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overheard a man talking to her father in the parlor. A noise of a teacup against its saucer. It was four in the afternoon. Already her mother had gone to bed. Or perhaps she hadn’t gotten up.
    Her father’s voice, almost too low to hear: “Dolly didn’t want it.”
    “Well—”
    “To break up a baby’s gravestone!”
    “People feel strongly about certain things. There are … Some things are not …” A loud sigh. The noise, like the hiss of a snake’s tongue, of feet on the thick carpet. “You must, for your own peace of mind, find it in yourself to forgive.”
    Alice watched the man depart. His rickshaw had a long red fringe on its canopy.
    T HE CAPTAIN LOOKED out the window. “Often there isn’t so much snow, sometimes just bare ground. A lot has fallen for the past month.” As he spoke, he rehearsed the familiar motions of touching his hat brim, mustache, and pockets. “This enterprise,” he said excitedly, “will have a more important influence on the progress of man than any other undertaking.” His voice grew loud, as if he were making an announcement to a crowd. “On the progress of civilization!”
    Alice watched the empty landscape. “What enterprise?”
    “Why, the train! The great Siberian railroad, of course!”
    “Oh.” Alice had never considered a land so impoverished that it lacked trains.
    “I helped in its construction,” the captain said.
    “Did you?”
    “Yes. That is to say, as engineer … And the army … What I mean to say is, the people who are indigenous, the … they were savages. They threw rocks and knives. Bones. Anything they could. They threw themselves at the workers to prevent them from laying the tracks.”
    Litovsky described the construction process. A train filled with men and equipment moved across the frozen landscape, every tree and rock and hill rendered white, a veritable tabula rasa—that was how they had understood it, Litovsky and the others. It was the ready page: the eager, empty future upon which the team of engineers would inscribe their extraordinary gift to posterity. According to the plans they drew, the construction train proceeded, laying track in front of itself, some days progressing no farther than a half a mile, creating the steel road that would offer to the far eastern reaches of Siberia things of which her people hadn’t yet dreamed: Coffee and vanilla from South America! Books from Paris! Glass from Venice! Medicines from New York! Seventeen-jewel watches from Geneva! Whatever Siberia lacked, whatever she desired, would come to her.
    “Picture this train, this train that invents itself, that chooses its own direction. It can happen only the one time.” Litovsky put his hand up to the window. “If only … if only I could convey the majesty of it,” he said. “The impossible, grand audacity. It was beautiful. Even after … No one could deny its beauty.” He fell silent, staring out at the fields of snow. On cloudless days, the setting sun had lit up the new steel rails; it made them into a burning path, at the end of which some saw a light that was heaven, some an inferno. The native people had been frightened. They possessed instincts he lacked.
    “Were they really savages?” Alice had looked carefully at the people at the last station. As they stood together in silent groups, their faces had possessed a squashed look, flattened as if by fatigue. Their eyes were narrow, like Chinese eyes. Except for a few gypsies, begging to tell the passengers’ fortunes for a kopeck or two, the Mongol people on the platform stared in wordless awe at the towering blue train, its locomotive shuddering dyspeptically on its great grinding wheels while belching black clouds. The station house was filled with men dragging huge bundles of skins, the air heavy with the smell of tanneries, acrid and nauseating.
    “Savages?” Alice asked the captain again. “Are you sure?” The people on the platform had seemed incapable of the