Riding the Iron Rooster

Blind Bob said, "Did you read that book by Paul Theroux, about taking this train?"

"No," Wilma said, and addressed me, "Did you?"

Flattening my face against the window I said, "Look at those birches! Isn't it amazing that you never see a fat one? They're all slender. Why do you suppose—"

"I read it," Morthole said, across the table. "The Gurneys have one of his books, I don't know which one. I saw Malcolm reading it in his compartment."

I made a mental note to avoid the Gurneys, but even so—sitting here—I felt like a hypocrite. But what was I to do? I hated being an object of attention. I had paid for my ticket, and so I had a right to my privacy. I hadn't deceived anyone; I had merely been economical with the truth. The alternative could be irksome—not just the conversations about writing books and "You should get yourself a word processor," but what I feared would be the duties of an unpaid guide. I had been on this train before; therefore, I ought to know whether that thermos bottle thing was a church steeple, and the name of that river, and if you could buy film in Irkutsk.

It was easy for me to keep to myself. I had my own compartment—plenty of space, plenty of provisions, the grapes, cookies, chocolates and tea that made being on the Trans-Siberian like a luxurious form of convalescence. It was a surprise to me that my little radio worked inside the train. At certain times of day I got the BBC news, and at other times Radio Australia or Voice of America. I listened to the Top Twenty, and the report of a Shakespeare Festival in China, and the fallout from the bombing of Libya. From the samovar at the end of the sleeping car, I got hot water for tea. And I divided the day into three parts and set myself tasks to perform: reading and writing.

That night a full moon was shining in the cloudless sky, and beneath it, water was lying everywhere, the melted snow flooding the birches. At midnight the moon shone from above and below this water and made the earth a glittering mirror on which leafless trees trembled, looking frail.

Every day is the same on the Trans-Siberian: that is one of its reassuring aspects. In itself it is not interesting, which is why it is such a pleasure to be a passenger and so maddening to write about it. There is nothing to write about. This train is an occasion, not a subject. It is more like an ocean liner than any other train I know—the solid steady travel, the sameness of the view. But in the thirteen years since I had last been on it, it had changed in many ways, and most of those changes were improvements. I assumed Gorbachev's cost-efficient approach to Soviet life was behind this. He had publicly criticized the uncaring attitude of Soviet workers: the old, grizzled provodniks on the sleeping car were gone, and in their place was a young couple who occupied one small compartment and worked in shifts. Gorbachev had denounced the drunkenness that was common in the country—the Trans-Siberian reflected this: a trip on it was no longer a binge. There were a few drunks on the train, but none dared to enter the dining car, and no alcohol was sold. The carriages were cleaner, and the officials fairly good-natured, and the passengers more prosperous looking. Still, at the longer stops, when I was strolling down the station platform I was buttonholed by Russians who asked: Want to sell your shoes? Want to sell your jeans? Want to sell your T-shirt? Perhaps it was only my imagination, but it seemed to me that there was something fundamentally wrong with a country whose citizens asked to buy your underwear.

Each day I moved my watch back one hour: Irkutsk is five hours ahead of Moscow. Losing an hour a day did not cause jet lag. Just after I awoke on the third day I looked out and saw a huge lake to the south: Ozero Chany (Lake Chany). Very soon we stopped at Barabinsk, which was cold—below freezing. Zhenia, the sleeping-car attendant, squinted at the sky and hugged himself and muttered meg (snow). Morthole drew my attention to the fact that some of the birches on the Barabinsk steppe were as fat as beer barrels—thicker than any birch I had ever seen. These older birches had black, burst-open bark on their trunks.

We came to Novosibirsk, on the river Ob. It is strange that this Siberian city should be so large, though not stranger than that Chicago should be—and like Chicago it is a city the railway put on the map. Much odder than this was the sight of so many sea gulls on the river—black-headed gulls, diving among the ice floes, over 1000 miles from the sea. The Ob itself, at 3461 miles long, is the fourth longest river in the world—longer than the Yangtze.

Once, Malcolm Gurney quoted with approval this know-it-all traveler, Theroux, who had done the trip some years ago. Everyone at the table listened with interest and apparent agreement. It seemed as though I was the only person who didn't agree with the wild generalization, and so I excused myself and left.