S.L. Sanger
Trans-Sib, part 2
KHABAROVSK
KHABAROVSK ITSELF, an industrial city of about 600,000, had a decaying and grimy aspect, in spite of the warm and sunny April afternoon. We took a walk after lunch at the Intourist hotel. Hoyt and I must have been obvious strangers. We were stared at, and accosted by a teen-aged black marketer who wanted to buy Hoyt’s $10 wrist watch for 35 roubles, which would have meant a tidy profit for Hoyt.
“Your jeans?”
“No, sorry,” we told him. One of the first rules of Soviet travel, we had been warned, was never to sell anything to anybody. Another dire warning, which resonated with Dick, was not to have anything to do with drugs. Dick was a dedicated pot smoker, but swore off the habit for the duration.
We bought ice cream, which was poor stuff, not like the ice cream aboard MV Khabarovsk. Sidewalks along the main street were crowded with hurrying shoppers, soldiers, students, police. Traffic was mostly trucks and military vehicles. People stood in long lines to buy fresh cucumbers and little knobby green apples. We went into one vegetable shop and were appalled to see only potatoes still covered with dirt in small bins and a few cucumbers. Cucumbers seemed to be the most popular fresh vegetable. We walked past the nearby Amur River and admired the ice floes. Our last stop was the Night Bar at the Intourist Hotel. We were treated shabbily by a waitress. We had to drink two vodkas each because she said she did not have change for “hard currency,” meaning a $10 U.S. bill. Early to bed, perchance to dream.
The next day was Saturday, 28 April. We awoke before 8. Our room was small, but clean and functional. After a night of rain, the fog was heavy. From our window, though, we could see that the ice was gone from the Amur. The train for Irkutsk was to leave at 2:08 p.m.
Before we began the long ride across almost limitless Siberia, 5,296 miles with overnight stops in Irkutsk and Novosibirsk, we sat down to breakfast with Goren Ek, a Finnish journalist who was waiting for an Aeroflot flight to Moscow. Ek had told us earlier that Russians considered Khabarovsk to be “the Paris of the Soviet Far East.”
“Obviously,” Ek said, “they have never been to Paris.”
At breakfast, Ek introduced us to his escort, a Communist Party man. His name was Igor, and dressed like an English gentleman country squire. He wore fine tweeds and spoke excellent English with what Hoyt and I considered an Oxford accent. Igor was surprised when we told him we were traveling alone, without an Intourist escort. When asked I told him I was a newspaper reporter, not mentioning my military assignments.
At the station, there were strong smells in the waiting room, a blend of the stockyard, pickled vegetables and old sweat. We ran into Indiana Ed and the Silent Valet and told them of the teenage black marketer. “Boys will be boys,” Ed said.
Our compartment was shared with a young Japanese couple, quiet and seemingly pleasant, on their way to Istanbul. Our “hard class” compartment, 5 ½ by 6 ½, barely enough room for four bunks, two up, two down, and a narrow aisle with a table at the window end. Pillows could be used for backrests during the day. Each car had 10 compartments, each with room for four. Our car had Russians at one end, Americans, Aussies, Kiwis and Japanese at the other. Our next overnight stops would be in Irkutsk and Novosibersk, which along with Khabarovsk, were the only Siberian cities where Americans were allowed in 1984 to spend the night.
As we left Khabarovsk a Russian passenger who looked like actor Ray Milland, stood at the window in the main aisle gazing at the nearby Amur River. He was murmuring, I thought, “Amour, amour.” I thought he was nursing a broken heart until I finally realized he was only telling me the name of the river, correctly and lovingly pronounced in Russian.
As we approached our first brief stop, the raw-boned muscular conductress shouted in English, “Bureya. Industrial city. We have 10 minutes. Dismount!” English because the Russians, if possible, kept the English speakers and other foreigners together and segregated from Soviet citizens. Our car was mostly Aussies and New Zealanders, husky vigorous friendly people, great travelers, with the Aussies brimming with jokes about kangaroos. An example: “There’s only one question to be asked about kangaroos. Are they a good jump?”
At the stop, passengers stayed close to the train, not wanting to “be duffeled,” which was Paul Theroux’s coinage for travelers who are careless about paying attention and are left when their train pulls out. This phrase was a Hoyt favorite. He was obsessively sensitive to the possibility and never lingered at a station.
Hoyt was beginning to enjoy the Faulkner novel he had thrown to the deck in frustration when we were aboard MV Khabarovsk. “As I Lay Dying” was not a page turner in normal conditions. I suggested when attempting one of Faulkner’s tangled stories of a Southern family in distress a reader might have a better chance of success with Faulkner’s prose if he is traveling across Siberia without anything else to read. Hoyt’s explosive laugh startled our Japanese companions.
THE SCENE OUTSIDE our narrow window was bleak. The villages looked like deserted mining towns in the American West. Outskirts of the larger towns were hobo jungles of tarpaper shacks and rubbish. As we got deeper into the interior the cities were blocks of gray concrete apartment buildings and factories surrounded by steel fences. Sometimes it was hard to tell if you were looking at a factory or a prison. The people were dark smudges on the landscape. Open areas were boggy and flat. Cement plants dominated industry. We passed prison camps. Prisoners in blue-gray uniforms waved. Freight traffic going the opposite way was mostly military cargo.
Silver birches were sweet relief, the startlingly white bark almost blinding against the dark and drab.
PASSENGERS
A WELL-DRESSED MAN, about 40, urbane and fluent in English, poked his head into our compartment and said he was a railway official whose hobby was collecting coins. Did we have any American coins? We gave him a quarter, a dime and a nickel. He became talkative and curious and stayed in our compartment for an hour asking questions, discussing the Soviet Far East, the Trans-Siberian Railway, the birch, aspen and Korean pine trees we were passing. He asked about President Reagan’s chances for re-election and was familiar with all the candidates, but was especially interested in Jesse Jackson. He was a fan of popular American novelist Robert Ludlum. He wondered what we did for a living, how much money we made and was amused when Hoyt and I told him we were two-time losers in marriage. He had been divorced once and was the father of an eight-year-old daughter.
I asked him if he had learned his lesson regarding marriage. “Probably,” he replied. As he left the train at his station stop, I shouted, “See you later.”
“Probably,” he replied.
DINING CAR VERSUS PLATFORM FOOD
DINNER, A RARE APPEARANCE by us in the dining car, was beefsteak, cabbage, sardines and wine so sweet it would gag a maggot. Cost: about $4.50 U.S. Eventually, we skipped dining car meals. We bought food from local women vendors on train platforms in the towns where the Trans-Sib stopped for 15 minutes or so every once in a while. This food was fresher, tastier and cheaper than the sometimes mystery menu items in the dining car. A typical platform food menu was a breakfast salad of cabbage, beets and pickles, a blend that may sound unappetizing but in fact was perfectly fine. Yet another favorite were the hard sweet rolls, when combined with the thick and strong tea in our car made a not bad meal.
By now it was Sunday, April 29, 7 in the morning. When we hit the sack the night before we saw silver birches gliding past our window. Ten hours later silver birches were still there. The country was mostly flat. The stink from the car’s toilet was powerful enough to knock a dog off a gut wagon. This comment and one about the maggots were favorites of Dick’s mother, Nellie, who was living on the outskirts of Umatilla, Oregon.
THE PRE-BREAKFAST ATMOSPHERE in our car was fairly tense. The toilets were acting up and there was a shortage of toilet paper and drinking water. The conductress assistant was cutting toilet paper into small pieces. The head conductress, Tanya, hogged one toilet to wash her hair with the scarce water. An elderly New Zealander from Auckland waiting to brush his teeth longed for the comforts of Auckland. He said the soap looked like it belonged in a museum exhibit of medieval artifacts. His description of the toilets probably never made it into the tourist brochures. They are built almost tight against the floor, so that sitting on one “is like putting a headlock on yourself.”
The old Aucklander was brimming with caustic remarks. When we passed Siberian huts, he said, “Bloody hovels. They think they have all the bloody answers. No wonder they lost so many men during the war. They can’t run things if this bloody train is any example.” Everyone was silent, though, when we passed prison/work camps with men in blue suits standing behind barbed wire watching the train go by. Occasionally one of them would wave.
At 8:50 a.m. the train stopped for 10 minutes. Hoyt and I did an older runner’s version of a 220-yard dash to a vendor’s shack to buy more cabbage, beets and pickles. Our breakfast routine amused conductress Tanya, a slight pretty woman with big red chafed hands. We welcomed the brief stops in spite of strong smells and blank stares inside the stations. The platform vendors were friendly.
Later, Indiana Ed told us, as I poured him a glass of sickeningly sweet wine, that we would enter the Gobi Desert at about midnight and not leave it until noon tomorrow. No more birches. A corner of the Gobi Desert, the northern tip of the Mongolian vastness, brown hills covered with snow. I was skeptical of Ed’s grasp of geography since my recollection was the sprawling Gobi was located in southern Mongolia and northern China. We did pass through many miles of bleak and desolate landscape, which could have passed, I suppose, for the Gobi Desert. We were skirting Mongolia, so Ed in his know-it-all way, was not incredibly far off.
My notes tell me during the approximately 12-hour crossing of the Ed-alleged tip of the Gobi, the Japanese girl sharing our apartment with her boyfriend returned to her bunk and waiting boyfriend. She smelled of wine and looked dreamy. Her boyfriend was suspicious, probably because she had been showing a lot of interest in a young Greek man, who struck Hoyt and me as opportunistic and destructive to young love. Her boyfriend spoke to her harshly and hit her hard on the face with his open hand.
Hoyt and I hoped the slap wouldn’t upset the girl so much she would be disinclined to make orgasmic sounds in her sleep as she had the previous night. Sounds not involving the boyfriend. We checked. He was asleep alone in his own bunk.
Not long after the slap, the girl left again and eventually returned red-faced and dizzy. She admitted she and the creepy Greek had been drinking “champagne,” no doubt a Russian version, which would make anyone red-faced and dizzy.
We were getting into the Faulkner novel and quoting from it when appropriate: “The sun, an hour above the horizon, is poised like a bloody egg upon a crest of thunderheads.”
The dining car again. Not a relaxing experience because of very loud and jangling Siberian music, which sounded a lot like the worst of American country music. Nothing resembling Merle Haggard, Willie Nelson or Loretta Lynn. Indiana Ed again showed his obstinate and annoying personality, a true believer, when he praised the Russian dessert wine as resembling cognac or brandy. Hoyt and I compared it to sugar water. As we argued with Ed, mixed forest and range land streamed past. We saw what looked like a funeral service on a hillside near the train tracks.
MY NAME IS ANDREY
HOYT, AFTER THE SUGAR WATER, played chess with a Red Army senior lieutenant and beat him. His opponent, Hoyt said later, was overly-aggressive and win-oriented and didn’t pay enough attention to what the other player was doing. He was an engineer from Yalta and proceeded to deliver a short lecture on the Yalta Conference in 1945 when the Big Three of Stalin, Roosevelt and Churchill, more or less decided the fate of Europe.
Later, conductress Tanya was in the aisle talking to us about the next stop – Ulan Ude – when the chess playing officer joined us. He had brought a gift of Russian sherry. “Very good, it has won five gold medals. “ We invited him to our compartment. He thought we were Canadians or Australians, but when told we were Americans, he slammed the compartment door and said with an excited grin, “You are first Americans I have ever met. My name is Andrey.”
First, we killed the Russian sherry bottle in the Russian style. We downed our drinks quickly with toasts, Andrey in language we didn’t understand and Hoyt and I responding Bogart-style, “Here’s looking at you, Andrey,” which Andrey didn’t understand. Andrey, 25, tall and handsome, spoke passable English, a professional soldier. His rank was roughly equivalent to captain in the U.S. Army. Stationed in the Soviet Far East, a native of Yalta in the Crimea, he was seemingly fascinated by America. Also fascinated by money and women. His Red Army pay was 400 roubles a month, about twice an average worker’s salary, he said. His income was apparently sufficient to have many women friends. “So much money, so many women, why get married,” was how he put it.
He read a lot, mostly American and Russian authors. One American favorite was Theodore Dreiser and he was especially enthusiastic about Dreiser’s “An American Tragedy.” Others were James Fenimore Cooper and Mark Twain, as well as the Russians Turgenev, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky and Pushkin. He liked the American singer, Donna Summer.
He was interested in the cost of things in the U.S. He asked dozens of questions about prices from beefsteak to blue jeans and wondered about how much Americans were paid and what they could buy with their income. He lectured us on the Crimea and the government of the Soviet Union. His hope was to visit “Paressh” in a few years and was impressed when Hoyt and I mentioned we had visited the Louvre. His only comment about U.S.-Soviet relations was: “Maybe all nations need armies at this time in history.”
Then, he was gone. Next stop Irkutsk, our second of three overnight stops.
IRKUTSK, MAY DAY
THE NEXT MORNING, 6:30, there was a hint of light to the east as we approached Irkutsk, which is not far from Lake Baikal, the world’s deepest freshwater lake, an interesting geologic marvel. A marvel we missed. At 6:30 our fellow travelers were up, using the “headlock” toilets, brushing teeth, folding bedding, packing suitcases, checking tickets and documents. Hoyt and I celebrated the approach of our two nights in the capital of Eastern Siberia by reciting, irrelevantly, another favorite passage from Faulkner.
“Her leg coming long from beneath her tightening dress: that lever which moves the world; one of that caliper which measures the length and breadth of life.”
It was May Day in the Soviet Union. After some domestic chores at the Intourist Hotel we headed for the big May Day celebration at Lenin Square, attended by many thousands in a city of more than half a million population. May Day was an official state holiday in the USSR, an observance of international socialism, workers’ rights, and the beauties of communism. Parades and rallies were held throughout the Soviet Union. In Moscow, this holiday and the May 9th Victory in Europe day were occasions for an arrogant and threatening display of military hardware, which meant exhibiting giant missiles capable of carrying nuclear warheads to U.S. cities.
THOUSANDS OF YOUNG PEOPLE turned out for the Irkutsk parade, dressed in bright gym outfits and carrying red banners and, for some reason, bright red plastic beach balls. Some rode on flatbed trucks, striking fairly silly heroic poses. Following them were thousands of seemingly ordinary citizens, most of them looking happy to be away from their jobs for the day. The day was cold and windy, probably typical for May in Siberia. No one looked uncomfortable. No military component, which disappointed us.
Hoyt, pretending he was serious, asked our Intourist guide, “Where are the rockets?” She was not amused.
We had lunch at the hotel and ran into an Ugly American, who was bitterly critical of the Trans-Sib, “Deplorable, and for God’s sake, the toilet paper is like sandpaper.”
A walk along the Angara River flashed Siberian scenes on a national holiday. We saw a drunk, his face covered with blood, numerous unbloodied drunks, and were impressed by the speed with which the Russians demolished a bottle of vodka and then heaved the empty toward the river, usually smashing against rocks along the shore. Irkutsk had a decrepit look, to say the least. The houses had a faded grandeur, some painted in fading pastels. Many were log houses, some two stories high. We took some photos but felt uneasy doing it because the houses were usually so rotten and poor. In the food stores, almost everything was canned, pickled or dry, except for meat and dairy products. We saw nothing fresh, except for an occasional cucumber. One shop smelled like a root cellar and sold last year’s beets, garlic, carrots, potatoes and onions, still covered with dirt and on the edge of rot. I craved fresh food, perhaps an apple, tart and crisp. No wonder people stood in line for fresh cucumbers.
A motorist spotted us, slowed his car and asked us if we wanted to do business. Definitely not. Another man, on foot, stopped us and asked if we had chewing gum, pens, jeans, watches. Ditto.
The prettiest scene was a young boy sitting on the bank of the Angara, imitating seagull cries. “A snappy chapter ending,” said Hoyt.
A good lunch at the hotel. Fish soup and expensive caviar.
Naps, after a snatch of Faulkner: “Squatting, Dewey Dell’s wet dress shapes for the dead eyes of three blind men those mammalian ludicrosities which are the horizons and the valleys of the earth.” This passage puzzled us for days. What was the meaning? Where were the commas? “Ludicrosities”?
That night we lounged in the hotel’s hard currency bar, where the only money accepted without an argument was the American dollar. Could be worse, though, because the beer was Belgian, Stella Artois. Plenty of annoyances, though. No change, out of menu items. We expected sullenness from the bartenders and were seldom pleasantly surprised by a friendly smile.
INDIANA ED IN LOONY MODE
INDIANA ED SAT DOWN at our table, more or less uninvited. No sign of the Silent Valet. Ed was in his elevated loony mode almost immediately. He insisted that Hoyt stop publication of “Cool Runnings,” a tongue-in-cheek atomic bomb thriller, which was published by Viking in July 1984 and sold well. Dick had mentioned he suffered from night sweats while writing the book in Ireland. “It isn’t what goes in that makes a man sick, it’s what comes out,” Indiana Ed said, an enigmatic comment he refused to explain. He told us Random House was interested in some of his “pithy” sayings like that one. He ignored the interest because he didn’t want to deviate from “the true path,” which we assumed was his return to Slovakia, his ancestral homeland. Ed said a woman had read his work and he knew “she was mine forever. I owned her.” Another enigmatic comment. While Dick was in the head Ed said he instinctively sensed “the bad behind women’s eyes” and thought he could make them well, although he also realizes he cannot make them well. It was a night of enigmas from our opaque companion.
Ed erupted when Dick refused to turn his back on his mother and reconcile with his older brother. This dispute concerned Hoyt’s disagreement with his brother concerning his mother’s live-in boyfriend. His brother did not approve. “You must wean yourself from your mother,” Ed said.
He wound up his near-monologue with a discussion of his time in Fiji. “Sunburn and alienation,“ he said, “White men don’t belong there.” Ed was gracious when we left him, shaking hands and telling us to take care. He joined a table of Russians.
Before hitting the rack, we composed, under the influence of vodka, a postcard featuring our idea of Russian script. Upside down letters, sideways, backwards. Our message was to request that when U.S. missiles were re-aimed or given new targets, “Please include Intourist Hotel Irkutsk, Siberia.” We addressed the postcard: “Pentagon USA.” We slipped the card into the hotel’s outgoing mail slot.
Up at 4 a.m. Fear of being duffeled or arrested because our passports were not available. In a few minutes they appeared and we rushed to the station. It was cold on the platform and the stars were as big as spaceships. Our Intourist woman guide was cold and did some not bad leg kicks to keep warm. I heard a whistle and in seconds three headlights appeared and the blue engine slid by. In 15 minutes were on our way west, on time, a slight rosiness behind us.