1

The Khabarovsk express was due to arrive in Moscow by 9 a.m. A young man in pajamas scratched his shaggy head and looked out of the window into the half-light of the autumn morning. He yawned, turned to the people standing in the corridor with their soap boxes and towels, and said, “Well, citizens, who’s last in line?”

The last in the queue, he was told, was a plump woman who had gone away for a moment. She was after a man with a twisted tube of toothpaste and a piece of soap plastered with bits of newspaper. He himself would be after this woman.

“Why’s there only one washroom open?” said the young man. “We’ll be arriving soon in the capital—and the conductors are only interested in the circulation of goods: their private deals and the packages they’ve been asked to deliver. What do they care about their duties to the passengers?”

A few minutes later, a stout woman in a dressing gown appeared, and the young man said to her, “Citizen, I’m next after you. But I’ve had enough of hanging about in the corridor—I’m going to go and sit down for a moment.”

Back in his compartment the young man opened an orange suitcase and began to admire his belongings.

One of his three fellow travelers was snoring; the back of his head was broad and bulbous. A second—pink-complexioned, young-looking, but bald—was going through the papers in his briefcase. The third, a thin old man, was sitting and looking out of the window, resting his head on his brown fists.

Addressing the pink-faced man, the young man with the suitcase said, “Have you finished with my book? I need to pack it now.”

What he really wanted was for his traveling companion to admire his suitcase. In it were some viscose shirts, A Brief Philosophical Dictionary, a pair of swimming trunks, and sunglasses in white frames. In one corner, covered by some local newspaper or other, lay some gray village-baked shortbreads.

The pink-faced man answered, “Here you are— Eugénie Grandet. I realized I read it last year, when I was on holiday.”

“It’s a powerful piece of writing, there’s no denying it,” said the young man. And he packed the book away in his suitcase.

During the journey they had played cards. And while eating and drinking, they had discussed movies, records, furniture, socialist agriculture, the merits of various houses of recreation in Sochi, and which football team had the better attack— Spartak or Dynamo.

The bald man with the pink face was an inspector for the All-Union Central Council of Trade Unions; he worked in a provincial capital. The shaggy-haired young man was returning from a vacation he had spent in some village. He worked in Moscow, as an economist for Gosplan, the State Planning Committee.

The third traveler, the one now snoring on the lower bunk, was a Siberian construction superintendent. The two younger men disliked him because of his lack of culture; he swore, and he belched after eating. Learning that one of his fellow travelers was working in Gosplan, in the Economic Science Department, he had said, “Political Economy—now what exactly is all that? Tells you why collective farmers go to the city to buy bread from the workers, does it?”

Once he had got very drunk in the bar of a junction station where he had gone, as he said, “on a brief mission.” After this he had kept his fellow travelers awake for a long time, sounding off about one thing after another: “You can’t keep to the law in our line of work—or you’ll never get anything done at all. To fulfill the plan, you have to work the way life tells you to work. Yes, you have to meet life’s demands: ‘You scratch my back, and I’ll scratch yours.’ Once—under the Tsar—this was called private enterprise. The way I put it is ‘Let a man live—he wants to live!’ Yes, I could teach you a thing or two about real economics! Once I had my steel fixers registered as nursery-school staff for a whole quarter—until our new budget came through. Yes, the law tries to stop life, but life makes its demands anyway. Fulfill the plan—and you get a pay raise and a bonus. But who knows? You might end up doing ten years in the camps instead. The law fights against life, and life fights against the law.”

The two younger men said nothing. But when the construction superintendent fell silent—or, rather, when he began to snore loudly—they said what they thought of him:

“One needs to keep an eye on people like him. Behind that comradely mask...”

“A wheeler-dealer. A man without principles. Bad as a Yid.”

This man was a nobody, an uncouth nobody from the back of beyond. It was infuriating to sense that he held cultured people like them in contempt. “I’ve got prisoners working on my construction site,” he had said on one occasion. “Their name for people like you is ‘layabouts.’ But when the time comes to decide who built Communism, no doubt it’ll turn out to be you lot who did all the plowing.” And with that he had gone off to the compartment next door to play cards.

As for the fourth passenger, it seemed that he seldom traveled in a carriage with reserved seats. Most of the time he just sat there, his palms on his knees, as if wanting to hide the darns on his trousers. The sleeves of his black sateen shirt ended somewhere between his elbows and his wrists, and the white buttons on the collar and the chest made it look like the shirt of a child. There is something absurd and touching about the combination of white, childish buttons and the gray temples and exhausted eyes of an old man.

When the construction superintendent said to him, in the voice of a man used to giving orders, “Move out of the way, Grandad—I need the table for my tea!”, the old man jumped to his feet like an obedient soldier and went out into the corridor.

Inside his plywood suitcase with its peeling paint lay a loaf of crumbling bread and some threadbare underwear. He smoked makhorka and, after rolling a cigarette, he would go to the platform at the end of the carriage, so as not to upset the others with his horrible smoke.

Sometimes his fellow travelers would offer him a piece of sausage; once the construction superintendent presented him with a hard-boiled egg and a glass of vodka.

Even people half his age addressed him familiarly as Ty, rather than politely as Vy. And the superintendent kept saying that when they got to Moscow, “Grandad” would pretend to be a bachelor and marry a young girl.

On one occasion the conversation turned to the subject of collective farms. The young economist began criticizing “village loafers”: “I’ve seen it now with my own eyes. In the morning they just hang about outside the farm office and scratch their arses. The collective-farm chairman and the brigade leaders have to sweat blood to get them out onto the fields. And all they do is complain. They make out that under Stalin they didn’t get paid at all, and that they hardly get paid even now.”

The trade-union inspector, thoughtfully shuffling a pack of cards, agreed with him: “And why should our dear friends be paid if they don’t keep up with their grain deliveries? They need to be taught a lesson—like this!” And he shook his white fist in the air—the strong fist of a peasant, though it had clearly not seen manual labor for many years.

The construction superintendent stroked his stout chest with its rows of greasy ribbons—he had evidently been awarded many orders and medals.

“There was bread enough for us in the army, on the front line. We were fed by the Russian people. And no one had to teach them how to do it.”

“You’re right there,” said the economist. “What matters is that we’re Russians. Yes, Russians—that’s quite something.”

The inspector smiled and winked at his companion. It was as if he were saying those well-known words: “The Russian is the elder brother, the first among equals.”

“That’s what makes one mad,” pronounced the young economist. “These peasants we’re talking about are Russians—not some national minority or other! One of them started haranguing me: ‘Five years we lived on linden leaves...Since 1947 we’ve been working without any pay...’ They just don’t want to work—and that’s all there is to it. They don’t want to understand that everything now depends on the people.”

He looked around at the gray-haired old peasant listening to the conversation in silence and said, “Don’t be angry, Grandad. The State has begun to address your needs—now it’s up to you. You must all fulfill your duty as laborers.”

“A likely story. There’s not the least consciousness in any of them—all they ever think about is food!”

This discussion—like most discussions, whether inside or outside a railway carriage—was never resolved. An air-force major with gleaming gold teeth looked into the compartment and said reproachfully to the three younger men, “Well, comrades? How about getting down to some work?”

And off they had gone to their neighbors—to finish a game of cards.

But now the long journey was nearly over. The passengers were packing away their slippers and depositing on the tables remnants of food: pieces of stale bread, chicken bones that had been gnawed till they were blue, pallid sausage ends wrapped in layers of skin.

The sullen conductors had already collected all the crumpled sheets and pillowcases.

The little world of the railway carriage was about to disperse. Jokes, faces, and laughter would all be forgotten—as would chance confidences and painful confessions.

Ever closer drew the vast city, the capital of the great State. Finished were the thoughts and anxieties of the journey. Forgotten were the tête-à-têtes at the end of the carriage with the woman from the compartment next door, while the great Russian plain rolled past before your eyes—just outside the clouded windows—and the water in the storage tanks sloshed heavily about behind your back.

The close-knit world of the railway carriage—a world that had come into being for only a few days and that was governed, on its straight or curved path through time and space, by the same laws as every other man-made world—was now melting away.

So great is the power of an enormous city that it makes every heart miss a beat—even the carefree hearts of those who are traveling to the capital to stay with friends, to roam around shops, to visit a zoo or a planetarium. Entering the force field generated by a world city, entering its taut invisible network of living energy, everyone feels a sudden moment of confusion and apprehension.

After nearly missing his place in the queue, the economist had been to the washroom. Still combing his hair, he had gone back to his seat. Now he was scrutinizing his fellow passengers.

The construction superintendent was putting his expense sheets in order. A great deal of alcohol had been drunk during the last few days, and his fingers were trembling.

The trade-union inspector had already put on his jacket. Entering into the force field of agitated human emotions, he had turned timid and silent; his supervisor, a gray-haired, bilious old witch, was sure to have a few things to say to him.

The train rushed past brick factories and little village houses made from logs, past tin-gray fields of cabbages, past station platforms where the night rain seemed to have made gray asphalt puddles.

On the platforms stood sullen men and women from the Moscow suburbs, wearing plastic macs over their coats. Sagging beneath the gray rain clouds were high-voltage power lines. On the station sidings stood gray wagons, ominously labeled: SLAUGHTERHOUSE STATION. CIRCUIT LINE.

And the train thundered on with ever increasing speed, with a kind of malign joy. It was a speed that flattened space and time, that cleaved through them.

Resting his head on his hands, the old man was sitting at the little table and looking out of the window. Many years ago, a young man with a tousled, uncombed head of hair had sat in the same way by the window of a third-class carriage. The people then traveling with him had disappeared. He had long forgotten their faces and words. Inside his gray head, however, things had come back to life that had seemed as if they could no longer be in existence at all.

The train had already entered the Moscow greenbelt. Its gray, tattered smoke clutched at the branches of fir trees and, forced down by the rushing currents of air, streamed over the fences of dachas. How well he knew the silhouettes of these austere northern firs; how strange it was to see them beside light-blue fences, beside flower beds planted with dahlias, the peaked roofs of dachas and the colored windowpanes of their verandas.

And this man, who during three long decades had not once remembered that the world contains lilac bushes—and pansies, sandy garden paths, little carts with containers of fizzy water—this man gave a deep sigh, convinced once again that life had gone on in his absence, that life had continued.