Ghost Train to the Eastern Star

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.