Compartment No 6

by Rosa Liksom

  The train gave a hoarse whistle and its wheels lurched into motion with a whoop. Arisa stood on the top step of the carriage holding the door frame with one hand and swinging a foot in the air.

  ‘All the far-flung peoples and their fine culture are blossoming like they never have before, although they ought to become Russians. All of these thousands of languages that are kept alive year after year when the Russian language would suffice. We Russians are an undemanding, resilient, patient bunch. We grant some space to others. But it can’t go on like this forever.’

  He took a needle and thread out of his bag and started to repair the bag handle. Between stitches he glanced at the loudspeaker, which was playing Beethoven’s Seventh.

  ‘If it just had a little singing with it. That damned roaring grows hair in your ears.’

  The sizeable city of Ulan Ude, with the world’s largest head of Lenin in its central square, disappeared in the distance. The train rattled through snow-capped mountains and wild wastes of taiga buried in snow. Rows of black hills spread at the edge of the flat landscape. She thought about Mitka and the chicken wire in the corridor window at the mental hospital. According to the military doctor’s diagnosis, Mitka was psychotic and was given antipsychotic medication. When a healthy person is forced to take that kind of medicine it can’t be good for them. Mitka got really sick in the hospital, wasn’t able to eat, his mental state pathetic.

  A spoon tinkled in a tea glass. The man fussed with his vodka bottles between bouts of sewing, wiping them and examining the labels and checking to see if the corks were firmly in place. But he didn’t open them. He just looked and admired.

  ‘Fellows like me, when we have to choose between two evils, we always take both.’

  A little later he spread some celery stalks and garlic chives on the table and opened a jar of cold borscht. He handed the girl a gigantic spoon. He smacked his lips and sniffed, his big ears wiggling. At regular intervals he added a splash of boiling water and smetana to the soup. It tasted good. The scent of the celery stalks filled the compartment. He handed her a Pepsi.

  ‘Seems to me you ought to have at least one taste of home on this trip, my girl. This is Brezhnev’s drink. That’s why I don’t drink it.’

  The train arrived in Khabarovsk station in the middle of the night. The station sign was covered in a thick layer of snow, as were the tops of the railway carriages sleeping along the tracks. She hurried off the train. A burning night frost seized her face. The air was so brittle it was difficult to breathe. A few street lamps oozed the faintest yellowish light as they struggled to illuminate the station. The city was so full of thick night that she almost turned back.

  She pushed herself forward and walked with squeaking steps into the station. There were no people there. The ticket windows were closed and the trinket kiosks sulked empty in the darkness.

  She walked across the station hall, past a kiosk that sold plastic pens and journals. A fat cat came to meet her. It looked at her with curiosity, waved its tail, leapt over a mound of snow carried in on travellers’ shoes, and disappeared behind a newspaper stand. In front of the main doors was a large puddle from earlier in the day chilled by the night, a skiff of ice gleaming on its surface.

  Along the edge of the railway square were two black Volgas with feminine smiles and elk-hood ornaments, one Moskvich, a little red Yalta, and a poison-green Pobeda. The engines were running, the drivers chatting in a circle. The square was filled with dense exhaust. She approached the men warily and asked if any of them could drive her to the Hotel Progress. The men erupted in laughter. A black-whiskered man with a flashing gold tooth grabbed her knapsack and directed her to the Moskvich.

  He turned on the radio and for a moment Galina Vishnevskaya filled the car with Tatiana’s letter aria. The gearbox complained and the engine roared, drowning out the aria. Spring slush frozen by nighttime cold shone in the light of a half moon. The driver turned to look at her.

  ‘Khabarovsk is the world’s most beautiful border city. We have the greatest wonder of the twentieth century, the Khabarovsk Bridge. On the other side is China, which is a province of ours. If you like I can show you the bridge tomorrow. I can meet you in front of the hotel at noon. All right?’

  The taxi’s green light flashed and the car disappeared into the impenetrable mist. She breathed in the big city night. It smelled familiar, like old charred iron and oven-fresh steel. The sky over the city was pitch black to the south, but in the east the dirty lights of the distant harbour blinked, and in the sky one red star twinkled.

  She pounded for a long time on the door of the sixteen-storey hotel before a sleepy, grey-haired woman came with slippers on her feet to open it. The hotel lobby was very dimly lit. On the walls were side-by-side copies of Cezanne’s fruit and Vasnetsov’s warriors. She handed the woman her hotel voucher, filled out the stack of grubby forms, and climbed thirteen flights to her room because the lift wasn’t working.

  The room was large and the bed was broad and clean. The radiator hissed like a steam iron. She turned on the tap in the bathtub. It angrily spat brown water. The city was deep in sleep.

  The misty gloom of a frosty morning covered half of the yellow moon, a quick purple flashing in the eastern sky. From between her rustling sheets, she looked at the polyester, tobacco-smoke-scented shade of the reading lamp. She’d seen the same kind of lamp before but she couldn’t remember where. She pulled aside the stained curtains and let the morning in.

  The sun hung over the opposite shore of the Amur River, in China. It poured its frozen rays towards the flat roofs of the highrises. In the middle of the river a shipping channel flowed; loose rafts of ice had been squeezed to pack ice during the night. A carmine red tram rattled far below with a loud clang.

  The living sun started to move. It crawled from the open ice of the Amur and over the snowy rooftops of the awakening city. Tawny light, a funnelled current of small snowflakes, and the bustle of city-dwellers rushing to work drifted through the open vent window into the room. Unhurried people the size of ants half hidden by banks of snow strolled along the treeless boulevard with grocery bags, boxes of smoked fish, and jars of pickles. A chimney-sweep busied himself with an ancient piece of cable in the chimney of a green block of flats. A lustre of frost sparkled on the car roofs, horns grunted, engines whined, exhaust pipes scraped against the frozen asphalt, trolleybuses sparked, trams clunked from stop to stop.

  She took a shower, dried her hair, dressed herself lazily, with voluptuous slowness, and went down to the hotel restaurant, where she was served lukewarm tea and good fatty fish.

  The beaten-up, seemingly hand-built Moskvich was sputtering outside, waiting for her. The driver nodded complacently when he saw her. She stood in front of the hotel for a moment and listened to the poignant song of an accordion drifting from a distant street, a tune about love that’s never requited, and slid into the back seat. The Moskvich shot out into the snowy street with a cough. The sooty crud from the nearby factories emerged from beneath the pure, sun-melted snow.

  The driver watched her in the rearview mirror. He was a weatherbeaten old man with a back bent by heavy labour, a creased face, and faded eyes. His thick eyebrows grew together and his sideburns met his beard. He had dressed his sparse hair with home brew and combed it neatly. He had looked quite different the night before. She didn’t even see a gold tooth now.

  ‘Are you a surveyor?’ he asked.

  She didn’t say anything. He glanced at her in the mirror again.

  ‘A geologist, then? A foreign geologist from Moscow? I’ll drive you wherever you like, but first the news from Moscow, eh? How’s Red Square? Same as always? And the Moscow River? How many cars are there in Moscow?’

  The Moskvich raced skidding past a dried-up, five-cornered fountain that a group of Chinese tourists was photographing. The sun-warmed crusty snow floated across the rooftops and fell crashing in great sheets onto the pavements. Beautiful Siberian people, strong and handsome, formed tw
isted queues in front of the food shops. The spring wind howled where the roads intersected.

  The driver turned into a roundabout. On the right was a heap of bright watermelons, defying the slippery spring ground. On the left was a jumble of discarded wooden crates that looked like Mayakovsky’s staircase.

  He dropped her off next to the bridge.

  In spite of the bright sunlight, the bridge was lit with floodlights at the edge of the water, their unreal illumination causing a strange distortion in perspective. It was as if the bridge wriggled over the water. She looked over the bridge at the trucks crossing and the silhouettes of the buildings in the harbour. She stood in front of the bridge beams, far from the border guards’ booths.

  A pallid blue sky shimmered over the river. The April morning wind whistled past and struck her face with a handful of grainy snow. She leaned against a beam and looked down at the river. Slush churned like something alive in the lead-grey water of the shipping channel and along the shore. A bright blue oil drum floated among it. The channel was crowded. Two Chinese icebreakers ploughed through the pack ice. Chinese, Korean and Russian cargo ships with their horns blaring, long barges, tugboats, dredgers, and ferries of various sizes slid through the icy slush. Brown splashes of water rose over the ice along the shore.

  She walked to a bus stop. The snow smelled like spring. A woman walked past dolled up, her flowered skirt fluttering in the breeze. She was holding a small heron with stained feathers and one wing hanging limp.

  The girl got on the bus, sat down behind the hiccuping driver and rode to Okhotsk, the city’s largest harbour.

  She got off and walked along the shore, which was in places a mixture of ice and slushy mud. She spent a long time looking at a wrecked ship, rusted through, lying on its side, listened to the melancholy howl of the wind and the noisy clank of the harbour machinery. She soon came to a place where the waves on the shore were churning wildly, carrying off great blocks of ice and crashing them against the steep rocks. The surface of the water was rising visibly, and the ice with it. Two men were crouched on the shelf of rock, their small Yalta parked on the sand farther away. They had a campfire on the rocks, too, where they were roasting fish on sticks.

  They gestured for her to come over. The winter sun had toasted both their faces brown and the fronts of their coats were covered in fish scales. One of them smelled of resin, the other of fortified wine. Both smelled of squalor.

  ‘A magnetic storm’s about to come up and take the ice with it. You shouldn’t be walking on the shore.’

  They offered her some foul-smelling vodka and nice-tasting fish. The man who smelled of resin, who had unbelievably bad teeth, told her that the previous summer a toxic spill from China had killed almost all the fish.

  ‘We used to get pike, catfish, carp and ruffe out of this river. Now nothing. I keep fishing, because I always have. You can’t change a man’s nature.’

  Disregarding his warnings, she continued strolling down the shore past a rusted boiler, old locks, an enormous buoy, a bicycle gear, a copper cylinder, a small motor, plugs, corks, broken vodka bottles, metal buckets with no bottoms, an oily enamel pot, plum weights, water pipes, steel pellets, a steering wheel from a tractor, bedsprings, and a metal sign rusted through that read technological-scientific organisation of industrial power engine vibrator research. The lively early spring sunshine melted the ice from the shore. The wind sighed and the river smelled of rot. The odour of decayed wood, sodden sawdust, household trash, oil, naphtha, and the foamy residue left by the barges covered over the ineffable scent of the ice breaking up.

  In shady spots there was still some pure, powdery spring snow, where marsh birds were happily pecking at holes in the river ice with their slippery beaks. Someone had painted in white on one of the rocks: Down with Yermak, Down with Stalin-Hitlers. The mysterious wind tore at the sides of a small barge caught among the pack ice, and a thin puff of blue smoke rose from the battered chimneys of the spruce-walled harbour buildings.

  She climbed up the bank. A vast flock of a thousand wild geese was gliding just over her head. The muddy masses of water flowing from farther upstream lifted the rafts of ice higher and higher. The rumbling grew louder. Then the last of the surface ice crumbled into great chunks that hurled themselves over each other and climbed crashing up the shore. Nothing could stop the power of the ice. It could crush the shore, the docks, the buildings. She climbed up onto a boulder. There was a heart carved into it with ‘Valentina + Volodya 14.8.1937’ written inside.

  She climbed higher and saw a little park a short distance away. There was a trodden path leading to it. She went and sat down to rest for a moment on a bench. The tranquil clouds looking down from the pale sky smelled like spring. She listened to the sound of the far-off Okhotsk Sea and looked at the half-built modern blocks of flats that seemed to press themselves quietly into the earth. A military band appeared from behind an arolla pine. They advanced towards the park’s small fountain with stiff steps, wearing black cloaks and billed hats of black fur. There was a post in front of the snow-filled fountain with a tin-shaded lamp on top that rattled loudly in the river breeze. The band tuned their wind-chilled instruments, the conductor’s baton fluttered, and a light military march rang in the air.

  As evening fell, needles of ice began to fall. She wandered some more in the city. The glaring red, dying sunlight lingered over the bumpy streets. As she walked farther from the city centre the streets became narrower and more rundown, meandering capriciously, then turning straight and clear. She missed Moscow and the Arbat, where the narrow streets zigzagged delightfully. The fitful east wind started to turn into a snowstorm. It ripped at the clouds and cleared the sky. She headed back to the middle of town.

  She went straight to the hotel restaurant. There were three signs on the restaurant door: CLOSED, CLOSED FOR DINNER, CLOSED FOR INVENTORY. The restaurant was full. She stepped inside. In addition to local diners there were a few Chinese salesmen, a couple of Koreans, and a few Japanese hotel guests sitting in the dining room. A pear-shaped waitress showed her to a table by the window where a thin woman with a shaggy fur hat and a lively face was sitting. The two of them looked sometimes at the other diners, sometimes at each other. The woman took a pretty packet of cigarettes out of her Yugoslavian purse and smoked one in a yellow amber cigarette holder. Her wrists were delicate and graceful.

  The girl ordered millet porridge, sauerkraut and cutlets, peas steeped in vodka, leeks, and scrambled eggs with sliced tomatoes.

  ‘Is everything all right in your bathroom?’ the woman asked. ‘I can’t sleep because the gas boiler clanks and whistles all night. I’m not used to that kind of noise. I’ve been on the taiga for fifteen months and this city life gets on my nerves.’

  She smiled, straightened her hat, and took out another cigarette. ‘We’ve been looking for oil for months in the far north. We didn’t find any this time.’

  She lit the cigarette and looked at its glowing tip for a long time. ‘If we do find oil, they’ll bulldoze the village and put an oil rig in its place. Shoot the dogs, since they won’t be needed any more. The people in the village will be shipped somewhere else – the next village, which could be three hundred kilometres away. There are no roads, of course.’

  She blew smoke gently towards the single pink carnation sitting primly in its long-necked vase.

  ‘This time we ended up having to leave empty-handed. All that’s left is a village ravaged by jeeps, tractors and earthmovers. That’s their gain, our loss. Now I’m flying to Moscow to rest. I have three months’ holiday. I’ll go walking down Mira Prospekt with my deadbeat friends and sit in cafés talking clever nonsense. After three months off, I’ll be perfectly glad to come back here. I like it here. Don’t you?’

  She looked at the girl and tilted her head slightly. ‘I’m not married, because I like being around people. I think like Chekhov: if you love solitude, get married.’

  There were at least ten waitresses at the counter
. At one end sat a bloated cashier; the young men waiting to unload their trucks were making her laugh with their talk. A stiff-backed doorman was chatting with the old woman supervisor. She sat erect behind her little table, wrapped in a shawl knitted from thick angora, sharpening her pencil. On the table was a green plastic telephone and a brown calendar. Some aged cleaners sat in a corner of the entryway with tin buckets at their feet and enormous black rags in their hands. The bussers had taken over one table, the coat check had fallen asleep in his squeaky chair among the heavy winter coats.

  An orchestra dressed in matching dark suits appeared on the restaurant stage. The bassist was Chinese; the drummer looked Korean. The first notes of ‘Moscow Lights’ drifted over the tobacco-smoke-softened dance floor.

  A fashionable young Japanese man asked the woman to dance. The pair moved slowly over the parquet floor, which was lit by a plastic crystal chandelier that reached in every direction. The joys and sorrows of the city, falling asleep in the night damp, condensed beneath it.

  Outside, the snowflakes gathered in a freezing whirlwind; a statue of Lenin blithely waving his hand peered in at the restaurant window. The woman said her goodbyes and left with the Japanese man into the bowels of the hotel.

  The girl left the restaurant. The cloudless, starless, faded sky kept her company in the quiet, dream-sunken city. She peeped into a beer house on a side street. A puff of sour tobacco smoke blew over her face. She hesitated a moment, then went in, curious. Two peasants lay passed out on the slushy floor. She ordered a mug of beer, but got a purplish, bad-tasting ale. She put the mug down and left.