Alone in Dead End
The story of the last resident of the former railway workers' settlement "Dead End 9 km"
We're continuing our story about Russia's Dead Ends. This idea has now brought us to the Sasovo railway station in the Ryazan region. Nearby is the Republic of Mordovia, where the former railway workers' settlement "Dead End 9 km" is located. An old woman lives there now. Alone. The second-to-last resident of Dead Ends, also a pensioner, was taken in by her children several years ago.
The only way to get to Tupik, at kilometer 9, is by train. It's on a so-called "wagon." That's where Tatyana Mikhailovna and I agreed to meet. She takes this wagon every day to the neighboring village of Kustarevka. "She does little things, like helping her grandchildren." There's no road to Tupik.
A ticket from Sasovo to Tupik costs 102 rubles. The ride takes about 45 minutes. There were two carriages.
Dead End Bus Stop
I join two women on one of them. They're returning to the 15 km with groceries. Among them: a shovel and a toilet seat. Apparently, these are top sellers here. In the next row, passengers are carrying the exact same items. In villages, toilet seats are used for outdoor toilets. They're placed on a step with a hole in it.
The 9th kilometer dead end belongs to the Republic of Mordovia, and our 15th, though further away, belongs again to the Ryazan Region. How this happened, we don't know. So Sasovo is our regional center. We come here to the savings bank, the hospital, and some of us go to work. We leave in the morning, finish our chores, and head back home.
You probably know each other in these trailers? You know Tatyana Mikhailovna?
Tanya? Of course. She's taking the next trailer. We'll show her what she looks like when we get to Kustarevka. She takes the trailer in the morning and comes back at lunch. She has goats, you can't leave them.
Tatyana Mikhailovna She boards the commuter train in Kustarevka with her daughter, who has come to visit her mother from Saransk. They are pulling an old rug on a sled. Her bag contains groceries and cans of goat's milk.
Before we can start talking, we're already there. We jump out into the snow, fortunately there's not much of it. We follow the tracks for another kilometer to the only residential building here. There aren't many buildings in Tupik. It turns out there was a fire here many years ago, and most of the houses were destroyed. No one died, but the children didn't rebuild their parents' houses after the fire and simply moved their elders to the mainland.
We used to have a lot of people here. About a hundred! And they worked at the station, washing the train cars; there was a second railway line. And there was a timber processing plant. They made window frames and log cabins there. Then they loaded them onto train cars and shipped them even to Moscow. Then perestroika happened, and everything was rebuilt. Only old people were left to live there, and after the fire, they left too. And I have nowhere to go. My second daughter and her grandchildren live in Kustarevka in a small house: a kitchen and a room. Where would I be, supposed to sleep by the door?
I worked at the 15th kilometer. I went there by train, or with a commuter train, and in the summer I walked along the side of the tracks. I worked receiving and delivering train cars.
And have you tried to cancel these two trailers? They are clearly unprofitable, aren't they?
Oh! These little train cars really got on our nerves. There weren't many people here anymore, and there was this stationmaster in Sasovo who decided to cancel the lunch car. My grandchildren were living with me in Tupiki at the time; they had to go to school. I even wrote a complaint to Putin. Personally, with a receipt. He received it! He told me to expect a response within a month. And while I was waiting, a commission from the Moscow Railway came on an inspection trip, and I stopped them, saying, "This and that." I told them, "I have two grandchildren here, and a girl who is visually impaired." They said, "Don't worry," and took us to Kustarevka. By then, we'd been walking for two months. I'd left with them on the commuter train in the morning, and in the evening, we'd walked back along the line ourselves. But we held our ground! They got our train back.
Isn't it scary to walk along the line here? In winter there's nowhere to even jump, only into a snowdrift.
Okay, so there aren't many trains running these days. And I know all their schedules. Incidentally, our line even used to have a club car. It had a sort of auditorium in the car, where you could watch a movie. There was also a clinic, with a doctor. And a store. It ran once a month. You could see a movie, shop, and see a doctor all in one go.
Hey, are you making a movie about me or something? There's a better guy for a movie, a man from Moscow. He's taken me under his wing, and I'm so grateful for his help. He even brings gas and helps with hay. There's this guy, Vladimir Ushakov. Write it down. He's a local, lived in another village, and always dreamed of moving to Tupiki. He liked it here. He even bought himself a log cabin, but then he decided to hold off, saying he'd let the kids grow up for now...
Well, here we are.
"I have nowhere to go."
Tatyana Mikhailovna has lived in this house for 36 years. Now it's completely slanted with age. The house is small, with one room divided into two. The kitchenette is tiny. There's a geranium and a money tree on the windowsill. The latter, however, "doesn't help." There are 13 cats in the house! The compassionate Tatyana Mikhailovna adopted them all from Kustarevka. One cat is missing a paw.
A pension of 14 rubles is barely enough to feed such a small household. At least this year she didn't have to buy hay for the goats—they haven't eaten last year's hay yet. One bale costs 800 rubles. And then there's the delivery. She gets help with the delivery: "There are good people everywhere."
They wanted to turn off our power here. Thank you, we also called and they helped. They even called Moscow. They stood by me. And the electricians are great guys, they don't leave me alone. If there's a breakdown or a tree falls on the line, they come and fix it.
Do you only pay for electricity here? And land and house taxes?
— No, I don't pay taxes. It's not my house. It's someone else's. And whoever owned it is dead. So who needs this house? They sent me land deeds once, pennies, and then they stopped. So I've been living here for 36 years. Thanks to people who help. Volodya came and redid my wiring, and, excuse me, he never took money from me. He even sent me money once. I said, oh, Volodya, don't. But he believes in God, that's the thing... Or there's that same Valya Gorokhova from Studenets, she and her husband always bring me hay, on a snowmobile. For example, they'll bring these bales of hay to Sasovo, and from there they bring them back to me. And they help me stack them.
And one time there was no car, the road was impassable, even the forester, who cuts down trees here, a complete stranger, lent me his big Ural, and gave him a tractor to bring me hay. I later wrote him a thank-you note in the newspaper. There's no one to hold a grudge against; everyone helps.
Tatyana Mikhailovna talks about how much she loves this place—the forest, the swamp where crucian carp used to live, but now, unfortunately, it's overgrown, the silence, her goats… And then she says she's tired of living like this; she's 73, after all.
She would have left if they'd given her a comfortable apartment in Kustarevka, closer to her grandchildren. But who would? She'd been on a housing waiting list for a long time back in the Ulyanovsk region. "Everyone kept saying, 'We'll finish building this five-story building and we'll get an apartment in it right away.' But they build it, they build it, and they're all just giving it away through connections." So she never got an apartment.
So I moved into this little kennel and here I am. For now, I can still walk, and then we'll see. Well, I've lived here for 36 years, of course, I've gotten used to it. And even now, at that age, it's not advisable for elderly people to move to a new place. They usually say you don't live long after that. But I don't want to die, I want to live a little longer!
What do you do if you're sick? You can't call an ambulance here.
Yes, an ambulance won't get here. You can only call one to Kustarevka. And you have to get to Kustarevka yourself. I was sick last year, my leg gave out for three months, and my daughter came here with me. My grandchildren came and helped. They brought me groceries and washed me. The paramedic in Kustarevka prescribed injections and ointment. And I don't like going to hospitals; I've never been to a hospital in my entire life, and I don't need it. Ugh, ugh!
There's another reason I want to stay. My grandmother dreams of finding her old flame. The last time I called the apartment in Minsk where he lived, they said he no longer lived there. And they didn't say where he'd moved to.
That's how it happened in my life: I missed out on a good man and married a drunkard. Maybe it was before I died, but I had this strong desire to find him. Sometimes you lie there and think, Lord, please help me find him. And then the Lord sent you to me. Maybe you can help? Anatoly Mikhailovich Korotkikh, born January 17th, 1948. Former military man, tank driver, studied in Ulyanovsk. That's where we met... I have a lot to tell him... I called once, but it's very expensive to call Minsk, and I didn't have much money on my phone, so we were disconnected. I didn't even have time to tell him anything. I wish I could have given him my address right away, fool that I am. And where can I find him now? But I want to! I really want to find him, I don't know why.
"We live one day at a time"
At home, daughter Larisa is stoking the stove. Her grandson built it using instructions from the internet. Photos are on the wall. Everything grandma has: two daughters, four grandchildren, and even a great-grandson.
Oh, my God, my God... We live here. Winter has just begun. Winter is boring, of course. Summer is more fun. But the mosquitoes are a real nuisance. You should come here in the summer—it's beautiful here, especially in the spring. I love April so much... We don't know what awaits us next. We live one day at a time.
It's getting dark quickly outside. I ask Larisa to show me where to board the train, early, while it's still light. There's no station as such here. I'm worried the train will fly past. After all, no one has boarded the train in Tupiki in the evening for years.
The train will definitely stop. It has a schedule. It has to. Even if no one is standing. Because people live here. And even if no one lived here, they need to officially close this Dead End. Don't worry, they'll turn on the streetlight here soon. And there's a bench over there.
Where's the bench? I can't see it. This one! I wouldn't have even noticed it. Is this like a platform?
No, the platform is what we're standing on, right here under the snow. And the bench is supposedly the platform. Mom's still worried about bringing in a big sign with the station information, when it would have been better to have at least a small booth to protect us from the rain and snow.
Tatyana Mikhailovna comes out to see me out the gate, waves goodbye, and we each part ways into our own darkness. I walk along the railroad tracks past a pitch-black forest. Only a light in the distance shows us where to go. It's a little scary. They said there are wolves and lynxes here. My sister calls—we both grew up at the train station—and advises me to wave a flashlight at the train so it will notice. And when I hear a locomotive approaching, I turn on the flashlight on my cell phone and wave it vigorously. The horn beeps. Once. Twice. That means they've spotted me. I board the carriage; it's empty. I'm the only passenger.
