Ghost Train to the Eastern Star

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 battery-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.