Olga Maximova suffered her claustrophobia stoically and, finding me self-sufficient, took to her bed, or bunk, for most of the trip, an arrangement which suited both of us. I would wake, dress, go to eat one of those timeless meals which merge one with another on this train and return to find the same log-like silhouette hunched beneath the blankets in a paralysing emotion composed of both claustrophobia and mortal boredom, from which she would surface dutifully to prime me with some vital statistics on lead ore, mining output, or collective agriculture.
But that first afternoon we had not yet established our respective ways. Resigned, but mournful, I observed our undramatic, almost stealthy departure, sliding out of the station as smoothly as a liner launched from the slips. There was no chugging, no straining, no blasts of a self-important whistle; no sense of power. What should have been, for me, a moment of supreme achievement passed almost imperceptibly.
The train had settled into its loping stride (one thousand miles an hour, I was informed by a patriot who, like myself, had no head for figures) as we streamed through the birch-woods heralding the golden-domed complex of Zagorsk. Great Zagorsk, the medieval monasteries and cathedrals once known as the Troitza, the Convent of the Trinity of St. Sergei, was famed as the ‘loveliest of all the holy Russian citadels’, and so I thought its rich jumble of rococo and medieval when first I visited it, some years earlier. And so I still thought it, seeing it now from the train, high on its hill, its crimson, pink and pistachio green walls glowing in the westering sun, and the five lofty domes of the Uspensky Cathedral (the highest for Christ and the lesser for the Evangelists) glittering above the tomb of Boris Goudenov. We were barely a half hour out of Moscow but once this patriarchal seat had been the object of prolonged and arduous pilgrimages for rich and poor alike. While some trudged for days, their feet encased in laptié, birch-bark wrappings, the Court made a splendid showing in gilded, sable-lined coaches, with tumblers and dwarfs to while away the tedium of the journey. The Traveller told me of the little boy who was to become Peter the Great who went there in a miniature golden coach pulled by dwarf horses, with dwarf outriders to complete the cortège, a splendour for which my infant heart had yearned in vain.
Zagorsk vanished, the setting sun crimson behind its glittering gold belfries, and the birches thickened along the track; we were running through sparse woods now. Birches, always birches fringing our route – the baraba, or birch steppes beloved of Russian writers. Viatka would be the next landmark. Viatka, where Herzen had spent two years of political exile as a young, bruised idealist. Now was the time to consult the Traveller’s little black note-book, the treasure he had bequeathed me on my twenty-first birthday and which, naturally, I had brought with me on this journey. But it was not to be found. With hands made clumsy by agitation, I searched for it frenziedly. It had been in my dressing-case in Moscow, protected from the face-creams in a plastic bag. I had been re-reading it in voluptuous anticipation the night before I made my false start, before renouncing the four-berthed compartment. It could not have vanished! But it had, and in a rising gale of panic I emptied my suitcases on the floor and fought down a desire to pull the communication cord. In an effort to hide my tears from Olga Maximova, I continued to pack and unpack incoherently. At that moment I thought the note-book lost or mislaid, dropped from the dressing-case or left behind in the hotel; but later, it seemed more likely that it had been removed by some persons curious as to its significance among my belongings. In any case, without it, I now had to rely on my memory. Deceptions and frustrations again. Neither the Traveller nor his shade nor even his notes would now accompany me, when at last I made the journey for which I had waited half my life away.
These gloomy reflections were interrupted by the arrival of our attendant offering glasses of tea, fresh-brewed from the stove-samovar, or batchok. There was one at the end of every corridor; ours was labelled The Titan, and it steamed furiously throughout the run. This tea-making ritual, and a passionate polishing of every available metal or wooden surface seemed our attendant’s chief occupation throughout the trip. He took a proper pride in his train and looked puzzled, hurt even, when I confided my regrets regarding the diesel engine. He thought this innovation particularly fine but, anxious to comfort me, promised a steam engine – the real, funnelled kind – at Omsk, ‘or Tomsk at the latest’. Engines were often changed en route, he said soothingly. And was it only my imagination that later, harnessed to the more classic form, our train ran differently? Its loping gait seemed accentuated; its blasts of steam and smuts, its lonely wail, as it raced on through the night all reassured me. It was still the great Trans-Siberian train of legend, a nine-day wonder journey – only days to cross the expanse of Asia that had taken Bering six years; which sometimes took the tragic prisoners two years, to stumble in chains to the halfway forwarding houses, such as that House of the Dead which Dostoievsky knew.
The lands through which we ran, hour after hour, day after day, and all through the night, they too were much as I had envisaged them. Rarely, a fierce glow lit the horizon; blast furnaces; some huge works such as the Traveller had never seen, their stacks rising like cathedrals of a new faith. Factories, armaments, unknown industrial plants, new installations, like the towns, both old and new, mostly lay miles from the railway. When the Tzar Nicholas I had originally discussed the route of the first Petersburg-Moscow railway he had cut short the experts’ suggestions, and taking a ruler drew a straight line from one point to another.
‘Gentlemen, the tracks will follow this line,’ he said, and the engineers knew better than to argue. This high-handed principle was repeated when, during the reign of his grandson, the Tzar Alexander III, the project of the Trans-Siberian line at last materialized. Thus, as the long steel ribbon of rail unwound westward from Vladivostok, it ran through swamps and forests, across raging rivers piercing the almost impenetrable taïga, seldom swerving to touch a city, so that most of them lay ten miles or so from the station or wayside halt which served them.
In the words of an Imperial edict, ‘having given the order to build a continuous line of railways across Siberia to unite our rich Siberian provinces with the railway system of our Interior,’ the Tzar Alexander III commanded his son, the Tzarevitch, later Nicholas II, to lay the first stone of the East-West Eastern line, at Vladivostok, in 1891. The young Grand Duke had been removed from the hot-house atmosphere of a love affair with St. Petersburg’s prima ballerina assoluta Mathilde Kesschinskaya, for the more bracing distractions of a world tour aboard a man o’war. From the Far East he put in to Vladivostok and ceremoniously trundled the first wheel-barrow load of Siberian earth; that earth over which twenty-seven years later, he was to trudge his bitter path to the ‘House of Special Purpose’ at Ekaterinburg.
As we sped eastwards the stations we passed were singularly pretty – coquettishly so, as if in a man-made effort to counteract nature’s desolation. The fretted wood-work of the izbas, like cottages ornés, and the fanciful little gardens with pebble-work and rustic log trimmings were strongly Victorian in flavour, but with a bold use of colour, bright blue or orange washes picked out in white paint. Sometimes an over-life-sized topiary bear in some local clipped shrub competed with an aluminium-painted statue of Lenin striking a commanding attitude. But the topiary bear won, for his eyes were invariably made of the semi-precious stones so plentiful in Siberia. It was these flashing amethyst or topaz peepers, rather than Lenin’s upraised arm, that seemed to galvanize the railway officials, who were to be seen trotting about so zealously, like lesser bears, in their full-length furry overcoats, blowing whistles or blasting on curious curved horns recalling Beowulf, as they stood to attention and waved us on our way in a flutter of red flags. The train, I observed, was still accorded ceremonial. If it was no longer the most luxurious train in the world it was still the most fabulous, as it snaked forward into the five thousand miles of its tracks, ever farther, into ‘a waste land where no man comes, or hath since the making of this world’. Or so
such vast emptiness sometimes seemed in its infinity.
Sometimes an eagle circled overhead, and now I saw marmot colonies – the Pharaoh’s mice of my childhood dreams. They sat perked up on their haunches just as the Traveller had described them, appearing astonished as the train thundered past. In all these years, more than half a century (and no one could calculate how many generations of marmots this would represent) it seemed that the train still took them by surprise. As we slowed to a halt in the middle of nowhere I was able to observe them more closely, for the other side of the track they stood their ground stoutly. Catching several pairs of beady bright eyes through the window, I saluted these brave little animals, remembering they were immortalized by Tarbagan, my Marmot Hero of nursery days, he whose bow and arrow shot down some of the twelve suns blazing on high. Marmot colonies have their own ways of transmitting news, and know what is happening in other, faraway colonies: they are aware of climatic changes long before mankind, and the Siberians regard them as the most reliable barometers.
Crossing the Volga, as I had always been told, was regarded as a moment of nationalistic fervour when every man on the train stood up and doffed his cap to Mother Volga.
But had anyone done so, as we rumbled over the bridge? Not in the restaurant car, at any rate, where, at that historic moment I found myself; as I happened to be, also, when we entered the tunnel, at Zlataoust, where Europe ended. AZIATIKA said a large notice beside the track, as we emerged from the tunnel. Asia! Asiatic Siberia. Siberia! Siberia won!
The waitress had put down a clattering tray of glasses and rushed at me, gripping my hand. ‘That’s your first handshake in Asia!’ she said affectionately. Russians are gregarious by nature, and a train journey is, first of all, a social occasion. I ordered drinks all round.
‘Siberia! the Great Highway of Revolutionary ideas!’ – I quoted Maurice Hindus as I took my first look at the landscape of my inner eye and was accorded a smile from Olga Maximova, who perhaps thought this rousing phrase was my own.
•
Suddenly we were running through a man-made belt of prosperity, a pastoral world. Snug villages huddled down under beetling roofs, the izbas brightly coloured, each window massed with a green curtain of plants and surrounded by the traditional nalichniki, delicate lace-like carved framework, painted white, to strengthen the lace-paper illusion. Trim gardens topped by gigantic late sun-flowers already singed by frost. Curious bee-hives, waggish wooden figures of birds, cats or bears for the most part, as primitive as African sculpture, where the bees swarmed in and out through holes cut in the eyes, or the belly. But to each izba, however traditional, its own aerial and television installation. What did they watch, in the long black nights of a Siberian winter, I wondered? Yet there was nothing forbidding or lonely in these lost villages. They looked peaceful, snug, very sure of themselves, and I preferred them to suburban Siberia, those straggling new town developments on the outskirts of some towns.
Birches, always birches fringing our route. I used to think them insipid until I saw them massed in silvery columns, graceful as the captive Princesses in the kingdom enchanted by the Firebird of legend and ballet. Riders, lone riders rounding up grazing cattle with a long pole and lariat in the Mongol manner described to me by the Traveller. Horses, singular little horses, horses of the steppes – those small, shaggy creatures whose ancestors had trotted in victory to Paris; toy-like, blunt-nosed little horses. Harnessed to farm wagons they looked rat-sized, more fitted to pull a pumpkin coach.
To the few Siberian citizens (an unexceptional, husky lot usually wearing oushankas, ear-flapped fur caps), who were about the stations where we stopped and rushed to buy sun-flower seeds, sweets, or to gulp intoxicating mouthfuls of northern air, the train seemed an everyday spectacle, and they were obviously of far more interest to us; or rather, to myself, for I was, I think, the only foreigner, or tourist from the decadent west, on that particular run. Though, as we all clambered down to stretch ourselves, at each of the three-a-day stops, we presented a strange enough spectacle, for our clothes ranged from overcoats to striped pyjamas, chintzy peignoirs and singlets and shorts for a few athletic types who exercised vigorously. Two whole carriages were reserved for a group of officers of the Vietnamese army, returning from a course in Moscow no doubt, tiny, beautiful creatures, a lesson in neatness and elegance. They had exchanged their uniforms for well-pressed boiler suits, appearing in claret-red for meals, while emerging on to the platforms in dark blue ones for a gruelling round of gymnastics, and a curious battledore and shuttlecock routine, spinning and bouncing with india-rubber exuberance. Throughout, they retained that air of soigné distinction so apparent among the peoples of the Far East. I remember reading somewhere that in official Indonesian language, trains are called snob-containers, and I wondered if these Vietnamese warriors found the Trans-Siberian such, and were making particular efforts to live up to it. But I came to the conclusion they were born soigné as a race; even their bone-structure made all the rest of us look lumps of very common clay. As we ran forward – or was it backwards – into another time, losing or gaining on the clock each twenty-four hours, nothing disrupted their exercise, their meals, or their immaculate appearance.
But for the rest of the passengers, a timeless lethargy prevailed where, imperceptibly, hours and days and meals merged. Thus, for those who had begun the journey in Moscow it ought by now to have been, let us say, Friday lunch time but mysteriously appeared, in the restaurant car, to be Saturday breakfast; while for those who had got in at, perhaps, Omsk, it was supper time – though which day of the week they were at, one could not guess. The degree of licence in clothes was no help in the guess-work either, for while some wore pyjamas throughout, as their tenue de voyage, others wore them, more classically, only on going to bed, just as one was, oneself, getting up. In any case, the restaurant car provided an endless, nameless meal (the menu being printed in Russian and Chinese) composed of basic dishes which were available the clock round and could be constructed as the passenger chose. This system is held to be an expression of Russian laissez-aller, for punctuality, like set times for meals, is apt to irk; thus some perpetual plats are ever simmering at the ready, in both restaurants and restaurant cars. Since tea was served with every meal on our train, the addition of caviare could make it either an exotic breakfast or a fish tea, while a meaty bortsch transformed it into lunch or dinner. After such a spread, a glass of Armenian brandy proffered by a late-comer to the train might appear in the nature of a liqueur to some, while to others at the same table, a pre-breakfast apéritif. The Traveller had not mentioned this puzzling aspect of life on the train.
Once, there had been no restaurant cars attached to the Trans-Siberian, or any Russian trains, and passengers had to make-do until the next stop. But, in return, station buffets were excellent and even stylish: in the provinces, it was quite the thing to go and dine at the station buffet; besides, watching the passengers coming and going broke the stagnation of provincial life. We read of waiters in evening dress, six course menus and champagneskye; also, accounts of the ruthless military descending to commandeer the buffets’ entire resources for their mess, so that nothing remained for incoming trains with mothers and small children aboard, but salted fish and vodka. But Heaven was high and the Tzar far away as the old proverb ran, and military abuses were seldom punished. Nowadays, I thought, station meals were no temptation, but train menus were generally good. With the flexibility of food vouchers, which were currency, I usually contrived to trade-in all the rest of the menu for caviare.
‘Nearly a week on the train – whatever did you eat?’ I have often been asked since – The reply: ‘Caviare’, always seemed to annoy my questioners.
Whenever I had imagined this journey into my mind’s eye, the Traveller and I had not gone to the restaurant car; we were always locked in our compartment with love and caviare: perhaps, once, we made a sortie to the library car, to hear some velvet-voiced choir collected from the ‘hard’ wagons;
or, if it was a Sunday, I might steal out, while the Traveller slept, and join the kneeling crowds packed into the chapel car, to kiss the ikons and receive the blessing of some itinerant Holy man before returning to my lover’s side.
After such reveries, now augmented by Armenian brandy, I would collect my thoughts, telling myself there could be no more sighing, no more backward glances. Today, pilgrims reach Mecca in air-conditioned buses, and man goes to the moon in a capsule. Sigh no more, lady, sigh no more. But sighing, all the same, I would lurch the train’s length, pausing, sometimes, en route, inveigled into a ‘hard’ compartment where concertina players endeavoured to rock and roll in the restricted space at their disposal. Most of the hard class had, I observed, taken pains to make things cosy. There was always a jam-jar of flowers on the side table; for, however modest their means, passengers bought bouquets all along the route; a bottle of something for passing visitors; books, and of course, concertinas, balalaikas or guitars were in abundance. I saw no pets; unhappily, they are not encouraged in the U.S.S.R. But passengers have the right to travel on the Trans-Siberian with one bird cage, it seems.
On reaching my compartment I generally found Olga Maximova, who showed a positively sublime indifference to the flesh-pots, still huddled beneath the blankets. But gradually, the baleful stare with which she used to greet me was becoming benign. Our friendship was ripening in an aura of mutual laissez-aller.
‘It was good eating?’ she would ask.
‘– and drinking,’ I would reply, climbing dizzily into my berth, for what might be either a morning nap or an afternoon siesta, my brain steeped in Armenian brandy and charged with Siberian history. The significant names of our route were dinning in my ears with the clatter of the wheels, till at last they seemed to merge with the clank and rattle of chains – the fetters, worn by untold thousands of convicts herded into their barred prison wagons attached to the Trans-Siberian, crowded inside the cage-like structures that covered the decks of the ferries and steam-boats transporting the convoys northwards to further miseries; fetters dragged by the convicts plodding along the Vladirmirka, the great Siberian highway across the Urals; unhappy phantoms who had passed this way, into the desolation which Leskov has described so hauntingly:
Journey Into the Mind's Eye Page 34