Nikolai had done little more than to sit watching her for the first couple of hours, until he'd realised that he was making her nervous. That was when he'd moved from the fold-down seat to lie full length on the compartment's upper berth, leaving Alina below to gaze out of the window at the passing landscape. This was continuous and unvarying, birch and pine forests standing dark in the moonlight; occasionally the trees thinned out for settlements of low wooden houses with small-paned windows and snow laden roofs, but for the most part it was just a rolling backdrop for their dreams and fears.
He adored her. One dream, at least, seemed to be coming true for him.
He was nervous about their situation, but nothing more. This wasn't like the dark old days, where people were let out grudgingly if at all and then only with the certainty of family ties to draw them back; Nikolai knew that, had he chosen to travel alone, he'd almost certainly have faced no difficulty in getting permission. Border controls were easing, the Berlin wall had fallen, there was a different kind of outlook all around. The problem lay with Alina; she'd some kind of a criminal record and she'd told him that there were charges still outstanding that she'd have to answer if ever they caught up with her. He'd never asked her what the charges were. He trusted her.
But he knew that she'd spent time in a prison psychiatric hospital, and that she'd slipped out on a technicality and they wanted her back, and that before he'd met her she'd already lived without a permanent address or identity for at least two years. He couldn't imagine himself surviving in that way, but he could see what it had been doing to her. There was no question about it, she had to get away; and after he'd known her for only a short time, there had been no question but that he'd have to go with her.
A sharp rap on the wall by the door brought him slithering down from the berth. Alina was already standing as the guard came in, a boy soldier in an iron grey uniform and with a deep cheek scar like a cattlebrand. He was carrying a short stepladder in one hand, their passports in the other; after setting the ladder down he read out the names on their papers, mispronouncing them, and then turned to the photographs. They were French passports, guaranteed stolen but not yet reported, and the flimsy visa forms inside were simple forgeries.
There wasn't much room. Alina was standing close beside Nikolai, her head only just level with his shoulder, and she was looking at the floor. Nikolai felt a small flame of apprehension coming to life inside him at this, and the flame became a steady heat as the guard — barely out of school but already as tough and as ugly as a board — looked up from her picture to find her avoiding his eyes.
Nikolai began to feel scared.
It wasn't as if he needed to be here. He'd chosen to be here, gone out of his way to take the risk, elected to travel on forged documents instead of legitimately under his own name because it meant that Alina would be less conspicuous than if she made the journey alone; but if her nerve folded now, if she gave them away, it would all be for nothing.
Alina lifted her head, and returned the guard's level stare.
Everything fell back into place. Her self possession was as cold and as hard as the light of a star. She was around twenty-eight, perhaps a little more; it was hard to tell because she was small and slim with a dancer's compact grace and a clear north country skin, a feature that still caused her to be mistaken for a teenager almost everywhere that she went. Her hair, not quite shoulder length, had been tied back. It had been longer, once, but in one of those rare moments where she'd unwound a little and told him something about herself he'd learned that they'd cut it short during her time in the hospital. He tried to imagine her like that, gaunt and defeated, but he couldn't.
The worst was over. The boy soldier handed back their passports and then hopped up onto his ladder to check the luggage rack and the vent seals. He then unhooked a flashlight from his belt and shone it into the space under the lower bunk; this ritual completed, he stepped out into the corridor and closed the door on them.
There was no baggage check.
The train rolled on slowly.
Alina lay back in the shadowed corner of the lower berth, and this time Nikolai sat beside her. The scene outside grew more and more empty, the forests cleared back from the trackside in a sure sign that the border was approaching. He saw the ruined remains of old concrete bunkers, many of them roofless and all of them half buried in the snow; the train glided on in near silence past the tracks of earlier ski patrols and the occasional bulldozed vehicle road, the snow thrown up at its sides like dirty concrete.
There was daylight in the darkness as they came under the first of the searchlight gantries. These straddled the track every fifty metres or so, and the effect was of a slow pulsing as the thousand-watt arrays passed over. There were other lines here with other trains, all of them freightcars and none of them moving; it was like a forgotten railyard, the place where all the ghost trains ended their runs, the only sign of life a small fire that had been lit under one of the diesel engines to free its iced up brakes. The fire's attendant was a silhouette that stepped out to watch them go by, an eyeless, faceless shadow of a man.
Alina hitched herself up, and moved closer to the window.
The train was slowing in its river of light. At this moment they were being watched from a two-man tower out across the tracks, a dark shape sketched in darkness that stood taller than the pines. Alina stared out at the tower; even in this harsh gantry light she was a wide-eyed madonna, and Nikolai felt his heart turn over. He couldn't understand her power over him, and had no urge to; if he was a lost soul, then he was grateful to be damned.
They stopped briefly in a wooded clearing so that the border control people could disembark. The train was already rolling again as the officials trudged off in ranking order, the two junior soldiers last in line; they were filing down a snowcut path toward a green-painted building about a hundred metres away, and then the trees closed in again and they were gone.
Alina was now staring into the reflected eyes of her own, ghost-glass image.
"Don't celebrate too soon," she said; perhaps to Nikolai, perhaps more to herself. "I've been this far before."
He wasn't aware of having fallen asleep. But when he woke the train had stopped, and Alina was already up and buttoning herself into her midlength overcoat. He looked out. By now the darkness had given way to that strange northern twilight that took a little of the colour out of everything but which sharpened up edges and outlines and presented them in a range of greys that shone like opal. It wasn't daylight — it wasn't even full dawn — but daylight couldn't be so far away.
"What's happening?" he said, but she didn't give him a direct answer.
"Get the bag," she told him.
The pre-dawn chill began to seep into them from the moment that they took the long step down from the carriage. Nikolai paused to look around, his breath misting in the grey air as he tugged his gloves on a little further and zippered his overjacket a little tighter. At first glance they seemed to be at an anonymous spot in the middle of nowhere, endless woodland crowding right up to the trackside and cutting off any chance of seeing what lay beyond. Further along the track, a crowd was gathering by the engine. Alina was already heading to join it.
He hurried to catch up.
He was walking on snow-covered gravel that had been stained brown with the throwoff of the passing trains. There were faces at most of the windows above him, and people were hanging out of the open doorways at the carriage ends as they craned to see what was going on. Everybody seemed dazed, rumpled, slightly shocked to find themselves active and awake at such an hour.