Behold, the station. The old man helped me down from my throne of logs, the horse snorted its clouds into the white air. The days of hard travel had taken their toll on my body, I moved like a woman of eighty. Pine pitch and splinters stuck to my sheepskin and squirrelskin gloves. I held on to my snowshoes and game bag, unable to adjust to the assault of so many people. Travelers pushed past me as if I were a turnstile.
I gazed up at the arches. Here was where I went wrong. Here was my chance to begin again.
I shoved my way through the station and out onto the platform, where a train stood steaming, stinking, its wheels terrifyingly outsized. After the timeless introversion of the countryside, the noise scoured my ears, the child’s jerking alarm took my breath, and I clutched my snowshoes to my breast. First- and second-class passengers paced the platform, stretching their legs and doing furtive business with the peasant women selling
Perhaps the boy I’d been—Misha, that cheeky lad—would have chanced it. He had his way of staying afloat, but I couldn’t conjure him now, not with the child on the way, my face gone round, my breasts past binding. I was a woman in full and there was no escaping it.
Wisdom does not consist of making the best choice among many. Wisdom is understanding when there is no choice and taking the step that must be taken, without complaints or sighs. Hoisting my small bag higher over my shoulder, I walked to the platform’s end and climbed down, strapped myself into my snowshoes, and followed the rails through the fog.
A switchman’s shack emerged from the milky white.
I knocked at the poorly made door, the pearly gates of this sooty heaven, and swung it open without waiting for an invitation.Inside, a blackened stove warmed the small hut—no better than a wooden crate—where four men seated on boxes played cards. The kettle boiled. Steam coated the one greasy window. But which was the switchman, the one in charge?
“Comrades. Forgive me. ” I spoke quickly, holding my hands in the universal language of wheedling. “I don’t want to trouble you, but I don’t know where else to turn. My brother was a Vikzhel man, an assistant engineer. He said if I ever needed help, to turn to the railwaymen. ” I rummaged in the sack and pulled out Misha’s papers, presented them to the switchman. “I lost my position, a cook in a boarding house. The woman’s daughter came home from Petrograd and took my place. ”