Off the Rails

by Beppe Severgnini

  Arriving in Kiev

  The four of us resemble bicycles: to stay upright, we have to keep moving. Two days in Moscow were enough to make it clear that we weren’t cut out for tourism. As soon as taxi no. 255 heads off toward the Kiyevskaya station, we catch a whiff of the change of mood. The trans-European journey has begun! Even the city seems a little less hostile, as the neon lights blink on to ward off the sunset.

  I have to admit, I like Russian stations. They’re full of kiosks that sell old-fashioned products; places to sit; policemen with oversized cinematic hats. You go to the track at the last second, just minutes before departure. When it’s cold out, for heat-related reasons. When it’s warm out, as it is this evening, just because that’s how everyone is used to doing it.

  It’s still deeply stirring, after years of traveling, to see the word Киев on the departure board. Kiev, Ukraine! Our first stop on the long trip to Lisbon. We board the train. It pulls out into the Moscow night. The woman in charge of the carriage is a statuesque Ukrainian, capable of stopping a speeding locomotive with a glance. She checks to make sure that all is in order, and then moves on.

  At four in the morning, we reach the border. Four expressionless guards—all women, all blond, all silent—check the passports of a populace still sleepy and in its underwear. The impression is that nothing can surprise them.

  I can’t seem to get to sleep. The train is running over a dark land, past infrequent lights and distant farms. Looking at a map, boarding a train, crossing a continent: childish, isn’t it? But every so often adults need to do childish things, and railway fantasies, let’s admit it, aren’t the most dangerous kind. Trains are places of exchange, study, and rest. You don’t need to rush toward the world; it’s the world that rushes toward you.

  Trains are generators of meetings and farewells. They are concert halls—all you need is a pair of earbuds—and reading groups. They are a classic idea, impervious to fashion, just like bicycles and watches and clocks with hands and a dial. They are cradles and cozy nooks, places for meditation, and gymnasiums for the imagination. Where do they go, those silent women who tuck their light coats around them to ward off prying eyes and the wind? What do those young people have in mind as they lean against the restroom door and chat? What’s going on, in this ordinary night in Eastern Europe, that we don’t know now and never will?

  Lend me your great noise, your great smooth speed,

  Your nocturnal gliding across lighted Europe.

  These lines were written by the Frenchman Valery Larbaud, an eccentric individual who was also known under the pseudonyms A. O. Barnabooth, L. Hagiosy, and X. M. Tourmier de Zamble. His father owned the company that bottled Vichy mineral water, and he traveled in luxury toward the end of the belle époque; he was troubled by some lingering sense of guilt, but on the whole he enjoyed himself. Things are different now: Ukrainian trains aren’t luxurious and the epoch we live in isn’t particularly lovely. Still, rolling by night across a brightly lighted Europe is a profoundly stirring thing. You need only wait for your heartbeat to catch the rhythm of the train, and hope that Mark doesn’t fall off the ladder to the upper bunk again.

  In Kraków

  From Kraków station, just outside of the Old Town, we go straight to the Italian Cultural Institute. We find a small crowd curious to gawk at four vagabonds, and we slip into several interesting discussions of railway philosophy.

  The first one concerns Karol Wojtyła, this city’s former archbishop and adopted son. John Paul II looms over the Market Square, the largest medieval square in Europe: he appears on billboards, posters, banners. How important was he to the defeat of Communism? Maybe not as important as they believe in Poland and more important than they believe in America.

  The second discussion has to do with the ideal train trip. We discover that the wildest dreams of those present range from the Orient Express to the Trans-Siberian Express, from a trip as a couple to Chongqing, China, to a dinner in the restaurant car with Mark Spörrle. The dining companion in question feigns modesty, but he doesn’t rule it out entirely.

  The third discussion has to do with the cardinal points of the compass. Stephan Bielanski, a professor at the Jagiellonian University, inquires, “In Italy, why do you include Poland among the Eastern European countries when we’re right in the center of Europe? You only need to glance at a map.”

  I reply: You need to start from Germany, which is at the very center of Europe. Not the geographic center, but the economic, political, and psychological center. It’s the richest, most populous, and most influential country in the European Union. Having established that it’s the center, everything else follows naturally. There is a north (Scandinavia, the British Isles), a south (the Mediterranean countries), and a west (from France to Portugal). The east, for the Europeans, begins at the river Oder. Is Vienna east of Prague? True, it is, but that doesn’t matter. In some cases, history, economics, and psychology count more than geography does.

  At this point, we stop discussing trains and longitude and we head for the buffet, which is excellent and well organized. Usually I hate buffets—they bring out the worst in mankind—but this one is an exception. Daria comes up to me, announces that she is one of my readers, and says: “I want to give you a book.” I turn pale. Giving a book to a traveler is an act of cruelty. It will be a deadweight in his suitcase for many days to come (unless the recipient abandons the book in his hotel room, which is something I’ve learned to do without turning a hair).

  How wrong I was! Thank you, Daria. Not only is the book light and convenient; it’s titled How to Write Like Chekhov: Advice and Inspiration, Straight from His Own Letters and Work. The editor starts from Anton Chekhov’s travel memoir The Island of Sakhalin, a piece of reporting from the easternmost corner of the czarist empire, and extrapolates advice for those setting out on long journeys and who are interested in telling the tale.

  I leaf through the book and discover a number of intelligent suggestions:

  Talk Things Over with Friends

  Challenge Indifference

  Read and Summarize

  Be Ready to Revise Your Opinions

  Do Not Make Too Many Plans

  Count, Measure, Weigh

  Make Inventories

  Walk in Company

  Stroll Alone

  Observe by Day and by Night

  Use All Five Senses

  Collect Facts

  Read the Local Papers

  And his last, most magnificent advice of all:

  Accept Invitations

  Gentle readers of Kraków! Who wants four talkative and ravenous travelers en route to Prague as dinner guests? They’ll tell you all about Anton Chekhov and the Polish railways.

  Arriving in Prague

  Have you heard of Prakrapest? It’s a legendary city. A place long beloved of the Italians, who are drawn here by excellent beer, old houses by the river, and beautiful young women. It’s at once exotic and familiar, mysterious and welcoming, comprehensible and indecipherable. Having progressed from dictatorship to democracy, and from terrible cooking to boring cuisine, Prakrapest is crisscrossed by quivers of capitalist economy and swarms of students. Only in the times of the USSR were the throngs so numerous, and those were throngs of secret agents.

  Prakrapest! A portmanteau word made up of Prague (where we are now), Kraków (where we were before), and Budapest (where we shall not go). A city that, in the minds of many tourists, overlaps, melds, and gets confused. The Italian equivalent, for the Americans, would be Rovenence (Rome + Venice + Florence). After a week, you can’t tell one church from another, and the special tourist menus all look alike.

  What about the Germans? Do they love Prague? One of them, who lives here, tells me, “A lukewarm, respectful love, bordering on apathy. The Czech Republic is a well-mannered neighbor who never makes noise: we just don’t think about them.
” This crucible of a city, which fused together the best of the Slavic soul, the Germanic influence, and the Jewish tradition, no longer exerts the allure it once did. The tourists from Hamburg prefer the Costa del Sol, and visiting German politicians don’t even bother to stay the night.

  Prague! I first arrived here in 1982 by motorcycle, on my way from Budapest and heading for Kraków. I came back in 1988 and again in 1989, a young foreign correspondent, and for two months I covered the “Velvet Revolution,” which deposed the grim and obtuse Communist regime. It was a special city that winter: Václavské Náměstí (Wenceslas Square) was full of police and hope, with cautious conversations at the Café Slavia, at the far end of the Národní, overlooking the Moldau River. There was no Internet; there were no cell phones. And yet back then we felt we understood things, perhaps because we had plenty of time to watch, to talk, and to think.

  Václav Klaus, who later became president of the Czech Republic, used to cut his calling cards out of a sheet of xeroxed paper, using a pair of nail scissors. Václav Havel, a dissident playwright, welcomed people into his book-lined home. Just months later, when he became president, he invited me to the Castle and explained something important to me: dictatorships are filthy and disgusting, but they produce good literature. “And that is why even I, who suffered under the dictatorship and spent time in prison, run the risk of feeling a certain nostalgia for it,” he said with a note of concern in his voice.

  I’ve come back other times, in different seasons, both political and meteorological. The city is always sumptuous, but it’s a stage awaiting a performance. That performance could arrive any second; there’s no saying. The young women of Prague—the Agnezkas and Dorotas who are waiting for the bus this evening, while they look at their phones—would ask me: “Velvet Revolution? Is that an advertisement for a new skin cream?”

  On to Vienna

  Departure for Vienna. Appointment at 7:45 a.m. at Praha Hlavní, Prague’s central train station, inaugurated in 1871 by Emperor Franz Joseph. The current art nouveau station was built between 1901 and 1909 to plans by the Czech architect Josef Fanta (no relation to the orange soda of the same name). During the First Czechoslovak Republic, the station was called Wilson Station, in honor of the president of the United States of America Woodrow Wilson. Then the pro-Soviet Communists, to no one’s surprise, changed the name.

  Everything unfolds according to script: Soledad and Gianni are right on time, I get there at the last minute, and Mark is late. The taxi driver looks like one of the Blues Brothers, he’s driving an old French sedan, he wants to speak Italian, and he’s listening to syncopated Tyrolean music: in Bohemia, a difficult assortment to metabolize first thing in the morning. And that’s not all. In Prague station, the tracks are indicated with a letter according to the cardinal points of the compass. But watch it: S doesn’t indicate the tracks on the south side of the station, but the ones on the north (sever in Czech).

  Miraculously, we find the Franz Schubert train no. 75, departing at 8:39 a.m., and we board car 262. A hostess offers us beverages and newspapers, but only in the local language. She’s a cherub standing almost six feet tall, smiling but impassive. If Mark and I jumped up and started doing the Hully Gully on our seats—which we exclude from the outset, far too much effort required—the young woman would ask: “Tea or coffee?”

  Bohemia rolls past us, verdant. I’m eager to see whether at the border with Austria—which I crossed years ago by car—there are still armies of garden gnomes, one of the specialties of the place’s craftsmen, which attract aficionados (or are they maniacs?) from various countries. No garden gnomes this time. But a good friend, who lives in Vienna, has promised to greet us with one when we arrive.

  It’s a day of strange presences. As we approach the Austrian capital, each of us wrapped in his or her own electronic microcosm (Mark writes; Soledad translates; Gianni edits videos; I listen to Tom Waits), a little yellow chick appears. You read that right: it’s a plush toy—it doesn’t peep, but it’s certainly a little yellow chick. Where has it been until now? Don’t ask me. Herr Spörrle makes the introductions: das Küken. His daughter gave it to him, asking him to take pictures of it during his trip. We immediately realize that we won’t be rid of it till we get to Lisbon.

  Vienna greets us with dazzling sunshine and crystal clear air: if it weren’t for the difference in architecture, traffic, and GDP, it would seem as if we were in Tunis. We do a public opinion survey, video camera in hand, among the Viennese populace, asking whom they prefer, Italians or Germans (all things considered, they prefer Italians—just saying!). Over the course of the day, the little yellow chick will make appearances in a vending machine, inside a green plant, and stretched out on an elephant tusk. Thanks, Mark. This trip is becoming increasingly interesting.

  From Vienna to Zurich

  In the middle of the journey, and on the eve of this stretch through the mountains, we need to take care of a few matters. For starters, the issue of punctuality. Mark and I are accused of always showing up late for departure, but that’s not fair. I admit that our entrances in the various train stations are always hasty and last-minute, but whose fault is it that the Viennese taxi driver had a trunk full of spray paint cans and couldn’t fit our luggage in? Are we seriously being blamed for the troops of tourists who always seem to be directly in our way?

  Anyway, here we are. An imperially sunny morning and the Vienna–Zurich train no. 162 departing at 9:14 a.m. entirely lives up to our expectations. Full of light, comfortable, probably the cleanest train in Europe. One screen shows the itinerary of the trip (Linz, Salzburg, Innsbruck, Sankt Anton am Arlberg, then Switzerland). There are three classes of seating: two first classes and one second class (don’t ask me why). The average age of the passengers is that of Jimmy Carter. An attendant passes by with an onion omelet that, first thing in the morning, constitutes a chemical weapon.

  By now, Mark’s little yellow chick is a member of the group. It appeared on its chaperone’s shoulder at breakfast. I responded with a garden gnome, given me by a reader. But the garden gnome was left behind in Vienna. The little yellow chick stalks us, implacable.

  Since we are midway through our journey—both in time and in distance: seven days out of fourteen, 1,986 miles out of 3,930—here are our Oscars of the First Week.

  Best Hotel: Das Triest, Vienna (we were ecstatic)

  Worst Hotel: Élite, Prague (we fled)

  Best Restaurant: Kvartira 44, Moscow (memorable herrings)

  Worst Restaurant: Hotel Metropol, Moscow (Soviet-era service)

  Best Buffet: Italian Cultural Institute, Kraków

  Cleanest Restroom: Vienna–Zurich train (absolutely inhuman in its cleanliness)

  Most Demanding Leg of the Trip: nocturnal journey from Kiev to Kraków

  Most Idyllic Leg of the Trip: Salzburg–Innsbruck–Sankt Anton (the grazing horses work for the tourism board)

  Most Beautiful Square: Red Square, Moscow, by night

  Most Baffling Station: Kraków, where the underpasses all have women’s names (and are closed)

  Most Literary Station: Kiyevskaya Station, in Moscow (you expect to see Turgenev selling beverages)

  City I Was Sorriest to Leave: Prague

  Best Line of the Week: “I’m wearing jeans” (Igor, our Ukrainian translator, on how to find him in the Kiev station, where EVERYONE wears jeans).

  From Zurich to Lyon, via Geneva

  Zurich has chosen to greet us with an unusual heat—eighty-five degrees—that allows the city’s residents to indulge in their Mediterranean fantasies. Last night, it was quite a show: people were stripping down, walking around barefoot, playing chess by the lake, listening to fake-Latin music sitting in fake-Italian bistros, in little fake-seaside piazzas. Staggering like sailors newly returned to dry land (eight days aboard a train takes its toll), we wound up at the restaurant Pulcino (of course, that’s Itali
an for “little yellow chick”!), where the Russian waitress and the Egyptian maître d’ were doing their best to seem, respectively, Ligurian and Pugliese.

  For once, Mark and I got to the station early. Waiting for us is an editor at the Neue Zürcher Zeitung (NZZ) for an interview. We talk about our horizontal Europe and we venture various railway allegories. With reference to the two classes of travel (by now we’re capable only of binary track thinking), I explain, “If Austria and Germany are in first class, economically speaking, Italy is in the (noisy) passageway between first and second class. And Switzerland is better than anyone: premium class.”

  The train departs, and we realize immediately: this isn’t a train. It’s a self-powered penthouse. Intercity no. 718, consisting of two-story carriages with panoramic vistas, rolls gently along from Zurich to Bern, and then beyond, toward Lausanne and Geneva, as if it were reluctant to disturb the quiet of the Helvetian Sunday morning. The mountains seem to part, good-naturedly, to let us pass. The meadows glitter. Grazing cattle bob their heads in a sign of approval. It’s all unquestionably very beautiful: it seems like we’ve slipped into the packaging of a chocolate bar.

  We cross the border between Switzerland and France and enter Latin Europe, which we won’t leave until we reach Lisbon. We change trains. In France the expressions change; the colors change; the sounds change; the shared concept of cleanliness and order changes. In our tiny double-decker car—we’ve moved from a penthouse to a studio apartment—our world has suddenly become much less homogeneous. We’re riding with Arabs, Asians, Africans; miniskirts mix with designer suits and tracksuits worn proudly by overweight white males. The Sunday sunshine roars over the French roofs, and people in their backyards watch the train go by, completely unaware of the unusual foursome riding along inside (plus the little yellow chick).