CHAPTER TWENTY

In the centre of a small public garden between the Opera House and the University where Sidelnikov was studying there stood on a pedestal the cast iron Bolshevik Srednov, whose name was patiently borne by the huge city like an undersized second-hand jacket. The rebellious Srednov was cast in the unhinged pose of a street punk, which did not go together with his round spectacles and goatee. On the left, the square was watched over by the clumsy pasty-white muses on the pediment of the Opera House and on the right, by senile portraits of the Politburo members hung on the University façade in honour of public holidays and left there for a long time until the cleanly shaven and well-groomed images turned grim with bad weather. It was clear that they would never die and even if such a misfortune did strike, a new cohort would have had enough time to grow as decrepit.

Needless to say, in this sickly company supervising Sidelnikov’s solitary walks, Rosa’s shadow would have been least appropriate, being as she was a lively and unconstrained substance. Yet it was here that after ten o’clock one December evening, Sidelnikov heard with his own ears a phrase spoken behind his shoulder by the cool dear voice he could not have confused with anybody else’s in the world.

Soft snow was falling, lit up by the yellow glow of streetlights. Annoyed with himself, Sidelnikov turned his head and naturally saw nobody nearby. By the way, if that was indeed a hallucination, it was not just an aural one, since the words were accompanied by a soft steaming exhalation from the mouth of the speaker.

The day had already run out. It was time to go back to the hostel. But what Rosa told him implied that he should go to Nizhny Gravesk that very evening. Strictly speaking, it was only the name of the place that was completely audible, whereas the whole phrase sounded like a vague, but urgent, plea. Something like, ‘Please go, you still have the time!’ or ‘let’s go together…’ In short, utter absurdity. Besides, not knowing a soul in the Northern gulag-and-industrial town of Nizhny Gravesk, Sidelnikov had never been there, nor ever aspired to go, and altogether could not imagine anything in the nearest future apart from the winter night. ‘Yeah, just like that, get up and go, as if I’ve nothing else to do!’ he was squabbling under his breath with God knows who, heading down the main street to the trolley bus stop, more and more looking like the village idiot in his own eyes. A half-empty trolley bus bound for the station pulled up and opened its doors for Sidelnikov. Such courtesy was hard to resist.

He melted the thin mica-like sparkly ice crust on the glass with his fingers – seen through these tiny dactyloscopic portholes, buildings and streets appeared somehow different, cosier and closer.

The railway station was all astir. Besides the clichéd partings and meetings, there was a constant and inexorable atmosphere of uncertainty, be that happy or hopeless. It was probably tiredness that made Sidelnikov feel like he was drifting as if he had drunk a glass of Agdam, the “fruit-and-berry wine”, on an empty stomach. In this state – also known as “automatic pilot” – he managed, even without a ticket, to get a decent seat, and by the window into the bargain, in the third-class carriage of a northbound train. His sobering up was facilitated by the loud-mouthed conductor who made him pay her a fine – or possibly a bribe – notifying him in return that the journey to Gravesk was less than three hours long.

This length of time was more than enough for him to do a mental conversion of the sum paid to the conductor into meat pies and cigarettes, get terribly frozen and curse everything on earth. ‘What the hell? Where on Earth am I going?’ Therefore, upon arrival at his idiotic destination, the now completely sober Sidelnikov first dashed to the ticket office of Nizhny Gravesk station, to inquire about the time of the next train to Srednovsk and buy a ticket. It turned out that he could go back in fifty minutes. This reassuring prospect generated a desire, quite normal in a leisurely tourist, to go and have a look at the unknown town.

He came out in the cold from the back of the station and looked around. A blind snowy wasteland separated the station from distant dwellings that had very few lights. The populated part of the landscape looked a tiny trifle surrounded by the land which stretched out under the snow and the irresponsive black sky. The night had withdrawn too deeply into itself – no point calling it back or shaking it awake. Despite the immensity of the space, only the merciless cold made itself comfortable there, grandly and without restraint.

Thus having looked round the town and become so frozen as to completely lose any touristic inclinations, Sidelnikov returned to the station, intending not to stick his nose out again before the train arrived. The waiting room was impressive by its institutional starkness and the majestic remnants of the Stalin empire style: a ceramic tile floor as in public lavatories, a ceiling with grimy grey stucco mouldings of wheat ears and sickles. From the oval niche in the wall, Lenin painted in imitation ivory was walking out half a step. A pair of columns in the same colour supported a high gallery with round-bellied balusters that could have served as a rostrum for the Leader, had he finally decided to leave his niche. But right at that moment, a one-legged old cripple was standing at the banisters, sending drunken curses into the void. In one corner of the room, someone was asleep on a spread-out newspaper, resting his head on some packs. Another three and half people including Sidelnikov hung around by the walls, shivering from the chill.

The cripple on the gallery was making more of a spectacle of himself. Having cast aside his crutch, he grasped the banister with both hands and continued screaming obscenities. This one-man show went on for the benefit of an almost entirely empty auditorium, where the few odd spectators turned away pretending not to hear. But it looked like the old man did not need an audience. With white-hot hoarseness and life-threatening strain, he was presenting to his country, and indeed the whole world, his lifelong hurt that could not be appeased. The proclaimed list of wrongdoers included: sons of bitches, bloody bastards, prison snitches, pigs, fucking communists and General Secretary Brezhnev. One could almost say it was the last scream on the gallows.

Rather pusillanimously, Sidelnikov had a fleeting thought about the old man being easy prey for the vigilant authorities, very likely exhausted by their energetic idleness. But what good was to them this cripple: he was not the type for a secret report. While on the contrary, any chatty student…

What happened within the next three seconds was as rapid as an avalanche. Resting his weight on his left leg, the old man swung his right thigh with the peg leg over the banister, slid along it on his stomach – and threw himself down with a jerk. But even as the suicide was rolling his body over the banister, Sidelnikov, without thinking, pushed the wall away with his back, leaped forward and reached the place of the fall. On impact, they both tumbled down together in a hideous embrace: the cripple dropped face first and chest down, like a sack, painfully hitting his saviour’s forehead with a sandpaper-like cheekbone, whereas Sidelnikov fell on his back, as if defeated. He was choking from the weight and musty odour of the old man’s unwashed body.

They lay there as if slaughtered – for one moment that lasted so long that Sidelnikov had time to have a dream. A stranger, clawing the air with his hands, his face growing oddly young, was falling down from a five-metre height. Sidelnikov was shaking from the cold, his back frozen to the wall. He turned away and heard the skull crashing on ceramic tiles.

This mutual blackout ended with the old man throwing his head back and suddenly howling with fierce woe, and the young man hurrying to get out from under him, shaking himself down with disgust.

An impenetrable fog hid all that followed, in which the single shining need was beckoning: leave! Get away from here, as soon as possible! The train’s coming…

An unfortunate delay emerged from somewhere out of the side door in the shape of a sleepy militia sergeant. They managed to drag the cripple, holding him under the arms, to a room with the sign, “Duty Attendant”, and the sergeant began to take depositions from both participants in the incident. After his every truthfully-given answer Sidelnikov tried to get away, but the interrogator was in no rush. For some reason, he proceeded to cross-examination, as if hoping to discover some cunning discrepancies in the depositions. But conversely, the old man bewildered him with a coincidence by giving his name as Mikhail Sidelnikov.

‘Are you relatives or something?’

‘We certainly are not! May I go? I’ve got a train to catch,’ implored Sidelnikov junior.

He seemed to sense some attributes of a bad crime novel in what was happening, and every single minute of delay was threatening him with permanent settlement in Nizhny Gravesk.

…

When he was let off to go home, he breathed such a beautiful freedom as he was running along the platform and jumping inside the carriage that smelt of hot coal and pressing his face avidly against the window – it was as if he had not just a moment earlier been struggling out of the embrace of this nightmarish station. Now he could sleep unimpeded, stretching his arm out on the little table by the window and burying his face in his forearm. He could change from the right arm that eventually went numb onto the left without breaking off the dream, in which the night was returning to its senses, the lost fragments of the broken whole coming together of their own accord. Nobody was dead, his mother was gentle and forgiving, and the one-legged old man was quietly looking with his green brown-speckled eyes, washed clean from grief. Sleeping through the journey simplified the universe by dividing it into two parts of the world, two opposite elements – one motionlessly freezing and one flying forward, inflamed by speed – the station and the train. Ultimately, the events of an entire life, blinkered and bridled, tightened up to the stripped thread, came down to the choice between stations and trains. It was only their lights that were shining in the winter darkness… And I was already chosen by that transit express in which, urged by love and sadness, I was to overcome the space and time of that huge country in order to burst finally, at full speed, into the faraway sea port. There everything was titled by precarious and long anticipation, there yphoons were given women’s names, there a pack of impatient suitors were showing off their paltry male valour, there the salty air was speaking on behalf of the great ocean and there, at last, I was definitely expected. I screwed up my eyes like I used to in childhood – among the innumerable shimmering beings only visible under my closed eyelids, each one needed to be entitled to its own mysterious life and pleaded for my protection. And now it was not Rosa, but myself who was repeating calmly, ‘don’t be afraid, don’t be afraid of anything,’ secure in the knowledge that I would be heard.