Paul Theroux - The Great Railway Bazaar

'Perhaps.'

'Capitalism bad, communism good.'

'Bullshit,' I said in English, then in German, 'You think so?'

'In America people kill each other with pistols. Pah! Pah! Pah! Like that.'

'I don't have a pistol.'

'What about the Negroes? The black people?'

'What about them?'

'You kill them.'

'Who tells you these things?'

'Newspapers. I read it for myself. Also it's on the radio all the time.'

'Soviet radio,' I said.

'Soviet radio is good radio,' he said.

The radio in the dining car was playing jazzy organ music. It was on all day, and even in the compartments

– each one had a loudspeaker – it continued to mutter because it could not be turned off completely. I jerked my thumb at the loudspeaker and said, 'Soviet radio is too loud.'

He guffawed. Then he said, 'I'm an invalid. Look here

– no foot, just a leg. No foot, no foot!'

He raised his felt boot and squashed the toe with the ferrule of his cane. He said, 'I was in Kiev during the war, fighting the Germans. They were shooting – Pah! Pah! – like that. I jumped into the water and started swimming. It was winter – cold water – very cold water! They shot my foot off, but I didn't stop swimming. Then another time my captain said to me, "Look, more Germans – " and in the snow – very deep snow – '

That night I slept poorly on my bench-sized bunk, dreaming of goose-stepping Germans with pitchforks, wearing helmets like the Rossiya's soup bowls; they forced me into an icy river. I woke. My feet lay exposed in the draught of the cold window; the blanket had slipped off, and the blue night light of the compartment made me think of an operating theatre. I took an aspirin and slept until it was light enough in the corridor to find the toilet. That day, around noon, we stopped at Skovo-rodino. The provodnik, my jailer, showed a young bearded man into my compartment. This was Vladimir. He was going to Irkutsk, which was two days away. For the rest of the afternoon Vladimir said no more. He read Russian paperbacks with patriotic pictures on their covers, and I looked out the window. Once I had thought of a train window as allowing me freedom to gape at the world; now it seemed an imprisoning thing and at times took on the opacity of a cell wall.

At one bend outside Skovorodino I saw we were being pulled by a giant steam locomotive. I diverted myself by trying (although Vladimir sucked his teeth in disapproval) to snap a picture of it as it rounded curves, shooting plumes of smoke out its side. The smoke rolled beside the train and rose slowly through the forests of birch and the Siberian cedars, where there were footprints on the ground and signs of dead fires, but not a soul to be seen. The countryside then was so changeless it might have been a picture pasted against the window. It put me to sleep. I dreamed of a particular cellar in Medford High School, then woke and saw Siberia and almost cried. Vladimir had stopped reading. He sat against the wall sketching on a pad with coloured pencils, a picture of telephone poles. I crept into the corridor. One of the Canadians had his face turned to the miles of snow.

He said, 'Thank God we're getting off this pretty soon. How far are you going?'

'Moscow; then the train to London.'

'Tough shitsky.'

'So they say.'

He said, 'I don't even know what day it is. It's going to be Christmas soon. Hey, did you see that house burning back there?'

'No.'

The previous day he had said, 'Did you see the truck that was crossing the river and crashed through the ice? Well, the back wheels anyway.' I wondered if he made it up. He was perpetually seeing disasters and events. I looked out the window and saw my anxious reflection.

I went back into the compartment and started to read New Grub Street again, but the combination of bad light and cold and drifting snow, and the decline of poor Edwin Reardon depressed me to the point of fatigue. I slept; I dreamed. I was in a mountain cabin with my wife and children. There was snow and a black mirror at the window. I was fretting: some people we knew, miles away, had to be told some tragic news. My feet were freezing, but I agreed to go and tell them this news. I kicked in a closet for a pair of boots and said, 'What about you, Anne? Aren't you coming?'

Anne said, 'It's so cold out! Anyway, I'm reading – I think I'll stay here.'

I addressed Annushka, the gorgon of the Rossiya dining car, who happened to be drinking tea in a corner of this cabin. 'You see? You see"? She always says she wants to go with me, but when the time comes she never does!'

Anne, my wife, said, 'You're just delaying! Go, if you're going – otherwise, shut the door and stop talking about it.'

I held the cabin door open. Outside, it was all emptiness. The cold wind blew into the room, throwing up the skirts of the tablecloth and rattling the lampshades. Snow sifted on to the log floor.

I said, 'Well, I'm going if no one else will.'

'Can I come too, Daddy?' I looked into my little boy's white face. He was pleading. His shoulders were pathetic.

'No,' I said. 'I have to go alone.'

'Shut the door!'

I woke up. My feet were cold. The compartment window was black and the carriage bounced (only the Trans-Siberian bounces, because the rails have square rather than staggered joints). The dream was an intimation of panic, guilty travelling, and a loneliness that made me lonelier still when I wrote it and examined it.

Vladimir had stopped sketching. He looked up and said, 'ChaiV

I understood. The Swahili word for tea is also chai. He hollered for the provodnik. Over tea and cookies I had my first Russian lesson, copying the words down phonetically on a notebook page: a dreary occupation, but it passed the time and was preferable to dozing into nightmares.

The dining car that night was empty and very cold. There was frost on the windows and such a chill in the air that the breath of the arguing employees was visible in steamy clouds. Vassily Prokofyevich, the manager, was doing his accounts, snapping his abacus. I had now been in the dining car enough times to know that by late afternoon Vassily, a short scar-faced man, was drunk. He jumped up and showed me his breath – vodka-scented steam – then dragged out a case of beer and demonstrated how the beer had frozen inside the bottles. He rubbed one in his hands to thaw it for me and barked at Nina, the black-haired girl. Nina brought me a plate of smoked salmon and some sliced bread. Vassily pointed to the salmon and said, 'Kita!'

I said, lEto karasho kita.'

Vassily was pleased. He told Nina to get me some more.

I tapped on the frosty window and said, 'Eto okhnor. '

'Da, da. ' Vassily poured himself some more vodka. He guzzled it. He gave me an inch in a tumbler. I drank it and saw that Annushka was at her usual place, dipping bread into black tea and sucking the bread slice.

I motioned at her tea and said, 'Eto zhudki chai. '

'Da, da.' Vassily laughed and refilled my glass.

I showed him my copy of Gissing and said, 'Eto ganyiga.'

'Da, da? said Vassily. Nina came near with the plate of salmon. 'Eto Nina,' said Vassily, seizing the pretty girl, 'and these' – I translated his gestures – 'are Nina's tits!'

The mornings now were darker, another trick of time on the railroad that seemed to be speeding me further into paranoia. After eight hours' sleep I woke up in pitch blackness. In the dim light of the December moon, a silver sickle, the landscape was bare – no trees, no snow. And there was no wind. It was weird, as dawn approached (at nine-thirty by my watch), to see the villages on the banks of the Shilka and the Ingoda rivers, the small collections of wooden huts aged a deep brown, with the smoke rising straight up, a puffing from each chimney that made me think of an early form of wood-burning vehicle stranded on these deserted steppes. After hours of this desolation we came to Chita, a satanic city of belching chimneys and great heaps of smoking ashes dumped beside the tracks. Outside Chita there was a' frozen lake on which ice-fishermen crouched like the fat black crows with fluffed-out feathers that roosted in the larches at the verge of the lake.