Alex felt a tug at his trouser leg and, turning, saw the moon face of little Vladimir. He was apparently too small to get a grip on the hand support and was using Alex’s trouser leg to hoist himself up. Alex could feel the tension in the fabric, then the giving way as his pants began to rip.
“For crying out loud,” he shouted in English, kicking his leg to shake the boy loose. The boy screamed but held on.
“Leave the boy alone!” Trubetskoi had appeared on the platform, his face red with cold.
“Get the damned brat off my leg,” Alex shouted, letting go of the handrail and gripping the waist of his trousers, barely keeping his balance. The father reached out and lifted the boy onto the first step, but not before Vladimir had lashed out and punched his father in his big belly.
“Are you all right?” Alex asked.
“You bastard,” the fat man said, still gasping.
The red-haired man had moved near them, observing the scene. Trubetskoi struggled to gain his composure.
“Somebody should lock that brat up,” a woman said. It was Tania.
“And his father,” Alex mumbled.
“They are a menace,” Tania said, moving back into the carriage.
Alex followed her and behind him he could hear the ubiquitous red-haired man moving in his wake.
Back in the compartment, Mrs. Valentinov was sitting in the chair thumbing through the pages of a Russian magazine.
“I was attacked by a four-foot monster,” Alex said, rubbing his hands together and emptying his pockets of the bags of sunflower seeds. He felt along the waistband of his trousers and discovered that two of the belt loops had been torn.
“I have some sewing things,” Mrs. Valentinov said, standing up and moving past him to her suitcase.
The train began to move, haltingly at first, then with gathering speed. Outside Alex saw the army of grandmothers, brooms in hand, sweeping the tracks, ignoring the moving train as it slid smoothly past them.
“I was about to kick the brat in the face,” he said, remembering the flowers, which he had thrown onto his bunk along with the sunflower seeds. They were slightly crushed. Looking at them he felt his old boyish shyness return.
“I bought you this,” he mumbled, his heart pounding. My God, I am clumsy, he told himself.
“A bouquet,” she said, smiling broadly. She took the flowers and arranged them in an empty tea glass.
“Everybody in Siberia is passionate about flowers,” she said. “These were grown in hothouses. But in the summer Siberia is a forest of flowers.” She opened the sewing kit and, squinting, threaded a needle. Crooking a finger, she slipped it beneath his belt and drew him toward her.
“Now let us see.” She surveyed the loose loops, pressed one torn loop to the material and began to sew.
Alex turned his head, and looking down, watched her with interest.
“So, we are neighbors in spirit,” she said, drawing the needle in and out through the material.
“In a way,” he agreed. “Although we’re a generation or so removed.”
“And this journey is a pilgrimage?” she asked abstractedly.
“I hadn’t thought of it quite that way,” he answered. He knew he was throwing caution to the winds now, feeling the sluices within him unlock.
“Then why?” she asked, her busy fingers pausing.
How much did she really know, he wondered.
“Pilgrimage seems so ponderous. Call it curiosity,” he said, watching her bite off the thread with her even white teeth. She re-threaded the needle, preparing to repair the other loop.
“Or putting it another way,” he said, drawing a deep breath, “I’m searching backwards in time within myself to understand my antecedents.” He shook his head and smiled. “What an insufferable pedant I am.”
When she didn’t respond, he went on. “My grandfather was a Czarist exile. It was the dominant experience of his life and he kept it alive for years afterward, handed it down through the generations. I’m beginning to think he passed his obsession on to me, in my genes. I have always had a sense of being the alien corn.”
“You feel this way even in America?”
“Especially in America.”
“Strange!” She sighed.
“Am I making any sense?” he asked, unsure that he was, but at the same time enjoying the exquisite sense of unburdening himself to her.
“When this opportunity came up—” He stopped, watching her. She continued to sew, showing no signs of heightened interest. “I have this mind’s-eye view,” he said. “A whole landscape has been imbedded in my mind and it just seemed important that I see the real thing. So, you see, it is quite possible to hand down an obsession.”
“Yes,” she said, looking up. “Quite possible.”
But he went on talking, carried on by his own momentum.
“You see, my grandfather was reliving the great adventure of his life and immersing his offspring in the idea of it. He was a prisoner here, a convict.”
“What was his crime?” she asked quietly.
Alex smiled grimly.
“This was his crime. When he was sixteen, the head of his village’s council decided that everyone who sold firewood for a living should give him a portion of wood in return for a license to do business. It was really a bribe, of course, and my great-grandfather refused. His license, of course, was withdrawn. He was forbidden to cut or sell his wood. Soon he was barely able to provide for himself and his family. Goaded by hunger and his inability to provide for his family, he soon became an object of ridicule, a kind of village character, whom no one took seriously. My grandfather was just becoming a man himself, and seeing this happen to his father made him bitter and angry. One day, he followed his father into the village and saw him go up to the head of the village council.
“ ‘Thief,’ ” his father cried. ‘You steal the bread from the mouths of the starving. You pig!’ ”
“The councilman just looked at him for a minute. Then he cleared his throat and spat in my great-grandfather’s face. My grandfather, who was standing right there, threw himself on the councilman and ground his face into the mud.
“That was all there was to it. Banishment by word, with no recourse, no trial, no chance to defend himself.”
They were both quiet for a few moments. Anna Petrovna did not seem to know what to say. Alex decided to go on.
“He did knock off a few years by helping to build this railroad,” he said, in a lighter tone. “When he was released, he started a new life in Irkutsk, your home town. He became a prospector and fur merchant. In 1913, he told me, he could smell what was coming and converted everything he had into gold nuggets. He sewed them into my grandmother’s and my father’s clothing, and they hopped the Trans-Siberian and made their way to Vladivostok, then on to Japan and the United States.”
“He sounds like an adventurer, your grandfather.”
“He admitted to being an opportunist, a briber, a cheat and a killer.”
“A killer?”
“He may have been exaggerating.”
“Everything about Siberia is exaggerated,” she whispered. “That will be your principal discovery.”
“How do you mean?”
She stopped her sewing. “It is considered by everyone a beastly place, hardly fit for human habitation.”
“Is that an exaggeration?”
“Absolutely. Here you have an example of good Siberian stock.”
“And me?”
She looked up at him with a slow smile. “The soft life may have taken its toll.”
It seemed a challenge. Was it an invitation?
In a sudden burst of courage, he reached out and grabbed her hand. It was cold. He saw her lips were trembling, and he sensed that her uncertainty somehow gave him an advantage.
Bending down, he pressed his lips gently over hers, feeling the sweet tingle of her flesh, and the mounting tension in his body as he breathed in the special smell of her. He knelt beside the chair and enveloped her in his arms, and felt all his fears slip away. Whoever she was, what did it matter?
Burying his head in her breast, he felt her hands run through his hair, gently caressing the back of his neck. The surge of desire then gripped him, as if every nerve end had suddenly become kindling. Rising, he drew her out of the chair, feeling the full length of her body, his lips moving over her face and neck. She sighed, and said his name, and then drew out his shirt and her hands found the bare skin of his back.
Then, as if some secret signal had passed between them, she insinuated herself out of his arms and moved back, watching his eyes as she began to undress with slow, languorous movements. Instinctively, she knew that he loved watching her. Not a word passed between them. Even the sound and bounce of the train seemed suddenly suspended. His fingers trembled as he removed his shirt and drew his T-shirt over his head. She stood now almost naked, and he reveled in the sight of her high breasts with big pink nipples, erect now, and he watched while she removed her panties, the last barrier. He looked for a long moment, then removed his own pants, and saw her eyes dart down longingly toward his phallus. No woman had ever looked at him that way, not even Janice—certainly never Janice.
He moved toward her, pressed his lips against hers again, caressing her nipple with one hand and, with the other, dipping into the fold of her buttocks. He could feel her shiver as he held her, and knew she was already on the edge of orgasm. Then he drew her down on the lower bunk, a confined space, where they fitted themselves together in an instinctive mutuality. Her hand, with tremulous lightness, reached out for his manhood and, as if she were plunging a dagger smoothly into its sheath, brought it deep into her body. He felt himself shudder and reach into her, and she responded with the same animal sense of abandon. This was the meaning of sexuality, he told himself when it was over, still holding her, determined to keep her in his arms.
He felt as if he owned her and, strangely, as if he had long known her. He knew it was all a fantasy, a reality totally distorted by the parameters of the train journey. Here, life unfolded within a confined space and time. He barely knew this woman, had spoken to her briefly, exchanged information, some of it banal and pedestrian, and yet he could tell himself that he was in love with her. The idea was foolish, adolescent, irrational. But as much as his mind tried to brush it aside, he found himself hooked by this overwhelming sense of possession. Could she be acting for anyone but herself?
He explored her face silently, his gaze washing over her skin, absorbing all the details of her pores, the curve of her full lips, the straight bridge of her nose widening at her nostrils, and finally, above the ridge of her high cheekbones, the blue eyes with their tiny flecks of yellow and black. He had not noticed this before. Old doubts crowded back. What did she really feel? Was he imagining all this?
“Am I dreaming?” he finally asked aloud, drawing blankets around them in the tight space. The sun was higher now, throwing a cold glaring light into the compartment. Outside the landscape had changed as the train threaded through endless rows of white birch.
“The taiga,” Anna Petrovna said. “That’s what we call the birch forests. Millions upon millions of birch trees,” she said, sighing. He followed her eyes, watching the trees, feeling the hypnotic effect of the repetitive whiteness.
“Beautiful,” he said, but he could not be sure what he meant. Everything was beautiful, he decided, putting his lips to her forehead and kissing her gently, feeling the chill of her skin. “I can’t believe this is happening,” he said, as if it were something provocative, profound.
“You are a romantic.”
“Me? A romantic?” He looked at her in disbelief. “I am the least romantic man I know.”
She reached for the hairs of his chest and crushed them in her fingers.
“You must accept good things as they come,” she said, smiling.
“They haven’t come that often.” He smiled back, but suddenly felt panicky. Was she trifling with him? Using him?
“You have been celibate?”
“Practically,” he said, then, feeling a challenge to his manhood, retreated into bravado. “Well, perhaps not quite.”
She laughed, showing the incredible evenness of her teeth.
He raised himself on one elbow and looked at her.
“Why do I feel I’ve known you all my life?” he asked.
“Because you are a romantic. You are reading more into events than meets the eye.”
“And you?”
“I think of myself as more practical.”
“So did I.”
“You should trust more in science.”
“I did. Until now.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean—” he paused, not wanting to banter, wanting to give her a real answer—“science cannot adequately explain this.” He leaned over and pressed his lips on hers, caressing her tongue with his own. He felt his phallus beginning to harden again. “I can explain the body’s reaction. What the body does under these circumstances. But not why.”
“It is simple animal attraction,” she said.
“Simple? That would imply that all men are attracted to all women, indiscriminately.” He felt pedantic. If I’m not careful, we will talk it away, he told himself, his fingers roaming her body, reaching for her clitoris, caressing, feeling the need of her again.
“There is no explanation for this at all,” he whispered, feeling her hands reach out for him as she moved her body to receive him. He felt the tight exquisite fit of her organs, the soft, yielding wonder of their joining.
“I love you,” he said, the words coming smoothly, yet foreign to his ear. He might have said them a hundred years ago, perhaps in another life. He was not sure whether he had ever said them to Janice. “I love you, Anna Petrovna,” he repeated, feeling comfortable with the words now, as his body pressed itself to hers. It was as if all the heavy years of dreariness had disappeared, he thought. It was like being born again. He was no longer afraid.
“You must love me,” she said, her voice a whisper, translating the urgency of her body’s needs, as she drew him into her, her hands pressing on his buttocks. He felt the beginning wave of her trembling, like distant thunder. In his mind he imagined a flash of lightning as she gasped her pleasure, her teeth biting into his shoulder.
She continued to tremble in the afterglow of their closeness and he felt his phallus shrink slowly within her.