carriages where many a man had solved the futility of life by falling out. That nauseating gap in the plates. Feel the speed shake your legs, and those sharp rocks poking through the snow, pointed at your crotch. The endless crunch crunch crunch. And so undignified. As far as cleaning went, Valentin had always made Savva look conscientious.
Times in the carriage under his care were extremely depressing, too. The nine tourists in 1A-C were the type that are so distrustful of foreigners that they travel poor. Their coats looked like dead cats. They spent all their time complaining, not that he could understand the words exactly, but who needed to? They lurked in the hallway and pounced on him, loudly and with eloquent body language—about the toilet, carpet, samovar, the slowness and unscheduled stops. And once, though they could see he wasn’t a waiter, they shouted borscht borscht borscht! It was a madhouse. They asked for the name of his supervisor and were not satisfied when he gave them a name. They’d been on the train forever, it seemed, and their destination was unknown, but they looked like they’d burrowed in. He couldn’t even persuade the conductor to check their tickets, declare them forged, and kick the tourists out because the conductor had fallen off the train, drunk, two years ago and the collective had voted for more worker flexibility by taking collective responsibility for the incident and therefore closing the matter, except for the monthly divvying up of his pay.
Only extreme self-interest kept Valentin’s spirits afloat. The woman smoked hungrily in the smoking section, flicking whatever it was in her pocket in that maddening manner of hers, and left. She didn’t complain, didn’t talk to anyone in fact, but often mumbled some word, “Gorgonna.” Valentin hated not being able to use his charm, to treat her like a woman should be treated—so that he could be treated with the respect a man of his looks deserves. He hated having to look busy and he especially hated that there was an added danger. He had to be especially careful about what he picked up off the shuddering, gaping steel plates that constituted the ‘floor’. Many a visitor came there looking for butts, and the old men were the worst. One old hero, thinking Valentin wanted what was rightly his, kicked Valentin in the ribs with a die-cast metal foot. If Valentin had fallen out, it would have been murder, not that Valentin would have had any satisfaction dead.
But the woman in red presented so much incentive. That hidden pocket of hers and the way she reached into it like a tourist who touches his chest where his passport pouch hangs secretly, or adjusts his hidden moneybelt. They might as well wear a sign: $. Not that she did anything blatant. She is subtle. But that tenseness, the way she uses her eyes, the habit of charm. Like me, she is a master. A mistress!
So far Valentin’s attentions had come to nothing.
When they arrived at L——, he hadn’t run off the train with the other workers but loitered till Savva had gone. Then he rushed to casually stroll past the open door of 3C. There she sat. Docile as a milk cow in her stall.
He left to see what the town had to offer, but the only trades he could make were for felt galoshes. Heartsick, he could only board the train and hope that the maddening woman delivered for him before the next town. He was getting mighty sick of working the trains.
So much for the past.
With minutes to go before the train left, Chance took over. As he stepped into Carriage 1, a flash of red caught his eye. Her! Running from the train. Of course. In moments, she’d do her business and be gone. What’s she trading? Who’s her contact?
His heart pounded as he followed.
She burst through the train station doors and rushed up to— Galina!
He watched the touching scene with disgust and some surprise. But not curiosity. He’d heard about that ridiculous compliment: “You have beautiful eyes.” Galina’s eyes were as attractive as the rest of her. And he’d heard about those three bowls of soup so disgusting that Galina tossed the rest of the soup, pot and all, out the restaurant window. You can never tell taste.
But taste was beside the point. That woman wafted a smell of contraband stronger than rotted caviar. She had wasted her business opportunity, or eluded him.
Whatever your taste, my beauty, you’re a professional. And now it’s a contest between pro’s.
He didn’t stay to see the denouement of the scene between the women, which must anyhow end immediately, as the train was ready to take off. Stiff-legged with anger, sputtering spite, he boarded Carriage 1. Beware, passengers. Hang on to your sodden old felt galoshes, your dead cat coats.
I’ve never been a hand-man like Grandpapa, but she’s forced me to it.
The lurch of the Amfesh-bena
FALDAROLO THOUGHT of taking off his shirt and binding his feet to help him walk, but as he might need to sell his shirt to afford her care, he decided that the best way to toughen his feet was to be cruel to them. And so he got to his feet and put one in front of another, barefoot.
Onwards he walked, thinking of love—out of the orchard, down the road; past a cave that he should have stopped in for the night; and on and on. When sun set, he paused till the moonrise, and walked on further.
His soles had rubbed through their blisters, and his lip was swollen and throbbing from the bladder-pipe’s bite. The bodily pains were mere annoyances compared to the agonies he suffered thinking of the muted bladder-pipe, of that desperate pinching measure she had been forced to take, to focus his attention on her needs.
“Listen!” whispers Ekmel.
He hadn’t slept a wink since they stopped in this exposed, haphazard place. And now, it isn’t the baying of running wolves, or the demands of a group of brigands that causes him to shake.
“Can you hear it?” he hisses.
A shuffling, coming closer, and closer. It doesn’t sound like any man, or any normal beast. It has to be that which he feared so much he hadn’t dared to mention it. The Amfesh-bena, the serpent with a head at each end, coming to take them—approaching, one slither at a time.
The Amfesh-bena wouldn’t eat now: it would bite with a poison that keeps you awake but unable to move. It carries you to its larder
where it hangs you like a sausagetill one night, it opens its jaws till they crack, and pulls you off the hook and into its mouth. But as it has two mouths they fight over you, and since it is a slow beast, the fight takes a very long while. And when the fight is over, your head faces your feet inside its serpent body where if there were light inside you could watch yourself be crushed by the ripple of its muscles. That is said to take one hundred days till there is not one solid bone in you, except your skull.
The shuffle is painfully slow.
“What a night, I wish it would last,” mumbles Burhanettin, who turns over.
“Shhhh!”
Burhanettin sighs. “How far is it,” he cries out, “from you to your heart?”
The beast must be almost upon them. The moon hides behind a cloud. Ekmel is so terrified, he cannot make a sound. He can barely move to place his hands over his eyes, but he manages that.
Burhanettin begins to blubber. “Your dear face I miss,” he sings in his sleep.
The moon peeks out, throwing light that slips past Ekmel’s fingers into his eyes.
There! The shadow approaches with a convulsive jerk.
That does it.
Ekmel jumps up, kicks Burhanettin, and leaps behind him. He is too frightened to run, but maybe the Amfesh-bena will consider Burhanettin enough. You should, Ekmel importunes. Burhanettin is a big and meaty man, whereas I . . .
Burhanettin sways woozily, woken from the first decent sleep he has had since travelling with this abomination of a man whose snores could cause an avalanche. He doesn’t know what has awakened him, luckily for Ekmel. He deserves his sleep after such an exhausting day. He needs his sleep. A tear slips down his cheek. He was just in the middle of such tenderness.
He shifts his hips to settle down again, but something is stopping him. Digging into his shoulders. He sniffs.
Ekmel! Suddenly he’s wide awake. That’s Ekmel’s filthy fingers, and the man is both clutching him and shoving him forward.
“Get away from me,” snarls Burhanettin. “What are you playing at?”
“Look,” whispers Ekmel, unfortunately close to Burhanettin’s ear, which is far too close to Burhanettin’s outraged nose.
“May you drown in your own breath.” Burhanettin, reaches behind and takes hold of a handful of Ekmel, flinging the man over in an arc whose point hits the earth on the path ahead.
The shadow lurches, and then falls upon Ekmel.
And then, the thing that followed the shadow falls upon Ekmel.
Ekmel’s face smashes into the rocky path. He feels nothing. Blood trickles from his lips, but he tastes nothing.
He has fainted at the touch of the shadow.
A watched cook can definitely boil
“OF COURSE HE’S YOURS, DEAR,” said the Muse to Galina.
That little train man with the turned up nose—he, the giver and maker of the greatest and only true-love declaration that she’d ever witnessed, as opposed to told about.
This was no time for a lot of explanation, but for Action.
But the fact is: ever since that day early in the train trip when the Muse had been peremptorily fetched by and then ordered by this cook to eat her cooking, the Muse had been drawn to the woman—not romantically, but not un-romantically either. That mark—irresistibly appealing. But the cook hated it. Is it the destiny of everyone, to be unhappy?
One day when served the borscht, the Muse said, “You have lovely skin.” But that only made the woman even more unhappy.
Soon enough, they were both more unhappy, for if the cook wanted to observe the Muse, that made it all the easier for the Muse to watch her.
The Muse witnessed the torture of the chief train driver, a man who ate quickly and never said a word but was so in love with the cook that the Muse could feel his love. No one else noticed a thing.
And the Omniscient’s friend, that little train attendant. He was so openly in love with the cook that one day, the Muse heard them arguing in the train attendant’s compartment. “Can’t you get it into your thick skull?” he shouted. “I love you.”
The day after that, he, with comical evasiveness, asked the Muse whether he could buy a magic potion from her that would banish a birthmark on his niece’s arm. He was so distraught with the Muse’s negative reply that they had a chat about beauty and the false lure of cosmetics. He hadn’t meant ‘magic potion’ literally, you see, and harboured scepticism about the power of cosmetics, and “didn’t give a damn” about the mark. “It doesn’t make her less beautiful to me,” he had, “but she thinks it ruins her.”
The Muse almost wished ill to the cook. The Muse would have settled for half that love—one is enough for me. Just one. For me! The contrast between the cook’s life and her own made her ever more frustrated, habitual, jumpy, romance-sodden, till:
The stop at the town of L——
The Muse was the only passenger who overheard one train unit employee say to another, “Twenty-four hours,” and watched them leave the train. She knew, therefore, how long the train would be sitting here, knew that they’d been abandoned, as this was the second time this had happened since she and the Omniscient had boarded, but that didn’t matter to her. “The destiny is joy. The joy is the journey,” she’d once dictated.
She watched the workers leave the train, some rushing, some strolling. The Carriage 3 train attendant ran out as preoccupied and worried as any lover should be. What would he seek for his own true love? The Muse didn’t let herself guess. She didn’t see the cook emerge, deducing that the silly woman was, if not locked in her kitchen, locked in her compartment weeping to her heart’s content as usual, too ashamed of her face to enjoy the town, let alone love.
When five hours had passed, the Omniscient said that he missed his tea; and later, he was surprised when the Muse said there would be no meals at the restaurant car that day.
“And why would that be?”
“Because there never are when we are stopped,” she said. “Tea? I’ll make it for you.”
“I couldn’t put you to the trouble,” he said, “Stopped? Where?”
“If you weren’t so immersed in that paper, you’d notice.”
When 24 hours were almost up, the Muse was at her post at the window, keenly watching the platform. The train’s workers had drifted back one by one till they all must have boarded. The chief train driver took leave of the stationmaster. The Muse chided herself for missing the return of the attendant.
She yawned. having been awake all night, and reached for a cigarette. Pushing up the window so her smoke didn’t disturb the Omniscient, she leaned her head out, and the cook! There she is. She’s running like a smuggler, from the train.
The Muse ran after her, as you know. And most likely, you also deduced that she didn’t just follow. She drew discretely alongside and watched where the woman cast her eyes. The Muse ignored the crude calls of the oaf across the street, but when she saw the woman’s eyes fill with tears of joy and what could only be secret pride, and saw the woman fold down the collar of her jacket and lift her face to the world, the Muse threw a glance to what had caused this extraordinarity.
The Muse had not had the adventures in history that gave the Omniscient all those memories that he forgot, so she had never seen a picture of the President to notice it as such. But here and now, she read the cook’s expression. And . . . it took a few seconds, but it did happen.
The wave hit her, tumbling her helpless, and floating, and exhilarated, and confused and breathless. She was swamped by Intuition, and almost unbearable jealousy, and then the wave subsided, beaching her on the sands of, of course—a higher selflessness. For the first time in her existence, the Muse was Woman.
To be loved like that.
“Savva,” breathed Galina. “Gulag or not, I’ll get you out.” A gust of wind tore at her hair and blew it out behind her in a golden blaze. With her squared shoulders, her fist of steel, and her many jutted out parts, she was the image of that statue at the State Art Ins
titute, “At the Ramparts” by Olya Shulpin, not that either of them knew it.
“You need me,” said the Muse.
Galina narrowed her eyes. “He told me he loves me.”
“He does,” said the Muse. “I can help.”
She didn’t know what she could do nor where he was, but she had to soak up this romance. She hadn’t a clue what help she could give. This wasn’t paper love, but the real stuff—red as roses, red as blood, red as hot, furiously beating hearts. The cook standing in front of her and the painting across the street and the hot, sticky button in the woman’s fist were: Love. I stand in its midst. She couldn’t walk away. This is the closest I’ve ever been to love. She corrected herself: Both-sides love. Inside her heaving breast, she felt everything that she’d ever dictated, and much much more. She shoved her jealousy as far down her gullet as it would go.
She smiled at Galina in a friendly way, but the other woman demanded: “Why?”
The Muse was at a loss. How could words explain? Besides, there is possibly No time to waste. “My Russian soul,” she guessed.
“Ahhhh.” That revealed all. It’s a poor citizen the Motherland doesn’t invest with that. Still . . . Galina looked the Muse over from head to toe. “You could be useful,” she said, taking the Muse’s arm.
“Excuse me, ladies.” The Omniscient startled them. They had forgotten all about the train. “We noticed.” He motioned to his companion, the chief train driver, who was blushing redder than a Stop button.
“You seem to have a problem,” said the Omniscient.
“Your friend—” said the Muse.
“They’ve arrested Savva!” said Galina.
The blushing man felt the dagger of love stab him in the heart.
“I’ll make a statement saying I did it,” he said stoutly, hoping Savva hadn’t murdered anyone.