by James Meek
Samarin sat on a bench on the station platform, watching the wagon. Something was burning in town, there was black smoke spreading over the roofs. The wind was so strong and hot there was bound to be a storm but the sky was clear, just the smoke spreading. Samarin sat on the bench and watched the students come and go. The bench was in the shade of the station roof and sheltered from the wind but planks in the roof began to rattle. The students were moving through clouds of dust, their eyes closed, the women bunching their skirts with one hand and holding their hats with the other. Samarin could smell the smoke from the burning. The trees would rustle and then roar like a waterfall. When there were no students still waiting outside in the wind Samarin began counting the ones coming out. He could smell the burning. The clouds were coming. They were thick and they heaved while he watched them. No one else was left on the platform. The air stank of dust and smoke and ozone. It became very dark. The sky was a low roof. The last of the students came running out of the wagon. Samarin got up and called to him. The student ran round the wagon and across the rails and off towards the fields with his collar turned up. He turned round once without stopping and looked at Samarin. It was a message from the future. He’d seen something he didn’t want to see again and all he wanted was to look Samarin in the face once more, to be able to say: ‘I saw Samarin that day.’
Katya was the only one who hadn’t come out. Samarin went over to the wagon. The reading room was empty and the desks were clear except for the copy of Essentials of Steam Katya had been using and some of her notes. She’d written a poem. ‘She loved like suicides love the ground they fall towards,’ she’d written,
It stops them, embraces them and ends their pain,
But she was falling over and over, jumping,
Hitting the ground, dying and falling through again.
Samarin closed the book, went to the door of the librarian’s office and pressed his ear against the wood. The wagon was creaking in the wind so loudly that he couldn’t hear. He couldn’t tell if he could hear whispers on the other side of the door or if it was the wind and the roaring of the trees. A gust caught sand and straw and sent them pattering along the wagon chassis like a flood of rats flowing through the wheels. Samarin moved away from the door and heard a woman cry out. It came from outside. He ran out of the wagon into the dust and looked up and down the platform. There was no one. He could hear bells from a fire brigade in the town. He heard the woman cry out again, as if not from fear or pleasure or anger, just for the sake of making a sound, like a wolf or a raven. It was a long way away. A stone hit Samarin in the shoulder, and another on his head, and one on his cheek, drawing blood. He covered his head with his arms and ran under the platform roof. The sound of the wind was drowned out by a sound like cannonballs being poured onto the town from an inexhaustible bunker and the air turned white. The hailstorm lasted two minutes and when it ended the remnants of leaves hung from the trees like rags. The ground was ankle-deep in ice. Samarin saw the door of the wagon open and Katya climb down with a satchel on her back. Something heavy inside it weighed the satchel down. She looked up and saw him. Samarin called her name and she began to run away down the line. He moved after her. She slipped in the hail and fell and he came up to her. She was lying in the ice, half on her back, half on her side. Samarin knelt down and she looked up at him as if he’d come to her in the morning to wake her up after nights and days of sleep. She touched the cut on his cheek and slowly drew back her fingertip with the smudge of blood on. She was beginning to shiver with the cold. She asked Samarin: ‘Where to?’ Where to. Samarin took her hands and pulled her up out of the softening hail. She was dripping wet and shivering. She took a few steps away from him, took off the satchel, looked inside it, held it against her chest and laughed. Samarin told her to give it to him. She went on laughing and ran away down the track. Samarin ran after her and caught her round the waist and she fell face forward. She was strong and she tried to cover the satchel with her body. Samarin wrestled with her, trying to turn her over, his shins wet in the ice, his knees against her thighs, his hands delving in under her to where she held the satchel against her belly. He smelled her hair and the wet cotton of her dress, and her soft strong middle twisted in his hands like a fish. He drove his right hand in between her legs and his left hand up to her breast and without crying out she let go of the satchel, squirmed round and tore at his hands with hers, their soft chill palms on his knuckles. He seized the satchel, rolled away from her and stood up.
‘Give it back,’ she said, lying still, looking at him.
Samarin opened the satchel. There was an explosive device in it. He took it out and threw the satchel to her. Katya began to shiver.
‘Better me than you,’ said Samarin.
‘Romantic,’ said Katya in a flat voice. ‘You’ve failed before you’ve begun.’
‘My throwing arm is stronger.’
‘You’ll throw it in the river. You’ll never use it.’
‘Why not?’ said Samarin, smiling, looking at the heavy package weighing down his hand. ‘It’s better than plans.’
Katya stood up, the melted ice leaving dark streaks down the crumpled front of her dress. Fragments of hail hung from the ends of her hair. She looked down, began to brush herself, then stopped and looked at Samarin. A change came across her face. It became warm, hungry and interested. She came up to Samarin, pressed her body against him, wrapped her arms round him and kissed him on the lips.
‘Do you really like me so much?’ she said.
‘Yes,’ he said, and leaned his mouth to hers. Katya grabbed the bomb from his distracted hand, hooked his ankle with her toe, snatched him off his footing, and ran away before he could catch her.
Two weeks later, she was arrested and charged with conspiring to commit an act of terrorism.
The Barber and the Berry Gatherer
In the middle of October nine years later, in that part of Siberia lying between Omsk and Krasnoyarsk, a tall, slender man wearing two coats and two pairs of trousers came walking from the north towards the railway. He followed the river, walking through the wild garlic and rowans and birches on the rocks above the rapids in the couple of miles before the bridge. His ears stuck out from coiling tails of dark hair reaching to his collar and his tongue slipped from the tangled beard to moisten his lips. He looked straight ahead and walked steadily, not stumbling, not like one who knew the way so much as one who had walked for months towards the white sun and was intending to walk onwards until killed or blocked. He ducked down and with his right hand touched a piece of string keeping his boots together. He kept his left forearm pressed tight against his chest.
He was a few hundred yards from the line when he heard the whistle of a locomotive. There was no wind and the trees shuddered from the sound to the horizon. His certainty and direction were sent awry and he looked around him with his mouth open, licking his lips. He squinted up at the bright grey sky and began to breathe deeply. The whistle went again and the man smiled and made a noise which could have been a part of a word or him having forgotten how to laugh and trying all the same.
When the whistle sounded for the third time, closer, the man ran forward, round a bend in the river, and saw the bridge. His face closed and he ran to the water’s edge. He squatted down and with his right hand scooped up water and splashed it over his face and drank some. He looked quickly at the bridge and behind him through the trees and let his left hand relax and pulled a package out from inside his coat. It was wrapped in a linen rag. He took a heavy stone and stuffed it into the cloth and tied two ends of the cloth tight in a knot. Stretching his arm back he hurled the package out and it disappeared into the water of the river. He put his hands into the water and washed them, took them out and shook them, rolled up the sleeves of his coats above the wrists and washed his hands again.
The locomotive came over the bridge, a dark green beast streaked with pale corrosion, like malachite, creeping across the thin span with a string of cattle wagons in
tow. The whistle sounded down the gorge and the weight of the train bore down on rotting sleepers with the groan of wood and the scream of unlubricated iron and steel. It crawled on as if there were many ways to choose instead of one and flakes of soot and pieces of straw drifted through the air towards the river. One of the wagons was rocking from side to side and above the noise of the engine and the train there was a hacking sound as if someone was taking an axe to a plank.
The door of the wagon shot open and a man in army breeches and a white shirt was in the doorway, with his back to the outside, holding on with one hand and trying to catch the bridle of a horse with the other. The horse was rearing up and flailing at the man with its forelegs. There were more horses behind, their heads lunging madly towards the light. The man fell from the wagon as it rocked towards the river and toppled over the rail. He fell fifty metres into rocky shallows. His limbs worked as he fell, as if he was trying at the same time to fly, to land feet first, and to brace himself for the moment of impact. His eyes were open and so was his mouth but he did not scream. His cheeks were stretched back and he hit the water belly down. The water lifted white skirts high around him and when they came down again the man was not moving, beached on gravel, lapped by quiet eddies at the river’s edge.
The horses, five of them, tumbled out of the wagon after the man. They were caught between the moving train and the low rusted guardrail of the bridge. One fell off the edge of the bridge immediately, landing on the edge of the river close to the fallen man with a crack on the water like a mine going off. The others fought for space on the bridge parapet. One stocky chestnut got dragged forward by a wagon, her harness caught by a projecting hook, and was hauled trotting and skipping and struggling against the mouth of the tunnel at the far end of the bridge, where her neck was broken.
The three surviving horses tried to shuffle to safety between the train and the rail. There was only space for them to move in single file, and barely that, but one of the three, a big skinny coal black horse, was trying to go in the opposite direction to the others. It reared up and its feet came down on the horse blocking its way, a bay. The black one got its balance back and reared again. The bay pushed forward and the black one ended up on top, its legs hung over the neck of the other.
While the bay and the black were locked together, like punch drunk boxers, the train must have given the third horse, a white stallion, a shove, or it had gone mad, because it charged the guard rail and dived head first over the edge into the river. It was roped together with the bay and the bay was snatched out from underneath the black horse and went down after. Bay and white flew down, so unlike Pegasus, graceless in the air, their limbs frozen, and smacked thunderously into the skin of water over river pebbles.
The survivor, the black horse, took a few paces back, stopped and cantered forward, against the motion of the train, back the way it had come. The space between the guard rail and the wagons widened as the horse moved on and it picked up speed as the last wagon swung across the bridge. The wagon disappeared into the tunnel and the horse was gone west at a gallop through the bracken and deep grass by the railside.
The man by the river stood still and listened until he could hear no sound from the train. He unbound his boots, took off both pairs of trousers and went out into the river to the place where he had thrown the package. The water came up to his thin white thighs. He searched for an hour, slowly, scanning the clear waters pace by pace, back and forwards. Twice he reached down and closed his hand round a pale stone.
He came out, sat down and put his boots and trousers back on. ‘A fool then,’ he said aloud.
He walked along the water’s edge till he came to the base of the bridge. The bay was still alive, its head flailing in a shimmering cloud of mosquitoes, the rest of it paralysed with the water rushing round it, a great soft warm rock of flesh. The soldier who fell from the train and another of the horses were washed up on the shore. The soldier was dead. His breeches were of fine material and his boots were imported. There was nothing in his pockets. The man took off the boots and tried them on. He couldn’t get his feet into them. He put the boots back on the corpse, turned the body over face down and took a knife out of his pocket. It was a single long, thin, rectangular piece of steel, sharpened to an edge along one side and with a strip of felt tied round the end for a handle. He went over to one of the dead horses, the white one, cut away a strip of hide from the leg, cut off a strip of flesh and put it in his mouth. He went over to the edge of the trees, picked a handful of sorrel leaves and squatted down, chewing the raw meat and leaves, looking round and watching the soldier. When he had finished he drank water from the river. He pressed his ear against the stanchion of the bridge and listened.
He went over to the soldier and picked up his right hand. He looked back upriver the way he had come, placed the soldier’s wrist on a stone washed by a thin stream of water and cut off his hand, sawing through the ligaments and parting the joints by pressure rather than the sharpness of the blade. Blood darkened the stone, clouded out into the waters and swirled away into the current.
The man let the soldier’s arm fall into the river, took the severed hand and ran into the woods. He walked for a mile away from the river and dug a hole with his hands through the mud and leafmould and earth. He buried the hand and covered it up. He returned to the river, cleaned his hands and began to climb the rocks up to the railway tunnel.
His toes with jagged broken toenails clawed out through the ends of the boots and when the way became steep he took the boots off and rammed them into the pockets of the outer coat. Thirty metres up there was a stanchion founded on the rock but the last ten metres up to it were steep, sheer almost, with no bushes to hold. The man stood on a ledge, breathing hard, the dying sun in the west hot on his back through the thick coat-cloth, and tracked the cracks in the rock with his eyes. He took the first handhold, stretching his left arm out straight up, and hauled his right foot up to a lip of rock. He crawled up limb by limb until the rock became smooth and the crack he had seen curving up to within reach of the stanchion turned out to be the shadow of a downfacing leaf of sandstone. He was pressed against the rock with his arms and legs splayed out like a newborn creature trying to suckle and embrace a stone mother vast beyond the scope of his senses. He had climbed too high to let go and fall. There was a vein of quartz slanting up towards the stanchion. The man felt the rock about to leave him. He made a sound, half grunt, half sob, and grabbed for the quartz with the fingernails of his right, then his left hand, getting half the purchase he needed from the translucent bulge to stop him falling, and the rest from his toenails. The long hard right big toenail scraped down the rock a couple of centimetres and slotted into a hidden crack. All the man’s weight slid back onto the brittle plectrum for an instant before he used it to shove himself back up and, in the moment before the nail tore off, snatch the rusted iron spar of the bridge stanchion with one hand. He hung for several seconds, then got hold with the other hand and pulled himself up so that his feet were resting on the metal.
He climbed up the stanchion. It was easy, like a ladder. The pain beat with his pulse while he climbed. There was a hatchway at the top onto the walkway by the line. He went through and sat on the painted metal plates. The sun was about to sink behind the trees. He lay down along a smooth stretch of metal between rivets and closed his eyes.
He heard feet moving on the stone chips bedding the sleepers and turned his head towards the sound, not getting up. The clouds had cleared and the sky in the west was orange with the skyline torn by the black pines and the twin humps of blasted rock on either side of the cutting. The being coming was on foot and alone, about thirty metres down the line, a small, broad, dark form moving slowly in the twilight. The man stood up and spread his arms out. ‘Brother!’ he shouted. The approaching form stopped. ‘Don’t be afraid! I’m alone, without weapons!’
The other figure took a few steps closer.
‘Come on, let’s not frighten each other.�
� The two men came near enough to see each other’s faces. The man from the west had a hat and an overcoat and downy fuzz on his chin. He was carrying a carpet bag.
The man who had climbed up said: ‘I’ve been gathering berries. Samarin, Kyrill Ivanovich.’ He held out his hand.
‘Balashov, Gleb Alexeyevich.’ His hand was long, cool and soft-skinned. Samarin’s was rougher, hot and chapped. Both men were about the same age; thirty.
Samarin sat on the rail and lashed his boots on. Balashov watched him, holding the bag in front of him with both hands.
‘Why are you walking?’ said Samarin. ‘Are the trains too fast?’
‘There are no trains any more. Only military ones. It’s forbidden to travel on them.’
‘I saw a train.’
‘That was a military train. A Czech train. The Czechs shoot at you if you try to climb onto them.’
‘Czechs? Is this still Siberia?’
‘Siberia.’
Samarin looked carefully at Balashov, as if trying to work out whether he was a liar, or an idiot. Balashov cleared his throat and looked away. He squeezed the handle of the bag till the leather creaked. He looked round, behind him, over the edge of the bridge, craning his neck. He cried out, dropped the bag and grasped the guard rail. When the bag hit the ground it fell on its side and objects spilled out of it. Balashov paid no attention.
‘There are horses down there!’ he said. ‘Injured!’
‘They’re dead,’ said Samarin. ‘They fell from one of the wagons in the train. I saw them fall.’
‘Poor beasts. Are you sure? I should go down. Perhaps one of them is still alive. When will men start leaving the horses out of their wars?’ He looked at Samarin as if he hoped for an answer.