The Great Railway Bazaar

by Paul Theroux

  The rest were embarrassed. They sent Gitler to the kitchen and brought another bottle of wine. Vassily said, ‘Gitler – ni karasho!’ But it was Viktor who was the most conciliatory. He stood up and folded his arms, and, shushing the kitchen staff, he said in a little voice:

  Zee fearst of My,

  Zee ’art of spreeng!

  Oh, leetle seeng,

  En everyseeng we do,

  Remember always to say ‘pliz’

  En dun forget ‘sank you’!

  Later, Viktor took me to his compartment to show me his new fur hat. He was very proud of it since it cost him nearly a week’s pay. Nina was also in the compartment, which was shared by Vassily and Anna – quite a crowd for a space no bigger than an average-sized clothes closet. Nina showed me her passport and the picture of her mother and, while this was going on, Viktor disappeared. I put my arm around Nina and with my free hand took off her white scullion’s cap. Her black hair fell to her shoulders. I held her tightly and kissed her, tasting the kitchen. The train was racing. But the compartment door was open, and Nina pulled away and said softly, ‘Nyet, nyet, nyet.’

  On the day before Christmas, in the afternoon, we arrived at Sverdlovsk. The sky was leaden and it was very cold. I hopped out the door and watched the old man being taken down the stairs to the platform. While he was being moved, the blankets had slipped down to his chest, where his hands lay rigid, two grey claws, their colour matching his face. The son went over and pulled the blankets high to cover his mouth. He knelt in the ice and packed a towel around the old man’s head.

  Seeing me standing near by, the son said in German, ‘Sverdlovsk. This is where Europe begins and Asia ends. Here are the Urals.’ He pointed towards the back of the train and said, ‘Asia,’ and then towards the engine, ‘Europe.’

  ‘How is your father?’ I asked, when the stretcher-bearers arrived and put on their harnesses. The stretcher was a hammock, slung between them.

  ‘I think he’s dead,’ he said. ‘Das vedanya.’

  My depression increased as we sped towards Perm in a whirling snowstorm. The logging camps and villages lay half-buried and behind them were birches a foot thick, the ice on their branches giving them the appearance of silver filigree. I could see children crossing a frozen river in the storm, moving so slowly in the direction of some huts, they broke my heart. I lay back on my berth and took my radio, its plastic cold from standing by the window, and tried to find a station. I put up the antenna – the zombie watched me from behind his clutter of uncovered food. A lot of static, then a French station, then ‘Jingle Bells’. The zombie smiled. I switched it off.

  Late on Christmas Eve I knocked on the door of the dining car and was admitted by Vassily. He told me, with gestures of shrugging, that the place was closed. I said, ‘It’s Christmas Eve.’ He shrugged. I gave him five rubles. He let me in and got a bottle of champagne, and, as he shot off the cork, I looked around at the deserted car. In the best of times it was cold, but without the trickle of warmth from the stove and buffeted by the snowy wind, it was colder than usual – lighted by a single flourescent tube and holding only the two of us. I could not imagine anything worse for watching Christmas approach. In the funereal chill Vassily drew up a chair and poured us both a drink. He tossed his back, as if the champagne were rotgut, screwing up his face and saying, ‘Yagh!’

  We sat facing each other, drinking, not speaking, until Vassily lifted his glass and said, ‘U.S.A.!’

  By then I was drunk enough to remember one of the Russian lessons Vladimir had given me. I touched Vassily’s glass with mine and said, ‘Soyuz Sovietski Sosialistichiski Respublik.’

  ‘Steppe!’ hollered Vassily. He was singing. ‘Steppe! Steppe!’

  We finished the bottle, got another, and Vassily continued to sing. Around midnight he broke into a military song that I recognized – the tune at least. I hummed along with him, and he said, ‘Da, da!’ urging me to sing. I sang the only words I knew, Italian obscenities to his patriotic Russian verses:

  Compagna Polacca,

  Hai fatto una cacca?

  Si, Vassili!

  Ho fatto venti kili!

  Io ho fatto nelle grande steppe …

  Vassily applauded and joined with me in Russian. We stood in the dining car, singing our duet, drinking between verses.

  Compagna Tatyana,

  Hai fatto un’ putana?

  Si, Bonanno!

  Ho fatto per un’ anno,

  Io ho fatto nelle grande steppe …

  ‘Merry Christmas,’ I said when the fourth bottle appeared. Vassily was smiling and nodding and chuckling hoarsely. He showed me a sheaf of restaurant bills he had been adding up. He shook them and then threw them into the air: ‘Whee!’ We sat down again, and Vassily, too drunk to remember that I couldn’t speak Russian, harangued me for fifteen minutes. I suppose he was saying, ‘Look at me. Fifty-five years old and I’m running this crummy dining car. Urp. Back and forth, every two weeks, from Moscow to Vladivostok, sleeping in Hard Class, too busy to take a piss, everyone giving me lip. Urp. You call that a life?’ Towards the end of his harangue his head grew heavy, his eyelids drooped, and his speech became thick. He put his head down on the table, and, still holding tight to the bottle, he went to sleep.

  ‘Merry Christmas.’

  I finished my drink and went back to my compartment through the bouncing train.

  The next morning, Christmas, I woke and looked over at the zombie sleeping with his arms folded on his chest like a mummy’s. The provodnik told me it was six o’clock Moscow time. My watch said eight. I put it back two hours and waited for dawn, surprised that so many people in the car had decided to do the same thing. In darkness we stood at the windows, watching our reflections. Shortly afterwards I saw why they were there. We entered the outskirts of Yaroslavl and I heard the others whispering to themselves. The old lady in the frilly nightgown, the Goldi man and his wife and child, the domino-playing drunks, even the zombie who had been monkeying with my radio: they pressed their faces against the windows as we began rattling across a long bridge. Beneath us, half-frozen, very black, and in places reflecting the flames of Yaroslavl’s chimneys, was the Volga.

  … Royal David’s city,

  Stood a lowly cattle shed …

  What was that? Sweet voices, as clear as organ tones, drifted from my compartment. I froze and listened. The Russians, awestruck by the sight of the Volga, had fallen silent; they were hunched, staring down at the water. But the holy music, fragrant and slight, moved through the air, warming it like an aroma.

  Where a mother laid her baby

  In a manger, for his bed …

  The hymn wavered, but the silent reverence of the Russians and the slowness of the train allowed the soft children’s voices to perfume the corridor. My listening became a meditation of almost unbearable sadness, as if joy’s highest refinement was borne on a needlepoint of pain.

  Mary was that mother mild,

  Jesus Christ, her little child …

  I went into the compartment and held the radio to my ear until the broadcast ended, a programme of Christmas music from the BBC. Dawn never came that day. We travelled in thick fog and through whorls of brown blowing mist, which made the woods ghostly. It was not cold outside: some snow had melted, and the roads – more frequent now – were rutted and muddy. All morning the tree trunks, black with dampness, were silhouettes in the fog, and the pine groves at the very limit of visibility in the mist took on the appearance of cathedrals with dark spires. In places the trees were so dim, they were like an afterimage on the eye. I had never felt close to the country, but the fog distanced me even more, and I felt, after 6,000 miles and all those days in the train, only a great remoteness; every reminder of Russia – the women in orange canvas jackets working on the line with shovels, the sight of a Lenin statue, the station signboards stuck in yellow ice, and the startled magpies croaking in Russian at the gliding train – all this annoyed me. I resented Russia’s size; I wan
ted to be home.

  The dining car was locked at nine. I tried again at ten and found it empty. Vassily explained that, as we would be in Moscow soon, the dining car was closed. I swore at him, surprising myself with my own anger. Under protest he made me an omelette; he handed it to me with a slice of bread and a glass of tea. While I was eating, a woman came in. She wore a black coat and had a Soviet Railway badge pinned to her black hat. She spoke to Vassily: ‘Kleb’ (bread). Vassily waved her away: ‘Nyet kleb!’ She pointed at my meal and repeated her request for bread. Vassily shouted at her. She stood her ground and got an almighty shove from Vassily, who smiled at me apologetically as he delivered the blow. The woman came back and put out her hand and screamed loudly at him. This infuriated Vassily. His eyes became small, and he threw himself on her, beating her with his fists. He twisted her arm behind her back and kicked her hard. The woman howled and was gone.

  Vassily said to me, ‘Ni karasho!’ The fight had left him breathless. He smiled his idiotic smile. I was ashamed of myself for not helping the woman. I pushed my food away.

  ‘Pavel?’ Vassily blinked at me.

  ‘You are a fucking monkey.’

  ‘Pozhal’sta,’ said Vassily, in glad welcome.

  The train was going at half-speed for the approach to Moscow. I walked down the corridors of Hard Class to my compartment, to pack my belongings. The other passengers were already packed. They stood in their arrival suits, smoking by the windows. I passed each one, seeing criminality and fraud in their faces, brutishness in their little eyes, fists protruding from unusually long sleeves.

  ‘Monkey,’ I said, squeezing through a group of soldiers.

  A man stroking his fur hat blocked my way. I went up to him. He agitated his enormous jaw with a yawn.

  ‘Monkey!’ He moved aside.

  Monkey to the provodnik, monkey to the man at the samovar, monkey to the army officer in Soft Class; and, still muttering, I found the zombie sitting by the window in an overcoat, his jam-flecked thumb on Mockba. ‘Monkey!’ I wished him a Merry Christmas and gave him two pipe cleaners, a can of Japanese sardines, and a ballpoint pen that would run out of ink as soon as he wrote his name.

  That was the end of my trip, but it was not the end of my journey. I still had a ticket to London, and, hoping to catch the next train west, I cancelled my hotel reservation and spent the afternoon arranging for a de luxe berth on the train to the Hook of Holland, via Warsaw and Berlin. I was packed and ready, and I arrived at the station on Christmas night with an hour to spare. The Intourist guide brought me to the barrier and said good-bye. I stood for forty-five minutes on the platform, waiting to be shown to my compartment.

  It was not a porter who inquired about my destination, but an immigration official. He leafed through my passport, rattling the pages. He shook his head.

  ‘Polish visa?’

  ‘I’m not stopping in Poland,’ I said. ‘I’m just passing through.’

  ‘Transit visa,’ he said.

  ‘What do you mean?’ I said. ‘Hey, this train’s going to leave!’

  ‘You must have Polish transit visa.’

  ‘I’ll get it at the border.’

  ‘Impossible. They will send you back.’

  ‘Look’ – the whistle blew – ‘I’ve got to get on this train. Please – it’s going to leave without me!’ I picked up my suitcase. The man held me by the arm. A signalman passed by, motioning with his green flag. The train began to move.

  ‘I can’t stay here!’ But I let the man hold on to my sleeve and watched the Holland-bound express tooting its way out of the station: frseeeeeeeefronnng. There were travellers’ faces at the windows. They were happy, safely leaving. It’s Christmas, darling, they were saying, and we’re off. It was the end, I thought, as I saw the train receding, taking my heart with it. It’s the end: duffilled!

  Two days later I was able to leave Moscow, but the trip to London was not outwardly remarkable. I tried to collect my wits for the arrival; I slept through Warsaw, glared at Berlin, and entered Holland with a stone in my stomach. I felt flayed by the four months of train travel: it was as if I had undergone some harrowing cure, sickening myself on my addiction in order to be free of it. To invert the cliché, I had had a bellyful of travelling hopefully – I wanted to arrive. The whistle blew at level crossings – a long moronic hoot – and I was mocked by it, not bewitched. I had been right: anything was possible on a train, even the urge to get off. I drank to deafen myself, but still I heard the racket of the wheels.

  All travel is circular. I had been jerked through Asia, making a parabola on one of the planet’s hemispheres. After all, the grand tour is just the inspired man’s way of heading home.

  And I had learned what I had always secretly believed, that the difference between travel writing and fiction is the difference between recording what the eye sees and discovering what the imagination knows. Fiction is pure joy – how sad that I could not reinvent the trip as fiction. It would have had (now we were boarding a blue ferry at the Hook) such a pleasing shape if I had artfully distributed light and shadow and played with the grammar of delay. I would have plotted myself into danger: Sadik would have had a switchblade and gold teeth, the Hué track an erupting mine, the Orient Express a lavish dining car, and Nina – imploring me – would have rapped softly on my compartment door and flung off her uniform as we crossed the Volga. It did not happen that way, and in any case I might have been too busy for that gusto. I had worked every day, bent over my rocking notebook like Trollope scribbling between postal assignments remembering to put it all in the past tense.

  Gladly, made nimble by sanity’s seamless glee, I boarded the train for London – correction: I am now leaving Harwich (there were often twenty miles between clauses and a hundred more before I finished a sentence) and setting my face at the hairless January fields. On my lap I have four thick notebooks. One has a Madras water stain on it, another has been slopped with borscht, the blue one (lettered, in gold, Punjab Stationery Mart) has the ring from a damp glass on its front, and the red one’s colour has been diluted to pink by the Turkish sun. These stains are like notations. The trip is finished and so is the book, and in a moment I will turn to the first page, and to amuse myself on the way to London will read with some satisfaction the trip that begins, Ever since childhood, when I lived within earshot of the Boston and Maine, I have seldom heard a train go by and not wished I was on it.

  Now read the first chapter of Ghost Train

  to the Eastern Star, in which the author

  retraces the steps of The Great Railway Bazaar thirty years on …

  I. The Eurostar

  You think of travellers as bold, but our guilty secret is that travel is one of the laziest ways on earth of passing the time. Travel is not merely the business of being bone-idle, but also an elaborate bumming evasion, allowing us to call attention to ourselves with our conspicuous absence while we intrude upon other people’s privacy – being actively offensive as fugitive freeloaders. The traveller is the greediest kind of romantic voyeur, and in some well-hidden part of the traveller’s personality is an unpickable knot of vanity, presumption and mythomania bordering on the pathological. This is why a traveller’s worst nightmare is not the secret police or the witch doctors or malaria, but rather the prospect of meeting another traveller.

  Most writing about travel takes the form of jumping to conclusions, and so most travel books are superfluous, the thinnest, most transparent monologuing. Little better than a licence to bore, travel writing is the lowest form of literary self-indulgence: dishonest complaining, creative mendacity, pointless heroics and chronic posturing, much of it distorted with Munchausen syndrome.

  Of course, it’s much harder to stay at home and be polite to people and face things, but where’s the book in that? Better the boastful charade of pretending to be an adventurer:

  Yes, swagger the nut-strewn roads,

  Crouch in the fo’c’sle

  Stubbly with goodness,
/>
  in a lusty ‘Look-at-me!’ in exotic landscapes.

  This was more or less my mood as I was packing to leave home. I also thought: But there is curiosity. Even the most timid fantasists need the satisfaction of now and then enacting their fantasies. And sometimes you just have to clear out. Trespassing is a pleasure for some of us. As for idleness, ‘An aimless joy is a pure joy.’

  And there are dreams: one, the dream of a foreign land that I enjoy at home, staring east into space at imagined temples, crowded bazaars and what V. S. Pritchett called ‘human architecture’, lovely women in gauzy clothes, old trains clattering on mountainsides, the mirage of happiness; two, the dream state of travel itself. Often on a trip, I seem to be alive in a hallucinatory vision of difference, the highly coloured unreality of foreignness, where I am vividly aware (as in most dreams) that I don’t belong; yet I am floating, an idle anonymous visitor among busy people, an utter stranger. When you’re strange, as the song goes, no one remembers your name.

  Travel can induce such a distinct and nameless feeling of strangeness and disconnection in me that I feel insubstantial, like a puff of smoke, merely a ghost, a creepy revenant from the underworld, unobserved and watchful among real people, wandering, listening while remaining unseen. Being invisible – the usual condition of the older traveller – is much more useful than being obvious. You see more, you are not interrupted, you are ignored. Such a traveller isn’t in a hurry, which is why you might mistake him for a bum. Hating schedules, depending on chance encounters, I am attracted by travel’s slow tempo.

  Ghosts have all the time in the world, another pleasure of long-distance aimlessness – travelling at half speed on slow trains and procrastinating. And this ghostliness, I was to find, was also an effect of the journey I had chosen, returning to places I had known many years ago. It is almost impossible to return to an early scene in your travelling life and not feel like a spectre. And many places I saw were themselves sad and spectral, others big and hectic, while I was the haunting presence, the eavesdropping shadow on the ghost train.