Beyond the window, nothing moved in the endless stretches of snow but black smears of telegraph poles, as if the train were suspended, stationary, between two slices of white and gray, and the wheels shrieked as if grating in a void. Once in a while, a white blot on a white desert, a blot with black edges shaped as fir branches, sprang up suddenly beyond the window and whirled like lightning across the pane.
When she remembered that she had not eaten for a long time, dimly uncertain whether it was hours or days, dimly conscious that she had to eat, even though she had forgotten hunger, she broke a chunk off a stale loaf of bread, which she had bought at the station, and chewed it slowly, with effort, her jaws moving monotonously, like a machine.
Around her, men left the car, when the train stopped at stations, and came back with steaming tea kettles. Once, someone put a cup into her hands, and she drank, the hot tin edge pressed to her lips.
Telegraph wires raced the train, crossing and parting and crossing again, thin black threads flying faster, faster than the shuddering car could follow.
In the daytime, the sky seemed lighter than the earth, a pale stretch of translucent gray over a heavy white. At night, the earth seemed lighter than the sky, a pale blue band under a black void.
She slept, sitting in her corner, her head on her arms, her arms on her suitcase. She tied the suitcase handle to her wrists, with a piece of string, at night. There were many moans around her about stolen luggage. She slept, her consciousness frozen on a single thought — of her suitcase. She awakened with a jolt whenever the motion of the car made the suitcase slip a little.
She had no thoughts left. She felt empty, clear and quiet, as if her body were only an image of her will, and her will — only an arrow, tense and hard, pointing at a border that had to be crossed. The only living thing she felt was the suitcase on her lap. Her will was knocking with the wheels of the train. Her heart beat there, under the floor.
She noticed dimly, once, on the bench before her, a woman pressed a cold white breast into a child’s lips. There still were people and there still were lives. She was not dead. She was only waiting to be born.
At night, she sat for hours, staring at the window. She could see nothing but the dim reflection of the candle-glow and benches and boarded walls shuddering in space, and the tousled shadow of her own head. There was no earth, no world beyond the window. Only far down, by the track, yellow squares of snow raced the train in the glow of the windows, and black clots whirled past as long, thin streaks. Once in a while, a spark of light pierced the darkness, somewhere far away, at the edge of the sky, and brought suddenly into existence a blue waste of snow beyond the glass. The light died and the earth went with it, leaving nothing in the window but the boarded walls and the candle and the tousled head.
There were stations where she had to get out, and stand at a ticket window on a windswept platform, and buy a new ticket, and wait for another train to come rushing through the dusk, a black engine spewing showers of red sparks.
Then there were wheels again, knocking under the floor, and another station, and another ticket, and another train. There were many days and nights, but she did not notice them. The men in khaki peaked caps, who examined the tickets, could not know that the girl in the old coat with the matted fur collar was going toward the Latvian border.
The last station, where she did not buy another ticket, was a dark little platform of rotted wooden planks, the last stop before the train’s terminal, before the border town.
It was getting dark. Brown wheel-tracks in the snow led far away into a glowing red patch. A few sleepy soldiers on the platform paid no attention to her. A large wicker hamper rattled as husky fists lowered it to the ground from a baggage car. At the station door, someone begged loudly for hot water. Lights twinkled in the car windows.
She walked away, clutching her suitcase, following the wheel tracks in the snow.
She walked, a slender black figure, leaning faintly backward, alone in a vast field rusty in the sunset.
It was dark when she saw the village houses ahead and yellow dots of candles in windows low over the ground. She knocked at a door. A man opened it; his hair and beard were a bushy blond tangle from which two bright eyes peered inquisitively. She slipped a bill into his hand and tried to explain as fast as she could, in a choked whisper. She did not have to explain much. Those in the house knew and understood.
Behind a low wooden partition, her feet in the straw where two pigs slept huddled together, she changed her clothes, while those in the room sat around a table, as if she were not present, five blond heads, one of them in a blue kerchief. Wooden spoons knocked in the wooden bowls on the table, and the sound of another spoon came from the shelf of a brick stove in the corner, where a gray head bent, sighing, over a wooden bowl. A candle stood on the table, and three little red tongues flickered before a bronze triangle of ikons in a corner, little glimmers of red in the bronze halos.
She put on the white boots and took off her dress; her naked arms shuddered a little, even though the room was hot and stuffy. She put on the white wedding gown, and its long train rustled in the straw, and a pig opened one slit of an eye. She lifted the train and pinned it carefully to her waistline, with big safety-pins. She wound the white scarf tightly about her hair, and put on the white fur jacket. She felt cautiously the little lump in the lining over her left breast, where she had sewn the bills; it was the last and only weapon she would need.
When she approached the table, the blond giant said, his voice expressionless: “Better wait for an hour or so, till the moon sets. The clouds ain’t so steady.”
He moved, making room for her on the bench, pointing to it silently, imperatively. She raised the lace dress, stepped over the bench and sat down. She took off the jacket and held it over her arm, pressed tightly to her body. Two pairs of feminine eyes stared at her high lace collar, and the girl in the blue kerchief whispered something to the older woman, her eyes awed, incredulous.
Silently, the man put a steaming wooden bowl before the guest.
“No, thank you,” she said. “I’m not hungry.”
“Eat,” he ordered. “You’ll need it.”
She ate obediently a thick cabbage soup that smelled of hot lard.
The man said suddenly in the silence, without looking at her: “It’s pretty near a whole night’s walk.”
She nodded.
“Pretty young,” said the woman across the table, shaking her head, and sighed.
When she was ready to go, the man opened the door to a cold wind whining over an empty darkness, and muttered in his blond beard: “Walk as long as you can. When you see a guard — crawl.”
“Thank you,” she said, as the door closed.
Snow rose to her knees, and each step was like a fall forward, and she held her skirt high, clutched in her fist. Around her, a blue that did not seem blue, a color that was no color, that had never existed in the world she had known, stretched without end, and sometimes she thought she was standing alone, very tall, very high over a flat circle, and sometimes she thought the bluish whiteness was a huge wall closing in over her head.
The sky hung low, in grayish patches, and black patches, and streaks of a blue that one could never remember in the daytime; and blots of something which was not a color and not quite a light ray, flowed from nowhere, trickling once in a while among the clouds, and she bent her head not to see it.
There were no lights ahead; she knew that the lights behind her had long since vanished, even though she did not look back. She carried nothing: she had left her suitcase and her old clothes in the village; she would need nothing — there — ahead — but the little roll in the lining of her jacket, and she touched it cautiously once in a while.