‘What are you saying?’ asks Annushka.
The shrouded woman freezes, holds her breath, and then starts sideways, spooked, towards the passage through the construction, over the frozen mud. Annushka follows her, does not take her eyes off her, is a few steps behind her, behind her quilted coat, behind her tiny teetering wool felt boots. She will not let her get away. The woman looks over her shoulder and tries to speed up, almost running, but Annushka is young and strong. She has strong muscles – how many times has she carried both Petya and his carriage all the way down the stairs, how many times has she carried them all the way up, when the lift wasn’t working.
‘Hey!’ Annushka shouts intermittently, but the woman gives no reaction.
They pass through the courtyards between homes, pass rubbish heaps and trodden squares. Annushka doesn’t feel tired but drops the bag with flowers for the cemetery; it would be a waste of time to go back for it.
Finally the woman squats and pants, unable to catch her breath. Annushka stops a few metres behind her and waits for her to stand back up and turn to her. The woman has lost; now she has to surrender. And sure enough, she looks over her shoulder, and you can see her face, she’s pulled the covering off her eyes. She has light blue irises, frightened, looking at Annushka’s shoes.
‘What do you want from me? Why are you chasing me?’
Annushka doesn’t answer, she feels as though she’s caught a big animal, a big fish, a whale, and now she doesn’t know what to do with it; she doesn’t need this trophy. The woman is afraid, clearly in this fear all her curses have escaped her.
‘Are you from the police?’
‘No,’ says Annushka.
‘Then what?’
‘I want to know what you’re saying. You’ve been saying something all this time, I see you every week as I go into town.’
To this the woman answers, more boldly:
‘I’m not saying anything. Leave me alone.’
Annushka leans over and extends her hand to help her stand, but her hand changes course and caresses the woman’s cheek. It is warm, nice, soft.
‘I didn’t want anything bad.’
At first the woman freezes, astonished by this touch, but then, seemingly mollified by Annushka’s gesture, she scrabbles and gets up.
‘I’m hungry,’ she says. ‘Let’s go, there’s a kiosk right here, they have cheap hot sandwiches, you can buy me something to eat.’
They walk silently, side by side. At the booth Annushka buys two long rolls with cheese and tomatoes, watching to make sure the woman doesn’t run away. She can’t eat anything. She holds her roll out in front of her like a flute about to play a winter melody. They sit on a wall. The woman eats her roll, and then wordlessly she takes Annushka’s. She is old, older than Annushka’s mother-in-law. Her cheeks are broken up by wrinkles that run diagonally from her forehead to her chin. It’s hard for her to eat because she’s lost her teeth. The tomato slices slip off of the bread, she grasps at them, saves them at the last minute and carefully puts them back in place. She tears off big bites with just her lips.
‘I can’t go home,’ Annushka says suddenly and looks down at her feet. She’s stunned she said something like this, and only now does she think in terror what it means. The woman murmurs something indistinct in response, but after swallowing her bite, she asks:
‘Do you have an address?’
‘Yes,’ says Annushka, and she recites it: ‘Kuznetskaya 46, apartment 78.’
‘So just forget it,’ blurts the woman, with her mouth full.
Vorkuta. She was born there in the late sixties, when the apartment blocks, which now seem age-old, were just going up. She remembers them as new – rough plaster, the smell of concrete and the asbestos used as insulation. The promising smoothness of the PVC tiles. But in a cold climate everything gets older faster, the frost breaks down the consistent structure of the walls, slows electrons in their ceaseless circulation.
She remembers the blinding whiteness of winters. The whiteness and the sharp edges of the light in exile. Such whiteness exists only in order to create a framework for the darkness, of which there is decidedly more.
Her father worked at a massive heating plant, and her mother in a cafeteria, which is how they got by – she always brought something home for them to eat. Now Annushka thinks that everybody there had a kind of weird illness, hidden deep inside the body, under clothing, a great sadness, or perhaps something vaster than sadness, but she can’t think of the right word.
They lived on the seventh floor of an eight-floor building, one of many identical buildings, but with time, as she grew up, the upper floors emptied out, people moved away to more amenable locales, usually to Moscow, but anywhere, as far away from there as possible. Those who stayed moved downwards, took up residence in the lowest-level apartments they could, where it was warmer, closer to people, to the earth. Living on the eighth floor during the many months of polar winter was like hanging from the concrete vaults of the world in a frozen drop of water, right in the middle of a frozen hell. When she’d last visited her sister and mother, they lived on the ground floor. Her father had died long ago.
It was fortunate that Annushka got into a good teaching school in Moscow; unfortunate she didn’t finish the course. If she had, she would be a teacher now, and perhaps she would never have met the man who had become her husband. Their genes would never have blended together in that toxic mix that was to blame for Petya coming into the world suffering from a disease that had no cure.
Many times Annushka had tried to barter with anyone she could, with God, with the Virgin, with Saint Parascheva, with the whole iconostasis, even with the closer, vaguer realm of fate. Take me instead of Petya, I’ll take his illness, I’ll die, just let him recover. She didn’t stop there – she threw in others’ lives: that of her reluctant husband (let him get shot) and of her mother-in-law (let her have a stroke). But of course, there was never any answer to her offer.
She buys a ticket and goes downstairs. There is still a crowd, people returning from the city centre to their beds, to sleep. Some already falling asleep in their carriages. Their sleepy breaths fog up the glass; you could draw something in those with your finger, anything, it wouldn’t matter because regardless it would vanish a moment later. Annushka gets to the final station, YugoZapadnaya, gets off and stands on the platform, only to realize a moment later that the train will go back, the same train. She sits back down in the same seat and from there returns, and then comes back again, until after several rides like this she switches to the Koltsevaya line. This line takes her in a circle, until around midnight she reaches Kievsky Station as though coming home. She sits on the platform until a menacing lady comes along, insisting that she leave, saying they’re about to close the metro. Annushka leaves, although she doesn’t want to – outside the frost is biting – but then she finds a small pub near the station, with a television up by the ceiling; the tables are peopled by a few lost travellers. She orders tea with lemon, one after another; then borscht, terrible, watery, and with her head propped up against her hand she drifts off briefly. She is happy, because she doesn’t have a single thought in her head, a single care, a single expectation or hope. It’s a good feeling.
The first train is still empty. Then at each station more and more people get on, until finally the crush is such that Annushka stands squashed between the backs of some kind of giants. Since she can’t reach the handles she’s condemned to having anonymous bodies hold her up. Then suddenly the throng thins out, and at the next station the train is empty. Only a couple of people remain. Now Annushka learns that some people don’t get off at the end stations. She alone gets off and switches trains. But she sees the others through the windows finding themselves spots at the ends of their carriages and setting out around their feet their plastic bags or their backpacks, usually old, made of hemp. They doze off with their eyes half-shut or unwrap the paper off some food and, excusing themselves over and over, mumbling, chewing re
verentially.
She changes trains because she’s scared someone might spot her, might grab her by the arm and shake her or – worst of all – might lock her up somewhere. Sometimes she walks over to the other side of the platform, and sometimes she changes platforms; then she travels by escalator, by tunnel, but never reading any of the signs, completely free. She goes, for example, to Chistye Prudy, changes from Sokolnicheskaya to Kaluzhsko-Rizhskaya and goes to Medvedkovo and then back to the other side of the city. She stops in the toilets to check her appearance, to make sure she looks all right, not because she feels the need to (in truth she does not), but rather to avoid being spotted, due to unkemptness, by one of those cerberi that guard the escalators in their glass booths. She suspects that they have mastered the art of sleeping with their eyes open. At a kiosk she buys some pads, some soap, the cheapest toothpaste and toothbrush. She sleeps through the afternoon, on the Koltsevaya line. In the evening she emerges from the station by way of the stairs, so as to maybe meet the shrouded woman out front – but no, she isn’t there. It’s cold, even colder than the day before, so she’s relieved to be going back underground.
The next day the shrouded woman is back, swaying on stiff legs and shouting out curses that sound like gibberish. Annushka stands in her line of vision, on the other side of the passageway, but the woman evidently does not see her, lost in her lamentations. Finally Annushka, taking advantage of a momentary lapse in the crowds, goes and stands right in front of her.
‘Let’s go, I’ll buy you a roll.’
The woman stops, snapped out of her trance, rubs her gloved hands together, stamps her feet like a saleswoman at a bazaar who is frozen to the bone. They go up to the kiosk together. Annushka is truly happy to see her.
‘What’s your name?’ she asks.
The woman, busy with her roll, merely shrugs. But a moment later she says with her mouth full:
‘Galina.’
‘I’m Annushka.’
That’s it for conversation. Finally, when the frost drives her back towards the station, Annushka asks another question:
‘Galina, where do you sleep?’
The shrouded woman tells her to come back to the kiosk when the metro closes.
All evening Annushka rides the same line and indifferently examines her own face reflected in the window against the dark walls of the underground tunnels. She already recognizes at least two people. She wouldn’t dare try to talk to them. She’s travelled a few stops now with one of them – there is a tall, thin man, not old, perhaps even young, it’s hard to say. His face is covered in a sparse light-coloured beard that comes down to his chest. He’s wearing a flat cloth cap, a worker’s cap, ordinary and threadbare, a long grey overcoat, pockets stuffed with something, and a weathered backpack. Then tall lace-up boots with homemade socks protruding out of them, the legs of his brown trousers tightly tucked in. He seems to not be paying attention to anything, immersed in his own thoughts. With verve he hops out onto the platform, giving the impression that he’s heading for some distant but concrete destination. Annushka has also seen him twice from the platform; once he was sleeping on some completely deserted train that seemed to be retiring for the night; the other time he was also dozing, resting his forehead against the glass; his breath conjured up a mist that concealed half his face.
The other one Annushka remembers is an old man. He walks with difficulty, with a cane, or rather, a walking stick, a thick piece of wood that curves a little at the end. When he gets into a carriage he has to hang on to the door with his other hand, and usually somebody helps him then. Once inside people give up their seats for him, reluctantly, but they do it. He looks like a beggar. Him Annushka does try to hunt down, as she hunted down the shrouded woman earlier. But all she manages to do is ride with him for some time in the same carriage, stand in front of him for more or less half an hour, so that she knows by heart every detail of his face, his clothing. She isn’t brave enough to talk to him, however. The man keeps his head down, not paying attention to what’s happening around him. Then a crowd of people going home from work sweeps her away. She lets herself be carried by this warm stream of scents and touches. She becomes free of it only after it has carried her through the turnstiles, as though the underground had spit her out like some foreign body. Now she will have to buy a ticket to go back in, and she knows that she will run out of money soon enough.
Why does she remember those two? I suspect because they’re constant, somehow, as though they moved differently, more slowly. Everyone else is like a river, a current, water that flows from here to there, creating eddies and waves, but each particular form, being fleeting, disappears, and the river forgets about them. But those two move against the current, which is why they stand out the way they do. And why they aren’t bound by the river’s rules. I think that this is what attracts Annushka.
When they close the metro she waits in front of the side entrance for the shrouded woman and just when she gives up, the woman finally appears. Her eyes are covered, and with all those layers of clothing her shape is that of a barrel. She tells Annushka to follow her, and Annushka obeys. She is very tired, to be frank, has no energy at all and would be thrilled to just sit down somewhere, anywhere. They walk along the bridge of boards over the excavation, passing tin fencing pasted over with posters, and then they go down into an underground passageway. For a while they walk down a narrow corridor, where it is pleasingly warm. The woman indicates a place for Annushka on the floor, and Annushka lies down without getting undressed and immediately falls asleep. As she’s dozing, just as she has always wanted – deeply, without a thought in her head – the image she just saw walking down the cramped corridor returns for a moment under her eyelids.
A dark room, and in it an open door that leads into another room, bright. Here there is a table, and people sitting around it. Their hands are arranged on the tabletop, and they are sitting up straight. They sit and look at each other in absolute silence and without moving. She could swear that one of those people is the man in the worker’s cap.
Annushka sleeps soundly. Nothing wakes her, no rustling, no creaking of the bed, no TV. She sleeps as though she were a piece of rock against which stubborn waves are crashing, or a tree that has fallen and is now being covered by moss and mushroom spawn. Just before waking she has a funny dream – that she’s playing with a colourful toiletry bag, with a pattern of little elephants and kittens, which she’s turning over in her hands. And then suddenly she lets it go, only the bag doesn’t fall, it hangs between her hands, suspended in mid-air, and Annushka finds that she can play with it without even touching it. That she can move it with the power of her will. It’s a very pleasant realization, with a great joy in it that she hasn’t felt for a long time, since childhood, in fact. So she wakes up in a good mood, and now sees that this is not some abandoned workers’ dormitory at all, as she’d thought yesterday, but rather a common boiler room. That’s why it’s so warm in here. And she is sleeping on cardboard laid out alongside a pile of coal. On a piece of newspaper lies a quarter loaf of bread, quite stale, and an ample helping of lard mixed with hot pepper. She guesses this is from Galina, but she won’t touch the food until she has relieved herself in the disgusting bathroom without doors, and managed to wash her hands.
Oh, how good it feels – how incredibly good – to become part of a crowd that gradually warms up. Overcoats and furs give off the smells of people’s homes – grease, detergent, sweet perfumes. Annushka goes through the turnstile and from there allows herself to be carried by the first wave. The Kalininskaya line this time. She stands on the platform, then feels the warm underground air. No sooner do the doors open than Annushka finds herself inside, pressed between bodies, so much so she doesn’t need to hold on. When the train curves she gives into that motion, sways like grass amidst more grass, a blade among other grains. At the next station people still get on although you really couldn’t even squeeze a match in now. Annushka half-closes her eyes and feels as though
her hands were being held, as though from all sides she were being embraced affectionately and rocked by reassuringly kind hands. Then suddenly they pull into a station where many people get off the train, and one must stand on one’s own two feet again.
When the carriage almost completely empties out near the final station, she finds a newspaper. At first she stares at it suspiciously – maybe she’s forgotten how to read – but then she picks it up and anxiously leafs through it. She reads about a model who’s died of anorexia, and how the authorities are thinking about prohibiting overly skinny girls from being displayed on the runways. She also reads about terrorists – yet another plot’s been foiled. TNT and detonators found in an apartment. She reads of disoriented whales swimming up onto beaches where they die. Of the police tracking down a ring of paedophiles on the internet. Of the forecast predicting it will get colder. Of mobility becoming reality.
There’s something wrong with this paper, which must be falsified somehow – which must be fake. Every sentence she reads is unbearable and hurts. Annushka’s eyes fill with tears and brim over, big drops plopping onto the news. The poor-quality paper instantly absorbs them like the barely-there pages of a Bible.
When the train goes above ground Annushka rests her head against the glass and looks out. The city’s every shade of ash, from dirty white through to black. Made up of rectangles and unformed masses, of squares and straight angles. She tracks high-voltage lines and cables, then looks up over the roofs and counts antennas. She shuts her eyes. When she opens them again the world has skipped from place to place. Right at dusk, revisiting the same place once again, she sees, just for a moment, just a few instants, the low sun break through from behind the white-blooming clouds to illuminate the apartment blocks with a red glow, but just their tips, the highest floors, and it looks like giant torches being set alight.
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