Trans-Siberian Express (24 page)

Plantinov had carefully described the station, a wooden shell in which one might still see some of the trappings of Czarist Russia, including a Byzantine cupola and a broken carving of the Imperial crown.

“I watched him for a long time,” Platinov had said. “I missed my train. He seemed as lazy as ever, sitting there in the little office drinking tea and twirling his mustaches while others did all the dirty work.”

The mustaches were new. Could Plantinov be sure? Godorov had prodded, over and over again.

“One could hardly forget Shmiot.”

It was confirmation enough and Godorov had had to paste a mustache on the face in his memory. Somehow it contributed to his hatred, warmed his blood. Only that kind of passion could have sustained him on the journey in the bouncing train, where each movement of wheel over rivet created new agonies in his body. The solace that he had derived from locking little Vladimir in the room at Omsk had now dissipated, although it still made him smile to think about it.

In his mind, the little brat symbolized all the meanness of Russian authority, the ridicule that one could suffer at their hands. It was not a child over whom he had scored a victory, but rather the monster of humiliation that had plagued him from the moment he had been sent away from his old life.

The euphoria of his little victory had been tinged with a slight uneasiness, since he had half-expected the boy to accuse him. Godorov was prepared for that—in the face of the boy’s brattiness, witnessed by everyone on the train, his accusation would be seen as just another silly tantrum. But the accusation had never come. He knows it was me, Godorov told himself. Why is he silent?

He imagined that Vladimir’s parents had confined him to his compartment. Perhaps the boy had even been beaten. Godorov was fascinated by the idea, imagining over and over how it would feel to perform the deed himself.

Once he had seen the boy’s slovenly mother emerge from her compartment, her fat bouncing in tandem with the train as she moved toward the toilet. Where is the little bastard? Godorov was tempted to ask. From time to time he would dart into his compartment and throw himself on his bunk.

At Omsk the gymnast had departed and an old man had joined him, his age somehow affecting his perception and he had insisted on conversing, hardly bothered by Godorov’s practiced rudeness. He was the only passenger who had not yet gotten the message that Godorov was not disposed to transient friendships, or even to conversation.

“I am going to see my grandchildren in Irkutsk,” the old man had begun, describing each child in detail, then progressing upward through the genealogical tree in an endless soliloquy. No calculated rudeness could shut him off.

Godorov lay on his bunk gathering his concentration, focusing on the details of his act, the old man’s drone fading into the din of the train’s movement. The sunlight that streamed into the compartment was somehow disconcerting, as if the deed Godorov contemplated required a more somber setting. In his imagination, he had seen snow as a backdrop, great heavy whiteness into which he would emerge with a drop of wet blood—Shmiot’s—dripping from his finger, a dab of scarlet on the white starkness.

Most important, though, was making Shmiot feel the same degree of pain and terror that he had felt. It was an impossible dream, he suspected, since he had to compress into less than seventeen minutes—the length of the stopover in Karasnoyarsk—thirty years of pain, the waste of more than half his lifetime. He wondered what Shmiot had done with the last thirty years. It was the first time he had asked himself that question. The first time he had let himself believe that Shmiot had had any mission in life other than escaping Godorov’s avenging wrath.

What would these thirty years have been for him, if he had held his temper on that fateful day, if he had simply given up his package without a murmur, as others had done, or if he had never entered the prison train?

Godorov had long ago lost the ability to imagine such a life. Even Natasha and their moment of love could not be summoned up for a hint of what that life might have been like. For that night on the train had also been the death knell of his sexuality. No one, not even the prison doctors, knew this. There was no physiological cause, and at first he had convinced himself that it was only some psychological trauma that would fade in time. But years passed and nothing changed. Besides, soon he was convinced that his injury had left him so repulsive physically that he would never again perform the sexual act.

Once, long after he had faced up to the reality of his predicament, he did attempt to test his sexual response. He was in Moscow, shortly after his release, and it was not difficult to find a partner. Prostitution was officially a crime punishable by imprisonment, but that did not stop prostitutes from openly soliciting on Gorki Street, and he had seen policemen nod knowingly to them as they passed.

It was summer, warm for Moscow, and the streets were never empty even in the middle of the night. Perhaps it was the huge glistening canopy of stars, the full moon, a reminder of his night with Natasha long ago. He had been walking behind the woman, not by design, and had not noticed her until the crowd thinned and her high heels tapped along the sidewalk ahead of him, echoing loudly in the silence of the streets.

It was not uncommon for him to spend the entire summer’s night out of doors. Anything was better than the stifling top-floor room which he shared with four other men. That summer he had taken to spending his nights out of doors, usually in a public park or on the grounds of public buildings, or even in cemeteries, where the flat ground sometimes caught the breeze which wafted off the Moscow River. Tonight he was heading for the grounds of Lenin Central Stadium.

The woman turned sharply off Gorkogo onto Yulius Fuchika, past the Czechoslovak Embassy, then turned again toward the Zod. Godorov was only aware that he was consciously following her when she turned again onto Klimaskina and he found himself going in the opposite direction from his destination.

The streets were growing quiet, although people sat in the open windows of the seedy apartments that lined Klimaskina Street. Occasionally a catcall broke the stillness as some drunken man would try to attract the woman’s attention. Sometimes she would shout an obscenity back at the harasser, confirming what Godorov had already suspected from the woman’s suggestive walk and dress.

He kept his distance, his anxiety growing as he contemplated how he would approach her. On Khodynskaya Street, near the Vogankovskoye cemetery, she slowed down and stopped to light a cigarette, the brief flash of light revealing a heavy face thick with makeup. She puffed deeply, blew out the match and turned suddenly to Godorov who was just a few feet behind her.

“Store’s closed,” she said, smiling contemptuously. Her indifference gave him courage.

“I have money,” he said. He dipped his hand into his pocket and felt his paper rubles. He always carried his money with him, never trusting it to the locker in his room.

“Pussy is tired, gone to sleep,” she said, laughing at her own joke.

He pulled out his pile of rubles and flashed it in front of her eyes. In the moonlight he could see her eyes glisten, and he smelled her breath as it mixed with the cigarette smoke. She had been drinking.

“Perhaps I can wake pussy up,” she said.

He peeled off ten rubles, making sure she saw the denomination.

“Pussy needs a bigger push,” she said, giggling drunkenly.

Godorov felt his palms sweat as he peeled off another ten-ruble note. “The cemetery?” he asked.

“Why not?”

She reached for his arm and moved with him toward the pillars between which stretched a single chain. They ducked under it and passed through, threading past the gravestones on the gravel road, the smell of grass and newly turned earth heavy in the air. They stopped in a little clearing near a freshly prepared grave.

The woman looked into the gaping dark hole. “Getting ready for the stiff,” she said. Then she sat down on the grass and looked around her.

Someone had recently put a bouquet of flowers at the foot of a gravestone within her reach. She picked it up and handed it to Godorov.

“Now you can pretend I am your sweetheart,” she said, giggling again as she lay back. “My God, I am in heaven,” she laughed, folding her hands on her chest. “Come lie down and see heaven.”

He dropped down painfully beside her, looking upward, the memory of the night long ago with Natasha vaguely recaptured. He remembered the peace he had felt, his last moment of tenderness.

“The money,” the woman said.

He handed her the rubles, moist from his hands. She took them, unfolded the bills, checking the denominations. She refolded them and put them into her brassiere. Then, businesslike, she reached for his pants, unbuttoned the fly and reached for his penis.

He let her, feeling himself heavy and dead, totally lacking in sexual response.

“So you want me to earn my money tonight,” she said, bending her head over his soft phallus. He could feel the coolness of her tongue as it mechanically caressed him. He lay back and looked at the sky, feeling only disgust and misery.

“What’s going on?” she said.

He looked down at her, saw the saliva shining on her lips and chin. Then she lifted her dress and quickly removed her underpants, spreading her legs.

“Here, play with pussy,” she said, lifting his hand and rubbing it between her legs. “Come on, it won’t bite.”

She bent over him and tried again with her tongue.

“I haven’t got all night,” she said impatiently.

His hand dropped away from her flesh, his fears confirmed, his hate rising as he watched her bobbing head over his groin. Then he lashed out with a clenched fist, feeling its heel strike the side of the woman’s head. Without a sound, she rolled over on the grass, a big crumpled doll, her soft belly glistening in the moon’s light.

He stood up and looked down at her. He could not tell whether she was still alive, nor did he care. In the distance a voice called, a horn honked, crickets clicked rhythmically. For a brief moment he had forgotten Shmiot, his mission, his need for retribution. He heard the woman sigh, then bent over and gripped her throat with his hands, feeling his strength as he crushed her windpipe.

Then he dragged her over to the open grave and tossed her body in, hearing the soft thud as it struck the earth. Taking a shovel from the pile of fresh dirt, he sprinkled a layer of earth over her, then pushed the shovel back into the dirt.

Even now, twenty years later, the incident was no more than a motion picture in his mind. He sometimes wondered whether her body had ever been found or simply covered by a casket. Occasionally, he thought of her in connection with Shmiot. He had given the woman a swift death, but Shmiot would not be so lucky.

The train was slowing. Godorov stood up quickly and pressed his face to the window, trying to see ahead of the train. Log cabins dotted the landscape now, with thin straggly plumes of white smoke disappearing into the deep-blue sky. He felt his excitement rise. Soon, he thought, trying to be calm, mentally picturing the station again. The old man babbled on.

The train chugged slowly into the station. On the westbound side was a stretch of wooden platform on which a group of babushkas, swathed in layers of clothing, their noses red with cold, stood staring indifferently at the train. Moving to the space between the carriages, Godorov pulled open the door and watched the station come into view, exactly as Platinov had described it, only shabbier. He jumped to the platform and a stab of pain sliced through his back. In his impatience he had stepped down before the train had stopped moving.

The pain throbbed downward toward his legs, making each step more difficult, but he pressed forward. Groping through the crowd of vendors, he moved into the overheated station. His heartbeat accelerated as he paused to get his bearings, his eye searching for the little office that Platinov had described. He felt a moment of panic when he could not find it, then realized that he was looking on the left instead of on the right. There, indeed, was the train agent’s office, the door half-opened, and through it he could see a man in a railway uniform. Moving slowly, he realized that one of his legs was dragging, and the other was barely able to support the full weight of his body.

When he reached the office, sweat began to pour down his back. A wooden nameplate over the door confirmed that he had reached the culmination of his long journey.

“Shmiot” the name read. Godorov’s body shook uncontrollably at the sight; his head pounded as the memory of thirty years ago returned in a rush, focusing the full power of his hate. He pushed the door open the rest of the way and stepped into the office, closing the door with a movement of his shoulder.

A gray-haired man with pink cheeks sat behind a desk.

“You are Shmiot?” Godorov asked, his voice tremulous and uncertain. Was this really the cruel visage that was etched in his mind? Behind the mustache, the spectacles, the pink cheeks and gray thinning hair, the man actually looked benign, kindly, hardly the object of a sustained hatred.

“Yes,” the man said, his eyes calmly searching Godorov’s face. Godorov stood staring at the man, waiting to be recognized. Know me, you bastard, his heart cried.

“Well,” the gray-haired man said with disdain, a hint of the old arrogance.

“I am Godorov.”

“Yes?” The shoulders shrugged with indifference, the old Shmiot emerging, recognizable.

“You don’t remember?” It was the first illusion to explode. How could he possibly remember me? Godorov reasoned, his mind strangely calm and alert. It was dark. I was merely another victim.

“I am Godorov,” he repeated, his voice strong now. He felt a charge of strength, savoring his power, goading Shmiot toward the revelation. He could see the man reaching back in time, searching his memory.

“Do I know you?” he said, his curiosity engaged.

“I am an old friend from the days in the Gulag,” Godorov said, his face cracking into a smile. Shmiot’s body relaxed. He sighed. The word “friend” seemed to give him a sense of security.