DAYSand nights had begun to blur in Alex’s mind, his rhythm shattered by this remarkable passion. Like Jonah in the whale, he was trapped in an environment totally foreign to his experience. He knew that the train was moving relentlessly forward, over a bouncing ribbon of steel, through the endless taiga, over bridges of concrete and stone and wood, through the blackness of tunnels. He knew there was movement, but he could not feel it. What he felt was an intensity that shattered his sense of time and space, a heat generated within himself and focused, like a single magnified dot of fire, on the body and soul of Anna Petrovna.
In her embrace he had reached the outer bounds of tenderness and passion. He felt the danger, too, but he dismissed it from his thoughts. Hardly anything mattered except the “now” of this consuming wonder. It was not uncommon to feel most alive on the threshold of death, a condition he might be sharing with Dimitrov. It did not matter to him how Anna Petrovna fit into Dimitrov’s equation. All that was merely their other lives, and now they had passed through a dark tunnel to the white light of the other side.
“It is beyond my understanding,” he admitted as they half-lay, half-sat crosswise across the lower bunk, their bare legs stretched across the carpet.
He looked out the window deep into the taiga, wishing that it would be more endless than it was, that the world would suddenly stop on its axis.
“All my life,” he said, feeling the need to plumb his own depth, “all my life, I have considered known quantities. I have used my curiosity, the scientific method, but I have never been up against a mystery like this before. This sudden attraction between us—I can’t explain it; I can’t even examine it. My old habit of curiosity seems useless, even wrong, in the face of this.”
“Never lose your curiosity,” Anna Petrovna said drowsily. “It will destroy your work.”
“I have been up against mysteries before.”
“Oh?”
“But of the blood only. Why, for example, does the white corpuscle suddenly develop odd tendencies? It is an enigma within an enigma.”
“If you lose your curiosity, you won’t care why the white corpuscle behaves as it does. You will just accept it. And that would be a terrible catastrophe for the future of the human race.”
“Who knows if it has a future?”
She put a finger on his lips. “It must have a future.”
“That’s the historian talking.”
“If I believed that there would be no future, why would I bother to study the past?”
“Study the present. There is enough nuclear energy poised on launching pads to destroy the whole world ten times over, and all your history with it.”
He felt her stiffen, then shiver.
“Are you cold?” He pulled a blanket up around their shoulders.
“You are frightening me.”
“I’m sorry.”
She remained silent for a long time. Then she said firmly, “We Russians will never start the holocaust.”
“Nor will we Americans.”
“I hope not.”
“You sound so tentative.”
“We did not drop the first bombs.”
“You would have if you could.”
“Never.”
“How can you be so sure?”
It was rushing back at him now, Dimitrov, bigger than life size. They were all helpless in the face of that man’s private thirst for power, for immortality.
“We are a family,” Anna Petrovna said. “Because of that we have more control over our destiny. Our lives are built on comradeship, on sharing.”
“You believe that?”
She turned and kissed him on the neck.
“I tell myself to believe that.”
“You’re denying your own history.”
“I know that.”
“Of all the countries in the world, you have spilled more of your own people’s blood, have brutalized your own people with such passion that it’s a wonder you’re still under one national umbrella.”
He wondered if he had gone too far. He was no expert on the subject of Russian history. What he knew he had learned more by osmosis than by design. He looked down at her tousled blonde hair, noting that the roots were as blonde as the ends. He pressed his lips to her head. But she was absorbed in her thoughts.
“We are a big country with big excesses. We are no more brutish than the rest of the human race. Surely, as a scientist, you know the lessons of the evolutionary process. Only the strong hold the land, and he who holds the land survives. You’re a Siberian.” She laughed. “You must understand that. The land is everything. Without the land there is nothing.”
He looked down at her again, seeing the tendons of her neck tighten. “You can only see that,” she said, “when you live on the edge of extinction.”
“Extinction?”
She sat up and looked at him, her eyes flaming above her high cheekbones like smoldering ashes come to life. Smoothing the blankets between them, she pointed a finger and drew imaginary lines.
“There are more than four thousand miles of Chinese border. The day will come when all along this border there will be missiles poised to destroy us. At this moment there are only a few, and their range is small. But soon the range will be unlimited. Now they can probably destroy only parts of Siberia and, perhaps, the western underbelly of the Soviet Union. Soon, very soon, they will be able to destroy all of us. Here, right here, good Dr. Cousins, lies the fate of the world.”
She looked at him, eyes still blazing, waiting for a response. He watched her. It was as if she had suddenly changed colors, like a chameleon. Was she an agent of Dimitrov? How much did she know? Then he saw the lines of her face soften, the hard surface of her fanaticism disintegrate, and she was herself again.
He remembered the evening he had sat quietly with Dimitrov, playing chess in a corner of his bedroom. “Even paranoids have enemies,” said Dimitrov suddenly, breaking half an hour of silence.
“What?” Alex had responded with some confusion. It was, after all, a statement in limbo.
“I must be quick,” Dimitrov said. Clearly his thoughts were not pleasant ones. Then, shaking himself like an old dog, he stood up, a sign that Alex was dismissed. It had, of course, been just one more piece in the puzzle, fitting into place in his mind at the right moment.
Anna Petrovna slumped back against the bunk, her fingers intertwining with his.
“I am much too serious,” she admonished herself, nuzzling her lips against his ear, her breath soft, like a warm tropical breeze. He felt his body stir again.
“Apparently it’s another national trait.”
“What is?”
“This fast swing between joy and depression. My grandfather was a perfect example. Sometimes he would tell a joke, roar with laughter, then almost immediately disintegrate into tears.”
“The Russian soul.”
“Is that what it is?” he teased.
“In all joy there is sadness.”
He let go of her fingers and felt them begin to roam over his body, coming to rest on his penis, which hardened to her touch.
“Now there is mystery,” she said.
As if to counterpoint his body’s involuntary response, he reached for her nipples, felt their hardness.
“Another mystery,” he said, leaning over and biting them gently.
She drew one of his hands down and moved it between her legs. “And still another.”
She bent over him, letting the blanket slip to the floor of the compartment. She kissed his chest, her hair brushing lightly against his skin as she nipped at him, moving downward over him languorously. Again, he felt the pressure of time, as if Dimitrov’s obsession had suddenly taken possession of him.
Then she was kneeling between his legs, kissing him gently, her lips roaming, her tongue searching out every nerve end of pleasure as his hands played through her hair. Her body quivered beside his thighs as he stroked her, then, feeling her longing, he lifted her, moving her upward as she spread her body to receive him.
They stayed joined for a long moment. His body lay suspended in happiness. Then, with a will beyond his control, he felt his pleasure come.
Later, he could not tell how much later, since he had lost his sense of time, he felt her moving around him. Struggling up from sleep, he heard material rustling, odd movements, breathing, a sudden change of sound. Then he was awake and his eyes were open, but the compartment was empty. He reached out to where Anna Petrovna’s body had been wedged against his, feeling the warmth where she had been. She must have slipped out, he thought, stretching his legs. It was dark and he could not see the face of his watch, not that it would have mattered, since it was still running on Moscow time.
Putting his hands behind his head, he looked up at the bottom side of the upper bunk, listening to the rush of wind against the steel and glass of the carriage. They were moving deep into Eastern Siberia now, into the wilderness of his grandfather’s memories.
He could even recall the pitch and timbre of his grandfather’s voice, deep, resonant, strong even to the very moment of his death, which Alex had witnessed, standing beside the high, pillowed bed. It was a frosty morning in midwinter, and his grandfather had turned his ashen face to the window where two glistening icicles hung from the eaves.
“Étape,” he had cried, lifting a gnarled hand and pointing. That had been his last word and, like all the others before it, it was an umbilical cord connected to his past.
Étape! Alex could not remember when he had first heard the word, but it had always epitomized, for him, his grandfather’s obsession. Remembering it now, he sprang out of bed and pressed his head against the icy window, peering into the blackness. He knew exactly what he was searching for, could see it in his imagination, feel the horror of it, the degradation and despair.
“Étapes,” his grandfather had explained, were way stations which dotted the thousand-mile journey from Omsk to Irkutsk. They were miserable, foul-smelling shelters built by the Czars at intervals of from twenty-five to forty miles. Parties of three to four hundred prisoners of every description—including women and children, political exiles, thieves and murderers, and those like his grandfather, simply banished by administrative order—were expected to make the three-month journey by foot from Omsk to Irkutsk. Guarded by forty soldiers, they snaked their way ponderously over the permafrost and through dirt roads cut into the taiga to the transfer prisons of Irkutsk.
Every day they were subjected to unbearable hardships. But worst of all, his grandfather assured him, were the nights spent in the étapes. Men, women and children, hopeless, cold, tired, hungry, would crowd into the long, low, airless building, still reeking with the stink of prisoners who had passed that way before them. His grandfather left out no detail, painting the picture with Brueghel’s eye and burning the image on Alex’s mind. He could smell the excrement bucket overflowing in a great horrible puddle on the permafrost floor. Since the prisoners were locked into the étape for the night, the bucket could not be emptied or removed. Sometimes his grandfather would gag on the description. Alex heard the low moans of the sick and the maimed. Cries of children urging themselves upon their exhausted mothers who were locked in a dead sleep, too tired to uncover their breasts and give suck. Men and women reaching for each other in the darkness for a moment of escape. The hardened criminals who threw the weaker of the group from the choice sleeping spots along the long low platform.
It was so unbearable that desperate escape attempts were frequent, all doomed to failure since all prisoners were forced to wear leg fetters. His grandfather’s scars never completely faded, and Alex had seen them when the body was removed from the bed by the undertaker.
Now, years later, those scars were the proof that it had really happened. He had never put the question to his grandfather, but he had always wondered. Three months along that endless, bleak landscape. As he watched it now from the train window, he felt even more strongly that it was beyond the imagination. His grandfather must have invented it. Such cruelty was not possible.
All his grandfather’s stories, taken together, formed the catalogue of an obsession. Alex could understand why it had been necessary for his father to grab the first opportunity to return to Siberia, as a young man in the uniform of a United States Army lieutenant. Alex had found in himself the same compulsion, which had brought him here by chance, actually against his will. Would the chain end with him? he wondered. His own daughter seemed permanently indifferent.
“Not again, Daddy. Not all that stuff about olden days.”
It was a sign of a breach in the continuum, he thought. An intensity, passed down through his family’s seed until now, had been lost, and he blamed it on Janice, whose view of life was so different from his own. He began to long for Anna Petrovna again. He measured her absence, not in time, but rather in yearning, as hunger growing inside of him.
Putting on his pajama top and slacks, he opened the compartment door and looked out the passageway in either direction. He saw the younger attendant come toward him with a look of consternation, and soon he was standing in the compartment of the sick woman, examining her, gathering his concentration again.
She was much worse, and it annoyed him that he had forgotten to look in on her as he had promised. But then, he had been certain that the Ginzburgs would have had the good sense to leave the train at Omsk. This time he would take no chances. He would see that they got off at Novosibirsk. There was obviously some terrible problem between them, having somehow to do with the husband’s Jewishness, but he could not get involved, he told himself, slipping into the discipline of withdrawal that had been his weapon for so many years.
For a moment he stood before the door of his compartment, half hoping that Anna Petrovna might appear at the door. But the compartment was empty, just as he had left it. It seemed as if she had been gone for hours. Perhaps she was in the restaurant carriage, he thought. She was wearing a housecoat, but women were always parading around the train that way.
He set off in the direction of the restaurant carriage, certain that his redheaded shadow would soon spring out from nowhere to take up position behind him. But he did not appear. Alex stood for a minute in the glare of the half-empty restaurant carriage. He did not see Anna Petrovna.
“Is anything wrong, Dr. Cousins?” a voice said. It was Miss Peterson, looking relaxed and benign as she sat, a plate of greasy stew before her, at the first table in the carriage.
“No, nothing,” he said quickly, forcing a smile.
“You are welcome to join me.”
“Thank you.” He hesitated. “Have you seen Mrs. Valentinov?” he asked.
“Who?”
“That tall blonde lady.”
“No, I haven’t,” she said, a brief frown creasing her forehead.
She looked at him and smiled.
“Come join me for a glass of tea. This stew is beyond the possibility of consumption.”
“Not right now,” he said.
Waving good-bye, he proceeded toward the hard-class carriages, glancing quickly through each open compartment door. In one compartment he saw a heavy woman slipping into a skirt. She looked at him angrily and slammed the door. A crowd was gathered in another compartment and he looked in hopefully. But it was only a chess game. He moved on, feeling an urge to shout Anna Petrovna’s name at the top of his lungs. Where could she be? he wondered, opening the next door with some trepidation, since he knew he had already reached the last car.
The heavy face of a Russian soldier confronted him.
“You cannot pass,” he said arrogantly.
“Have you seen a tall blonde lady in a flowered housecoat?” he said.
The young soldier looked at him as if he were crazy.
“I’m sorry,” Alex said, moving back into the passageway feeling like an idiot.
As he turned, he saw the face of the red-haired man, impassive as ever, but somehow reassuring as it watched him. That one knows, he thought. He knows everything. Alex walked faster, determined to confront him, but the man suddenly moved away with equal speed, disappearing down the passageway.
These people are all crazy, Alex thought, pushing through the crowd that was gathered around the chess players. Up ahead he saw the door between the carriages slide shut. Following quickly, he reached the icy chamber and gripped the metal handle to open the door ahead. He felt the wrench in his shoulder as the door stuck, refused to budge. He pulled hard, with all his strength. It would not move.
Gripping the metal handle with both hands, he wedged one of his feet against the door jamb and tugged. Still the door would not move. He stepped back, pushing his bruised and frozen fingers into the waistline of his pants for warmth. He kicked at the door and hammered on it with his fists.
“Open the damned door,” he shouted, knowing that his voice would be lost in the din.
With a great effort, ignoring the cold and pain in his hands, he calmed himself. After all, sooner or later someone would have to pass through the stuck door.
But after a few minutes, the cold proved too much for him. His lips chattered, his shins trembled. The cold seemed to seep into his nerve ends and bone marrow. Finally he yielded to the discomfort and let himself into the carriage he had just left, searching for the attendant while he warmed his frozen hands on the coals of the samovar.
The attendant was nowhere to be seen in the crowded passageway and the group bunched around the chess game were chattering noisily. Farmer, the British diplomat, emerged from the crowd and came toward him.
“He’s done it again, old chap. Simply marvelous.” He looked down at Alex’s hands. “I say, how did you do that?”
“The damned door is locked in the carriage ahead.”
“Now there’s a mystery, old boy.”
The diplomat went out and looked curiously at the face of the door, bending down and feeling below the handle. Then he came back inside. “There’s no triplock there,” he reported. “Only a keyhole.”
“The mechanism may have frozen,” Alex volunteered, rubbing the blood back into his fingers.
“The best way to cope with this part of the world, old boy, is to suspend your sense of Western logic,” Farmer said, puffing delicately on his cigarette, and blowing the smoke upward from a puckered lower lip. His eyes crinkled and the bow tie jumped below his Adam’s apple as he talked. He looked a lot like Basil Rathbone, Alex thought, comforted by his easy self-assurance. The man was a calming influence. Alex felt his anxiety diminish. Surely, Anna Petrovna was back in their compartment, perhaps anxious about his own whereabouts.
“The Russians are a mass of contradictions.” Farmer was warming up to his subject. “Capable of all sorts of excesses. When they are joyous, it is an endless banquet. When they are sad, it’s a massive state of depression. When they are angry, it’s a tantrum. Everything is an excess. Love. Hate. Suspicion. When it comes to suspicion, they are absolutely beyond comprehension. They think of themselves as a healthy body about to be besieged by a pack of enemy viruses. Don’t you think so?”
Is he trying to tell me something? Alex wondered. Or trying to get me to tell him something? Looking up, he saw an attendant coming toward them, a fat, almost slovenly creature with a morbid look about her. He felt his moment of closeness with the diplomat pass.
“The door to the next carriage is stuck,” Alex told her, in as neutral a tone as he could manage.
The attendant looked at them both, tight-lipped and contemptuous.
“How do you know?” she asked with a sneer.
“Try it yourself.”
She watched them for a moment, then stepped outside and tried the door. Returning, she looked at Alex and shook her head, as if he were a child who had broken it deliberately.
“She is rather annoyed with us,” the diplomat said. “She thinks we did it to confound her.”
As he spoke they felt the train begin to slow down as they reentered the carriage. Within a few moments it was clanking to a crawl.
“A country stop,” the diplomat said. “Probably for less than five minutes.” The sour-looking attendant bore down on them, a toolbox swinging in her hand. They followed her into the space between the carriages as the train continued to slow, edging its way through the taiga. Watching over the woman’s head, Alex could not make out any breaks in the trees. Then, as if it were an apparition, a dimly lit platform came into view. Huddled there was a single female figure, wrapped in a heavy coat with the collar drawn over her ears and a kerchief on her head wound under her chin. As the train passed, her face was briefly illuminated. She looked cold and lonely. Then Alex’s car went by, but he could still look back and see her, an unvanquished figure in the emptiness. She is Siberia, he thought, the image of her imprinted on his mind.
As the train stopped, the woman attendant grabbed her toolbox and swung herself to the ground, opening the outside door to the next carriage and hoisting herself up. Alex and the British diplomat followed.
As Alex hit the ground, his attention was caught by a sudden movement up ahead. A robed figure half-jumped, half-fell from one of the carriage entrances and began moving hesitantly toward the little shack that served as the station. Anna Petrovna, he thought, his heart jumping as he ran toward the faltering figure. He could hear his shoes pounding the hard ground. Faces in the lighted restaurant carriage turned toward him, gaping.
As he ran, he saw another figure leap from the train and begin running toward the robed woman, who had paused, holding fast to a strip of metal fencing. “Anna Petrovna,” he cried, but the words were swallowed even as uttered them. It was not Anna Petrovna. He recognized, instead, the sick woman he had treated on the train.
When he reached her, she had already collapsed in her husband’s arms and was gasping for breath.
“I was only gone a moment,” Ginzburg cried.
“You had better get her aboard,” Alex commanded. She had a raging fever.
The wheels of the train were already turning as he hoisted himself aboard and helped Ginzburg lift the woman into the carriage. Together they laid her gently in the bunk. Alex felt her pulse, a faint beat against his fingers, and put his head against her chest.
“She is leaving us,” he said.
“Please, Vera!” Ginzburg cried, pulling her to him, tears streaming down his cheeks. “I can’t bear it.”
The woman opened her eyes, sunk deep in their sockets, her face ashen as life left her.
“Vera,” Ginzburg pleaded, “forgive me. Forgive me.” The words seemed an incantation.
“I am not a Jew,” the woman gasped, lurching forward, the last tremor of life departing as her head fell back.
The coming of death was a common experience for Alex, but it never failed to stir him. His first impulse was to place the blame, to establish Ginzburg’s guilt for this death that might have been avoided. But the man knew his own guilt, and his agony was beyond simple grief. He was moaning now, an incoherent Hebrew prayer.
Alex lifted Vera’s limp arm to confirm her death officially, then, in a practiced gesture, he pushed her lids down over the staring eyes. He touched Ginzburg’s shoulder, then backed out of the compartment. Tania was waiting in the passageway.
“Mrs. Ginzburg has died,” he told her. “What must be done? I don’t know how you handle these things here.”
“They’ll remove the body at Novosibirsk.”
“Tough go,” the diplomat said. He had also been waiting in the passageway. Then he paused. “Jews?”
“Yes,” Alex replied. It seemed too complicated to explain.
“It never ends for them.”
“If I’m needed, Tania, let me know,” Alex said. “It’s best that Mr. Ginzburg be left alone for awhile.”
“Of course.”
He made his way back to his compartment. It was dark, but he could tell by the faint aroma of the familiar perfume that Anna Petrovna had returned.