Stanley Stewart - In the Empire of Genghis Khan - A Journey Among Nomads

The women awoke together at six o’clock as if a bell had rung. Nodding in my direction, they lit cigarettes and set about filing their nails. Precedence among them was denoted by the number of their gold teeth. I wondered if it was the reputation of the train which had persuaded them to deposit their savings in dentistry. The eldest, a butch blonde, had a mouthful while the youngest, a pretty woman in satin trousers and sunglasses, relied on a single gold incisor to ensure her financial security. They settled down to read the Russian tabloids. Devoted to everyday tales of corruption, sex and violence, the gory covers displayed montages of corpses, American dollars, blazing guns, and a man with tattoos thumping a half-naked woman. I glanced over one of their shoulders at an inside page dominated by a photograph of a man’s naked bottom with a spear planted deep in the right buttock. Mercifully this was in blurry black and white.

With evening the Kazakhstan Express settled into a swaying domesticity, the antithesis of the dark criminality that the train was rumoured to represent. Up and down our carriage the compartments had been colonized by their passengers. Bags were unpacked, blankets unrolled, shoes stowed beneath the seats, and food, newspapers and general clutter spread over the tables and the seats. The handrail in the corridor had been commandeered as a communal clothes line for towels and flannels. People changed into slippers and old sweaters, lit pipes and opened brown bottles of beer. Reclining on the lower bunks, unbuttoned and unconcerned, they might have been installed on familiar divans in their own homes. An old-fashioned neighbourliness took hold of the carriage with people popping in and out of one another’s compartments to share stories and sausages, or standing outside in the passageway like villagers at their front gates, gossiping, admiring the view, sharing cups of tea from the samovar.

Reports of barbarism invariably tend to exaggeration. The evil reputation of the Kazakhstan Express dated from the dark years of 1992 and 1993 when crime in the former Soviet Union surged into the vacuum created by the collapse of government authority. But a railway police force and the stubborn resistance of the ordinary passengers, who had set upon thieves like lynch mobs, had brought an end to this lawless period. Though it still has its problems, I can report that the Kazakhstan Express was a good train of decent people. The three women in my compartment were not prostitutes but traders transporting dresses to Almaty. In the evening they arranged a small fashion show for our immediate neighbours who applauded the latest Moscow fashions with innocent enthusiasm.

Night fell and the lamps came on in the compartments. Somewhere in the past hour or two we had crossed into Kazakhstan untroubled by border inspection. I stood by an open window in the passage and watched the moon sailing in and out of view as the train curved back and forth. A scarf of smoke from the engine flapped away over a great silver emptiness.

The village street of the carriage passageway was almost deserted now. Two windows along an elderly gentleman in heavy cotton pyjamas and slippers was reading a book by one of the carriage lights. He was a tall ramshackle figure with a bony face and unruly thatch of hair. He looked like the village eccentric. In the dim light he pressed his face so close to the page, he might have been smelling the print. He looked up and saw me watching him.

‘Pushkin,’ he murmured. His nose was a beak, and his hair falling over his brow gave his face a startled appearance.

‘Do you know Eugene Onegin ?’ he asked in French.

I said I did, then went on to tell him that I had named my cat Pushkin. The old man’s face darkened at this frivolity, and his long hands encircled the book protectively.

‘Russia’s Shakespeare,’ he said under his breath, as some reprimand to my cat.

‘Onegin was a traveller,’ the man went on. His voice held some note of accusation. He peered at me as if I too was indistinct print he was trying to decipher. There was something strange about his eyes. They looked at me individually, first one then the other. ‘He was never satisfied,’ the man said. ‘He needed always a new horizon.’ The clatter of the rails crescendoed as we passed over a stretch of bad track. The train bucked and we swayed in unison against the windows. Over the noise words surfaced like pieces of wreckage – ‘Un romantique … unable to form attachments … a nomad … emotional dilettante … only wanted what he had lost …’ – until the roar of the wheels overwhelmed us completely and the man drifted away, still mouthing complaints about the lovelorn Onegin.

I retired to my bunk. The women were already asleep. All night the long whistle of the train echoed through my dreams, a mournful solitary note, a traveller’s complaint, trailing uneasy notions of movement and displacement.

The morning brought further emptiness. The landscape had been reduced to cruel simplicities – a white sky and a flat scaly plain over which clouds and their shadows sailed without distraction. In places the tough hide of the desert was softened by a spring glaze of green, a brief interlude between the twin extremities of winter and summer. The only buildings seemed to be government projects which appeared occasionally in the distance, a cluster of tin-roofed cement barns, a collection of silos, yards of antiquated tractors, a ploughed field as big as Wiltshire, then nothing again. How the Mongols must have loved these regions. Riding towards Europe, they could do a thousand miles out here without having to cross a ditch, or deal with the impediment of cities. Friar William was less happy. It took him almost seven weeks to cross the deserts of Kazakhstan.

‘The most severe trial,’ William reports. ‘There was no counting the times we were famished, thirsty, frozen and exhausted.’ What little habitation they encountered belonged to Mongols newly arrived in this recently conquered wilderness. All were keen to know about the sheep, cattle and horses in France and whether the Pope was really five hundred years old.

In the next compartment was a Russian family of three lumbering ursine figures – Father Bear, Mother Bear and Little Bear, a girl of eight. Father Bear was a colonel in the army. He took an interest in me, and emerged every time he saw me in the corridor to tell me things in passable English. He told me about the workings of drilling equipment on distant oil wells, about camel breeding, about the navigational systems of space craft, about the train schedules on our line. You name it, Father Bear was an expert on it. Through the open door of the compartment I could hear him droning on to his wife. Marriage to Father Bear had made the long-suffering Mother Bear a professional listener. She listened for hours at a stretch to his interminable discourses as we drifted through this flat emptiness, including a good hour and a half on the subject of baling equipment.

They invited me for lunch. The main course was a three-foot dried fish which they kept beneath one of the seats. Father Bear was telling me about Russian motorcars, of which he had an unaccountably high opinion. We passed a vast factory, one of the government projects abandoned in this bleak place. The empty buildings showed windows of sky.

‘Look,’ Father Bear said. ‘ Perestroika. Gorbachev’s restructuring.’ And he launched into a lengthy rant about the last Communist leader. The intense hatred for Gorbachev in Russia is a puzzle to most Westerners, particularly in the light of the directionless governments which succeeded him. Having abandoned dictatorship Russians seem to have gone straight for the basest features of democracy. Yeltsin’s appeal was based on his image as the man in the street. He reflected the Russian character with all its virtues and faults – tenacious, romantic, put-upon, alcoholic. He was prostonarodny , a difficult Russian term to translate, which means earthy or folksy. Gorbachev by contrast was a pedagogue, never happier than when he was lecturing the nation about its shortcomings. Most curious was the universal loathing for Gorbachev’s wife, Raisa. Father Bear believed that she was personally to blame for the country’s decline. She had dismantled Communism, he said, in order to buy her hats in Paris.