07:44.
You wake with your back to the wall.
The light is the grey that happens at this latitude in June before the sun has fully committed. The train is moving at the slightly-different-rate that means open countryside.
Your head is clear in a way that surprises you and then stops surprising you.
You have new compartment-mates — two men who boarded somewhere between Krasnoyarsk and Ilanskaya — a father and his son, from what you can tell, going somewhere to visit an aunt. The father is reading a newspaper on his upper bunk. The son is maybe eleven, asleep with his mouth open. They do not say anything. You do not say anything.
You lie for some minutes.
You get up. You put your hair back in the braid that has come loose. You put on the boots.
The bleeding starts in the morning, the way it has always started — without warning, before the body has named it. You go to the corridor bathroom with the small things you have been carrying for this. You manage. You wash your hands twice. You come back to the bunk.
10:16.
You are in the corridor with your empty cup on your way to the samovar at the end of the car. The corridor is narrower than it was yesterday — it has been filling up with passengers as the train moves east, and the narrowness now has bodies in it — a man leaning against a window, smoking an electronic cigarette and watching fields, a woman at her compartment door speaking on a phone in a language that is not Russian and is not any language you know. Polish, maybe. You slide past them both.
The samovar is at the vestibule. The provodnitsa is not Larisa Mikhailovna. It is a different provodnitsa — younger, dark hair, a small scar on her chin you catalogue and let go — and she fills your cup. Forty rubles.
You turn back.
The woman is in the corridor.
She is standing between you and your compartment. She is maybe sixty. She has a grey shawl over a green housedress. A wedding ring has been moved to her right hand. Her hands are at her mouth, and the hands are trembling, and the trembling is not the trembling of a woman in a train it is the trembling of a woman who has seen something.
She says a sentence in Russian you do not catch all of.
Then she says a word.
"Vira."
10:17.
Keep your face still.
The scalp goes cold the way it did in the dining car two nights ago and this time it is a different cold, a cold that travels into the jaw and pools at the place under the ear where a pulse is. The name is not your name. The name is one letter from your name. The name is your name in the language your grandmother's mother spoke, the Ukrainian form, the one you have never called yourself and have heard twice in your life and both times by accident. The distance between the two versions of the name is exactly the distance between a person who could be you and a person who is not.
She takes a step toward you.
"Vira. Vira, ty zhe ne..." You are not, she is saying. You are not... Her hand reaches. Her hand does not quite reach.
You do not speak. You do not know what sentence you have.
10:18.
The trembling reads to you as performance.
She says more words. You do not catch them. You catch mat' and you catch doch' — mother and daughter. Something about mother and daughter. The words are words your grandmother used in the kitchen and now they are words at you. You understand more than you admit to yourself; your hand tightens around your empty cup without your telling it to. You file the comprehension.
She is not going away.
You do not nod. You do not shake your head. You do not speak.
You slide past her the way you slid past the man with the electronic cigarette. Your shoulder brushes her shawl. The shawl smells of an apartment — not your apartment, not any apartment you know. The smell of a life.
You get to your compartment door. You go in. You close the door. You sit.
10:25.
The father on the upper bunk has lowered his newspaper.
He looks at you. He looks at the door. He looks at you.
He says, very quietly, in Russian you understand: "Ona ne tebya ishchet." She is not looking for you.
You set the cup on the fold-down ledge by the window. Your hand returns to your lap and stays.
He adds, quieter: "Ona poteryala svoyu vnuchku." She lost her granddaughter.
You nod. You do not know if you are agreeing with what he said or thanking him for saying it.
He raises the newspaper again.
The son on the bunk across is still asleep. His mouth is still open.
14:02.
You do not leave the compartment.
You eat a piece of bread from the packet the compartment-mate father shares with you wordlessly. You drink the tea that has gone lukewarm. You watch the landscape, which has flattened into something that is not birches and not steppe and not either.
The woman is somewhere on the train. She is not at your door. She has not come back. You do not know if she is in her compartment or walking the corridors or off the train at the last station or standing on a platform with her shawl at her mouth.
You file her with the grey-jacket men and the watchers in New York and the man with the scar the shape of a comma on the base of his right thumb, whose name you read on a ticket two nights ago.
Some name on a chyron at the gate at JFK two weeks ago — Halloran something, an inquiry deepening, private-intelligence contractors named — files itself somewhere lower in the same drawer. You do not reach for it. The drawer takes it.
The file has a shape now that it did not have at breakfast. The shape is six days of walking east and a woman who said a name that was almost a name you know and the paranoia-model is now a model you can see from above.
I am not wrong about this.
Keep your face still.
19:50.
The light is going again. The father on the upper bunk has moved to the lower. He eats hard-boiled eggs with his son. You share the tea you bought. None of you speak.
Outside the window, a Trans-Siberian crossing — a small dirt road perpendicular to the tracks, a man standing beside a horse, the horse not moving, the man not moving, the whole arrangement just there, the way a photograph is there. The train passes. The crossing is past.
You lie down. You face the wall.
I know what I know.
I do not know what she was.