Compartment No 6 by Rosa Liksom Page A

care of his purges. Then came Peter the Great who wanted to make us Europeans and built St Petersburg with slave labour. To please you Finns! He licked your arses. A pansy. After that came the German princess, Catherine the Great. That hag had a cunt as big as a wash tub, made Potemkin fuck her, ’cause she heard he was hung like an aubergine. There’s no triumph of reason in Russian history. And what about Nicholas the First? Gave every slob a couple of hundred lashes, and a thousand runs through the gauntlet just to be on the safe side. A lot of them didn’t live through that hell. We’ve always known the noble art of torture.’
    He pressed his head against the cold glass of the window and shut his eyes. She thought for a moment that he’d fallen asleep, but he soon opened them again. A slash of orange sky flashed in the window. He looked at her tenderly.
    â€˜It’s time, high time, Ivan the Terrible said, and gave the order to build the Trans-Siberian railway. Or was that Alexander the Second? Without this damned railway I could be lying around in Moscow with my honeybun in my arms. They made the railway like this to torture the poor. It could head straight to its destination in one go, but no, they have to take a piss at every godforsaken village and there are plenty of them in the Soviet countries. But on the other hand, what do I care? It could be worse. After all, we have plenty of time.’
    He got up from the bed with a look of apathy on his face. He groaned, shyly put on some lighter clothes, did a couple of drunken calisthenics, sat down on the edge of the bed, and stared at the floor.
    â€˜I work for the Mongols, bringing some good to a country where my people don’t live. It’s not snow that falls in Mongolia, it’s gravel. There are no thick forests there like we have, not a single mushroom or berry. Last year this thing happened on the job site that made every man there shit his pants. There was a comrade – let’s call him Kolya. He was a shithead, but one of us. And then a herd of those mongoloids came to the site and claimed that Kolya had knifed one of them. We told ’em, Get out of here, Russians don’t knife people. When we got to the site the next morning there was a wooden cross at the gate stuck into the ground the wrong way. That was neither here nor there, but on that cross hung Kolya, with his head hanging down. They had crucified him and poured hot tin down his throat. That’s the kind of friends those Mongols are. Their souls are as dirty as ours, though not as sorrowful.’
    The train switched gears with a jerk and stopped as if it had hit a wall. They were in Achinsk. Arisa shouted that the train would be stopping for two hours. The man didn’t want to get off – the fresh air would just clear his head.
    The girl jumped onto the platform and headed into a town dozing through its evening chores. She walked along the lifeless boulevard towards the town centre. A heavy sleet was falling. The city was dim and shapeless, damp, silver-grey, the white moon peeping out from a straggling carpet of curly clouds that hung over the colourful houses. She stopped to look in a delicatessen display window. It was like something by Rodchenko, the packages of vermicelli lunging for the sky like lightning. She felt something warm on her foot. A small stray dog was peeing on her shoe.
    The dog looked at her with sweet button eyes and barked, revealing a gold tooth. It took a few steps, then stopped and stared at her. She could see that it wanted her to follow.
    They walked along the deserted street. She couldn’t hear the sound of her own footsteps though the sleet was quickly changing to a snowfall that made its way lazily along Petrovskiy Boulevard, turned into a narrow side street, lost its strength as it reached a corner bread shop, and dried up. The cold tightened around her. The dog stopped and stood at a cellar window. The window