Open Mic Night in Moscow

by Audrey Murray

  This is followed by the reading stage, or possibly the journaling stage, or maybe, if you’re lucky, the napping stage. The nice thing about a train, you realize, is that there’s nowhere to be, and no one to bother you, except your enemy/roommate, Oorma. A plane, of course, also cuts you off from the outside world and pleasantly unburdens you of responsibility and agency. You’re not steering the plane and you can’t make it get you there faster. A train goes two steps further, by also giving you a view, and removing the seat belt sign.

  In truth, this is the real pleasure of the train: the sense of being somewhere with nothing to do and no one to answer to, but still on your way to something. It’s travel without a to-do list. You can’t tick certain monuments off your list, but you can watch the countryside roll by.

  In the afternoon, the sun finally breaches the barrier of gray clouds and paints the sky blue. Light barrages the trees—naked white birch trunks with errant fir tops poking up.

  Five minutes later, it’s all fir, thick boughs clinging to rocky landscape with only a few dots of snow visible when the train crests a hill. Bright evergreen shrubbery covers ground; it could almost be summer, but then the snow pokes back into view.

  Before we get into Irkutsk, Oorma helpfully points out a nervous habit I have of fiddling with the ends of my hair.

  “I know,” I say, because I do not know how to say, Boy, do you get extra points for personality, in Russian.

  But then she surprises me. “I do this,” she says, showing me how she smacks her lips when she’s anxious. “I think we all have something.”

  I nod, but she’s not done.

  She can tell by the way I nervously finger my hair while writing, she says, that my book will be a huge success. And with this, she is no longer my enemy, but in the running for future maid of honor.

  Once we’re out of the train, and I’ve replaced my stolen pen, Oorma starts to look a little less one-dimensional. I can see hints of a crisis of identity. I remember little things that suggested she was seen as too Russian in Mongolia, and too Mongolian in Russia. It’s the lesson of the Kazakh cowboy, with the added reminder that not everyone will tell you up front that he cried and cried.

  Stopover: Irkutsk

  Irkutsk has twenty-four-hour flower shops, twenty-four-hour Subway sandwich shops, and a dental clinic that claims to be open twenty-four hours, but looks dark and closed when I walk by at nine p.m.

  Grocery stores devote half of their shelf space to alcohol of an unimaginable quantity and variety. Beer is sold, by default, in one-liter bottles. The conveyor belts beside cash registers don’t move, and, as if in testament to their permanent stationary positions, the checkout aisle displays have encroached onto them.

  But there’s more to Irkutsk than round-the-clock bouquets and enabling grocery stores. There’s also a rich history, historic architecture, and a giant lake.

  Siberia is known for the wooden houses you probably picture if you close your eyes and imagine a Russian village. The windows are surrounded with intricately carved wooden frames, and the houses are painted different shades of pastel.

  Historically, Siberia is where the Russian Empire and Soviet government sent the people they wanted to get rid of. Its name is synonymous with gulags and prison camps, and Irkutsk, in particular, was where the Decembrist revolutionaries were exiled. Their wives followed them here, and Anton used to ask me, if he were sent to Siberia, if I would follow him, and I would always say yes, because I figured it would help me learn Russian.

  Siberia is also synonymous with wild landscapes perpetually covered in winter, which is why today, I’m going to see frozen Lake Baikal up close.

  At breakfast, I’m seated one table over from a handsome European man in horn-rimmed glasses. We both give each other the once-over that indicates that we both recognize each other as foreigners in a strange land. It’s his neatly pressed pants and discreetly expensive watch that give him away. I wonder what tipped him off in my case—the fact that I’m not wearing a bra or makeup?

  I direct my attention to the inane music videos playing on TV in the hotel dining room. They all seem to follow the same basic plot: guy raps in front of late-’90s-model car while carrying machine guns, eventually robs bank, beautiful woman dies in process.

  After breakfast, the receptionist gives me directions to a minibus that will take me to the lake. I take a long, snowy walk through town to the bus stop.

  Inside the minibus, I find the most unpleasant odor one can find inside a panel van, and also the handsome European guy from breakfast.

  Quel surprise! Except, he’s Spanish, not French. Still, very handsome.

  The minibus starts driving with just me and the Spanish man, and I ask the driver how much it’ll cost to get to Lake Baikal. Oh, he’s not going to take us to the lake, he’s going to take us to his friend’s minibus, which will take us to the lake.

  The Spanish man and I are now seated backward on a minibus whose windows quickly become fogged. Here is a list of things that make me nauseated to the point of vomiting: 1) minibuses, 2) sitting backward, 3) moisture inside moving vehicles.

  To make matters worse, I’m down a Sea-Band, a medicinal wristband that harnesses the healing powers of the placebo effect, and my one proven method for preventing motion sickness. The Spanish guy, who I learn is named Jorge, is also taking the Trans-Siberian alone, and he’s eager to swap stories, but now is not the time.

  I could see frozen Baikal from the train, but up close, it’s even more incredible. An expanse of ice extending from here to the horizon. What’s more, people are out there walking on it.

  “Do you think it’s safe?” I ask Jorge, and before he can answer, I’m jumping down an embankment toward the ice.

  At the shoreline, it cracks under my feet, and I jump back. Below, I see water gently sloshing under the frozen surface. But there are people so far out!

  I take a deep breath and try a few tentative steps on a different path that looks more sturdy. The ice creaks under my feet but doesn’t give way.

  On the ice, I spot two women taking pictures.

  “Is it safe?” I ask.

  “Oh, yeah,” one says, brushing away the snow on top of the ice to reveal a blue glass floor that’s easily inches thick.

  She’s taking a photo of her friend, who wears trendy winter boots that seem ill-suited for stomping around on a frozen lake. “Do you want me to take a picture of the two of you?” I ask.

  They’d love that, and then I ask them to take a picture of me, and then they ask to take a picture of me, and suddenly there’s a German couple, who also need someone to snap a photo, and then a Chinese guy named Max, and his Russian girlfriend, Nadia, and soon we’re all chatting, and Max suggests we all go back up to dry land and get lunch.

  Inside a cozy wooden restaurant, I gravitate toward Max because he’s studying Russian and speaks almost fluently. I ask him how long he’s been studying, and he tells me two years.

  “Wow, if you’ve only been studying for two years, and you speak so well, it gives me hope,” I say. “How many hours a day do you study?”

  He shakes his head. “All the time. I’m studying all hours, every day.” Okay, so our results may differ. Max lives with Nadia, who doesn’t really speak English, and he goes to a local university. “You know, I get up in the morning, and it’s ‘Chto ti hochesh yest,’”—what do you want to eat?

  Max’s mother is ethnically Korean, and he grew up speaking Chinese and Korean. He learned English in school and came here two years ago for a graduate degree. He shakes his head. “You know, sometimes, I have things that I want to say, but I don’t even know which language to say them in. I don’t even know how to say them in any language. Before I came here, I used to think Chinese and Korean are my mother languages, English is my third language. But now I think Russian becomes my third language, English fourth.”

  Max speaks English better than I speak Chinese or Russian, but we switch between the three because he’s kind an
d humors me. He’s tall and gregarious, and in him I see the kind of person I want to be. He’s taken it upon himself to be our group tour guide. “Come on!” he announces, when he sees we’re finishing our food. “It’s time to climb a mountain.”

  He takes us to a hiking path that promises a panoramic view of the lake, and I chat with the German couple on the way up. They’re doing the Trans-Siberian, too, as are the women I first spoke with, who have come here from Thailand. So that explains the boots.

  From the top, the lake expands to fill more of the space below. The ice still stretches out to the horizon, but it’s starting to melt at the hilly shoreline to our right. We can see open water there.

  We all ride the bus back to Irkutsk together and get dinner, and afterward the German couple takes me to the grocery store and helps me meal-prep for my next train.

  That night, I marvel at the world. I have many stories of meeting strangers while traveling. One of my closest friends in China was an Israeli woman my sister started talking to as we boarded a flight from Yunnan to Beijing.

  But I’ve never had a group of people from all over the world spontaneously come together on a frozen lake. I think about what would have happened if I’d caught a later bus, or an earlier one, or if I hadn’t offered to take the Thai women’s picture.

  So much of life is like that, I guess. Anton used to say that everything you could imagine had a 50 percent chance of happening. “Either it’ll happen,” he would say, grinning, “or it won’t.” This drove me crazy, but now I kind of see what he means. Sometimes a group of strangers from all walks of life converges on a frozen lake in Siberia, and sometimes it doesn’t.

  Third Leg: Irkutsk to Novosibirsk (One Day, Seven Hours, and Twenty-Five Minutes)

  Unbeknownst to me, the train I shared with Oorma was the nicest that runs on the Trans-Siberian.

  As soon as I board the train to Novosibirsk, I realize how good Oorma and I had it. This carriage is older, darker, still spotless, but more worn. The kupes are dark, cramped faux-wood-paneled compartments with sailors’ netting for stowing belongings and pilled bedding that looks like it survived all of the twentieth-century wars. A cheesecloth has been placed over the small fold-out table. Most notably, my room doesn’t have an outlet, which I guess is good, but I didn’t sign up for a digital detox. I think back on the liberties I’d taken on my first train. I’d left my computer open! Used my data on my cell phone!

  Last night at dinner, the German man from the lake group giggled feverishly when he heard the route the Thai women and I were taking. “It’s so strange,” he says, between gasps, “that you would start your trip in Asia and not Europe.”

  The Thai women and I exchange glances. “But we live in Asia,” we explain. “It’s the same as you starting your trip in Europe.”

  “Besides,” I say, “I have this romantic vision of starting in this far-flung, backwater outpost, and then arriving in”—I pause for dramatic effect—“Moscow.”

  I’m now seeing the flaw in this logic. Perhaps I should have saved the nicest train for last.

  Luckily, as we pull out of Irkutsk, I’m alone in my compartment. I giddily, greedily study my guidebook. Just seven more stops to make it through with no one getting on, and then I’m guaranteed to have my cabin to myself for a few hours.

  Fifteen minutes later, the train stops at a platform crowded with people, and my heart sinks. Sure enough, a quiet, meticulous man in his fifties enters my compartment with a single briefcase. He nods at me and says hello.

  I’m immediately uncomfortable, for all the reasons a woman traveling alone would be nervous, though he’s quiet and respectful as he takes his seat across from me. I notice he’s wearing a jacket emblazoned with the railroad company’s logo. I avoid eye contact.

  But then I notice a younger man hovering outside in the hallway, wearing the same uniform. I make room for him on my seat, and he comes in, also avoiding eye contact. This emboldens me, and I try to ask the younger guy if he works for the railway company. I speak softly, and he looks confused. I wonder if it’s his first time speaking to a foreigner.

  The older man carefully spreads a newspaper over our tiny table and unloads a lunch that he and his younger friend share: noodles with bread and coffee sipped from a tin can, eaten with real silverware. They eat in silence. Not a word passes between them, and they don’t try to talk to me. I’m very weirded out. Then the older man climbs into the top bunk, lays out the bedding, and goes to sleep.

  I ask the younger man if they’re riding to Novosibirsk. He shakes his head. Taking that as a sign that he doesn’t want to talk, I stare out the window. We pass freight cars full of lumber, more villages, a graveyard.

  I become aware that the young man is trying to get my attention. “Do you speak English?” he asks, in Russian.

  “Yes,” I tell him.

  He nods.

  That’s it? I think. So bizarre.

  But after a moment, he hands me a tablet computer, open to Google Translate. A single question has been written in Russian, translated into English. “I’m Alexandr. What is your name?”

  I smile. “My name is Audrey,” I say out loud, in Russian.

  He takes the tablet from my hands, and when he hands it back, it says, “We’re going to Zima.”

  Our conversation proceeds like this. For reasons I don’t fully understand, he types his questions into the tablet, hands it to me, and I respond out loud in mangled Russian. Sometimes, though not often, I have to type back. I begin to wonder if he’s mute, but then he asks me if I like politics, and then he starts speaking out loud, and I can’t understand, so we switch back to typing.

  Alexandr went to university in Irkutsk and now works on short-haul electric trains.

  “Is this train electric?” I ask.

  “No.”

  He tells me that world oil prices are down, but in Russia, they’re up.

  I ask why.

  “Corruption in government levels,” he says. “How is the political situation in America?”

  I try to explain that a reality television star named Donald Trump and a politician named Hillary Clinton are running for president, and I think I do a not great but okay job of conveying the basics. I ask him how the political situation is in Russia.

  “Terrible,” he says.

  Why?

  He gets a mischievous look in his eyes, and then writes, “Official explanation is economic crisis. Unofficial? Corruption at government levels.”

  Alexandr hates corruption, and I realize I have strong views on this. It takes me so long to type the following message that he falls asleep before I’m finished: “I think corruption is the most important problem, because if there’s corruption, you can’t fix other problems like health, education, job, food supply.”

  When he wakes up, he reads my message and smiles. Then he changes the subject.

  “Do you have a boyfriend?” he writes.

  We talk about our families, and he asks me what my sign is. I say I don’t know, although I do, I just don’t know how to say it in Russian. He asks my birthday, and my answer excites him: it’s the same as his mother’s. He tells me that the man sleeping above us is his colleague.

  Then he types a bolder question. “What life goals haunt you?”

  I give an answer that’s part of the truth, but not the whole truth. “To publish a book,” I tell him. “What about you?”

  He types. “Raise a son, buy a house, plant a tree.”

  “Why plant a tree?” I ask.

  “Outside of a house it’s nice to have trees,” he types. “Also nice for nature.”

  I wonder why I can’t admit that I am also haunted by the life goals of raising a son, buying a house, and planting a tree.

  Alexandr is four years younger than me, though he looks much older. His face is deeply lined. He smokes, he says, because it gives him confidence.

  I get up to walk around and find the hallway filled with tipsy men who stare at me for a little too lo
ng. I’m suddenly glad for Alexandr and his quiet companion.

  Alexandr and I pass the tablet back and forth for a little longer, and then I fall asleep while reading a book, and when I wake up, they’re getting ready to get off the train.

  Alexandr’s older colleague closes the door to our compartment and gently combs his thinning hair with his fingers until it’s neat. He pulls up his pants to make sure he looks presentable. Alexander comes back in, and they grab their belongings and start leaving.

  “Do svidaniya,” the older colleague says, using the formal goodbye.

  Alexandr smiles. “Poka,” he says, using the more casual form that melts my heart whenever a Russian man says it.

  After Zima, brown fields rise and fall outside my window like dolphins playing in a ship’s breakwater. I know it’s cold when a thin layer of snow covers to the hills and warmer when bogs form beneath us.

  It’s quiet without Alexandr and his colleague in my compartment. I close the door behind them and watch the fields reflect the early-evening light. Occasionally, we pass houses that look like they’ve long ceased to be homes: sad, sagging buildings with broken windows and overgrown yards. Other times smoke billows from narrow chimneys.

  I have the compartment to myself for a few blissful hours, and then another Alexandr gets on. He’s an older man with a large belly who smiles at me before methodically unpacking his belongings and making his bed. I’ve realized that Russians are very neat, which is why it must horrify them the way I strew my belongings all over my bed and leave crumbs after I eat.

  I go to the bathroom, and when I return, I notice that Alexandr II has spread candies out on the shared table for anyone to take. It’s a sweet, touching gesture. He’s splayed out in his bed, and in my terrible Russian I tell him that, if he wants to go to sleep, I can turn out the overhead light. He shakes his head. He sees that I’ve been reading a book, and he’s worried that the small lamp on my berth doesn’t give enough light for reading. We begin chatting—he’s disembarking in the morning, at Khojasomething. We chat briefly about my trip, but my Russian has long since faded, and I’m fading with it.