The Travellers

The last time it happened, I packed my bags and left. I got on a train at Birmingham New Street and then on another and another and another and I didn’t get off until I reached Siberia.

I liked Siberia.

I liked the snow, the quiet.

I opened an inn at the edge of a small town, and catered for the passing trade—a good kitchen with hot stew and boiled potatoes, a downstairs room with a fire and high-backed benches where people could warm themselves and eat their dinner. Upstairs there was a dormitory with six plain but sturdy bunks, and for those in search of a little privacy who were prepared to pay me the extra, two more rooms, each with its own carved and painted single bed. I found a local man, Pyotr, to help me with the heavy work, chopping wood for the stove and the fire and lugging it in from the shed, shovelling snow and seeing to people’s horses, repairing their sledges, etc.

I prospered; I didn’t miss Birmingham, I didn’t miss any one from the office, and whenever I found myself thinking about Geoffrey, well, I just busied myself with something that needed doing, like peeling vegetables or polishing the samovar, or shaking out the big floppy mattresses on the beds upstairs.

My new life was calm.

It was uneventful, and even if I wasn’t exactly happy I was at least doing okay. Pyotr was proving himself to be hard-working and reliable and I had settled into a routine; I was enjoying the cooking, my Russian was coming along nicely. I’d started learning the balalaika.

And then, one cold winter’s night, very late, when I had washed down the tables and wiped the greasy remains of the meat from the wooden board in the kitchen, when everything was quiet—the six guests who’d come earlier were asleep in their bunks in the dormitory upstairs, the young lawyer who was on his way to Vladivostok was tucked up in one of the single beds, an elderly insurance salesman from Irkutsk in the other—I heard the sound of a sledge, drawing softly to a halt outside the front door.

Pyotr swore; he had just finished tying on his hat, ready to go home. ‘It’s all right, Pyotr,’ I said. ‘You go. I can do the fire.’

But Pyotr didn’t move; he was staring at the door. I felt a blast of cold air in my back, snow spiralled into the warmth on the freezing wind, a shower of icy flakes landed on my neck and when I turned there he was, steam rising like smoke from his tall fur hat and his long frozen coat: a huge black-haired man, dark and wild like a Cossack, with a beard and a broken nose and narrow glaring eyes and a thin furious mouth—the meanest, most murderously bad-tempered looking person I had ever seen in my life. In one gloved hand he carried a large bone-handled knife with a curved blade that dangled almost to the floor; in the other—a piece of brown paper crumpled into a twisted cone, like a small flowerless bouquet, or the losing end of a Christmas cracker. He asked for vodka.

Pyotr and I began to scurry about, Pyotr going out to the shed for wood to build up the dying fire and back out again to see to the man’s horse. I heated up what I had left of the stew and poured vodka into a brown jug and worried about how I was going to tell the terrifying Cossack that I was full for the night, that I had no beds left. Perhaps I could go up and ask the young lawyer if he wouldn’t mind squeezing into the dormitory if I put a mattress on the floor and gave him back his money in the morning?

Perhaps —

But I got no further with sorting out the bed problem, because just then Pyotr came back into the kitchen and I knew at once that he had some news to tell me. He was a close, silent sort of man, Pyotr, someone who, though he swore quite a lot, actively seemed to dislike having to speak. On this occasion however I could see that there was something urgent and unavoidable he felt obliged to communicate.

He stood for a while, stamping his boots on the mat to get rid of the snow and untying the laces of his hat from around his chin so that the furry earflaps hung loose on either side of his broad head.

‘What is it, Pyotr?’ I said. ‘What’s the matter?’

He nodded towards the other room, where the Cossack was, and over to the little window near the front door.

‘A woman.’

‘A woman?’

Pyotr nodded. ‘Outside. On his sledge.’

I looked. I craned my neck to see over the high backs of the benches in the other room. It was true. There was a shape on the sledge, I could see it through the misted window, hunched into a ball against the whipping of the snow, motionless as a pile of rags.

Over by the fire the Cossack had finished his stew and, by the look of it, the jug of vodka too. He was staring into the flames, brooding and cross. He had taken off his long coat and I could see the curved knife, hanging now from a leather loop attached to the coat’s belt.

‘Is she dead?’ I whispered.

Pyotr shrugged.

I tried to get a better view through the window by rising up on my tiptoes. It was a distance of about twenty feet from the threshold of the kitchen, where I was standing with Pyotr, over to the far wall of the front of the inn where the window was—a small, frost-feathered window with eight thick panes of glass just to the left of the solid front door. To our right, another twenty feet or so away, sat the Cossack, on one of the benches by the fire. Very softly, I took a step out of the kitchen into the room. There. I could see her more easily now. Although it was late, the light was good, the moon shone and the snow was bright, and as I looked, as I craned my neck again to see over the lintel of the window, I thought I saw the heap of rags move.

‘Pyotr,’ I whispered and nodded towards the window.

This time there was no mistake. The bundle shifted and we saw her face, long and pale like an almond and wrapped tightly round in a dark fringed shawl. Just for a moment, she looked towards the inn; then turned away again and sat like before, motionless and staring straight ahead at some distant point in the snow.

Pyotr was shaking his head and looking uncomfortable. He hated getting involved in the lives of others and had started tying on his hat again.

‘Don’t go, Pyotr,’ I said. ‘Please.’

He looked back over at the Cossack, at the knife hanging from his coat. Pyotr shook his head again and took off his hat. I wondered if there was something he wasn’t telling me—if he understood these people better than I did and just didn’t want to say. You could never quite tell with Pyotr. It was almost impossible to tell what he was thinking at any given moment; what he did or didn’t know.

‘Do you think he’s kidnapped her?’ I whispered.

Pyotr shrugged like before. ‘Possible.’

I pictured the huge angry Cossack grabbing the woman by the hair while she was walking down the street and forcing her onto his sledge then bringing her here to my little wayside inn against her wishes. I wondered if he was some sort of mercenary—if he had stolen her to order perhaps, and planned to take her in the morning to a secret destination where he would be paid for her delivery. I wondered —

Pyotr nudged me with his elbow. I jumped.

The huge man was on his feet again. Behind him on the low table in front of the fire lay the crumpled piece of brown paper he’d been carrying when he’d first come storming in. He had smoothed it out. I wondered what it was. A letter perhaps? Some sort of contract? A set of instructions? Something, at least, that formed a connection of some sort between him and the woman?

He was standing now with his back to the fire. I could see his face. He had pushed his wild black hair back from his forehead and as we watched him through the open kitchen door, he rubbed his cheeks and forehead vigorously with his big hands, as if he were washing his face—the way people do when they are tired and want to revive themselves before beginning some new and necessary task. He let out a big sigh. Then he put on his coat, walked over to the door, and went back out into the snow.

It was falling more thickly now. The woman, in her shawl, had begun to resemble a big white stone. A black dog had come trotting out from the town and was sniffing around at the base of the sledge.

I opened the front door a crack behind the man. The wind had died away and when he spoke we heard him clearly.

‘You will freeze,’ he was saying to her in a flat toneless voice. ‘In the morning I will come and you will be nothing but a block of ice. A frozen statue.’

I could see now that she was very beautiful, but also that she was as angry as he was. Both of them had exactly the same expression—sullen, furious, unyielding. She hated him and he hated her back. You could feel it, plain as anything, the poison between them—a bitter, resentful mutual loathing that seemed ready at any moment to turn into something much, much nastier.

The Cossack took a step forward, the dry snow squeaked beneath his boot. ‘You should come in now,’ he said.

The woman raised her chin. ‘No.’

‘Then you will die.’

His words hung between them in the freezing night; it occurred to me that it was the cold and nothing else that had brought him out to her. It wasn’t because he wanted to be the one to make peace between them; everything about him was grudging and reluctant; he was as morose and brimful of dislike as she was; it was only the danger she was in that had made him come out—the dark travelling shawl she had on might have been good enough for the day but it would not see her through the night. He stood there for another few minutes while she remained seated on the sledge, mulishly still as before. At one point he held out his hand to her in a cool, unwilling kind of way but when she didn’t take it he let it fall, and in one final furious gesture, he took off his coat and threw it, knife and all, onto the sledge, so it covered her shoulders like a blanket, and then he came marching back into the inn, alone.

Inside, on the low table by the fire, the piece of brown paper lay as before. The man picked it up now, folded it, and put it away inside his shirt. He didn’t ask if I had a room, he just wrapped his giant’s arms around himself and leaned against the high back of the bench and sat there, glaring into the fire.

Sometimes I wonder if at some half-conscious level, I knew then what had happened between them.

If I did, I wasn’t aware of it; when I discovered the truth, it came to me, I swear, as a revelation.

I didn’t go to bed. From time to time during the night and early morning I looked out through the window at the woman on the sledge. It was one of the drawbacks of the inn that we had no covered place for the horses and the sledges, only an open shelter with a beaten tin roof which kept out some of the wind but not the cold and not much of the snow. She wasn’t wearing the man’s coat. It lay behind her like a big dead animal. Still she sat, straight as a pole, though as the hours passed, her body began to shake. Around two o’clock the snow stopped falling; it was too cold now for snow. A crust of ice formed on the leather traces of the sledge and around the woman’s shawl and on the tops of her boots.

Twice in the night I went out with Pyotr, once with a fur wrap and once with some stew; she thanked us for both but when I said, would she come in out of the cold and sit by the fire? she shook her head.

‘Not if he’s in there.’

Towards morning we went out for the last time.

The stone pillars of the town gates were grey against the yellow sky, snow filled the thick clouds but none had come down now for several hours. Something had happened though, to the woman.

She lay now, in the bottom of the sledge. The black dog that had come in the night sat on her feet, as if trying to keep them warm. But she was frozen hard; her hair, when I lifted a piece that had slipped out from her shawl onto her face, snapped between my fingers like a frozen reed. I prised open the crisp folds of her clothing—the fur wrap, her grey woollen shawl—and found her hands. I began to chafe them with snow.

Pyotr watched, frowning. ‘Stop,’ he said. ‘Let Pyotr.’

He was strong, Pyotr. Short and stocky and wide. Even so, he couldn’t move her. He put his arms around the lumpy parcel of her body but it seemed to cling with a kind of obdurate force to the sledge. She was frozen and stuck to it. He went inside and came back with a rope, looped it around her and pulled. There was a sharp snap as she broke free from the ice and then he lifted her in his arms and carried her, like a small frost-covered pine tree, into the warm.

The fire was low now, there were just a few embers left glowing in the grate. Mostly it was ash. I raked up what was there and threw on a new log. The Cossack was still sitting up but he was dozing now. Pyotr laid the frozen woman at his feet by the hearth.

Under the fur wrap and her woolly grey shawl she had on one of those pretty, brightly embroidered dresses, like the ones the Sadler’s Wells dancers had worn when Geoffrey took me to see The Rite of Spring a few years before for my birthday. The most striking thing about her, though, was her face, still furious and indignant, gazing out from beneath a thin carapace of ice, like something trapped in a pond, or behind the clouded glass of an old mirror. The effect was curious and unsettling; it was clear to me now that she was dead.

On the bench beside me the Cossack no longer slept. He was sitting without moving, just staring at the body of the frozen woman at his feet.

Pyotr grunted. He bent to the floor to pick up his rope, which was lying in a sodden coil on the hearth. I didn’t know what to say. For something to do I began to gather up the remains of the Cossack’s dinner—his bowl and cup, his fork and spoon, the empty vodka jug—and perhaps it would all have ended there if I hadn’t noticed then the piece of paper on the floor beneath the bench, the one the man had carried in his fist and later folded and put inside his shirt. It must have fallen out while he slept.

I picked it up, opened it. It was a map. A maze of hand-drawn tracks across the snowy wilderness, an arrow in the right-hand corner, pointing north. I thought of the Cossack’s smouldering fury when they arrived, of the woman’s suicidal six-hour sulk in the snow and then I understood; everything that was familiar about the two of them seemed at that moment to reveal itself. Even before the Cossack glanced over and saw me holding the map, even before he’d shrugged his massive shoulders and thrown up his hands and gestured towards the window at their sledge parked outside, even before he’d opened his mouth to speak, I knew what he was going to say:

‘Always when we drive, my wife and I, we argue.’

I thought of Geoffrey.

I thought of our last horrible scene in the car after his brother’s wedding in Salford, after I’d told him to come off the M6 just north of Manchester at junction 26 and go into Wigan; after we’d got lost in Wigan and been stuck in traffic for an hour and three quarters in the centre of town, then trailed slowly on for another hour through Hindley, Atherton and Tyldesley, and ended up arriving at the church when the wedding ceremony was just finishing; I thought of how we’d sat through the reception without speaking a word to each other and then walked silently back to the car, of how Geoffrey had taken the road atlas out of the compartment in the door on my side and said to me in that quiet voice that pretends to be patient and understanding but is in fact a hair’s breadth away from being speechless with incandescent fury, ‘Why would you do that, Harriet? Why wouldn’t you tell me to come off at junction 21a and then take the M62 all the way up to the M602 into Salford? Or junction 20 so I could have taken the M56 and picked up the western ring road until we hit the M602 there and gone in that way? Jesus Christ, Harriet, why would you take us in through the centre of Wigan on a Saturday morning?’

I remembered how I’d turned away from him and stared out of my window at the trees and the departing wedding guests and the other cars in the hotel car park and said, quietly, as he had, ‘It seemed like the best way to me, Geoffrey.’

I thought of the five hours we’d spent on the Boulevard ­Périphérique in Paris. I thought of the horrible, fat Michelin book with its hundreds of pages, each one with a small piece of Paris on it so that the road kept running off the edge of one page and on to another but never onto the next page, always onto a different page somewhere else in the book that you could only find by consulting the index at the back and by the time you’d found it, it was too late. I thought of Geoffrey’s demented shouting as we went whipping past the Saint-Cloud exit for the fourth time. Shall I come off here, Harriet? Shall I? Shall I? Tell me what I need to do Harriet, you need to tell me, you need to tell me, you need to tell me NOW. Look! There’s the exit. You need to tell me now now now now now oh too late. I thought of the evening we drove down to London for a ­seven-thirty performance of Oklahoma! at the National Theatre; of how at around eight o’clock, somewhere between Hendon and Cricklewood, Geoffrey stopped the car and pulled over and switched on the overhead map-light and without a word put his hand out for the A to Z; how he turned over a few pages and studied them and then handed me back the book and extinguished the light and moved slowly off again into the traffic. I thought of the satellite navigation device Geoffrey had bought, not long after his brother’s wedding, and what high hopes I’d had of it, but it too had been shouted at, and then banished, for choosing the wrong way and taking us to places we didn’t want to go, and after a short time we’d gone back to doing things the way we’d always done them, and I thought, now, of the hundreds of occasions when things had gone badly for us in the car. I thought of how, somehow, the between-car-journeys bit of our life suddenly became an unimaginably distant thing; I thought of how every single time it happened, my heart shrivelled up into a tiny dry peanut without the tiniest drop of love left inside it for Geoffrey, until the only thing left to do was to show him the back of my head and stare out of the window on my side and cry and silently repeat the chant, I hate you Geoffrey Parker, I hate you, I hate you, I hate you.

Next to the fire, the Cossack stared sadly at the body of his dead wife. Pyotr had fetched a mop and was dabbing gently at the wet floorboards around her where the ice from her clothes had begun to thaw.

Upstairs in the dormitory the bunk beds creaked. People were getting up. Soon they would be down, the young lawyer on his way to Vladivostok and the old salesman from Irkutsk and the others, wanting their breakfast. Well, I would make breakfast. I would fill the samovar and give them hot tea and fresh rolls. I would send Pyotr into town for the carpenter and the priest and when he got back I would say to him that I was very sorry but I was going back to Birmingham now. I would tell him that he could keep the inn if he wanted it, I would leave everything for him, the beds and the cooking pots, the crockery, the vodka jugs, the knives and forks, the wood pile in the back, my balalaika, and then I would pack my bags. I would walk out into the snow and climb on the first train that was heading west out of Siberia and I would keep going until I got back to Geoffrey, and once I was there I would do what I should have done years ago, I would have some driving lessons, and when I passed my test, I would drive, and Geoffrey would navigate. And if I failed my driving test, I would take Geoffrey’s hands in mine and tell him I loved him. I would make us a good dinner and open a bottle of wine, I would put on the blue Margaret Howell linen blouse he gave me for our twelfth wedding anniversary and the cedar-wood bracelet he gave me for our fifth, and I would talk to him about public transport.