Permanent Ways

The train clacks past farmland, where soggy fields harbour invasions of spiky purple loosestrife. The occasional blue-fenced cemetery or collection of tiny dacha houses peeks through the woods. Well after midnight, the sky is just drifting toward twilight, and the moon, one-third full, hangs pink.

My Russian has been losing steam with the increasing tempo of Leonty’s conversation. When I realize my internal translation is leapfrogging to every seventh word, I wander into the hall, where the freckled conductor is offering black chai to passengers. “Sugar? Milk? ” she asks me politely when I express interest. Where have all the grumpy, middle-aged women who hate to serve people gone? “Just a few minutes,” she tells me, waving a champagne bottle at the next compartment, where three women have already giggled their way through three bottles.

The conductor soon brushes past me into our cabin and sets my tea on a tiny table below the window. The first time I saw steaming tea served in thick glass, I was certain it would shatter. My father had to explain that the silver holder — then stamped with a miniature hammer and sickle — draws heat away from the glass. I stir coarse-grained sugar into my tea while trying to follow Leonty’s argument with Anya about the plight of working pensioners. When the msu lecturer comes to claim her bed, Leonty goes out for a smoke.

At 5 a.m., after a few hours of fitful sleep, I peer down from my bunk. Leonty, opposite, hugs a sheet over his tanned shoulder. Below me, the academic’s feet swing onto the floor. On each foot, her big toe drives a forty-five-degree angle into the next one. Obviously long inured to their condition, she stuffs her feet into narrow-toed shoes.

I zip up my backpack for arrival in Moscow. “Do you think we should wake Leonty? ” I ask Anya. She shrugs: “You can try.” I touch his shoulder and gently whisper. He doesn’t move. Ten minutes later, I shake him harder. “Leonty. Leonty.” Nothing. Anya blinks out the window; the academic ignores me.

Anya and I drag our bags to the end of the corridor. As the train pulls up to the platform, our bunkmate hurries up to us, smothering smiles with her hand.

“I woke him up,” she says.

“And how? ” asks Anya.

“I poked him with a spoon.” Her shoulders quiver, and her square face wrinkles with childish satisfaction. It’s that Russian mix of cruelty and kindness, Dostoevsky’s half-saint, half-savage. I shake my head, trying not to grin.