THE BEST IN CONTEMPORARY RUSSIAN FICTION
IN ENGLISH TRANSLATION

FEAR OF FROST

(excerpt, Glas 42)

Railway stations are the crossroads of our lives, where we abandon our well-worn ruts and intersect with a multitude of other people. We become exposed there to all the circumstances that make the essence of these crossroads – be they railway stations, hospitals, stores, laundries, canteens, airports, or communal toilets. They are always a test of a society's ability to think and to act. They are indicators of its lung function. Arrive by night at a railway station or an airport, and you will hear how wheezy, how laboured is our breathing, how we sigh, how we choke on clots of blood. Night decants its sediment, and it is terrible.
Here waiting passengers are sleeping right on the floor. The fortunate few are huddled along the walls while latecomers make do with a pitch across a passageway. They are uneasy, ashamed at the outset, but fatigue erases their feelings, wipes the creases of expression from their faces, and crumples any trace of bearing. They all sleep the same sleep, indiscriminate, heavy and shameful.
The people sleep, leaning shoulder to shoulder, their defenseless, childlike faces painful to behold. Husbands embrace their wives awkwardly, ashamed of exhibiting in public this ordinary, intimate gesture. Mothers shield their children between themselves and the wall. The children sleep with pale, frightened faces, tense against the stuffiness and the heat. They sleep on newspapers, bags and boxes, on the bare, soiled floor. Here’s a one-legged man sleeping with his head leaning against a seat.
In this world, expensive fur jackets jostle with soldiers' greatcoats, felt boots with army jackboots, children's overcoats with leather jerkins, and fur hats are of all descriptions. There are workingmen asleep here, and doctors and schoolchildren, officers, teachers and managers. This is equality. This is the lowest common denominator of the barracks, the easiest one of all to achieve.
We have grown used to being patient. History has taught us discipline. But today, when bread has long been unrationed, when class enemies no longer breathe so hotly down our necks, from whence derives this universal submissiveness, our so easily depreciated sense of human dignity?
The man who sleeps on the railway station floor and also suffers his daily dose of torture in the queues is a daily witness to filth and rudeness. He will never feel like watching a full-length television documentary, never dream of owning a factory, never read the biography of a parliamentary candidate, and will never, ever, give shelter to his neighbour. Who ever gave a shelter to him?
It is shameful that we only become human beings in times of flood or fire or war. Can only tragedy make us raise our heads?
Where did our self-respect go, and why did it leave us all at the same time? We have all lost it, not only the man sleeping on the filthy tiles of the station floor but the station managers too. I do not believe that, just in order for people to relate to each other decently, we have to start with billions of roubles, or with reliable suppliers of goods. Before all else, we need some sense of human dignity, common to all of us, independent of the "system", with its roots in self-respect.

Do people who manufacture sophisticated cameras, computers, yachts, space stations, marble memorials and granite riverside drives have to suffer in inhuman conditions waiting for a train or a plane in station buildings where there is no room to move for the bodies lying on the floor?
It was in the army that I first became aware of the lack of self-respect. I understood then that I lacked something that would have enabled me to call myself a human being. It was easy to humiliate me. The entire army system of relationships beyond the military manual – like fagging in a public school – is built on daily humiliation, both physical and moral which amounts to savagery. Serving in an elite unit, I had no right for a year to wash morning and evening, to go to the library or to watch television. The first time I was stripped and beaten in the toilets, it was because, watching the news, the only program allowed, I had seated myself slightly apart from the lads in my draft.
In the army, I understood that there is not enough justice to go round. They invent their own justice in the army. They model our society after their own fashion: one group crushes another. In order to survive, you have to crush someone else. This does not end with your release from the army.
Moral losses are like radiation, colourless and odourless, and the more terrifying for that. The man who has been treated as a non-person finds it very easy to live afterwards. It sets my very teeth on edge when I hear the words "The army is a good school of life" – it's true!
Until my army service, I had hated the endless food queues, been exasperated by the formalities of production meetings, and my spirit yearned for something it lacked. But after the army I became quite reconciled. I saw, and still see all around me, the ingrained humiliations of the army. Yet how little we all need for our happiness! Never mind the queues and the rude salesgirls – we've bought something, haven't we? Never mind if we sleep on the floor – we're travelling, aren't we? Even if it's without a seat, in an unheated compartment – we're going home! Never mind if the boss curses – at least he's not beating us! Never mind if the toilet's filthy – it's still better than doing it in the bushes.
The army is not responsible for what goes into the psychology of relationships beyond the military manual. It is no paradox – and it certainly won't soften the dedovschina system – that a man, humiliated for an entire year, will subsequently humiliate and beat in his turn. The more fiercely, the more he has been beaten himself.
I first saw a man die with my own eyes at a quiet little railway station. The stationmaster had twice announced the departure platform incorrently. There were frequent duplications in the reservations, condemning people to act according to the savage principle of "finders, keepers". The passengers therefore, and among them this particular ex-serviceman, rushed over the bridge from platform to platform to meet the long-awaited train. This man was lucky: he reached his carriage first and, breathing heavily, began to shove his way towards his compartment, hanging on for dear life to his two suitcases, which he needed in order to grab two extra seats, for his wife and daughter. He wanted them at least to be able to sit down, even if there was not enough room to lie down. The man's heart gave out in the narrow corridor, and he fell face down. The other passengers, huffing and puffing, clambered over his body, passing bags and boxes, hurrying to secure their places.
When everyone had found a seat, they eventually carried the man out on to the platform, where his daughter gave him artificial respiration. She did it expertly – he must have suffered from heart trouble – but she could not save him. He had just wanted to secure his place on the delayed train. Our way of life gave him no choice. The daughter was groaning pitiably for breath, pressing rhythmically on the man's ribcage. In her hands was the life of her father who in childhood had seemed immortal and whose face now, on the grey asphalt, after a happy vacation, had become strange and dreadful. People stood around, the carriage attendant looked out – wasn't the signal green yet? The passengers craned out of the windows. The man died.
They carried his suitcases on to the platform, and the train pulled out.