The World's Longest Road

1.

The Transsiberian Railway from Moscow to Vladivostok is in the Guinness Book of World Records. It is the longest rail route you can travel without changing trains.

Train No. 1 travels the distance of over 10 thousand kilometers in 7 days, 20 hours and 25 minutes.

Last summer, I tried to travel the Transsib from west to east. It was a tactical error.

I was in a state of depression until I quit, got off the train and traveled the remainder of the route by plane. With every new station, I had a physical feeling of getting further and further from what was familiar and treasured. With each kilometer, the darkness within me thickened.

The solution, of course, was to travel not away from home, but homeward. Then, it would be easy. So, this winter, I bought a ticket in the opposite direction – from east to west. Homeward.

And, you know, the road was bright and happy. In spite of everything.

 

2.

I walked onto the platform through a long, concrete tunnel. Well, truthfully, there was no platform. It was just a level spot between protruding rails.

It was dark and dirty in the tunnel. The signs laconically announced that west was to the right, east to the left. On the wall encrusted with frozen phlegm there was a laser-printed announcement: “Travel to China for Ten Days, $45.”

Dawn had not yet broken. A voice over the loudspeaker announced the boarding of Express No. 1, but the train had not arrived. I stood and waited. It was so cold that I tried not to make any unnecessary movements. Like in the movie Terminator-2, I feared that I would shatter into tiny fragments of ice.

Then the train arrived. The famous wagons were painted the colors of the Russian flag.

My ticket said that I was riding in wagon number 15, which was directly connected to number 9.

A female conductor in glasses asked: “You one of mine?”

She examined my ticket and tried again: “Where to?”

The cold was really not conducive to a detailed accounting of my itinerary.

“Hold on. Don’t get on yet. The Khunkhus are unloading.”

“Who?”

“A half wagonload of Chinese. Here they are now.”

The Chinese were puffy from sleep. They wore light jackets completely inappropriate for the weather. They pushed huge luggage bales between them. Other passengers followed the Chinese fellows outside. They bought beer in two-liter bottles and bustled back inside.

I also went inside. It was warm.

 

 

3.

 

I slept my first few hours on the Transsiberian. You cannot even imagine how pleasant it was – after two weeks bumping around the dirtiest recesses of Northeast Asia – to sleep on the Transsiberian Express.

Here, the entire point is simply to ride. Sleep, wake, eat, look out the window and, whenever you like, fall asleep again. There is nothing to decide. Everything was decided the moment you bought your ticket.

Sharing my cabin were a Mongolian guy in sweatpants and a Russian babushka. She was constantly knitting and excusing herself. It is something of a Russian courtesy to ask 30 times in succession: “I’m not bothering you, am I?”

All day long they discussed price differences of goods in different regions, Putin, the size of pensions, why it is they live so well in the West while we live so poorly, and cursed Muscovites. The usual train banter.

At one point, the babushka told how, in 1953, exactly on this spot we were passing, the train she was riding on jumped the rails. The passengers spent two days among the snow banks and volcanoes before the train was fixed.

The first half of the day the passengers slept. In the second half ... they also slept. The sun blared in the window. In order not to disturb anyone, I sat on a fold-down chair in the corridor and watched the Primorsky region out the window.

Volcanoes. Crumbling villages. Children in huge fur hats skiing across a frozen puddle. Volcanoes again. A huge snowy expanse. In the distance, in front of a volcano, someone was riding a motorcycle with a sidecar.

It is pleasing to consider that the birch tree is a symbol of our Motherland. But almost no birch trees grow where I live. In St. Petersburg there are mainly poplars, and pine trees in the suburbs.

Yet I seem to find birch trees in those very places which I like least, which I in no way consider to be my Motherland. For example, there are lots of birch trees growing along the Russo-Chinese border.

A very independent, red-haired girl shuffled past where I was sitting. A year old ... maybe 14 months. She wore only tights and a t-shirt. And an Orthodox cross around her neck.

The little girl waddled up to me, touched my face with her fingers and moved on.

The girl’s parents, a very nice young couple, were sitting in the neighboring cabin. They had only a few hours left in their ride. Meanwhile, they were squeezed around a wooden box (in place of a table), drinking vodka with their fellow travelers, some ecologists.

Bits of their conversation drifted toward me ...

“We are ecologists. And you? You have a wonderful little girl! Shall we drink?”

“Okay, let’s.”

“Well, here we are. And last year, along these same rail lines rode the special train of Kim Jong-Il. As a matter of fact, I saw him.”

“Really? Kim Jong-Il himself?”

“Uhuh! I was standing at the station. And this foreigner came out of his wagon to wave. He had two security guys with him. One on the right, the second on the left, and in the center ... me. You get it? If I had had a grenade launcher, I could have brought him down and damned if they would have ever caught me!”

 

4.

 

It was warm in the cabin. But all I had to do was take a smoke in the tambour to remember where I was. In the mornings, the glass there was covered with three centimeters of ice. I tried to melt the ice with the flame of my lighter, in order to look outside to see what was out there. But it would have been impossible to melt this ice even with a blowtorch. It was so cold that my feet began to freeze, even through the thick soles of my boots. I rapidly inhaled my nicotine and ran back into the warm cabin.

I had slept at most an hour the previous evening. I was woken by the fact that the ecologists on the other side of the wall turned on their boom box. I think it signified that the time had come for dancing.

I lay there with my eyes shut. I wanted to sleep something terrible. But the music screamed so loudly it vibrated the wall.

In order to drop off to sleep again, I tried to calculate exactly how much money I had spent on the trip, and what remained. But this got me so upset that, instead of falling asleep, I was wide awake.

I got down from my upper bunk, pulled on my pants and went calling on the ecologists.

“Guys, so, you planning to party for a long time yet?”

The guys answered honestly.

“Till morning!”

I looked around. The guys were not simply drunk, but half-dead from alcohol. By my estimate, they would last another half hour. Then they would fall on the floor and sleep. Every organism has its limits, after all.

I decided that a half hour was nothing. I could wait.

Damn! I did not know Siberians. The guys did not simply party until morning. Their party lasted until lunch the following day. And they had no plans to fall on the floor even after that.

 

5.

 

The Transsib is the spinal column of Siberia. Life presses upon the rail line. Alongside it, highways run and towns are built. North and to the very edges of the Arctic Ocean, there is only taiga, drunkenness, poverty, absence of roads and life.

In the morning, we were at Arkhara station, departing the Far Eastern Railroad for the Transbaikal Railroad.

The locals had prepared their tables for our arrival: beer, Chinese noodles, fried chicken legs. And huge pine cones which, from a distance, were indistinguishable from pineapples.

I met a red caviar vendor. The delicacy was packed in plastic jars normally used for mayonnaise. And on a box lay some cured salmon.

The caviar and the salmon cost significantly less than in Petersburg. Yet I still did not buy either. The fact is, I don’t like salmon and never buy caviar. Not for a little or a lot.

Lady profiteers ran up to the doors of the train. They wore thick fur coats and striped sweatpants. High-heeled shoes peeked out from under the legs of their sweats. The gentle ladies traded in pies and strings of sausages.

Passengers wandered coatless among the vendors’ tables. One woman was in just her robe, with naked legs. The temperature outside the train was -25o C. I smoked a cigarette and made a few purchases.

The prices were ridiculous. For $1.20, I laid in food for two days. When the sales guy counted out my change, I saw that some of his fingers had been amputated because of frostbite.

During the stop, a special railway worker used a sledgehammer to remove frozen water and excrement from beneath the bathroom. Dirty, shaggy dogs trotted between the people on the platform. They knew that, if they sat with a raised paw and howled loudly at the wagon doors, passengers might throw out some food.

Scraps tossed out the window meant the continuation of life for the hounds. Therefore, they quickly seized any competitor by the throat. When food was thrown to them (or when it became clear that it would not be), the dogs quickly gobbled it up and went on to the next car.

Then the passengers jumped back into the car. The vendors wrapped their beer bottles in warm rags and put them in bags. In cold like this, beer freezes and even bottles in rags burst in 10 minutes.

Hauling their goods on their carts, the aborigines went back to their village. There would be no business until tomorrow.

 

6.

 

After stops at large stations, passengers would go at their food. The main dish was fast-cooking ramen. These noodles have long been a Russian dish.

In the neighboring coupé, along with the jolly ecologists, was a young Chinese guy. I asked him if he liked these noodles.

“In Russia, the Chinese noodles are bad. They have absolutely no meat. In China, they sell meat patties with such noodles. Thick meat. It is pleasant to eat!”

The Chinese fellow was quite young. White sweater, black pants, white socks, black boots. Black locks and a round, white face. On his backside, tights – worn under his pants for warmth – stuck out from behind his belt.

The Chinese fellow was polite and easy-going. When the carousing of his ecologist cabin mates finally became too much, he simply rolled over to face the wall and covered his face with a towel.

In the morning, a woman took a seat with the ecologists and the Chinese fellow. The gentlemen found their second wind. Sitting in the corridor, I heard them become interested in what their new companion would like to chase down her vodka with ... mineral water?

Their fellow traveler smiled in embarrassment and said that, if possible, beer would be best.

The night before, we stopped for half-an-hour at the Chernyshevsk-Zabaikalsky station. During this short stop, the conductor succeeded in coaxing a militia detail onto the train. The militiamen worked up a report on the ecologists and fined them $30.

The conductress ratted on the ecologists for having a contest for the loudest whistle ... at 3:30 in the morning. And also for the fact that they kept coming to her cabin all night, to inform her that the next dance would be “white” [women asking the men]. The ecologists did not deny the charges.

When the militia left the wagon, I was standing outside, smoking. I saw how they pleasantly divided up the fine exacted from the debauchers – $15 to the conductor, $15 for themselves.

The steppe began immediately after Chernyshevsk. It was not flat, like in European Russia. There were some hills, but there was no forest. There were hundreds of naked inclines, stretching to the horizon. It was like looking over heads in front of you in a movie theater, all of them bald.

 

7.

 

I wanted to try to trick my body. I would tire it out, make it so that at least one night I would sleep through until morning.

My body did not wish to be deceived. By the third day of traveling, my organism had once and for all become absolutely confused about the time. I settled into a two sleeps per day regime. I nodded off around seven at night, woke at 2 am, and during the day slept for an hour or so.

Most likely, it was a matter of age. When I was 20, I flew to the Philippines. There I acclimated within 24 hours, and, on the return trip, in 2 days. Now I could not acclimate to Siberian time even after 2 weeks.

Waking up at night offered nothing of interest. Not a single light burned throughout the car. The passengers slept. Strange as it may sound, sometimes even the ecologists slept.

In the last few days, the only thing that changed in their cabin was, instead of the antediluvian music of the group Queen, they started listening to a cassette of Russian pop.

I went out into the corridor and stood for hour looking out the dark window. Except for the moon, there was nothing to see.

Through the slightly open door, I could see my sleeping Mongolian cabin mate. Even when he was sleeping, the Mongol did not take off his socks. They were synthetic grey things. The kind that begin to smell after about three minutes of walking in them.

In the corridor hung the schedule with our arrival time at various stations, all noted in Moscow time. It would be pointless to indicate local time, as it changed three times every day.

In the toilet, next to the coupé of the conductor, I found this announcement:

 

Dear passengers!

Please do not use this toilet for serious business.

The wall is not hermetically sealed and all smells come through to the duty cabin.

 

Two conductors were on duty in our wagon. One worked during the day, the second at night. Both were pleasant and courteous women. The night conductor would mostly sit in her coupé, reading a thick book about the adventures of Conan the Barbarian.

Out of nothing to do, I imagined one early morning how I might cope as a conductor on such a long route. For example, paired up with my wife. I decided that I would have the patience to travel from the East to Moscow, and on the return trip I would likely seek a divorce.

At 5:30 in the morning, the train stopped at the village of Yerofey Pavlovich. This strange name came from the first name and patronymic of the conqueror of Siberia, Khabarov.

I stepped out of the wagon. The conductor shouted:

“Looking to take a leak, eh? Then do it, for heaven’s sake! I’ll turn away. Stand right here and do it!

“Naw, I’m just looking. It has an interesting name.”

The conductor stood about a meter away. But she was shouting as if I stood at the other end of the platform.

“What could be interesting here? They have even hauled off the station for firewood. It’s better to warm up inside the wagon. Otherwise it will be colder inside than outside.”

The waking passengers came out of the car and dispersed. A few men went off to the side to relieve themselves. The conductor warned loudly that they might freeze to the ground.

I got back on the train. In 20 minutes, the train took off. The conductor made me some coffee.

“The name Yerofey Pavlovich is in fact interesting. There are interesting names everywhere here,” she said. “Tomorrow we will pass a station called ‘Yaya.’ Two ‘yas.’ It occupies a place at the end of every encyclopedia. And a bit further on there are three stations: Zina, Shuba and Zima [“Zina, Fur Coat and Winter”]. We say: ‘Zina, put on your shuba, winter is coming.’”

 

8.

 

In the mornings, I would put my pants on in one climactic zone and in the evening take them off in an entirely different one.

Fir forests flittered by outside the window ... Manchurian hills, taiga, Transbaikal steppes … and Siberian concrete cities, as alike as twins.

Long before the cities, there began the rail transport graveyards. Disemboweled metal boxes stretched from the rails on which we rode to the horizon: buses, wagons, cars ... burned piles of metal.

Passengers would wait for the next city, the next stop, immediately after we departed from the last. They would check the schedule, look out the window, and try to give the impression that they were among the living. When you are traveling for a week in a train from the Pacific to almost the Atlantic, there is nothing else to do.

It had been five days since I boarded the train. In that time, I had succeeded in completely using up two gel pens, unravelling a pair of warm socks I bought in Khabarovsk, reading a thick weekly newspaper (not completely), breaking off a small piece of a molar, traveling 5000 kilometers, thinning down by one hole in my belt, growing a beard up to my eye sockets and smoking up seven packs of Marlboros. The babushka beneath me succeeded in knitting two woolen socks.

I lay on the top bunk, thinking about all of this and planned to nod off. Someone knocked on the door of the coupe. It was 2 am local time.

I opened the door. Outside stood one of the ecologists. He was full of alcohol up to his ears.

Fixing his stare at my chin, he said loudly:

“Komandir! Your muzzer!”

“Is that all?”

“Your muzzer!”

“So I heard. Is that all?”

“It ... eee ... your muzzer!”

I closed the door and returned to my bunk. I almost fell asleep, but again there was a knock at the door.

“What the heck do you want?”

“Your muzzer!”

“Do you have anything besides that to say?”

“Just a sec ... don’t be offended ... you understand ... your muzzer!”

The next morning, I left the 15th wagon of the Transsiberian Express. I decided to travel the rest of the distance home by plane.