In the morning, we have a final breakfast in the outdoor kitchen. Tanya cooks. She is already mothering Igor, and me by association. She prepares eggs and toast from black bread with, like all our meals here, smoked omul.
We ride in her Nissan to the shore of Baikal for one last look. “You were right, Jeff,” Igor says. “I was not believing you, but there is some something here.” He looks at Tanya.
Tanya drives us back to Irkutsk along the Angara drain. We stop in a large field and she puts down a blanket. We eat—what else?—omul. And we drink water and soda. I walk around and leave Tanya and Igor to nuzzle and make out on the blanket.
It’s still a little early, but I circle back, interrupting them with the suggestion that probably we should go.
They double-check each other’s phone numbers in their phones.
She tells us that her husband sometimes gets drunk and beats her. That she used to love him but now they don’t communicate anymore. She tells us that she has nowhere to go. Igor tells her that she should come with him to Sochi. If he gets the job there, the two of them can live there together. She says that she would really like that. She says that she has to go home and figure things out with her husband—even though he is a goat. She owes him that. Igor has it for her bad.
“We still have about an hour,” Igor says.
“But we better leave a little bit early,” I say, “just in case we have to bribe any cops at the train station not to arrest you.”
This time we ride in platzkart, which means we have no coupe. Platzkart is the hostel of Russian train accommodations—a whole train car full of beds but without the coupes, fully open, like a rolling barracks.
Igor and I are not seated together, but we both sit on my bed, waiting to see if the car fills up. People to my left have a Bible with gold-embossed pages hanging in their net.
“And I don’t have flip-flops,” Igor says as everyone begins the transformation from day clothes to train/sleep clothes.
The guy next to me twists a girl’s ring off her finger. She lets out a small cry and the ring settles on the table. He sits for a while with her then leaves, taking the ring.
People put bags down and sit near their assigned beds. Three women and a guy sit with us; two of the women are in their forties and spry and the other is in her twenties. The guy is also in his twenties. They look like boyfriend and girlfriend. They are from Tyumen. One removes a five-litre water bottle filled with beer. She slaps a cold smoked omul down on the table. “Help yourselves,” she says to us. It is no wonder this fish is endangered.
“I’m tired of omul,” Igor says. I also pass, but we take them up on cups of beer.
They tell us they are coming back from a relative’s funeral in Bratsk, near where Igor’s relatives whom we didn’t visit live.
Igor and I feel fortunate to have such agreeable train companions. Then, at our first stop, a babushka and a girl, maybe her daughter, arrive to claim their seats and kick everyone out. They slam purses down on my seat as they lay claim. They kick off their heels. Igor retreats to his place in the front of the train. My new neighbours start showing each other sexy shorts they bought in Listvyanka and reading each other their horoscopes. The young one uses a fashion magazine as a fan.
The Tyumen group invite me to join them in their seats. I extend the invite to Igor and suddenly we’re back to our good time, cramped in a bit on their beds. The older ones are sisters, and Olya and Tolya are brother and sister, not boyfriend and girlfriend. We get off in Zima and buy two litres of Shore of Baikal beer to supplement their five litres. Olya and Tolya buy some as well and they stand with one of the beggars at the station. I buy some chips and offer them some. They introduce me to the beggar, whose name is Tolya too. They seem to know him, but I’m unclear how. Or maybe, as with us, they just met him and already seem like great old friends. I offer him some chips. He declines.
Back on the train, the aunts compete in showing me photos on their cellphones. Natasha’s are mostly of her Siamese cat. One of him in a cast. Then everyone wants to have their photo taken with me, the foreigner.
Olya asks me if I want to hear her best English phrase. I say that I do. She clears her throat. Our group suddenly goes quiet. “Who is absent today?” she says.
“This is a very useful phrase,” Igor says, laughing.
“Very useful,” I say.
Olya and Tolya have lots of questions about North American schools. They have been told that in America and Canada people work and go to school on Sunday. I tell them the truth: some people go to work and school on Sunday and some people, most people, don’t.
Natasha tells me about how she occasionally applies leeches to her body to keep the blood flowing. In some pharmacies in Russia you can buy a small vial of leeches. Even Igor confesses that he tried it once. “That’s it,” he says. “Just to try. Most important thing is this coagulating agent.”
Natasha invites me to come live with them. “You can marry Olya,” she says. “Yeah!” Olya says. “I’d be honoured to have you as my brother,” Tolya says. I look at Olya. She is very beautiful. I imagine it. My moving to Tyumen. It seems, in my drunken state, the best idea going. I would marry Olya and we would have some Russian kids. Tolya and I would go into business together; I have no idea what Tolya does, but I’m sure in Tyumen, he and I, as brothers-in-law, would go into some business or other together. Igor and Tanya would come and visit from the Black Sea occasionally, and occasionally we would visit them, bringing along five-litre bottles of whatever Tyumen-region beer we could find to share with people we meet on the train. I would take Tolya’s place giving Olya foot massages and she would return the favour. This is pure derangement—but such seductive derangement. Something like the fantasy Igor was having about Tanya and maybe she about him.
The train attendant stretches a large sheet over the runner that lines the train car’s passageway and snaps it into clips that hold it in place. After a couple of hours she flips the sheet. Then a couple of hours later she changes the sheet.
The fantasy starts to go bad. The intimacy of Olya and Tolya, at times, makes me a bit uncomfortable. She feeds him omul with her hands, then he licks her fingers. He rests his hand on his aunt’s bare thigh. I spin out a different story, my coming to live with this incestuous family. Olya having been the bait, they get me drunk and marry me to Natasha … who seems actually very kind and fun if considerably older than me and, quite simply, not my type. And, of course, why would I ever want to go to Tyumen? If I am having thoughts like this, I need to leave Russia soon, I think.
When the beer is gone, Tolya opens a bottle of vodka, which we chase with bites of fresh cucumber.
It’s dark, but the luminescence of the summer Siberian sky shines like a purple jewel. Most people on the car have gone to sleep by now except for the two women on whose beds we sit, a mother and daughter from Irkutsk. They don’t drink with us but are very easygoing.
When I find my bed, I am quite drunk. There is no ladder, just a single step, the size of a bike pedal, to put my foot on, and a metal bar to pull myself up.
The windows in the wagon can be pushed open, but they are all closed, suffocating us. A draft is to be feared in Russia. I have seldom seen a fan in this country. I have never seen a ceiling fan, though it’s possible they exist here. An air conditioner may be used, but it will never be used at night.
I have tried to discredit the draft fear, but it is simply another example of American arrogance. One friend countered, “You don’t believe that drafts make you sick, and we don’t believe that caffeine keeps you awake.” The train coughs at night exactly as Igor’s uncle’s cucumber peel–eating dog Marusya had in Gelendzhik. I sleep with my laptop bag wound tightly around my sweating body.