“Parting is always grief.”
Socrates
I arrived at the central railway station long before the train was due. It was early morning, clear and cold. There was no wind, and the sun was shining at a low angle. The skies were dark blue and the air crisp and fresh, lightly touched by timid scents of the first Siberian blossoms.
The large square overlooked by the station — a long, massive, old-fashioned building — was almost empty. The occasional screechy tram stopped there, in the middle of its emptiness, releasing small groups of hasty people who, like herds of buffaloes, stampeded straight toward the station’s entrance, their breath steaming in the chilly air.
Not far from the tram stop, a group of nomadic magicians in gaudy shawls were looking patiently for a simple soul who might want to know his or her future and, at the same time, part with any cash or jewelry.
A couple of policemen were nibbling sunflower seeds, observing the square with the eye of a proprietor and giving short, impatient looks to a small improvised market set in the corner of the square. The market was empty at the moment. Later on, old ladies would gather there to sell handmade items such as knitted mittens, pickles, lollipops made from melted sugar or so-called “sera” — pine tree sap boiled in water which, for many generations, had served as chewing gum. Solitary bums, as if in slow motion, plodded their trajectories reasonably far from the two uniformed gentlemen with the seeds, heading toward the station dumpster. Even if you live a bit off the grid, the first thing you need in the morning is breakfast.
There was nothing astonishingly new about this image. I had seen it myself for as long as I could remember. I just stood at the entrance steps and waited. A small pack of muggers slid by me, giving me a sharp predatory glance. Not here guys, not this time. In my thoughts, I was far away from the troubles of this world, drifting back in time to when, as a young kid, my parents and I had traveled by train to the Black Sea.
As a child, I had serious problems with my lungs. I was born premature and suffered from endless bronchitis and pneumonia almost every winter. Sometimes I had to stay in the hospital for a month or so, and I lost count of how many weeks I spent at home wheezing and coughing in bed. It seemed there was no permanent solution for the problem, but one day an old doctor had said to my father, “Take your kid to the Black Sea.”
It had been an expensive adventure. My parents, who worked so hard that I barely saw them, had to work even harder and take on even more hours. But that piece of advice worked perfectly. Thanks to it, I stopped being ill and, despite the fact that I had been born in the heart of Eurasian land, discovered the eternal love of my life — the sea.
We had traveled in a second-class carriage, having reserved an entire four-bed compartment for the three of us. Plastic panels, aluminum framings, futuristic switches, and a sliding door in our private nook made me feel as if we were riding in a spaceship rather than on a train. It was the end of the 1970s — the golden era of the Soviet world. Gasoline was cheaper than fizz water, and chocolate bars, arranged in neat pyramids, still adorned the shop windows. A few years later, those chocolate bars were replaced with cheap canned fish, and gasoline prices started growing like a colony of prurient germs. The onboard railway service was reasonably good, and, straight out of the carriage window, the country looked fresh and full of hope, like a smiling seventy-year-old groom. My parents spread out on the two bottom bunks, and I quite promptly occupied the top berth just beside the fourth — the empty one.
The train parted, and it looked as if a gigantic animated atlas of the largest country in the world started unfolding in front of my eyes. Day after day, the landmarks I had only read about in books appeared outside our window. Boundless green Siberian plains and distant hills gradually morphed into the soft Ural Mountains. The landscape outside was changing too. Coniferous forests almost disappeared, being replaced by deciduous trees and wide clearings of the steppe. We entered Europe, for the first time in my life. A huge bridge over the Volga River gave way to mixed forests and groves, huge plants shaped as if they were puffing on their Brobdingnagian pipes, vast worm-holes of strip mines and endless farm fields — new places and new people every hour, every day.
I would spend long hours looking out and sharing my impressions with my parents who, unusually, were by my side for days on end. It took five days to reach Moscow, which looked to me like another planet a hundred years ahead of mine. From there, after a short break, we had to change to the southbound line to reach our final destination: the coast of the Black Sea.
It was another dream world, abounding in fruit gardens, hundred-year-old sycamore-lined alleys and mysterious cypress groves dotted with glow-worms at night — a perfect world bordered by the warm sea. It was a sweet dream, a Paradise crammed with ice cream stands and amusement arcades. And then, almost ten years later, there I was, picturing it all again in my mind’s eye.
Redhead came precisely on time, just when the minute hand on the watchtower ticked 8:00, as if she had been waiting around the corner. She waved to me amiably from a distance, and at that moment I forgot everything and felt as happy as two dozen pink piglets that had found an unattended wedding cake.
“Hi,” she said smiling like the goddess of joy. “What cool weather!”
“Yeah,” I agreed, “A bit chilly today, but…”
She stared at me and tittered. While I was racking my brain in hot pursuit of the next phrase, Gleb and the company jumped out of a black limousine that seemed to have rolled straight out of a James Bond movie. They appeared suddenly in front of the entrance, pushing each other and, as usual, being noisy and talkative. After a short round of handshakes, we rushed straight through the station’s swinging doors.
In those times, public places such as railway stations and airports were always overcrowded with long thick lines for tickets; there were endless delays, cancellations, and confusing information about train traffic — all the mess the local bribe-takers thrived on. Gleb, however, didn’t even look at the line that snaked through the hall. He walked somewhere energetically, then stopped, turned back, and called me to the side.
“Are you still going to make it?” he asked.
I nodded. He leaned closer to my ear.
“She… Redhead… She is really after you. Have you noticed that?”
I murmured something indistinct. Gleb looked at me sourly.
“All right, old boy,” he said and patted me on the shoulder. “I wish you all the luck. And remember — we have to arrive more or less at the same time. Give me a call as soon as you can. It’s my responsibility too. Don’t get me into trouble.”
I winced, trying to mimic a manly smile and nodded again.
Then Gleb walked away swiftly, only to reappear soon with a bunch of small brown tickets in his hand. Whether he had bought them or stolen them from a cashier, nobody cared. The problem was solved. We relaxed, dropped our backpacks in the middle of the hall, and gathered around the heap. We were chatting, laughing, and telling anecdotes, collecting reproachful looks from the crowd. But we didn’t care. We were the new kids on the block, and that block, as well as the whole world around it, had already been scheduled for demolition. The brave new one ought to be built soon. We could feel it in the air.
The suburban train arrived, screeching and groaning, and slowed down to a halt, like an old man who had to catch his breath. We picked up our stuff and rushed to the platforms. Here, in a vast roofed hangar, the smell of ozone from the high-voltage power lines above the rails mingled with the heavy odor of used grease and turf smoke from the carriage heaters. The voices from the loudspeakers, talking over each other, echoed under the high-domed roof, resembling the magnificent spells of unseen deities. And we, simple laymen, begged those almighty spirits for only one thing: to let us leave that world of stir and steam peacefully.
After a short delay and a hot argument between Gleb and a train inspector, we squeezed into the carriage. There were eight rows of stiff-backed wooden benches on either side, each one seating three passengers. The benches were set in pairs so that they faced each other.
We occupied one of those pairs — a sweet spot for our three-to-three company. The girls, with a battle cry, jumped ahead to catch the seats by the window and the guys and I tackled the baggage. Sergey picked up the backpacks one by one and passed them to Gleb, who was setting them on the upper shelf. The last backpack was mine. I sat down and meaningfully put my bag next to me. Sergey looked at it and then, inquiringly, at Gleb. Gleb gave him a sign that said “wing it,” and all the fuss was forgotten. They took their seats, and the train, clacking on the rail joints, sailed away. Sergey, his girl, and I sat on the rear-facing seats; Gleb, his girl, and Redhead settled on the opposite side.
Outside, boring rundown buildings alternated with spots of wasteland overgrown with tall dry grass or crammed with industrial lumber. Gaping gates, strongholds of grain elevators and cement heaps, pipes and cables, timber yards and other suburban odds and ends appeared and disappeared in our window, framed like a slideshow. As we progressed, the city was losing its hectic angular shape. The spaces grew emptier. Roadside trees, with their crooked branches stretching out in a silent plea for a gasp of oxygen, were replaced gradually by healthy groves that became thicker with every extra mile. Soon we reached the border of a suburban forest.
There, beyond the patch of planted trees, I spotted something that made my heart skip a bit. No, it wasn’t an alien spaceship — if they want to show off they usually go to Utah. It wasn’t something meant for the eyes of always-excited foreigners, who, in those times, were already being allowed to travel across Siberia without supervision.
In a dead end, behind a sparse pale of birches, I saw them — the numb witnesses of harsh Siberian history. They were wooden carriages, about a dozen of them, crammed together. Their ramshackle carcasses with sticking pale-grey ribs, their paint all faded and wheels rusted, had found their last rest there. Their story was as follows:
At the turn of the nineteenth century, the czarist government devised the Trans-Siberian railway project: a steel artery that would connect Russia’s former capital, St Petersburg, with Vladivostok — the farthest Russian city on the coast of the Pacific Ocean. It was an unprecedented program designed, as it were, to speed up the colonization of Siberia.
The state leaders of those times had long-term plans for that land. At the beginning of the twentieth century, more than three million men, with their wives, children, cats, and cows, had been relocated, absolutely voluntarily, from the overpopulated European part of Russia to the vast Siberian lands.
For that purpose, a new type of carriage had been introduced by the then-Russian Prime Minister Pyotr Stolypin. It had enough space to move one peasant family — which might have consisted of a dozen souls or more — with their instruments and livestock in modest comfort to the new place. They named it after the PM: the “Stolypin carriage.” But when czarist Russia collapsed, and the Bolsheviks seized power, the Stolypin carriages became the instrument and brand name for repression. Hundred of thousands of prisoners were moved around in those carriages. For many of them, it was a one-way trip.
I looked at those carriages with a mixture of fear and awe. Soon, however, I noticed a streak of smoke that was coming out of a tin L-shaped chimney sticking out of a small carriage window. Then, I recognized a laundry line with reasonably white sheets and small items of clothing. A crude terrace made of fresh wood was attached to one of the carriages. Somebody was living in that shack and had tried to make it comfortable. I swept my gaze to the inside of the carriage. I had to feed my mind with something more cheerful. Of course, I thought about Redhead.
I didn’t know how it happened, but instead of sitting in front of the red-haired beauty, I found myself sitting against an empty seat decorated with weary wooden racks. It should have been impossible: There were three pairs of us on board, three plus three on each side. I squinted and started my investigation. The two girls sat by the window, then two boys, Gleb in front of Sergey, then Redhead, again, in front of Sergey… and me, in front of nothing.
According to my calculations, the main problem was Sergey. He would have had to be incredibly fat to be able to sit in front of two people — Gleb and Redhead. But he wasn’t fat. In fact, he was slim, fit, and even played tennis in those times when most people would have used a racket — if they had found one on the road — for beating dust out of their rugs. What I observed here was obviously an anomaly of physics, bent space, I tell you!
I started to analyze the situation again: two girls, two boys, Redhead and me in a shifted position. I was sitting and biting my lips. Then I looked again at Sergey, and his girl — the two of them and I were perched on the same bench. Then I got it. The girl was sitting not exactly on the bench, rather, she sat on her folded leg pushing Sergey slightly away from her. Sergey sat not in front of two people — he sat in front and between them. The puzzle seemed to be solved, but… wouldn’t I at least have had half of Redhead? Surely, there was a gaping hole somewhere in my calculations.
I gave it a second thought, glanced under my right hand and found the missing link — it was my backpack! It was pushing me even farther outward, to the very edge of the bench. I slipped the backpack under my seat and moved closer to Sergey, as unobtrusively as possible. However, Redhead was still sitting in front of the tennis playboy and not me. I decided to let it go and fixed my eyes on the window again. Anyway, I had other things to worry about today.
The landscape outside had changed thanks to the large square areas belonging to the notorious summer house communes, the dacha cooperatives. Those tiny houses, stuck to each other, were more suitable for gnomes rather than humans and stretched for miles.
I could never comprehend why in that huge country, people were only allowed to possess one-tenth of an acre with such a small house that if they sneezed inside it, their foreheads would definitely knock against the wall… and probably break it. The message, of course, was simple: Stick to your class, Joe. Don’t turn into the disgusting bourgeoisie with a shovel. After this graveyard of proprietor dreams, we finally entered proper Siberian forestland.
The company, except for Gleb, still didn’t know that I was going to leave. That fact, along with the nifty knife hidden in my backpack, made me feel almost as if I was on a mission. I glanced at Redhead secretly. She was reading a book with a worn-down cover, looking vacantly through the window from time to time. I couldn’t recognize the title. Of course, I could have just moved next to her and asked. But then, I would never have left. Did I really have to? Scattered doubts, like cracks in the ice, started to appear in my mind.
Well, all in good time, I thought. In just a few days, everything would be different. I would be a new man. Toughened by severe Siberian nature, I would come back and ask her out — straight away, without any ado. Redhead stopped reading, suddenly looked straight into my eyes and smiled. Then I realized that my seemingly inconspicuous looks at her had been, in fact, a long dreamy gaze of a sloth in love. I squeezed a smile too. Do I really need this extreme trip? What on earth prevented me from asking her out right now, in particular when we were already going out? A faint shadow of doubt came upon me, but at that very moment, the whole world turned upside down — literally.
We will never know what it was — a bum who had fallen asleep on the rails or a moose struck by diarrhea — but something caused the driver to hit the brakes, and every single physical object on the train — passengers, carrots, fishing nets, suitcases, and parcels — obeyed the law of inertia and went flying through the carriage. Bags and boxes from the upper shelves fell down on passengers’ heads like volcanic bombs. Cracked eggs worked perfectly as grease, making people slide along the aisle. Many passengers in the paired benches had ended up on the laps of the travelers on the opposite side. You were lucky if it was a tiny blonde student, less so if it was a three-hundred-pound Godzilla of a passenger (as it did happen to one poor goner).
My backpack slipped out from under my seat with its flap open and the carved handle of the hunting knife sticking out if it for a mile. While all eyes in the carriage were locked on that handle (at least I thought so), my own eyes were riveted on Sergey’s hand that, like the sinful Serpent, had coiled around Redhead’s waist. Her book, its pages tousled, was on the floor and she herself was sitting now on Sergey’s lap. Of course, it had just been an accident caused by momentum. I angrily pushed my backpack into its cage and looked back again, but Redhead’s waist and Sergey’s hand hadn’t parted yet. Bending forward and messing with my bag, I recognized the title of the book she had been reading: The White Fang by Jack London — one of my favorite. Sweet, but too late. Redhead stood up slowly from Sergey’s lap, slower than I would have wanted to see, adjusted her clothes and returned to her seat. She picked up the book, dusted it, but didn’t open it again. Instead, she sat and stared at Sergey with a smile of a lost dream. Suddenly, everything in my cozy love story looked different. Were Redhead and Sergey just friends? What did I know about her, about all of them? Things might be more complicated than I had thought. Sergey’s girl, however, didn’t care for the accident at all. She glanced at him, then at Redhead, wrinkled her nose, scratched her leg and continued staring out the window. But I… I felt jealous, terribly jealous. My good mood had evaporated. I set my gaze on the dirty brown linoleum of the floor and buried my head between my shoulders. Nobody rushed to ask me why. I had to leave, now. There were no doubts about it anymore.
Yes, I was a strange type. On being mobbed, I never tried to run away. It was a reasonable thing to do, considering the fact that most of the mobsters weren’t fit at all. I was. I would have outrun any of them. But in my view, it would have looked cowardly. Moreover, I had a very unhealthy habit of telling bastards who they were, which didn’t particularly help me dodge their blows. But when my feelings were hurt, I always ran away.
Little by little, the disarray in the carriage settled down. People returned to their places as well as their bags while spilled potatoes joyfully rolled to and fro on the floor under the seats, as if playing a game of tag. The incident sparked a conversation among the passengers, filling the carriage with a cheerful buzz. Suddenly, unfamiliar people started to talk to each other! A pale, long-faced lady, a warmly-dressed granny in a babushka, a tall nifty guy in jackboots, a red-cheeked girl clutching a violin case, an army man, a small vendor, an elegant matron, a clerk, a gang of girls from a technical school — all of them, for just a few moments, were one happy company. All of them except me. Thank you, moose. I hope your stomach is better now. Chew some willow bark and stay home tonight. Adieu.
I plucked my backpack from under the seat and put it on my lap. Now the train was steaming steadily toward the station where I had to hop off. It was time to show my cards to the rest of the company. When I saw the rundown village houses scattered on the slope along the road, I knew that the moment was right. I turned to my companions and said:
“Hey, folks. I’m gonna leave now.”
The boys and the girls, all in the best mood, stopped chatting, looked at me and froze as if I was about to take a group picture. They hadn’t quite grasped what I was talking about.
“I’m leaving now,” I said again, more cheerfully as if repeating the same thing could have made the message more convincing.
“Yes, he’s leaving,” Gleb broke the silence with his confident voice and coughed. Now all the company stared at him, asking wordlessly for more information: the girls with thick half-eaten sandwiches in their hands, Sergey with a knowing grin, kind of “Yes, I knew it,” Redhead with her finger placed promisingly deep between the thick bulk of pages. Under such pressure, Gleb flicked his gaze and the implied question back to me. I was put on the spot again.
At that very second, the train, squeaking and moaning, came to a full stop. The people in the carriage started to talk and fidget again, and I, seizing the moment, murmured a very hasty “see ya soon” and rushed to the exit. My last sideways glance was aimed at Redhead, whose wide-open eyes and mouth were asking three separate, yet solid, questions: “You? Really? Why?”
In a moment, I was outside on an empty, shabby platform, breathing the cold air mixed with a good deal of natural odors from the nearby cattle farm. I inhaled it exaggeratedly deeply as if trying to convince myself that this thick rural air was much more beneficial for me than that of the carriage, which I had left in such an embarrassing way.
I hesitantly stood with my back to the train, looking with false curiosity at the remote mountains whose sharp peaks were silver with snow. The train was to stop here just for three minutes. For me, however, it felt like a month of Sundays. When the train was starting to leave, I turned to the carriage. Through the departing window, I saw the whole company, laughing and gesturing animatedly. All their attention was riveted toward Gleb. Redhead laughed and waved her hands too. Just in three minutes, I had been forgotten. Nobody followed me with their eyes, their cheeks squeezed against the glass. After all, were they my true friends? Was I their true friend?
“Cheer up, man,” I said to myself. “You got what you paid for.” I had paid for a fourth-class ticket to this desolate village, forgotten by the Discworld gods and the tax inspectors. I had to hurry. The local bus that would bring me to the starting point was due in just 15 minutes. So, there I was, an isolated would-be hero, with his faded and frayed backpack, and his plan whose feasibility had faded away as well.
© 1995–2025 Alexander Daretsky. All rights reserved.