by John King
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It’s bright and crisp outside, but I stand back from the window, just in case, listen to the comrade running my carriage and keep out of sight as the train crawls towards the Soviet border. It would be faster to get out and walk, but only if you fancy a bullet in the head. The ground’s covered in tufts of grass, two long swaying rows of barbed wire separating the China boys from the Soviet service crew, two chunky pigs strolling around in no-man’s-land. The wood-and-pipe towers of the Chinese army lean into the wind, soldiers watching, fingers on the trigger. The Russian matron says they get nervous. She speaks good English, using her hands in sweeping motions, long bone fingers tipped with clipped, blunt nails. She’s a hard worker, boiling water for the flasks she hands out, brewing tea in her cabin, looking after her passengers as we leave China behind, in control from the start. The train stops, stuck between two superpowers, time dragging, stopping dead.
We sit here for half an hour, the only sound the land breathing in and out, the crack of the brake being released echoing along the carriages. We finally arrive on the Soviet side, and the train stops again. Nothing happens. We’re on the outskirts of a small town, and after another hour all these characters arrive and walk along the side of the carriages. They’re wearing jeans and leather coats, hair greased back like rockers. They climb on the flat cargo trolleys next door and watch us through the windows. Matron says they’re KGB, and there’s police coming along the carriages checking papers. She says she hopes we haven’t tried to smuggle currency in. The faces of the policemen are serious as they enter our compartment, picking and choosing the hippy. They search his bags. It takes a long time for them to go through the train. I think of the roubles stuffed in my pants and try to look innocent, but they’re more interested in the hairy wearing the Mao costume. When it comes to border crossings and the smell of drugs and dodgy deals, it’s always nice to have a hippy around to take the blame. Never trust a hippy. I wonder if they’ll do a thorough search and call in special agent Andre Arseholovic, the specialist in rubber gloves, who’ll make the hippy bend over and touch his toes as he checks for hidden herb.
Eventually the police finish and the train lurches forward, stops again. A gang of men come forward to change the bogies to the Soviet gauge and we’re ordered off. The carriages are unhooked and lifted into the air. I walk along the platform and go into the ticket hall, where I get a shock. Talk about time standing still, because now we’re going backwards. This is time travel, never mind space. The people are white, most of them blond, fresh from the thirties. I thought they would be Oriental, Chinese, a mixture of Mongolians and one or two Cossacks. I could be in Saxony, or maybe even Slough before the war. It takes me a minute to realise that the white race circles the top half of the globe, that the clock on the wall is moving at a different speed, the ticking the loudest noise in the room.
I think of the Cold War propaganda I grew up with, atomic bombs and four-minute warnings, nuclear winters and radiation, endless doom and gloom, warheads loaded, coming our way soon. I see the faces here, and they’re the ones with most to fear from the Soviet government, something they’ve got in common with the Chinese. They know how to behave, don’t give anything away. Two more leather coats sit watching, one combing his quiff. I could be in 1930s Mississippi, but then when I go outside I know I’m in the Soviet Union, the wall opposite with a mural of a Russian soldier, sub-machine gun in his hands, a yellow star against a red sky. Nearby is a tank, with a small statue, names chiselled into brass. I follow the road for a bit, but there’s nowhere to go. There’s just this space stretching away from me, continuing on from Manchuria, all the way to the North Pole I suppose. There’s concentration camps out there, where millions of people died, tortured for crimes they never committed. If nobody ever wrote it down, how would we know? It’s the same with China. I saw nothing.
Once the bogies have been changed, we set off into the Soviet Union, a five-day run across Siberia to Moscow. I talk to the German while the hippy goes through his bag, muttering under his breath. I’ve got used to being on my own over the last few months, on the back of those three years working in Hong Kong. It was a good time, in its way. The chance to go overseas and work was there so I took it, rented a room on the eighth floor of Chungking Mansions, the owner of the hostel an old Tamil called Sammy. He spent most of his time sitting on a couch by the front door, chain-smoking as he waited for something to happen. I got to know him, a bald little man with smooth skin, who was a lot older than he looked. There was enough space for a bed and a chair in my room, and I ended up staying there the whole three years. It was dirt cheap, cheaper when I didn’t move out after a few days. I lived out of my bag for the first year, till Sammy forgot how mean he was and bought a chest of drawers, a plywood effort that had been coated and lined with paper. If I went away, Sammy let me leave my stuff there for a week or two. It was all I wanted. I was always knocking the price down.
The best thing was the fan, a brand-new model that kept the air moving, chilling me nicely in my own little pressure cooker. There was no view from the window, just the dormitory and the kitchen of another hostel opposite, but the light got in, and I was happy. It gave me the freedom to leave the next day if I wanted. I wasn’t going to put down any roots, living day-to-day. I was out on the piss when I wasn’t working, or saving for a ticket to Manila, where I sat on the beach and baked, ate fresh fruit. Chungking was a death trap, a run-down fleapit, dirty and broken, everyone waiting for the fire that would probably wipe out hundreds of people. But it was a great place, full of chancers, Chinese and Indians, European drifters and an American deserter from Vietnam, an ancient German who Sammy reckoned was an SS man, everything going. It was like the whole world had ended up here, dossing on mattresses, each floor a maze of cheap hostels and indoor markets, whole sections serving the hottest, cheapest range of food I’d ever seen. There were Indians and Pakistanis, Bangladeshis and Sri Lankans cooking up curries, and I was eating Chinese and Vietnamese food every other day. At night I was working in the bar, serving drinks to a mixed group of mainly British, Aussie and Kiwi pissheads. Some of them were twats, the sort I’d never meet back in Slough, but there were a lot of good blokes there, men who’d seen a chance to do something different and grabbed it, one or two well educated men who didn’t fit the arrogant stereotype and had broken free from the class system, spent the last twenty years travelling up and down the Far East.
But that was then and this is now, and I stand by the window for a long time as the train quickly settles back into its rhythm. Whoever thinks the world is overcrowded should come out here. There’s grassland and forests running off to the skyline. There’s no humans, and time passes till I go back into my compartment, lie on my bunk looking out at an angle, stay here for hours, get up and climb down again, go along to the bog, pissing on the tracks below, walking through the other carriages with their Russian, Chinese, Mongolian faces, men playing cards and sipping vodka. The buffet car is a cafe on wheels, hot and steamy, but without much food. There’s borsch and chocolate, so I order borsch and chocolate. It costs me pennies and the borsch is good, thick and red from the beetroot, a dollop of cream curling out from the middle. Nobody talks to me. I don’t know the language, and they keep to themselves, but it’s okay. The vinyl is peeling off the tables, and the place is clean. There’s no fry-ups, no steaming fresh tea and warm toast, the sort of food you miss when you’re abroad, just Nescafé if I fancy a cup of coffee. I’ve stocked up on food, a bag of buns, dried tofu and a load of red-bean cakes, a tin of vegetables and packs of sesame crackers. I can’t open the vegetables and only bought it because the picture looked good, a dark green plant with spikes.
I walk back down the train to my compartment, climb the steps again and spread out, wonder what Gary would’ve made of all this. I don’t want to think about him too much, but still imagine what travelling through China and Siberia would’ve been like with him off his head, not depressed and asleep, hibernating through win
ter waiting for the sun to shine, spring pulling him out of the depths, watching the crocuses and daffodils sprouting in the park, the dossers on the benches rubbing their hands looking forward to summer. I imagine us lining up with the party members and Hong Kongers, stretching across the concrete quiet of Tiananmen Square, the Forbidden City on the far side with its dragons and cauldrons, me and Smiles standing in government lines, grinning, trying not to laugh at the serious faces of the police. Marching in small groups towards the mausoleum, up the steps and into the viewing room where Chairman Mao lies in state, Smiles opening his mouth and shouting out that the body is a fake, a waxwork forgery, where’s the signature, because he’s seen Mao in Slough, rehoused and working behind the counter in the Bamboo Garden, scribbling numbers on a pad. I see Smiles steaming past the soldiers and through the sacred rope, banging on the case, ordering king prawns in breadcrumbs, special fried rice and spare ribs. Taken out on to the steps and forced to his knees. A pistol pushed into the back of his head. Trigger squeezed. Brains on the concrete. Ruining the peaceful feel of Tiananmen Square. I blow the pictures out of my head, sleep for a while, wake up with the lights off, the train rolling along at the same speed as when we left the border.
I need a piss and watch my step in the dark, go down the corridor and into the toilet, stand over the tin bog, splash my face with water when I’ve finished. I go back out and see Matron standing by the door of her cabin, trying to open a bottle. She asks me to help and I unscrew the top without any problem. She asks if I’d like a drink, and I don’t see why not, go and sit down just inside the entrance to her cabin, compartment, whatever it is, the place she lives and works and travels east and west across Siberia. There’s a radio playing in the background, Russian love songs I suppose. She speaks good English and says she picked it up on the train, English the language of the world. She says her name is Rika, and I look at her properly. Her jacket is hanging behind the door and she’s got a heater going. For the first time I see her as a woman. It’s a surprise, but I’m not wondering now, know right away what could happen. Before, she was the commandant, someone in a uniform off the films, a lifetime of cold Eastern Bloc women with thick calves and weightlifter faces, but now she’s Rika, with short blonde hair and nice legs.
We get talking and she, tells me about Moscow and her apartment, how she started working for the railways, the years in boring jobs, slowly moving up the ranks, the responsibility that comes with her position. It’s taken her ten years to get here. I listen and watch her eyes, drink the vodka, feel a sharp burn on the back of my throat. I’ve never been much of a spirit drinker. She gulps hers back and refills our glasses. She says she’s never off duty, but this is her quiet time. She reads my thoughts and says there are eyes everywhere. Everyone is watching everyone else. She leans over and pinches my cheek again. She’s strong, laughs, and I can see she likes me. She sits back on her bunk and tells me how she loves the trip across Siberia, how it’s different every season. In winter there’s solid snow, the temperature a long way below freezing. In the spring everything is possible, and crossing the steppes she can never believe how the plants have managed to survive. Summer is warm and the windows stay open, while autumn is her saddest time, with the leaves changing colour, a time of death between the happiness of summer and the hard beauty of winter, everything dying and rotting away. I think of Smiles, know there’s no more seasons for him, that he won’t be coming back. She says she loves life and hates politics. There’s a song in my head, a line I can’t place. She wants to know if I understand what she means, and I nod and say I do, that she’s explained things well. She gets angry suddenly and says she hates this time of year. Some people say autumn is beautiful, like spring, but to her it only represents death.
The drink doesn’t seem to affect her, but after half an hour I’m struggling. Her mouth is bigger and redder than when I started, features stronger. But I like that. I love tough women, strong but feminine. There’s no suntans out here, her skin white, same as a china sink but with none of the cracks. And she’s telling me how she’s been on holiday to the Crimea, sandy beaches and fresh air, small restaurants along the boulevard. I lean my head back and listen to her voice. I’m knackered. This vodka is proper paint-stripper, Russian moonshine. A while ago I was looking at Rika wondering if I was going to get my leg over, but that’s not what it’s about. There’s more to her than that. It’s in the face, bones, everything she says, sitting in the sun next to the Black Sea. She pours me more vodka, lifts her glass to her mouth and swallows it in one go. She leans forward and smiles, rubs my leg. She says she has to be careful, because if we’re caught together she’ll be in serious trouble. The police could make things very difficult for her. She could easily lose her job. That would be terrible for her, to be stuck in Moscow and not be able to move around.
There’s this rumbling in my gut and I know I’m going to be sick. I haven’t drunk a lot, not really, but this vodka is lethal. It’s got a label, but is rough as fuck. Something to put in the engine of a clapped-out army truck in the middle of winter. Sex is the last thing on my mind right now. I stand up and tell Rika that I like her, but don’t want to get her in trouble. She goes to say something, but I’m too quick, open the door and wave goodbye, pull it shut and stumble towards the bog, check she hasn’t followed as I fall into the toilet. I lock myself in and kneel down, push the lever that opens the flap that lets the shit and piss splash over the land, a nice treat for the Cossacks who travel around on horses. Cossacks with swords and rifles. Cossacks with the wind in their faces. Cossacks on the brain. And I look into the mechanics of the Trans-Siberian Express and imagine I can see the tracks down below in the darkness, hundreds of slats of wood flashing past in time with the drumming of the wheels. Maybe I can. Maybe I can’t. I jerk forward and puke my guts up, the second time in a few days, the worst sort of feeling, where nothing matters, just the pain in your throat.
I let the other bloke down, was just considering myself and never looked back, the sort of selfish thinking that mucks people up, something that’s built into us and is exploited by the state, big business, our masters waiting as we sit pretty in the womb, least till the water breaks and the contractions begin, the struggle for survival starting with a flush of tears. None of it was planned, it was just the way things turned out. Instead of offering a helping hand I reached for the surface, struggled for life, instinct taking over. Survival was all that mattered, life too precious to give up on. I didn’t want to die. Had to live and see what happened next, fulfil the potential. Not that I thought of it like that, went into things, there was none of that analysing and mind games, how could I think things through at that age, so I burst into the world and filled my lungs with air, let the oxygen race in and feed my brain, blood pumping, valves and muscles cranking up as my heart struggled to cope with the explosion of air down my throat, sucking in oxygen. I was greedy, the world turned upside down, hanging in the air, floating in space. I pulled myself out of the slime, eased back and enjoyed the peace, the worst behind me now, my back cushioned. The air was warm on my skin and I loved the taste of the oxygen, panic over as my heartbeat slowed down and became steady, settled into a rhythm, the best music going, hidden from what was going on behind me, not knowing or caring what the other person felt. We were close, as close, any two boys can be, but I never got in his brain and stayed there, lost touch and left him behind. I was glad to be alive, must’ve been happy, but don’t remember exactly, my head fuzzy, mixed up and confused. There were no shapes in the darkness, just a vague glow of light in the distance, high above me, energy burning in outer space. I was young and none of it should’ve happened. It wasn’t fair, just wasn’t right, and that day stayed with me for the rest of my life. It’s a simple rule, the law of cause and effect, something they understand out here, in Hong Kong, away from the big corporate skyscrapers, in China’s country compounds, peasants versus the party. Back home we don’t see this, just think about the short-term rewards, cut the cancer
out and never wonder why it’s there in the first place, why it keeps coming back. Everything that happens has a reason, and I should be able to turn that around and make it work for me, but I can’t, not properly.