‘You?’ The finger with the long nail described an arc.
‘Yes, he worked in Kolyma,’ the unknown man said. ‘They say he was a decent sort. Helped people like us. They said good things about him.’
The finger with the nail disappeared.
‘OK, clear out,’ the thief said in an unhappy tone. ‘We’ll think about it.’
I was lucky that I didn’t have to spend the night at the station. The train was leaving for Moscow in the evening.
In the morning the light from the electric bulbs seemed heavy. The bulbs were murky and didn’t want to go out. Through the opening and closing doors could be seen the Irkutsk day – cold and bright. Swarms of people packed the corridors and filled up every square centimeter of space on the cement floor and the dirty benches as soon as anyone moved, stood up, left. There was an endless standing in line before the ticket windows. A ticket to Moscow, a ticket to Moscow, the rest can be worked out later… Not to Jambul, as the travel orders instructed. But who cared about travel orders in this heap of humanity, in this constant movement?
My turn at the window finally arrived, and I began to pull money from my pockets in jerky movements and to push the packet of gleaming bills through the opening where they would disappear as inevitably as my life had disappeared until that moment. But the miracle continued, and the window threw out some solid object. It was rough, hard, and thin, like a wafer of happiness – a ticket to Moscow. The cashier shouted something to the effect that reserved berths were mixed with non-reserved ones, that a truly reserved car would be available only tomorrow or the day after tomorrow. I understood nothing except the words tomorrow and today. Today, today. Clasping my ticket firmly and attempting to feel all its corners with the deadened senses of my frostbitten hand, I pulled myself free and made my way to an open spot. I had just come from the far north by plane and I had no extra things – just a small plywood suitcase – the same one I had unsuccessfully tried to sell back in Adygalakh to get the money together to leave for Moscow. My traveling expenses had not been paid, but that was a meaningless detail. The main thing was this firm cardboard rectangle of a railroad ticket.
I caught my breath somewhere in a corner of the train station (my spot under the light was, of course, occupied) and set out across town, to the departure area.
Boarding had already begun. On a low hill stood a toy train, unbelievably small – just a few dirty cardboard boxes placed together among hundreds of other cardboard boxes where railroad employees lived and hung out their frozen wash to splash under the blows of the wind.
My train was in no way distinguishable from these railroad cars that had been transformed into dormitories.
The train didn’t look like a train that was about to set out in a few hours for Moscow. Rather, it looked like a dormitory. People were coming down the stairs of the cars, moving back and forth, and carrying things over their heads – just as others were doing around the dormitories. I realized that the train lacked the most important thing – a locomotive. Neither did any of the dormitories have a locomotive, and my train looked like a dormitory. I wouldn’t have believed that these cars could carry me away to Moscow, but boarding was already taking place.
There was a battle, a terrible battle at the entrance to the car. It seemed that work had ended two hours early today and everyone had come running home, to the barracks, to the warm stove, and they were all trying to get in the door.
Inside, you could forget about finding a conductor… Each person sought out his own place, dug himself in and maintained his own position. Of course, my reserved middle berth was occupied by some drunken lieutenant who belched endlessly. I dragged the lieutenant down and showed him my ticket. ‘I have a ticket for this spot too,’ he explained in a peaceable fashion, hiccuped, slipped down to the floor, and immediately fell asleep.
The car kept filling up with people. Suitcases and enormous bales were lifted up and disappeared somewhere above. There was an acrid smell of sheepskin coats, human sweat, dirt, and carbolic acid.
‘A prison car, a prison car,’ I repeated lying on my back, jammed into the narrow space between the middle and upper berths. The lieutenant, his collar opened and his face red and wrinkled, crawled upward past me. He got a grip on something, pulled himself upward, and disappeared.
In the confusion, amid the shouts of this prison car, I missed the main thing that I needed to hear, that which I had dreamed of for seventeen years, that which had become for me a sort of symbol of the ‘mainland’, a symbol of life. I hadn’t given it a thought during the battle for the berth. I hadn’t heard the train whistle. But the cars shuddered and began to move and our car, our prison car, set out somewhere just as if I were beginning to fall asleep and the barracks was moving before my very eyes.
I forced myself to realize that I was headed for Moscow.
At some switch point close to Irkutsk the car lurched and the figure of the lieutenant gripping his berth leaned out and hung down. He belched and vomited on my berth and that of my neighbor, who was wearing not a quilted coat or a pea jacket but a real overcoat with a fur collar. The man swore mightily and began to clean off the vomit.
My neighbor had with him an infinite number of plaited wicker baskets, some sewn up with burlap and some without burlap. From time to time women wearing country kerchiefs would appear from the depths of the car with similar wicker baskets on their shoulders. The women would shout something to my neighbor and he would wave back to them in a friendly fashion.
‘My sister-in-law! She’s going to visit relatives in Tashkent,’ he explained to me although I had asked for no explanations.
My neighbor was eager to open his nearest basket and show its contents. Aside from a wrinkled suit and a few small items it was empty. But it did contain a number of photographs, family and individual pictures in enormous mounts. Some of them were daguerreotypes. The larger photographs were removed from the basket, and my neighbor eagerly explained in detail who was standing where, who was killed in the war, who received a medal, who was studying to be an engineer. ‘And here I am,’ he would inevitably say, pointing somewhere in the middle of the photograph, at which juncture everyone to whom he showed the photograph would meekly, politely, and sympathetically nod his head.
On the third day of our life in this rattling car my neighbor, having sized me up in detail, no doubt very correctly despite the fact that I had said nothing of myself, waited until the attention of our other neighbors was distracted and said quickly to me:
‘I have to make a transfer in Moscow. Can you help me carry one basket across the scales?’
‘I’m being met in Moscow.’
‘Oh, yes. I forgot you’re being met.’
‘What do you have in the baskets?’
‘What? Sunflower seeds. We’ll take galoshes back from Moscow. That sort of “private enterprise” is illegal, of course, but…’
I did not get out at any of the stations. I had food with me, and I was afraid the train would leave without me, would surely leave without me. I was convinced something bad would happen; happiness cannot continue endlessly.
Opposite me on the middle berth lay a man in a fur coat. He was infinitely drunk and had no cap or mittens. His drunken friends had put him on the train and entrusted his ticket to the conductor. The next day he got out at some station, returned with a bottle of some sort of dark wine, drank it all straight from the bottle, and threw the bottle on the floor. The bottle could be turned in for the deposit and the woman conductor agilely caught it and carried it off to her conductor’s lair, which was filled with blankets that no one in the mixed car rented and sheets that no one needed. Behind the same barrier of blankets in the conductor’s compartment a prostitute had set up shop on the upper berth. She was returning from Kolyma, and perhaps she wasn’t a prostitute but had simply been transformed into a prostitute by Kolyma… This lady sat not far from me on the lower berth, and the light from the swinging lamp fell on her utterly exhausted face with lips reddened by some substitute for lipstick. People would approach her and then they would disappear with her into the conductors’ compartment. ‘Fifty rubles,’ said the lieutenant who had sobered up and turned out to be a very pleasant young man.