The Trans-Siberian Sleeper Car Mystery

My wife went missing in February. I spent three weeks trying to convince myself she'd simply decided not to come home. By the time I boarded the Eastbound train out of Moscow, I knew that wasn't true. I'll go through it in order. Her name is Zoya. She's 41. She took the Eastbound train out of Moscow to stay with her aunt in Irkutsk. We'd had a bad year. I won't lay all of it out, but there was a distance in the flat you could have measured with a ruler, and one morning she said she wanted to go for a while. She'd made that trip a dozen times. She grew up out east. She could sleep on a train the way most people can't sleep in their own beds. For two weeks the messages came. Short ones. She was at the ants, the weather was hard, the signal came and went. I answered everyone. I told her I loved her. I asked if she was eating. I've had a long time since to think about who was reading those. The one that broke it came on the 8th of February. Everything is fine here, Yuri. Signal is bad at Aunt Larisa's. Don't worry about me, talk soon. My wife called me Yura, 19 years and not once Yuri, not on a birthday card, not in the worst fight we ever had, Yura. And she didn't use exclamation marks. She used to say they were for people who didn't trust their own sentences. I sat on the edge of the bed and read it until the screen went dark. I fixed things for a living. The refrigerators mostly and the front loaders people buy and then can't understand. It isn't clever work but it taught me one thing. When a machine stops behaving the way it always has, there's a reason and the reason is findable and it's usually small and already inside the machine. So I looked at the message that said Yuri and I did what I do on a job. I went looking for the small reason. I found her card two days later, going through her desk drawer for no reason I could have named. A folded square of paper, soft from handling, a list of rules for the train in someone's careful hand, Russian on one side and bad English underneath. Keep your curtains shut between three and four in the morning. If the train stops where it shouldn't, don't get off and don't look out. That sort of thing. Toya had written that line since she was a girl and I suppose anyone who rides it long enough ends up with one. Tourist stuff. A game the old women play with people who believe it. In the margin, in her small print, she'd written three words, "Don't trust the paper." I bought a ticket on the same train she'd taken, same number, same second class car, two weeks to the day. I booked it through to the end to Vladivostok, though the ants is at her kutsk and her kutsk is barely half the line. I think some part of me had already worked out that she might not be at the ants. I told myself I only wanted to walk up the platform at her kutsk and see with my own eyes that she was there and fine and cross with me for coming. The ninth car was up near the front. The attendant checked my ticket against her list. Titova, her tag said. Nadezhda Titova. Fifty's haired the gray of a filing cabinet, hands that had wiped that Samovar a hundred thousand times. Bykov, she said, reading it off her list, alone. Yes, she put a pencil mark beside my name. Nine days then. The trip is seven, and I let it go. She had the keys to my tea and my bed for the next week, and I wanted her friendly. My compartment was second from the end. Lower birth, a little table under the window, a blind you drew against the platform lights. I put the two cards, I'd come to think of them as two things, in the inside pocket of my coat and hung the coat on the hook. Down the corridor, a big man in the cruise gray stood by the boiler with his hands folded in front of him not doing anything. He looked at me, the way you look at a fridge you've been called out to see, then looked away. The Brigadier, Panov. That first night I decided he was bored and I was a stranger. A man traveling alone gets looked at. We came into Kirov a little before midnight, twelve hours down the line and stood there twenty minutes to take on water. I bought tea I didn't want from an old woman with a folding table, mostly to stand near a person who wasn't crew. She wrapped a pie I hadn't asked for in brown paper and put it in my hand. And while she did it, she looked both ways down the platform first. You go all the way, to the end? I said I did. She took a folded paper from under the table and pressed it into my hand with the pie. Your grip was a working grip, stronger than it had any business being. You follow? You tell nobody I give it. And then she was wrapping a pie for someone else and I wasn't there anymore. It was the same list, the same careful hand, near enough that in the cold I couldn't have sworn it wasn't Zoya's copy. I had two of them now, the racket was better run than I'd credited then. There'd be a stack of these printed somewhere and an old woman at every long stop from here to the sea. I got back on before the whistle. It was easier to think that than anything else, and there wasn't anything else yet. Only two identical papers and a cold platform. The young one was waiting by my door. He was maybe twenty-five in the same gray as Panov, but wearing it like it was borrowed. He'd been lining the tea glasses up in their metal holders, turning every handle to the same angle and his hands weren't steady. When he saw me, he opened his mouth and got out the front half of a word, then nothing. He gave up on the sentence. He took a used ticket stub from his breast pocket, already folded, warm from being held, and pressed it into my hand and closed my fingers over it with both of his. The same thing the old woman had done, the exact same thing. He held on a half second too long. From the end of the car, Nadezhda said his name, just the name. Lev. He let go and went quick toward the boiler and didn't look back. I read the stub under the reading light after they'd both gone. Three words printed hard enough to score the paper. Count the beds. I turned it over, but there was nothing on the back. I decided the boy wasn't well. You meet them on trains, people the cities are done with, sent east to relatives, and I put the stub in the pocket with the two cards. Then I lay down in my clothes and listened to the wheels find the joints in the rail. Sometime past two in the morning, I remembered I hadn't answered Zoya's last message. I wrote back that I loved her. The little grey check went blue almost before I'd put the phone down, at that hour in that country with no town for an hour in any direction. The signal out there was better than people said. I went to sleep on that. I woke on the second morning and the blind was up a hands width, not all the way. A hands width, the way Zoya left it in any room she slept in, at home in a hotel and I suppose on this train, all the years before I knew her. She said she couldn't sleep sealed in. I'd drawn it down the night before against the platform lights at some stop I didn't wake for. I know I drew it down, and in the morning it was up a hands width and the flat grey light of the taiga came in under it in a bar across the blanket. I looked at it for a while, then I decided I'd done it myself, half asleep because I'd watched her do it ten thousand times. People reached for a light switch in a house they moved out of years ago. I got up, I left it where she'd have left it. That was deliberate and I knew it at the time. I'd brought a photograph, not on the phone, a printed one from the same drawer as the card. Zoya, on a beach near Sochi, squinting it whoever held the camera, which was me. I took it to Nadezhda first. She was the one I saw most, standing at her counter up by the Samovar with the glasses in their holders. She looked at it for exactly as long as politeness needed. Nothing moved in her face. My wife, I said. She was on this train two weeks ago, this car maybe. Her name's Zoya, Zoya Bekova. You're traveling alone, Nadezhda said. I know I am. I'm asking about before, two weeks. She turned back to the glasses and started counting them, touching each one as she went. She got to the end of the row and started again from the beginning. I asked the others through the day, the man who worked the dining car, a second attendant from the next carriage. every time the same. the photograph a small shake of the head, then something to do with their hands that carried them away from me, pan off I didn't ask. He was always somewhere down the corridor, folding timetables or not folding them, and once when I came out of the washroom he was standing closer to my door than a man has reason to stand. He nodded at me and went back up the corridor at a walk. The dining-car man was the one who checked later. I'd bought a beer I didn't want to sit, and I asked him again quietly, and something in him gave a little. He looked at a screen behind the counter. He scrolled and frowned. He said a woman of that name had a booking two weeks back. Bykova, he read it out. And I had my hand flat on the counter, then he scrolled again and said no, that was this train, this week. There was no Bykova on it, only Bykov, only me. He looked at the screen, then at me, booking systems, he said. The spelling may be a maiden name against a married one. It happens, it does happen. I've spent a career on machines that give you two different readings depending on where you put the meter. That afternoon I started counting. The boy's note, count the beds, which I'd decided was nonsense from a boy who wasn't well, but a thing gets into you. We'd left Moscow with the car better than half full. I'd counted heads on the first evening out of habit. I count things. Orteen in our carriage that I'd seen, plus the ones I hadn't. By the second afternoon I could find nine, by evening seven. Compartments with bags in them at breakfast were made up clean by dark. The blankets folded into their blue squares. Nobody in them. I asked Nadezhda where the family from number three had got to. A mother and two children I'd heard the children in the corridor. "Herm," she said. "People get off in the night," she said. "It's a long line and a quiet season," she said, and none of it was said unkindly, and all of it could have been true. I wrote the numbers in my notebook. I write things down instead of shouting. Fourteen, then nine, then seven. The text came that evening going through the long tunnels before the river where the phone had no bars at all. I was watching the bars. I'd started watching everything. The screen was dark and then it wasn't. Joy's number. Made it to Aunt Larisa's warm bed. Sleep well, don't worry, all good here. No bars. I checked the little icon three times, not one bar, a hundred meters of rock over the roof of the car, and a message sitting there delivered. I told myself the phone had held it and let it through when I wasn't looking, that the timestamp was the phone's gas and not the truth. Messages cue. My own had done it to me at Kurskaya, three at once from the day before. This was the same thing running the other way. I wrote back that I loved her and watched the check go blue in the middle of the mountain, and I put the phone in my shirt pocket against my chest and left it there. There was a man two doors down called Pavel, Filatov, on the little brass holder by his door, a big loud salesman going home to Krasnojarsk. The first day he'd been the only warm thing on the train. He'd shown me his own card, the same card, and laughed at it and done the old woman who gave it to him at Nijni gripping my arm till nobody. We'd both laughed. He kept his curtains open at night. He said only a peasant sleeps with the curtains shut that he liked to watch the country go by, even black country with nothing in it. The rule about the curtains is the first one on the card. Between three and four in the morning, heaped them shut. I heard him that night through the wall, his voice low and friendly talking to someone passed three by my watch. I didn't get up, the card was in my pocket and I'd decided to do what it said, and doing what it said meant staying where I was. I lay still and listened to Pavel Filatov have a conversation I couldn't hear the other half of. After a while it stopped. In the morning, number six was made up clean, the blankets squared away. The brass holder was empty. When I asked the dining-car man, he didn't scroll the screen this time. He just said there was no Filatov and went back to wiping a counter he'd already wiped. I got the card out and read it all the way down. The first time I'd read it like it was true. Then I put it back in the good pocket with the photograph. I'd stopped thinking it was a game somewhere in the night. I couldn't put a time on it. By the third day I was keeping the card to the letter and hating myself a little for it. The curtain's down before three, door locked. I didn't speak to the two or three passengers still in the car and I didn't take the team nadezhda left unless she'd spoken to me first, which was the fifth rule and which felt insane in daylight and necessary at night. The dining-car did the same three things all week. Solyanka, a chicken cutlet with rice and a pancake with jam that came whether you'd asked for it or not. I had the cutlet four days running. There was a laminated card on the table with the prices and three currencies and somebody before me had picked the corner of the lamination up into a little strip and I picked at it too every meal without noticing I was doing it. I'd stopped sleeping in any real way. I knew what that does to a man and I said it to myself in the dining-car over food I wasn't tasting. You haven't slept Yuri, a man who hasn't slept sees patterns. That's all this is. Grief and no sleep. It was her argument, not mine. She was the sensible one and for a day it held. Then I counted the car again and got a different number. The messages had changed too or I had. That same afternoon one told me the ant's village was wonderful in the snow that she felt lucky that I should take care of myself. I told myself people go soft away from home. Zoyen never had. I read it four or five times looking for her in it and she wasn't there. Panov had taken to being wherever I was, not close, just present, at the end of whatever car I was in, hands folded, a big shape and gray with nothing in particular to do. Once I walked four cars down the train just to see and when I turned around he was three doors behind me, looking at a window with nothing out of it but snow. I don't know what I expected him to do. He never did anything. Nobody on that train ever did anything you could point to. Lev caught me in the cold rattling gap between two carriages where the noise covers everything. He must have waited for it. He came through the door behind me fast and got in close and his whole face was working. The jaw, the throat, the muscle under one eye and nothing came out of it. He looked back through the glass once at the corridor at whether Panov was coming. Then he took my wrist, hard, that same grip, the old woman's grip, the crew all had it and pressed a folded stub into my hand and shut my fingers on it. His eyes were wet. He got one sound out and went back through the door. I didn't read it. I stood in the cold with it in my fist and I didn't read it because I'd watched him check the glass and I'd decided that whatever it was, I didn't want to be holding it up to the light where anyone could see. I put it in the good pocket with the rest and went back to my compartment. We stopped that night where there was nothing. I knew there was nothing there because I'd learned the timetable by then and between the stop we'd left and the stop that was coming there were four hours of taiga and not one name. The train slowed that long, confident breaking, not the jolt of trouble and stopped. I heard doors, not hours. Somewhere up the train, a carriage door letting the cold in. The card is clear about this, if the train stops where it shouldn't, don't get off and don't look out. I lay on my side facing the window, blank it up, blinded down. I meant to keep my eyes shut. I managed about four minutes, then I opened them and lifted the blind with one finger, the width of an eye. There was snow and the black wall of the trees and back in the trees there were lights. Headlights, low and yellow, two of them where there was no road. And between the train and the lights a man was walking a passenger across the snow. One hand at the passenger's back, unhurried, the way you'd steer someone who'd had too much to drink or someone old. The passenger went along with it. I couldn't see a face, only a coat, and the careful short steps people take on ice, and the two of them got smaller and went into the lights until I couldn't see them at all. I put the blind down. I lay there with my heart going and built the ordinary version. A drunk helped off by someone who knew him. A local halt they don't print, a long line and a quiet season. I built it and I lay inside it and I didn't believe one brick of it. After a while the doors closed, somewhere up the train and we pulled away, that same smooth, confident going, and the lights slid back into the trees and were gone. In the morning there was no love. I don't mean he wasn't on shift. I mean when I asked Nadezhda for him, she looked at me with the mild patience you'd give a man asking after someone off a different train entirely. There was no love on this crew, she said. There was her, the second attendant, the brigadier. I said the young one, the one who couldn't get his words out, who lined up the glasses. She said the glasses were her job, always had been. She turned back to them and counted them under her breath, one to the end of the row and back. I went and sat in my compartment and got out the stub he'd been so frightened to hand me. That's how I thought of it by then, though I had no body, no proof, nothing but an empty holder and a boy nobody would admit had been there. I unfolded it under the reading light, one word pressed hard enough to tear the paper, backwards, the other way round. I got Zoya's card out and laid it on the little table and looked at her three words in the margin. Don't trust the paper, and loves one word beside them. I sat with the two of them a long time while the tiger went by. I read the card backwards that night and it read perfectly. It wasn't gibberish reversed. Every line turned over and stood up as its opposite and the opposite was sense, was in fact the only sense there'd ever been in it. Keep your curtains shut between three and four. Turn it over. Be seen. Sit at your window with the light on where anyone outside would clock a face. Don't get off when the train stops where it shouldn't. Turn it over. Get off. Get away from the thing while it's stopped and slow and its doors are standing open. If anyone asks where you're going, tell them. Tell everyone. Be a man with people expecting him somewhere, people who will phone the police at 10 past the hour he doesn't arrive. The card wasn't protection. I understood that sitting on my birth at some black hour with the two papers on my knee. It was a set of instructions for how to disappear, written kindly, handed to you by a grandmother with a strong grip who tells you it's for your safety. Do everything it says and you draw your own curtains and lock your own door and tell not one living soul the truth of where you've gone. I'd done all of it. Four days to the letter I'd been making myself easy. In Zoya had done all of it before me. Zoya who'd written this line since she was a girl who had one of these cards soft in a drawer who knew the rules and kept them like manners because her mother had taught her to. Don't trust the paper she'd written in the margin and then she'd kept every line of it. She'd drawn her curtains. She'd told the crew nothing. She'd stayed put when the train stopped where it shouldn't. She'd made herself easy and somewhere out in the four dark hours with no name on them. A man had walked her across the snow with a hand at her back and she'd gone along with it. Every rule kept right to the end. She had no reason on earth to think that was the trap. I looked at the phone last. Don't trust the paper. The messages were paper too. For two weeks I'd been texting somebody and putting her name on it. I didn't text her. I called. It rang a long time that flat foreign ringtone on and on in a place I couldn't picture and I'd nearly taken it from my ear when it stopped and there was a room on the other end. I could hear the size of it. And then Zoya said my name. She said Yura. Small and wrong and frightened. No brightness in it at all. My wife's actual voice saying Yura, where are you? And I couldn't get enough air to answer her the first time. I'm not going to get this next part in the right order. I've tried. I said I was on the train. I said I was coming. I asked where she was. She said she didn't know. They don't tell you. There were other sounds in the room with her and she said, "Yura, don't." And it was gone. Not hung up. Cut off midword. The same as the tunnels did. I called back and it rang out into nothing. Forty minutes later a message came from her number. It had an exclamation mark in it. It said she was having a lovely evening and hoped I was sleeping. I went and found the brigadier. I won't dress up what I did. I banged on the door of the crew compartment until Panau opened it. I held up the phone and the photograph. I told him too loud that my wife had been on this train, that she was out there off the line somewhere, that people were being taken off in the night. He knew it. They all knew it, and that he was going to stop the train. I heard myself. I sounded like the man I'd have crossed the road to avoid. Panau listened to all of it. That was the terrible part. He looked at the photograph properly longer than any of them had and something went over his face that I've decided since was almost sorrow, though I was in no state to read faces. Then he said quietly that I hadn't slept, that it was a hard journey to make a loan, that the dining car would bring me tea. And he put his hand on my back to turn me toward my compartment. I knew that hand. The weight of it, the ease of it, low on the back, steering. It was the hand I'd watched cross the snow. I looked at him and he looked at me, and neither of us said the thing we both knew. I let him walk me three doors down, because my legs had gone, and there was nowhere to walk to anyway. The train didn't slow. It never once slowed. Whatever I'd thought I could make happen by shouting, the machine simply took it in. It had taken in Filatov and the boy, and 9,000 kilometers of people before them, without hurrying, without a raised voice, the paperwork all in order. Because there was nothing to report, and that was the real trap. My wife was texting me that she was having a lovely evening. There was no love on the crew and never had been. There was no Filatov. The manifest had me alone from Moscow. I was a man who hadn't slept in four days, saying his wife had been taken off a train in the night, and she was texting me from a warm bed to say she loved me. I had a place now. That was all I had, or dark hours between two stops with no name and headlights back in the trees where there was no road, and Zoia somewhere passed them in a room she couldn't put a name to. I could have put my finger on the map near enough. I couldn't reach it, and there was nobody I could make believe it was there. I got off at her kutsk. That was where Zoia had been going, and I couldn't think what else a person does. I left three days of my ticket on the table with the tea glass. The station was ordinary. People met, people. A man sold roses from a bucket. The cold was the same cold as outside my own flat 5,000 kilometres back, and nobody on that platform knew that a train had come in behind me with a car that ran a little emptier than its manifest, and I couldn't have made them understand it if I'd stood on the roses and shouted. I carried my bag out through the doors into the city like a man arriving anywhere. Aunt Larisa lived on the fourth floor of a block behind the market. The stairwell smelled of cabbage and wet stone. When she opened the door she was smaller than I'd expected, and she had flower on her hands, and she knew me straight off from the wedding photographs. She was glad to see me. She was also confused to see me, and she kept glancing past my shoulder at the landing, at the place where Zoia should have been standing. I said I'd come out to meet Zoia. She said that was lovely, and that Zoia would turn up when she turned up, and did I want tea. I sat down in her kitchen. I'd had to stop twice coming up the stairs. The flat was warm, and it smelled of the same soup Zoia used to make, which I hadn't expected, and which took something out of me. Larisa put a cup in front of me, and a plate of something with cabbage in it, and told me to eat. I ate all of it. I couldn't have told you what it was. She wasn't worried at all. Zoia had written to her only the day before, and Larisa got her phone out of her apron pocket to show me, holding it out at arm's length, and tipping her chin down to find the words through her glasses. Then she read it to me out loud, and her own voice pleased with it. I'm seeing the country, Auntie. Everything here is wonderful. Don't you worry about me. She laughed at that. She said Zoya had gone sentimental in her old age and that she'd never written so much in her life. I asked if I could look. She gave me the phone without a thought. The message had come in at 10 past four the previous afternoon. There were four more from the same week, all of them signing off with something warm. I scrolled up past them, from before Christmas, in the same conversation, from the same number. Arrived. Cold here. Z. I handed it back and said it sounded like she was having a good time. Larisa asked how the two of us were doing. She'd heard we'd had a hard year. I told her we were fine. I sat in that woman's kitchen and I lied to her and then I finished the tea and then I let her fill the cup again. There wasn't a version of it I could have said out loud that wouldn't have ended with her looking at me the mild, patient way the crew had. A man who hasn't slept. I went to the police in her kutsk the next morning. A young sergeant took it all down properly, name, age, date of travel, what she'd been wearing as far as I knew. He wrote for about ten minutes without interrupting me, and I remember being grateful for it because I'd come in expecting to be laughed at. Then he asked when I'd last had contact with her. I said that morning. He stopped writing. I told him it wasn't her. I told him about the exclamation mark and about the name that she'd called me Yura for 19 years and the message said Yuri. I heard it leave my mouth and I heard exactly what it was. He was kind about it. He asked whether things had been difficult at home. I said we'd had a hard year. He wrote that down. It was the only thing he wrote after I started talking. In Moscow, weeks later, a different office and an older man who didn't write anything at all. At the end of it, he gave me a number on a slip of paper. Not a police number. A different sort of number for men who can't put down a grief. I took it and thanked him. I've never rung it. I called her phone every day after that for about a month. Mornings before work because if I did it at night, I didn't sleep afterwards. It rang out every time. Ten rings, then nothing. Then on a Thursday, at the end of March, it picked up. There was a room on the other end. I could hear the size of it the same as before. I said her name. Then I said Yura because that was the name she'd know me by. And if she was in that room, I wanted her to hear it. Somebody breathed, not close to the phone. Further back in the room, a person taking a breath in and letting it go and taking their time about it. Then it went dead. I called back forty times that day. It didn't ring again. It went straight to the flat. Nothing a number gives you when it's been switched off and it stayed like that for two weeks, and then the bright messages started up again as though none of it had happened. I stopped calling after that, not because it was doing me harm, though it was. I stopped because of the breathing. Whoever it was had been in no hurry and I couldn't get away from the idea that I'd been allowed to hear it. I've kept the two cards. I've kept the boys two stubs, count the beds, and the one word that turned the whole thing over. I keep them in a drawer, the way Zoya kept hers. Some nights I lay them on the table and look at them, to be sure they're real. Everything else I've got, somebody can explain to me. The photograph they'll explain, grief, a marriage that ended, a man who reads too much into an old picture. The paper's nobody can explain, so nobody looks at them. I can't hear her voice anymore. That's what I wasn't ready for. I had it for two minutes in the dark, the real one, Yura, and I've run it so many times in my head that I've worn it smooth. Now when I reach for it, I get my own voice doing an impression of hers, and I can't tell how far from her it's drifted. The messages still come. Not often now. Every few weeks, her number tells me something bright and light. She's well, she's happy, I should take care of myself. Last week it said she was almost home and couldn't wait to see me. From a warm bed in a place I'll never be shown. I don't know who reads it. I sent it anyway. It's the one thing on that whole line they let through in her direction, and if there's any of her still in the room where the phone is, I want the last thing that ever reaches her to be that. Two months later, a young man boards the Eastbound train at the Yaroslavsky station, a student traveling alone to see the country before he starts work. At one of the long stops past midnight, an old woman at a folding table sells him a pie he doesn't much want and puts a folded paper in his hand with the change. Her hands are bare in the cold. She tells him in bad English to read it and follow it and tell no one she gave it. "For your safety," she says. He reads the first line, something about the curtains between three and four, and he grins because it's exactly the kind of spooky nonsense he came out here hoping to find. He pockets it to show his friends. He feels if anything looked after. The attendant who brings his tea is a woman in her 40s with tired eyes. She wears a wedding ring. If you asked her about it, she'd look at her own hand a moment and then go back to the glasses. The door's closed. The train pulls East into eight time zones and a great deal of country with no one in it. He does everything the paper tells him. On the third night between three and four, he falls asleep with his curtain open and she comes down the corridor and draws it for him, gently so as not to wake him. The fourth night, the train stops where there's nothing and stands a while with the door open somewhere up the front and goes on. In the morning, his compartment is made up clean, the blankets folded into their blue squares. She sits at the end of the car with a phone that isn't hers. She finds the name he'd saved his mom and writes that he's arrived, that the signal is poor out here, that there's nothing to worry about. She reads it back to be sure it sounds like him. Then she puts an exclamation mark at the end and sends it. The answer comes before she set the phone down. His mother has been up waiting on it. She reads that and writes back that he loves her and sends that as well. Then she puts the phone in the drawer under the counter and goes to do the glasses because the car wants finishing before Novosibirsk. His mother will tell people he's traveling. She'll say it for a long time and she'll say it in their words. The signal's poor out there, he's seeing the country, there's nothing to worry about. They only have to take him. His mother does the rest. Thank you for staying till the end.