Paul Theroux - The Great Railway Bazaar

Everyone got off the Vostok Express, most of them to catch a plane for the nine-hour flight to Moscow, some – including myself – to spend the night in Khabarovsk before taking the Rossiya Express. I jumped on to the platform, was seared by the cold, and ran back into the Vostok to put on another sweater.

'No,' said the Intourist lady. 'You will stay here on platform please.'

I said it seemed a little nippy out there.

'It is thairty-five below tzero,' she said. 'Ha, ha! But not Celsius!'

In the bus she asked whether there was anything special I'd like to do in Khabarovsk. I was stumped for a moment, then said, 'How about a concert or an opera?'

She smiled, as anyone in Bangor, Maine, might have if asked the same question. She said, 'There is musical comedy. You like musical comedy?'

I said no.

'Good, I do not recommend.'

After lunch I went in search of pipe tobacco. I was running low and faced six smokeless days to'Moscow if I couldn't find any. I crossed Lenin Square, where a statue of the great man (who never visited the city) showed him posed with his arm thrust out in the gesture of a man hailing a taxi. On Karl Marx Street newspaper sellers in kiosks said they had no tabak but offered me Pravda with headlines of the 'Khabarovsk Heavy Industry Workers Applaud Smolensk Sugar Beet Workers on a Record Harvest' variety; then to a lunch counter. My glasses steamed up; I saw misty people in overcoats standing against a wall eating buns. No tabak. Outside, the steam turned to frost and blinded me. This I corrected in a grocery store, piled with butter and big cheeses and shelves of pickles and bread. I entered stores at random: the State Bank of the USSR, where a vast portrait of Marx glowered at depositors; the Youth League Headquarters; a jewellery store, filled with hideous clocks and watches and people gaping as if in a museum. At the end of the street I found a small envelope of Bulgarian pipe tobacco. Coming out of the store I saw a familiar face.

'Hear about Bruce?' It was Jeff. His nose was red, his beret was pulled over his ears like a shower cap, his scarf was wound around his mouth, and he was dancing with the cold. He plucked at the scarf and said, 'He's butcher's hook.'

'What's that?'

'You don't know the lingo. Jesus, it's cold! That's rhyming slang.'

'Butcher's hook' in cockney rhyming slang means 'look'. He's look? It didn't make sense. I said, 'What's it rhyming slang for?'

'He's crook,' said Jeff, hopping, attracting the stares of passing Siberians. 'Crook – don't they say that in the States when someone's sick?'

'I don't think so.'

'He looked seedy this morning. Lips all cracked, glassy eyes, running a temperature. Intourist took him to a hospital. I think he got pneumonia in that fucking ship.'

We walked back to the hotel. Jeff said, 'It's not a bad place. It looks like it's coming up.'

'It doesn't look that way to me.'

We passed a shop where about 150 people were lined up. The ones at the end of the line stared at us, but in the front of the line, at the half-open door, they were quarrelling, and if you looked closely you could see them crashing through the narrow entrance, all elbows, one at a time. I wanted to see what they were queuing for – obviously something in short supply – but Jeff said, 'On your right,' and I turned to see an enormous policeman gesturing for me to move along.

There were some oriental-looking people in the crowd; Khabarovsk seemed to be full of them, plump Chinese with square dark faces. They are the aboriginal people of the region, distant cousins of the American Eskimos, and are called Goldis. 'A sartorially practical tribe,' writes Harmon Tupper in his history of the Trans-Siberian, remarking that they changed from wearing fish skins in summer to dog skins in winter. But in Khabarovsk that December day they were dressed the same as everyone else, in felt boots and mittens, overcoats and fur hats. Jeff wondered who they were. I told him.

He said, 'That's funny, they don't look like abos.'

In the hotel restaurant Jeff made a beeline for a table where two pretty Russian girls sat eating. They were sisters, they said. Zhenyia was studying English; Nastasya's subject was Russian literature ('I say Russian literature, not Soviet literature – this I do not like'). We talked about books: Nastasya's favourite author was Chekhov, Zhenyia's was J. D. Salinger – 'Kholden Khaulfield is best character in every literature.' I said I was an admirer of Zamyatin, but they had not heard of the author of We (a novel that inspired Orwell to write 1984, which it resembles), who died in Paris in the twenties trying to write a biography of Attila the Hun. I asked if there were any novelists in Khabarovsk.

'Chekhov was here,' said Nastasya.

In 1890, Anton Chekhov visited Sakhalin, an island of convicts, 700 miles from Khabarovsk. But in Siberia all distances are relative: Sakhalin was right next door.

'Who else do you like?' I asked.

Nastasya said, 'Now you want to ask me about Solzhenitsyn.'

'I wasn't going to,' I said. 'But since you mentioned him, what do you think?'

'I do not like.'

'Have you read him?'

'No.'

'Do you think there's any truth in the statement that socialist realism is anti-Marxist?' I asked.

'Ask my sister this question,' said Nastasya.

But Jeff was talking to Zhenyia and making her blush. Then he addressed both girls. 'Look, suppose you could go to any country you liked. Where would you go?'

Zhenyia thought a moment. Finally she said, 'Spam.'

'Yes, I think so,' said Nastasya. 'For me – Spam.'

'Spam!' shouted Jeff.

'Because it is always hot there, I think,' said Zhenyia. The sisters rose and paid their bill. They put on their coats and scarves and mittens and pulled their woollen pompom caps down to their eyes, and they set off into the driving wind and snow.

Later the Intourist lady took me on a tour of the city. I said I wanted to see the river. She said, 'First, factory!' There were five factories. They made, she said, 'Kebles, weenches, poolies, bults.' In front of each one were six-foot portraits of hard-faced men, 'Workers of the Month', but they might easily have been photographs of a Chicago bowling team. I said they looked tough. The Intourist lady said, 'They have an opera company.' This is meant to rebuke the visitor: these monkeys have an opera company! But opera is politically neutral and the Khabarovsk opera house was vacant most of the time. If there was an alley they'd have had a bowling team. There wasn't much to do in Khabarovsk – even the Intourist lady admitted that. After various obelisks and monuments and a tour of the museum, which was full of dusty tigers and seals, all facing extinction, we went to the east bank of the Amur River. The Intourist lady said she would wait in the car. She didn't like the cold (she wanted to go to Italy and work for Aeroflot).

The river at this point is half a mile wide. From where I was standing I could see dozens of men, huddled on the ice, each one near a cluster of holes. They were ice-fishermen, mainly aged men who spent the winter days like this, watching for a tug on their lines. I scrambled down the bank and, marching into a stiff wind, made my way across the ice to where an old man stood, watching me come near. I said hello and counted his lines; he had chopped fourteen holes in the two-foot-thick ice with a blunt axe. He had caught six fish, the largest about nine inches, the smallest about four inches, and all of them frozen solid. He made me understand that he had been fishing since eight o'clock that morning; it was then half-past four. I asked him if I could take his picture. 'Nyet!' he said and showed me his ragged overcoat, his torn cap, the rips in his boots. He urged me to take a picture of one of his fish, but, as I was about to snap, something caught my eye. It was the comb of a fish spine, flecked with blood, the head and tail still attached.