Century #4: Dragon of Seas by Pierdomenico Baccalario

beside Linda’s, and in front of them is a wool-lined cradle with a baby girl sleeping inside it.
    Now the woman is working on her pajama top and Linda has to dodge her elbow. Still, it’s a quick process and in under a minute the woman has taken off her good dress and put on her trainclothes. She folds the dress and shoves it, crumpled, into the luggage rack over their heads.
    Linda is horrified. “You can’t leave it like that,” she murmurs, biting her lip. “You’ll ruin the crease!”
    But the woman beside her couldn’t care less about the crease. She tosses everything overhead, including her shoes, and ends up barefoot, as are her husband and many of the other passengers in the train car. Rows of shoes hang by their laces, jackets and shirts are draped over seats, swaying with the train’s every lurch. The air is filled with the hum from the heater and has a mix of smells that are anything but pleasant: sweat, cheap soap, gasoline, salted fish, smoked mutton and other odors better left unidentified. The train car doesn’t have compartments—just rows of high-backed wooden seats divided by a central aisle and small folding tables. In Linda’s row, across the aisle, four men have been playing chess for hours. That is, two are playing and the other two are watching. And although there’s probably a No Smoking sign somewhere, the players appear to have no intention of obeying it.
    Linda sits in her little corner, trying not to touch, look at or breathe in anything. Her large suitcase has been stowed in the train car behind theirs and her small traveling bag is on her lap, sealed tight. She’s so tense that she’s on the edge of her seat, ready to spring to her feet at the slightest contact.
    On the other hand, the woman next to her seems more relaxed now that she’s in her pajamas. She even offers Linda a cup of coffee as thick as motor oil.
    “Oh, no, thank you!” Linda exclaims, horrified but polite.
    She stares at the cup as it’s passed halfway around the train car and back again to be refilled. When the woman’s husband holdsthe cup out to the baby in the cradle, Linda can’t stand it any longer. “No! You can’t give coffee to a baby!”
    The man with the mustache stares at her, not understanding, so Linda takes the cup away from the little girl and sits down again.
    “Ah, da!”
The mustachioed man smiles, thinking Linda wants to finish the coffee herself. Holding back a shudder, she raises the cup to her lips and pretends to take a sip.
    “Daaa!”
the mustachioed man cheers as his wife offers her some more.
    Linda politely declines and tries to concentrate on the monotonous landscape passing by outside the window. It’s the endless expanse of the taiga: green fields, shrubs and countless rivers dotted here and there with tiny villages of little wooden houses or huge cement buildings devoid of beauty, the work of some overzealous local party administrator.
    Once the thermos has been put away, Linda studies the train car again. The chess players smoke like chimneys as they calculate their next moves. A thick cloud of smoke hangs in the air over their wooden seats. A few of the travelers noisily flip through newspapers as big as bedsheets.
    Linda imperceptibly unzips her bag. She takes out a slip of paper folded in eight, on which she’s written down her departure and arrival times. But once the train set off, she realized that for some strange reason both schedules are in Moscow time, which means two time zones ago, so the times on the clocks at the various stations don’t coincide.
    Sighing, Linda tries to sort it out in her mind: ten more hours on the train, she thinks. Or eight. Or twelve.
    She huffs, completely downcast.
    Then she reflects. She’s surrounded by strangers who don’t speak her language. But maybe she could try to make herself useful.
    She unzips her bag a bit wider and pulls out her little Italian-Russian phrase book.
    “Hmm … so …,” she begins, staring