“Thank you, comrade, thank you,” I intoned, bowing my way from his presence like a mandarin from a Manchu emperor. I slipped and stumbled my way out into the muddy street, splattering black stains of slime up my trousers as I went.
The town, if we could call it that, went by the name of Ploskye Prydy, and as I walked down its one still street I half expected to find that the fronts of the wooden shacks sinking slowly into the mud were exactly that–fronts with no backing, a Soviet answer to the cowboy movies, from one of which, any second now, a wildly screaming Cossack would come bursting, pursued by an angry peasant maid with a cry of “God damn you! God damn you to hell!” No such adventure struck. It seemed little more than a place where the railway stopped, a transit town built to service the journeys of people heading to other destinations. The roads were defined merely by the place where the mud was most pressed down; the one store had a sign in the porch which declared, NO EGGS, and the old veteran on his crutches in the door, an obligatory feature of all good cowboy movies, droned the same two lines of the same forgotten song like a tape stuck in a loop. Nevertheless, in its own small way Ploskye Prydy stood as the gateway between civilisation and the land beyond, a ploughed expanse of black mud and drooping trees as far as the eye could see. The only structure of any note was a large brick building on the side of the tracks, where the air simmered and the chimneys choked blackness into the sky: a brick maker’s kiln, providing material for the newer developments further north with translated names as glamorous as Institute-75 or Commune-32, a place for all the family. I bribed my way on to the back of the brick maker’s truck, heading north, towards Pietrok-111, and spent three black but warm hours sitting between still-cooling bricks, which slid and rattled uncontrollably from side to side as we bounced along the one arrow-straight road to the north. Once the worst of the brick falls had happened, and I was relatively secure in a den of tumbled building blocks, it was almost possible to doze, cocooned in the warmth of the cooling slabs, until with a shudder the truck came to a stop and the back was pulled down with a cheery cry of “Pietrok-111. Hope you enjoyed the ride!”
I climbed out blearily from the back as the brick maker and his assistant began throwing the bricks into a mish-mashed pile on the side of the road, like a newspaper boy hurling his daily delivery at the door of a rude neighbour, chatting away brightly as they did so. I blinked against the dim lights of the town, making out apartment blocks, one general store and, towering over it all, a refinery whose flares of burning gas were the only signs of colour in the dead-black night. The stars overhead were tiny numerous waters, frozen in a cloudless sky. I found Polaris, turning my face further north, and asked of my companions, “How far is it to Pietrok-112?”
They laughed. “Another two hours’ drive, but you don’t want to go there! It’s all soldiers and scientists there, comrade.”
I thanked them profusely and headed into what I suppose we should call the vibrant throbbing heart of the town.
It seemed unwise to seek out lodging. There was no reason to believe that the authorities weren’t yet pursuing me. The night was too cold to sleep outside, those pools of water which had by day melted in the darkness now turning to treacherous slabs of black ice. I wandered through the unlit streets, feeling my way by the walls, the fires of the refinery and the cold silver of the stars, until at length I stumbled on the town bar. It wasn’t advertised as such, and made no invitation to strangers, but it was that universal place that springs up in all towns where there is nothing to do–perhaps once it had been a private home which had simply forgotten to close its door to strangers, and was now transformed into a small warm den with a stove set in the centre of the room, where men could sit in silence, focused on the entirely serious business of drinking themselves blind on moonshine. My presence aroused the odd stare but no comment as I slipped down by the stove and offered the two-toothed woman in charge a few roubles for a glass of alcohol only a few steps above antifreeze and a bowl of rice and beans.
“I’m going to see my cousin,” I explained. “He’s dying. Do you know anyone who can take me to Pietrok-112?”
“Tomorrow, tomorrow,” mumbled the crone, and that, it seemed, was all that there was to say.
Chapter 40