Ghost Train to the Eastern Star

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.