Dining car. Day 2, 01:34.
You came for tea you do not need.
The car is two down from yours. You walk three narrow corridors that sway at a slightly different beat than your body — a train is something you live inside by disagreeing with. Two men at the far end; a woman in the booth by the galley who is reading a book she has been reading since Moscow, or since before Moscow. The waitress behind the counter has the look of a woman who has been awake for nine hours and has three more to go.
You sit near the window. You do not sit by the door. The car smells of tea and old cooking oil and the cold of a metal that was never in the sun.
Your braid has been in for two days. The braid is tight enough to feel. You have not eaten since the tea-biscuit your compartment-mate left on the fold-down at seventeen hundred. You touch your own wrist under the table and the wrist is the wrist of a twenty-three-year-old who has not slept properly since Moscow.
The window at 01:34 is not a window. It is black with small lights moving past it at a rate that makes the lights useless. You see yourself faintly in it and look away.
The man two seats down.
He is already there. You did not register him when you entered because he does not take up space the way a man does. Forty-five, maybe forty-seven. European. Not Russian. You know this before you know how you know — something in the way he is sitting with his tea, the small quietness of a body that has been in a lot of rooms it did not belong in and has learned not to mind.
He is not looking at you.
He has a cup of tea in front of him and a saucer and a small plate with something on it you cannot see. His hands are on the table. The right hand has a scar at the base of the thumb. A small precise scar the shape of a comma, too neat to be an accident. You cannot tell from two seats down whether it is a burn or a cut. You catalogue it the way you catalogue exits.
His cup is held the way you hold things you are pretending to drink.
The waitress.
You ask for tea.
She pours without looking. Her hand is small. There is a photograph taped to the cash register behind her — you see it when she turns — a girl of perhaps eight, braids, in the snow. You do not ask. You pay in the new rubles from the hand-off in Moscow and she gives you change that is exact and clean and you realize she has not counted it, she knows the price of a cup of tea the way a woman knows the weight of her own arm.
She slides the cup across. She rubs the small of her own back with one hand and turns away.
You put both hands around the cup for the heat.
The other two.
The two men at the far end have stopped talking. One of them glances at you; the other does not. The one who glances is older, in a suit that is not a suit, a kind of grey that wants to be nothing. You know that look. You have catalogued that look since you were twelve. The glance is brief and goes back to his drink and you are still in the room and still the same person.
The one who does not glance is bent over something — a small notebook, or the edge of a menu — and his stillness is different.
You drink tea.
The man two seats down again.
He has not moved. He has not looked at you. You would know.
Somewhere behind you, by the galley, a man is humming. Not loudly. Not a full tune. Fragments, a few bars, stopping and restarting. You catch words. Exiled. Democracy. The words are English, which makes no sense at 01:34 on a train through Russia, and also makes exactly the sense the train is making tonight. The humming stops. Starts. Stops.
You do not turn to look.
The man two seats down lifts his cup. The scar at the base of his thumb is visible at this angle, pinker than his skin, a comma laid on the side of his hand. He sets the cup down. He is looking at his own hand now, or at something past his hand, or at nothing.
He says, apparently to his tea, apparently to himself:
"Lestnitsa derzhit svet sorok let."
A staircase holds its light for forty years.
The Russian is perfect. The Russian is also wrong in a way you catch before you know you have caught it — the shape of a language learned on purpose, soft vowels too careful, intonation out of a classroom. Not your grandmother's Russian. Not anyone's grandmother's Russian.
You do not turn your head.
Keep your face still.
The cup is in your hand. Your scalp goes cold under your hair — the small cold that arrives before any other, the cold that tells you before your mind has told you. The bra strap you have not noticed in six days is suddenly a line. Your mouth going dry faster than the tea can help.
You put the cup down carefully.
I want to ask him where. I am going to ask him. I do not.
After.
He stands.
The rail ticket is face up beside the cup. Latin letters on the stub. ADRIEN LENZ. A berth number. A car number. The route in Cyrillic down the column. You read the name in the second before he reaches for it.
I know the name. I do not know the name.
He slides the ticket into his inside pocket without looking at it.
He leaves a ten-ruble coin on the table — a small bright coin that makes the wrong sound on the formica because it is small for the tea and he knows it — and he takes his jacket off the hook and he goes. He walks past you without looking. You see his hand on the door-latch for half a second and then he is through the door and the door is closing and the sound of the door closing is smaller than it should be.
The woman by the galley turns a page. The humming behind you has stopped.
The two men at the far end are talking again.
The compartment. 02:19.
You sit on the edge of the bunk.
The bag is on your lap. You open it. You do not take out the photograph. You touch the envelope through the canvas and you do not take it out. You take out nothing.
The train is moving east.
I know what he said. I do not know what he said. I know what he said and I do not know where the staircase is. I have been carrying a photograph of a staircase I have not been able to place since New York and tonight a man said forty years about a staircase in a language my grandmother spoke, and now my grandmother is in the room.
She is not in the room.
Keep your face still.
You put the bag at the foot of the bunk. You lie down.
The ceiling is metal. The light in the compartment is orange and will not go off for seven hours. The train moves east.
I am not going to sleep.