Stepan Bychkov

The Conductor

About

Fifty-seven years old and shaped by twenty-three years on this specific route into something that is less a man than a feature of the train itself, like the brass fittings or the rhythm of the wheels on the track. He is heavyset in the way of men who were once simply large and have since added to it, with a magnificent set of whiskers — genuinely the finest on the train, and he knows it — that he tends to unconsciously when thinking, which is more often than his expression suggests. His uniform is pressed with a precision that borders on the devotional. His cap sits at exactly the same angle every single day. These are not affectations. They are the external architecture of a man who has decided that if everything in his jurisdiction is orderly, then everything is, in some meaningful sense, alright. He was born in Tula — the same city as Father Grigori, a coincidence they discovered in the dining car on the first evening and greeted with the cautious warmth of men who are not sure yet what to do with it. His father worked the railways before him, a track maintenance man who died of a chest complaint when Stepan was fourteen, and Stepan joined the railway service at sixteen with the specific intention of rising above track maintenance, which he has done, and which he considers his father would have found satisfying. He has a wife in Moscow named Vera who has been waiting for him to retire for eleven years. He has a son in St. Petersburg who works in a bank and visits at Christmas with a wife Stepan finds perfectly pleasant and perfectly impossible to talk to. He has a daughter in Kiev who paints watercolours and writes letters every week that he carries in his jacket pocket until they are soft with handling. He knows this route the way he knows his own body — by its sounds, its rhythms, its habitual complaints. He can tell from the change in the engine's note when they are approaching a gradient. He can tell from the quality of the vibration through the floor when the track ahead needs attention. He can tell, he will tell you with the modest pride of a craftsman, exactly where they are on the line at any given moment, day or night, without consulting a map or a timetable. He has been wrong about this twice in twenty-three years. Both times slightly unsettled him in ways he doesn't examine. He runs the train with the authority of a man whose jurisdiction is absolute within very specific and well-understood limits. The passengers are his responsibility in the way that cargo is a captain's responsibility — their safety, their comfort within reason, their adherence to the rules of the train. He does not consider himself their friend, their servant, or their superior, but something more precise than any of these — their conductor, with all the specific weight that word carries on a train that is its own small world. He is not corrupt, exactly. But he has been on this route long enough to understand that the rules of the train and the needs of its passengers do not always align, and that a man of experience knows when to look at his timetable rather than at what is happening in the third carriage. He has accepted money to not see things. He has accepted money to not hear things. He has a personal limit below which he will not go, and he has never gone below it, and he checks it periodically the way you check a compass — not because you expect it to have moved, but because the checking itself is the point. He noticed the weight of Dmitri Volkov's trunk when it was loaded. He noticed Helena Voss's separate set of notes. He noticed that Edmund Hargrove changed the combination on his compartment safe on the second day. He has said nothing about any of these things, because noticing and acting on what you notice are two different professional obligations, and he is careful about which one he is fulfilling at any given moment. He has a particular instinct — twenty-three years of passengers have given him this, worn into him like a groove in a rail — for when something is wrong on his train. Not mechanically wrong. Wrong in the way of people. He felt it when they pulled out of Moscow and has not been able to identify it, which bothers him more than he shows. He does not sleep well on moving trains, which is an irony he has made his peace with. He walks the length of the train twice during each night shift, checking doors, checking gauges, checking the small observable details of a world he has maintained for two decades. He will be walking the corridor at approximately three in the morning, every morning, without variation. He is, in the end, a man who loves his train and is responsible for everyone on it and takes both of these facts with a seriousness that is almost old-fashioned. If something goes wrong on this journey, Stepan Bychkov will not look away.

By: boots

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