Ghost Train to the Eastern Star

"We Marine!" one of them said to me. He told me his name was Fyodor and that they were based on a ship in Vladivostok.

The others began to shout incoherently. They wore track suits and slippers. They were going to Nizhni Novgorod, three days west of here.

When they had gone, I saw Nobu taking a picture of Ulan-Ude Station, where, under the station sign, the temperature was given in a lozenge of red lights. It was minus-17 Celsius.

My surprise in this frozen station in the middle of the Siberian steppe was that my BlackBerry buzzed with messages, some of them from Penelope, quite a few urging me to buy Viagra or to have my penis enlarged or to invest in promising stocks. Spam in the wilderness. But a mile out of Ulan-Ude it went dead—as it had been through the whole of Japan—and its only use was as a night light or (as I had used it for months) an emergency flashlight when I woke at night and groped down the carriage to take a piss.

Rolling through deepening snow—the effect of Lake Baikal—I spent the day writing about my father and thinking how nothing had changed on the line since I'd last taken it, thirty-three years ago. The train was still a big clanking antique, the food was still filthy, the trackside villages were still collections of wood-burning bungalows. The railway personnel, especially the women, were diligent about knocking the ice out of the drains with a long-handled ax and keeping the samovar going, but apart from that, there was no service to speak of. They were inattentive to passengers, but scrupulous about standing at attention in uniform by the coach at every stop.

What seemed a sprinkling of snow chips in the late afternoon under a darkened sky thickened to a whirling mass of snowflakes and finally a blizzard that entirely obscured Baikal—quite a storm, since it was the largest lake in the world. Out of the snowstorm at Slyudyanka a mob of hawkers, old men and women in fur hats, lifted bags of smoked fish and jostled in the doorway.

"What is this?" I asked Dimitri, who was in a kupe in my coach.

"Is omul. Good wiz beer," Dimitri said.

Omul was a sort of salmon trout found only in Lake Baikal. Prized by Russians, who made an effort to travel all this way to buy this fish, it was sold cold-smoked (stiff and dried) or warm-smoked (soft and fleshy and aromatic). I bought two bags of each.

The fishmongers in the falling snow at Slyudyanka were a glimpse of old Russia, not just their beautiful fur hats and big bulgy coats and thick mittens, but their dark frozen faces, their deeply pitted noses, as they pushed the bags of fish to the potential buyers on the train. A hundred years ago it could not have looked any different: the same boots, the same mittens and furs and ragged scarves, the same waiting on the platform in the storm for the brief stop of the long-distance train, the same look of urgency.

We stopped again at Irkutsk while I feasted on the fish. Darkness fell, the train plowed slowly through the night, and in the morning frost-sparkle, four days on from Vladivostok, in another time zone, one of eight on this train trip, the landscape was unchanged: birches and black saplings in the snowfields passing the mud-flecked window.

A settlement of small cottages covered a whole slope of a hillside.

"Dachas?" I asked Dimitri, just a guess, because there was no smoke in the chimneys. As soon as I said it, I thought: It's a surmise, because travelers are always inventing the country they're passing through.

"Yes," he said. "People from Krasnoyarsk, they come here in the summer."

"It's a whole village."

"Not a village," Dimitri said. "A station."

"What's the difference?"

"No post office. No shop. No school," he said. He was making a distinction between a seasonal camp and a real settlement.

Dimitri was from Krasnoyarsk, an hour down the line. He had studied mining at the local university. It was a city of mines—I saw many from the train—some of them gold mines, surface diggings. Gold has been mined this way in Russia for more than three hundred years.

What interested me about Dimitri was that he was completely satisfied, as a Russian worker, a resident of Krasnoyarsk, a voter and householder and citizen. As we were talking in the corridor of the train, his cell phone rang.

He answered it, and when he was through talking he said, "That was my boss. He knew I was on the train. He wants me to work today. It's okay. I like my work."

He was employed by a company that made mining equipment that was shipped all over the country, even to distant Kolyma and Vladivostok.

Dimitri was about thirty, not tall but muscular. He skied in the hills around Krasnoyarsk, he rode his motorcycle in better weather, he lifted weights. He had his own apartment but was looking for a bigger one, "maybe when I get married." He drove a new Toyota Corolla. He wanted a Lexus. He was ambitious but contented, not a boozer, a nonsmoker—that rare individual, a sober, happy Russian.