Rossiya by Eluned Gramich

Russia’s number one train, the Rossiya, pulled into the Siberian village of Erofei Pavlovich. The pale yellow rectangles of the carriage windows were the only source of light in the midnight dark. There was no sign of the village of Erofei Pavlovich. The walls of the station house blurred into the black sky so that it seemed never-ending. Above its double-door, the word ‘Exit’ was illuminated by the train’s headlights. Beyond the tracks, the world stopped.

The Rossiya’s Russian passengers filed out onto the platform. Kathryn burst out like a cat shooting through the back door. Erin followed shuffling, her head heavy with sleep. Unlike the Russians, who wore dressing gowns and old tracksuits, the two English travelers chose tight jeans and lycra vests. The waitress and the cook had their black and white uniforms; the conductor, naturally, wore his official badges and peaked cap. The Rossiya let out a plume of smoke, a long sigh of relief after the journey.

Erin wrapped her scarf around her neck. She didn’t want to be outside in the cold: all that was Kathryn’s fault. She’d insisted. Erin watched with barely concealed disapproval as Kathryn started on her stretches: forward bends, lunges, reaching her thin arms towards the clouds. It’s the middle of the night, for Christ’s sake, she thought.

“It’s so nice to be out in the fresh air!” Kathryn exclaimed, her breath visible in the cold.

“It stinks of smoke,” Erin said. “And it’s fucking freezing.”

The cook - a large woman who’d been in and out of their cabin all day, trying to sell the last remaining roast chicken - lit a cigarette. Then she lit one for the waitress, who took it without a word and squatted on the platform. The tips of their cigarettes hung like fireflies in the dark. No one spoke. After the noise of the train, the silence was unsettling.

Kathryn started skipping, her breath coming faster.

“Where do you think we are?” she gasped.

“How should I know?”

Erin was nervous. Every night on the train so far, she’d dreamed of being left behind on the platform. These dreams were brutally vivid: the carriage door locked behind her, the freezing wind, her screaming for the train to stop. Sometimes her mother would appear at the window, waving goodbye, ignoring her daughter’s desperate cries.

A whistle blew. Erin started. “That’s enough. I’m getting back on,” she said.

“But it’s not time to go back yet.”

“Did you check the timetable?”

“Yes.”

“But you always get it wrong.”

“Not true.”

“Remember,” Erin sighed. “It’s Moscow time. It won’t be the same as what we think it is.”

“I checked. It’s a long stop this time. Fifteen minutes at least.” Kathryn gestured towards the station house. “Let’s go have a look.”

“No,” said Erin. “Don’t be ridiculous.”

“Come on.”

“The train will go without us.”

Kathryn took a step back, teasing, her smile half-concealed by the dark. Another step and Erin wouldn’t be able to make out the colour of her clothes. Kathryn pressed, “Come on, come on.” She was a tall girl: it gave her an advantage, Erin thought, towering over people, overseeing everything. People who were blessed with stature could direct activities and run away from them, as they liked. Of course, it helped that Kathryn was beautiful—a fact strangers acknowledged in the street. Like a model, they told her. Kathryn complained she was ‘gangly’, and moaned about being flat-chested. To Erin, who barely reached five foot and whose skin hadn’t improved since the age of thirteen, any complaint Kathryn made about her appearance was an act of insulting false modesty.

“We’ll be stranded,” Erin warned. “I heard it can happen... A guy at the hostel in Moscow told me. People sprinting after the train when it’s already moving. Their passports still in the compartment.”

“Yeah, right.”

“It won’t wait for anyone.”

“So what? They survived, didn’t they?”

“I don’t know. I didn’t ask what happened to them.”

Kathryn rolled her eyes up at the sky, muttering under her breath.

“What?” Erin demanded.

“Don’t be a coward,” she quickly replied.

“I’m not a coward,” Erin insisted. She glanced longingly at the train, wishing she could be inside; imagining an onward journey of studied solitude: silence and calm. She was anxious for Kathryn to leave. The train manager stood watching them with his fingers curled around a pocket watch. Erin gestured at it. The conductor peered at the clock’s round-face before solemnly spreading his fingers to indicate the time they had left.

“Just ten minutes,” she translated. The conductor nodded.

“Ten minutes!” Kathryn turned on her heels. “I bet there’s a shop. We can get beers.”

“You go.”

“Come with me.”

“No, go without me.”

They hadn’t bought anything to drink or eat for the last three days. They had the polystyrene packaged meal at 12 o’clock Moscow time from the train kitchen, which they could barely eat. After that, there was hot water from the samovar served pure. The promise of beer tempted Erin, but still she couldn’t bear to be separated from the train. Neither, at this moment, could she bear to be around Kathryn: her constant needling voice pricked Erin’s nerves.

“All my things are on the train,” she said.

“So are mine.”

There was a sudden crash as a young family further down the platform closed a carriage door with force. Their baby began to cry; a whine quickly transforming into full-blown sobs. Erin winced. What was ten minutes here, in this complete darkness? she thought. They might forget how long they were away for, misjudge the distance, lose their way. There was knowing what was waiting there across the tracks

“For God’s sake, Erin.”

The baby reached a crescendo of desperate screams, sending a shoot of pain through Erin’s head. “Just go, will you?” she snapped. “Go on. Piss off.”

Kathryn shrugged, turned and ran off, swiftly pulling herself up onto the opposite platform, her body unfurling in the direction of the ticket counter like the stem of some long flower.

A moment later and she was gone.

The waitress coughed loudly. The noise made Erin jump. “Sorry,” she muttered. The waitress squinted at her.

*

They’d known each other from childhood. The primary school where they were desk-sharers, pencil-stealers, hop-scotchers, and the masters of elaborate games. When one yawned, the other followed. When one of them was sick, the other caught it. Even when they grew up, attending the same secondary school, they continued to lie in each other’s beds, and tip-toe around each other’s family homes like tolerated stray-cats. In the darkness of the long sleepover that made up their childhood, they whispered secrets to each other, close and quiet and honest. Erin would carry those secrets through to adulthood; words she could never forget, because they were so sincere and innocent, so different from anything she said now. One night, Kathryn told Erin she knew she was going to die. And there was nothing she could do to stop it. She was in her sleeping bag, her breath warm against Erin’s cheek. The whites of her eyes visible in the dark. Kathryn asked, “What happens after we die?” Erin knew there was nothing after death because her mother had said so. Erin was too young to understand; the fear of death hadn’t reached her yet. So she answered casually, callously, in a way she came to regret: “We just die. That’s it.” Kathryn fell silent. Only a long time afterwards did Erin realise that she too would not be excluded from death.

There’s no way of escaping, Erin thought, no way of escaping their childhood selves. They knew too much: bound to each other by a long-acquired knowledge. If Kathryn, an artist, spoke about her work to a group of journalists, Erin immediately thought of her as a teenager: her tantrums - kicking the desk, tearing up exam papers that didn’t go well. If Erin, a doctor, offered medical advice to friends, Kathryn recalled the time Erin ate too many chocolates and threw up on her mother’s Bohemian silk cushions. Within the net of their friendship, growing up just wasn’t possible.

Erin was ambitious – she wanted to be forceful, precise, competent. Now that her mother was dead, this necessity for self-improvement became more urgent. After the funeral, the first thing she decided to do was go on holiday. To escape. Her mother would have told her to go to the beach, but Erin didn’t want to go anywhere which may have reminded her of her mother. She wanted to be alone; prove she didn’t need anyone. She wanted to run away from the old, childish Erin.

Kathryn didn’t agree with these plans. She explained, “I need to travel too. Broaden my horizons.” It was raining that day, Erin remembered. The weather had been so awful and she’d been grateful for the tickets to Moscow filed away in her bedside cabinet. Standing in the little kitchen, Kathryn poured a coffee for herself, stirring the sugar with her finger. She grew thoughtful, as if Erin had asked her along on the trip and was now waiting for her answer.

“When are you leaving?” Kathryn wanted to know.

That was when Erin made the mistake of telling her.

*

The conductor raised his right hand, like a Roman emperor hailing an audience. Five minutes.

Erin began to pace. A habit which failed to calm her nerves. Instead it triggered memories of the times she’d set to pacing in the past. Pacing in airports to assuage her fear of flying. In the hospital corridors when her mother was sick. Kathryn, on the other hand, didn’t pace. In moments of stress, she simply vanished. Another quality Erin coveted apart from her beauty: this talent for abandonment.

When Erin drove two hours every night to the hospital, with towels and underwear hastily shoved in a plastic bag, it was a young nurse - tall like Kathryn, although less striking - who came and helped Erin change her mother’s clothes. When Erin sat in the car on the way back, and cried in floods of self-pity because she knew she’d be an orphan at twenty-six, it was the radio presenter who comforted her with a joke. When Erin helped her mother to the commode four times a night, it was Kathryn’s answer machine who listened to her messages in the early hours of the morning.

Kathryn had said, once, “I don’t do hospitals.” Erin laughed at the time. Later, when she waited in the car park for the coffee and painkillers to kick in before the drive home, the phrase echoed round her head. I don’t do hospitals, she repeated to herself. I don’t do hospitals. Who does? Even her mother, who stayed in one long enough to know the names of all the nurses on her ward wanted to go home as soon as possible. Home, in the end, was Erin’s single bed in her Hackney flat; Erin slept on the sofa, when she managed to sleep at all.

Her mother used to say, on the days she was feeling better, “Why don’t you go out? I can manage.” But Erin didn’t want to go out. She was too lonely to go outside into the world of other people’s friendships.

*

In Russia, smiling is considered insincere, possibly even dangerous. Superfluous smiling is a mark of a spy, or someone who wants to trick you out of your money. This information, provided by a cheap travel guide, comforted Erin, who hadn’t felt like smiling in a long time. The taut, suspicious faces of their fellow passengers created the perfect setting for Erin’s soul-searching. No distractions. No small-talk. Just the mnemonic sound of the train rolling on the tracks. And the tundra speeding past in its yawning monotony. Most of the time, she slept, and every time she woke, she looked forward to sleeping again.

“God I’m bored.” Kathryn swung her feet from the top bunk. “I’ll go get tea, shall I? And where’s that woman with lunch?”

As she climbed down, she accidentally kicked Erin’s books from the folding table. Standing with her hands on her hips, she dominated the space.

“Here you go,” Kathryn said, coming back with two steaming cups of hot water. “Well,” she continued, “aren’t you drinking the tea I made?”

“Not now.”

“Waiting until it’s cold, is it?”

“Later.” Erin turned to face the wall, hugging her knees to her chest. She felt her friend’s eyes on her back.

“Erin.”

“I want to sleep for a bit longer.”

“Erin, seriously, that’s all you do.” She heard Kathryn slump onto the seat. The silence grew tense. She sensed Kathryn deliberating whether to give up or go on.

“Are you alright?” Kathryn managed.

“Yes.” Erin reluctantly opened her eyes. The slats on the bunk above were covered in graffiti.

“Well,” said Kathryn. “If you’re sure.”

“Really, I’m fine. I just need to rest.”

“Are you annoyed with me?”

“Annoyed?”

Kathryn had come to the funeral. Every time Erin feels she might be brave enough to talk about the betrayal: she has to remember that day. At the wake, Erin locked herself in her room and refused to go downstairs. It was the sudden arrival of all those people she hadn’t seen in so long. Relatives who’d failed to visit her mother when she was most desperate. The aunts and uncles and Kathryn too: she wanted to tell them all, you’re too late! You should have seen her when she was alive, not now she’s dead. The anger translated into a fit of coughing and crying. She ran to her room and threw herself on her bed as if she was thirteen again. The smell of coffee and toast from downstairs pervaded the room. Kathryn knocked on her door, tried to persuade her to come eat. Erin continued to sob; her head buried in a pillow. Kathryn knelt down and stroked her hair. Please come downstairs, she said. At the sound of her voice, which was uncharacteristically soft and quiet, Erin looked up. Kathryn’s dark skin was flushed red, her eyelashes wet, and a line of snot hung from her left nostril. She wiped it with the back of her hand. Come downstairs. Erin obeyed. It was a long time since she’d seen Kathryn cry. The two women washed their faces and sat on the edge of the bath together, preparing themselves. Kathryn held Erin’s hand. I still have the set of watercolours she gave me when we were on holiday, do you remember? Erin nodded. I was nine years old. She showed me how to use them. How much paint to water. We were in Cornwall and the first thing I painted was the sea. Kathryn spent the rest of the afternoon close by, touching Erin’s arm, the small of her back, lightly, comfortingly. She helped her through awkward conversations; steered her away from people she didn’t want to see. In that single afternoon of the wake, Erin was so grateful to her friend she almost forgave her everything.

“Well? Are you annoyed with me?” Kathryn repeated.

“I’m not.”

“I notice you don’t speak to me anymore.” Kathryn’s expression was tired, melancholic.

“Really?” Erin managed.

“If you didn’t want me to come, you should have said...”

There was a knock on the compartment door. The cook appeared with the polystyrene boxes. It smelled strongly of boiled fish.

“I’m starving,” said Erin quickly, opening her lunch. Inside, the fish’s flesh inside was yellow. Peas floated in green a pool of water.

“Disgusting,” said Kathryn, tossing it to one side. “I can’t wait until we get some real food.”

*

Without speaking, the passengers of the Rossiya prepare themselves for the onward journey; The cook kicks her cigarette stub under the train. The waitress rises slowly from her squat. Passengers stamp their feet, brush the biscuit crumbs from their jackets; alighting in silence, like a procession of solemn choirboys. And the conductor, like a priest bestowing his benediction, holds up his right forefinger. One minute left.

Erin’s heart beats rapidly; her pacing grows frenetic. There is still no sign of Kathryn. She walks back and forth, back and forth, skirting the edges of the platform. The dark is impenetrable.

The conductor raises a stern finger again. One minute.

“Wait!” she cries. “We’re missing someone!”

He lowers his arm. The ghost of his pale finger remains suspended in the darkness. There is no arguing with Moscow time.

Erin spins around and begins to scream.She is so loud, so wild, she can hardly hear her own voice. Blood pumps in her ears. The baby started to cry again, but Erin’s screams drowns them out:

“KATHRYN!”

Her thoughts race through possible scenarios: a flickering picture book of horror. She sees herself alone on the train: safe and warm, her passport in hand. I must get on the train, she thinks. I have to leave her. Then another image: Kathryn alone on the platform, desperately beating at the windows; Kathryn attacked, weeping, beaten, robbed in some lightless cell; Kathryn on the street with nothing, anonymous and abandoned. And Erin imagines herself, profile illuminated in the train window, calmly waving goodbye.

Panic transforms into a prickling pain, running down her arms and legs. She sobs breathlessly. Oh god, what if she’s dead? She whispers, I can’t lose another one.

A whistle slices through her cries. People are laughing at her from the train. Someone shouts, mimicking “Kathryn! Kathryn!” in a high-pitched voice, making faces through the window.

“Kathryn,” she murmurs.

Finally, as the conductor moves to lock the carriage door, she returns. She pulls herself up onto the platform, towards the piercing light of the train. She extends an arm, and Erin catches it, and they are children again, clutching each other in the close dark of a long sleepover.