1
The Khabarovsk train arrived in Moscow at nine in the morning. A young man in pyjamas scratched his shaggy head and looked out the window at the autumnal morning twilight. Yawning, he addressed the people with towels and soap dishes standing in the aisle: “Comrades, who is the last one here?”
He was informed that a plump woman had taken the place after the man holding a crushed tube of toothpaste and a piece of soap stuck with newspaper. “Why is only one lavatory open?” the young man muttered. “We’re approaching the final stop, the capital, and the conductors are only busy with commerce; they don’t have time to serve the passenger in a civilized manner.”
A few minutes later, a stout woman in a dressing gown appeared, and the young man told her: “Citizen, I am after you, but in the meantime, I’ll go to my compartment so I’m not cluttering the aisle.”
In the compartment, the young man opened an orange suitcase and admired his belongings. Of his neighbours—one, with a swollen, broad nape, was snoring, the second—ruddy, bald, and young—was sorting through papers in a briefcase, and the third, a thin old man, sat with his head propped up by his brown fists, looking out the window. The young man asked his ruddy companion: “Aren’t you going to read anymore? I need to put the little book in the suitcase.”
He wanted his neighbour to admire the suitcase. It contained viscose shirts, and a “Concise Philosophical Dictionary,” and swimming trunks, and white-rimmed sunglasses. On top, covered by a small-format regional newspaper, lay grey biscuits of homemade, country baking.
His neighbour replied: “Go ahead, I read this book, Eugénie Grandet, last year at the sanatorium.” “A powerful little thing, you can’t argue with that,” the young man said and put the book in the suitcase.
During the journey, they played preferans (a card game), and while drinking and snacking, they talked about movies, records, furniture sets, Sochi sanatoriums, and socialist agriculture, arguing whose attack was better—Spartak’s or Dynamo’s…
The ruddy, bald man worked as a trade union (VTsSPS) instructor in a regional city, and the shaggy-haired man was returning to Moscow after a vacation spent in the village, where he worked as an economist in the State Planning Committee (Gosplan) of the RSFSR.
They disliked the third companion, a Siberian foreman who was now snoring on the bottom bunk, for his lack of culture: he swore, burped after eating, and, upon learning that his fellow traveller worked in Gosplan in economic sciences, asked: “Political economy, ah yes, that’s about how collective farmers travel from the village to the city to buy bread from the workers.”
Once, he drank heavily in the buffet at a junction station, where, as he said, he ran to “check in,” and kept his companions awake for a long time, making noise: “You won’t achieve anything in our business by law, and if you want to deliver the plan, you have to work as life demands: ‘I’ll give you, and you give me.’ Under the Tsar, that was called private initiative, and in our terms: let a man live, he wants to live; that’s economics! I had my reinforcement workers signing in place of nannies at the nursery for a whole quarter until the new credit arrived. The law goes against life, but life demands! Delivered the plan, here’s your bonus and premium, but, by the way, you can also get ten years. The law against life, and life against the law.”
The young men were silent, and when the foreman quieted down—or rather, did not quiet down, but on the contrary, began to snore loudly—they condemned him: “We should keep an eye on people like that, too. Under the guise of a buddy.” “A wheeler-dealer. Unprincipled. Like some Abramsha.”
It angered them that this crude man from the provinces treated them dismissively. “I have convicts working on my construction site; they call people like you ‘pridurok’ (simpleton/camp trusty), and when the time comes to sort out who built communism, it will turn out that you were the ones doing the ploughing,” the foreman once told them and went to the neighbouring compartment to play podkidnoy (a card game).
The fourth companion, apparently, did not travel often in a platskart carriage. He mostly sat with his palms resting on his knees, as if covering patches on his trousers. The sleeves of his black sateen shirt ended somewhere between his elbows and wrists, and the white buttons on the collar and chest gave it the appearance of a child’s, a boy’s shirt. There is something funny and touching about this combination of small white children’s buttons on the clothing with grey temples and the look of elderly, tormented eyes.
When the foreman said in a voice accustomed to commanding: “Old man, move away from the table, I’m going to drink tea now,” the old man jumped up soldier-style and went out into the corridor.
In his wooden suitcase with peeling paint, next to his washed-out linen, lay a loaf of crumbling bread. He smoked coarse tobacco (makhorka), and after rolling a cigarette, he went to smoke in the vestibule so that the foul smoke would not bother his neighbours.
Sometimes his companions offered him sausage, and the foreman once presented him with a hard-boiled egg and a shot of Moscow vodka. They addressed him as “ty” (the familiar form), even those who were half his age, and the foreman kept joking that the “old man” would pass himself off as a bachelor in the capital and marry a young woman.
Once, a conversation about collective farms started in the compartment, and the young economist began to condemn the village loafers. “I’m convinced with my own eyes now; they gather near the board and scratch themselves. The chairman and the team leaders sweat ten times over to make them go to work. And the collective farmers complain that they weren’t paid at all per workday under Stalin, and now they barely get anything.”
The trade union inspector, thoughtfully shuffling a deck of cards, supported him: “Why should we pay them, my friends, if they don’t fulfill their delivery quotas? They need to be educated, that’s what.” And he shook a large, peasant-like, work-unaccustomed white fist in the air.
The foreman patted his thick chest with greasy medal ribbons: “We had bread at the front; the Russian people fed us. And no one was educating them.” “That’s right,” said the economist. “Still, the main thing is that we are Russian people. It’s no joke: a Russian man!”
The inspector, smiling, winked at his travel buddy: that is, the Russian is the older brother, first among equals! “That’s why it makes me angry,” the young economist said, “they are Russian people, after all! Not ethnic minorities. One of them got going at me: ‘We ate linden leaves for five years; we haven’t been paid for a workday since forty-seven.’ And they don’t like to work. They don’t want to understand—now everything depends on the people.”
He glanced at the grey-haired peasant, who was silently listening to the conversation, and said: “Don’t be offended, old man. You don’t fulfil your labour duty, but the state has turned its face towards you.” “They can’t manage,” said the foreman. “No consciousness whatsoever; they want to eat every day.”
This conversation ended with nothing, like most train and non-train conversations. An air force major, his gold teeth gleaming, looked into the compartment and said reproachfully to the young men: “What are you doing, comrades? Who’s going to work?” And they went to the neighbours to finish their game.
But now the vast journey is over… Passengers are putting slippers in suitcases, laying out pieces of stale bread, chicken bones gnawed blue, and slices of pale, skin-wrapped sausage on the tables. The gloomy conductors have already passed by, collecting the crumpled bedding.
Soon the carriage world will fall apart. Jokes, faces, laughter, and fate, accidentally told, and pain, accidentally expressed, will be forgotten. The huge city, the capital of the great state, is getting closer. And there are no more travel thoughts or worries. Conversations with the neighbour in the vestibule are forgotten, where the great Russian plain rushes past the cloudy windows, and the water in the tanks gurgles heavily behind one’s back. The cramped carriage world, which arose for a few days, equal in its laws to all other worlds created by people, moving rectilinearly and curvilinearly in space and time, is melting away.
The enormous power of the great city is huge. It makes even the carefree hearts of those who come to the capital to visit, scour the shops, go to the zoo, or the planetarium contract. Anyone who falls into the force field where the invisible lines of the living energy of the world city are strained suddenly experiences confusion, languor.
The economist almost missed his turn for the lavatory. Now, combing his hair, he returned to his place and surveyed his neighbours. The foreman, with trembling fingers (he had drunk quite a bit on the journey), was rearranging his estimate sheets. The trade union inspector had already put on his jacket, quieted down, and become timid, having entered the force field of human confusion—what would the bilious, grey-haired woman in charge of VTsSPS inspectors say to him?
The train speeds past log village houses and brick factories, past tin-coloured cabbage fields, past station platforms with grey asphalt puddles from the night rain. On the platforms stand sullen Moscow suburbanites in plastic raincoats worn over their coats. High-voltage power transmission lines sag beneath the grey clouds. Grey, ominous wagons stand on the side tracks: “Boynya Station, Ring Road.”
And the train rattles and rushes with a kind of malicious, ever-increasing speed. This speed flattens, splits space and time.
The old man sat by the table, looking out the window, his temples propped up by his fists. Many years ago, a young man with a shaggy, poorly combed mop of hair sat just like this by the window of a third-class carriage. And although the people who travelled with him have disappeared, their faces and speeches forgotten, what seemed to exist no more came alive again in the grey head.
And the train has already entered the green Moscow suburban belt. Grey torn smoke clung to the spruce branches, pressed by air currents, streaming over the dacha fences. How familiar these silhouettes of stern northern spruces are, how strange the blue picket fence, the pointed dacha roofs, the multi-coloured glass of the verandas, and the flowerbeds planted with dahlias look next to them.
And the man who, over three long decades, had not once remembered that lilac bushes, pansies, sand-covered garden paths, and carts with soda water existed in the world—gasping, was convinced once again, in a new way, that life went on and continued even without him.
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