“So where do you think you’re heading?” asks the controller, turning the ticket between his fingers. “You’re going the wrong way!”
“You dolt, you’re going the wrong way!” says the conductor-in-chief. “You got onto the wrong train, you numskull! You should have gotten on the one for Zhivoderovo and we’re going to Khaldeevo! Here, take it back! It never pays to be an idiot!”
The young man blinks rapidly and stares blankly at the smirking public. He dabs his eyes with his sleeve.
“Don’t cry,” people say. “Ask for help! Look at the size of you, you big blockhead—bawling like a baby! You’re probably married with children, and just look at you!”
“Ticket!” The conductor-in-chief turns to a peasant in a top hat.
“Huh?”
“Ticket! Snap to it!”
“A ticket? I need a ticket?”
“Your ticket!”
“I got it . . . You want to see my ticket . . . Well, I’m not going to stop you. Here comes.” Slow as a snail, the peasant reaches inside his shirt, producing a scrap of greasy paper. He hands it to the controller.
“What’s that you’re giving me? That’s your passport! Give me your ticket!”
“I haven’t got another ticket!” says the peasant, alarmed.
“So why are you on the train, if you don’t have a ticket?”
“But I paid.”
“Who’d you pay? Stop lying!”
“I paid the conductor.”
“Which conductor?”
“Damned if I know! Some conductor, that’s all . . . ‘Don’t need a ticket,’ he tells me. ‘You can travel without one’ . . . So I didn’t get it . . .”
“We’ll see about that at the station! Madam, your ticket!”
The door creaks, opens, and to everyone’s surprise in walks Petrovna.
“I could barely find our car. How’re you supposed to tell them apart—they all look the same . . . And they didn’t let Pakhom on! Those vipers . . . Where’s my bag?”
“Oh, trials and tribulations! I threw it out the window! I thought you’d been left behind!”
“You threw it where?”
“Out the window. How was I supposed to know any better?”
“And who asked you to do that? You’re a witch, a regular witch, Lord forgive me! What do I do now? Why didn’t you throw your own bag out? Or your own ugly mug! I hope your guts crawl out of you!”
People are laughing. “Send a telegraph from the next station!” someone advises.
Petrovna is wailing and spouting profanities. Her friend clutches her own sack; she’s weeping too. The conductor walks in.
“Whose are these?” he shouts. He holds up Petrovna’s things.
“A pretty one!” the old man across from me whispers to me. He gestures at the pretty girl. “Real pretty. And I haven’t got any chloroform here, dammit! One whiff of that and you can kiss her as much as you’d like! Everyone else is asleep!”
The man in the straw hat keeps rolling over, loudly grumbling about his bothersome legs.
“Scientists this,” he mumbles, “scientists that! There’s no going against nature! Scientists. Why can’t they figure out how to screw your legs on and off. Now that would be something!”
“I had nothing to do with it! Ask the deputy prosecutor!” the investigator raves in his sleep.
In a distant corner, two schoolboys, a corporal, and a young man in blue-tinted glasses are playing cards by the light of their glowing cigarettes.
To my right is a tall fancy lady of the no-need-to-ask-twice variety. She reeks of powder and patchouli.
“Travel is so delightful!” a cad murmurs into her ear, murmuring sweetly, disgustingly sweetly, saying his g’s, n’s, and r’s French-fashion. “You get to know people so quickly and so well, so intimately, when you travel. I just adore travel!”
A kiss. Another one. What the hell? I can’t believe what I’m seeing. And now the pretty girl wakes up, looks around, and . . .without a second thought, lowers her head onto the shoulder of Themis’s* votary, the investigator. And still he dozes on, poor fool!
The train comes to a halt. We’re at a way station.
“The train will stop for two minutes,” a hoarse, cracked bass voice says from outside the train car. Two minutes pass, then another two. Five, ten, twenty minutes go by, and still the train stands. What the hell is going on? I step out of the car and head over to the train engine.
“Ivan Matveich! Are you almost done, dammit?” the conductor-in-chief is yelling into the space underneath the engine.
The train engineer squirms out from under the engine on his belly. He’s red, sweaty, and has a smear of soot on his nose.
“Do you believe in God or not?” He turns on the conductor-in-chief. “Are you a human being or not? Why are you rushing me? Don’t you see? I hope you all croak! Call this an engine, do you? This here is no engine, it’s a piece of junk! It won’t go!”
“So what do we do?”
“Do whatever you want! Get me another one, I’m not driving this one! Put yourself in my place.”
The engineer’s assistants are running around the broken engine, tapping it and shouting. The stationmaster, wearing a red cap, is cracking jokes with his assistant about Jews and their sidesplitting day-to-day lives. It’s raining. I head back to my car. A stranger in a straw hat and a dark gray shirt runs past. He’s clutching a suitcase. Oh my God, it’s mine!
* Samuel Polyakov (1837–1888) was the most famous of Russian railroad magnates; he constructed more than a fourth of Russian railroads.
* Themis was the ancient Greek goddess of law, justice, and order.
1,001 PASSIONS, OR, A DREADFUL NIGHT
(A Timid Imitation of Victor Hugo)
THE TOWER clock struck midnight. I shuddered. The time had come. Convulsively, I grabbed Theodore’s hand and together we departed for the street. A sky as dark as typographer’s ink. It was as dark outside as it is inside a hat pulled down low. A dark night—like a day shut up in a nutshell. Cloaks wrapped tight, we set off, the wind gusting, chilling us to the bone. Rain and snow—those two sodden brothers—battered our faces with terrible force.
Though it was winter, lightning was everywhere, furrowing the sky. Thunder, that terrible, that majestic companion of lightning, as lovely as blue eyes flashing, as fast as thought, horrifyingly jolted the air. Theodore’s ears glowed with electricity. The fires of St. Elmo crackled and flew overhead. I looked upward. I trembled. Who does not tremble before Nature’s grandeur? Several shiny meteors flew across the sky. I counted twenty-eight and pointed them out to Theodore.
“A bad omen!” he muttered, turning as pale as Carrara marble.
The wind groaned, howled, and wailed. The groaning of the wind—what is it but a conscience groaning under the weight of horrific crimes? Thunder leveled an eight-story building beside us, which burst into flames. I heard shrieks issuing from inside. Without stopping, we walked on. What was one burning building to me? Within my breast burned the fires of one hundred and fifty buildings! Somewhere out in the vast distance a bell tolled slowly, lugubriously, monotonously. The elements battled each other. Unseen forces strove to achieve a terrifying harmony of the elements. What are these forces? Will mankind ever know them?
A timorous yet daring hope!
We summoned a coachman. We climbed into the carriage and raced off. He is a brother of the wind, the coachman. As a daring thought races within the mysterious convolutions of the brain, so we raced. I thrust a purse full of gold into the coachman’s hand. The gold aided the whip, redoubling the speed of the horses’ legs.
“Antonio, where are you taking me?” Theodore moaned. “You look like an evil demon. Hell glimmers in your dark eyes. I fear . . .”