Paul Theroux - The Great Railway Bazaar

'Galina Petrovna,' I said to the bartender. 'Another beer, please.'

The blonde put down her knitting, and, mumbling to Nikola in Russian, filled my glass.

Nikola said, 'She wants you to call her Galya. It's more friendly.'

'I don't think I have anything to gain by calling her Galya.'

'You are right.' He winked. 'Nothing to gain.'

We talked about Yugoslavia. Nikola said, 'In Yugoslavia we have three things – freedom, women, and drinking!'

'But not all at the same time surely?' I said. The mention of freedom brought the conversation around to Djilas, the persecuted Yugoslav writer.

'This Djilas,' said Nikola. 'I tell you steury. I am in school. They make me rat Djilas. I have to rat all he has reet. About Staleen. He say, hum, Staleen same as Zayoosh. Zayoosh, the Greek gat. Not he theenk like Zayoosh, but look like Zayoosh – big face and great head. I call Djilas traitor of communeesh. This is why. He reet book – big book – call it, hum, Conversation with Staleen. But, hum! he says now Staleen is monstra. Monstra! First Zayoosh, then monstra. I ask you why. Why? Because Djilas is traitor – '

Nikola had been the captain of a Yugoslav ship. He was now an official with a shipping company, on his way to Nakhodka to inspect a damaged freighter. He wished he was still a captain, and he reminisced about the time his ship had nearly sunk in a storm in these Tsugaru Straits. We were passing through dangerous currents, he said. 'Sometimes you have to pray, but don't let the men see you!'

Late at night the bar of the Khabarovsk held only the American couple, Nikola, a gloomy Pole whose name I never learned, and me. The American couple said they were 'into the occult'. I asked them for proof. They told me ghost stories. One was about a Japanese doll they had been given; it had a chipped nose. 'Get rid of it! It's alive!' a Japanese man told them. It had a soul. They went to a temple, sprinkled salt in a circle, and performed a purification ceremony. 'Or else something might have happened to our faces.' I said this was pure speculation. They told me another story. This happened in New Orleans. They were given a strange book. Dinner guests remarked on how depressing their house had become; the book was giving off emanations. They burned the book in an ash can, and a week later their house burned to the ground – no one knew why.

'I know a dealer in old prints,' I said, and began to tell them the most frightening story I know, 'The Mezzotint', by M. R. James.

'Yike!' said the woman when I finished. Her husband said, 'Hey, are you into the occult, too?'

The next morning we were out of the straits; I thought the Sea of Japan would be calmer, but it was much worse. Nikola explained that there were two currents in the Sea of Japan, the warm Kyushu current from the south, and the cold current from the Sea of Okhotsk: they met and made great turbulence. All day the ship rolled in a snow storm into the deepness of the swelling sea, at the far trough of each swell thumping an enormous wave that shook the windows. The dropping ship gave me a sensation of weightlessness, which the shuddering screws a moment later turned into nausea. The seasickness was half fear – that the ship would founder in that icy sea, that we would have to cope with the snow and those waves in frail lifeboats.

The Pole said I looked ill.

'I feel ill.’

'Get drunk.'

I tried, on Georgian wine, but felt worse afterwards, as if I had drunk turpentine. The ship was rocking tremendously; and it was loud with the explosions of waves on the hull, banging doors and loose cupboards and walls so shrill with vibrations it seemed they were about to burst apart. I went to my cabin. Anders was already in his bunk, looking ghastly. Jeff and Bruce were moaning. Now the ship seemed to be leaping clear of the sea, staying airborne for five noisy seconds, and then dropping sideways with a terrific wrenching of woodwork. I didn't take off my clothes. Lifeboat Seven was mine. In his sleep, Anders shrieked, 'No!'

Just before dawn the sea was at its roughest. Again and again I was thrown upwards from my bunk, and once I hit my head on the bunk's frame. At dawn – the light showed through the ice on the porthole – the sea was calmer. I slept for an hour, before being awakened by another bump to hear the following exchange.

'Hey, Bruce.'

'Mm?'

'How's your little Ned Kelly?'

'Mawright.'

'Ya throw ya voice?'

'Naw.'

'Gee, it's rough! These beds make a hell of a racket.'

Jeff was silent for a while. Anders groaned. I tried to tune the radio I had bought in Yokohama.

'I wonder what's for brekkie?'Jeff said at last.

Breakfast (salami, olives, runny eggs, damp bread) was served to eight passengers. The rest, including all the Japanese, were seasick. I sat with the Pole and Nikola. The Pole and I were talking about Joseph Conrad. The Pole called him by his original family name, Korzen-iowski. Nikola wondered at my interest and said, 'He writes about Staleen too, this Korzeniowski?'

That was our last day on the Khabarovsk. It was sunny, but the temperature was well below zero – much too cold to spend more than a few minutes on deck. I stayed in the bar reading Gissing. Around noon Nikola showed up with an old grizzled Russian in tow. They drank vodka, and, once primed, the Russian began telling stories about the war. The Russian (Nikola translated) had been a mate on a ship called the Vanzetti - its sister ship was the Sacco – a decrepit freighter captained by a notorious drunkard. In a convoy of fifty ships crossing the Atlantic the Vanzetti was so slow it dropped far behind, and one day, when the convoy was almost out of sight, a German submarine approached. The captain radioed for assistance, but the convoy sped away, leaving the Vanzetti to fend for herself. The Vanzetti somehow eluded two German torpedoes. The sub surfaced for a look, but the drunken captain had swung his rusty cannon around; he fired once, puncturing the sub and sinking it. The Germans came to believe that this hulk, manned by incompetents, was a secret weapon, and gave the convoy no further trouble. When the Vanzetti limped into Reykjavik, the British organized a special party for the Russians, who showed up two hours late, bellowing obscene songs, and the captain, paralytic with drink, was awarded a medal.

I saw seagulls in the afternoon, but it was five o'clock before the Soviet coast came into view. Surprisingly, it was bare of snow. It was brown, flat, and treeless, the grimmest landscape I had ever laid eyes on, like an immense beach of frozen dirt washed by an oily black sea. The Russian passengers, who until then had sloped around the ship in old clothes and felt slippers, put on wrinkled suits and fur hats for the arrival, and along the starboard deck I saw them pinning medals ('Exemplary Worker', 'Yakutsk Cooperative Society', 'Blagoveshchensk Youth League') to their breast pockets. The ship was a long time docking at Nakhodka. I found a sheltered spot on the deck, fiddled with my radio, and got gypsy music – violins scraping like a chorus of ripsaws. A deck hand in a mangy fur hat and ragged coat crouched by the davit. He asked me, in English (he had been to Seattle!), to turn the music louder. It was the Moldavian half-hour on Moscow Radio. He smiled sadly, showing me his metal dentures. He was from Moldavia, and far from home.

The Siberian port of Nakhodka in December gives the impression of being on the very edge of the world, in an atmosphere that does not quite support life. The slender trees are leafless; the ground is packed hard, and no grass grows on it; the streets have no traffic, the sidewalks no people. There are lights burning, but they are like lighthouse beacons positioned to warn people who stray near Nakhodka that it is a place of danger and there is only emptiness beyond it. The subzero weather makes it odourless and not a single sound wrinkles its silence. It is the sort of place that gives rise to the notion that the earth is flat.