Compartment No 6 Read Online Free PDF Page B

about to look away, she noticed three men under the old maple trees. Something strange was going on among them – quick movements, lurches, swinging motions, sudden slumps. Then she saw a red blood stain on one thin man’s white shirt. One of the other men ran away. She saw him throw a knife down in a driveway. One stabbed man fell to the ground, another rolled on the pavement holding his stomach. There was a truck in front of the bakery. Five workers were lounging on the back of the truck. They ran after the stabber, got hold of him, and knocked him down. All five of them started to hit and kick him. Soon there were dozens of people around him, mostly women, beating him with handbags and gigantic sweet potatoes. The girl’s gaze shifted to the stabbed men. They were both lying motionless. No one was interested in them. A militia car arrived and the crowd around the stabber reluctantly dispersed. Blood poured out of the beaten man’s mouth and ears; his head had swollen to the size of a watermelon; one of his legs was bent in an unnatural position. There were two militiamen. They dragged the horrifying pile of flesh over to their Lada and then straightened their backs as if they were pondering how to cram the dying killer into the little car. When one of them grabbed him to shove him into the back seat, he wrenched himself free and hopped on one foot, vomiting blood, and got into the car.
    After a grating screech of the train’s brakes, the Perm station slid across the window. The girl glanced at the man who was bleating in his sleep, moaning, trembling, muttering to himself.
    She heard Arisa’s voice in the corridor. ‘There’s nothing in this town but drunken soldiers.’
    The girl watched the wind wrestle with the disintegrating carcass of a cardboard box wandering the empty rails. A flat-looking dog the size of a calf lapped brown water from a hole in the ice that covered a puddle of sludge. Soon the engine whistled shrilly and the train picked up speed. Perm, the last city before the Urals, was left behind. Rimsky-Korsakov’s bitterly jaunty song ‘Pesnya Varyazhskogo Gostya’ chirped from the loudspeakers. The view from the window was sometimes obscured by passing trains, sometimes fences, warehouses, large buildings, buildings under construction or demolition, light, darkness, barracks, fences, power lines, an endless crisscross of wires, scrap metal, ravaged landscape, light, darkness, wild nature, an old train engine passing. Perm was left behind. The man slept peacefully in his bed, a soft expression on his face. The girl read Garshin’s The Scarlet Flower:
    â€˜He left the door-step. Glancing round, but not seeing the keeper, who was behind him, he stepped across the bed and stretched out his hand to the blossom, but could not make up his mind to pick it. He felt a burning and pricking sensation, first in the outstretched hand, then through all his body, as though some strong current of a force unknown to him flowed from the red petals and penetrated through his whole frame. He drew nearer and touched the blossom with his hand, but he fancied that it defended itself by throwing out a poisonous, deadly vapour.’
    She didn’t feel anxious any more. She thought about Mitka’s description of the mental hospital – a place where even the crazy are in danger of going crazy. She liked the book’s sick main character so much she would have liked to read more about him, his strange, twisted world. Mitka’s world. She thought about the mental hospital in the book and the hospital where Mitka was. Had anything changed in a hundred years? Perhaps there was a little less water on the floor of Mitka’s room than there was in the patient’s room in the book. How long would it take for things to change here? Could time really change anything?
    The Ural mountains glimmered far off, low and insignificant. They weren’t impressive. The range