Peter Higgins - Wolfhound Century

The train was a twelve-foot-gauge monster, the locomotive as high as a house. The Admiral Grebencho , in the purple livery of the Edelfeld Sparre line. Three cylinders, double Chapkyl blastpipe, sleek, rounded, backswept prow, pulling thirty carriages. The Admiral could make a hundred and fifty versts an hour on the straight, but they travelled with meticulous slowness, stopping at every halt and crossing place, sliding across vast flat country.

Krasnoyarsk. Novorossiysk. Volynovsk. Elgen. Magaden.

Lom had spent an entire week’s salary on a first-class compartment. He travelled in solitude, in a slow blur of daylight and darkness. His only company was a framed photograph of the Novozhd and two posters: CITIZEN! WHOM ARE YOU WITH? and COME TO LAKE TSYRKHAL! THE WATER IS WARM!

The unchanging landscape of birch forest made all movement seem an illusion. Time grew thickened and lazy, measured out in the glasses of tea the provodnik brought from the samovar at the end of the corridor. Lom watched the trees and slept, stretched out on the green leather upholstery. Five days of enforced inactivity… the trundling of iron wheels and the slow passage of trees and earth and sky… rest in motion…

The birches bored him. They were unimpressive: widely-spaced chalk marks. Nothing like the forest east of Podchornok. That was proper forest. Dark. Mossy. Thick. He’d lived all his life in its shadow. Podchornok was the last town before the forest began: from Durnovo-Burliuk Street you could see the low hills of the tree edge. The measureless forest. No one knew how big it was, or what — if anything — lay beyond it. Normally, Lom tried not to think about the forest too much — it was addictive, it consumed the hours — but now, with nothing else to do, he imagined what it would be like to walk there, smelling the damp earth, digging his fingers into layers of mouldering leaves and rotting, mushroomy fallen wood. Swimming in the white lakes. Great wolves and giant elk moving through splashes of sunlight.

The Vlast mounted periodic incursions into the trees. Artel followed artel into the woods, only to find themselves caught in impenetrable thickets of thorn, their horses floundering up to their bellies in mud. River expeditions drifted through tangled shadow, feeling themselves shrinking, diminishing, losing significance as the world grew silent and strange. Aircraft flew over an illimitable carpet of trees flecked with the glint of rivers and lakes. The silence of the forest remained undisturbed.

Karka. Lapotev. Narymsk. Kaunats. Vorkutagorsk.

Having no money for the restaurant car, Lom carried with him a supply of bread and white crumbly cheese. Bored of this eventually, he got off the train at Chelyagorsk, where they had a two-hour stop, and spent a few kopeks on some mushrooms and dried fish and a newspaper. There was a wooden hut at the end of the platform. A sign said EXHIBITION OF PRESERVED ZOOMORPHS — 5 KOPEKS. A pale girl in a knitted headscarf was sitting on a flimsy chair by the door. She was shivering. Her eyes watery with the cold.

‘Is it good?’ he said. ‘The exhibition. Is it worth seeing?’

The girl shrugged. ‘I guess. It’s five kopeks.’

‘Do you get many visitors?’

‘No. Do you want to go in? It’s five kopeks.’

He gave her the money. She put it in her pocket carefully.

The hut was unheated and dim and filled with dusty stuffed animals: some drab wildfowl, a pair of scrawny wolves, a cringing bear. Feeble specimens compared to the forest beasts of his imagination. And there was a female mammoth, extracted from permafrost to the north. She had been mounted exactly as she was found, sitting back on her haunches, one forefoot set on the ground, as if she had fallen into a bog and was trying to climb out. Her hair was reddish, rough, worn thin in patches, and she squinted at Lom with mean, resentful eyes, small and black and glittering like sloes. Yellowing tusks arched up in supplication towards the pitch ceiling. For the rest of the journey she came to him in his dreams.

One incident broke the limpid surface of the long, slow journey. In the next compartment to Lom’s an old man — clouded eyes, a thick spade of a beard combed with a central parting — was travelling with his wife and a dark-haired girl of six or so. Lom heard him through the partition, coughing, grumbling, swearing at his wife for letting the cold air in.

There was a commotion as the train was coming into Tuga. Lom found the wife in the corridor, wailing in dry-eyed distress, surrounded by guards and curious passengers. The girl was watching, silent and wary in the background. It turned out the old man had run from the compartment in his slippers, rushed down the length of the carriage and pushed open the door onto the small ledge at the end, just as the train was slowing. He’d fallen between the cars, and was dead.

Lom watched them bring a stretcher to carry off his shrunken old body. Blood was leaking from his mouth. The wife and child and all their baggage followed him off the train.

As Lom turned to go back to his compartment, a gendarme grabbed him by the arm.

‘You,’ he said. ‘You.’

‘What do you want?’

‘What do you know about the man who died?’

‘Nothing. Why?’

‘You were watching.’

‘So was everyone.’

‘But not like you. Where are you from?’

‘Podchornok. I joined the train at Yislovsk. But—’

The gendarme was standing too close, looking up into Lom’s face. He thrust his hand forward, almost jabbing it into Lom’s midriff.

‘Papers. Your papers.’

‘What papers?’

‘Papers. Passport. Permission to travel. Certification of funds. Certification of sound health and freedom from infestation. Papers .’

‘There was no time,’ said Lom. ‘And I don’t need papers.’

‘Everyone needs papers. If you’ve got no papers, you’re coming with me. Unless –’ The gendarme pushed his face up closer to Lom’s. ‘Unless you’ve got a big fat purse.’

‘Fuck you,’ said Lom quietly, and turned away.

The gendarme grabbed his shoulder and spun him round. ‘You’re coming with me. Now. Bastard.’

‘You’re talking to a senior investigator in the third department of the political police. You don’t call me bastard. You call me sir.’

For a moment the gendarme hesitated; but only for a moment.

‘I don’t care if you’re the fucking Novozhd himself. If you’ve got no papers, you’re mine.’

‘Like I said, I don’t need papers.’ Lom took off his cap to let the man see the irremovable seal, the small dark coin of angel flesh embedded in the bone of his forehead like a blank third eye. ‘I have this. This is better.’

On the fifth day the birch trees thinned out, separated now by long tracts of flat and treeless waste, black mud under dirty melting snow, and on the sixth morning the train emerged abruptly into a flat watery landscape. Lakes. Rivers. Marshland. Low, misty cloud. And sometimes a glint of harder grey on the skyline that was the sea. Stops became more frequent, though the towns were still small. Rain trickled down the windowpane in small droplets. A large, stumpy, dark red mass appeared on the horizon. It looked like an enormous rock. The Ouspenskaya Torso.

Then, suddenly, without warning, the train was high above the landscape and he was looking down on houses: ramshackle wooden structures with pig yards and cabbage rows; yellow tenements; streets and traffic; the pewter glint of canals and basins. They were on the Bivorg Viaduct, hopping from island to island, closing on the Litenskaya. The rain gave everything a vivid, polished sheen of wetness. Lom felt a nameless stirring of excitement. Arrival. New things coming. The capital. Mirgorod.