Ghost Train to the Eastern Star

  Killing time at the post office on the third day, I saw a young woman of twenty-two or so, rather earnest and plain, wearing a heavy coat, sitting at one of the littered wooden tables, hunched over, making a fair copy of a letter that began, Dear Sirs! I wish to introduce myself to Philip Morris Company...

  "Maybe I can help you," I said. "Are you looking for a job?"

  My eye fell on another line: I have unique vast experience to think outside the box.

  "Who are you?" she demanded, scowling at me. "What do you want?"

  "I used to be an English teacher," I said. That got her attention. "Mind if I look?"

  It was a letter of introduction, to accompany an application for a job at a tobacco company based in Switzerland. The dense full-page paragraph, rather old-fashioned in expression and handwriting flourishes, was scattered with grammatical errors. I made some suggestions, corrected the grammar, and advised her to break it into shorter paragraphs, to make it easier to read.

  "Thank you," she said.

  "It would help if you got it typed and printed."

  She shook her head. "That is too expensive."

  "It would make a better impression. I'll pay for it," I said, and took out some rubles and looked at her signature. "An investment in your future, Anna."

  She became fierce and snatched up the letter. "I will never accept charity from you!"

  This attracted the attention of the other people at the big post office table—some old women, a young woman with a baby, and a bearded old man in felt boots who'd been sleeping on his arms. They looked at me and then at Anna, and they waited for another outburst.

  But Anna began to whisper in a harsh voice. She was strangely stubborn and full of warnings. She wanted to leave Vladivostok. She said I should do the same.

  "I'm leaving tonight," I said.

  "Leave now. You are not safe here," she said. "People will steal your mobile phone. They will find the password. Yes! They have so many ways to do it. You don't know. Why did you come here?"

  "To take the train."

  "There is so much crime in this city. You can write me a letter, but maybe someone will steal it out of my mail container."

  "What about this letter?"

  "It will be stolen! I want to work. I have sent five letters. But my dream? It is to have my own business. Information technology."

  In this cold and chaotic place, she sat in the stinking post office in her old coat, sending out letters, plotting to leave, as I was. I tramped around the snowy streets as soot drifted from the sky, and I encountered the inevitable pair of American Mormons. One of them, Elder Hogue from Salt Lake City, was buttonholing strangers and passing out invitations.

  "What's happening?"

  "A film," Elder Hogue said. "You're welcome to come and see it."

  I glanced at the leaflet. It was a screening of a film dramatizing one of the great events adumbrated in Mormon doctrine, the visit of Jesus Christ to Central America after he was crucified, in the year 33. Jesus had preached to the Mayans.

  "I've seen that film already," I said. "Jesus giving a sermon on the pyramid. I'm wondering if it really happened."

  "Surely it happened," Elder Hogue said, chuckling at my doubt. He had the torpid smile and steady gaze of the evangelist, which was also the expression of the car salesman sizing up a flat-footed customer. I was impressed that, in this terrible place, he looked so presentable and healthy, and he and his fellow missionary were possibly the only people in Vladivostok wearing a white shirt and a necktie.

  "How's things in Vladivostok?"

  "We're meeting some people," he said. That seemed ambiguous. I asked him to explain. He said, "We knock on doors. But it's a sad place. Gangs. Drugs. Corruption. Thievery. I've been robbed. They took my computer. The place is going downhill—just look at it. I've got another whole year."

  "You can set them on the right path," I said.

  "I know we can," he said, and made a dive at a passerby, an old man who took the leaflet, and Elder Hogue began chatting with him in fluent Russian, framing the Mormon message.

  ***

  VLADIVOSTOK STATION BULKED against the harbor, a weirdly pretentious example of Russian railway design, with dense walls and great sloping roofs and cupolas and steeples wearing witches' hats, and a clock showing the right time. The whole thing was impressive until I went inside, where its bare interior was echoey and cold. The waiting room was filled with wooden benches, like church pews. Although the station was unheated and rather stark, some of the public rooms had colorful murals of railway scenes.

  I was leaning on the banister that led to the outside platform, reading Murakami's Sputnik Sweetheart. A young Japanese man approached me.

  "I like Dance Dance Dance," he said.

  His name was Nobuatsu Sekine. A persevering traveler, Nobu was taking the Rossiya to Moscow and doing a grand tour of Europe. Like me, he had arrived a few days before in Vladivostok.

  "What do you think so far?"

  "Very primitive. Very dirty," he said.

  He pointed out that the station had no conveniences, no shops, no bar, no newsstand, not even any heat. He was burdened by a heavy backpack and a bulging shopping bag.

  "What have you got there?"

  "Noodles, beer, bottles of water. You don't have any?"

  I said no, it hadn't occurred to me to buy provisions. "But I have half a pound of powdered green tea from Kyoto."

  "I'll watch your bag if you want to go buy food. There's a market across the street."

  Taking his suggestion, I hurried out of the station and into the nighttime snow flurry to the market. I bought noodles, beer, water, and chocolate cookies, and over the next seven days, whenever I saw Nobu, I thanked him for his suggestion. I did not see him often. He was traveling hard class and I was in soft.

  We watched an express train pull out of the station for China. It would arrive in Harbin, capital of Heilongjiang Province, the following morning. Most of the passengers were Chinese traders who had come to Vladivostok to sell clothes and household goods and electronics. They were taking nothing back to China but money. They looked delighted to be heading home.

  About an hour before the Rossiya left, I found my coach and introduced myself to the conductor, a woman in a Russian Railways uniform—black jacket with gold braid, black skirt, black boots. She showed me to my compartment, calling it a kupe, where a dark balding man with Levantine features was already sitting, talking on the phone.

  "Where are you going?" I asked. If he said Moscow, I would have him as a roommate for seven days.

  "Khabarovsk," he said.

  "Tomorrow?" I said.

  He confirmed this. He said there was no flight there—in most of Siberia the only reliable way to get around was the railway. He added that his English wasn't very good. But it wasn't bad, though he had a heavy accent. His name was Rashid. He was about fifty, a Kurd, originally from Iraq but had been brought to Armenia with his parents in the 1960s. For close to twenty years he had been living in remote Kamchatka, a frozen appendage of far eastern Siberia in the Sea of Okhotsk. He was a businessman in Petropavlovsk. He had four children—he showed me their pictures, stored on his cell phone.

  "You're nearer to Alaska than Moscow."

  "I been Yeleska." He'd done a circuit, starting and finishing in the Arctic: Kamchatka-Yeleska-Meeamee-Yolando-Deesnee Whorl-Teexah-Yeleska-Kamchatka.

  As we were talking, the train whistle blew and we left Vladivostok, heading north to Khabarovsk and then turning left for the long haul around northeastern China.

  Seeing that I had pulled out my map, Rashid put his finger on Afghanistan and said, "I was here, too. And here. And here."

  "What doing?"

  "Fighting."

  Moving his finger, he traced his route through towns to the east and south of Mazar-i-Sharif, the places where he had fought in the Soviet army from 1985 to 1987, marching with his battalion, dragging cannons, firing on Afghan positions. He smiled as he read the names o
f the towns he'd bivouacked in: "Kunduz!...Baghlan!"

  "What do you think about that war?"

  "Big mistake."

  "For you?"

  "For us. For you. For anyone. Afghanistan"—and he smiled again—"I seenk no one can win in Afghanistan, except Afghanistan people."

  Rashid made a few more phone calls while I sorted out papers. To keep busy, I intended to write notes for a memory of my father. Since his death, I had been unable to write about him without becoming sad; but now, almost twelve years on, I felt it was time. He was a loving father, a private man, and a hard worker without any obvious ambition. Although he was a reader of history, of classic novels, he had never read anything I'd written; or, if he had, he'd never mentioned the fact to me.

  With a week of solitude on the train ahead of me, I knew I could write a portrait of this kind and somewhat mysterious man.

  Suddenly Rashid said, "Why America doesn't like Azerbaijan?"

  "I'm not sure."

  "They are on side of Georgia."

  "There aren't many Armenians in America, but they're powerful. They want the U.S. government to settle the Nagorno-Karabakh problem."

  "Political problem! It's all stupid." He laughed. He pointed to himself. "I live in Kamchatka!"

  It was like saying he was from another planet, and a glance at the map confirmed it. He said he'd gone to Kamchatka after he'd finished fighting in Afghanistan and left the army. I had the impression that his wish was to get as far away from political follies as possible.

  I said, "Rashid, you're a Muslim?"

  "Not Muslim. Zoroastrian. When the sun comes up, I pray."

  "Where else are there Zoroastrians?"

  "Plenty in Iraq. Plenty in Turkey. India—many."

  This led to talk of the Iraq War.

  "America in Iraq," he said, shaking his head. "Yes, Saddam was a problem. He killed my people. He gassed them, he bombed them. Not good. But this American war? It is"—he spread his hands for emphasis— "disaster."

  He went back to phoning, I went back to reading the history of the yakuza I'd bought in Niigata. Then I was drowsing, and I turned my reading light off. Rashid did the same. Then I heard him clear his throat.

  "Who will be next president?" he said in the darkness, over the banging of the train's wheels.

  "I don't know."

  "Maybe Gillary," he said.

  "Gillary?"

  "Gillary Cleenton."

  "I like Obama."

  "Black one. Good one, I seenk," he said.

  I slept soundly, and the next morning at nine we arrived in Khabarovsk. Rashid gave me a bag of tangerines he'd bought in Vladivostok and stepped into the snow.

  As the train pulled out, I went to breakfast. I was the only customer. The ornate wood-paneled dining car, with mirrors and lace curtains, was dirty, the tablecloths spattered and stained with food, the floor littered, the woodwork scummy. One end of the car was stacked with beer crates. An unshaven knob-nosed man with wild hair sat at one of the tables, tapping on a computer with black fingernails, a cigarette between his lips.

  After a while he surprised me by getting up and handing me a bilingual menu. His hands were grubby. He scribbled my order and went to the kitchen. He was gone a long time. I imagined his dirty hands and drooping cigarette. A submissive old woman, who was probably his wife, brought me a cup of coffee and the omelet I'd ordered. When I asked for bread—khlyeb, one of the Russian words I knew—the wild-haired man yelled at his wife and she brought it.

  This experience gave me a taste for instant noodles and green tea in my compartment on succeeding mornings, easily prepared using the samovar that is provided on every Russian train—always accessible, always steaming.

  The sun was up, the day was bright. Somewhere, bathed in sunbeams, Rashid was murmuring a Zoroastrian prayer. Out the window the land was flat, scattered with emblematic birch trees, some of them bulked with crows' nests. The snow was thin enough so that brown tussocks showed through.

  I settled down and began to write about my father, and a few hours later, at a brief stop, the provodnitsa introduced herself as Olga. We were, she said, at Birobidzhan.

  One station sign was spelled out in Hebrew letters, the other in Cyrillic. The station building was newish, red brick, and empty. In the distance I could see a gold-domed church, barracks-like tenements, thick birch logs stacked in railway cars, and a large factory. Even in the glorious snow-gleam, the sun shining in the frost-sparkle, the icy-bright trees, it looked like an open prison. Birobidzhan, at the edge of China, in the heart of eastern Siberia, was the capital of Yevreyskaya Oblast, the Jewish autonomous region. No one got off or on the train.

  The proof that Siberia was a simple world simplified even further by snow was the market on the snowy platform at Obluche in the middle of that first afternoon. Old women sold dumplings (verenike) filled with cabbage and potato, fried fish, hard-boiled eggs, bottles of water, and squares of chocolate. It was the sort of merchandise you'd see on a railway platform in Africa. Little tables of hopeful hawkers, a few rubles changing hands, and they begin packing up as the train leaves, the arrival of the train being the big event of the day.

  I soon saw why. Obluche was a place of wooden cabins and snowbound cottages, huts at the outskirts, like a scene of a nineteenth-century settlement in a Minnesota winter—the small cabins, the picket fences, the thick icicles, and the chimneys sending up smoke, and beyond them a great emptiness of snowfields. No footsteps, no car tracks, not another human being or a vehicle, and China was just beneath the horizon, within walking distance if you had snowshoes.

  Even at the larger stations no people appeared, nothing stirred. Bureya was a low town of square Siberian cottages, some prettified with gingerbread, with smoking chimneys. Where the fences had fallen and the birches iced up, the delicacy of black and white, the land looked like an Andy Wyeth snowscape.

  Most days were to be like that, villages of low smoking huts, like Amazar on the Shilka River, hundreds of chimneys sending up white smoke, huddled behind flimsy wooden fences, many miles apart, birch groves, bare trees, a monumental emptiness of snow and sky, the Trans-Siberian moving across the snow like a ship across a frozen sea.

  After two days and two nights we had penetrated to an even more desolate region. I had my yakuza book to read, some more Simenons. And I had some writing to do—notes on this trip and the memoir of my father, who, every day as I wrote about him, seemed to recede, smiling pityingly at me.

  When I boarded this train in the winter of 1973-V41 had no clear idea how many days it would take to get to Moscow. With delays and blizzards, it ran late, and I ended up spending Christmas on it, feeling miserable and homesick. Now I had my kupe to myself. I could not have been more content, sitting in this privacy, watching the cooling gold light from the sinking sun redden the snow and the birch bark, making the world seem so far away. I was released from all concerns, floating across the snowfields.

  I made another visit to the dining car. The knob-nosed waiter-chef was a whole day dirtier and grouchier. His fingernails were still rimmed with black; he wore a black cotton hoodie and dark woolen trousers and heavy boots. His thick glasses were smeared with grease. He smoked and tapped on his old computer, but when he took my order he scribbled with a pencil on torn scraps of paper.

  "Salyanka" I said. Stew. And, enunciating slowly, "Ya-ich-nitsa" Fried eggs.

  With the sort of frustrated intelligence that made him impatient and resentful, he had the look of a Dostoyevskian anarchist or a dissident. But of course he was neither, just an underpaid slob who ran the unpopular dining car with his wife. All this woman ever did was roll paper napkins on a stick to make them into tubes that she placed in vases on the tables to mimic bouquets. Apart from a few drunks, I never saw any other diners. I began to avoid the dining car.

  A few days later, I encountered the waiter-chef's wife in the vestibule of one of the cars. It was thick with layers of frozen ice and blown-in snow.

  Sh
e gabbled at me. I was sure she was saying, "Where have you been? Come and eat!" But by then I was living on noodles and the smoked fish and sausages I bought on the railway platforms.

  Mogocha, one of those platforms, was a sprawl of houses, some big wolf-like dogs frolicking in the snow, a man in a fur hat lifting his boots high because of the deep drifts, and a bus chugging down a riverbank and across a frozen river. Many of the cottages had carved and ornamented blue shutters—a small wood-burning town, looking centuries old, as perhaps it was.

  In the past I had sneered at a half-buried place like this and wanted to move on. Now I saw it as not bleak but peaceful, a quiet refuge, muffled by snowdrifts, entirely self-sufficient, too far from Moscow for anyone to care about it, the sort of place I might live in if it weren't so damnably cold.

  For hundreds of years this region had been a place of exile. At dusk that day we came to Chernyshevsk-Zabaikalsky. It was as remote and cozy-looking as Mogocha, and it had been a prison for the literary critic and novelist Nikolai Chernyshevsky, who had been exiled there in 1864. His was another typical story of the dangers of expressing an opinion in Russia, but he was a czarist victim. He had advocated the freeing of serfs and the emancipation of women, and he had argued in many essays that art needed a purpose. After enduring a mock execution, he spent twenty-five years in hard labor and Siberian exile. His crime? "Subversion." Four months after returning home from Siberia, he died, aged sixty-one. He had written a novel while in exile, called What Is to Be Done? (Shto Delat?), and it became a socialist tract, which was why there was a brooding silver statue of the man in front of the railway station.

  I was reminded here, and elsewhere on this train, of something Nabokov wrote in one of his essays—that much of Russian literature has the smell of the prison library.

  ***

  BEING ON THE TRANS-SIBERIAN was indeed like being on a ship, not any old ship, and not a cruise liner, but an old iron freighter plowing through a frozen sea, complete with grumpy deckhands, bad food, and an invisible captain. And with the same sort of smugness for the passenger inside that I happened to be, warm and comfortable, the deadly elements out the window, the sleet sometimes lashing the glass.