Ghost Train to the Eastern Star

by Paul Theroux

  If there was a Trans-Siberian challenge, the seven nights and days on the long-distance train, it wasn't getting the visa or the ticket or finding one's way to Vladivostok; it was the usual obstacle in travel, the mental challenge. Russians overcame it by staying drunk—the men, anyway. So when I roamed around the train, all I saw were people drinking beer or vodka or else sleeping it off. For a Russian, a train journey of this length was a bender, and because of this, most of them were incoherent.

  Nobu was hopping to keep warm on the snowy platform of Ulan-Ude in the early morning. I asked him how he was managing.

  "The men in my compartment are very alcoholic," Nobu said. "They start in the morning when they wake up. They drink all day."

  He didn't drink. He was snapping pictures and making notes. Now and then we met in a vestibule and talked about Murakami's novels or tried to guess how cold it was outside.

  A Mongolian-looking man approached me at Ulan-Ude—squat, round-cheeked, Asiatic. As this was the railway junction for the line to Mongolia and China, I was curious to know his ethnicity. He told me he was a Buryat, and would I like to buy some manti7?

  They were steaming meat-filled dumplings—I knew the word because I'd heard manti for dumpling in Turkey and elsewhere.

  As he wrapped them, he said, "You American?"

  "Yes, American."

  "Mee-sippi," he said. "Al-bama. Flodda."

  "I'm from Boston."

  "Boston Bruins," he said without hesitating, still wrapping the dumplings.

  "You like hockey?"

  "New York Rangers," he said and handed me the package of dumplings. "Good manti. Sank you. Good journey."

  What sent this cheery soul away was the sight of three drunks from the train staggering towards us. It was not yet nine in the morning. They were crapulous and carrying blue cans of beer, one of them with a can in each hand.

  "We Marine!" one of them said to me. He told me his name was Fyodor and that they were based on a ship in Vladivostok.

  The others began to shout incoherently. They wore track suits and slippers. They were going to Nizhni Novgorod, three days west of here.

  When they had gone, I saw Nobu taking a picture of Ulan-Ude Station, where, under the station sign, the temperature was given in a lozenge of red lights. It was minus-17 Celsius.

  My surprise in this frozen station in the middle of the Siberian steppe was that my BlackBerry buzzed with messages, some of them from Penelope, quite a few urging me to buy Viagra or to have my penis enlarged or to invest in promising stocks. Spam in the wilderness. But a mile out of Ulan-Ude it went dead—as it had been through the whole of Japan—and its only use was as a night light or (as I had used it for months) an emergency flashlight when I woke at night and groped down the carriage to take a piss.

  Rolling through deepening snow—the effect of Lake Baikal—I spent the day writing about my father and thinking how nothing had changed on the line since I'd last taken it, thirty-three years ago. The train was still a big clanking antique, the food was still filthy, the trackside villages were still collections of wood-burning bungalows. The railway personnel, especially the women, were diligent about knocking the ice out of the drains with a long-handled ax and keeping the samovar going, but apart from that, there was no service to speak of. They were inattentive to passengers, but scrupulous about standing at attention in uniform by the coach at every stop.

  What seemed a sprinkling of snow chips in the late afternoon under a darkened sky thickened to a whirling mass of snowflakes and finally a blizzard that entirely obscured Baikal—quite a storm, since it was the largest lake in the world. Out of the snowstorm at Slyudyanka a mob of hawkers, old men and women in fur hats, lifted bags of smoked fish and jostled in the doorway.

  "What is this?" I asked Dimitri, who was in a kupe in my coach.

  "Is omul. Good wiz beer," Dimitri said.

  Omul was a sort of salmon trout found only in Lake Baikal. Prized by Russians, who made an effort to travel all this way to buy this fish, it was sold cold-smoked (stiff and dried) or warm-smoked (soft and fleshy and aromatic). I bought two bags of each.

  The fishmongers in the falling snow at Slyudyanka were a glimpse of old Russia, not just their beautiful fur hats and big bulgy coats and thick mittens, but their dark frozen faces, their deeply pitted noses, as they pushed the bags of fish to the potential buyers on the train. A hundred years ago it could not have looked any different: the same boots, the same mittens and furs and ragged scarves, the same waiting on the platform in the storm for the brief stop of the long-distance train, the same look of urgency.

  We stopped again at Irkutsk while I feasted on the fish. Darkness fell, the train plowed slowly through the night, and in the morning frost-sparkle, four days on from Vladivostok, in another time zone, one of eight on this train trip, the landscape was unchanged: birches and black saplings in the snowfields passing the mud-flecked window.

  A settlement of small cottages covered a whole slope of a hillside.

  "Dachas?" I asked Dimitri, just a guess, because there was no smoke in the chimneys. As soon as I said it, I thought: It's a surmise, because travelers are always inventing the country they're passing through.

  "Yes," he said. "People from Krasnoyarsk, they come here in the summer."

  "It's a whole village."

  "Not a village," Dimitri said. "A station."

  "What's the difference?"

  "No post office. No shop. No school," he said. He was making a distinction between a seasonal camp and a real settlement.

  Dimitri was from Krasnoyarsk, an hour down the line. He had studied mining at the local university. It was a city of mines—I saw many from the train—some of them gold mines, surface diggings. Gold has been mined this way in Russia for more than three hundred years.

  What interested me about Dimitri was that he was completely satisfied, as a Russian worker, a resident of Krasnoyarsk, a voter and householder and citizen. As we were talking in the corridor of the train, his cell phone rang.

  He answered it, and when he was through talking he said, "That was my boss. He knew I was on the train. He wants me to work today. It's okay. I like my work."

  He was employed by a company that made mining equipment that was shipped all over the country, even to distant Kolyma and Vladivostok.

  Dimitri was about thirty, not tall but muscular. He skied in the hills around Krasnoyarsk, he rode his motorcycle in better weather, he lifted weights. He had his own apartment but was looking for a bigger one, "maybe when I get married." He drove a new Toyota Corolla. He wanted a Lexus. He was ambitious but contented, not a boozer, a nonsmoker—that rare individual, a sober, happy Russian.

  He had no desire to travel, except to Moscow and St. Petersburg. He said he wished he spoke English better.

  "Your English is fine."

  He tapped his front teeth. "You say 'teef' or 'teet'?"

  "Teeth."

  "Teef," he said.

  "I have thirty-two teeth."

  "I have feerty-two teef," he said.

  Muttering this mantra, he got off the train with the paperbacks I'd read—three Simenons, the Murakami, and the yakuza book. I bought apple juice, yogurt, salami, bread, and smoked salmon from a babushka at the improvised market on the platform at Krasnoyarsk, and I picnicked in my compartment and watched Siberia go past.

  Snow, birches, huddled cottages, crows, distant ridges "eyelashed with firs," trackless snow all day, and then another night in the train. By now I was stuporous in the daytime and spent my nights dreaming, waking exhausted from the variety. Memorial services figured in two dreams, orations (by me) in one, flying (by me) in two, and in a memorable dream I was visited by my dead father, who explained, "I'm just checking in."

  The previous night, my fifth on the train, we passed through Omsk, where Dostoyevsky had spent four years imprisoned. He'd written about it vividly in The House of the Dead.

  Staring at the dense pine forest—the taiga—I drowsed all day, inte
rmittently writing about my father, knowing that towards midnight on this sixth day I would be getting off at the city of Perm. We passed Ishim, where there were tire tracks on the frozen rivers: in winter, Siberian rivers serve as thoroughfares for vehicles. At Tyumen around noon, I bought some chicken from an old woman on the snowy platform, and late in the afternoon, around five, at Yekaterinburg, city of regicide. Guided tours were advertised of the site where the czar and his family had been shot in 1918. Yekaterinburg was the first substantial city I'd come to on the line—it had been named Sverdlovsk on my earlier trip, when I'd arrived on Christmas Eve, at precisely the same time of day. Then, watching a boy hoist his dead father in a stretcher off the train, my depression was complete. This time, I thought: We're on time, we'll arrive in Perm at midnight, and—as I had not washed for a week—I'll probably have a bath.

  ***

  "PERM IS A MODERN INDUSTRIAL city that most travelers could bear to miss," the guidebook said. But surely that was just as inaccurate as this same guidebook's rubbishing my Great Railway Bazaar as "caustic," with travel guide solemnity and philistinism. My visit to Perm was to be memorable and enlightening, especially in the snow-muffled silence of the Siberian winter.

  "We were on a secret Pentagon list of Soviet cities to be destroyed!" a Permian man boasted to me soon after I arrived. Because of its rocket factories, its cannon plants, and its manufacture of explosives, Perm was closed to foreigners when I passed through in 1973. Perm was another transit point for Siberian slave labor—had been so since czarist times—and out of town had some of the largest and fiercest prisons in the gulag. Rocket-making, arbitrary incarceration, and torture were the industries in Perm until just the other day when, in February 1992, the prison here was closed and foreigners were allowed to visit, to attend the ballet, to eat juicy posikunchiki ("pissing dumplings") in the good restaurants, to wander the snowy streets, to watch the local fatties jump naked into holes chopped in icy ponds, to drive among the empty hills, the taiga, the mixed forest, through tiny wooden one-story villages, and to see the worst gulag, Perm 36—all of which I managed to do.

  Tiny crystals of frost shone in the lights of the main station—not the same station that Yuri Zhivago detrains at in the second part ("Train to the Urals") of Doctor Zhivago, when he first sets eyes on the city. Perm looked much the same today: "It clung to the summit of the hill in tiers, house by house and street by street, with a big church in the middle of the top, as in a cheap color print of a desert monastery or of Mount Athos." Much of the action of that mournful fifty-year-old novel of love and struggle takes place in Perm, called Yuriatin, "another territory, a different, provincial world, which had a center of gravity of its own."

  A city or a landscape that has been described in a novel, even in a distorted way, is made more visible and accessible, even hallowed, with a quality of everlastingness. So I was happy to be in Perm and off the train, but I had become so used to the train's vibrations and my narrow berth, I could hardly sleep in my hotel bed. I was like a startled child in a cradle that had ceased to rock.

  In the dark early morning, I met my guide, Sergei, and his translator, Yelena. They'd brought a friend, Viktor Shmirov, an authority on the gulag system and one of its historians. We got into Sergei's car and began driving on the white streets of packed snow, under sulfurous streetlamps.

  "Why does the guidebook write that about Perm?" Sergei asked when I mentioned the jibe. "This city is full of history. Dostoyevsky stopped here on his way to Omsk. The Diaghilev family is from here. Chekhov of course—this is the setting for Three Sisters. And Pasternak's book. The city is full of history!"

  Dostoyevsky was on his way to prison and had spent only one night here. Sergei Diaghilev fled the city and spent his life in Paris as a balletomane. For Chekhov it was the epitome of stifling provincial cities ("When can we go to Moscow?" the three sisters keep moaning), and Pasternak had been regarded as a literary pariah until fifteen years ago.

  I mentioned that Three Sisters depicted Perm unfavorably, the stifled sisters longing to leave for Moscow.

  "Because Chekhov had a problem," Sergei said. Sergei's English was not bad, but he preferred to speak Russian. Yelena sat behind me, translating. "He was turned away from a building because he was wearing the wrong clothes. He never forgave them for this."

  This episode is not mentioned by any of Chekhov's biographers, only the fact that in 1890 he arrived by river in Perm at two o'clock one April morning and left the same day at six in the evening, on a train heading east. He was on his long Siberian trip—eighty-one days from Moscow to Vladivostok, on his way to the penal settlement at Sakhalin. Still, sixteen hours in Perm was enough for a genius like Chekhov to sum up the city as stifling.

  "It's like this," Sergei said. "What if you went to a city and found a cockroach in your soup?" A big beefy man, he was hunched over the wheel, steering us through the snow. He turned heavily in his seat and faced me, his hands still on the wheel of the slowly moving car. "You wouldn't like that city, would you? You'd always remember it. 'Ah, Perm, that's where I had the cockroach in my soup!'"

  "But we have no cockroaches," Yelena said.

  "Five years ago, all the cockroaches left Perm," Sergei said. "Was it radiation? Did they sense trouble coming? The professors can't answer this question."

  "And now we are passing Bashaya Smirti," Viktor said.

  "The Tower of Death," Yelena said and pointed up ahead at a wide gray tower, like a silo with a sloping roof, attached to a gray, ecclesiastical-looking building pierced by small windows.

  "There was a wave of repression in the early 1950s," Viktor said as we made a circuit around the grim-looking tower. "The Tower of Death was built then for the KGB. People were taken here for interrogation."

  I asked who those suspects might be.

  "People regarded as 'cosmopolitan,'" he said. "Westernized. Not patriotic. Also what were known as 'left radicals.' Anti-Stalinists."

  The terrifying tower loomed like an oversized crematorium near the center of Perm, so I asked the obvious question: "Did people in Perm call it the Tower of Death?"

  "They didn't say it out loud. They whispered it," Viktor said. "Under Khrushchev they said it a little louder."

  I mentioned that my favorite writer about the gulag, a man who had been extensively interrogated, was Varlam Shalamov, the author of Kolyma Tales.

  "This is Shalamov's centenary," Viktor said, brightening. "His father was a priest, but Shalamov wasn't religious at all. It's amazing that someone with such a huge experience of prison life didn't become a Christian."

  "Unlike Solzhenitsyn."

  "Yes, and unlike Solzhenitsyn, he did twenty-seven years in Siberia. At the end, he lived in great poverty in Moscow. He died in obscurity."

  Solzhenitsyn was the West's most famous zek, or prisoner. Yet in her exhaustive history of the prison system, Gulag, Anne Applebaum writes that his prison time was not onerous: "[Solzhenitsyn] was an unremarkable prisoner. He flirted with the authorities, served as an informer before seeing the light, and wound up working as a bricklayer." And Shalamov's Kolyma Tales, which she praises, she also describes as "among the bitterest in the entire camp genre."

  We had left the outskirts of Perm and were headed northeast, into the snow and pine forests along an unplowed road. Aside from a few cars and heavy trucks, there was almost no traffic. The early morning darkness had lifted; we were traveling through slanting snowfall under a low gray sky.

  "I want to tell you a story about the organs of power," Viktor said, Yelena translating. "I once had a chance to interview a peasant woman in the northern Perm region. She told me she had never left her village, except once. She had gone to Chernaya, a biggish town. She was very impressed because it was so beautiful. She was sitting quietly, admiring the place, when she heard someone say, 'Apoga is coming.'

  "She knew the name. Apoga was the chairman of the Emergency Committee of the Cheka."

  The Cheka was one of the previous incarnat
ions of the KGB, now known as the FSB. It has undergone nineteen name changes since 1919, yet it is the same organization, devoted to spying, torture, and murder.

  "Apoga was a frightening name to the woman. And the idea of seeing him was just terrible. Everyone was scared by the prospect of seeing this man. The woman left as soon as she could—went back to her village and never left again." Viktor raised his hands. His face was fixed in an expression of helpless pain. "People could be imprisoned for nothing. That man's name, Apoga, represented terror and fear."

  I said, "The paradox is that at exactly the same time—the 1950s—we had McCarthy in the U.S. persecuting people for sympathizing with the Soviet Union."

  Sergei was clucking "Nyet, nyet, nyet" before I could finish. "I've been to America," he said. "I know about McCarthyism. The problems were not on the same scale."

  I had to agree, though the motives, the witch-hunts, the betrayals, the stink of fear—of ruined lives and lost jobs and disgrace—that hung over McCarthyism were similar.

  "Here's a story," Sergei said. "Viktor says people were afraid. It's true. I know it from my own family. My grandmother's family was from Kirov"—Kirov was on the railway line, about eight hours west of Perm—"and they had eleven children, seven girls, four boys. My grandmother was considered educated, because she'd graduated from primary school with honors."

  Yelena said, "Is also a joke, Paul."

  "I get it." I also understood that he kept referring to his grandmother as babushka.

  "Her father was a well-known butcher. This man was strong physically, a muscular man. Fifty years later he was still remembered in this province. At the time of the revolution," said Sergei, "my grandmother was seventeen. She got married at nineteen, and for eight years all was well. They were in that remote place. The secret police couldn't reach them.

  "In the 1920s, Stalin wanted collectivization, so they came to my grandparents. Her father the butcher was a kulak"—a rich peasant, or one defying authority. "He had a beautiful house that he'd built himself. The inspector wanted the house for his own family. The house was very dear to the butcher.