Compartment No 6 by Rosa Liksom Page A

bright blue of spring appeared through a rift in the clouds. The spring sky. The train sped east and everyone waited for morning. The girl thought of travelling in the hot train across dreaded Siberia, how someone might look at that train and long for Moscow, someone who wanted to be on that very train, someone who had escaped from a camp without a rifle, without food, with nothing but wet matches in his pocket, travelling on skis stolen from a guard, a rusted knife in his pocket, someone willing to kill, willing to suffer freezing and exhaustion, willing to throw himself at life.
    The girl had waited the whole dark, dense, quiet night to reach Novosibirsk. She had waited for the safety of the metropolis, waited to be able to be alone for just a few hours. The dry, unrelenting cold of Siberia sliced at her face and made her breath catch. A tuft of hair peeping out from under her knit cap frosted over instantaneously, her eyelashes clumped, her lips froze together. She walked along the platform and listened to the snow squeaking and crunching under her feet, the railway tracks popping in the cold’s grip. She watched the gentle glow of the intermittently buzzing light from the lampposts. When she came back, cold, into the corridor of the train she met Arisa.
    â€˜Our beloved Victory engine with the red star on its forehead has given its all. If it doesn’t get some time to cool down and rest, it will die, and that’s not something any of us wants. We’re going to let him take a breather, a few days’ rest.’
    The girl decided to go into town and reserve a hotel room. She could have a shower and some quiet time.
    â€˜You can’t go out alone,’ the man said. ‘I won’t let you. Novosibirsk will eat you alive. We’ll go together. I’ll take care of everything.’
    Two hours later they were strolling towards the saffron-yellow-tinted sunrise and the centre of the frost-stiffened city. She felt the safety of the street under her feet. Snow banks as tall as a man grew on either side of the uneven pavement with paths trodden between them. They walked stiffly, gulping for air as they passed wastegrounds covered in snow, community gardens, a school, fences and garden gates crusted with snow, verandas with ice blossoms in their paned windows, a stocky woman wandering in a cloud of icy mist. There was so much snow in some places that the piles reached as far as the lights on the tops of the poles.
    At the bus stop a cosily sleeping and abundantly steaming cluster of people stood waiting for the trolleybus in thin quilt jackets and steaming fur-trimmed hats with hefty felt boots on their feet. Golden-yellow light glimmered from the windows of a concrete highrise, the dogs in the courtyard howling like a pack of wolves. The wind blew open the coats of passers-by and tore apart the bittersweet song coming from the loose folds of an accordion. There was a barber’s and hairdresser’s on every corner. A wheelbarrow and pieces of rusty pipe jutted out from under piles of snow on a side street, a broken Czech sofa slouched on one corner covered in little drifts of windblown snow. They kept on walking, through an industrial city waking from an icy dream, crossed courtyards, and found the gloomiest queue in the universe among the chilling mist. They went to stand on a sheet of ice at the back of the line, the man first, the girl behind him. The front of the queue disappeared into the sooty, thick, frosty fog. A woman walked past and left an opening behind her in the mist. The people were steaming like horses. The man turned around quickly.
    â€˜We stand here suffering for no reason and don’t complain. They can do whatever they want to us and we take it all humbly.’
    An old man with large grey eyes and a basket full of homemade pies yelled from somewhere behind them.
    â€˜Jesus suffered, and commanded us to suffer. Deal with it.’
    â€˜All we want is an easy life.