To the Ends of the Earth

The fat lady’s name was Anna Feyodorovna and, though she screamed at her fellow countrymen, she was pleasant to me, and urged me to call her Annushka. I did and she rewarded me with a special dish, cold potatoes and chicken—dark sinewy meat that was like some dense textile. Annushka watched me eat. She winked over her glass of tea (she dipped bread into the tea and sucked it) and then cursed a cripple who sat down at my table. Eventually she banged a steel plate of potatoes and fatty meat in front of him.

The cripple ate slowly, lengthening the awful meal by sawing carefully at his meat. A waiter went by and there was a smash. The waiter had dropped an empty carafe onto our table, shattering the cripple’s glass. The cripple went on eating with exquisite sang-froid, refusing to acknowledge the waiter, who was muttering apologies as he picked up pieces of broken glass from the table. Then the waiter plucked an enormous sliver of glass from the cripple’s mashed potatoes. The cripple choked and pushed the plate away. The waiter got him a new meal.

“Sprechen Sie Deutsch?” asked the cripple.

“Yes, but very badly.”

“I speak a little,” he said in German. “I learned it in Berlin. Where are you from?”

I told him. He said, “What do you think of the food here?”

“Not bad, but not very good.”

“I think it is very bad,” he said. “What’s the food like in America?”

“Wonderful,” I said.

He said, “Capitalist! You are a capitalist!”

“Perhaps.”

“Capitalism bad, communism good.”

“Bullshit,” I said in English, then in German, “You think so?”

“In America people kill each other with pistols. Pah! Pah! Pah! Like that.”

“I don’t have a pistol.”

“What about the Negroes? The black people?”

“What about them?”

“You kill them.”

“Who tells you these things?”

“Newspapers. I read it for myself. Also it’s on the radio all the time.”

“Soviet radio,” I said.

“Soviet radio is good radio,” he said.

The radio in the dining car was playing jazzy organ music. It was on all day, and even in the compartments—each one had a loudspeaker—it continued to mutter because it could not be turned off completely. I jerked my thumb at the loudspeaker and said, “Soviet radio is too loud.”

He guffawed. Then he said, “I’m an invalid. Look here—no foot, just a leg. No foot, no foot!”

He raised his felt boot and squashed the toe with the ferrule of his cane. He said, “I was in Kiev during the war, fighting the Germans. They were shooting—Pah! Pah!—like that. I jumped into the water and started swimming. It was winter—cold water—very cold water! They shot my foot off, but I didn’t stop swimming. Then another time my captain said to me, ‘Look, more Germans—’ and in the snow—very deep snow—”

That night I slept poorly on my bench-sized bunk, dreaming of goose-stepping Germans with pitchforks, wearing helmets like the Rossiya’s soup bowls; they forced me into an icy river. I woke. My feet lay exposed in the draft of the cold window; the blanket had slipped off, and the blue night light of the compartment made me think of an operating theater. I took an aspirin and slept until it was light enough in the corridor to find the toilet. That day, around noon, we stopped at Skovorodino. The provodnik, my jailer, showed a young bearded man into my compartment. This was Vladimir. He was going to Irkutsk, which was two days away. For the rest of the afternoon Vladimir said no more. He read Russian paperbacks with patriotic pictures on their covers, and I looked out the window. Once I had thought of a train window as allowing me freedom to gape at the world; now it seemed an imprisoning thing and at times took on the opacity of a cell wall.

At one bend outside Skovorodino I saw we were being pulled by a giant steam locomotive. I diverted myself by trying (although Vladimir sucked his teeth in disapproval) to snap a picture of it as it rounded curves, shooting plumes of smoke out its side. The smoke rolled beside the train and rose slowly through the forests of birch and the Siberian cedars, where there were footprints on the ground and signs of dead fires, but not a soul to be seen. The countryside then was so changeless it might have been a picture pasted against the window. It put me to sleep. I dreamed of a particular cellar in Medford High School, then woke and saw Siberia and almost cried. Vladimir had stopped reading. He sat against the wall sketching on a pad with colored pencils, a picture of telephone poles. I crept into the corridor. One of the Canadians had his face turned to the miles of snow.

He said, “Thank God we’re getting off this pretty soon. How far are you going?”

“Moscow; then the train to London.”

“Tough shitsky.”

“So they say.”

There was a young black-haired man who swept the floor and rarely spoke to anyone. Viktor, a waiter, pointed him out to me and said, “Gitler! Gitler!”