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.
But I wanted to reveal myself and tell them that this train was much better than the one I had taken in 1973. It was more orderly, and cleaner, and seemingly more tolerant. What I remembered was that the dining car had run out of decent food after a few days, and we had lived on eggs and watery soup and stale bread; and I had a very clear memory of the thin soup sloshing in the steel soup bowls as the train jolted around long curves.
Clouds were massing and building towards the dazzling white moon just before I turned in. It had grown cold. In the immensity of the Siberian forest, amid the blue pools of snow and spiky trees, there were wolves and wild dogs — farther on I saw their skins being stretched on frames. It seemed to me hateful that they should make wolves into hats. When the moon was lost in the cloud cover, a blackness overwhelmed the view. I awoke at Taishet the next morning to driving snow.
It was spring snow — sudden, heavy and deep. The whole landscape was buried in it, with only a few brown muddy creeks showing through — no water, just a creek shape of chocolate ice cream straggling through the snow. The strange silence and isolation that snow brings to a place was intensified here in Siberia — or technically Eastern Siberia, as it said in Russian on the sign at the little wooden station at Uk. It snowed all day, and at times, as the train rolled through it, the snow was so thick that everything was white — the sky, the earth: nothing but a blankness with a few faint tracings of trees.
I had Rick Westbetter's word that the wooden townships looked like small towns in the Midwest in the 1920s — one-story wooden houses with steeply pitched roofs; and outside town a couple of filthy factories whose smoke was the same browny-gray as the clouds, and all around an expanse of prairie — in this case the great Gromboolian Plain of the steppes. Those places a few hours out of Zima all looked like Gopher Prairie. I was now reading Main Street and marveling at the similarity: the boom town in the middle of nowhere.
The snowstorm lessened in the afternoon, and later as we approached Angarsk what looked like a blizzard was the wind whipping the snow from the ground; it had stopped falling. Where the ground had been scoured by the wind, the soil was light brown and dry, the sort of frozen ground you can stub your toe against. It was not until I saw a falcon roosting on a bare tree that I realized that there was little sign of life here — just bare ground and drifted snow under an iron-dark sky. The train raced along, and I looked for more. I thought I saw magpies and crows, but it might have been a trick of the light.
We arrived at Irkutsk, after four and a half days of the Trans-Siberian's crossing the vastness of the steppes. The astonishing thing is not that it took so long to get there, but that for anyone who chooses to go on to Vladivostok, there are four more days of it, and they are much the same. It was like crossing an ocean.
It was nine o'clock at night when we arrived at Irkutsk, but we did not stay in the city. We were directed to a bus and driven to a hotel forty miles away on the shore of Lake Baikal. The Wittricks called it Lake Bacall, like the actress.
The lake was frozen solid, with great shoved-up ice slabs at the shore, because of the pressure. Baikal is the largest lake in the world — it contains one-fifth of the earth's fresh water, and the Russians suggest that there are monsters in it as well as fat seals and numerous varieties of fish. The ice is two meters thick, they boasted. You can walk the length of it — over 400 miles. Or take a sleigh across to Babushkin, which they do to save time in winter. They had amazing things here at Baikal. Natural wonders! Over at Bashaiyarischka they had fur farms — they raised ermine and lynx and mink, and made them into hats. They trapped sable — the little devils wouldn't breed in captivity, but there were plenty of them around and they fetched $1000 a pelt. They had coral in the lake, they boasted. And just down the shore at Listvianka they had a church. There was a priest in the church — a real one.
They never boasted about the hotels. In Moscow it had been a vast and dusty place, with straw mattresses and a shriveled floor, ragged carpets, blankets blackened with cigarette burns, and stinking bathrooms — leaky pipes, cracked cisterns. "The bogs are tragic," Richard Cathcart said. I thought that was about right. The hotel at Baikal was marble and mausoleumlike, and it was clean. But I had to be shown three rooms until I found one with hot water, and in the last there was no toilet seat, and none of them had curtains on the windows. The babushkas dusted and mopped, but apart from that there was no maintenance — not only in the larger sense of the drains working or the water running, but in details: knobs were missing from dressers, and the latches from the windows, which didn't open in any case; the locks jammed, the lamps were either dead or bristling with bare wires. Repairs were carried out with bits of sticky tape and pieces of string. It is true that every traveler has to expect to put up with discomfort, but there were huge areas of Soviet life that seemed to me not simply uncomfortable but downright dangerous.
The members of the group were not happy here: it was too cold, the hotel was a wreck, the food was dreadful, and why didn't these Siberians smile?
Honeymooners came to the hotel — some stayed, some merely stood in front and had their pictures taken, some roistered there. On my second night the room next to mine was occupied by a pair of newlyweds playing Russian rock and roll on a cassette machine until, at two in the morning, I banged on their door and told them to shut up. The groom appeared, drunken and drooling and a foot taller than me, but when he saw I was a foreigner he decided not to attack me. Behind him in the room, a young woman encouraged him. In defiance, they turned the music even louder for about ten minutes, and then they switched it off.
It was a custom for just-married couples to drive to where the Angara River flowed from the lake — it was all eider ducks and ice floes — and these newlyweds parked by the shore, opened a bottle of champagne and toasted each other, while the driver took their picture. The bride wore a rented dress of white lace, and the groom a dark suit with a wide red ribbon worn as a sash. In the course of one walk in this direction I saw four couples do this — have a ceremonial drink, then pose for a picture. The shore was littered with champagne bottles.
I found this very depressing. Was it the ritual, or was it the fact that, because the Soviet divorce rate was so high, everything related to marriage there looked like a charade? It might have been nothing more than the cold: Baikal was freezing, and the lake looked like a plain of snow and ice in Antarctica. Well, after all it was winter in Siberia.
***
There were any number of people eager to explain why Irkutsk was the capital of Siberia, an education center, an Asiatic crossroads; but I thought Rick Westbetter had it just about right when he said, "Grand Rapids used to look like this, when I was a kid. Look, outdoor privies. We haven't seen those since the twenties." I told him that I had been reading Sinclair Lewis and that these Siberian cities and towns looked like tired versions of Zenith and Gopher Prairie: not only the wooden houses with the porches, but the main street and the old cars and the trolleys, and the wide-fronted department stores that looked as though they should be called The Bon-Ton Store. If there was a difference it was that the class system was probably more rigid in Siberia, and the local version of George F. Babbitt would be a party hack rather than a real-estate man.