Compartment No 6

by Rosa Liksom

  ROSA LIKSOM is a Finnish artist and the author of over a dozen books. She won the Finlandia Prize in 2011 for Compartment No. 6, now translated into thirteen languages.

  Rosa Liksom

  COMPARTMENT NO. 6

  Translated by Lola Rogers

  Serpent’s Tail gratefully acknowledges the financial assistance of FILI – Finnish Literature Exchange

  This book has been selected to receive financial assistance from English PEN’s ‘PEN Translates!’ programme supported by Arts Council England. English PEN exists to promote literature and its understanding, uphold writers’ freedoms around the world, campaign against the persecution and imprisonment of writers for stating their views, and promote the friendly co-operation of writers and free exchange of ideas. www.englishpen.org

  Passages from Vsevolod Garshin’s The Scarlet Flower translated by E. L. Voynich

  A complete catalogue record for this book can be obtained from the British Library on request

  The right of Rosa Liksom to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

  Copyright © 2011 Rosa Liksom

  Published by agreement with the Hedland Literary Agency

  Translation copyright © 2014 by Lola Rogers

  The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, dead or alive, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.

  First published as Hytti Nro. 6, by WSOY, Helsinki in 2011

  First published in 2014 by Serpent’s Tail,

  an imprint of Profile Books Ltd

  3a Exmouth House

  Pine Street

  London EC1R 0JH

  www.serpentstail.com

  eISBN 978 1 84765 923 1

  thank you

  gospodin / graždanin X.X.

  MOSCOW HUNKERED DOWN into a dry, frozen March evening, sheltering itself from the touch of an icy sun setting red. The girl boarded the last sleeping car at the tail end of the train, found her cabin – compartment number six – and took a deep breath. There were four bunks, the higher two folded against the wall above. There was a small table between the beds with a white tablecloth and a faded pink paper carnation in a plastic vase. The shelf at the head of the beds was full of large, clumsily tied parcels. She shoved the unprepossessing old suitcase that Zahar had given her into the metal storage space under the hard, narrow bunk and threw her small backpack on the bed. When the station bell rang for the first time she went to stand at the window in the passageway. She breathed in the smell of the train: iron, coal dust, smells left by dozens of cities and thousands of people. Travellers and the people with them pushed past her, lugging bags and packages. She touched the cold window and looked at the platform. This train would take her to villages of exiles, across the open and closed cities of Siberia to the capital of Mongolia, Ulan Bator.

  When the station bell rang the second time she saw a muscular, cauliflower-eared man in a black working-man’s quilted jacket and a white ermine hat and with him a beautiful, dark-haired woman and her teenage son, keeping close to his mother. The woman and the boy said goodbye to the man and walked arm in arm back towards the station. The man stared at the ground, turned his back to the icy wind, pinched a Belamorka, lifted it to his lips and lit it, smoked greedily for a moment, stubbed the cigarette out on the sole of his shoe, and stood there, shivering. When the station bell rang for the third time, he jumped on the train. The girl watched him walk towards the back of the car with swinging steps and hoped he wasn’t coming to her compartment. She hoped in vain.

  After a moment’s hesitation she went into the compartment and sat on her own bunk across from the man, who radiated cold. Both were silent. The man stared sullenly at the girl, the girl at the paper carnations, uncertain. As the train jerked into motion Shostakovich’s Eighth String Quartet burst forth from loud, plastic loudspeakers in the compartment and passageway.

  And so the Moscow winter, the steel-blue city warmed by the evening sun, is left behind. Moscow – the city lights and the noise of traffic, the circle dance of churches, the teenage boy and the beautiful dark-haired woman with one side of her face swollen – are all left behind. The sparse neon signs against a morose, pitch-black sky, the ruby stars on the towers of the Kremlin, the waxed bodies of the good Lenin and the bad Stalin, and Mitka, are left behind. Red Square and the Lenin Mausoleum, the lacy iron railings of the spiral staircase at the GUM department store, the Intourist international hotel with its foreign currency bar, its floor staff commandeering living space in the cleaning cupboards and looking for Western make-up, perfume, and electric razors, are left behind. Moscow, Irina, the statue of Pushkin, the ring roads and the metro’s circle line, Stalin’s thoroughfares, the Western-style, multi-lane Novy Arbat, the Yaroslavl Highway and the rows of dachas embellished with carved wooden flourishes, the slack, weary, overworked land, are left behind. An empty freight train a hundred metres long zooms by outside the window. This is still Moscow: a mass of nineteen-storey prefab buildings in the middle of a mud pit, faint, glimmering lights trembling in their icy windows, a construction site – half-finished highrises with gaping holes in their walls. Soon they, too, will be silhouettes in the distance. This is no longer Moscow: a house collapsed under the snow, a wild, swaying pine forest covered with frost, a clearing blanketed with snow, a gentle mist trapped under piles of snow, darkness, a lone log house in an expanse of white, an unkempt apple tree in the yard, a mixed forest stiff with snow, the plank fences of villas, a ramshackle wooden barn. An unknown Russia frozen in ice opens up ahead, the train speeds onward, shining stars etched against a tired sky, the train plunging into nature, into the oppressive darkness lit by a cloudy, starless sky. Everything is in motion: snow, water, air, trees, clouds, wind, cities, villages, people, thoughts. The train throbs across the snowy land.

  The girl could hear the man’s heavy, peaceful breathing. He was looking at his hands; they were large and strong. The light from switching lanterns flashed on the surface of the ground below. Sometimes the view was blocked by train carriages standing on the tracks, sometimes the dark of the Russian night spread outside the window, here and there a faintly lit house flashed by. The man looked up, gave the girl a long, piercing once-over, and said with relief, ‘So it’s just the two of us. The shining rails carrying us to God’s refrigerator.’

  A stocky, uniformed old carriage attendant appeared in the doorway of the compartment and handed each of them clean sheets and a towel. ‘No spitting on the floor. The passageway is cleaned twice a day. Your passports, please.’

  Having received their passports, she left with a sneer. The man nodded after her.

  ‘That old bag Arisa has militia powers. She keeps the drunks and whores in line. It’s best not to mess with her. She’s the god of heat on the train. Keep that in mind.’

  He took a folded knife with a black handle out of his pocket, removed the safety catch, and pressed a button. There was a ringing of metal as the steel blade clicked and sprang open. He put the knife carefully on the table and dug a large chunk of Rossiskaya cheese, an entire loaf of black bread, a bottle of kefir and a jar of smetana out of his bag. Last he brought out a bag of pickles dripping salt water and started to pop them into his mouth with one hand while he devoured the black bread he held in the other. When he’d finished eating, he reached into the bag and took out a wool sock with a glass bottle of warm tea inside it. He looked at the girl for a long time. His eyes showed distaste at f
irst, then a greedy curiosity, and finally some degree of acceptance.

  ‘I am Iron Steelavich,’ he said. ‘Metal man and general labourer to the princes of Moscow. Vadim Nikolayevich Ivanov is my name. You can call me Vadim. Would you like some tea? It has vitamins, so it’s good for you to drink a cup or two. I was thinking for a moment that they’d given this old codger a stiff sentence, put me in the same cage with an Estonian. There’s a difference between the Finlyandskaya respublika and the Sovietskaya Estonskaya respublika. Estonians are hook-nosed German Nazis, but Finns are basically made from the same flesh as we are. Finlandiya is a little potato way up north. You people are no trouble. All the world’s northern people are one tribe, a northern pride holds us together. By the way, Miss, you’re the first Finn I’ve ever seen. But I’ve heard a lot about you. You Finns have prohibition.’

  He poured her a glass of black tea. She tasted it warily. He savoured a small sip of his own, then got up and made his bed. He undressed modestly, taking off his outermost clothes, his thick black trousers with their narrow leather belt, his light jacket sewn from coarse fabric, and his white shirt, and folded them neatly at the end of the bed. He pulled on striped, sky-blue pyjamas and crept in between the starched sheets. Soon his cracked heels and toes, twisted from poor shoes and neglect, emerged from under the blanket.

  ‘Good night,’ he said with a bland look on his face, almost whispering, and fell immediately asleep.

  The girl was awake for a long time. The shadows of the tea glasses moved around the dim compartment without lighting on anything. She had wanted to get away from Moscow because she needed distance from her own life, but now she was already yearning to go back. She thought about Mitka, Mitka’s mother Irina, Irina’s father Zahar, and herself, how they were all doing. She thought about their temporarily shared home, which was empty now. Even the cats, Miss Dirt and Tom Trash, were gone. The engine whistled, the rails screeched, the rattling train pounded metallically, the man snored quietly all night long. The sound reminded her of her father and she felt safe. Finally, in the wee hours, as the shadows began to dwindle, she fell into a frothy, white dream.

  WHEN SHE WARILY OPENED HER EYES, the first thing she saw was the man doing push-ups between the beds. A green glimmer of sunlight played over the lacquered walls of the compartment; the man wiped the sweat from his brow with a towel. Before she had time to sit up there was a knock at the door and Arisa, who had stuffed herself into her black uniform jacket, brought in two steaming glasses of tea, moist waffles, and four large cubes of Cuban sugar, and put them on the table. The man dug some kopecks out of his wallet, which was decorated with an embossed picture of Valentina Tereshkova in her space helmet.

  When Arisa had left he grabbed his narrow-bladed knife from under the bed, picked up a sugar cube in his left hand, knocked the cube in two with the dull side of the blade, and handed the girl a steaming glass of tea and half a cube.

  He gave a shy, melancholy smile, took out a bottle of vodka, opened it, and filled two blue shot glasses that he dug from the depths of his bag.

  ‘Our shared journey may be a long one, but my speech will be short. A toast to our meeting. A toast to the world’s only real power, the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union will never die!’

  He tossed the shot down his throat and bit off a juicy piece of onion. The girl lifted her glass to her lips, but didn’t drink.

  He dried his lips on the edge of the tablecloth, smiling boyishly. The girl took a drink of tea. It was well-steeped, aromatic and strong. That’s when he noticed that she hadn’t drunk her vodka.

  ‘It’s sad to drink alone,’ he said.

  She didn’t touch the glass. He stared at her with a look of disappointment on his face.

  ‘It’s hard to understand. But all right. I won’t make you, even though I’d like to.’

  He was lost in thought, watching her from under his eyebrows. She didn’t like the expression on his face, so she took the small towel and her toothbrush and headed for the WC for her morning wash.

  There was a queue reaching halfway down the corridor. The travellers were wearing their dressing gowns, pyjamas, track-suits, a couple of men in nothing but white army longjohns.

  More than an hour later she reached the front of the queue. It was her turn to grab the wet, sticky door handle. The WC was filthy and the stench was pungent. Pee and soap and wads of newspaper floated around on the floor. Not a drop of water came out of the tap. There were two paltry, sharp-cornered fragments of beige-brown soap broken from a larger bar, smelling of soda. One piece was covered in a rusty-brown slime. She stepped up onto the toilet so she wouldn’t wet the slippers she’d bought in Leningrad, and managed to dry-clean her teeth and face. The little window of the WC was open a crack. An abandoned, forgotten station was passing by.

  The man loaded the table with black bread, canned horseradish, chunks of onion and tomato, mayonnaise, canned fish, and boiled eggs which he carefully peeled and sliced in two.

  ‘God doesn’t forget the well-fed, and vice versa. So help yourself.’

  They ate for a long time, and when he’d put the remains of the breakfast back in his bag of food and wiped the breadcrumbs off the table onto the floor they enjoyed their tea, which had cooled now.

  ‘I had a dream about Petya last night. He and I were born the same year and we were in the same grade at school. Five and a half years together. School didn’t suit us – we had to go to work. I met the trucks at the market steps and when they arrived I threw the goods from the trucks into the warehouse. Petya hauled boards at a construction site. We lived in a boiler room. There was one window, you could see the pavement, people’s feet going by. That’s where we were living. Then one evening Petya didn’t come home from work. I took the trolley to the construction site the next day to ask about him and they said that he had been run over by a machine and killed. They said the machine had killed him. I asked what machine. One old guy pointed to a wretched little excavator. Said that it was the culprit. I took a sledgehammer and smashed it beyond repair. Since then I’ve been on my own.’

  She glanced at him, deep in his thoughts, and thought about Mitka and an early morning in August. They’d been sitting on a concrete bench at the edge of Pushkin Square smoking pot, waiting for dawn, when a drunken gang of young people showed up and started to push and threaten them. They pushed past the group and hurried away, but one fat, bald-headed goon went after them and threatened to ‘knock the four-eyes’ brains out’. They were scared. They ran down the deserted street and a car appeared at the other end of the street and she was sure that it would have more skinheads in it. They went down a side street, cut across courtyards, and sprinted sweatily to their door.

  ‘The first time I was in south Siberia was at the beginning of the sixties. It was at the time of the monetary reforms. A rouble wasn’t worth anything, you couldn’t get food with good money, and they were asking fifty kopecks for a pint at the beer stand. I used to sit in the canteen on the site drinking some swill with Boris, Sasha and Muha the Dog. One day a work official came in, this felt-booted bumpkin, and said, Comrade, go to Sukhumi, in the Crimea, southern Siberia, they need crack workers out there. He shoved a piece of paper in my hand and disappeared like he was sucked under the floor. I went and told Vimma thanks for the pussy and see you later, my dear fat-assed bitch, and headed for the station and rode a rattly train across the wide open spaces of the Soviet Union. I ended up in Yalta instead of Sukhumi. They were building all kinds of little cabins, and when I told them I was a human machine, a Stakhanovite concrete hero, I got work immediately. It was the best summer of my life. I did nothing but lay around and whore. Girls who when you asked them if they were wet yet, they were, in about two minutes. Sometimes I went with one of them to the movies at the Construction Worker to see an adventure flick. Three Men in the Snow. Lost in the Ice. And what was that one I liked … Three Friends on the High Sea. Whenever I remember that summer my mouth waters. Life wasn’t tied down with good sen
se back then. But then came this last bitch. Katinka. Warbling, in her sugary voice, Let me wash your shirt. That’s when my life ended, nothing ahead of me but the dark, bumpy road of an alcoholic, sinking deeper all the time.’

  An east wind sprinkled the white plain with lonely snowflakes, a pale glimmer flashed over the trees. He spat angrily over his left shoulder into a corner of the compartment.

  ‘I’m talking about the same Katinka who saw me off at the station yesterday. Her face was my doing. I came home drunk and then it started. Same mess every time. She started in with the same old argument. She didn’t know how to stop, so I slapped her once, then twice. If she’d just keep her mouth shut like a good girl, help a poor traveller take off his clothes, make a good supper. But she never learns. I try to explain, I even praise her. But she doesn’t listen, she just lays it on thicker, screaming about how men built this damned world just for themselves. That’s how a henpecked husband’s anger can build up, and then I slap her till she’s quiet. If she doesn’t shut up then I knock her a good one right in the mouth. It’s not easy for me – I don’t like hitting – but it always happens that way. I have a right to speak too, to be a human being in my own home, even if I’m not there very often.’

  He laid careful stress on each word, dropping them one by one. The girl tried to close her ears.

  ‘It’s depressing to have the same old fight in the middle of the night. It takes all the joy out of life. Last night there was a strong whiff of her rolling over me like a tank in my dreams. Just the thought of her wreck of a pussy makes me want to puke my guts out.’

  The train gave a lurch, his hand jerked, and a tear rose in the corner of his eye. He wiped it away with the back of his hand and closed his eyes, cleared his throat and sat up straight, filled his lungs with air and blew it out again.