‘What a really delightful chap,’ said Kenneth. We told Dorothy the good news. At the moment all three of us felt extremely pro-Japanese.
As we undressed a depressing thought struck me. ‘If Mr Shimada comes in at ten and lunch is at three, that makes five hours. And five hours for ten days make fifty. How can we talk to him for fifty hours when it is so difficult to keep up a conversation for five minutes, even when we have something urgent to say?’
Next morning we were dressed and ready when the attendant came at nine to tidy away our beds.
‘During the night we crossed the Volga,’ he announced. This news was also passed on to us by our Intourist man, who seemed relieved to have some positive information to give us about the Journey.
The view from the windows of the train, dimmed by a thick film of grime, was discouraging. On all sides the prairie stretched away featureless and dun-coloured.
When we reached the restaurant car the tables were not cleared and the atmosphere frowsty. One of the waitresses was still stretched out on the floor. (Her normal sleeping place, we learnt afterwards.)
‘Seychas’ they both murmured and we went back to our carnage.
‘They keep Moscow time on the Trans-Siberian,’ said Kenneth.
‘What! For the whole six and a half thousand miles of it? Does that mean that breakfast and lunch and dinner will get earlier and earlier until we are breakfasting in the middle of the night and having our last meal at lunch-time?’
‘No silly, it’s only the station clocks which correspond to the time in Moscow, and maybe the time tables too.’
In fact, our meals were produced according to a rhythm devised by the train staff, and this was not always predictable.
We returned to the restaurant car at ten. Though the dirty crockery had been removed the tablecloths were unchanged except that the sides, by now as dirty as the tops, had been turned down again. But the coffee was at least hot, and with an Intourist coupon we were able to get some butter.
Shimada, looking dapper, bowed and pointed to his watch saying with a giggle, ‘I am coming seychas.’
Ten minutes later he was sitting between us and waiting for the conversation to begin.
We waited too, our three minds groping for something to say. Mr Shimada clearly had a very strong sense of etiquette and we were not sure whether he would approve of the personal questions about family, job and so on, which are such a useful standby.
‘In the night we crossed the Volga,’ he said at last. This non-event was serving a useful purpose. There was a welcome break when the train stopped abruptly in the middle of an empty stretch of prairie and many of the passengers jumped down onto the track. After only eighteen hours of travel one was suffering from a sense of claustrophobia, and the fresh air and huge emptiness of earth and sky were a relief. Like our fellow passengers we strolled happily in the autumn sunshine.
Suddenly, without a sign of warning, the train started. There was a wild stampede to get on board. The lowest step was two feet above the ground and the handrail out of my reach. A burly Russian threw me up to his friend who reached out and pulled me on board. The rest of the passengers scrambled on somehow and the train gathered speed. Apparently this was a well-known engine driver’s prank and accepted as such.
‘Never go far away from the train unless the engine driver gets out too,’ advised my rescuer kindly.
Shimada appeared to enjoy the joke as much as anyone. Lunchtime was not far off and all three of us were beginning to relax. Kenneth got out the vodka and poured three drinks. Mr Shimada averted his eyes as I drank mine. It was not until three days later that we were sufficiently intimate for him to explain that his wife would not touch spirits. ‘It is very ge ... ish,’ he said, drawing out the single syllable in apologetic disapproval.
Lunch consisted of cabbage soup once more and an anonymous piece of stringy meat.
‘Isn’t there any caviar?’ we asked. Caviar, in Russia, was not then regarded as a great luxury, though an awareness was growing that foreigners considered it as something special.
‘Tomorrow,’ said the waitress reassuringly.
The tablecloths had now acquired a uniform gluey texture due partly to the varying standards of culture of previous diners and partly to the inevitable slopping of greasy soup as the waitresses struggled to maintain their balance against the rocking of the train, so spoons and forks, and even fingers, stuck to the cloth in an unpleasant way.
‘Government Property!’ we exclaimed. ‘We can arrange the sheets to make little clean islands.’ When we did this, the waitresses collected them up carefully as soon as we had finished, smoothed them out, and slipped them into their pockets. Evidently they were considered valuable.
‘We are not allowed to give tips, but they seem to appreciate toilet paper. Let’s ask the girls if they would like some more,’ Co suggested.
Both waitresses nodded emphatically. ‘But what would you use it for?’ asked Co.
‘To write letters, of course,’ they replied.
‘Better cut off the printed words GOVERNMENT PROPERTY,’ advised Co. We couldn’t risk the girls or their families being picked up as members of an underground group sending out cryptic messages in English.
During the afternoon the train stopped at a busy station.
‘Where are we?’ we asked our Intourist man. ‘What is this place called?’
He was clearly at a loss and jumped down on to the platform to avoid further questioning.
‘It must be his maiden voyage,’ I said. ‘We’ll look in the Times Atlas. It’s a bit ancient but the maps are beautifully clear.’
From the map it was evident that this must be Perm, the last town before crossing the Urals into Siberia. We hastened to share our discovery with our guide.
‘Perm?’ he said, puzzled.
‘It is Molotov,’ said a grim voice. The old Tsarist name was clearly unpopular.
That night we made a few small domestic improvements, stretching a piece of string across our carriage to dry our smalls and puffing a little insecticide into the cracks, just in case.
We were two nights out from Moscow, and European Russia lay behind us. Already we had settled into a comfortably domestic routine as members of a small community. On a really long train journey all impatience vanishes. There is no thought of arrival. No counting the hours. Each day has its own events or particular highlights. One adopts a cruise mentality, content with small amusements, passive while the management takes over control of the journey.
As the train rolled down the foothills of the Urals we sat over breakfast, waiting till Mr Shimada had finished his.
‘Murray’s Guide says the recommended route from Moscow to Omsk, in summertime, was through Nizhni Novgorod,’ I said, ‘and then by steamer down the Volga to Kazan and then north up the Kama to Perm. After that one hired or bought a telega or larantass and horses. It took six days, so you see there has been progress.’
Before the train drew up in Sverdlovsk the Intourist man was knocking at the door of our compartment. He obviously wanted to avoid another awkward confrontation with the Times Atlas.
‘We are coming to Sverdlovsk,’ he said.
‘Have you been a courier on the Trans-Siberian Railway before?’ I asked. He shook his head. ‘Have you ever before worked for Intourist?’ He shrugged.
Dorothy had joined us. ‘What do you really do?’ she asked.
‘I am a student at Moscow University.’
‘And what do you study?’
‘Well, ...’
‘Are you doing a holiday job?’
His face brightened. ‘Yes. You see, my wife has had twins ...’
It seemed unlikely that a sought-after Intourist job would have been given to an ordinary student who happened to be hard-up.
‘And when you get to Vladivostok will you bring a party back?’
‘No. I am just looking after you.’
This, and his
ignorance of the route and of anything to do with rail travel seemed to settle it. Either he was a trainee member of the NKVD or else he had been co-opted to help deal with an unscheduled group of tiresome travellers.
‘I think we should christen him Untourist,’ said Kenneth.
We decided to take his story at face value and see if he could do anything to improve our amenities.
‘The windows of our carriage are very dirty and we can’t enjoy the view. Please can you ask the attendant to see the outsides are done?’
But at Sverdlovsk there was no attempt to clean the windows. Passengers crowded in and out of the train. Queues formed on the platform to buy the few available copies of the local newspaper, though it seemed hardly worth the effort when the contents of the paper were so predictable. Russia was not at war. Her ally, Germany, had for the moment run out of countries to conquer. America was taking a passive, detached role. The only relief to be expected from routine Communist Party propaganda would be the news of a German invasion of England, but with England so small and far away this was unlikely to be of great interest to the inhabitants of a Siberian town.
Sverdlovsk, the former Ekaterinburg, with its factories and foundries and industrial gloom, seemed from the train as unattractive as its history. Memories of the tragic end of the Tsar Nicholas and his family in a cellar only a few kilometres away added a macabre note to the drab actuality of the present town.
The train rolled on through country of a sameness which made any small diversion welcome.
‘I read somewhere that at the Paris Exhibition of 1900 they showed luxury coaches built for the Trans-Siberian—a Louis XIV dining car with a ceiling wreathed in flowers and a smoking room decorated with Turkish motifs, and so on,’ I told Kenneth. ‘To make things more lifelike, a roll of scenery was wound past the windows of the dining car.’
‘Unless the scenery is going to become a bit more varied, it can’t have added much to the interest,’ said Kenneth wearily. ‘Just silver birches and prairie with a conifer here and there.’
But there were small alleviations to the monotony. For example, two goods trains, each obviously determined to make use of the same set of points, had collided head on, the locomotives rearing up and plunging down an embankment. The scene had an air of quiet finality. The results of the crash were clear, but how it came about, and why it appeared to have been ignored, was a mystery.
Further on, a stand of silver birches, their trunks all splintered off at half-height, so that they stood up like broken matchsticks, provided another puzzle.
Towards dusk our train stopped at a small lonely station. The air was chill. No one got out. Beside us, on the west-bound line, stood a slow train, the engine puffing black smoke from its great spark-arrester pot. Its bell was ringing. All at once a woman ran across the empty platform. Our train was just moving as she scurried between the coaches. There was a cry, and a sickening jolt as the train came to an abrupt halt. The engine driver came running down the platform and was joined by the guard. They pulled the body out from under the train and laid it, covered with a blanket, on a stretcher. Our attendant was talking excitedly to his colleague.
‘The train has cut off her leg. The woman you saw,’ he told me. ‘She was trying to catch the local to Sverdlovsk and she must have tripped and fallen just as our train started to move. They are putting her in the guard’s van and taking her to Novosibirsk.
‘But that’s nearly a day’s journey, isn’t it?’ The man shrugged.
Next morning we asked about the woman.
‘She’s turning black. I think she’s going to die,’ he replied, not unkindly.
One of our minor puzzles was that we could never distinguish between the two sleeping car attendants, who looked and spoke alike. To increase our confusion the two shared a copy of Pushkin which they read, turn and turn about, perched on the jump seat beside the samovar.
It seemed to be a point of etiquette on the train not to address a person by name, though we did discover that one of the waitresses was called Galina. This reserve was not due to unfriendliness, we felt, but rather to caution. We were travelling in a cocoon, isolated from the outside world, and however relaxed the passengers might become the journey must end, and there was always an underlying feeling of apprehension.
The landscape had changed overnight and the soil was now the rich dark Chernoziom, the famous Black Earth of Siberia. In the official guide to the railway issued in 1900 under the patronage of Tsar Nicholas II, Autocrat of All the Russias, as the title page stated, this was described as the greatest treasure of Siberia, an apparently inexhaustible source of wheat more valued, at that time, than the mineral wealth of the region. Inspired perhaps by the lovely morning the engine driver stopped the train in the middle of a grove of silver birches, their leaves sparkling like a shower of gold coins. Reassuringly he climbed down from his cab.
One of the passengers, described to us as a biologist from Lithuania, did a performing flea act on the rails, balancing nimbly and then hopping from one to another and challenging the onlookers to compete. A tall Soviet officer wearing shiny top boots, ran quickly along a single rail with arms outstretched. Then the engine driver strolled up. Standing on the near side of one rail he swung his arms, flexed his knees and, with a flying jump, cleared the far rail. Smilingly he acknowledged the gasps of admiration and sauntered back to his engine. ‘Of course, he’s had lots of practice,’ muttered his competitors.
Even in Tsarist days, the engine driver took an important part in the social life of the train, mingling with the passengers at stops, shaking hands all round and joining in the conversation. At the best of times engine driving must be a lonely job, even with a colleague to take alternate shifts, but when it goes on for ten days at a stretch some light relief must be absolutely necessary, and a meeting with one’s friendly engine driver is reassuring for the passengers.
We had passed through Omsk in darkness and were crossing the Barabinskaya Steppe, a marshy region where the Swiss surgeon Hans de Fries nearly lost his life in the 17th century. ‘We remained stuck in the swamps,’ he wrote, ‘through whole nights, not knowing whether we would freeze to death from the terrible frosts or drown in the swelling floods.’
Things were not much better for the men who struggled for over two years to build the line between Omsk and Novosibirsk across the treacherous ground. Tormented by mosquitoes and engulfed by the swamps in summer, suffering from frostbite and the exhaustion of quarrying in the frozen ground in winter, hauling thousands of tons of ballast to form a firm base for the permanent way, they suffered and died in numbers which could not be accurately recorded.
The line was following the Trakt, the great highway which is still the main land route through Siberia. Along it, over the years, stumbled convicts, chained and branded, sad political exiles, and peasants hoping for land and a new life. The carriage trade of the Trakt, officers, officials, traders and adventurers of all kinds, travelled in horse-drawn vehicles of varying degrees of discomfort.
Our mornings were now occupied with Mr Shimada, and before-dinner drinks in one of the compartments of our group had become routine, but between these fixed events we chatted to fellow passengers wherever the opportunity offered. The Lithuanian biologist was the most informative of our contacts and clearly knew a great deal about Siberia and its history. He was travelling to Chita, where the line to Dairen through Manchukuo splits off from the longer route to Vladivostok.
‘I have been sent,’ he said, ‘on a special assignment.’
‘The plague?’ we asked.
He shrugged and said nothing.
After lunch our map showed that we were nearing Novonikolaevsk.
‘Novosibirsk now,’ said the biologist with a twinkle.
A wide river came into view, the Ob, which runs for three thousand miles into the Arctic. It was crossed by nine double spans of a great iron bridge. To the north the river flowed in wide curves bordered with white sand. H
ouseboats painted in faded turquoise, green and yellow, were tied to the bank. Down the middle of the stream a river boat chugged, awaited by a long queue at the landing stage.
As we crossed the bridge, great blocks of buildings rose to meet us on the opposite side.
‘The Chicago of Siberia,’ said the biologist.
Novosibirsk was clearly on the up and up. Separated from our platform by broken fences and piles of scaffolding, an immense new station was in course of construction, the wide central arch supported on monumental pillars, the façade pale green and white against a cloudy sky. The current business of the Trans-Siberian was being conducted on a platform of beaten earth splotched with puddles. Unlike previous stations, where queues formed following a rumour that there might be something to buy, here there were stalls selling little felt bonnets and painted toys. A teddy bear, or more probably a replica of a real bear from the nearby forest, dressed in crimson trousers and leather boots, was held up for sale by an old woman. Beside her, a girl with a tray of bootlaces found eager customers. An immense strawstack turned out to be a mountain of last winter’s ice, heavily insulated. Men were quarrying the face and loading the ice blocks into the top of a refrigerating car.
In spite of reminders, our carriage windows were as dirty as ever.
‘Let’s make some wads of damp newspaper and take the ladder for the upper bunk out onto the platform and clean them ourselves,’ I suggested.
It was quickly done and the little plush-covered ladder back in place. As we were admiring the sudden clarity of the view,
Untourist knocked at the door. ‘There has been a complaint,’ he said.
‘Why? We asked again and again for someone to clean the windows and nothing happened.’
‘It is nyekulturni for foreigners to do such things,’ he replied.
In fact, Untourist was hardly likely to have bothered about the level of culture shown by our behaviour. He might have been nettled at the implied criticism of his efficiency, but his real worry, we decided, was the greatly improved view we had gained of the installations along the line.
Baltic Countdown: A Nation Vanishes Page 18
