by Paul Theroux
That was why, rolling towards Kirov that first day, I was very happy—reading, drinking, listening to the news on the BBC, and writing down the odd episode with Olga and Natasha. It seemed to me like a sort of rest cure—idleness, and undemanding scenery, and they woke you for meals. And because we were in a group we were served before anyone else.
The experience of the Trans-Siberian Express is both monotony and monkish beauty: all day outside the loud, hurrying train it is birch trees and undulant hills, and after the utter blackness of night on that line, you see more birch trees and more undulant hills; and all that day too, until it seems more like wallpaper than a landscape—the kind of wallpaper that is so simple and repetitious that you look at the seams rather than the design.
There is no more austere sight in nature than birch trees set among small snow-covered hills, a study in black and white that is made starker by the crows and their nests, the fat black birds in the branches or looking deranged, flapping in the white sky.
We went through Perm, and passed the East-West marker at 1100 miles; and then to Sverdlovsk. The dwellings diminish and change from concrete towers in cities, to brick apartments on the outskirts, and then to houses made of planks that grow rougher until huts made of split logs appear, and these are replaced in the hinterland by plain log cabins with turf jammed into the chinks. In fifty or a hundred miles you see the entire history of Russian architecture.
Over lunch I was sitting with Blind Bob, Wilma and Morthole. Morthole brought us up to date on his rock collection: one from Berlin that had been thrown by a rioter, a chunk from Warsaw, a pebble from Moscow. He was planning to snatch something interesting at the twelve-minute stop in Omsk.
"These houses are horrible," Wilma said. She was wearing a wool hat over her baldness.
Morthole hadn't shaved and was looking whiskery. It always seemed ominous to me when a man stopped shaving on such a trip.
I remarked that they didn't seem to paint many of their houses out here—usually it was just the trim. In the poorer villages there was no paint at all. The log cabins and shacks just blackened in the rain and sun. And there was the proof out of the window: a whole settlement of black, chubby huts.
Wilma said, "I'd like to read something about it."
Blind Bob said, "Did you read that book by Paul Theroux, about taking this train?"
"No," Wilma said, and addressed me, "Did you?"
Flattening my face against the window I said, "Look at those birches! Isn't it amazing that you never see a fat one? They're all slender. Why do you suppose—"
"I read it," Morthole said, across the table. "The Gurneys have one of his books, I don't know which one. I saw Malcolm reading it in his compartment."
I made a mental note to avoid the Gurneys, but even so—sitting here—I felt like a hypocrite. But what was I to do? I hated being an object of attention. I had paid for my ticket, and so I had a right to my privacy. I hadn't deceived anyone; I had merely been economical with the truth. The alternative could be irksome—not just the conversations about writing books and "You should get yourself a word processor," but what I feared would be the duties of an unpaid guide. I had been on this train before; therefore, I ought to know whether that thermos bottle thing was a church steeple, and the name of that river, and if you could buy film in Irkutsk.
It was easy for me to keep to myself. I had my own compartment—plenty of space, plenty of provisions, the grapes, cookies, chocolates and tea that made being on the Trans-Siberian like a luxurious form of convalescence. It was a surprise to me that my little radio worked inside the train. At certain times of day I got the BBC news, and at other times Radio Australia or Voice of America. I listened to the Top Twenty, and the report of a Shakespeare Festival in China, and the fallout from the bombing of Libya. From the samovar at the end of the sleeping car, I got hot water for tea. And I divided the day into three parts and set myself tasks to perform: reading and writing.
That night a full moon was shining in the cloudless sky, and beneath it, water was lying everywhere, the melted snow flooding the birches. At midnight the moon shone from above and below this water and made the earth a glittering mirror on which leafless trees trembled, looking frail.
Every day is the same on the Trans-Siberian: that is one of its reassuring aspects. In itself it is not interesting, which is why it is such a pleasure to be a passenger and so maddening to write about it. There is nothing to write about. This train is an occasion, not a subject. It is more like an ocean liner than any other train I know—the solid steady travel, the sameness of the view. But in the thirteen years since I had last been on it, it had changed in many ways, and most of those changes were improvements. I assumed Gorbachev's cost-efficient approach to Soviet life was behind this. He had publicly criticized the uncaring attitude of Soviet workers: the old, grizzled provodniks on the sleeping car were gone, and in their place was a young couple who occupied one small compartment and worked in shifts. Gorbachev had denounced the drunkenness that was common in the country—the Trans-Siberian reflected this: a trip on it was no longer a binge. There were a few drunks on the train, but none dared to enter the dining car, and no alcohol was sold. The carriages were cleaner, and the officials fairly good-natured, and the passengers more prosperous looking. Still, at the longer stops, when I was strolling down the station platform I was buttonholed by Russians who asked: Want to sell your shoes? Want to sell your jeans? Want to sell your T-shirt? Perhaps it was only my imagination, but it seemed to me that there was something fundamentally wrong with a country whose citizens asked to buy your underwear.
Each day I moved my watch back one hour: Irkutsk is five hours ahead of Moscow. Losing an hour a day did not cause jet lag. Just after I awoke on the third day I looked out and saw a huge lake to the south: Ozero Chany (Lake Chany). Very soon we stopped at Barabinsk, which was cold—below freezing. Zhenia, the sleeping-car attendant, squinted at the sky and hugged himself and muttered meg (snow). Morthole drew my attention to the fact that some of the birches on the Barabinsk steppe were as fat as beer barrels—thicker than any birch I had ever seen. These older birches had black, burst-open bark on their trunks.
We came to Novosibirsk, on the river Ob. It is strange that this Siberian city should be so large, though not stranger than that Chicago should be—and like Chicago it is a city the railway put on the map. Much odder than this was the sight of so many sea gulls on the river—black-headed gulls, diving among the ice floes, over 1000 miles from the sea. The Ob itself, at 3461 miles long, is the fourth longest river in the world—longer than the Yangtze.
Once, Malcolm Gurney quoted with approval this know-it-all traveler, Theroux, who had done the trip some years ago. Everyone at the table listened with interest and apparent agreement. It seemed as though I was the only person who didn't agree with the wild generalization, and so I excused myself and left.
But I wanted to reveal myself and tell them that this train was much better than the one I had taken in 1973. It was more orderly, and cleaner, and seemingly more tolerant. What I remembered was that the dining car had run out of decent food after a few days, and we had lived on eggs and watery soup and stale bread; and I had a very clear memory of the thin soup sloshing in the steel soup bowls as the train jolted around long curves.
Clouds were massing and building towards the dazzling white moon just before I turned in. It had grown cold. In the immensity of the Siberian forest, amid the blue pools of snow and spiky trees, there were wolves and wild dogs—farther on I saw their skins being stretched on frames. It seemed to me hateful that they should make wolves into hats. When the moon was lost in the cloud cover, a blackness overwhelmed the view. I awoke at Taishet the next morning to driving snow.
It was spring snow—sudden, heavy and deep. The whole landscape was buried in it, with only a few brown muddy creeks showing through—no water, just a creek shape of chocolate ice cream straggling through the snow. The strange silence and isolation that snow brings to a plac
e was intensified here in Siberia—or technically Eastern Siberia, as it said in Russian on the sign at the little wooden station at Uk. It snowed all day, and at times, as the train rolled through it, the snow was so thick that everything was white—the sky, the earth: nothing but a blankness with a few faint tracings of trees.
I had Rick Westbetter's word that the wooden townships looked like small towns in the Midwest in the 1920s—one-story wooden houses with steeply pitched roofs; and outside town a couple of filthy factories whose smoke was the same browny-gray as the clouds, and all around an expanse of prairie—in this case the great Gromboolian Plain of the steppes. Those places a few hours out of Zima all looked like Gopher Prairie. I was now reading Main Street and marveling at the similarity: the boom town in the middle of nowhere.
The snowstorm lessened in the afternoon, and later as we approached Angarsk what looked like a blizzard was the wind whipping the snow from the ground; it had stopped falling. Where the ground had been scoured by the wind, the soil was light brown and dry, the sort of frozen ground you can stub your toe against. It was not until I saw a falcon roosting on a bare tree that I realized that there was little sign of life here—just bare ground and drifted snow under an iron-dark sky. The train raced along, and I looked for more. I thought I saw magpies and crows, but it might have been a trick of the light.
We arrived at Irkutsk, after four and a half days of the Trans-Siberian's crossing the vastness of the steppes. The astonishing thing is not that it took so long to get there, but that for anyone who chooses to go on to Vladivostok, there are four more days of it, and they are much the same. It was like crossing an ocean.
It was nine o'clock at night when we arrived at Irkutsk, but we did not stay in the city. We were directed to a bus and driven to a hotel forty miles away on the shore of Lake Baikal. The Wittricks called it Lake Bacall, like the actress.
The lake was frozen solid, with great shoved-up ice slabs at the shore, because of the pressure. Baikal is the largest lake in the world—it contains one-fifth of the earth's fresh water, and the Russians suggest that there are monsters in it as well as fat seals and numerous varieties of fish. The ice is two meters thick, they boasted. You can walk the length of it—over 400 miles. Or take a sleigh across to Babushkin, which they do to save time in winter. They had amazing things here at Baikal. Natural wonders! Over at Bashaiyarischka they had fur farms—they raised ermine and lynx and mink, and made them into hats. They trapped sable—the little devils wouldn't breed in captivity, but there were plenty of them around and they fetched $1000 a pelt. They had coral in the lake, they boasted. And just down the shore at Listvianka they had a church. There was a priest in the church—a real one.
They never boasted about the hotels. In Moscow it had been a vast and dusty place, with straw mattresses and a shriveled floor, ragged carpets, blankets blackened with cigarette burns, and stinking bathrooms—leaky pipes, cracked cisterns. "The bogs are tragic," Richard Cathcart said. I thought that was about right. The hotel at Baikal was marble and mausoleumlike, and it was clean. But I had to be shown three rooms until I found one with hot water, and in the last there was no toilet seat, and none of them had curtains on the windows. The babushkas dusted and mopped, but apart from that there was no maintenance—not only in the larger sense of the drains working or the water running, but in details: knobs were missing from dressers, and the latches from the windows, which didn't open in any case; the locks jammed, the lamps were either dead or bristling with bare wires. Repairs were carried out with bits of sticky tape and pieces of string. It is true that every traveler has to expect to put up with discomfort, but there were huge areas of Soviet life that seemed to me not simply uncomfortable but downright dangerous.
The members of the group were not happy here: it was too cold, the hotel was a wreck, the food was dreadful, and why didn't these Siberians smile?
Honeymooners came to the hotel—some stayed, some merely stood in front and had their pictures taken, some roistered there. On my second night the room next to mine was occupied by a pair of newlyweds playing Russian rock and roll on a cassette machine until, at two in the morning, I banged on their door and told them to shut up. The groom appeared, drunken and drooling and a foot taller than me, but when he saw I was a foreigner he decided not to attack me. Behind him in the room, a young woman encouraged him. In defiance, they turned the music even louder for about ten minutes, and then they switched it off.
It was a custom for just-married couples to drive to where the Angara River flowed from the lake—it was all eider ducks and ice floes—and these newlyweds parked by the shore, opened a bottle of champagne and toasted each other, while the driver took their picture. The bride wore a rented dress of white lace, and the groom a dark suit with a wide red ribbon worn as a sash. In the course of one walk in this direction I saw four couples do this—have a ceremonial drink, then pose for a picture. The shore was littered with champagne bottles.
I found this very depressing. Was it the ritual, or was it the fact that, because the Soviet divorce rate was so high, everything related to marriage there looked like a charade? It might have been nothing more than the cold: Baikal was freezing, and the lake looked like a plain of snow and ice in Antarctica. Well, after all it was winter in Siberia.
***
There were any number of people eager to explain why Irkutsk was the capital of Siberia, an education center, an Asiatic crossroads; but I thought Rick Westbetter had it just about right when he said, "Grand Rapids used to look like this, when I was a kid. Look, outdoor privies. We haven't seen those since the twenties." I told him that I had been reading Sinclair Lewis and that these Siberian cities and towns looked like tired versions of Zenith and Gopher Prairie: not only the wooden houses with the porches, but the main street and the old cars and the trolleys, and the wide-fronted department stores that looked as though they should be called The Bon-Ton Store. If there was a difference it was that the class system was probably more rigid in Siberia, and the local version of George F. Babbitt would be a party hack rather than a real-estate man.
An Estonian rock group called Radar was playing in Irkutsk, a freezing wind blew across the river, the toilet seat in my room had been cut from a flat and splintery piece of plywood. How had these people sent rockets to Mars?
Young men and fox-faced women lurked on the promenade and importuned what foreigners they could find.
"Want to sell—"
They wanted to buy blue jeans, T-shirts, track shoes, sport shoes, watches, sweaters, sweatshirts, lighters. They paid in rubles—or else I could have Annushka for an hour. Did I have a radio? And what about a pen?
That night, listening to my little shortwave radio, I heard the news on the BBC World Service. It was the usual headmistress's voice, but the message seemed portentous.
"Swedish officials say they have detected high radioactive levels in the atmosphere," she said, "and they link these with other reports that Finland, Denmark, and Norway have also detected much higher concentrations of radioactivity than usual. At first, it had been thought that the radioactive material had leaked from a Swedish plant near Uppsala, north of Stockholm. But officials from different parts of Sweden say they think the leak has come from the east, in other words from a nuclear power station in the Soviet Union. Easterly winds have been blowing over Scandinavia for several days. According to one report, radiation levels are up to six times above normal level in Finland and half as much again as is normal in Norway."
This was the first inkling of the disaster at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Station, near Kiev. It had happened two days before, when I was in the Soviet Union—in Baikal, cursing the Soviets for never bothering to fix leaky pipes.
In the morning we left Irkutsk for Mongolia. The people in the group complained that the train was three hours late, but that didn't seem bad—after all, it had come from Moscow, which was almost 4000 miles away. It was the direct Moscow-to-Mongolia train, following the route of the Trans-Siberian as f
ar as Ulan-Ude and then becoming the Trans-Mongolian Express when it turned south from there. It takes in the most rugged and beautiful part of Siberia, the mountainous region south of Lake Baikal called Buryatskaya, inhabited by the nomadic Buryats. The train skirts the lake, passing the ice fishermen at Slyudyanka and keeping to the shore, to Babushkin and beyond. To the southwest there is a tremendous mountain range, the Khrebet Khamar Daban, very snowy, and with great peaks, one behind the other like the Rockies, and rising to 15,000 and 16,000 feet. These mountains constitute the frontier and it is necessary to travel around them in the flat valley of the Selenga River in order to enter Mongolia.
The last time I was here I did not see anything. I was going west, and the westbound trains round Baikal at night. So this was all new to me: icy mountains in brilliant sunshine. The sleeping car had a punished and dusty look; written on its side in Cyrillic were the words Mongolian Railways, and there was the Mongolian state seal—a galloping fur-hatted horseman. When we stopped, scores of flat-faced Mongolians in blue tracksuits jumped out of the train and began running in place on the platform. It was the prize-winning Mongolian wrestling team, on their way back from a successful series of matches in Moscow. One of the wrestlers told me that the horseman on the seal was the liberator of Mongolia, Suhe Baator. The name means "Suhe the Hero."
On Russian trains there are loudspeakers in all the coaches, sometimes broadcasting music, sometimes news or comment. The drone is always in the background, and the Russians appear not to notice it. It has a practical value, giving information about the next stop and how long the train will be there. In the past the volume could not be regulated—the knobs were removed from the volume control, and so it droned day and night. One of the improvements on Soviet trains has been the replacement of the volume control knobs. On Mongolian trains these knobs are missing, and the traveler is subjected to an ear-bashing in the Mongolian language.