by Rosa Liksom
‘But there’s a limit to everything. I never hit Katinka out in the hall of the communal apartment, or in the street, or at the office. I only hit her in our own room, because otherwise the block watch or the militia would show up and I don’t like either one of them, especially the militia. The number one rule is to not let the boy see it – after all, it is his mother. He’s so big now that he has his own little woman to smack around. I don’t like that … Beat your wife with a hammer and you turn her into gold, that’s what the old guys told me when I was a young man. It’s advice I’ve followed. Maybe too much.’
The girl looked first at the floor, then at a frozen cloud at the edge of the sky. She’d never met a Russian man like this before. Or maybe she had, but she hadn’t wanted to remember it. No Russian man had ever spoken to her like this. Still, there was something familiar about him, his insolence, his way of drawing out his words, his smile, his tender, disdainful gaze.
‘Katinka is a Russian woman, ruthless and just. She works, takes care of the home and kids, she can handle anything. I just think differently than she does. Take my old mother, for instance. We all live next to each other in the same communal apartment, and I think it’s a great thing – Katinka can cook for the old lady at the same time she cooks for herself and the boy, and keep a lookout, make sure Ma’s life has some flavour to it. But it isn’t that easy. For all the twenty-three years we’ve been married that bitch has been demanding that I throw my old mother out.’
The girl got up from the bed to go into the corridor, but he grabbed her tightly by the arm and pointed at the bunk.
‘You’re going to hear this to the end.’
She tore herself free. He dashed at her and seized her by the wrist, firm but fatherly. She slumped down on the foot of the bed.
He went back to his place, lifted a fingertip to his lips, and blew, smiling obscenely.
‘Something that’s always baffled me is how every suitor loves his bride, but every husband hates his wife. As soon as the marriage licence is signed the man turns into a clod and the woman turns into an old bag and discontent starts to gnaw away at both of them. The broad thinks that once they get some of the creature comforts then everything will be all right. She thinks the answer is her own hotplate, a new dressing gown, a floor vase, a kettle without any dents in it, a china tea set. The fellow, on the other hand, thinks, man, if I could get myself a whore, I could stand that old bag a little better. But in spite of everything … Sometimes when I look real hard at Katinka, I feel like I want to say, Katyushka, my silly little thing, my little fool.’
He gave a heavy sigh, reached for the pickle bag, got hold of a pickle, popped it in his mouth, and accidentally swallowed it whole.
‘Us men have nowhere to go. The dames would get by better without us. Nobody needs us, except another man. Right now I feel like drinking a toast to the energy, the toughness, the patience, the courage, the humour, the shrewdness, the deceitfulness and beauty of the Russian woman. It’s the dames that keep this country going.’
He slid his hand under his bunk and pulled out a Tchaikovsky chocolate bar. He opened the wrapper with his knife and offered some to the girl. He didn’t take a piece for himself, just put the bar down in the middle of the table. The chocolate was dark and tasted of naphtha. She thought of Irina, of how she would often sit under the reading lamp in her favourite armchair in the evening and read a book, how the yellow light from the lamp fell on the book’s pages, how Irina’s hands held the book, how her face …
‘Women used to know how to keep quiet. Nowadays they got their traps open all the time. One of the bitches used to put out and smoke at the same time, while I was fucking her. I wanted to strangle her.’
A birch forest, weary with hard frosts and sharp winds, came into view. The naked trees drew graphic lines in the snow. The train sped by, the snow blew into the air and hung there pure and sparkling. Sometimes the window was filled with frozen white forest, other times with blithe, blue, cloudless sky. The girl could hear the tones and rhythms of the man’s voice. His momentary passion quickly evaporated, replaced by a hint of deep sadness.
He thought for a long time. His wet lips moved, now quickly, now very slowly. His posture had fallen; he was sitting with his shoulders drooped. The girl took her drawing things out of her bag and started to draw.
He glanced at her, sighed a little, shrugged his shoulders lamely.
‘Katinka. My own Katinka.’
Silence fell over the compartment. He put his head against the cold windowpane. She got up and went out.
Several passengers were standing in the corridor. A freight train was going past in the other direction, causing their train to rock. The little station building flashed like a turquoise dot in a vast universe. A splash of dirt had been thrown against the corridor window during the night, and a pale light filtered through it. The birches grew sparse, the train quieted its speed, a rusted wreck of metal lay on the neighbouring track, and soon the train was shooting into Kirov station. A sign along the track said that Moscow was about a thousand kilometres away.
The door of the carriage was open. She stood in the doorway. A few small snowflakes drifted in the still, dry cold of the day. A decrepit local train twitched restlessly at the next platform as if it was in the grip of a seizure. People pushed their way out of its innards, desperately gulping the fresh air. The station bell rang once, then twice. She had a glimpse of the black plastic peak of the guard’s cap before Arisa came to close the door.
‘What are you standing there for? Do you want to get off in Kirov? They’d horsewhip you here. Get back into your compartment! You don’t have a citizen’s passport, or an address here. Stupid foreigners don’t understand anything, sticking their noses where they’re not wanted! They foist all the unlucky ones on me. Do you even know who Kirov was?’
The girl tottered slowly back down the corridor of the moving train and looked at the swaying town outside the window. A pack of stray dogs were fighting in front of a baroque administration building and a young man was hitting them with a broken broomstick. She went to the stewardess’s compartment to buy some tea. Arisa sat on the bed, all-powerful, and looked at her pityingly. Georg Ots was singing in Russian on a small transistor radio.
‘Everybody’s lives should be equal,’ Arisa said. ‘Either equally good or equally bad.’
She handed the girl two glasses of tea and three packets of biscuits instead of two.
‘People can handle anything, when they have no choice. Now get back to your own compartment!’
The man sat on his bed. He wore a plaid shirt open over his white longjohns. Under the wrinkles of the white shirt peeped a sweaty, muscular belly. He picked up a small orange from the table and started to tear roughly at the peel. When he’d eaten the fruit he dug a tattered newspaper from under his bunk and blurted from behind it in an irritated tone, ‘People are restless when they’re young. No patience at all. Always rushing somewhere. Everything goes at its own pace. Time is just time.’
He wrinkled his brow and sighed.
‘Look at me. An old duffer, a melancholy soul filled with a dull calm. A heart that beats out of sheer habit, with no feeling in it any more. No more pranks in him, not even any pain. Just dreariness.’
The girl remembered her last night in Moscow, how she’d hurried from one place to another, dashed down the long stairway into the metro and taken the red line to Lenin Library, run across the tiled floor of the museum-like station, through the maze of corridors lined with bronze statues and up the steep escalators to the blue line, ridden it past Arbat, got off at the church-like station decorated with mosaics whose name she couldn’t remember now, and realised as she stood under a concrete arch that she’d forgotten her bag, which contained her train tickets and vouchers, had turned back the way she came, jumped off one metro train and onto another, gone through the stations where she’d changed lines and, to her great amazement, found her bag at the Lenin Library stop – it was waiting for
her in the middle of the metro inspector’s window.
The train braked and came to a stop. A moment later the engine gave a jerk and the train was moving again. Another brake. Another stop. The engine dithered for a moment, whistled cheerfully, made up its mind, and moved. The wheels rang in momentary apology but soon the train was rattling ahead with purpose. The sun bounced up from beyond a field of snow, lit up the land and sky for a moment, then disappeared behind the boundless swampy landscape. The man examined the girl sharply.
‘So your soul’s full of nothing but dreams? Well, go ahead and dream. Ivan the Fool falls asleep on the stove bench and dreams about a stove that moves and a table that fills itself with food, but this life that men wiser than me call a mere holding cell is here and now. Death may come tomorrow and grab you by the balls.’
His narrow face shone with self-satisfaction. He had a beautiful mouth, narrow lips and a small scar on his chin like Trotsky.
‘Death can’t be any worse than life.’ He closed his eyes and pressed his lips tightly together. Then he hummed. ‘Don’t you fear death my girl, not as long as you’re alive. If you’re alive, then death’s not here yet, and once you’re dead, it’s already gone.’
He hiccuped a little, shook his shoulders, and sat up straighter. ‘I’d rather die than be afraid. If there’s anything you should be afraid of, it’s the Mongolians. They don’t even have names. They don’t do anything but eat, screw, sleep, and die. They have no morals of any kind. The human soul doesn’t mean a thing to them. But they do know how to destroy. Give a Mongolian a transistor radio and five minutes later he’ll hand back a pile of screws and wires and an empty case. The Mongolians have treated us Russians terribly and crushed the moral backbones of the likes of us, and still we try to help them. Try to bring them up to the present. But they don’t understand anything. They screw their children and laugh right in our faces … Am I getting through to you? Look, the Soviet Union is a powerful country, a great, old, very diverse people lives here. We’ve suffered through serfdom, the time of the tsars, and the revolution. We’ve built socialism and flown to the moon. What have you done? Nothing! What do you have that’s better than us? Nothing!’
He smacked his palms on his knees and opened his mouth to say something, but was silent.
Next to the train, far above the wall of forest, an eagle glided by with a calf carcass in its claws. The compartment door fell open. The little lamps that glimmered yellowish along the edge of the floor buzzed; the corridor looked like an airport runway. The heating vent threw out a burning heat in the narrow space. The girl went into the corridor. There was a young couple there, with a wrinkled old woman the size of a child, and a little girl in pigtails. The girl had a brown Pioneer teddy bear under her arm and in her lap a clown doll in a tall hat that looked like a schizophrenic who’d been through a bad trip. A violet sun over a shy forest clearing slipped behind the snow-covered evergreens. In the dense depths of the forest slept little birds in nests among the rocks, sinewy, white-coated hares in their burrows, and snoring bears in their hidden caves.
Arisa was making her rounds of the compartments and Sonechka, the younger stewardess in her oversized uniform, followed after her. The girl tried to talk with Sonechka, but she was so shy that she turned her face away at once and disappeared after Arisa into the first compartment. It was an area restricted to the carriage staff where an angrily bubbling samovar as big as the wall steadily puffed and steamed day and night. The samovar held a bucket of boiling water.
The slackening sun revolved briefly on the horizon. The dusky forest rose up humming towards a frail, cloud-embroidered sky. The man appeared in the passageway, and the girl went into the compartment, felt the rumble of the rails, and fell asleep.
When she woke up, he was looking at her with a very offended expression on his face. She smiled at him, thinking about how logical the whole thing was. She had left Moscow because now was the right time to realise her and Mitka’s shared dream of a train trip across Siberia, all the way to Mongolia. True, she was making the trip alone, but there was a reason for that.
The man had taken a worn deck of cards out of his bag and started to play solitaire.
‘Georgians,’ he said. ‘They’ve got legs like giraffes and they know how to sell themselves to fellows like me so well that you forget you paid for it. History has beaten the Armenians down, made them all humble lesbians and nice guys who won’t discipline their children. A Tatar only likes Tatars, a Chechen is a combination of an excellent baby machine and a drug dealer, the Dagestanis are small, thin, ugly, and smell of camphor, and the foolishly proud Ukrainians are always plotting nationalist conspiracies in their horrible accents. A Russian gets to where he’s deaf to it. And then there’s the Balts. Half-assed. They have no secrets. Too practical. Walking around with their mouths turned down, eyes straight ahead.’
He tapped his fingers on the tabletop. The girl coughed wearily, but he didn’t take any notice of this indication of her thoughts.
‘I’ve never screwed a Russian woman who was satisfied, not even for a minute. And this cock has pumped thousands of different colours of pussy.’
He stretched his thick hands out towards her. Long fingers grew from them, the fingernails flat and clean. They were horrible hands. His expression was at first nonchalant, then plainly hostile.
‘But tell me, what’s someone like you doing on this train? Selling some cunt?’
The girl flinched, let out a feeble squeak, grabbed her winter boot from under her bunk and threw it at him, then got up and went out into the corridor. The heel of the boot hit him right in the temple. Once outside, she calmed herself for a long time before going to Arisa to ask for a different compartment.
Arisa listened to her request with her head to one side.
‘We’ll see,’ she said, in such an unhurried manner that the girl handed her a twenty-five-rouble note.
Arisa apparently didn’t feel it was a sufficient sum.
‘It’s against the law to change compartments. But perhaps I could do something to arrange it. It will be difficult, though.’
The girl slipped another banknote of the same value into her hand – it was all she could part with.
Arisa glanced at the note disdainfully.
‘Getting around a rule like that is a tough job, in fact it’s dangerous for me personally. I could lose my job or even end up in jail because of you. But perhaps it could be arranged …’
The girl didn’t listen to the rest of what she had to say. She rushed back out into the corridor with a sob in her throat. She simply had to swallow her defeat and go back to the man, at least at night.
The train sped with a whine across the flat, blustery landscape, under a sky frothy with winter clouds. A vibrant forest beyond an open field tossed a flock of sparrows at the sky. She calmed herself by watching the black, starkly drawn shadow of the train against the bright snow.
She thought about Irina, how she might be sitting in the smoking room of the chemistry institute, behind the Achievements in the National Economy pavilion, smoking a cigarette and getting ready for her next lecture. She thought about Zahar, who could see through her, and Mitka, who was good. A little kitten appeared in the corridor and looked at her beseechingly. She picked it up and held it and petted its rumpled fur. At the insane asylum, Mitka had said that socialism kills the body and capitalism kills the spirit but socialism the way we have it harms both the body and the spirit.
When Mitka was turning eighteen, she and Irina had the task of finding food to cook for his birthday party. They had started gathering ingredients back in November, and had managed to find all kinds of things, but Irina wasn’t satisfied. One morning they went out to hunt for groceries at six a.m. They rushed through the dry, freezing weather to the Yelisev shop, but they didn’t find anything there, not even baked bubliks. Angry, they hopped onto a freezing tram, and rode past the Boulevard and the snowy maples to the fragrant bread shop in Bronnaya. There they found a sma
ll loaf of good bread. They got on the trolleybus, which was so hot that they were soon covered in sweat, and trundled hopefully to Zachaczewski Lane. There was a grocery there where Irina had once found two cans of high-quality sardines. They didn’t find anything, though, not even pickles. They stood for a moment in the windy street, uncertain what to do, where to go. They walked with frozen toes, arm in arm, to Lenin Street, but the trip didn’t add any weight to their shopping bag. They jogged over to Timiryazev. There they found a bottle of cologne for Yuri, but nothing to eat. They swung by Chistiye Prudy on the bus, brought Yuri his cologne, and got six eggs from him. Why not go to the currency exchange shop? he asked. I don’t have any dollars, the girl whispered, we already blew all of it, plus my salary, at the beginning of autumn. Yuri yelled after them to go to the market, for God’s sake, although he knew that there was nothing there. On Sokolniki Street they found two big jars of borscht, put them under their arms and headed proudly to the tram stop on Tverskoy Boulevard, and Irina glanced at her watch and said that she should have been lecturing at the institute a long time ago. A country woman was shivering in front of the paper shop. The girl bought a handsome gladiolus from the woman and handed it to Irina, and just as they were about to leave, the woman whispered that she had two chickens in her bag. Were they interested? Of course! Irina said, and settled on a price. They ran to the nearest metro station. Irina took the blue line to the institute and the girl went home on the yellow with her bag of chickens. Zahar was home and she asked him to come in the kitchen and opened her bag and there they were, two sweet, fluttering brown chickens with rubber bands wrapped around their beaks. Zahar looked at them and said that with a few weeks of seed feed they would be ready to stew. They took the squawking chickens into the bathroom. She laid some of the laundry on the bottom of the tub as a cushion. The wooden towel rack served as a perch. They called the little one Plita and the big one Kipyatok. The day before Mitka’s party Zahar slaughtered the fattened chickens expertly in the bathroom and plucked them on the balcony. Then Irina taught her and Mitka how to cook chicken the Stalinist way.
