The Yermakov Transfer

She ordered more coffee. “Do you live in Moscow, Harry?”

He nodded. “I have an apartment there. I’m a journalist in case you’re wondering.”

“I guessed as much. Do you find it difficult? I mean with the restrictions and everything?”

He was silent for a moment, thinking that this beautiful girl with her long blonde hair and blue eyes was very perceptive. Unconsciously, perhaps, but with an unerring knack of asking the pertinent question – sensing that he had a special status. He also thought she was tough, like one of those pioneering Englishwomen who had traversed the steppes and taiga at the turn of the century; therefore her fear had a formidable source.

He dodged the answer by saying: “It’s usually me who asks the questions. What are you doing crossing Siberia?” he asked.

“Escaping,” she said, staring out of the window.

“We’re all doing that,” Harry Bridges said. “Escaping from what? The police? A jealous lover?”

“Just escaping.” She pointed at a railway siding called Naked Boy Halt. “It looks as if I’ve made it.”

“The Wild East,” Harry Bridges said. “Wilder than the West ever was. Especially farther east. Escaped convicts, Cossacks, gold barons, bandits. In Irkutsk they used to have six murders a week until the whole town was burned down because the firemen were all drunk.”

“Look,” she said. They gazed at gentle hills covered with birch and red pine, running with streams. Beside the railway stood a log-cutter’s hut with red and blue, fretworked eaves. An old woman with a hard, ancient face was feeding geese beside a pond tissued with ice.