Eastbound

by Maylis de Kerangal

Siberia—fuck! This is what he’s thinking, stone in his belly, as though seized with panic at the idea of plunging further into what he knows to be a territory of banishment, giant oubliette of the Tsarist empire before it turns Gulag country.

The cadence of the train, monotonous, rather than numbing his anxiety, shakes it up and revives it, unspools lines of deportees pickaxes in hand stumbling through swirling snowstorms, stirs the frail shacks lined up in the middle of nowhere, hair frozen to wooden floor planks in the night, dead bodies stiff under the permafrost, blurred images of a territory from which no one returns.

Outside, the afternoon is drawing to a close, in a few hours it will be night, but this night won’t be populated with human dreams, Aliocha knows this too.

It’s not hard to understand, it is terrifying, and Aliocha’s heart wallops in his chest as the train chugs along at a constant speed just like the boy’s terror will, from here on in: at the end of the rails, there will be the barracks and the diedovchina, the hazing, and once he’s there, if the second-year conscripts burn his dick with cigarettes, if they make him lick the toilets, deprive him of sleep or fuck him up the ass, no one will be able to do anything to help.

It’s the end of the afternoon and the sky is turning to ash.

The back window is free again and Aliocha leaps to it, magnetized to this unique focal point on the world—like an eye in the back of your head—captivated by the sight of the tracks that hurtle backwards into the landscape, striped ribbon alternating light and dark, stroboscope lighting up his face, and soon, hypnotized, he touches the point in space where the forest swallows the still-hot rails, engulfs the ties in a well of mystery, bit by bit he forgets the train car, forgets the guys smoking behind him and the smell of skin suctioned to the walls from sweat, all he is now is this vanishing point that devours space and time; he coincides with it, grows obsessed, ready to pour himself too into the great black hole, to tumble in headfirst, anything but Siberia, anything but the barracks, so concentrated in this moment that he doesn’t hear the two guys coming up behind him, bellies out jostling him, sandwiching him, then pushing roughly and pressing him against the wall as though trying to shove his body into it.

People play cards while cutting up cold chicken and smoked fish, they drink vodka because there’s nothing else to do, they fill in crosswords mechanically, they tappety-tap on cell phones, and, finally, they don’t even look outside, not even a glance.

Doesn’t he know that in hostile territory the solution is always collective? Who does he think he is? Before he runs, he still has to get past his filthy ignorance and know where he’s putting his feet.

her ductile profile—and

She has a tragic and patchy image of Russia, a jumbled montage involving the fatal fall of a baby carriage down a monumental staircase in Odessa, the firebrand in the eyes of Michel Strogoff, the gymnast Elena Mukhina spinning on the uneven bars, the fevered face of Lenin as he addresses the crowd, the Soviet Union flag at the top of the Reichstag, doctored photos, Brezhnev’s eyebrows and Solzhenitsyn’s beard, La Mouette at the Odéon cinema one spring night, thousands of prisoners digging a canal between the Baltic and the White Sea, Nureyev leaping across the border in an airport, a parade of tanks on the Red Square and decorated tunics glimpsed between flakes of snow, the dusha, the invasion of Afghanistan in December 1979, queues in front of stores seen on the news, large women swathed in scarves, the Sakharovs back to Moscow after years of internal exile in Gorki, spies traded on bridges at night, the birthmark on Gorbachev’s forehead, Soyuz, Yeltsin drunk, the smile of a young billionaire as he buys the Chelsea Football Club, top models, the mafia, murders, the hold-up of the entire country, the Chechen nightmare, Putin’s face, the lobby of the building where Anna Politkovskaya lived, the verdigris skin tone of Viktor Yushchenko, the war again, Ossetia and Georgia, the family of old believers found on the taiga after seventy years; she has never seen the Red Square, the bulbous domes of Saint Basil’s Cathedral or the frozen Volga, doesn’t speak a word of Russian, but ...

Would she have even spoken to him if he hadn’t been the man from the forbidden country? Would she have even loved him if there hadn’t been, at the heart of all this, Russia—this country she is now fleeing?

this young soldier also embodies the entire country, he’s an archive of all the Russian wars—“the homeland our mother, the war our stepmother,”

you see what I mean about that crazy country? Bunch of nutcases. Hélène draws back instinctively, reminds herself that this is also a body at her mercy.

The plains, horses, violence: a typically Russian story, Anton had concluded, pouring himself another drink.

crossing time zones one by one, breaking up time as it charges through space; the train that compacts or dilates the hours, concretes the minutes, stretches out the seconds, continues on pegged to the earth and yet out of sync with earth’s clocks: the train like a spaceship.

his body no more than a vibratile material oscillating in the unplaceable space of the train,

She doesn’t turn on the overhead light but lifts the curtain of the big window where everything is black and magmatic, and where she sees nothing but herself. The large-format portrait of a woman in full flight on a train somewhere in the middle of Siberia. What’s this story all about? she asks herself, very calm, causing the shadows on her face to shift in the glow of the nightlight, carving out her features in a strange cinema of black and white—serpentine flashes in the curls of her hair, milky forehead, pits of her eye sockets of a very pure black, marble cheekbones accenting hollowed cheeks, carbon lips.

he’s so dizzy he nearly falls, catches himself on the sink but slips as he does and his shoe bangs into the metal garbage can: a sound as loud as danger.

Letchov and his sidekick knock on the door of the compartment and Hélène opens it, exasperated, while the provodnitsa catches her eye from the doorway and lowers her lids, a sign to remain calm.

huge metal bridge the hue of rusted Coca-Cola,