Later the Intourist lady took me on a tour of the city. I said I wanted to see the river. She said, ‘First, factory!’ There were five factories. They made, she said, ‘Kebles, weenches, poolies, bults.’ In front of each one were six-foot portraits of hard-faced men, ‘Workers of the Month’, but they might easily have been photographs of a Chicago bowling team. I said they looked tough. The Intourist lady said, ‘They have an opera company.’ This is meant to rebuke the visitor: these monkeys have an opera company! But opera is politically neutral and the Khabarovsk opera house was vacant most of the time. If there was an alley they’d have had a bowling team. There wasn’t much to do in Khabarovsk – even the Intourist lady admitted that. After various obelisks and monuments and a tour of the museum, which was full of dusty tigers and seals, all facing extinction, we went to the east bank of the Amur River. The Intourist lady said she would wait in the car. She didn’t like the cold (she wanted to go to Italy and work for Aeroflot).
The river at this point is half a mile wide. From where I was standing I could see dozens of men, huddled on the ice, each one near a cluster of holes. They were ice-fishermen, mainly aged men who spent the winter days like this, watching for a tug on their lines. I scrambled down the bank and, marching into a stiff wind, made my way across the ice to where an old man stood, watching me come near. I said hello and counted his lines; he had chopped fourteen holes in the two-foot-thick ice with a blunt axe. He had caught six fish, the largest about nine inches, the smallest about four inches, and all of them frozen solid. He made me understand that he had been fishing since eight o’clock that morning; it was then half-past four. I asked him if I could take his picture. ‘Nyet!’ he said and showed me his ragged overcoat, his torn cap, the rips in his boots. He urged me to take a picture of one of his fish, but, as I was about to snap, something caught my eye. It was the comb of a fish spine, flecked with blood, the head and tail still attached.
‘What happened to him?’ I picked up the bones.
The old man laughed and made eating movements with his mittens, champing on his decayed teeth. So he had caught seven fish: the seventh was his lunch.
After ten minutes of this I was stiff with cold and wanted to go. I fumbled in my pockets and brought out a box of Japanese matches. Did he want them? Yes, very much! He took them, thanked me, and when I turned to go he hurried over to show them to a man fishing fifty yards away.
The ice-fishermen, the old ladies sweeping the gutters with twig brooms, the quarrelling line of people at the shop on Karl Marx Street; but there was another side to Khabarovsk. That night the restaurant of the hotel filled with army officers and some truly villainous-looking women. The tables were covered with empty vodka bottles, and many ate their Siberian dumplings (pelmenye) with champagne. I lingered, talking to a fierce captain about the declining Soviet birthrate.
‘What about family planning?’ I asked.
‘We are trying to stop it!’
‘Are you succeeding?’
‘Not yet. But I think we can increase production.’
The band began to play, a saxophone, a piano, snare drums: ‘Blue Moon.’ And the army officers were dancing. The women, who wore sweaters under their low-cut dresses, hitched their clothes and staggered with their partners. Some men were singing. There were shouts. A waltzing couple bumped the arm of a man stuffing a dumpling into his mouth. A bottle crashed to the floor; there was a scuffle. The captain said to me, ‘Now you must go.’
3. The Rossiya
Afterwards, whenever I thought of the Trans-Siberian Express, I saw stainless steel bowls of borscht spilling in the dining car of the Rossiya as it rounded a bend on its way to Moscow, and at the curve a clear sight from the window of our green and black steam locomotive – from Skovorodino onwards its eruptions of steamy smoke diffused the sunlight and drifted into the forest so that the birches smouldered and the magpies made for the sky. I saw the gold-tipped pines at sunset and the snow lying softly around clumps of brown grass like cream poured over the ground; the yachtlike snowploughs at Zima; the ochreous flare of the floodlit factory chimneys at Irkutsk; the sight of Marinsk in early morning, black cranes and black buildings and escaping figures casting long shadows on the tracks as they ran towards the lighted station – something terrible in that combination of cold, dark, and little people tripping over Siberian tracks; the ice-chest of frost between the cars; the protrusion of Lenin’s white forehead at every stop; and the passengers imprisoned in Hard Class: fur hats, fur leggings, blue gym suits, crying children, and such a powerful smell of sardines, body odour, cabbage, and stale tobacco that even at the five-minute stops the Russians jumped on to the snowy platform to risk pneumonia for a breath of fresh air; the bad food; the stupid economies; and the men and women (‘No distinction is made with regard to sex in assigning compartments’ – Intourist brochure), strangers to each other, who shared the same compartment and sat on opposite bunks, moustached male mirroring moustached female from their grubby nightcaps and the blankets they wore as shawls, down to their hefty ankles stuck in crushed slippers. Most of all, I thought of it as an experience in which time had the trick distortions of a dream: the Rossiya ran on Moscow time, and after a lunch of cold yellow potatoes, a soup of fat lumps called solyanka, and a carafe of port that tasted like cough syrup, I would ask the time and be told it was four o’clock in the morning.
The Rossiya was not like the Vostok; it was new. The sleeping cars of East German make were steel syringes, insulated in grey plastic and heated by coal-fired boilers attached to furnace and samovar that gave the front end of each carriage the look of a cartoon atom smasher. The provodnik often forgot to stoke the furnace, and then the carriage took on a chill that somehow induced nightmares in me while at the same time denying me sleep. The other passengers in Soft were either suspicious, drunk, or unpleasant: a Goldi and his white Russian wife and small leathery child rode in a nest of boots and blankets, two aggrieved Canadians who ranted to the two Australian librarians about the insolence of the provodnik, an elderly Russian lady who did the whole trip wearing the same frilly nightgown, a Georgian who looked as if he had problems at the other end, and several alcoholics who played noisy games of dominoes in their pyjamas. Conversation was hopeless, sleep was alarming, and the perversity of the clocks confounded my appetite. That first day I wrote in my diary, Despair makes me hungry.
The dining car was packed. Everyone had vegetable soup, then an omelette wrapped around a Wiener schnitzel, served by two waitresses – a very fat lady who bossed the diners incessantly, and a pretty black-haired girl who doubled as scullion and looked as if she might jump off the train at the next clear opportunity. I ate my lunch, and the three Russians at my table tried to bum cigarettes from me. As I had none we attempted a conversation: they were going to Omsk; I was an American. Then they left. I cursed myself for not buying a Russian phrase book in Tokyo.
A man sat down with me. His hands were shaking. He ordered. Twenty minutes later the fat lady gave him a carafe of yellow wine. He splashed it into his glass and drank it in two gulps. He had a wound on his thumb, which he gnawed as he looked worriedly around the car. The fat lady gave his shoulder a slap and he was off, moving tipsily in the direction of Hard. But the fat lady left me in peace. I stayed in the dining car, sipping the sticky wine, watching the scenery change from flat snow fields to hills – the first since Nakhodka. The drooping sun gilded them beautifully and I expected to see people in the shallow woods. I stared for an hour, but saw none.
Nor could I establish where we were. My Japanese map of the Soviet Union was not helpful, and it was only in the evening that I learned we had passed through Poshkovo, on the Chinese border. This added to my disorientation: I seldom knew where we were, I never knew the correct time, and I grew to hate the three freezers I had to pass through to get to the dining car.
The fat lady’s name was Anna Feyodorovna and, though she screamed at her fellow countrymen, she was pleasant to me, and urged me to call her An
nushka. I did and she rewarded me with a special dish, cold potatoes and chicken – dark sinewy meat that was like some dense textile. Annushka watched me eat. She winked over her glass of tea (she dipped bread into the tea and sucked it) and then cursed a cripple who sat down at my table. Eventually she banged a steel plate of potatoes and fatty meat in front of him.
The cripple ate slowly, lengthening the awful meal by sawing carefully at his meat. A waiter went by and there was a smash. The waiter had dropped an empty carafe on to our table, shattering the cripple’s glass. The cripple went on eating with exquisite sang-froid, refusing to acknowledge the waiter, who was muttering apologies as he picked up pieces of broken glass from the table. Then the waiter plucked an enormous sliver of glass from the cripple’s mashed potatoes. The cripple choked and pushed the plate away. The waiter got him a new meal.
‘Sprechen Sie Deutsch?’ asked the cripple.
‘Yes, but very badly.’
‘I speak a little,’ he said in German. ‘I learned it in Berlin. Where are you from?’
I told him. He said, ‘What do you think of the food here?’
‘Not bad, but not very good.’
‘I think it’s very bad,’ he said. ‘What’s the food like in America?’
‘Wonderful,’ I said.
He said, ‘Capitalist! You are a capitalist!’
‘Perhaps.’
‘Capitalism bad, communism good.’
‘Bullshit,’ I said in English, then in German, ‘You think so?’
‘In America people kill each other with pistols. Pah! Pah! Pah! Like that.’
‘I don’t have a pistol.’
‘What about the Negroes? The black people?’
‘What about them?’
‘You kill them.’
‘Who tells you these things?’
‘Newspapers. I read it for myself. Also it’s on the radio all the time.’
‘Soviet radio,’ I said.
‘Soviet radio is good radio,’ he said.
The radio in the dining car was playing jazzy organ music. It was on all day, and even in the compartments – each one had a loudspeaker – it continued to mutter because it could not be turned off completely. I jerked my thumb at the loudspeaker and said, ‘Soviet radio is too loud.’
He guffawed. Then he said, ‘I’m an invalid. Look here – no foot, just a leg. No foot, no foot!’
He raised his felt boot and squashed the toe with the ferrule of his cane. He said, ‘I was in Kiev during the war, fighting the Germans. They were shooting – Pah! Pah! – like that. I jumped into the water and started swimming. It was winter – cold water – very cold water! They shot my foot off, but I didn’t stop swimming. Then another time my captain said to me, “Look, more Germans –” and in the snow – very deep snow –’
That night I slept poorly on my bench-sized bunk, dreaming of goose-stepping Germans with pitchforks, wearing helmets like the Rossiya’s soup bowls; they forced me into an icy river. I woke. My feet lay exposed in the draught of the cold window; the blanket had slipped off, and the blue night light of the compartment made me think of an operating theatre. I took an aspirin and slept until it was light enough in the corridor to find the toilet. That day, around noon, we stopped at Skovorodino. The provodnik, my jailer, showed a young bearded man into my compartment. This was Vladimir. He was going to Irkutsk, which was two days away. For the rest of the afternoon Vladimir said no more. He read Russian paperbacks with patriotic pictures on their covers, and I looked out the window. Once I had thought of a train window as allowing me freedom to gape at the world; now it seemed an imprisoning thing and at times took on the opacity of a cell wall.
At one bend outside Skovorodino I saw we were being pulled by a giant steam locomotive. I diverted myself by trying (although Vladimir sucked his teeth in disapproval) to snap a picture of it as it rounded curves, shooting plumes of smoke out its side. The smoke rolled beside the train and rose slowly through the forests of birch and the Siberian cedars, where there were footprints on the ground and signs of dead fires, but not a soul to be seen. The countryside then was so changeless it might have been a picture pasted against the window. It put me to sleep. I dreamed of a particular cellar in Medford High School, then woke and saw Siberia and almost cried. Vladimir had stopped reading. He sat against the wall sketching on a pad with coloured pencils, a picture of telephone poles. I crept into the corridor. One of the Canadians had his face turned to the miles of snow.
He said, ‘Thank God we’re getting off this pretty soon. How far are you going?’
‘Moscow; then the train to London.’
‘Tough shitsky.’
‘So they say.’
He said, ‘I don’t even know what day it is. It’s going to be Christmas soon. Hey, did you see that house burning back there?’
‘No.’
The previous day he had said, ‘Did you see the truck that was crossing the river and crashed through the ice? Well, the back wheels anyway.’ I wondered if he made it up. He was perpetually seeing disasters and events. I looked out the window and saw my anxious reflection.
I went back into the compartment and started to read New Grub Street again, but the combination of bad light and cold and drifting snow, and the decline of poor Edwin Reardon depressed me to the point of fatigue. I slept; I dreamed. I was in a mountain cabin with my wife and children. There was snow and a black mirror at the window. I was fretting: some people we knew, miles away, had to be told some tragic news. My feet were freezing, but I agreed to go and tell them this news. I kicked in a closet for a pair of boots and said, ‘What about you, Anne? Aren’t you coming?’
Anne said, ‘It’s so cold out! Anyway, I’m reading – I think I’ll stay here.’
I addressed Annushka, the gorgon of the Rossiya dining car, who happened to be drinking tea in a corner of this cabin. ‘You see? You see? She always says she wants to go with me, but when the time comes she never does!’
Anne, my wife, said, ‘You’re just delaying! Go, if you’re going – otherwise, shut the door and stop talking about it.’
I held the cabin door open. Outside, it was all emptiness. The cold wind blew into the room, throwing up the skirts of the tablecloth and rattling the lampshades. Snow sifted on to the log floor.
I said, ‘Well, I’m going if no one else will.’
‘Can I come too, Daddy?’ I looked into my little boy’s white face. He was pleading. His shoulders were pathetic.
‘No,’ I said. ‘I have to go alone.’
‘Shut the door!’
I woke up. My feet were cold. The compartment window
was black and the carriage bounced (only the Trans-Siberian bounces, because the rails have square rather than staggered joints). The dream was an intimation of panic, guilty travelling, and a loneliness that made me lonelier still when I wrote it and examined it.
Vladimir had stopped sketching. He looked up and said, ‘Chai?’
I understood. The Swahili word for tea is also chai. He hollered for the provodnik. Over tea and cookies I had my first Russian lesson, copying the words down phonetically on a notebook page: a dreary occupation, but it passed the time and was preferable to dozing into nightmares.
The dining car that night was empty and very cold. There was frost on the windows and such a chill in the air that the breath of the arguing employees was visible in steamy clouds. Vassily Prokofyevich, the manager, was doing his accounts, snapping his abacus. I had now been in the dining car enough times to know that by late afternoon Vassily, a short scar-faced man, was drunk. He jumped up and showed me his breath – vodka-scented steam – then dragged out a case of beer and demonstrated how the beer had frozen inside the bottles. He rubbed one in his hands to thaw it for me and barked at Nina, the black-haired girl. Nina brought me a plate of smoked salmon and some sliced bread. Vassily pointed to the salmon and said, ‘Kita!’
I said, ‘Eto karasho kita.’
Vassily was pleased. He told Nina to g
et me some more.
I tapped on the frosty window and said, ‘Eto okhnor.’
‘Da, da.’ Vassily poured himself some more vodka. He guzzled it. He gave me an inch in a tumbler. I drank it and saw that Annushka was at her usual place, dipping bread into black tea and sucking the bread slice.
I motioned at her tea and said, ‘Eto zhudki chai.’
‘Da, da.’ Vassily laughed and refilled my glass.
I showed him my copy of Gissing and said, ‘Eto ganyiga.’
‘Da, da,’ said Vassily. Nina came near with the plate of salmon. ‘Eto Nina,’ said Vassily, seizing the pretty girl, ‘and these’ – I translated his gestures – ‘are Nina’s tits!’
The mornings now were darker, another trick of time on the railroad that seemed to be speeding me further into paranoia. After eight hours’ sleep I woke up in pitch blackness. In the dim light of the December moon, a silver sickle, the landscape was bare – no trees, no snow. And there was no wind. It was weird, as dawn approached (at nine-thirty by my watch), to see the villages on the banks of the Shilka and the Ingoda rivers, the small collections of wooden huts aged a deep brown, with the smoke rising straight up, a puffing from each chimney that made me think of an early form of wood-burning vehicle stranded on these deserted steppes. After hours of this desolation we came to Chita, a satanic city of belching chimneys and great heaps of smoking ashes dumped beside the tracks. Outside Chita there was a frozen lake on which ice-fishermen crouched like the fat black crows with fluffed-out feathers that roosted in the larches at the verge of the lake.
I said, ‘Vorona.’
‘Nyet,’ said Vladimir and he explained they were fishermen.
‘Vorona.’ I insisted on the crow image until he saw what I was driving at. But it didn’t take much insisting, for the sentimental fanaticism I had detected in the Russians I had met was a flight from their literal-mindedness. Vladimir was in the habit of reciting – reciting rather than saying – long sentences, and then muttering, ‘Pushkin’ or ‘Mayakovsky’. This compulsive behaviour is taken for granted in the Soviet Union, but I think if I were on the old Boston and Maine and a man began to quote, ‘This is the forest primeval – ’ I’d change my seat.