View from the back window of the last car on the train
The Trans-Siberian Railway is the longest train ride in the world -- 7,621 km, across 10 time zones & 16 big rivers, passing 87 cities & towns in China, Outer Mongolia, & Russia. In winter, occasionally you get lucky with a second class cabin to yourself; it is you & your indomitable spirit slicing through the unknown with your great sweet free will.
Today's cabin: two upper berths, then me below on the left & a kindly Russian man on the right (who wanted to explain to me why he takes the 24-hour-long ride from Yekaterinburg to Moscow every 6 days. He gestured in one direction & said "my voman" then in the other direction & said "my mama." "My voman, my mama; my voman, my mama," & with these few words you can understand the core dilemma of this man's life).
Most often, you have three cabinmates & it's a human experiment in sociocultural & physical adaptation. Physical facts: the interior of the train (all cabins & hallways) is kept at 85 degrees F at all times. The windows don't open. It's suffocating. Not a molecule of moving air to be had. The beds are hard, very hard, like old wooden park benches. The bathrooms, one at each end of each car, are disgusting. All waste goes directly from people's bodies into a metal toilet-like contraption (which is filthy beyond description, suffice it to say that you must crouch), then down onto the tracks...right onto the tracks, all along the length of the Transaction-Siberian Railway.
As you lie on your very narrow cot during the long winter nights, taking care not to crack your head on the table an inch away, the train rocks you across unimaginable distances, the wheels & rails clatter under you, you touch the cold windowglass from time to time just to remind yourself that there is cool air somewhere in the world. You can feel & hear the breathing of your roommates.
Lovely British woman with a bad cold, resting
As you spend oddly intimate days & nights with these strangers, you very soon learn who has an adenoid condition, who mutters in their sleep, who suffers from insomnia, & that unfortunate Russian man who has the ill manners to use his Coke bottle as a pissoir, loudly relieving himself into it right there in the tiny cabin, just inches from his fellow sleepers. You see them in their underwear...this one has a scar all the way down one calf, that one keep a huge wad of money in her bra, that other one takes tremendous pleasure in eating a cup of noodles at midnight by sensually sucking in one long noodle at a time, not 7 inches from your face.
Border crossing soldiers are kind of scary
Border crossings are serious business. The China/Mongolia one took a tolerable 3 hours, but the Mongolia/Russia border stop is now into its 10th hour of being stopped on the tracks, doing what appears to be mostly nothing. Every few hours a small army of guards boards the train & painstakingly inspects every person, every person's belongings, every person's passport, visa & customs papers multiple times. They make you stand right in front of them, then look from your passport photo to your face six or seven times, long gazes that might be quite personal in other circumstances, to find out if it's really you. One soldier stood on the doorsill of our cabin & pointed a space-age laser gun at each of us, a heat-sensing device, to see if we might be carrying Ebola. Then the drug-sniffing dogs. This process elicits a kind of obsequiousness in the face of authority, especially when that authority is wearing a military uniform, heavy black boots, a huge Russian fur hat, and an absolutely absence of human emotion.
At last we are on our way again & giddy from the mere fact of moving. Siberia, today's Siberia out this window is grand & cold, but not forbidding, what with a rose sunset & your cheek pressed against the cold window as the train trundles on. The roommates recede into the background & all seems eternal through a time long, long before consciousness.
You are one brave woman! The guards look pretty scary and small. Be safe
ReplyDeletePat