Ghost Train to the Eastern Star

  All this history was well within the memory of most people I met. These were the sentiments of a woman activist, one Madam Alexeev, who appeared in a short film about Perm 36: "To see that this is not a labor camp but a museum is to realize what an incredible step we've taken from our years of slavery."

  True, but the film had been underwritten by the Ford Foundation, and many of the prison guards, the floggers, the torturers, the spies, the men hissing the word "dust" at the suffering slave laborers, the hacks and political flunkies who had made this prison possible, were in the Russian government now—including Russian president Vladimir Putin, who had headed the KGB when Perm 36 had been a place of great suffering and death.

  In the lowering darkness of late afternoon we drove back to the city of Perm on the empty roads. The snowstorm had not abated. The landscape seemed much bleaker and colder for my having seen the slave labor camp hidden in the hills.

  ***

  FOR ALL THE UPBEAT TALK of Perm as the setting of Doctor Zhivago and Chekhov's Three Sisters, I still could not ease my mind after I'd seen the gulag. Many places in Perm, some of them innocent-looking, were associated with repression or imprisonment. Sergei only depressed me more when he said things like "Dostoyevsky walked down this street on his way to prison in Omsk!" and, at the Kama River, "Look at this river—barges brought prisoners here from Moscow, before the railway! Even in czarist times."

  And long afterwards, too. In Hope Against Hope, Nadezhda Mandelstam recounts her experience of misery and suffering passing through Perm on a barge with her husband, Osip. The Perm Public Library had mounted an exhibit about Pasternak, which was also a recounting of repression, imprisonment, and book banning—the 1957 novel had not appeared in Perm until more than thirty years later.

  And the churches, too, every one that I saw—lovely eighteenth-century onion-domed buildings, not just in Perm but in Kungur, down the Siberian Road, and the Belogorsky Monastery high on a hill outside the village of Kalinino—had served as either a prison or a madhouse, many of the rooms used for torture or solitary confinement. Some of these handsome buildings had functioned as prisons until 1990.

  "See the bullet marks?" Sergei said.

  He traced his gloved fingers on the deeply pitted brickwork of the Belogorsky Cathedral wall as we stood averting our faces from the sharp freezing wind. The wind was so strong it tipped my body, and I had trouble standing upright. This hilltop in the Urals was the coldest place I'd been in Russia. The whole wall was plastered with blown snow and ice, but the gouged bricks were unusual.

  "After Stalin took over this church in 1930 and made it a prison, the police lined up seventy-four monks against this wall, five at a time, and shot them."

  Later, a Russian told me in passing, "You know why people were imprisoned and tortured in churches? Huh? Because of the thick walls and the strong construction. They were soundproof. No one outside could hear the screams."

  The next day, more memories of misery at the Peter and Paul Cathedral, the oldest stone building in Perm—and another former prison, like Belogorsky, and St. Nicholas in Kungur. Up to their knees in snow, nine children stood looking hopeful—most of them skinny and pale-faced adolescents who were very cold—with their hands out, begging as the snow fell on their heads.

  "They are from poor families," Yelena said.

  But after the experience of Perm 36, even their sadness was an anticlimax. We went to the ice caves outside the city of Kungur; they were dungeon-like, like a deep freeze three miles deep, just darkness, tumbled boulders, and slimy stalactites. The entrance was protected by clanking steel doors, making me think that these caves, too, might have served as a prison in earlier times.

  On another day, in another snowstorm, I saw some naked, fattish, middle-aged couples in Speedos jumping into a hole that had been cut through the ice in a lake. Barefoot in the snow, they gasped from the cold, their skin blotchy pink, their body hair prickling with ice.

  That frosty night at Perm's Tchaikovsky Theater, I sat, drowsy with champagne from the lobby bar, and watched the ballet Sleeping Beauty. In the audience were children, families, old women, stuffed shirts, old couples holding hands, and local beauties in stylish boots, tight sweaters, and fur hats. The atmosphere could not have been sweeter, nor the music more beguiling. Yet my mind, ruminative with the melodies and the wine, wandered back. I imagined this same theater, perhaps the same ballet, fifteen years ago: the lovely sets, the costumed dancers, the music, the warmth and well-being—and up the road the prisoners regarded as slaves.

  "Next to the right to create, the right to criticize is the richest gift that liberty of thought can offer," Nabokov wrote, with Soviet prisoners in mind, adding that the American living in freedom "may be apt to regard stories of prison life coming from remote lands as exaggerated accounts spread by panting fugitives."

  Perm 36 represented forty years of the starved and dying, half frozen, benumbed in their plank bunks, shivering in rags, waking up from a state of near mortification every few hours in the cold, turned into slave labor, reduced to dust, because of something they said or wrote.

  "This is posikunchiki" Yelena said, helping me to some dumplings in a restaurant in Perm on our last evening, a farewell delicacy. "They squirt when you eat them. 'Pissing dumplings.'"

  Sergei poured vodka. He raised his glass. "Friendship!"

  We ate dumpling soup (pelmenye), Tatar buns with spinach (potchmak), and mushroom stew in pots (garshochki). We toasted one another with vodka, saying that we would stay in touch, that we'd meet again in warmer weather—and I drank, and drank again, and drunkenly agreed to return, and made more extravagant promises, as travelers do just before they move on.

  ***

  IT WAS STILL SNOWING AS the overnight train, the Kama Express, named for the river, left Perm for Moscow. This was around noon. I was bewildered by the thought that a habit of travel I'd acquired was now ending—the long backtrack that had begun many months before in London and become a way of living, as long journeys do. We were crossing the Urals, the Asiatic dividing line; now, out of Asia, I felt restless, inattentive, thinking only of the way home.

  This train was luxurious by Russian standards: I had a private compartment (cushions, lace curtains, tassels), I drank my Kyoto green tea, and the provodnitsa brought me cookies. Throughout the afternoon, hawkers in the driving snow on unshoveled railway platforms sold dried fish and handicrafts and home-knitted wool shawls, the cottage industries of an earlier time, my whole railway experience a throwback, complete with belligerent drunks and demanding beggars at many stations.

  Before Kirov—formerly Vyatka—where Sergei's babushka had suffered political repression, I was standing at the window looking at the passing birch forest when a man setting his luggage down asked where I happened to be from. When I told him, he smiled, almost in pity. I knew what he was thinking, so I asked him for his opinion.

  "Do Russians talk about us fighting in Iraq?" I asked.

  "Russian people don't pay much attention. Yes, they talk about it sometimes." He said no more about that, implying: I'm not going to insult you by repeating what people say. "It's not really in the news. We have our own wars."

  I was surprised by how good his English was; though it was heavily inflected, he was fluent and direct.

  "We were in Afghanistan," he said. "It's unwinnable. Because there's no government. Iraq, though..."He nodded almost approvingly. "The effect has been to put the oil price up. This is good for us. Now I must say goodbye. Have a good trip. This is my station."

  He got off at Kirov. Night had fallen. At some stations after that, people rushed out of the darkness in thick fur hats and big felt boots selling fish on sticks jammed through their gills. Though we were less than ten hours from Moscow on the main line, it might have been a scene from the earliest years of the Trans-Siberian.

  The night passed quickly. I was roused by a rapping at the door—"Moskva!" I woke and yawned and, as always, took a vitamin pill and shaved with my b
attery-powered razor and brushed my teeth. Then I walked into Yaroslavl Station, jostled by the crowd—people bright-eyed with fatigue, yawning, sleepwalking along the platform through the falling snow.

  After the usual give-and-take with a taxi driver—half quarrel, half negotiation—and a slow trip along unplowed city streets, I found my hotel. The desk clerk wouldn't admit me because I was too early. I went outside and walked. As I passed a sushi bar in the predawn snowfall, a woman on a stool leaned at the window and beckoned to me—a prostitute, still alert and willing in the early morning. She represented a new Russian tendency: having been relieved of the burden of unsmiling dogma, they seemed restlessly preoccupied with the worst excesses of the West, not just the flesh, but money and crime, the joyless greed and promiscuity I had seen in the new China too.

  I walked for several hours, enjoying the emptiness of the city, looking magical in the snow. After I checked into the hotel and had a bath, I went on a walking tour with a woman who was a historian of the city. I wanted to know how it was different from the Moscow I had seen in 1973.

  "It's a completely different place," she said. "Though 1973 was better than 1988, when we had nothing."

  The country had collapsed in 1988, and for the next few years food was scarce and consumer goods were almost unobtainable, she said. This woman's children liked cheese. She made cheese at home in her kitchen, squeezing milk through a cloth bag. She wanted to buy bunk beds for them. She was put on a six-month waiting list.

  "You know the joke?" she said. "A woman wants to buy a car. She is given a voucher and told, 'It will be delivered in ten years.' 'Morning or afternoon?' she asks. 'Why do you want to know?' She says, 'Because the plumber is coming in the morning.' It was like that."

  But the economic tide turned in 1995. Putin kept his promises and things improved. My guide didn't say so, but it was well known that the Russian government was filled with crooks, embezzlers, and opportunists.

  We strolled around, from Beria's house ("he buried bodies on his grounds") to Gorki's house (oceanic theme, sea creatures and coral) to the mansion that housed the Union of Russian Writers on Porvaskaya Street, which is mentioned as Rostov's house in War and Peace.

  "Our history is that of the government fighting against its own people," she said as we crossed New Arbat Street. She helped me buy tickets for performances at the Moscow Conservatory, and then she said goodbye.

  I went to a Mahler concert and in the middle of the lugubrious music remembered the long days I'd spent on the train passing Siberian birches and snowfields. The next night I sat through half of a Poulenc opera, and when I asked for my coat the woman spoke fiercely in Russian, and I knew she was saying, "But it's not over yet!" It was over for me. Tchaikovsky the next night: passionate and dramatic, and I reflected on the forbidding place that Russia had been that first time: the closed cities, the repression, the gulag, no magazines to speak of, hardly any restaurants. And here were sushi bars and pizza parlors and Mexican restaurants and coffee shops and newsstands selling Time and the International Herald Tribune and bookstores with my own books in them, in Russian and English. In one of those stores, I was chatting up a Russian woman, telling her my travels. I told only half of what I'd seen, because she would never have believed me. Yet she wasn't impressed. She just said, "Why do you travel alone?" as though I was out of my mind.

  And why was I still here? I felt I was killing time, especially in Russia, which, in spite of all the talk of change and reform, seemed exactly the same place as it had ever been: a pretentious empire with a cruel government that was helpless without secret police.

  I was at the conservatory in the L. L. Bean boots that I had been tramping around in since Japan, listening to Tchaikovsky, "Variations on a Rococo Theme," with a wonderful cello soloist, and in the mythomania that all travelers indulge in, I was thinking that it was like the closing theme music to my trip: cue the violins.

  NIGHT TRAIN TO BERLIN AND BEYOND

  IN THE MORNING DARKNESS and lamp-lit iridescence of the Moscow outskirts, on the fast train to Berlin (via Minsk and Warsaw), I remembered my story about the American girl in India, how I had added a thought to my Tao of Travel. It was about a true journey being much more than a vivid or vacant interval of being away. The best travel was not a simple train trip or even a whole collection of them, but something lengthier and more complex: an experience of the fourth dimension, with stops and starts and longueurs, spells of illness and recovery, dawdling and hurrying and having to wait, with the sudden phenomenon of happiness as an episodic reward.

  Some travel didn't involve locomotion, but instead periods of residence and reflection, a weightless orbiting, as when I became almost invisible and seemed to dissolve, ghost-like again, in an agreeable location, an aromatic version of home, days of work and thought when I remained monkishly in my head, unaware of the exotic—days when I would emerge from my hotel room into a crowded Asiatic lane as though I'd been beamed there as "matter transfer" by a hot light, surprised to see a bazaar and rickshaws and skinny street vendors, pretty girls staring, and I would laugh: What am I doing here?

  I'd come to see that travel for me was no longer a fun-seeking interlude, not even the roundabout detour of heading home, but a way of living my life: a trip without an end where the only destination was darkness. The beauty of it was that I was doing it in the simplest way, as a homeless person with a small bag and a briefcase of papers, rubbing across the world, traveling light. The epitome of this was the elderly father of the Jain I had met in Jodhpur, who, after a long career as an accountant, said goodbye to his family and set out on foot to spend the rest of his wandering life seeking enlightenment, or a monk like Tapa Snim in Mandalay, his whole material existence tucked into a bag slung over his shoulder, traveling from country to country to solve holy riddles in his head about the Buddha as a pinecone tree.

  In the dining car of this Berlin train, I was making notes on the flyleaf of the book I was reading, one I had bought in Moscow for the onward journey. It was Venus in Furs, but it did not live up to its lurid cover or its reputation as an erotic classic. I ordered bread, fried eggs, and tea (I could still say khlyeb and ya-ich-nitsa and chai).

  The rock-faced Russian men pigging it over a messy breakfast at the next table noticed my book. Gesturing with big fingers and smiling, they indicated, How about a closer look at the cover?

  The book was passed from horny hand to horny hand, the fat fingers poking at the bosomy torso wrapped in a fur stole. Before they went back to their sausages and their vodka, the men regarded me with widened lips and welcoming teeth.

  "You woodka." They were not so much offering me a drink as ordering me to take one, the inevitable Russian challenge.

  I took one. They bullied me to repeat it. We toasted peace and friendship. Five shots later, my brain was inflamed. The sun came up, glanced on the snow, slashed through the window, and stung my bloodshot eyes.

  "Fryendsheep!" Oleg was saying. His friends were Valery and Alexey. They were steelworkers going to Minsk. They had the dangerous and half-domesticated look of men who'd just been given bad haircuts.

  "To money!" I said, attempting a joke.

  "No money!" Oleg said. "Money—sheet!"

  "To the little children," I said.

  "What you are saying?"

  "To love," I said.

  "Love," they said.

  "Bush is rediska" Oleg said with the suddenness of a drunk. "Rediska?"

  "Is a bad fruit," Oleg said.

  A radish, I guessed, a mildly denigrating euphemism.

  "Peace," I said, and was glad when at last the vodka bottle was empty. I was helplessly drunk at nine-thirty on this sunny morning as the train drew into Minsk's bright, cold, and dazzling snow, its pistachio-colored station. I had to lie down. I slept and woke and read the rest of Venus in Furs, written by the man whose name Freud chose to define the desire for pain. Oh, a man must feel like a God when he sees others before him trembling, I read, and thought of the p
aranoiac Stalin and his gulag.

  "Kontrol!" a Polish border guard shouted at Terespol Station as she flung my door open that night. Black leather coat, boots, black gloves: she could have stepped from Sacher-Masoch's novel.

  After a peaceful night, "Kontrol!" again, and I looked out the window into the edge of Germany and the first snowless landscape I had seen since Vladivostok.

  In the next compartment, a young English couple and their small child were headed for a skiing holiday in the Alps. They asked where I'd been. I'd just come from Perm, I said, and I mentioned the gulag.

  "I'd do all right in a gulag," the wife said, sniffing confidently.

  "How so?"

  "I like being on my own."

  I got off at Berlin. It was a whole city now, and rebuilt. The wall was down, and fragments of it were erected as freakish monuments. More sushi bars and pizza parlors and Mexican restaurants and coffee shops, and couples strolling in the sunshine. I went to three museums, and at nightfall, instead of checking into a hotel, I went back to Berlin Hauptbahnhof and caught the Paris Express.

  In the most comfortable compartment of the many night trains I had occupied on my trip was a wide bed with a soft duvet, a writing desk, and a bathroom as large as any in a Japanese hotel—with a shower stall and a swing-out sink. I took a hot shower, drank some beer, and went to bed. I woke to green bushes, and trees in bud, and a silvery fog like threadbare silk fraying to scraps and ghosting over the green hedges and plow marks of neatly ruled fields.

  The mild morning in Paris was a gilded evaporation of dissolving fog, like a mist of decomposing angels, the sun burning through its essence and beautifying the ornate backdrop of biscuit-colored buildings, revealing the city to me once again as a luminous stage set.

  For the sake of symmetry, and because I was hungry and had time to kill, I checked my bag at the Gare du Nord and walked across the street to the Brasserie Terminus Nord. I ordered the same meal that I'd eaten that early evening, months and months ago, before taking the Orient Express to Budapest—bouillabaisse, green salad, a half bottle of white burgundy. Afterwards, I walked a little, and thought: Once a city's boulevards have been marched by triumphant Nazis, they never look quite so grand again. Then I took the Eurostar to London.