Ghost Train to the Eastern Star

"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.

She 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.

If there was a Trans-Siberian challenge, the seven nights and days on the long-distance train, it wasn't getting the visa or the ticket or finding one's way to Vladivostok; it was the usual obstacle in travel, the mental challenge. Russians overcame it by staying drunk—the men, anyway. So when I roamed around the train, all I saw were people drinking beer or vodka or else sleeping it off. For a Russian, a train journey of this length was a bender, and because of this, most of them were incoherent.

Nobu was hopping to keep warm on the snowy platform of Ulan-Ude in the early morning. I asked him how he was managing.

"The men in my compartment are very alcoholic," Nobu said. "They start in the morning when they wake up. They drink all day."

He didn't drink. He was snapping pictures and making notes. Now and then we met in a vestibule and talked about Murakami's novels or tried to guess how cold it was outside.

A Mongolian-looking man approached me at Ulan-Ude—squat, round-cheeked, Asiatic. As this was the railway junction for the line to Mongolia and China, I was curious to know his ethnicity. He told me he was a Buryat, and would I like to buy some manti7?

They were steaming meat-filled dumplings—I knew the word because I'd heard manti for dumpling in Turkey and elsewhere.

As he wrapped them, he said, "You American?"

"Yes, American."

"Mee-sippi," he said. "Al-bama. Flodda."

"I'm from Boston."

"Boston Bruins," he said without hesitating, still wrapping the dumplings.

"You like hockey?"

"New York Rangers," he said and handed me the package of dumplings. "Good manti. Sank you. Good journey."

What sent this cheery soul away was the sight of three drunks from the train staggering towards us. It was not yet nine in the morning. They were crapulous and carrying blue cans of beer, one of them with a can in each hand.