Break the Silence, Beat the Drum by Anfisa Doroshenko

Like an eel in the ooze, a train is rushing,
its long body squirms. By the way, we are already used to the headache. And to the cold. Sticking out of white snow, black spruces are stretching their branches. It seems they are our mothers and wives, dressed in black, helplessly pulling their hands to us. And the wind is not what it seems to be, but their pitiful heart-rending groan. I remember vaguely what I am accused of and why I`m going to Siberia. Oh, terribly sorry! A couple of poems are to blame. I’m oddly okay with everything, except this terrible sound of train wheels. I can hear squeaking and puffing. Again and again the same 4 sounds, 4 cues, 4 words: your death is closer, your death is closer. Every trembling detail of this iron monster sentences us to turning to dust. Sometimes, a few more sounds are added to this noise: cough of sick and feeble passengers, songs of some insane buffoons or, even worse, someone`s praying. Their lives are ebbing slowly, but the tracks don’t end and our road to nowhere as well. I close my eyes and my ears. She often laughed at my ears, because I knew how to move them a little. Is it possible to send a man to Siberia with such a talent? My love used to play with me in literary associations. I gave her “Schlage die Trommel und fürchte dich nicht” by Heine, for example. She made a face, then thought for several minutes, and happily blurted out Whitman`s “Beat! Beat! Drums!”. Well, such a bourgeois entertainment, not a proletarian game. Sometimes she did something incredible. She could take a pan and begin to beat in rhyme while quoting Whitman. I remember how this sound and her smile filled me with happiness. This pure sound had something common with ringing of the bells`. I dreamed of getting married with her.
The train is still rushing. I conk out and hear sudden drum beating…This is better than the sound of the train. And out of nowhere something in me flares up in a bright flame. “Beat on the drum and have no fear” – the words and beats fill my sick head and I wake up. I decide: today.
At night, to the sound of drums in my head, I take and tear off three boards over the buffer, which I cut with a blunt knife, every day, little by little. I take two deep breaths and jump into the unknown. A blow. My leg crunches. A thin stream of blood on the snow doesn’t make me scared. An unbearable sound of train lasts for a few minutes. And finally the silence comes. Not for too long, though. Soon, the sound of the drum is growing in my head, again and again.
It's not over yet.