Eastbound by Maylis De Kerangal

Author:Maylis De Kerangal [De Kerangal, Maylis]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Steerforth Press
Published: 2023-02-07T00:00:00+00:00

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Later, they sit facing each other, exhausted, and although she fights to resist—after all, she doesn’t know this guy, he might go through her things, might steal them or worse—might attack her in her sleep (he did threaten her earlier, didn’t he?)—Hélène falls asleep in front of Aliocha, who’s taken aback, and suddenly stands guard.

He keeps his face turned away at first so as not to see her. Not because he’s scared of her—she’s not big enough to give him any trouble, one smack would be enough—but he has no way to anticipate her movements, her reactions: she’s a Westerner, and he doesn’t spend time with Westerners, doesn’t know how they work. The only thing he knows is that the moment the two women knocked on the door, Hélène stepped over into his camp. In the second when she opened the door to let them see that she was indeed alone—in that second she became his accomplice. She may not even know why she did it, maybe just for fun, to play the game. But she didn’t act under duress, he’s sure of it: she’s a different story, he doesn’t know what, but it’s something else.

She lies stretched out in front of him on her side, lids still smudged with yesterday’s eyeshadow, mascara dry at the ends of her lashes, rumpled shirt, black nails. How far is she going? Two bunks for her alone, the whole compartment to spread out, how much would this madness cost? He doesn’t dare get up to rummage through them but notices a few papers on the table, reaches out an arm like a pincer, touches the pile from a distance, among them a train ticket—he recognizes the rectangular cardboard, thicker than the other papers—picks it up, and with some difficulty makes out the boxes filled in with codes mixing numbers and Cyrillic, capital letters, small letters. Twenty-seven thousand two hundred and twenty rubles. He slowly re-reads the number. His saliva tastes of burning metal. He makes out the destination. Vladivostok. That’s where she’s going. That’s at the other end of the country, in the east, he knows this much, there’s ocean there, a naval base where the country’s fleet is anchored in secret, light gray buildings reeking of machine oil, undetectable submarines with unknown destinations, just like him. What’s she going to do there? The only thing he knows is that now there’s something they share.

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