Open Mic Night in Moscow

by Audrey Murray

  Do we ever! The Dutch couple and I are outside before she’s finished asking the question. The new goats are only a few weeks old, and they range in size from adorably tiny to adorably miniscule. Some can’t really open their eyes yet, most stagger around their pen on shaky legs, and I want to adopt all of them.

  Our task is simple: each baby has a tag affixed to its ear that matches a tag on its mother’s ear. The tags are resourceful: a bottle cap, a torn label with a brand logo, the occasional piece of paper with a number scribbled on it. When it’s time for the goats to nurse, each baby is placed directly beneath its mother; otherwise, the strongest kids would starve the smallest runts.

  The babies are kept in a separate pen while their mothers spend the day grazing. On horseback, the men have rounded up the mothers and cornered them in an adjacent pen. Our job is to scoop up the babies and hand them over the pen to the herders, who use the tags to match them with their mothers.

  We gingerly cradle the goats like babies; the herders, in contrast, don’t see them as fragile. They carry the kids by their legs and fling them around with a less-than-delicate touch.

  “I see why they asked us to help,” the Dutch guy muses as we hand the last of them over. “Can you imagine how long it would have taken them without us?”

  With more than double the manpower, I realize, it still took over an hour. I go to bed that night with more understanding of what it takes to get a herd through winter.

  Second Leg: Ulaanbaatar to Irkutsk (Twenty-Three Hours and Fifty-Five Minutes)

  If you’re in a hurry, you can make it from Mongolia to Moscow in four days, three hours, and thirty-six minutes; because I’m not, I decide to take a month.

  When you try to picture the Trans-Siberian Railway you might be, as I was, a little unsure where to start. Most of us are vaguely aware that it’s a long train line crossing Siberia to link Asia and Europe. But I’d always thought of the Trans-Siberian as a kind of express train that started on one end and shot through to the other without stopping.

  In actuality, the Trans-Siberian Railway is a network of railways that runs from Moscow to the Pacific Ocean on 5,772 miles of track. A lot of times, when people say “the Trans-Siberian,” they’re referring to connections on both ends that would allow you to go from London to Beijing without stepping off a train.

  All kinds of trains run along these routes, from luxe carriages with TVs and showers to low-budget basics that feel like one step up from a boxcar. You can book private compartments in first-class cabins or single bunks in open carriages. Some trains have restaurants that serve freshly made borscht and blinis, but even the least peckish travelers need to pack additional provisions, a feat made trickier by the fact that you won’t have access to refrigeration or anything to heat things up. You will, however, have unlimited access to boiling water. Your staple foods become ramen, instant oatmeal, and bread, a diet you so quickly tire of that you soon start to question whether items like cheese really require refrigeration, which becomes a gateway to convincing yourself that pasteurization is a sham we’ve been sold by Louis Pasteur, or that occasionally pressing perishable foods against the cold window while your compartment-mate goes to the bathroom is adequate refrigeration.

  I think a lot about what kind of ticket to purchase before booking my journey. My main concern is safety. I grumble about the special sections for solo female travelers at the back of each guidebook, resenting the way they make women traveling alone sound as fragile as glass figurines being shipped via zip line.

  Still, it is impossible to ignore the fact that women almost never travel alone in the former Soviet Union, and that falling asleep on a moving vehicle open to the public is not without its risks. There are a few schools of thought. For an average trip of, say, just over a day, a first-class ticket would cost around $120 U.S., which by my standards is a fortune, but more reasonable when you consider that it includes transport, lodging, a few meals, a modest toiletry kit, and, of course, unlimited boiling water. (In a nod to Soviet ideals of equality, it’s not called “first class” but instead “SV,” which stands for spalny vagon, or sleeping train, but which I prefer to think of as shaggon vagon.) SV carriages are blinged out, with luxuries like throw pillows, fresh flowers, and generic art. There are also, occasionally, en suite bathrooms and showers. Most notably, SV compartments are built for two, meaning you only share a room with, at maximum, one stranger.

  The next step down from SV is kupe, or second class, where a ticket for the same train runs closer to $50 U.S., if you’re okay with top bunk, or $60 U.S., if you aren’t. Kupe compartments accommodate four, which translates to you plus up to three strangers, but there’s still a door that can be locked, which provides a greater or lesser degree of safety, depending on whether you’re more afraid of the people outside your room or the passengers in it.

  The cheapest option is third class, known as platskart, an open carriage with about fifty bunks, where tickets for the same ride start at less than $25 U.S. While the main cabin is likely to be clean, the bathrooms, it is rumored, can quickly descend into anarchy.

  I initially assume SV is the safest bet, because it comes with the lowest potential for being locked in a room with a serial killer. But travel books and people chiming in on message boards disagree.

  There’s safety in numbers, many argue. If things get sketchy in a platskart, forty-nine other people will hear you scream. “SV can be nice if you’re traveling with one other person,” one travel book wrote. “But it can be more awkward to be in a room with one stranger than with three.”

  After much consulting and discussing and falling into unrelated Wikipedia holes, I decide to travel in second class.

  In some ways, I luck out on my first train, because though the cabin sleeps four, there are only two of us in it. In other ways, I’m less lucky.

  My roommate’s name is Oorma, and she immediately gives off the vibes of the freshman-year roommate who inspires you to start researching medical conditions that warrant a single. As she unpacks her bags to settle in for the trip, she begins throwing her belongings on my bed, and, when that space runs out, on me. Then she sighs, sits down, and starts snacking, a pursuit she will continue, loudly, for the duration of our journey.

  “So . . . Audrey,” she begins, in the kind of slow, singsongy Russian you’d use with a child or someone recovering from a traumatic brain injury. “Where . . . are . . . YOU . . . from?”

  We talk about where we’re from and the countries we’ve traveled to, and she suggests we show each other our passports, which doesn’t strike me as a terrible idea until she starts taking pictures of mine. I freeze. Is she a thief? Or is this part of train etiquette? Should I take out my phone and photograph hers just to be polite?

  “I’ll show my friends,” she announces as she hands me back the proof of citizenship that could also double as a how-to guide for stealing my identity.

  People advocate traveling by rail for the same reason they say you should bike or hitchhike: so that you can see the country. Airplanes take you from one city to the next without giving you any sense of the distance you’ve traveled or the land in between. Which is mostly fine by me. “Land” has struck me as something that comes with drawbacks, including bugs, cold weather, and lack of trendy restaurants. But I have to admit, the Mongolian countryside is pretty. Very brown, but pretty. It’s all grassland, and grass, notoriously, spends the winter dead. You wouldn’t think dead grass would look nice (especially if you were raised by my father), but it’s more golden than I remember the patches of lawn we left our toys out on being. It’s empty, rugged, bare, as though an overzealous bikini waxer yanked off all the people and plants, leaving only the mountains and the wide spaces in between.

  Russian trains all run on Moscow time, which is meant to prevent confusion but instead creates chaos. Outside your window, it’s eight p.m. in Mongolia, but the clock on the wall and the time on your ticket insists that it’s three in the afternoon. This eliminates the need to
reset the clock as the train crosses each of Russia’s eleven time zones, but also induces panic at the checkout counter.

  “I wanted the train that left at nine a.m.!” you exclaim, after handing over piles of cash for a ticket that is probably technically refundable in the same way that waffle fries are technically vegetables.

  “Yes,” the woman behind the glass window mumbles through a garbled microphone. “Two a.m.”

  “No!” you exclaim, close to tears. “Nine a.m.!”

  “Nine a.m. here is two a.m. in Moscow.”

  Each car is ruled by a provodnitsa, a word often translated as “carriage attendant,” but might be better thought of as “drill sergeant who occasionally serves you meals.” The provodnitsi run a tight ship; ours already poked her head into our cabin, for no discernible reason, and barked at us to straighten out our rug.

  Oorma is telling me about her career, which seems to have taken a series of extremely implausible twists.

  “First,” she tells me, “I was training to be a gynecologist. But then I discovered that I am allergic to blood.”

  “You mean, you realized you don’t like blood?”

  “No, I am allergic to it.”

  After this unfortunate setback, Oorma became a mechanical engineer, and then a genetic engineer, before finishing her career working in the “auto service.”

  “Auto service?” I ask.

  “You know,” she clarifies. “Like cars.”

  “Fixing them?”

  “No.”

  Now Oorma is retired. Her daughter is a schoolteacher in Irkutsk, a Siberian city not far from the Mongolian border.

  As the Soviet Union was beginning to come apart at the seams, Mongolians, too, began agitating for democracy. After a series of hunger strikes and peaceful protests, the Soviet-backed communist ruling party resigned in 1990, and Mongolia held free, democratic elections.

  In the communist period, the most elite schools operated in Russian, which is presumably how Oorma and her daughter came to speak it well enough for her daughter to teach in Russia, and for Oorma to read the original edition of Putin’s biography, which she’s doing right now, for the third time.

  “You know, Putin published a list of books that every schoolchild must read,” she tells me.

  Oorma is educated and well traveled, and I assume that, like me, she has generally unfavorable opinions of Putin and the idea of him handing schoolchildren a list of must-read books, and so I sympathetically roll my eyes while shaking my head, because I lack the vocabulary to say anything other than wow in English, a language Oorma does not understand.

  Luckily, Oorma also does not seem to understand what rolling your eyes while shaking your head means, because it quickly becomes apparent that she loves Putin.

  As part of their indoctrination, I guess, Russian schoolteachers are encouraged to write an essay that I first assume is original, but then Oorma indicates that they are just supposed to copy an essay Putin wrote. (“My daughter has very good handwriting!” Oorma informs me with pride.) Either way, Oorma’s daughter’s essay/recitation was so good that she was selected to speak to the president for one minute, by teleconference.

  “That’s . . .” I can’t remember how to say something like That’s terrible, which is lucky, because Oorma is telling me how proud she is, and that she immediately went out and bought this very biography she’s holding. Great: I’m traveling with a Putin fan.

  Outside, the golden grasslands dimple as they stretch out and rise suddenly into hills on the horizon, like a sheet unfurled with a snap. In some places, the ground has been sliced open to reveal veiny rivers colored a crisp blue, but the land seems, above all, empty.

  As afternoon fades, the hills draw closer, revealing crumbling, graveled slopes. Mongolia is dusty, which is not something I thought a place could be, until I spent a week shaking and swatting all of my outerwear, eventually beating it against walls and heavy furniture, in an attempt to remove the fine layer of earth that caked everything. Where American homes would have welcome mats to shake the mud from your boots, Mongolian thresholds have wet towels, which you step on to catch the dust. Outside my window, it’s like I’m watching the earth fracturing into smaller and smaller particles that will eventually become the outer coating of my backpack.

  This is when Oorma casually suggests that I might help her smuggle Adidas tracksuits and sausages over the border.

  Oorma is carrying about three dozen packages of sausages, a quantity that strikes me as excessive but unlikely to arouse suspicion, and ten identical men’s tracksuits, which might require an explanation. She’s thinking that if we each take half of her load, it’ll make things easier.

  I’m not really feeling this plan, mostly because I hate Oorma. In the past half hour, she opened a container of extremely pungent cabbage, which she’s eating far too slowly, and, unforgivably, asked to borrow my pen and then placed it in her purse when she was finished.

  I tell Oorma that I do not want to help her smuggle sausages and men’s tracksuits over the Russian border.

  Undeterred, Oorma proceeds to rip all of the price tags off of the tracksuits and stash half of them, along with two dozen sausages, in compartments on my side of the cabin. I’m too fed up with her to even protest, and so I stare out the window, fuming.

  “If the police ask, it’s better to say that the tracksuits are yours,” Oorma helpfully suggests, and for a moment, I’m charmed by the idea of my declaring, Yes, these five identical size-large men’s tracksuits are mine.

  I didn’t take the Trans-Siberian to make friends, but I wasn’t expecting to garner a mortal enemy, as I have with Oorma. As the train hurdles over the tracks, I vow to avenge my pen.

  At the border, a tall, lanky officer enters our cabin. Like a ninja, he scales the ladders to the cabin’s upper berths in three nimble steps and then perches on the lip of the cubby where the train staff stores bedding. He proceeds to fling all of the spare blankets, comforters, pillows, and sheets over his shoulder, instantly making a huge mess of our compartment. Unsurprisingly, he finds no contraband. Rather than peek in the obvious place for smuggling—the closed cabinets where Oorma has actually stuffed the good stuff—he jumps down and rips all the sheets off our beds, tossing these, too, in an unwieldy pile on the floor. Then he pats down the cushions, as though feeling for the telltale lump of drugs? Finding none, he nods and departs our cabin, having not so much as glanced at our luggage or personal belongings.

  Oorma starts putting our compartment back together, as though it weren’t just ransacked by a shockingly incompetent border guard. Though I don’t want to root for Oorma, I find myself feeling oddly violated by the search. Oorma doesn’t seem to be. I wonder if that’s because, where she’s from, this kind of thing is normal.

  The next morning, I wake up in Siberia.

  Gone are the brown grasslands, and in their place is a frozen landscape of snow and birch trees. Every once in a while, we pass a village of clapboard houses painted bright colors and trimmed with fairy-tale eaves.

  Lake Baikal makes a sudden, dramatic entrance. One minute, we see nothing but trees, and then the next, the frozen expanse of the world’s largest freshwater lake. It contains almost a quarter of the world’s freshwater, and it spends the winter completely frozen. It’s also the world’s deepest lake, and, in the winter, its surface becomes a road. You may hear this and assume, as I did, that this is a metaphor, like a path to serenity. But no, no, it’s a literal, government-maintained, police-monitored, speed-limit-restricted road.

  When the temperatures drop, the lake’s surface turns to ice that can be up to six feet thick. At this point, the government jumps in and maintains the roads, adding signs, flooding the surface with more water to thicken the ice, providing insulation, and building on- and off-ramps if needed. Tractor trailers drive over them.

  Where we are, the surface of the lake is buried under drifts of snow, but when the tracks edge closer to the shore, I see that the water at the edges
is frozen midwave. It looks so strange and unnatural, almost like we’re seeing the waves through a strobe light.

  I keep thinking about Oorma and the photos she took of my passport. I have two competing fears as I glower at her. One, that she is a spy. Two, that she has been sent specifically to spy on me, and that she will report back that she found nothing interesting.

  What is it like to spend almost twenty-four hours on a train?

  It is somewhat like passing through the five stages of grief, out of order, and with the most intense stage being hunger.

  The first stage is acceptance. With the right clothes and snacks, trains are perfect, you think. Haute train couture involves layers, bike shorts, sports bras, and a change of clothes, because, although it’s below freezing outside, inside, the train is heated to approximately four billion degrees Fahrenheit. Because there is little privacy inside a four-person compartment the size of an average American refrigerator, bike shorts and sports bras allow you to change with relative modesty, which is not something Oorma seems overly concerned about.

  The next stage is hunger. Somehow you had imagined twenty-four hours of moderate lounging would create minimal caloric demands, but you were very wrong. A day full of sleeping and reading has left you starving. You are not alone in this. Oorma is also hungry, and when you both confess this to each other, she comes up with a plan by which she will go to the restaurant in the dining car first while you watch over both of your belongings, and then she will do the same for you. Oorma is gone for what feels like two hours. You actually begin to worry that someone has pushed her off the train, and then you wonder if this should be a cause for concern or joy, but then she saunters back with an air that suggests she took her goddamn time, and when you finally reach the restaurant car, you realize a person would have to work to kill time in here, because the restaurant is empty and the food comes quickly, and also, though this has nothing to do with Oorma idling while your body began to consume itself, the waitress is growing flowers in window pots, which, well, that’s not something you see every day: green sprouts in window boxes on the Trans-Siberian.