Riding the Iron Rooster

Moscow had a chastening effect on the tour group. They became very quiet and rather wary. They seemed actually afraid—something I had not expected. Was it the glowering soldiers and police? Or perhaps the repeated security checks, and having to show your hotel ID card before you were allowed into the lobby? Or was it the big bare buildings and wide streets? Ashley said he felt very small in Moscow.

Kicker winked and told me that in his three days in Moscow he had not left the hotel. He said he was afraid of being picked up and never heard of again.

"Why would they do that?"

"I was a Marine," he said. "They kill you for things like that in Russia. Let's get out of here. That's what I say."

It was a dark rainy afternoon when we set off from Yaroslav Station on the Trans-Siberian. The people in the group were nervous and chatty—glad to be going but apprehensive about what it would be like. Some had never spent a night on a train. They were faced with four nights to Irkutsk, living at close quarters—Americans in one compartment, British in another, Australians in a third, the nameless French foursome together. From the moment I was assigned to my compartment I knew it would be a splendid trip: I was alone. I had my Polish provisions, and chocolate and champagne that 1 had bought in Moscow. 1 had books, and my shortwave radio. I was looking forward to four days of bliss.

It is an unusual feeling in the Soviet Union, because they do not cater to the individual—they hardly seem to notice that the solitary traveler exists. If a person enters a Russian restaurant alone, it takes ages for him to be served; but the group of thirty-five drunken Finns chanting "Suomi! Suomi!" (Finland! Finland!) are fussed over and fed and are back on their tour bus in less than an hour. The Soviets prefer to feed large groups of people; they like herding them and lecturing them and counting them and sending them on their way. The individual is often dangerous and always a nuisance. Why bother with individuals when it is so much easier to bully a whole mob of tourists? The solitary traveler is despised and feared, and if he manages to triumph over the bureaucracy, he will find it twice as expensive as traveling with a group. Soviet society does not recognize the individual. The answer is simple: travel with a group and, when it suits you, drop out.

Traveling on my own I would never have had a sleeping compartment to myself. But two whole coaches had been allotted to this tour, and as the tour only filled one and a half coaches, some of us lucked out and were on our own.

That was why, rolling towards Kirov that first day, I was very happy—reading, drinking, listening to the news on the BBC, and writing down the odd episode with Olga and Natasha. It seemed to me like a sort of rest cure—idleness, and undemanding scenery, and they woke you for meals. And because we were in a group we were served before anyone else.

The experience of the Trans-Siberian Express is both monotony and monkish beauty: all day outside the loud, hurrying train it is birch trees and undulant hills, and after the utter blackness of night on that line, you see more birch trees and more undulant hills; and all that day too, until it seems more like wallpaper than a landscape—the kind of wallpaper that is so simple and repetitious that you look at the seams rather than the design.

There is no more austere sight in nature than birch trees set among small snow-covered hills, a study in black and white that is made starker by the crows and their nests, the fat black birds in the branches or looking deranged, flapping in the white sky.

We went through Perm, and passed the East-West marker at 1100 miles; and then to Sverdlovsk. The dwellings diminish and change from concrete towers in cities, to brick apartments on the outskirts, and then to houses made of planks that grow rougher until huts made of split logs appear, and these are replaced in the hinterland by plain log cabins with turf jammed into the chinks. In fifty or a hundred miles you see the entire history of Russian architecture.

Over lunch I was sitting with Blind Bob, Wilma and Morthole. Morthole brought us up to date on his rock collection: one from Berlin that had been thrown by a rioter, a chunk from Warsaw, a pebble from Moscow. He was planning to snatch something interesting at the twelve-minute stop in Omsk.

"These houses are horrible," Wilma said. She was wearing a wool hat over her baldness.

Morthole hadn't shaved and was looking whiskery. It always seemed ominous to me when a man stopped shaving on such a trip.

I remarked that they didn't seem to paint many of their houses out here—usually it was just the trim. In the poorer villages there was no paint at all. The log cabins and shacks just blackened in the rain and sun. And there was the proof out of the window: a whole settlement of black, chubby huts.

Wilma said, "I'd like to read something about it."