The Great Railway Bazaar

by Paul Theroux

  Just before dawn the sea was at its roughest. Again and again I was thrown upwards from my bunk, and once I hit my head on the bunk’s frame. At dawn – the light showed through the ice on the porthole – the sea was calmer. I slept for an hour, before being awakened by another bump to hear the following exchange.

  ‘Hey, Bruce.’

  ‘Mm?’

  ‘How’s your little Ned Kelly?’

  ‘Mawright.’

  ‘Ya throw ya voice?’

  ‘Naw.’

  ‘Gee, it’s rough! These beds make a hell of a racket.’

  Jeff was silent for a while. Anders groaned. I tried to tune the radio I had bought in Yokohama.

  ‘I wonder what’s for brekkie?’ Jeff said at last.

  Breakfast (salami, olives, runny eggs, damp bread) was served to eight passengers. The rest, including all the Japanese, were seasick. I sat with the Pole and Nikola. The Pole and I were talking about Joseph Conrad. The Pole called him by his original family name, Korzeniowski. Nikola wondered at my interest and said, ‘He writes about Staleen too, this Korzeniowski?’

  That was our last day on the Khabarovsk. It was sunny, but the temperature was well below zero – much too cold to spend more than a few minutes on deck. I stayed in the bar reading Gissing. Around noon Nikola showed up with an old grizzled Russian in tow. They drank vodka, and, once primed, the Russian began telling stories about the war. The Russian (Nikola translated) had been a mate on a ship called the Vanzetti – its sister ship was the Sacco – a decrepit freighter captained by a notorious drunkard. In a convoy of fifty ships crossing the Atlantic the Vanzetti was so slow it dropped far behind, and one day, when the convoy was almost out of sight, a German submarine approached. The captain radioed for assistance, but the convoy sped away, leaving the Vanzetti to fend for herself. The Vanzetti somehow eluded two German torpedoes. The sub surfaced for a look, but the drunken captain had swung his rusty cannon around; he fired once, puncturing the sub and sinking it. The Germans came to believe that this hulk, manned by incompetents, was a secret weapon, and gave the convoy no further trouble. When the Vanzetti limped into Reykjavik, the British organized a special party for the Russians, who showed up two hours late, bellowing obscene songs, and the captain, paralytic with drink, was awarded a medal.

  I saw seagulls in the afternoon, but it was five o’clock before the Soviet coast came into view. Surprisingly, it was bare of snow. It was brown, flat, and treeless, the grimmest landscape I had ever laid eyes on, like an immense beach of frozen dirt washed by an oily black sea. The Russian passengers, who until then had sloped around the ship in old clothes and felt slippers, put on wrinkled suits and fur hats for the arrival, and along the starboard deck I saw them pinning medals (‘Exemplary Worker’, ‘Yakutsk Cooperative Society’, ‘Blagoveshchensk Youth League’) to their breast pockets. The ship was a long time docking at Nakhodka. I found a sheltered spot on the deck, fiddled with my radio, and got gypsy music – violins scraping like a chorus of ripsaws. A deck hand in a mangy fur hat and ragged coat crouched by the davit. He asked me, in English (he had been to Seattle!), to turn the music louder. It was the Moldavian half-hour on Moscow Radio. He smiled sadly, showing me his metal dentures. He was from Moldavia, and far from home.

  2. The Vostok

  The Siberian port of Nakhodka in December gives the impression of being on the very edge of the world, in an atmosphere that does not quite support life. The slender trees are leafless; the ground is packed hard, and no grass grows on it; the streets have no traffic, the sidewalks no people. There are lights burning, but they are like lighthouse beacons positioned to warn people who stray near Nakhodka that it is a place of danger and there is only emptiness beyond it. The subzero weather makes it odourless and not a single sound wrinkles its silence. It is the sort of place that gives rise to the notion that the earth is flat.

  At the station (‘Proper name is Tikhookeanskaya Station’ – Intourist brochure), a building with the stucco and proportions of the Kabul madhouse, I paid six rubles to change from Hard Class to Soft. The clerk said this was highly irregular, but I insisted. There were two berths in the Soft-Class compartments, four in Hard, and I had found the cabin in the Khabarovsk a salutary lesson in overcrowding. Russian travel had already made me class-conscious; I demanded luxury. And the demand, which would have got me nowhere in Japan, where not even the prime minister has his own railway compartment (though the emperor has eleven carriages), got me a plush berth in Car Five of the Vostok.

  ‘Yes, you have question please?’ said a lady in a fur hat. The platform was freezing, crisscrossed with the moulds of footprints in ice. The woman breathed clouds of vapour.

  ‘I’m looking for Car Number Five.’

  ‘Car Number Five is now Car Number Four. Please go to Car Number Four and show voucher. Thank you.’ She strode away.

  A chilly group of complaining people stood at the entrance to the car the lady had indicated. I asked if it was Car Number Four.

  ‘This is it,’ said the American occultist.

  ‘But they won’t let us in,’ said his wife. ‘The guy told us to wait.’

  A workman came, dressed like a grizzly bear. He set up a ladder with the meaningless mechanical care of an actor in an experimental play whose purpose is to baffle a bored audience. My feet had turned to ice, my Japanese gloves admitted the wind, my nose burned with frostbite – even my knees were cold. The man’s paws fumbled with metal plates.

  ‘Jeepers, I’m cold!’ said the woman. She let out a sob.

  ‘Don’t cry, honey,’ said her husband. To me he said, ‘Ever see anything like it?’

  The man on the ladder had removed the 4 from the side of the car. He slipped 5 into the slot, pounded it with his fist, descended the ladder, and, clapping the uprights together, signalled for us to go inside.

  I found my compartment and thought, How strange. But I was relieved, and almost delirious with the purest joy a traveller can know: the sight of the plushest, most comfortable room I had seen in thirty trains. Here, on the Vostok, parked on a platform in what seemed the most godforsaken town in the Soviet Far East, was a compartment that could only be described as High Victorian. It was certainly pre-revolution. The car itself had the look of a narrow lounge in a posh London pub. The passage floor was carpeted; there were mirrors everywhere; the polished brass fittings were reflected in varnished wood; poppies were etched on the glass globes of the pairs of lamps beside the mirrors, lighting the tasselled curtains of red velvet and the roman numerals on the compartment doors. Mine was VII. I had an easy chair on which crocheted antimacassars had been neatly pinned, a thick rug on the floor, and another one in the toilet, where a gleaming shower hose lay coiled next to the sink. I punched my pillow: it was full of warm goose feathers. And I was alone. I walked up and down the room, rubbing my hands, then set out pipes and tobacco, slippers, Gissing, my new Japanese bathrobe, and poured myself a large vodka. I threw myself on the bed, congratulating myself that 6,000 miles lay between Nakhodka and Moscow, the longest train journey in the world.

  To get to the dining car that evening I had to pass through four carriages, and between them in the rubber booth over the coupling was a yard of Arctic. An icy wind blew through the rips in the rubber, there was snow on the floor, a thickness of heavy crystals on the car wall, and the door handles were coated with frost. I lost the skin from my fingertips on the door handles, and thereafter, whenever I moved between the cars of the Trans-Siberian Express, I wore my gloves. Two babushkas acknowledged me. In white smocks and turbans they stood with their red arms in a sink. More old ladies were sweeping the passage with brushwood brooms – a nation of stooping, labouring grannies. Dinner was sardines and stew, made palatable by two tots of vodka. I was joined halfway through by the American occultists. They ordered wine. The wife said, ‘We’re celebrating. Bernie’s just finished his internship.’

  ‘I had no idea occultists served internships,’ I said.

  Bernie frown
ed. He said, ‘I’m an M.D.’

  ‘Ah, a real doctor!’ I said.

  ‘We’re celebrating by going around the world,’ said the wife. ‘We’re on our way to Poland – I mean, after Irkutsk.’

  ‘So you’re really living it up.’

  ‘Sort of.’

  ‘Bernie,’ I said, ‘you’re not going to go back and become one of those quacks that charge the earth for curing halitosis, are you?’

  ‘It costs a lot of money to go to medical school,’ he muttered, which was a way of saying he was. He said he owed $20,000. He had spent years learning his job. Textbooks were expensive. His wife had had to work. It didn’t sound much of an ordeal, I said. I owed more money than that. He said, ‘I even had to sell my blood.’

  ‘Why is it,’ I said, ‘that doctors are always telling people how they sold their blood as students? Don’t you see that selling blood by the pint is just another example of your avarice?’

  Bernie said, ‘I don’t have to take this from you.’ He grabbed his wife by the arm and led her out of the dining car.

  ‘The great occultist,’ I said, and realized that I was drunk. I went back to Number VII, and just before I switched off the table lamp I looked out the window. There was snow on the ground, and in the distance, under a cold moon, those leafless sticklike trees.

  It was pitch dark when I woke up, but my watch said it was past eight o’clock. There was a pale dawn breaking at the bleak horizon, a narrow semicircle of light, like the quick of a fingernail. An hour later this glowed, a winter fluorescence on the icy flatness of Primorsk, lighting the small wooden bungalows, like henhouses with smoking chimneys, surrounded by fields of stubble and snow drifts. Some people were already up, dressed for the cold in thick black coats and heavy felt boots that made them look clubfooted. They walked like roly-poly dolls, their heavily padded sleeves making their arms stick out. In the slow winter dawn I saw one especially agile man sliding down a slope, steering his feet like skis; he carried a yoke and two buckets. After breakfast I saw more of these scenes, bucket-carriers, a horse-drawn sleigh with a man in it who looked too cold to crack his whip, and another man pulling his children on a sled. But there were not many people out at that hour, nor were there many settlements, and there were no roads: the low smoking huts were set without any discernible pattern in trackless fields.

  The sun broke through the band of haze and then shone in a cloudless sky, warming the curtains and rugs of the sleeping car. There were occasional stations, wood-framed, with gingerbread peaks, but we stopped long enough only to view the posters, portraits of Lenin, portraits of workers, and murals showing people of various colours looking courageous and linking arms. I looked for a reaction on the faces of the Japanese in the Vostok; they remained impassive. Perhaps the murals depicted Chinese and Russians? It was possible. This was a disputed area. All the way to Khabarovsk we travelled along the Chinese border, which is at that point the Ussuri River. But maps are misleading – this corner of China was no different from the Soviet Union: it lay frozen under deep snow and in the bright sunlight there were crooked forests of silver birch.

  The city of Khabarovsk appeared in the snow at noon, and over the next week I grew accustomed to this deadly sight of a Soviet city approaching on the Trans-Siberian line, buried at the bottom of a heavy sky: first the acres of wooden bungalows on the outskirts; then, where the tracks divided, the work-gangs of women chipping ice from the switches; the huffing steam locomotives and the snow gradually blackening with fallen soot, and the buildings piling up, until the city itself surrounded the train with its dwellings, log cabins and cell blocks. But in the history of the Trans-Siberian Railway, Khabarovsk is an important place. The great railway, proposed in 1857 by the American Perry McDonough Collins and finally begun in 1891 under Tsarevich Nicholas, was completed here in 1916. The last link was the Khabarovsk Bridge over the Amur River; then the way was open by rail from Calais to Vladivostok (now off-limits to foreigners for military reasons).

  Everyone got off the Vostok Express, most of them to catch a plane for the nine-hour flight to Moscow, some – including myself – to spend the night in Khabarovsk before taking the Rossiya Express. I jumped on to the platform, was seared by the cold, and ran back into the Vostok to put on another sweater.

  ‘No,’ said the Intourist lady. ‘You will stay here on platform please.’

  I said it seemed a little nippy out there.

  ‘It is thairty-five below tzero,’ she said. ‘Ha, ha! But not Celsius!’

  In the bus she asked whether there was anything special I’d like to do in Khabarovsk. I was stumped for a moment, then said, ‘How about a concert or an opera?’

  She smiled, as anyone in Bangor, Maine, might have if asked the same question. She said, ‘There is musical comedy. You like musical comedy?’

  I said no.

  ‘Good, I do not recommend.’

  After lunch I went in search of pipe tobacco. I was running low and faced six smokeless days to Moscow if I couldn’t find any. I crossed Lenin Square, where a statue of the great man (who never visited the city) showed him posed with his arm thrust out in the gesture of a man hailing a taxi. On Karl Marx Street newspaper sellers in kiosks said they had no tabak but offered me Pravda with headlines of the ‘Khabarovsk Heavy Industry Workers Applaud Smolensk Sugar Beet Workers on a Record Harvest’ variety; then to a lunch counter. My glasses steamed up; I saw misty people in overcoats standing against a wall eating buns. No tabak. Outside, the steam turned to frost and blinded me. This I corrected in a grocery store, piled with butter and big cheeses and shelves of pickles and bread. I entered stores at random: the State Bank of the USSR, where a vast portrait of Marx glowered at depositors; the Youth League Headquarters; a jewellery store, filled with hideous clocks and watches and people gaping as if in a museum. At the end of the street I found a small envelope of Bulgarian pipe tobacco. Coming out of the store I saw a familiar face.

  ‘Hear about Bruce?’ It was Jeff. His nose was red, his beret was pulled over his ears like a shower cap, his scarf was wound around his mouth, and he was dancing with the cold. He plucked at the scarf and said, ‘He’s butcher’s hook.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘You don’t know the lingo. Jesus, it’s cold! That’s rhyming slang.’

  ‘Butcher’s hook’ in cockney rhyming slang means ‘look.’ He’s look? It didn’t make sense. I said, ‘What’s it rhyming slang for?’

  ‘He’s crook,’ said Jeff, hopping, attracting the stares of passing Siberians. ‘Crook – don’t they say that in the States when someone’s sick?’

  ‘I don’t think so.’

  ‘He looked seedy this morning. Lips all cracked, glassy eyes, running a temperature. Intourist took him to a hospital. I think he got pneumonia in that fucking ship.’

  We walked back to the hotel. Jeff said, ‘It’s not a bad place. It looks like it’s coming up.’

  ‘It doesn’t look that way to me.’

  We passed a shop where about 150 people were lined up. The ones at the end of the line stared at us, but in the front of the line, at the half-open door, they were quarrelling, and if you looked closely you could see them crashing through the narrow entrance, all elbows, one at a time. I wanted to see what they were queuing for – obviously something in short supply – but Jeff said, ‘On your right,’ and I turned to see an enormous policeman gesturing for me to move along.

  There were some oriental-looking people in the crowd; Khabarovsk seemed to be full of them, plump Chinese with square dark faces. They are the aboriginal people of the region, distant cousins of the American Eskimos, and are called Goldis. ‘A sartorially practical tribe,’ writes Harmon Tupper in his history of the Trans-Siberian, remarking that they changed from wearing fish skins in summer to dog skins in winter. But in Khabarovsk that December day they were dressed the same as everyone else, in felt boots and mittens, overcoats and fur hats. Jeff wondered who they were. I told him.

  He said, ‘Tha
t’s funny, they don’t look like abos.’

  In the hotel restaurant Jeff made a beeline for a table where two pretty Russian girls sat eating. They were sisters, they said. Zhenyia was studying English; Nastasya’s subject was Russian literature (‘I say Russian literature, not Soviet literature – this I do not like’). We talked about books: Nastasya’s favourite author was Chekhov, Zhenyia’s was J. D. Salinger – ‘Kholden Khaul-field is best character in every literature.’ I said I was an admirer of Zamyatin, but they had not heard of the author of We (a novel that inspired Orwell to write 1984, which it much resembles), who died in Paris in the twenties trying to write a biography of Attila the Hun. I asked if there were any novelists in Khabarovsk.

  ‘Chekhov was here,’ said Nastasya.

  In 1890, Anton Chekhov visited Sakhalin, an island of convicts, 700 miles from Khabarovsk. But in Siberia all distances are relative: Sakhalin was right next door.

  ‘Who else do you like?’ I asked.

  Nastasya said, ‘Now you want to ask me about Solzhenitsyn.’

  ‘I wasn’t going to,’ I said. ‘But since you mentioned him, what do you think?’

  ‘I do not like.’

  ‘Have you read him?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Do you think there’s any truth in the statement that socialist realism is anti-Marxist?’ I asked.

  ‘Ask my sister this question,’ said Nastasya.

  But Jeff was talking to Zhenyia and making her blush. Then he addressed both girls. ‘Look, suppose you could go to any country you liked. Where would you go?’

  Zhenyia thought a moment. Finally she said, ‘Spam.’

  ‘Yes, I think so,’ said Nastasya. ‘For me – Spam.’

  ‘Spam!’ shouted Jeff.

  ‘Because it is always hot there, I think,’ said Zhenyia. The sisters rose and paid their bill. They put on their coats and scarves and mittens and pulled their woollen pompom caps down to their eyes, and they set off into the driving wind and snow.