The train rocked with a rhythm that had long since dulled into a background complaint. Not the smooth kind, like Misha had imagined after seeing a photograph of a Swiss train once, but a stuttering, groaning lurch that rattled his knees and his nerves in equal measure. He pressed his boots flat to the floor as if that might steady the world around him, and flipped the page of Atlas of Human Anatomy for the Student Doctor with a care he did not extend to the dog-eared corner now folding into itself as though caught in a door frame.
His eyes had been stuck on the same diagram for half an hour. Something about the hepatic portal vein. Something important, he assumed, since it had a long name and two arrows.
A cough broke the quiet in the cabin. Misha flinched and lowered the book a fraction, just enough to catch the blurry edge of movement across from him. The man who had coughed—a barrel-bodied type with a paper-wrapped package tucked under one arm—was smiling faintly. Not at him, Misha realized after a beat. At the window. Or perhaps at the fact that they were twenty minutes outside Novgorod and the cabin no longer smelled like boiled eggs and damp wool.
The man caught Misha looking and nodded. Misha nodded back, jerkily, then vanished again behind the book.
He didn't like this part. Being seen.
The anatomy textbook, dense and written in a tone somewhere between scientific and vaguely scolding, had become his defense. He wasn't sure what he thought he was hiding—his face, his nervousness, his ridiculous belief that if he just stared long enough at the illustration of a pancreas, he might actually start to understand it—but the moment he stopped reading, someone might talk to him. Worse, they might ask why he was going to Leningrad.
He hadn't yet figured out how to answer that without sounding like he didn't belong there.
The train jerked again, harder this time. The pages fluttered in protest. Misha's elbow knocked against the wall of the compartment. He made a small noise—not quite a curse, not quite anything—and muttered a clumsy apology to the textbook itself.
He glanced out the window. The trees were getting thinner now. No more fat birches hugging the track side like village women waiting for post. No more tin-roofed sheds or little boys waving halfheartedly from fences. Just pine now, stretched out and indifferent. The sky looked like old laundry—pale, not quite clean, and pulled taught over everything.
With some reluctance, Misha reached into his coat pocket and retrieved a folded piece of paper, creased from too much handling. The acceptance letter. He didn't need to read it. He had it memorized. But he read it anyway, as if it might suddenly change—might say, We regret to inform you… instead of The Ministry of Health has decided…
His name looked strange in print.
Mikhail Petrovich Petrov: Admitted to First Year Studies, Pediatric Medical Institute of Leningrad.
He didn't feel like a Mikhail Petrovich. Mikhail Petrovich sounded like a tall boy with even teeth and a sturdy handshake. Someone who walked like he belonged wherever he went. Not a boy from Bolotny who once failed a physics exam because the test supervisor had the voice of his grandmother and it made him nervous.
He folded the paper again. Tighter this time.
The train hissed against a curve in the tracks. Somewhere down the corridor, someone shouted in that cheerful, exhausted way soldiers sometimes did when returning home or leaving something behind. Laughter followed. Then quiet again.
Misha's stomach grumbled. He ignored it. His mother had packed two boiled eggs and a roll with poppy seeds—he'd eaten one egg, but the yolk had been too dry, and the roll smelled faintly of last night's cabbage. He thought about it, then pushed the thought away and tried again with the textbook. This time it was a page on the brachial plexus. No arrows. Just a spaghetti of nerves.
He traced the lines with a finger. Then did it again.
The woman sitting diagonally from him, older, with heavy cheeks and a basket under her seat, leaned forward. "Student?" she asked in a voice both curious and resigned, the way people ask about the weather.
Misha looked up. Blinked. "Yes," he mumbled. Then coughed. "Yes. First year."
She smiled, but it wasn't unkind. "Doctor, then."
"I—hope so."
"Leningrad?"
He nodded.
"You'll need better shoes," she said, glancing at the scuffed leather. "And gloves. My cousin lost three fingers last winter. Surgeon. Didn't matter what kind of doctor he was after that."
"I have gloves," he lied. She nodded again, satisfied, and settled back into her coat. Misha let his breath out slowly and tucked his boots further under his seat.
The man across the cabin offered him a mint candy. Misha took it without thinking, said thank you, and struggled to unwrap it discreetly.
The train pulled them forward.
By late afternoon, the air in the compartment had thickened with sour heat and the smell of over-worn wool. Misha's collar itched. He shifted. The book fell shut. He didn't bother opening it again. The pages had begun to feel like they were judging him.
He leaned his forehead against the cool windowpane.
Leningrad.
He tried to picture it as something real, not just a city with its name printed on the acceptance letter. He saw the institute in flashes—cold marble floors, bright lights, clean coats. People who knew how to pronounce Latin words without sounding confused. He would need to become someone else to fit in there. Someone sharper.
Another hour passed. The trees thinned further. Then buildings. Then light.
When the train finally wheezed into the station, the sky was a shade of grey that swallowed all the color off people's faces. Misha stepped down from the car and immediately felt the pull of the city around him: fast, foreign, and full of people who walked like they had somewhere important to be.
He adjusted the strap of his satchel. The textbook inside felt heavier now.
He stood on the platform for a full minute before moving. Not because he didn't know where to go—he'd memorized the tram route twice—but because the station itself loomed like something from a dream too big to be real. Every surface shined. Every voice echoed. Even the pigeons seemed louder here.