06:14.
The train has been slowing for twenty-three minutes. You have been awake for an hour watching it slow. The landscape has gone from taiga to low hills to something that is not hills and not plain and is the kind of place where the land is deciding about the sea.
Your bag is packed. The boots are on. The long shirt that is not yours is folded at the bottom of the bag — you have started thinking of it as yours in the small way an object becomes yours by living with it, and you are going to keep it. Sixteen thousand eight hundred rubles are divided between the boot and the jeans. You have spent eight hundred since Moscow. The count is not the count of a woman who did not count.
The compartment is quiet. The knitting-woman and her daughter are both asleep. The knitting is in the lap of the sleeping woman. The phone is in the hand of the sleeping daughter.
You sit with your bag on your knees.
07:40.
The provodnitsa comes through and taps each door. Vladivostok. One word. The word you have been walking toward for six days.
The train slows further. Buildings appear in ones and twos — a low warehouse, a fence with rust, a road with no car on it, a road with one car on it, a road with several cars. The Pacific is not yet visible. You can smell it before you see it. The smell is a cold that is different from the metal cold of Siberia — it is a cold with salt in it, a cold that has been somewhere else first.
You stand. You sling the bag. The knitting-woman wakes up and says something to you in Russian that you do not catch, and then she says "udachi" — luck — and you nod, and she goes back to folding her knitting.
08:06.
The platform.
You step down.
The Pacific is not here yet — it is two streets away, under a sky that is grey in a way that is a specific Pacific grey — and the light is a morning light that is about to become a day light.
You walk the length of the train toward the station building. You do not look for him.
The platform has the passengers of the train becoming people-off-the-train, which is different from passengers. An old couple with four suitcases. A man in a business coat. A family of five. A young man with a guitar case and a hangover. A woman in a hijab with a child sleeping against her shoulder. None of them are the man with the scar on his hand. You catalogue the absence.
Your boots hit the concrete and the concrete is what concrete is and also is the concrete of the city where Nina died.
Keep your face still.
The station.
The station is small. The ceiling is high and has a painting you do not look at. The signs are in Russian and in a transliteration that insists on being helpful. Vladivostok. Vokzal. You know both words.
The announcements are in Russian. A woman's voice. Arrival-departure, arrival-departure. Between the announcements another voice is reading at the pace of news. You do not listen.
You walk through the station. You go to a bench. You sit.
You take out the Xiaomi with the nameless contact. The signal is Russian signal, five bars. You type, in English: Arrived. You send. You put the phone back in the coat pocket.
You sit for some minutes.
You are in Vladivostok.
You are in the city where Nina died.
You are in the city where on May 16, a woman you did not know but who had sent a voicemail to your phone in a language you half-know died in the water. The woman who said "ya znala tvoyu babushku. Oksanu." The woman Jana sent. The woman whose voice you played in your apartment in New York and did not know what to do with.
You are sitting on a bench in the building that woman arrived at.
She arrived. She went to the water. The water did something. The water is two streets away.
Outside.
You walk out of the station.
The sky is the sky the Pacific has at this hour in June — grey-blue, high, the kind of sky a photograph cannot catch because the grey is in the air and not in any object. A bus is at the stop. A taxi is at the rank. A woman is selling something wrapped in paper from a small cart — pirozhki, the smell is pirozhki, cabbage, you buy one for sixty rubles and eat it on your feet in the street and the pirozhki is hot and the cabbage is good and a piece of pastry sticks to your lip and you wipe it off with the back of your hand and you have been traveling for six days.
The body has had something to eat.
The body has arrived.
The harbor in the distance.
You walk toward the water because the water is why you are here.
The street slopes toward it. The buildings are the buildings of a port city — low, ochre-and-grey, some with signs in Russian and some in Korean and one in Japanese — and the street smells of diesel and of the specific bread smell of a pirozhki woman and of the sea, and the sea is ahead of you, and the sea is the sea Nina was in.
I have been walking east for six days.
I am in the city of a woman who said she knew my grandmother.
I am going to the water.
The harbor in the distance is grey and blue and flat. The harbor does not know anything.
You keep walking.