The landscape on Day 5 is a landscape that has been running out of words for some hours.
You have been on the train for four full days and you are beginning to understand the way a train takes time out of a body. Not the way a plane does — the plane takes your body somewhere and leaves a gap you fill later with jet-lag. The train moves with you inside it, and every hour the train moves some of you into the motion and leaves some behind, and by Day 5 there is a column of you on every kilometre of track between Moscow and here, and the you on the train is what is left.
In sleep-debt and in not-eating and in the slow watching of a country you do not have a word for, something of you leaves every hour. You do not notice it leaving. You notice what is left.
The compartment-mates of this morning are a woman and her teenage daughter who boarded at Ilanskaya. The woman knits. The daughter reads something on her phone. Neither speaks to you, and you are grateful for the not-speaking, and the not-speaking is the register your body is in now.
You eat a biscuit. You drink tea at forty rubles per glass, which is the rhythm your money knows by now. You watch the landscape flatten toward the east.
At eleven you walk to the end of the car to stretch your legs and to look at a different version of the same corridor.
The man at the end of the car is standing in front of the samovar but not using it. He is maybe forty, in a jacket that is too big for him, and he is muttering a sentence you catch half of.
"— and the rest is not silence." He says it to the wall. He says it with the conviction of a man who has been in the middle of a thought for a long time and has only just arrived at this end of it.
You have heard him before. Not him, specifically — but the type. A man at the end of a bar who has been saying sentences like this since before you were born and will be saying them after you have moved on. A man Auden would have catalogued, somewhere.
The samovar whistles.
He does not turn.
You do not fill your cup. You do not need the cup filled. You turn and go back to your compartment.
Some hours go by.
You do not sleep but you close your eyes. The compartment-mates come and go. The daughter laughs once at something on her phone and the laugh is a nine-second piece of a girl's life inside the train and then it is gone. The knitting-woman says something to her daughter about tea.
The train has been slowing for fifteen minutes.
The station is a station whose name in Cyrillic is above the platform and below the platform and you read it in the seconds before the train stops. Chernyshevsk. You have heard the name. You do not know what you know about it. The station was named in 1906 for a writer who died in 1889. He was never on this platform.
The stop is scheduled for twenty-two minutes — passengers onto and off, supplies, the engine drinks something only it knows. You stay in the compartment. You look out the window at the platform.
The platform is narrower than the Yaroslavsky platform was. The building behind it is long and blue and has weather on it. An old woman with a wheeled bag is walking toward a car. A man in a uniform is smoking. A young soldier is on a bench, alone, with nothing.
Then there is another man on the platform, two cars down, standing with his back half-turned to you, and you know him before you know him.
The jacket. The stillness. The line of the shoulder.
Keep your face still.
He is not looking at your car. He is not looking for you. He is waiting for something of his own — a phone message, a person, a train going the other way. His hand, the right hand with the small comma-scar, is in his jacket pocket. He takes it out. He puts it back. He takes out a phone and looks at it.
He is on this train and he is getting off here, or he is getting on a different train here, or he is here because he was always going to be here and you did not know it until now.
The futility of the train arrives in your body at once and in several places. It is in your spine. It is in the small of your back. It is at the back of your jaw.
He is two cars down. Or a car back. You do not know which. He is here.
In headaches and in worry, the days go. In waking at three and lying with your eyes on the ceiling and not being a person who sleeps, the hours go. In the body of a train that moves east, the country is entered and the country keeps more than you keep of it.
The train gives a small shake. It is the shake that precedes motion. Lenz — the man on the platform, whose name you will not say out loud and cannot unsay in your head — puts the phone back in his pocket. He turns. He walks. Not toward your car. Toward his.
You do not see him board.
The train moves.
You sit on your berth.
The daughter's knitting-mother looks at you briefly and then does not look at you. She says something small to her daughter. The daughter replies without looking up from the phone.
You are the only person in this compartment who has just seen what you saw.
I am on a train with a man who is on this train.
I am moving east through a country I thought I could move through, and a man whose name is a name I read on a ticket stub is also moving east, and he is moving east because he is, and he is moving east because I am, and I do not know which of those two sentences is the sentence.
Keep your face still.
The light outside is going.
The compartment-mates eat. The daughter shows her mother the phone. The mother nods.
You close your eyes.
You do not sleep.
The train moves east. Something of you leaves at every kilometre. What is left is what is on the train.
The ceiling is orange. The orange is not a color. The orange is the light they leave on in Russian trains at night so that passengers do not fall walking to the bathroom. The orange does not go off.
I am awake.
I have been awake, at this level, for a day and a half.
The train moves east.