The Pole said I looked ill.
'I feel ill.’
'Get drunk.'
I tried, on Georgian wine, but felt worse afterwards, as if I had drunk turpentine. The ship was rocking tremendously; and it was loud with the explosions of waves on the hull, banging doors and loose cupboards and walls so shrill with vibrations it seemed they were about to burst apart. I went to my cabin. Anders was already in his bunk, looking ghastly. Jeff and Bruce were moaning. Now the ship seemed to be leaping clear of the sea, staying airborne for five noisy seconds, and then dropping sideways with a terrific wrenching of woodwork. I didn't take off my clothes. Lifeboat Seven was mine. In his sleep, Anders shrieked, 'No!'
Just before dawn the sea was at its roughest. Again and again I was thrown upwards from my bunk, and once I hit my head on the bunk's frame. At dawn – the light showed through the ice on the porthole – the sea was calmer. I slept for an hour, before being awakened by another bump to hear the following exchange.
'Hey, Bruce.'
'Mm?'
'How's your little Ned Kelly?'
'Mawright.'
'Ya throw ya voice?'
'Naw.'
'Gee, it's rough! These beds make a hell of a racket.'
Jeff was silent for a while. Anders groaned. I tried to tune the radio I had bought in Yokohama.
'I wonder what's for brekkie?'Jeff said at last.
Breakfast (salami, olives, runny eggs, damp bread) was served to eight passengers. The rest, including all the Japanese, were seasick. I sat with the Pole and Nikola. The Pole and I were talking about Joseph Conrad. The Pole called him by his original family name, Korzen-iowski. Nikola wondered at my interest and said, 'He writes about Staleen too, this Korzeniowski?'
That was our last day on the Khabarovsk. It was sunny, but the temperature was well below zero – much too cold to spend more than a few minutes on deck. I stayed in the bar reading Gissing. Around noon Nikola showed up with an old grizzled Russian in tow. They drank vodka, and, once primed, the Russian began telling stories about the war. The Russian (Nikola translated) had been a mate on a ship called the Vanzetti - its sister ship was the Sacco – a decrepit freighter captained by a notorious drunkard. In a convoy of fifty ships crossing the Atlantic the Vanzetti was so slow it dropped far behind, and one day, when the convoy was almost out of sight, a German submarine approached. The captain radioed for assistance, but the convoy sped away, leaving the Vanzetti to fend for herself. The Vanzetti somehow eluded two German torpedoes. The sub surfaced for a look, but the drunken captain had swung his rusty cannon around; he fired once, puncturing the sub and sinking it. The Germans came to believe that this hulk, manned by incompetents, was a secret weapon, and gave the convoy no further trouble. When the Vanzetti limped into Reykjavik, the British organized a special party for the Russians, who showed up two hours late, bellowing obscene songs, and the captain, paralytic with drink, was awarded a medal.
I saw seagulls in the afternoon, but it was five o'clock before the Soviet coast came into view. Surprisingly, it was bare of snow. It was brown, flat, and treeless, the grimmest landscape I had ever laid eyes on, like an immense beach of frozen dirt washed by an oily black sea. The Russian passengers, who until then had sloped around the ship in old clothes and felt slippers, put on wrinkled suits and fur hats for the arrival, and along the starboard deck I saw them pinning medals ('Exemplary Worker', 'Yakutsk Cooperative Society', 'Blagoveshchensk Youth League') to their breast pockets. The ship was a long time docking at Nakhodka. I found a sheltered spot on the deck, fiddled with my radio, and got gypsy music – violins scraping like a chorus of ripsaws. A deck hand in a mangy fur hat and ragged coat crouched by the davit. He asked me, in English (he had been to Seattle!), to turn the music louder. It was the Moldavian half-hour on Moscow Radio. He smiled sadly, showing me his metal dentures. He was from Moldavia, and far from home.
2. THE VOSTOK
The Siberian port of Nakhodka in December gives the impression of being on the very edge of the world, in an atmosphere that does not quite support life. The slender trees are leafless; the ground is packed hard, and no grass grows on it; the streets have no traffic, the sidewalks no people. There are lights burning, but they are like lighthouse beacons positioned to warn people who stray near Nakhodka that it is a place of danger and there is only emptiness beyond it. The subzero weather makes it odourless and not a single sound wrinkles its silence. It is the sort of place that gives rise to the notion that the earth is flat.
At the station ('Proper name is Tikhookeanskaya Station' – Intourist brochure), a building with the stucco and proportions of the Kabul madhouse, I paid six rubles to change from Hard Class to Soft. The clerk said this was highly irregular, but I insisted. There were two berths in the Soft-Class compartments, four in Hard, and I had found the cabin in the Khabarovsk a salutary lesson in overcrowding. Russian travel had already made me class-conscious; I demanded luxury. And the demand, which would have got me nowhere in Japan, where not even the prime minister has his own railway compartment (though the emperor has eleven carriages), got me a plush berth in Car Five of the Vostok.
'Yes, you have question please?' said a lady in a fur hat. The platform was freezing, crisscrossed with the moulds of footprints in ice. The woman breathed clouds of vapour.
'I'm looking for Car Number Five.'
'Car Number Five is now Car Number Four. Please go to Car Number Four and show voucher. Thank you.' She strode away.
A chilly group of complaining people stood at the entrance to the car the lady had indicated. I asked if it was Car Number Four.
'This is it,' said the American occultist.
'But they won't let us in,' said his wife. 'The guy told us to wait.'
A workman came, dressed like a grizzly bear. He set up a ladder with the meaningless mechanical care of an actor in an experimental play whose purpose is to baffle a bored audience. My feet had turned to ice, my Japanese gloves admitted the wind, my nose burned with frostbite – even my knees were cold. The man's paws fumbled with metal plates.
'Jeepers, I'm cold!' said the woman. She let out a sob.
'Don't cry, honey,' said her husband. To me he said, 'Ever see anything like it?'
The man on the ladder had removed the 4 from the side of the car. He slipped 5 into the slot, pounded it with his fist, descended the ladder, and, clapping the uprights together, signalled for us to go inside.
I found my compartment and thought, How strange. But I was relieved, and almost delirious with the purest joy a traveller can know: the sight of the plushest, most comfortable room I had seen in thirty trains. Here, on the Vostok, parked on a platform in what seemed the most godforsaken town in the Soviet Far East, was a compartment that could only be described as High Victorian. It was certainly pre-revolution. The car itself had the look of a narrow lounge in a posh London pub. The passage floor was carpeted; there were mirrors everywhere; the polished brass fittings were reflected in varnished wood; poppies were etched on the glass globes of the pairs of lamps beside the mirrors, lighting the tasselled curtains of red velvet and the Roman numerals on the compartment doors. Mine was VII. I had an easy chair on which crocheted antimacassars had been neatly pinned, a thick rug on the floor, and another one in the toilet, where a gleaming shower hose lay coiled next to the sink. I punched my pillow: it was full of warm goose feathers. And I was alone. I walked up and down the room, rubbing my hands, then set out pipes and tobacco, slippers, Gissing, my new Japanese bathrobe, and poured myself a large vodka. I threw myself on the bed, congratulating myself that 6,000 miles lay between Nakhodka and Moscow, the longest train journey in the world.