by Paul Theroux
Vladimir bought a bottle of Hungarian wine and we played chess. He played aggressively, hovering over the board and moving his pieces as swiftly as checkers. Between moves he cracked his knuckles. I moved not to win – I knew that was beyond me – but to slow him down. He pushed at his chessmen; the train pushed into wind. Outside, the snow had returned and I saw that now we were getting two landscapes a day. The low Mongolian hills on the edge of the Gobi Desert were covered by cedars as finely formed as tropical ferns, and by four o’clock, as we made our slow approach to the Central Siberian Plateau, snow was blowing past the windows, tiny flakes in the trailing smoke. At a distance the snowstorm created the effect of fog, a whiteness over the Gobi that blended with the birch trunks and made the cedars seem especially frail. Siberia was wood and snow – even the railway buildings matched the forest: throughout Chitinskaya the stations were wooden structures made of many carefully slanted bare planks plastered with frost.
My chess worsened, but as long as the wine held out we continued to play. Two more games saw the end of the vodka and then, without drink, there seemed no point in going on. But we had the whole evening ahead of us. My napping had divided the days into many parts, each part resembling a whole day, a lengthened distortion of time familiar to a person with a high fever in a seldom-visited sickroom. At times this feeling of experiencing a futile convalescence on the Trans-Siberian turned into a simpler occasion for boredom; simulating my bad dream, it was like being snowed-up in a mountain cabin. It was cold, the light was poor, and it was hard to move around the train since most of the passengers, assigned to overcrowded compartments, preferred to stand in the corridors. And, really, there was nowhere to go.
I took out a sheet of paper and taught Vladimir tick-tack-toe. He found this, as he said, very interesting – the Russian word is similar – and soon discovered the trick of beating me at that, too. He introduced me to an immensely complicated Russian game for killing time. This consisted of drawing on graph paper ten figures of slightly varying geometric size, made up of squares. The more irregular the figure, the higher the score – or perhaps one was shooting for a low score? I never got the hang of this game. Vladimir finally gave up trying to teach me and returned to his sketching. I persuaded him to show me his sketch pad, and, amazingly, it was filled with page after page of telephone poles, pylons, high-tension wires, pictures of girders with wires webbed to them, and skeletal-seeming apparatus. This was his hobby, sketching vertical monstrosities, though he might easily have been a spy. He showed me how to draw a telephone pole. I feigned an interest in this unappealing thing and the called to the provodnik for wine. Two more bottles of the Hungarian wine came – the provodnik wouldn’t go until he got a glassful – and Vladimir drew a black cabin in a black and brown landscape, a low orangy red sun, and sky full of spiders. This he labelled ‘Siberia.’ Then he drew a picture of several spires, some large buildings, a blue sky, a sunny day.
‘Leningrad?’
‘Nyet,’ he said. ‘London.’ He wrote ‘London’ on the picture. He did another picture of London – a harbour scene, a schooner, ships at anchor, a sunny day. He did one of New York – tall buildings, a sunny day. But they were fantasy pictures: Vladimir had never been out of the Soviet Union.
Because he had insisted on paying for the wine, I broke out my box of cigars. Vladimir smoked five of them, puffing them like cigarettes, and the wine and the cigars and the knowledge that we were now travelling along the shores of Lake Baikal, returned Vladimir to his own language. He strode up and down the compartment, waving away the smoke, telling me what a deep ozero Baikal was, and finally slipped his hand inside his coat and, blowing a great cloud of smoke, said, in the halting momentous voice Russians reserve for quotations, but coughing as he did so,
‘I dym otechestva nam sladok i pryaten!’
and raised his eyes.
I said, ‘Eh? ‘
‘Pooshkin,’ he said. ‘Eugen Onegin!’
(Months later, in London, I recited my phonetic transcription of this verse to a Russian-speaker, who assured me that it was indeed Pushkin and that it could be rendered in English as, ‘Even the smoke of our motherland is sweet and pleasant to us.’)
In the dark corridor early the next morning the Australian librarians and the Canadian couple sat on their suitcases. Irkutsk was two hours away, but they said that they were afraid of oversleeping and missing the place. I thought then, and I think now, that missing Irkutsk cannot be everyone’s idea of a tragedy. It was still dark as Irkutsk’s flaming chimneys appeared above a plain of shuttered bungalows with tarpaper roofs. It is not the steel fences or even the tall cell blocks where the workers live that give these Russian cities the look of concentration camps; it is the harsh light – searchlights and glaring lamps fixed to poles – that does it, diminishing the mittened figures and making them look like prisoners in an exercise yard. Vladimir shook my hand and said a sentimental farewell. I was moved and thought charitably about the poor fellow, stuck in Irkutsk for life, until I went back to the compartment and discovered that he had stolen my box of cigars.
The provodnik entered the compartment, gathered up Vladimir’s blankets, and threw a new set of blankets on the berth. He was followed by a tall pale man who, although it was midmorning, put on a pair of pyjamas and a bathrobe and sat down to solve complicated equations on a clipboard pad. The man did not speak until, at a small station, he said, ‘Here – salt!’
That was the extent of his conversation, the news of a salt mine. But he had made his point: we were truly in Siberia. Until then we had been travelling in the Soviet Far East, two thousand miles of all but nameless territory on the borders of China and Mongolia. From now on, the Siberian forest, the taiga, thickened, blurring the distant hills with smudges of trees and hiding the settlements that had swallowed so many banished Russians. In places this dense forest disappeared for twenty miles; then there was tundra, a plain of flawless snow on which rows of light-poles trailed into the distance, getting smaller and smaller, like those diagramatic pictures that illustrate perspective, the last light-pole a dot. The hugeness of Russia overwhelmed me. I had been travelling for five days over these landscapes and still more than half the country remained to be crossed. I scanned the window for some new detail that would intimate we were getting closer to Moscow. But the differences from day to day were slight; the snow was endless, the stops were brief, and the sun, which shone so brightly on the taiga, was always eclipsed by the towns we passed through: an impenetrable cloud of smoky fog hung over every town, shutting out the sun. The small villages were different; they lay in sunlight, precariously, between the taiga and the tracks, their silence so great it was nearly visible.
I was now the only Westerner on the train. I felt like the last Mohican. Deprived of friendly conversation, denied rest by my bad dreams, irritated by the mute man in pyjamas and his pages of equations, doubled up with cramps from the greasy stews of the dining car – and, guiltily remembering my four months’ absence, missing my family – I bribed Vassily for a bottle of vodka (he said they’d run out, but for two rubles he discovered some) and spent an entire day emptying it. The day I bought it I met a young man who told me in fractured German that he was taking his sick father to a hospital in Sverdlovsk.
I said, ‘Serious?’
He said, ‘Sehr schlim!’
The young man bought a bottle of champagne and took it back to his compartment, which was in my sleeping car. He offered me a drink. We sat down; in the berth opposite the old man lay sleeping, the blankets drawn up to his chin. His face was grey, waxen with illness, and strained; he looked as if he were painfully swallowing the toad of death, and certainly the compartment had the dull underground smell of death about it, a clammy tomb here on the train. The young man clucked, poured himself more champagne, and drank it. He tried to give me more, but I found the whole affair appalling – the dying man in the narrow berth, his son beside him steadily drinking champagne, and at the window the snowy fore
sts of Central Russia.
I went to my own compartment to drink my vodka and saw in my solitary activity something of the Russians’ sense of desolation. In fact they did nothing else but drink. They drank all the time and they drank everything – cognac that tasted like hair tonic, sour watery beer, the red wine that was indistinguishable from cough syrup, the nine-dollar bottles of champagne, and the smooth vodka. Every day it was something new: first the vodka ran out, then the beer, then the cognac, and after Irkutsk one saw loutish men who had pooled their money for champagne, passing the bottle like bums in a doorway. Between drinking they slept, and I grew to recognize the confirmed alcoholics from the way they were dressed – they wore fur hats and fur leggings because their circulation was so poor; their hands and lips were always blue. Most of the arguments and all the fights I saw were the result of drunkenness. There was generally a fist fight in Hard Class after lunch, and Vassily provoked quarrels at every meal. If the man he quarrelled with happened to be sober, the man would call for the complaints’ book and scribble angrily in it.
‘Tovarich!’ the customer would shout, requesting the complaints’ book. I only heard the word used in sarcasm.
There was a nasty fight at Zima. Two boys – one in an army uniform – snarled at a conductor on the platform. The conductor was a rough-looking man dressed in black. He did not react immediately, but when the boys boarded he ran up the stairs behind them and leaped on them from behind, punching them both. A crowd gathered to watch. One of the boys yelled, ‘I’m a soldier! I’m a soldier!’ and the men in the crowd muttered, ‘A fine soldier he is.’ The conductor went on beating them up in the vestibule of the Hard-Class car. The interesting thing was not that the boys were drunk and the conductor sober, but that all three were drunk.
Another day, another night, a thousand miles; the snow deepened, and we were at Novosibirsk. Foreigners generally get off at Novosibirsk for an overnight stop, but I stayed on the train. I would not be home for Christmas, as I had promised – it was now 23 December and we were more than two days from Moscow – but if I made good connections I might be home before New Year’s. The tall pale man changed from pyjamas into furs, put his equations away, and got off the train. I cleared his berth and decided that what I needed was a routine. I would start shaving regularly, taking fruit salts in the morning, and doing push-ups before breakfast; no naps; I would finish New Grub Street, start Borges’ Labyrinths, and begin a short story, writing in the afternoon and not taking a drink until seven, or six at the earliest, or five if the light was too poor to write by. I was glad for the privacy: my mind needed tidying.
That morning I spent putting my thoughts into order, sorting out my anxieties and deciding to start my short story immediately. A woman of forty falls in love with a boy of nineteen. The boy wants to marry her. The woman agrees to meet the boy’s mother. They meet – they’re the same age – and hit it off, discussing their divorces, their affairs, ignoring the boy who, callow, inexperienced, only embarrasses them both by his surly insistence on marriage. So:
The Strangs had one of those marriages that goes on happily for years, filling friends with envious generosity, and then falls to pieces in an afternoon of astonishing abuse that threatens every other marriage for miles around. Friends were relieved when, instead of lingering in New York and persuading them to support her in her bitter quarrel with Ralph, Milly chose to go to …
The door flew open with a bang and a man entered carrying a cloth bundle and several paper parcels. He smiled. He was about fifty, baldness revealing irregular contours on his head, with large red hands. He had the rodent’s eyes of someone very nearsighted. He threw the cloth bundle on his berth and placed a loaf of brown bread and a quart jar of maroon jam on my story.
I put my pen down and left the compartment. When I returned he had changed into a blue track suit (a little hero-medal pinned to his chest), and, staring through the eye-enlarging lenses of a pair of glasses askew on his nose, he was slapping jam on a slice of bread with a jack-knife. I put my story away. He munched his jam sandwich and, between bites, belched. He finished his sandwich, undid a newspaper parcel, and took out a chunk of grey meat. He cut a plug from it, put it in his mouth, wrapped the meat, and took off his glasses. He sniffed at the table, picked up my yellow sleeve of pipe cleaners, put on his glasses, and studied the writing. Then he looked at his watch and sighed. He monkeyed with my pipe, my matches, tobacco, pen, radio, timetable, Borges’ Labyrinths, checking his watch between each item and sniffing, as if his nose would reveal what his eyes could not.
This went on for the rest of the day, defeating what plans I had for establishing a routine and eliminating any possibility of my writing a story. His prying motions made me hate him almost immediately and I imagined him thinking, as he tapped his watch crystal between sniffs of my belongings, ‘Well, there’s thirty seconds gone.’ He had a little book of Russian railway maps. At each station he put on his glasses and found its name on the map. There were about fifteen stations on each map, so he dirtied the pages in sequence with his thumbs before the train moved to a new page, and I grew to recognize from the jam smears and thumbprints on his maps how far the Rossiya had gone. He read nothing else for the rest of the trip. He didn’t speak; he didn’t sleep. How did he pass the time? Well, he yawned: he could sustain a yawn for five seconds, sampling it with his tongue, working it around his jaws, and finally biting it with a loud growl. He sighed, he groaned, he sucked his teeth, he grunted, and he made each into a separate activity that he timed, always looking at his watch when he had completed a yawn or a sigh. He also coughed and choked in the same deliberate way, studying his eructations, belching with disgusting thoroughness as he exhausted himself of wind in three keys. In between times he looked out the window or stared at me, smiling when our eyes met. His teeth were stainless steel.
I find it very difficult to read and impossible to write with another person near by. If the person is staring at me over a quart of jam and a crumbling loaf of bread, I am driven to distraction. So I did nothing but watch him because there was nothing but that to do. He was odd in another way: if I glanced out the window, so did he; if I went into the corridor, he followed; if I talked to the boy next door, whose father lay dying among empty champagne bottles, the zombie was at my heels and then peering over my shoulder. I couldn’t rid myself of him – and I tried.
Fearing that I would be left behind, I had not gotten off the train at any of the brief stops. But when this haunting creature parked himself in my compartment and shadowed me everywhere, I conceived a plan for ditching him in Omsk. It would be a simple duffilling: I would get off the train and lead him some distance away, and then, just as the train started up, I’d spring over and leap aboard, pausing on the stairs to block him from gaining a foothold. I tried this in Barabinsk. He followed me to the door, but no further. Omsk, three hours later, was a better opportunity. I encouraged him to follow me, led him to a kiosk doing a brisk trade in buns, and then lost him. I entered the train at the last minute, believing he was duffilled, but found him back in the compartment sniffing over his maps. After that he never left the compartment. Perhaps he suspected I was trying to ditch him.
He had his own food, this simpleton, so he had no need of the dining car. His meals were extraordinary. He surrounded himself with the food he had brought: a fist of butter in greasy paper, the bread loaf, the hunk of meat and another newspaper parcel of pickles, the jar of jam. He tore off a segment of bread and slathered it with a jack-knife blade of butter. Then he set out a pickle and a plug of meat and took a bite of each in turn, pickle, bread, meat, then a spoonful of jam; then another bite of the pickle, and so forth, filling his mouth before he began to chew. I could no longer bear to watch him. I spent more and more time in the dining car.
When the drunken soldiers had been turned out of the dining car, and the others, either very gaunt or very fat, lifted their faces from their metal bowls and left, scuffling their boots, the dining-car doors were
locked and the kitchen employees cleaned the place up. They allowed me to stay, because, under the terms of our agreement, Vassily continued to supply me with bottles of Hungarian white wine as long as I bribed him for it and shared it with him. Vassily turned the accounts over to his assistant, Volodya, who had his own abacus; Sergei, the cook, ogled Nina from the kitchen door; Annushka wiped the tables; and Viktor, a waiter – who later told me that he paid Anna to do his work (he said she would do anything for five rubles) – Viktor sat with Vassily and me and pumped me for information about hockey teams: ‘Bostabroons, DorontMupplekhleef, Moon-droolkanadeens, and Cheegago Blekaks.’ Viktor often stood behind Vassily and scratched his right cheek, meaning that Vassily was a drunkard.
There was a young black-haired man who swept the floor and rarely spoke to anyone. Viktor pointed him out to me and said, ‘Gitler! Gitler!’
The man ignored him, but to make his point Viktor stamped on the floor and ground his boot as if killing a cockroach. Vassily put his forefinger under his nose to make a moustache and said, ‘Heil Gitler!’ So the young man might have been an anti-Semite or, since Russian mockery is not very subtle, he might have been a Jew.
One afternoon the young man came over to me and said, ‘Angela Davis!’
‘Gitler!’ said Viktor, grinning.
‘Angela Davis karasho,’ said Gitler and began to rant in Russian about the way Angela Davis had been persecuted in America. He shook his broom at me, his hair falling over his eyes, and he continued quite loudly until Vassily banged on the table.
‘Politics!’ said Vassily. ‘We don’t want politics here. This is a restaurant, not a university.’ He spoke in Russian, but his message was plain and he was obviously very angry with Gitler.
