To the Ends of the Earth

The man ignored him, but to make his point Viktor stamped on the floor and ground his boot as if killing a cockroach. Vassily Prokofyevich, the manager, put his forefinger under his nose to make a mustache and said, “Heil Gitler!” So the young man might have been an anti-Semite or, since Russian mockery is not very subtle, he might have been a Jew.

One afternoon the young man came over to me and said, “Angela Davis!”

“Gitler!” said Viktor, grinning.

“Angela Davis karasho,” said Gitler and began to rant in Russian about the way Angela Davis had been persecuted in America. He shook his broom at me, his hair falling over his eyes, and he continued quite loudly until Vassily banged on the table.

“Politics!” said Vassily. “We don’t want politics here. This is a restaurant, not a university.” He spoke in Russian, but his message was plain and he was obviously very angry with Gitler.

The rest were embarrassed. They sent Gitler to the kitchen and brought another bottle of wine. Vassily said, “Gitler—ni karasho!” But it was Viktor who was the most conciliatory. He stood up and folded his arms, and, shushing the kitchen staff, he said in a little voice:

Zee fearst of My

,

Zee ’art of sprreng!

Oh, leetle seeng

,

En everyseen we do

,

Remember always to say “pliz”

En dun forget “sank you”!

Later, Viktor took me to his compartment to show me his new fur hat. He was very proud of it, since it had cost him nearly a week’s pay. The pretty waitress, Nina, was also in the compartment, which was shared by Vassily and Anna—quite a crowd for a space no bigger than an average-sized clothes closet. Nina showed me her passport and the picture of her mother and, while this was going on, Viktor disappeared. I put my arm around Nina and with my free hand took off her white scullion’s cap. Her black hair fell to her shoulders. I held her tightly and kissed her, tasting the kitchen. The train was racing. But the compartment door was open, and Nina pulled away and said softly, “Nyet, nyet, nyet.”

On the day before Christmas, in the afternoon, we arrived at Sverdlovsk. The sky was leaden and it was very cold. I hopped out the door and watched an old man being taken down the stairs to the platform. While he was being moved, the blankets had slipped down to his chest, where his hands lay rigid, two gray claws, their color matching his face. His son went over and pulled the blankets high to cover his mouth. He knelt in the ice and packed a towel around the old man’s head.

Seeing me standing nearby, the son said in German, “Sverdlovsk. This is where Europe begins and Asia ends. Here are the Urals.” He pointed toward the back of the train and said, “Asia,” and then toward the engine, “Europe.”

“How is your father?” I asked, when the stretcher bearers arrived and put on their harnesses. The stretcher was a hammock, slung between them.

“I think he’s dead,” he said. “Das vedanya.”

My depression increased as we sped toward Perm in a whirling snowstorm. The logging camps and villages lay half-buried, and behind them were birches a foot thick, the ice on their branches giving them the appearance of silver filigree. I could see children crossing a frozen river in the storm, moving so slowly in the direction of some huts, they broke my heart. I lay back on my berth and took my radio, its plastic cold from standing by the window, and tried to find a station. I put up the antenna—the zombie now sharing my compartment watched me from behind his clutter of uncovered food. A lot of static, then a French station, then “Jingle Bells.” The zombie smiled. I switched it off.

The next morning, Christmas, I woke and looked over at the zombie sleeping with his arms folded on his chest like a mummy’s. The provodnik told me it was six o’clock Moscow time. My watch said eight. I put it back two hours and waited for dawn, surprised that so many people in the car had decided to do the same thing. In darkness we stood at the windows, watching our reflections. Shortly afterward I saw why they were there. We entered the outskirts of Yaroslavl and I heard the others whispering to themselves. The old lady in the frilly nightgown, the Goldi man and his wife and child, the domino-playing drunks, even the zombie who had been monkeying with my radio: they pressed their faces against the windows as we began rattling across a long bridge. Beneath us, half-frozen, very black, and in places reflecting the flames of Yaroslavl’s chimneys, was the Volga.

 … Royal David’s city

,

Stood a lowly cattle shed …