1The Brim of a Poisoned Well
It was eight o’clock on Friday morning, and Olga Pushkin was weeping on the arm of her new sofa. This would surprise you, if you knew her, for she wasn’t much given to weeping (or buying new furniture). And even if you didn’t, tears looked somehow incongruous on her face, like hipster jeans on an old man, or a Christmas tree in June. Her cheeks were broad, her nose stolid and wind-raw, her eyes deep-set and wary and wise. She had a face like Russia.
The reason for her tears was a crudely written letter that lay on the table under the window. The table, which was brightly painted in red and gold, was one of Olga’s most prized possessions. She had salvaged it from a shut-down Chinese restaurant in nearby Tayga the year before, clambering into a skip and plucking off the fast-food wrappers that clung to the table-top like leeches. She’d wiped it down with a discarded shirt, and with the help of her friend Ekaterina Chezhekov had wrestled it into the boot of a borrowed Lada, and brought it home in triumph to the house she shared with her father Mikhail. But now the coveted object held up the letter like a villain’s sidekick, taunting her with its venomous, half-literate insults.
You TART, thinking you can waltz in to that poor old mans’ dacha and get away with his savings when he Pops his Clogs, and Mr Solotov an Army man with no children of his own … Its daylight robbery is what it is, a Railway Worker should know better. (as if youd ever be anything else!) Youll be found out, oh yes in the end Everyone will know what you’ve DONE.
She had thought the letter idiotic when she first read it that morning. Everyone in the village knew Olga was about as far from a tart as a woman could be. For one thing, she hadn’t had a boyfriend since 1996, assuming Piotr Katin could even be placed in the boyfriend category (a story for later). For another thing, she didn’t know how to waltz. In fact, she didn’t know how to dance at all, unless swaying back and forth to slow 1980s American love songs in the Roslazny church hall (also in 1996) counted as dancing. Since then she’d always found an excuse to inhabit the edges, not the middles, of party rooms. And Vladimir Solotov’s tumbledown shack, whose flooring consisted mostly of ancient copies of Pravda, could hardly be described as a dacha. Wealthy Russians kept dachas, second houses in the country where they could escape from their busy city lives. Old Solotov was no Roman Abramovich: what did he have to escape from? Even her father Mikhail, who had a nose for roubles that would put a bloodhound to shame, didn’t think Vladimir Solotov worth courting for a mention in his will. He made her visit his lecherous old friend not in hope of a legacy but because he thought it made the family look good in the village, and at no cost to himself. (He himself, of course, was too old, and too unwell, to hobble through the winter snow. Friendship had its limits.)
So – a stupid letter. The writer was clearly deranged, she thought, and probably jealous of her in some obscure way. And didn’t they come to the same thing, anyway? After all, there wasn’t much to envy in Olga’s life. It was Olga who envied others, women who had made something of their lives, who had had education and opportunities, who lived in glamorous cities rather than dying railside backwaters ‒ women whose mothers had lived to nurture them, whose fathers had encouraged them, rather than trapped them … To be jealous of Olga was to be deranged. But on the other hand, Olga was still healthy, still pretty, still on the right side of thirty-five. An old person might well envy those things. Yes – it was probably some old crone, lashing out at a random target as elderly people often do, their inhibitions worn away, like locomotive brake-pads, by the slow passage of years. She knew plenty of old people in Roslazny, where young people rarely stayed longer than they had to. No doubt her correspondent was some housebound invalid whose window she walked past on the way to her job, or to the café, or to Anna Kabalevsky’s house. It was someone to ignore – someone to pity, even.
She had shaken her head after her first scan of the letter’s contents, as if to empty her mind of troublesome thoughts, and then dropped it on the red-and-gold table from the Chinese restaurant. She’d looked out of the window – heavy snow again – and started to prepare her sandwiches and salted-fish snacks for the day ahead. It looked set to be another cold one, which was saying something in the Kemerovo region of Siberia.
But then she’d paused and picked up the letter again. And this time she couldn’t help thinking: was it so idiotic after all? She read one of the lines again: As if youd ever be anything else!
Anything else but a railway worker, they meant, of course. The casual phrase, almost tossed away in parenthesis, that she’d barely noticed first time round – that was clever, barbed like the fish-hook on which, as a child, she had impaled her finger by the River Tom, except this time the result wasn’t torn flesh and a run of blood but a desperate sinking feeling in her heart.
And that phrase had been written with special conviction. The writer’s pen had scored through to the other side for those seven words, and those words alone, showing a depth of spite Olga could scarcely imagine. This was no chance insult written by some old relic who barely knew her, but a knowing, well-directed dart, precisely aimed and delivered. The letter hurt not because it accused her of duplicity, of doing good for others in the hope of reward. It hurt because it voiced her own hidden fears. It was as if some cheap ballpoint had scored her, had penetrated a paper-thin veneer and punched into her most vulnerable place: the terror, now spelled out in black and white, that she would never be anything else but a track engineer, third class, in a little hut by the tracks near Roslazny village.
Because she did so desperately want to be something else. For years, she had fantasised about becoming a writer, of studying literature at Tomsk State University – the Oxford of Western Siberia – and earning her livelihood on an electronic typewriter or computer in a warm, brightly lit coffee-shop instead of a cramped, mouldy railside hut. Her mother would have wanted that for her, Olga was sure of it. Yet she was gone, and with her the magical grace that dissolved difficulties into laughter. And her brother Pasha too, sweet soul, posted to far Crimea with his regiment. She had friends – Ekaterina Chezhekov at Tayga station three miles down the tracks, and Anna Kabalevsky in the village, and others – but most of them had difficult husbands or small children or both, and were taken up with their own troubles. Most days she was alone, with only the trains weaving across frozen vastnesses to clatter past her hut, and in the evenings her father Mikhail, who scorned her yearnings and drank up her earnings in cheap vodka.
When she was alone she wrote whenever she could, on whatever she could, huddled close to the hut’s little iron stove for warmth. New paper was expensive, but old timetables and memos from the railway provided ample white space to fill between track inspections, her scribbled words charting their own route between departure times from Vladivostok and Moscow. She was halfway through her magnum opus, a book she was writing for women like her, who had to struggle through life. After years of equivocation she had recently settled on a title – Find Your Rail Self: 100 Life Lessons from the Trans-Siberian Railway. A hundred was a lot, she realised, but surely it was better to have more ideas than fewer. She’d seen some books with just six or seven, like Sasha Ivanov’s Seven Ways to Conquer Your Careeror Nikita Aliyev’s Six Daily Habits of Billionaire Muscovites. Perhaps that made sense to people who travelled only by car, with room for just a few bags in the boot. But on the railway it wasn’t unusual for cargo trains to have fifty, sixty or even seventy wagons, each filled with varied and essential goods. The people waiting for the goods didn’t want just six or seven wagons. Some wanted one thing, and some another. You had to have a lot of wagons to be sure of satisfying people in big cities like Novosibirsk or Ekaterinburg or Irkutsk, let alone Moscow or St Petersburg. And Olga was sure it was the same with ideas. The more ideas you had, the more chance you had of pleasing people, because people always liked best the ideas they had already had themselves. And the more people you pleased, the more books you could sell. And the more books you sold, the sooner you could save up the fees for the honours literature course at Tomsk State University.
When there was a big gap between trains, and nothing much to do on the track, Olga would sit in her little hut and get very excited about her book. Her eyes would glow and her pen would fly across the paper as she laid down lesson after lesson that she had learned from her life on the lines, and which she thought would help other women who struggled with similar burdens. But hers was a busy job, and such times were relatively rare. Almost always the telephone would ring, or the alarm would sound for a train, and she would have to stop writing and start working – not that writing wasn’t working, but it was a different kind of work. And then she would go home tired and have to start cooking dinner for her father Mikhail, or pick up shopping for her aunt Zia Kuznetsov (Mikhail’s widowed sister), or – like the night before – go around to Anna Kabalevsky’s house to help with some emergency or other. At times like that, when there were many calls on her time and energy, she had to decide whom to help first: there was nobody else to call on. And then some people would be upset ‒ again like the night before, when she’d had to call Aunt Zia and tell her she couldn’t bring her shopping around because she needed to help Anna. Olga would get to bed late, and get up early, trying to please everybody but really pleasing nobody. It was hard, at times like that, to think of herself as a writer, as an artist nurturing an inner and sacred fire.
As if youd ever be anything else …
She stared at the phrase until its vicious words burned into her consciousness, eating away at her most cherished ambitions. The ties that bound her to her dreams were thin and fraying, she realised. Perhaps there would be no glittering, bestselling career after all, no triumphant release to follow the long years of struggle. Perhaps there was only more work on the railway, more endurance, more suffering, more trying to please too many people, on and on until the end.
She dropped the letter onto the table and sank onto her new sofa, laying her head on the arm and allowing herself to be engulfed by a tide of despair that washed over her with the exquisite drawn-out misery of decades, as if each sentence in the hateful letter had been drops of poison in a well that had overflowed at last.
When her sobs began to subside, she saw that her mascara had run with her tears, and was staining the fabric of her sofa. She had bought it from the butcher, Nikolai Popov, only a few weeks before, when their old one had finally collapsed under her father’s swelling paunch.
‘Stop calling it new,’ Mikhail had said, when she complained of his cigarette ash one day. ‘Popov had it for years. I remember him boasting about it at Odrosov’s when he got it – I don’t remember when. But it’s an old couch. He probably ended up keeping his pig-heads and sausages on top of it.’
‘It’s new to me,’ she replied quietly, fetching him an ashtray. But now there was cheap mascara on the sofa as well as cigarette ash, alongside a number of dubious and quite possibly meat-coloured stains on the yellowing brocade fabric.
In a rush of anger she seized the letter and threw it into the fireplace. She drenched it with a dash of the paraffin she used for firelighting and threw a match on top, and soon the evil words were consumed in a fleeting blaze. In some part of her mind she knew she should probably have kept the letter to show to the police, whenever they got around to sending another sergeant to the tiny Roslazny outpost. But with a more primal part of herself she stared fiercely at the fire, as if doing so would speed the flames and their cathartic work.
‘Suka, blyad!’ she cried, then covered her mouth. Her father Mikhail swore constantly, like all the men in the village, but he hated to hear women cursing. Not that she was afraid of him, but the last thing she needed was an irritable, hung-over, ageing man waking up three hours before usual and adding to her troubles with a rant about the proper conduct of the Russian Unmarried Female.
She knew what he would say. ‘How will you ever attract a husband and get us out of this dump, talking like that? It’s bad enough you look like a man without speaking like one, too.’
And she would reply: ‘If I look like a man it’s your fault. You made me work for the railway. What am I meant to wear when I’m checking the rails? A ball-gown?’
And he would shrug and make a sound, inarticulate but expressive, as if to say: ‘What was I to do? What other jobs were there for you in Roslazny?’
She looked in the cracked bit of mirror that hung over the fireplace, wiping the last teardrops from her eyelashes and pushing a stray blonde hair over her ear. She didn’t look so bad, she thought, for having spent the best part of twenty years working outdoors in Siberia. It was many years since her mother had called her the prettiest tsarevna in all Russia, but she still had attractive features and a good figure underneath her outerwear. The old people should envy her, she thought. She did perhaps look a little masculine in her fur-lined Russian Railways boiler-suit and high visibility jacket, but so what? She had long since given up any hope of a husband, in Roslazny or anywhere else. Besides, the only men she saw were railwaymen, and she’d heard enough tales from her Tayga friends, and from her father Mikhail, to give them as wide a berth as possible. And so she dressed for comfort and warmth, as any sensible person would who had to stand in snow and ice all day.
And it wasn’t as if she didn’t wear make-up. Every self-respecting woman wore make-up, she often thought. The tourists on the Trans-Siberian didn’t, so they mustn’t be very self-respectful, she reasoned. She had often looked at young women from England and Germany and Spain and America as they stood on the platform at Tayga considering which food-stall looked most hygienic – Larisa’s, in fact, but Anya was better at attracting their attention – and wondered at their careless hairstyles, scruffy sweatpants and clumpy hiking boots.
‘Don’t they want to look good?’ she would ask her friend Ekaterina Chezhekov, on days when she had to visit the maintenance depot at Tayga station. Ekaterina sold cigarettes on the platforms from a little box with straps over her shoulders, like an old-time cinema usher.
‘They don’t think we Russians matter,’ Ekaterina would say, lighting one for herself. ‘That’s why they dress like that, and appear without make-up. If there were more foreigners here, they wouldn’t dress like that.’
‘But what about the other foreigners on the train – the men?’ Olga would say. ‘Don’t they matter?’
‘Nobody could matter who chooses to travel by train,’ Ekaterina would say. ‘These girls are clever. They know that a sensible man, a man with brains as well as money, would take an aeroplane instead of a train. They save their make-up for those men.’
‘But these girls are travelling by train,’ Olga would say, ‘so aren’t they stupid too?’ Then they would laugh, and the tourists, who never spoke any Russian, would smile politely, buy something small, get back on the train and move on.
I look tired today, she thought, as she gazed at herself in the mirror. But that was no surprise, and not just because of her unaccustomed tears. She’d been out until the small hours the night before, after all, helping Anna Kabalevsky with her children in the absence of her husband, Bogdan, who described himself as a local businessman. His real business was to be at home with his wife and three sons, Olga often said, and helping to run the Kabalevsky Hostel, which consisted of two sparsely furnished rooms and a rudimentary toilet in the basement of their house.
‘You’d give your right hand away,’ Mikhail would say, ‘and your left, too, if a friend asked you. You’re always out here and there, helping your friends, doing this and doing that. What would they do for you? That’s the question to ask yourself.’ And he would nod wisely as if universal suspicion were the only truth. ‘Be prudent,’ he would continue. ‘Prudence is the Russian virtue! D’you think I earned all this’ – pointing at the walls, or sometimes the ceiling, of the house they shared – ‘by giving away my time or money?’
At times like this, Olga had to force herself to hold her tongue, telling herself that a good daughter wouldn’t reply with scorn. A good daughter wouldn’t reply that her father had never done a day’s work since his accident in 1988, or that the house had been bought with his wife’s money rather than his, or that her father had since sold off all but one of her mother’s precious heirlooms (and that he’d refrained from selling this last treasure only because nobody knew where it was), or that her father had driven her brother into joining the army and herself into working for Russian Railways, or that her father—
Enough, Olga Pushkin would say to herself. A good daughter would say none of those things, but would carry on and help her friends regardless. And Anna Kabalevsky was a good friend despite the fact that she had children. She’d been Olga’s friend ever since their mothers had taken them to the Roslazny state nursery together. And it was a proper nursery in those days, since the local sovkhoz, the state farm, was still being propped up by the Kremlin, providing jobs and food for many families. Nowadays, more than a decade after the sovkhozhad collapsed into the frozen mud, there was no nursery, just as there was no bathhouse or post office or church or doctor’s surgery. There was just whatever each mother could do for her children in her own home, with the help of relatives or friends. But Anna was from the east, of the people of Listvyanka on Lake Baikal, and had no relatives within a thousand miles. So she had to call on friends like Olga when she needed help to manage Boris, Gyorgy and Ilya.
Olga had had a tiring time on the railway that Thursday, with repeated breakdowns of the signalling relays, but she hadn’t objected when Anna called and asked her to come around. She needed someone to look after Ilya, she said, while she took Boris and Gyorgy to see Dr Zinozev, who held a free evening surgery for children at the community hospital in Tayga. Ilya was a sweet baby, Olga knew, and rarely difficult to put down. Anyway, as long as Bogdan wasn’t there, Olga quite liked being at Anna’s. For one thing, it got her away from her father. And Anna had a better television than Olga and Mikhail’s 20-inch Sony. So Olga was quite willing, all things considered, to spend some time putting Ilya to bed and watching re-runs of Ne Rodis Krasivoy, her all-time favourite soap. It would be considerably more enjoyable than what she had originally planned, which was to help Aunt Zia with her grocery shopping.
That night, however, Ne Rodis Krasivoy was bumped from the schedules to allow for yet another televised press conference held by Lieutenant Colonel Grigor Babikov, the head of police in Kemerovo. Every other day, it seemed, his fussy, pedantic voice could be heard exhorting members of the community to offer their assistance in solving some case or other. Olga liked to think of herself as public-spirited, but replacing Ne Rodis Krasivoy with hours of gruesome photos and grainy CCTV footage was a step too far – especially as everyone knew Babikov was only doing it to bolster his profile for the upcoming mayoral elections in Kemerovo, the provincial capital.
To make matters worse, Ilya was unsettled that night, and woke several times after being put down. After some investigative work, Olga found a little white stub poking through his gums.
‘Aha,’ she said, holding Ilya close. ‘So now we know the culprit. A tooth! Well done, detka, well done! Soon you will be a big boy like your brothers. But first we must get you back to sleep, back to sleep.’ She sat down in Anna’s rocking chair, wrapped Ilya with faux-fur blankets, and cuddled him gently back and forth.
Anna texted from the hospital: Long queue, I’ll be back as soon as I can. Thanks Olga! You’re the best Axx.
Olga sighed, and carried on rocking the baby. Soon Ilya’s eyelids drooped, and Olga’s, too, began to close with sleep. But then someone came noisily in at the front door and woke them both up again. It was Bogdan, Anna’s husband.
‘What are you doing here?’ he said, when he saw Olga nursing Ilya in Anna’s rocking chair. Bogdan Kabalevsky was short, tubby, and more often inebriated than not, but he tried to offset these disadvantages with heeled boots and shirts with vertical lines, and by walking as straight as possible at all times.
‘I’m doing your job,’ said Olga, answering his question. ‘So’s Anna, most of the time. D’you think hostels run themselves?’
‘I’ve got a better job than that,’ said Bogdan. ‘I’ve got—’
He belched and tried to refocus his blurry vision on Olga’s face. ‘I’ve got bigger irons in the fire,’ he said eventually. ‘Not that it’s any of your business. Go on, get out of here, grombaba!’ he went on, laughing and falling into an armchair. Grom-baba, or ‘thunder woman’, is usually a compliment; but the way Bogdan said it, with his eyes lingering on Olga’s figure, was clearly meant to imply that she was sturdily built – that the ground would tremble as she walked. This was a very insulting thing to say to a woman like Olga, who wasn’t really overweight at all.
‘Get back to your shack,’ he continued. ‘Mikhail needs you. Or do you have another family to interfere with on your way home?’
‘I’ll go when Anna gets back,’ said Olga. ‘For now, you’d better sleep off that vodka. I can smell it from here. Don’t you know Odrosov brews his own? You’ll be blind in a year, drinking that much.’
Igor Odrosov was the owner of Café Astana, Roslazny’s sole bar, restaurant and general store. The locals called him the Cosmonaut because he was Kazakh and never stopped boasting of his country’s achievements in the USSR’s space programme. He’d christened his home-made vodka ‘Rocket Fuel’. The joke was that it actually tasted like it.
‘Better than listening to kids screaming all night,’ muttered Bogdan. He closed his eyes and fell asleep in his chair.
Anna returned after midnight with two tired children and a small paper bag of medicine from the hospital pharmacy. Olga handed over the sleeping Ilya in exchange for Anna’s whispered thanks and made her way out, stepping over Bogdan’s outstretched legs.
How does Anna put up with that pridurok? Olga wondered, as she walked home through the falling snow, stupefied with the desire for sleep and navigating the unlit streets from memory. The vodka, the gambling, the stupid business ventures that always failed … But at least he didn’t beat Anna or the children, as far as she knew. He was a neglectful, but not an abusive, husband and father. There’d been plenty of those in Roslazny over the years. And on the whole he tolerated Olga helping with the family, which was not the case with all fathers in the village, some of whom would rather see their wives die of exhaustion than accept ‘charity’ from others. Bogdan had called Olga a grom-baba, true, but she’d heard much worse. Her own father had never stinted himself when it came to abuse.
‘You can’t wear a dress like that,’ Mikhail had told her one day, in the department store in Tayga. Olga was fourteen, and hoping to persuade him to buy her something pretty for the sovkhoz’s annual party.
He pushed her towards the mirror and held up the dress in front of her. ‘See? You’ll look fat.’
‘I’m not fat,’ she said. ‘I’m just not thin. Mama said I would be a famous beauty when I grow up.’
‘You don’t need to bother dressing up, anyway,’ went on Mikhail. ‘You’re like a diesel locomotive on the railway. A Luhanskteplovoz. I always tell ’em, you can paint a 2TE116 in all the colours you like, it’ll still look like a pig’s arse.’
Olga had stared at him in amazement. Had her father compared her to a Luhanskteplovoz 2TE116 diesel engine? And to a pig’s bottom?
‘Just think,’ said Mikhail, warming to his theme. ‘You’re heavy, you go where you’re told, but you can’t go very fast. Just like a diesel locomotive. Ha! Like I always said, you were born to be a railwayman. If they run short of engines you can pull the carriages for them!’
‘Railwaywoman,’ Olga had replied. But though she had courage enough for this, ...
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