Riding the Iron Rooster (6 page)

I said, "Why don't we go to the Berioska shop first?"

Tatyana dressed and we found a taxi. It was a twenty-minute ride and well after five by the time we arrived. But for me it was simply a way of saving face—and saving money. I had been disgusted with myself back there at the apartment.

Before we went into the shop the three women started bickering. Olga said that it was all my fault for not making love to Natasha when I should have. Tatyana had to meet her daughter at school, Natasha was due home because she was going to the Black Sea tomorrow with her husband and small child—and was counting on having a cassette recorder; and Olga herself had to be home to rook dinner.
Vremya,
Natasha said,
vremya.
Time, time.

I had never seen such expensive electronic equipment—overpriced radios and tape decks, a Sony Walkman for $300.

"Natasha wants one of those."

Olga was pointing to a $200 cassette machine.

"That's a ridiculous price."

"It's a good cassette. Japanese."

I was looking at Natasha and thinking how thoroughly out of touch these people were with market forces.

"
Vremya,
" Natasha said urgently.

"These are nice," I began trying on the fur hats. "Wouldn't you like one of these?"

Olga said, "You must buy something now. Then we go."

And I imagined it—the cassette recorder in a Berioska bag, and the dash to Tatyana's, and the fumble upstairs with Natasha panting
vremya, vremya,
and then off I'd go, saying to myself: You've just been screwed.

I said, "Tatyana, your daughter's waiting at school. Olga, your husband's going to want his dinner on time. And Natasha, you're very nice, but if you don't go home and pack you'll never make it to the Black Sea with your husband."

"What are you doing?"

"I have an appointment," I said, and left, as the Berioska shop was closing.

I went to the Bolshoi, and I noticed at the coat check and the buffet and the bar, Russian women gave me frank looks. It was not lust or romance, merely curiosity because they had spotted a man who probably had hard currency. It was not the sort of look women usually offered. It was an unambiguous lingering gaze, a half smile that said: A
lay be we can work something out.

Moscow had a chastening effect on the tour group. They became very quiet and rather wary. They seemed actually afraid—something I had not expected. Was it the glowering soldiers and police? Or perhaps the repeated security checks, and having to show your hotel ID card before you were allowed into the lobby? Or was it the big bare buildings and wide streets? Ashley said he felt very small in Moscow.

Kicker winked and told me that in his three days in Moscow he had not left the hotel. He said he was afraid of being picked up and never heard of again.

"Why would they do that?"

"I was a Marine," he said. "They kill you for things like that in Russia. Let's get out of here. That's what I say."

It was a dark rainy afternoon when we set off from Yaroslav Station on the Trans-Siberian. The people in the group were nervous and chatty—glad to be going but apprehensive about what it would be like. Some had never spent a night on a train. They were faced with four nights to Irkutsk, living at close quarters—Americans in one compartment, British in another, Australians in a third, the nameless French foursome together. From the moment I was assigned to my compartment I knew it would be a splendid trip: I was alone. I had my Polish provisions, and chocolate and champagne that 1 had bought in Moscow. 1 had books, and my shortwave radio. I was looking forward to four days of bliss.

It is an unusual feeling in the Soviet Union, because they do not cater to the individual—they hardly seem to notice that the solitary traveler exists. If a person enters a Russian restaurant alone, it takes ages for him to be served; but the group of thirty-five drunken Finns chanting "Suomi! Suomi!" (Finland! Finland!) are fussed over and fed and are back on their tour bus in less than an hour. The Soviets prefer to feed large groups of people; they like herding them and lecturing them and counting them and sending them on their way. The individual is often dangerous and always a nuisance. Why bother with individuals when it is so much easier to bully a whole mob of tourists? The solitary traveler is despised and feared, and if he manages to triumph over the bureaucracy, he will find it twice as expensive as traveling with a group. Soviet society does not recognize the individual. The answer is simple: travel with a group and, when it suits you, drop out.

Traveling on my own I would never have had a sleeping compartment to myself. But two whole coaches had been allotted to this tour, and as the tour only filled one and a half coaches, some of us lucked out and were on our own.

That was why, rolling towards Kirov that first day, I was very happy—reading, drinking, listening to the news on the BBC, and writing down the odd episode with Olga and Natasha. It seemed to me like a sort of rest cure—idleness, and undemanding scenery, and they woke you for meals. And because we were in a group we were served before anyone else.

The experience of the Trans-Siberian Express is both monotony and monkish beauty: all day outside the loud, hurrying train it is birch trees and undulant hills, and after the utter blackness of night on that line, you see more birch trees and more undulant hills; and all that day too, until it seems more like wallpaper than a landscape—the kind of wallpaper that is so simple and repetitious that you look at the seams rather than the design.

There is no more austere sight in nature than birch trees set among small snow-covered hills, a study in black and white that is made starker by the crows and their nests, the fat black birds in the branches or looking deranged, flapping in the white sky.

We went through Perm, and passed the East-West marker at 1100 miles; and then to Sverdlovsk. The dwellings diminish and change from concrete towers in cities, to brick apartments on the outskirts, and then to houses made of planks that grow rougher until huts made of split logs appear, and these are replaced in the hinterland by plain log cabins with turf jammed into the chinks. In fifty or a hundred miles you see the entire history of Russian architecture.

Over lunch I was sitting with Blind Bob, Wilma and Morthole. Morthole brought us up to date on his rock collection: one from Berlin that had been thrown by a rioter, a chunk from Warsaw, a pebble from Moscow. He was planning to snatch something interesting at the twelve-minute stop in Omsk.

"These houses are horrible," Wilma said. She was wearing a wool hat over her baldness.

Morthole hadn't shaved and was looking whiskery. It always seemed ominous to me when a man stopped shaving on such a trip.

I remarked that they didn't seem to paint many of their houses out here—usually it was just the trim. In the poorer villages there was no paint at all. The log cabins and shacks just blackened in the rain and sun. And there was the proof out of the window: a whole settlement of black, chubby huts.

Wilma said, "I'd like to read something about it."

Blind Bob said, "Did you read that book by Paul Theroux, about taking this train?"

"No," Wilma said, and addressed me, "Did you?"

Flattening my face against the window I said, "Look at those birches! Isn't it amazing that you never see a fat one? They're all slender. Why do you suppose—"

"I read it," Morthole said, across the table. "The Gurneys have one of his books, I don't know which one. I saw Malcolm reading it in his compartment."

I made a mental note to avoid the Gurneys, but even so—sitting here—I felt like a hypocrite. But what was I to do? I hated being an object of attention. I had paid for my ticket, and so I had a right to my privacy. I hadn't deceived anyone; I had merely been economical with the truth. The alternative could be irksome—not just the conversations about writing books and "You should get yourself a word processor," but what I feared would be the duties of an unpaid guide. I had been on this train before; therefore, I ought to know whether that thermos bottle thing was a church steeple, and the name of that river, and if you could buy film in Irkutsk.

It was easy for me to keep to myself. I had my own compartment—plenty of space, plenty of provisions, the grapes, cookies, chocolates and tea that made being on the Trans-Siberian like a luxurious form of convalescence. It was a surprise to me that my little radio worked inside the train. At certain times of day I got the BBC news, and at other times Radio Australia or Voice of America. I listened to the Top Twenty, and the report of a Shakespeare Festival in China, and the fallout from the bombing of Libya. From the samovar at the end of the sleeping car, I got hot water for tea. And I divided the day into three parts and set myself tasks to perform: reading and writing.

That night a full moon was shining in the cloudless sky, and beneath it, water was lying everywhere, the melted snow flooding the birches. At midnight the moon shone from above and below this water and made the earth a glittering mirror on which leafless trees trembled, looking frail.

Every day is the same on the Trans-Siberian: that is one of its reassuring aspects. In itself it is not interesting, which is why it is such a pleasure to be a passenger and so maddening to write about it. There is nothing to write about. This train is an occasion, not a subject. It is more like an ocean liner than any other train I know—the solid steady travel, the sameness of the view. But in the thirteen years since I had last been on it, it had changed in many ways, and most of those changes were improvements. I assumed Gorbachev's cost-efficient approach to Soviet life was behind this. He had publicly criticized the uncaring attitude of Soviet workers: the old, grizzled
provodniks
on the sleeping car were gone, and in their place was a young couple who occupied one small compartment and worked in shifts. Gorbachev had denounced the drunkenness that was common in the country—the Trans-Siberian reflected this: a trip on it was no longer a binge. There were a few drunks on the train, but none dared to enter the dining car, and no alcohol was sold. The carriages were cleaner, and the officials fairly good-natured, and the passengers more prosperous looking. Still, at the longer stops, when I was strolling down the station platform I was buttonholed by Russians who asked: Want to sell your shoes? Want to sell your jeans? Want to sell your T-shirt? Perhaps it was only my imagination, but it seemed to me that there was something fundamentally wrong with a country whose citizens asked to buy your underwear.

Each day I moved my watch back one hour: Irkutsk is five hours ahead of Moscow. Losing an hour a day did not cause jet lag. Just after I awoke on the third day I looked out and saw a huge lake to the south: Ozero Chany (Lake Chany). Very soon we stopped at Barabinsk, which was cold—below freezing. Zhenia, the sleeping-car attendant, squinted at the sky and hugged himself and muttered
meg
(snow). Morthole drew my attention to the fact that some of the birches on the Barabinsk steppe were as fat as beer barrels—thicker than any birch I had ever seen. These older birches had black, burst-open bark on their trunks.

We came to Novosibirsk, on the river Ob. It is strange that this Siberian city should be so large, though not stranger than that Chicago should be—and like Chicago it is a city the railway put on the map. Much odder than this was the sight of so many sea gulls on the river—black-headed gulls, diving among the ice floes, over 1000 miles from the sea. The Ob itself, at 3461 miles long, is the fourth longest river in the world—longer than the Yangtze.

Once, Malcolm Gurney quoted with approval this know-it-all traveler, Theroux, who had done the trip some years ago. Everyone at the table listened with interest and apparent agreement. It seemed as though I was the only person who didn't agree with the wild generalization, and so I excused myself and left.

But I wanted to reveal myself and tell them that this train was much better than the one I had taken in 1973. It was more orderly, and cleaner, and seemingly more tolerant. What I remembered was that the dining car had run out of decent food after a few days, and we had lived on eggs and watery soup and stale bread; and I had a very clear memory of the thin soup sloshing in the steel soup bowls as the train jolted around long curves.

Clouds were massing and building towards the dazzling white moon just before I turned in. It had grown cold. In the immensity of the Siberian forest, amid the blue pools of snow and spiky trees, there were wolves and wild dogs—farther on I saw their skins being stretched on frames. It seemed to me hateful that they should make wolves into hats. When the moon was lost in the cloud cover, a blackness overwhelmed the view. I awoke at Taishet the next morning to driving snow.

It was spring snow—sudden, heavy and deep. The whole landscape was buried in it, with only a few brown muddy creeks showing through—no water, just a creek shape of chocolate ice cream straggling through the snow. The strange silence and isolation that snow brings to a place was intensified here in Siberia—or technically Eastern Siberia, as it said in Russian on the sign at the little wooden station at Uk. It snowed all day, and at times, as the train rolled through it, the snow was so thick that everything was white—the sky, the earth: nothing but a blankness with a few faint tracings of trees.

I had Rick Westbetter's word that the wooden townships looked like small towns in the Midwest in the 1920s—one-story wooden houses with steeply pitched roofs; and outside town a couple of filthy factories whose smoke was the same browny-gray as the clouds, and all around an expanse of prairie—in this case the great Gromboolian Plain of the steppes. Those places a few hours out of Zima all looked like Gopher Prairie. I was now reading
Main Street
and marveling at the similarity: the boom town in the middle of nowhere.

The snowstorm lessened in the afternoon, and later as we approached Angarsk what looked like a blizzard was the wind whipping the snow from the ground; it had stopped falling. Where the ground had been scoured by the wind, the soil was light brown and dry, the sort of frozen ground you can stub your toe against. It was not until I saw a falcon roosting on a bare tree that I realized that there was little sign of life here—just bare ground and drifted snow under an iron-dark sky. The train raced along, and I looked for more. I thought I saw magpies and crows, but it might have been a trick of the light.