Off the Rails

by Beppe Severgnini

  At Vyborg, I’m informed by the Thomas Cook European Rail Timetable, the train ought to stop for twenty-five minutes. Just to be sure, Ortensia pulls out her Russian phrase book. “Skolka vryeminy budyit stoyat poyezd?” she asks. How long will the train be stopping here?

  “Twenty-five minutes,” the conductor replies in English, as he hangs on the windows to make sure they really are closed, per regulation. Of course, that isn’t true. When the Repin Express pulls out again ten minutes later, heading for Leningrad, I’m a member of the small crowd chasing after it and cursing.

  As the train continues through the woods, the little boy keeps walking back and forth in the corridor, “excuse me” resonating with murderous regularity. The father, realizing that his son is becoming unpopular, drags him off to the dining car, where I’ll soon be forced to join them. The menu is lavish, but as is so often the case in these parts, it’s nothing but a list of good intentions, or perhaps a tombstone commemorating all the exquisite dishes that have been consumed on these tables over the years. This evening the selection is soup, bread and cheese, and cucumbers. No beer, just water that reeks of sulfur. No wine, but a crate of empty bottles of Soviet spumante sold who knows when and to who knows whom. The waiter smiles only when he writes up the check, probably because he’s embarrassed to ask twenty-five Finnish markkas for three rubles and fifty-seven kopecks. To prove that his accounting is accurate, he reaches into his pocket and pulls out a musical calculator: each digit is a different note; after the addition sign, two notes; after the equal sign, a short melody. I pay the twenty-five Finnish markkas; it’s too much for bread and cheese, but the concert is certainly worth it.

  While the retirees from Vermont are busy trying to find the station of Zelenogorsk on a world map, and the Soviet boy bombards even the Russian waiter with “excuse me’s,” the train runs past wooden houses and birch trees, passes Repino, and arrives in Leningrad, at the Finland Station, in the intense light of the northern evening. The station, which is said to be quite lovely, was built to plans by the architects Ashastin, Baranov, and Lukin between 1955 and 1960. In front of it is a statue of Lenin, who on April 16, 1917, arrived at this station, after ten years of exile and seven days of travel in another train—that one, too, with its windows shut, but probably with a better dining car. Those were different times: Lenin found the Bolsheviks of Saint Petersburg waiting to welcome him, and he harangued them from the turret of an armored car. I have to settle for a taxi driver who heads off toward the Pribaltiyskaya Hotel, though it’s actually in the opposite direction, but it’s not a serious mistake: the longer the drive, the more time he has to try to sell me watches, caviar, stacks of rubles, and a T-shirt with the slogan “Lenin Rocks,” which he pulls out of the glove compartment. Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov could have worn it, if he’d had a sense of humor, while marching toward the Winter Palace.

  White Nights on the Leningrad Ekspress

  According to Intourist in Leningrad, a person with any common sense has no reason to go all the way to Warsaw by train. If you absolutely must go to Warsaw, take a plane. If you insist on taking a train, then you’re not a person with a shred of common sense. These rigid convictions are reflected in the train reservations, which appear and disappear like rabbits in a magician’s top hat: two days before the trip, there’s room on the Leningrad Ekspress; one day before departure, the seat has vanished; four hours before departure, the seat reappears. All I need to do is rush over to the Varshavsky Voksal, the Warsaw Station, in car no. 8513, at the courteous expense of Intourist itself, with a driver who either is in a bad mood or else wants a tip.

  Standing guard at the station is the usual statue of Lenin scanning the horizon, the work of the sculptor N. Tomsky, who, along with his colleagues S. Evseev, M. Kharlamov, V. Kozlov, A. Kriyanovskaya, and M. Anikushin, filled Leningrad with “monuments to the leaders of the proletariat, founders of scientific Communism.” As so often happens in Russian stations, in order to reach the trains, you don’t enter the building; you go around it, making your way through the usual crowds loaded down with packages. There are many Poles who have come to Leningrad to buy appliances and sell them back home. A man, a woman, and a child go by, transporting a refrigerator of truly daunting size. They will wrestle it into the compartment next to mine, and they’ll travel with it for twenty-four hours, like a family transporting their loved one’s corpse.

  The Leningrad Ekspress departs right on time, at 4:10 p.m., and rolls silently through the outskirts of town, where everyone’s busy celebrating the short summer season. Ahead of it stretches 718 miles of track: heading southwest, it will run through the Pskov Oblast (Pskov Region) for the whole afternoon; it will enter Latvia around midnight; three hours later it will be in Lithuania, the land that in the 1930s changed hands between Russian and German overlords; at dawn it will reach Belarus; and it will be on the Polish plains around noon. We’ll eventually arrive in Warsaw in midafternoon.

  The journey promises to be long, therefore, and this is good news. For twenty-four hours we’ll have nothing to worry about. In Communist Eastern Europe the problem with trains is boarding them; once you’re aboard, however, you don’t have anything else to worry about until the next train and the next fight to buy a ticket and get on board. The compartment is cozy, and no smaller than a Soviet hotel room; the walls are lined with plastic that looks like wood, while the table is made of wood that looks like plastic. The beds are comfortable and the neighbors are silent. When we lower the window for ventilation, it won’t stay down, but a small piece of engineering solves the problem: we hang one of our travel bags off the handle, and the Russian air then has free access. Robert Louis Stevenson was right when he described the attractions of railway trains in these words: “The train disturbs so little the scenes through which it takes us, that our heart becomes full of the placidity and stillness of the country; and while the body is borne forward in the flying chain of carriages, the thoughts alight, as the humour moves them, at unfrequented stations. . . .” In other words, it’s nice to travel in a self-propelled bedroom, with a documentary streaming past outside the window.

  Truth be told, there are a few snafus, but nothing much to speak of. A conductor speaks to me in Russian for ten minutes, and when I tell him, “I’m not Russian,” he replies with a grin, “Neither am I; I’m Estonian.” There are no tables available in the dining car; it is garrisoned by young Polish couples who silently gulp down chicken and lemonade, the only items on the menu. Last of all, there is Vladimir, the konduktor who’s in charge of our carriage: he insists that the customs form exists only in Russian and in Polish, so we’re just going to have to deal with that.

  The Leningrad Ekspress runs across black peaty earth, flax fields, and bogs. Around sunset, it stops without warning in several microscopic stations, where no one gets off and no one gets on. These stops, however, meet with the approval of the local population: whole families, with little kids and picnic baskets, have come out to see the train, and sitting on the grassy banks, they entertain the passengers while we entertain them. At Strugi Krasnye a husband and wife shout out that it’s beautiful to see an italianski head poke out of a train window on an August evening. At Novoselye the audience consists of young couples who all look the same pushing baby carriages: he’s wearing track shoes and linen pants, while her T-shirt is too tight and her hair is pulled back in a bun.

  After Pskov, which has a station painted aquamarine, the same color as the churches of Leningrad, we see cranes perched on one leg, poised atop light poles. After Ostrov, where the station is a candy pink, Vladimir the conductor appears, apparently tipsy and carrying three blankets, three quilts, three sets of sheets, three pillows, three pillowcases, and six towels, almost as if he were hoping to make up for the shortage of dishes on the menu with this gesture of abundance. We arrive in Rēzekne after midnight; we’re in Latvia now and Vladimir reappears, well and truly drunk, shouting: “Idite za mnoy! [Come with me!] I’ve found t
he party.” Incredibly, it’s true.

  The party, as he calls it, is three cars away, in a compartment where four Russians are traveling with an unspecified quantity of cans of caviar, watches, Paul McCartney record albums in Soviet editions, chocolates, salamis, and Pepsodent toothpaste. Three men and a woman: one man says his name is Valentin, another is Nikolai, the young woman is named Violeta, and the fourth member of the party says nothing but drinks Georgian cognac as if it were orangeade. They tell me that they’re assiduous clients of the Leningrad Ekspress: for business, not for pleasure. In Warsaw, Valentin explains, people have nothing, and so they buy everything; unfortunately, they pay in zlotys, a currency that is virtually worthless. I ask him whether he’s tired of living on a train. He replies: “It’s better than living on a ship, which is what I did until last year. Do you know that I was the executive officer aboard a freighter, and I earned one-fiftieth of what a cabin boy on an American ship makes, simply because he is paid in dollars?”

  Nikolai pours more cognac and tells of a smuggler’s hard life. “The Poles don’t like us Russians,” he says, “but who cares? Caviar, if you want it, is five dollars, and Soviet Paul McCartney records are ten dollars: in America, collectors will pay two hundred dollars for them. If you invite me to Italy, you’d be doing me a favor; if you invite me in the name of Greenpeace, so much the better. I like Gorbachev, but he doesn’t understand us smugglers.”

  Valentin listens, cuts salami, and hums. The conductor Vladimir repeats for the fifth time that he has customs forms only in Russian and in Polish, and that it’s my problem if I know neither Russian nor Polish. The blond Violeta, with the eyeglasses and makeup of a 1950s high school girl, says nothing, smokes Moskva cigarettes, and looks at her reflection in the windows until it’s five in the morning, when the neon lights of the city of Vilnius appear and the Lithuanians, in the darkness, begin their peaceful assault on the Leningrad Ekspress. “Are you Russian?” I ask two female students. “Not on your life,” the younger one replies. “We’re Lithuanians.”

  In Grodno—which has changed hands over the centuries between Tartars, Lithuanians, Poles, and Russians—it is the Russians who check our passports. In Kuźnica Białostocka the train cars are hoisted into the air to put on narrower axles, suitable to the European gauge. As the train runs across the plains, the Poles start pushing their refrigerator toward the exits, cursing because the corridors are so narrow. In uniform and slippers, conductor Vladimir battles against his headache. Violeta continues looking, with decided disinterest, at the world outside her glasses and the train window. Nikolai talks about a Polish friend who spends his life in trains, from Warsaw to Beijing. In every station along the Trans-Siberian Express, he sells something. With the money he earns along the way, he purchases a monkey in China, takes it back to Poland, and sells it for many dollars to university laboratories. If I’m interested in a monkey, I should just let him know.

  5:55 a.m.: Ekspresowy Berolina

  The train stations of Eastern Europe should be toured at dawn, when people are walking around briskly, and before they acquire the defeated expression that comes with the first humiliations of the day. Even Warsaw’s Central Station, at that time of the morning, is almost pretty: a reassuring mastodon, a monument to the Polskie Koleje Państwowe, the Polish railways, a place where only the Poles, apparently, can find their way around. For everyone else, it’s a labyrinth, and the signs aren’t signs: they’re sleight-of-hand tricks performed with consonants. This is how an American guidebook describes it: “Warszawa Centralna consists of four levels. On the first level are arrivals (przyjazdy) and departures (odjazdy). On the second floor are the connections with buses and taxis. On the third level, you can purchase tickets for the departures of the day. The ticket windows from 1 to 11 are also for making reservations for certain specific destinations; the windows from 12 to 16 are for reservations for any destination at all. If you are in line for windows 1 to 11, check to see the destination written above the window. If it’s not listed, you’re in the wrong line. Write on a sheet of paper the time of your train, your destination, and the desired class, and show it to the ticket clerk. On the fourth level, you can buy tickets for trips within the next two months.” Perhaps you can understand why the guidebook concludes: “Don’t go to the Warsaw train station to buy tickets, go to a tourism office.”

  With tickets in hand, however, it’s not impossible to find your train. The Ekspresowy Berolina, the express train to East Berlin, departs daily at 5:55 a.m., and anyone will be able to point you to the right peron (platform). The train arrives from the Warszawa Wschodnia station, which is on the other side of the Vistula River, and it stops for exactly thirteen minutes. When the train departs, my compartment offers a representative assortment of Poles: a young engineer who alternates reading the poetry of Czeslaw Milosz and a copy of Trybuna Ludu, the newspaper of the Polish United Workers’ Party; a blond matron who reads nothing and simply smiles full-time; a teacher, with the kind of mustache and blow-dried hair that you only ever really see in the photographs posted on hairdressers’ windows; and last of all an oversized young man in his early twenties who yawns, hiccups, noisily digests, takes off his running shoes, and checks to see what’s inside them. When he gets off at Kutno, after two hours on the train, we survivors all exchange relieved glances.

  Until we reach Poznan, which is midway between Warsaw and Berlin, there’s room in the compartment only for a maelstrom of rote courtesies in many languages: the Poles, among themselves, in Polish; the schoolteacher, with me, in French; the engineer, in English. A couple of peasants, who boarded at Kutno and are heading for Sẃiebodzin, explain to everyone in German that it was the conductor who sent them to first class with a second-class ticket, because their car—no. 36—was nowhere to be found. For the rest of the trip, they’ll sit with their eyes on the door and their tickets in hand, expecting an announcement that car no. 36 has finally been found, and that their ride in first class has therefore come to an end.

  These are momentous days for Poland, a country that is certainly used to momentous days. Solidarity is asking to form a government; General Jaruzelski has been made president; Prime Minister Rakowski has succeeded him as party leader. The market for agricultural products has just been liberalized, consumer prices in certain instances have jumped fivefold, and people fear riots in the streets. There’s every reason for the passengers on the Ekspresowy Berolina to be eager to express their opinions, which is something Poles are always willing to do. Along with the Russians and the Israelis, in fact, they’re the world’s most politically loquacious people. For years, prudence has suggested the wisdom of restraining that impulse, but now they can almost taste freedom, and they’re giving the impression they want to make up for lost time.

  After Poznan, the engineer looks around, and starts unburdening himself in English. “What do you think of Poland?” he begins. I tell him: “It’s a friendly, fascinating country, with an inept government clinging to an anachronistic ideology. But you’ll get by.” He smiles, unconvinced, and then he explains why his country is on the brink of collapse. “I have a university degree, I’m thirty-seven, and I have a wife and two children. I’m a state employee, and I earn sixty thousand zlotys a month. Since a dollar is worth six thousand zlotys, I earn ten dollars a month, right? If I came to Italy to work as a field hand—remember, I’m an engineer—I’d earn at least five hundred dollars a month. In other words, I’d earn fifty times as much, right? That’s why the young people want to leave, my dear friend. Because we’re the beggars of Europe, and the latest appointments make me laugh: the party leader who becomes president, the prime minister who becomes party leader, the minister of the interior who wants to become prime minister. It’s always the same people, and they aren’t even slightly ashamed. Right? No, it’s not right!” At this point he falls silent. The peasants of Sẃiebodzin look at him happily. Since the engineer was speaking in English, they didn’t understand a thing, but they
’re in first class.

  The Ekspresowy Berolina approaches the Oder River, rolling across the plain through the region named Wielkopolska, “greater Poland,” a land that had the misfortune of finding itself in the wrong corner of Europe and has paid the price: there’s no counting the invasions and battles that have taken place in these fields. In the corridor, a young blond woman in a tracksuit has arrived and is looking out at the flat countryside outside the window. She has eyes and a figure that on an Italian train would guarantee that she’d be left alone for thirty seconds at the most. She’s a twenty-one-year-old born in Poznan named Agnieszka. She works in an Italian restaurant in West Berlin, and she detests her compatriots. “They’re too poor,” she says. “I’m ashamed of them.” She detests this Polish train, the Polish conductors, and the Polish customs officers. She detests the West Germans, “because they despise us Poles and all they drink at the restaurant is prosecco.” She detests the East German conductors, who are constantly on the hunt for Ausreisewillige, “those who want to leave” for the West without permission. Agnieszka asks whether there are Poles in Italy. I tell her that there are. “And what do they do? Horrible things, I can imagine. Don’t even tell me. I detest the Poles in Italy.”