10:22.
Yaroslavsky Station is a low ochre building with a green cupola and a clock that does not tell the right time. The station went up in 1902 and has held a century of departures in its floor. You know it does not tell the right time because the clock in the hotel this morning said 09:47 and this clock says 09:51 and neither can be right, but neither is your problem. Your problem is Platform 4.
The train is green and cream. It is long in a way a train can be long when you are walking beside it and the engine is already at one horizon and the end of the train is at the other. The cars have Cyrillic over the doors and numbers under the windows. You find car 11, berth 34, and the provodnitsa — a woman of maybe sixty with a uniform that fits at the sleeves and not at the chest — checks your ticket with a hand that has held a lot of tickets.
"Vladivostok."
"Yes."
She says a sentence you do not catch. The word chai is in it and so is the word polotentse. Tea and towel, somewhere in the sentence. You nod at both. She nods back, once, and turns to the next passenger.
You board.
10:58.
The compartment is four berths, two lower and two upper, with a small table under the window. You have a lower berth. A woman already has the other lower — a woman of perhaps seventy, in a pale blue blouse buttoned to the throat, with a plastic bag at her feet from which she is not-taking-anything-out. She does not look at you. She does not look away either. She is in the attitude of a woman who has taken this train before.
"Zdravstvuyte." You say hello. Your vowel is the wrong vowel.
She nods. She says "Zdravstvuyte" back with her correct vowels.
The upper berths are empty. The train gives a small shake that is not the train moving. Then another shake that is. The platform slides. The station slides. The clock on the station slides. The train goes.
12:17.
You settle.
Your bag goes under the lower berth at the head of the bed, wedged between the wood of the bunk and the metal of the radiator. Inside the bag are the things you cannot put down — the envelopes, the photograph, the seventeen thousand six hundred rubles now divided between the boot in the bag and the jeans on your body, the Xiaomi with the nameless contact. Outside the bag on the table goes your book (a paperback novel in English you do not intend to finish) and a small kettle-cup the provodnitsa will fill from the samovar at the end of the car for a number of rubles you will learn in an hour.
The landscape outside the window has already stopped being Moscow. It is birches. It is a concrete cooling tower on the horizon. It is the first of many towns you will not go into.
The woman opposite takes out knitting. Pale blue, to match the blouse.
13:45.
You eat the sandwich you bought at the station. Black bread, cheese, one slice of tomato. The cheese is the kind of cheese you would have called not cheese in New York. On the train you eat the sandwich and are grateful for the sandwich.
The woman opposite has taken out a boiled egg and peeled it over a paper napkin. She eats the egg in three bites. She puts the shell in the napkin and the napkin in the plastic bag at her feet. Her hands know the egg.
You drink water from the bottle you bought at the station. The landscape is birches.
15:10.
The provodnitsa brings tea. Forty rubles for a glass, six rubles for a sugar. You pay for one glass and one sugar. She pours. The glass is in a metal holder with a pattern of troikas on it. The pattern is from a country that is not the country the train is moving through and is also exactly the country the train is moving through.
A man walks past the compartment door in the corridor. European-looking. Forty-five. He is in a different car and he is going somewhere in this one. You look at his back until the corridor turns. It is a back. It is not a scar.
Keep your face still.
18:47.
The light outside has gone the gold it goes in Russia in June at evening, which you have only known in translation.
The woman opposite has fallen asleep sitting up. Her knitting is in her lap. Her mouth is slightly open.
You are tired in a way you have not been tired since Istanbul.
I sit with the tea going cold.
I am moving at a rate I have not moved at in eleven months. The motion I have not been in is the motion my body is in now, a motion I did not have to decide for, a motion that is being made by something under me that I did not start and cannot stop. There is a loosening in my chest. The loosening does not know what to do with itself. It does not arrive as relief. It arrives as a slight adjustment of how I am sitting, a sentence I do not say, a sentence I do not know the first word of.
The train moves east.
I do not know what has just happened to me. I know something has.
Keep your face still.
21:03.
Night. The compartment is dim. The corridor is dim. The landscape is black.
The woman opposite is in her upper bunk now — she moved without you noticing. Her blouse is folded on the small table. She sleeps the way a woman who has taken this train before sleeps.
You lie on your lower berth. The berth is narrow. The train rocks a little at switches, a little more at bends. The rocking is the kind of rocking that does not belong to you.
You close your eyes.
You do not sleep.
The train moves east.