08:34.
The landscape at this hour is a word your grandmother had and you do not have. You know this because she would say it once a winter, at the kitchen window above the sink in the house in upstate New York, and she would be looking at nothing in particular, and you would be nine and not listening, and now you are twenty-three and looking at what she was looking at and you do not have the word.
The landscape is grey-green and dark-green and grey-green again and the sky has the kind of white that is not cloud and not absence of cloud and is the weather of a place that does not announce what it is.
The woman opposite is gone. Her bunk is made. Her plastic bag is gone. She got off at a station at 03:20 with a conductor carrying her suitcase. You heard the conductor call her babushka softly and you remembered why you came.
You are alone in the compartment.
12:15.
The body has had tea. The body has had another sandwich — this one bought from the provodnitsa's cart for one hundred and twenty rubles, cheese-and-cucumber, the cucumber sliced thin enough to be translucent. You have been to the toilet at the end of the car. You have passed three other compartments whose doors were open and have seen, in each, the life of a compartment at noon — two men with a chessboard, a family of three eating from a plastic container, a single woman reading a paperback she was holding upside down on purpose because the paperback was hiding a different book.
The landscape at noon is the landscape at any hour and also not. Noon makes it particular. The sun is not overhead — the sun is slightly south because you are that far north — and the shadows of the birches are long in a direction your body did not know shadows could go at noon.
Noon on a Siberian train is an hour you have not had before.
14:40.
The provodnitsa has a name. It is stitched above her breast pocket in Cyrillic. Larisa Mikhailovna. You read it when she passes you in the corridor on the way to the samovar. She does not see you read it, or does not make a show of seeing.
She is fifty-five, perhaps sixty. Her hair is brown-going-grey, the grey at the temples, pulled back. Her wedding ring has been moved to her right hand, which is how Russian women wear it when they are widowed. Her face has the fatigue of a person who works a seven-day rotation on a seven-day train. She smiles once at the end of the car, at the other provodnitsa in car 12 across the vestibule. The smile is small. It is also the smile of a woman who has worked these runs with this woman for a long time.
She turns. She sees you in the corridor.
"Chai?"
"Spasibo." Thank you. The second word your grandmother gave you and the one you can still say without the wrong vowel.
She pours. Forty rubles. You pay.
Tepyer tak, she says, quiet, half to you and half to the kettle. Eto uzhe ne to, chto bylo. Now it is this way. It is not what it was. You do not ask what was. She does not say.
She goes back to the samovar.
You carry the glass back to your compartment with both hands. You are not spilling any of it. You realize, halfway down the corridor, that you are trying not to spill any of it because Larisa Mikhailovna would disapprove, and that you are twenty-three years old and that the disapproval of a woman you do not know has just become the framework you are moving inside.
You put the glass on the small table. You sit on your berth.
18:20.
The other passengers of this car have a rhythm you are inside of now. The man three compartments down plays chess against himself at eighteen-hundred every day and he is doing it again; you hear the small click of the piece against the board. A child is crying two cars up and has been for six minutes. The crying is not the kind of crying you need to do anything about. A woman's voice soothes in Russian. The crying does not stop and does not intensify; it is the sound a child makes when something is not wrong but nothing is right.
The landscape has been birches for five hours. The birches become pines. The pines become birches again. The track under the train was laid by arms and sentences between 1891 and 1916. The train moves at that rate still. Somewhere between Nizhny and Omsk a town you do not read the name of comes into view and leaves again and a man on a platform is standing by himself with his back to the train.
You look at him. He does not turn.
The train is past him. The town is past you. Your jaw is set without your deciding.
Keep your face still.
The thought you have is not a thought. It is the shape of a thought, the shape your mind makes when something has been noticed and not named. You let the shape be. You do not put a word under it.
I am in a country my grandmother was removed from, and I am moving through it on a train full of strangers, and the strangers are working and eating and sleeping and playing chess, and I am doing none of those things, and the body is nonetheless a body and has had tea and is still here.
The light outside is going gold.