Compartment No 6 Read Online Free PDF Page A

inside a tank and the museum guard found them after the place had closed. They ended up sitting up all night with him in the guard’s booth clinking champagne glasses. Mitka, whose door always had to be open, had gone to the mental hospital to avoid the army, deployment to Afghanistan.
    The night had already chilled through the dark into a red dawn coming in through the window. The yellow moon swept up the last bright star to make way for the fiery sun, and slowly all of Siberia grew light. The man was in his blue tracksuit bottoms and white shirt, doing push-ups between the beds, his forehead sweaty, his eyes sleepy, his mouth dry and stinking, a thick stench in the room, an airless window, silent tea glasses on the table, quiet crumbs on the floor. A new day was before them, with its orange, frost-covered birches and pine groves where hidden animals roamed and fresh snow drifted over the plains, white, fluttering longjohn legs, limp penises, mitts and muffs and cuffs and flowered flannel nightgowns, shawls and wool socks and straggly toothbrushes.

THE NIGHT SPEEDS THROUGH THE DARK into dim morning, a dogged queue at the shrine of the WC, a dry wash among the puddles of pee, sputum, shame, sheepish looks, shadows of steaming tea glasses in the windows, large, flat cubes of Cuban sugar, paper-light aluminium spoons, black bread, Viola cheese, sliced tomatoes and onion, the roasted torso of a young chicken, canned horseradish, hard-boiled eggs, salt pickles, mayonnaise, tinned fish, and canned peas from Moldavia.
    The darkness breaks out in a new day, snow rising from the ground up the tree trunks, the silence fading in their upper branches, a hawk perched on a turquoise cloud, looking down at the slithering worm of train.
    Quiet spread orange over the snowy taiga. The man sat on the edge of his bunk, placed teacups on the table, and waited impatiently for the girl to look at him.
    â€˜Once, in Moscow, there was a father, a mother, and a son. On 65 Kropotkin Street, in a little room behind a communal kitchen, in a home where locks couldn’t protect them. This family was quite ordinary, the mother working behind the counter in a bread shop, the father drinking on a construction site, but a true Stakhanovite nonetheless. Late one evening, when he thought the boy was asleep, the man said to his wife, It’s the boy or me. The wife whispered back in a sweet voice, Wait another month and he’ll be gone.’
    He wiped his nose with his palm and swallowed.
    â€˜In the morning the boy said his goodbyes to his one-eyed dog and pulled the door shut behind him. By nightfall he had joined a gang of other runaways and started living on the streets of Moscow. These street children slept wherever and whenever they could, in a heap like puppies, together with the deformed and the crippled, the thieves, whores, mental patients and hunchbacks. Nobody missed them, but they, too, wanted to live. The less bread they had, the more misery they had, the greater their desire to live became. They knew no fear because they were so young that they didn’t yet know the value of life. They didn’t know themselves and they didn’t know the world. This boy grew up on the streets. He grew up to be a shaggy, iron-belted Soviet Citizen who pissed pure vodka.’
    He poured steeped tea into both glasses and added hot water from the samovar to get it to the right strength.
    â€˜Tell me, do you know why a rainbow never forms behind the back of the person looking at it?’
    There was a thud, a knock, and then the train braked furiously. The rails trembled, the carriages swayed, the snow on the roadbed flew into the air. The train jerked along with the brakes screeching for some distance. Boxes toppled off the shelves and the tea glasses smashed against the wall of the compartment. A woman screamed, children cried, someone ran down the corridor with heavy steps.
    Arisa’s calming voice could be heard. ‘Don’t