Things are easier when they’re moving. Zuleikha watches another life fly by in the tiny rectangular grated window – sparse little forests, small villages sliding from knolls, wrinkled ribbons of brooks, steppes resembling tablecloths, and the brush-like forest – and forgets about hunger. But she remembers it again during stops.
Sometimes she catches her neighbor’s attentive gaze upon her. Leibe watches – intently, for a long time, and unblinking – as she painstakingly licks her shallow bowl squeaky clean. And then he’ll suddenly give her his half-eaten chunk of bread or the remaining porridge in his dish. Zuleikha refused at first, but then she stopped. Now she just thanks him and accepts, and listens, listens to his endless muddled speeches that might be stories of medical practice or scraps of diagnoses. She soon notices that the book lover, the sullen Konstantin Arnoldovich, seems to want to join in their strange discussions, too. He needn’t bother, she thinks possessively. The professor isn’t about to start sharing his food with that bookworm, too!
She hasn’t been able to discover if this train car has its own iyase, its own house spirit. It ought to; how could it not, since people are living here? Then again, how would it feed itself? There aren’t even dead lice here – some people eat them themselves, others burn them in the stove – never mind breadcrumbs. She listens for it at night: the sounds of clattering or creaking under a house spirit’s shaggy paws. No, there’s nothing, it’s quiet. The train car is soulless, dead.
It’s very cold in the railroad car and they’re given little coal. Candles are issued occasionally for two cloudy-glassed lamps and then it’s bright for a short while.
Vestiges of their predecessors are scattered all around the train car, like greetings from the past. While investigating all the crevices and knotholes in the planks, Gorelov discovered an entire cigarette during the first half-hour of their journey. They wiped a layer of rusty dirt off the stove and read an impassioned inscription scratched with a nail that said, “Burn the scum!” The bunks are mottled with messages containing the names of loved ones, dates, oaths promising to not forget and not forgive, poems, dedications, threats, prayers, raunchy profanity, a delicate female profile, quotes from the Bible, Arabic squiggles… The children from the large peasant family found a small cream-colored shoe while playing under the bunks, set on an elegant heel with a thin leather sole; it was for a girl of around five or six. Gorelov wanted to pull out the silk laces (anything could come in handy) but was too late because Ikonnikov, who was usually reserved, abruptly flung the shoe into the stove. A horrible smell of singed leather lingered in the car for a long while after.
Their route is long. It seems unending. The names of cities, settlements, and stations string together, one after another, like beads on a thread.
Kenderi, Vysokaya Gora, Biryuli, Arsk…
Sometimes their train races swiftly along the railroad through wind and blizzards, sometimes it lazily drags its way along sidings and branch lines, searching for a holding area, and sometimes it stands motionless in that same holding area for weeks, covered with drifted snow, its wheels freezing to the rails.
Shemordan, Kukmor, Kizner…
Sometimes at small stations a second special train running close by will flash in the crevices of the railroad car door.
“Laish!” shout the peasants, who are usually quiet. “Mamadysh! Sviyazhsk, Shupashkar!”
“We’re from Lipetsk!” flies out in response.
“Voronezh! Taganrog! Shakhty!”
“From near Arzamas!”
“From Syzran!”
“We’re from Vologda!”
Sarkuz, Mozhga, Pychaz…
One time after standing in a holding area yet again, the train unexpectedly sets off in the opposite direction: Pychaz, Mozhga, Sarkuz… The peasants laugh from joy, praying incessantly: “We’re going home, heaven be praised, home!” They ride for almost a day. Then they come to their senses as they begin heading east again to Sarkuz, Mozhga, Pychaz…
“Nobody needs us,” Ikonnikov says then. “They’re knocking us around like…”
He falls silent.
“Yes, yes,” says Izabella, cheering him. “You’re absolutely right, like shit on a shoe. Just like it!”
And they roll on.
Agryz, Bugrysh, Sarapul…
The children begin dying first. All the children of the unfortunate peasant who had so many ran off to the other side, one after another, as if they were playing tag – first the babies (both at once, on the same day) then the older ones. His wife went after that; by then, she wasn’t distinguishing the boundary between this world and the other very clearly. The peasant man pounded his head against the carriage wall that day; he wanted to crack open his skull. They dragged him away, tied him up, and held him until he calmed down.
Yanaul, Rabak, Turun…
They bury the dead along the tracks in one common pit. They dig it themselves using wooden shovels, with the escort guards’ rifles aimed at them. Sometimes they don’t have enough time to finish digging graves or cover the corpses properly with crushed stone before the order “To the train!” booms. The bodies are left to lie in the open, with the hope that kind people will turn up on the next special train and scatter something over them. They themselves always scatter something when their train stands by open graves like that.
Bisert, Chebota, Revda…
Ignatov never gets used to the tea-glass holder. He drinks hot water from a good old aluminum mug and lets that thing – fat around the middle, with even steel lacework gleaming on its gut and a daringly smooth handle – just stand on the table. The faceted glass in the holder trembles invitingly when they’re in motion, sometimes bouncing: it’s reminding him of its existence. But it seems silly, shameful, and simply impossible to drink from such a ridiculous object. After Sarapul, Ignatov gives it to the escort guards in the next compartment so they can amuse themselves with it. He wants to give them a disgustingly soft striped mattress with an unusually smooth cover (was it silk or something?) but then thinks better of it; they’d ruin the goods, the clods. He rolls it up and somehow stuffs it on the high shelf under the ceiling. He sleeps better on a wooden bench; it’s what he’s used to.
There’s a lot he doesn’t like in the commandant’s compartment. There’s the lackey-like, soundless, and subservient sliding of the door (right-left, right-left…) and the foppish scalloped curtains with thin, barely noticeable stripes (let’s assume bare windows are no good, but why the frills?) and the flawlessly clean, large mirror over the voluminous funnel-like tank that holds water for hand washing (he only looks when necessary, in the morning, while shaving). There’s so much happening all around him! But there are lacy things and tea-glass holders here…
Serving as the train’s leader is not the easy job he thought it would be. They’ve already been traveling for two months. Which would be fine if they were actually moving, but more often they’re just waiting. They’re constantly on edge, like people in an asylum, because they’re either urgently pressing ahead (“You out of your mind or what, commandant? Look, everything’s backed up! Hand over your papers and push off, push off now and free up track five for me!”) or holding their horses, waiting in a siding again for a week (“There weren’t any orders with your name on them, comrade. You’ve been told to wait, so wait. And don’t come see me every hour! We’ll find you ourselves if anything comes up…”).
He loves those moments when the train gathers speed with a deep, ferocious rumble, rattling along the rails as if it were quivering with anticipation. He wants very much to yank the window down, stick his head outside, and put his face into the wind. He has difficulty enduring long days of painful anticipation at small stations in out-of-the-way places denoted on the map in italics.