To get to the dining car that evening I had to pass through four carriages, and between them in the rubber booth over the coupling was a yard of Arctic. An icy wind blew through the rips in the rubber, there was snow on the floor, a thickness of heavy crystals on the car wall, and the door handles were coated with frost. I lost the skin from my fingertips on the door handles, and thereafter, whenever I moved between the cars of the Trans-Siberian Express, I wore my gloves. Two babushkas acknowledged me. In white smocks and turbans they stood with their red arms in a sink. More old ladies were sweeping the passage with brushwood brooms – a nation of stooping, labouring grannies. Dinner was sardines and stew, made palatable by two tots of vodka. I was joined halfway through by the American occultists. They ordered wine. The wife said, 'We're celebrating. Bernie's just finished his internship.'
'I had no idea occultists served internships,' I said.
Bernie frowned. He said, 'I'm an MD.'
'Ah, a real doctor!' I said.
'We're celebrating by going around the world,' said the wife. 'We're on our way to Poland – I mean, after Irkutsk.'
'So you're really living it up.'
'Sort of’
'Bernie,' I said, 'you're not going to go back and become one of those quacks that charge the earth for curing halitosis, are you?'
'It costs a lot of money to go to medical school,' he muttered, which was a way of saying he was. He said he owed $20,000. He had spent years learning his job. Textbooks were expensive. His wife had had to work. It didn't sound much of an ordeal, I said. I owed more money than that. He said, 'I even had to sell my blood.'
'Why is it,' I said, 'that doctors are always telling people how they sold their blood as students? Don't you see that selling blood by the pint is just another example of your avarice?'
Bernie said, 'I don't have to take this from you.' He grabbed his wife by the arm and led her out of the dining car.
'The great occultist,' I said, and realized that I was drunk. I went back to Number VII, and just before I switched off the table lamp I looked out the window. There was snow on the ground, and in the distance, under a cold moon, those leafless sticklike trees.
It was pitch dark when I woke up, but my watch said it was past eight o'clock. There was a pale dawn breaking at the bleak horizon, a narrow semicircle of light, like the quick of a fingernail. An hour later this glowed, a winter fluorescence on the icy flatness of Primorsk, lighting the small wooden bungalows, like henhouses with smoking chimneys, surrounded by fields of stubble and snowdrifts. Some people were already up, dressed for the cold in thick black coats and heavy felt boots that made them look clubfooted. They walked like roly-poly dolls, their heavily padded sleeves making their arms stick out. In the slow winter dawn I saw one especially agile man sliding down a slope, steering his feet like skis; he carried a yoke and two buckets. After breakfast I saw more of these scenes, bucket-carriers, a horse-drawn sleigh with a man in it who looked too cold to crack his whip, and another man pulling his children on a sled. But there were not many people out at that hour, nor were there many settlements, and there were no roads: the low smoking huts were set without any discernible pattern in trackless fields.
The sun broke through the band of haze and then shone in a cloudless sky, warming the curtains and rugs of the sleeping car. There were occasional stations, wood-framed, with gingerbread peaks, but we stopped long enough only to view the posters, portraits of Lenin, portraits of workers, and murals showing people of various colours looking courageous and linking arms. I looked for a reaction on the faces of the Japanese in the Vostok; they remained impassive. Perhaps the murals depicted Chinese and Russians? It was possible. This was a disputed area. All the way to Khabarovsk we travelled along the Chinese border, which is at that point the Ussuri River. But maps are misleading – this corner of China was no different from the Soviet Union: it lay frozen under deep snow and in the bright sunlight there were crooked forests of silver birch.
The city of Khabarovsk appeared in the snow at noon, and over the next week I grew accustomed to this deadly sight of a Soviet city approaching on the Trans-Siberian line, buried at the bottom of a heavy sky: first the acres of wooden bungalows on the outskirts; then, where the tracks divided, the work-gangs of women chipping ice from the switches; the huffing steam locomotives and the snow gradually blackening with fallen soot, and the buildings piling up, until the city itself surrounded the train with its dwellings, log cabins and cell blocks. But in the history of the Trans-Siberian Railway, Khabarovsk is an important place. The great railway, proposed in 1857 by the American Perry McDonough Collins and finally begun in 1891 under Tsarevich Nicholas, was completed here in 1916. The last link was the Khabarovsk Bridge over the Amur River; then the way was open by rail from Calais to Vladivostok (now off-limits to foreigners for military reasons).
Everyone got off the Vostok Express, most of them to catch a plane for the nine-hour flight to Moscow, some – including myself – to spend the night in Khabarovsk before taking the Rossiya Express. I jumped on to the platform, was seared by the cold, and ran back into the Vostok to put on another sweater.
'No,' said the Intourist lady. 'You will stay here on platform please.'
I said it seemed a little nippy out there.
'It is thairty-five below tzero,' she said. 'Ha, ha! But not Celsius!'
In the bus she asked whether there was anything special I'd like to do in Khabarovsk. I was stumped for a moment, then said, 'How about a concert or an opera?'
She smiled, as anyone in Bangor, Maine, might have if asked the same question. She said, 'There is musical comedy. You like musical comedy?'
I said no.
'Good, I do not recommend.'
After lunch I went in search of pipe tobacco. I was running low and faced six smokeless days to'Moscow if I couldn't find any. I crossed Lenin Square, where a statue of the great man (who never visited the city) showed him posed with his arm thrust out in the gesture of a man hailing a taxi. On Karl Marx Street newspaper sellers in kiosks said they had no tabak but offered me Pravda with headlines of the 'Khabarovsk Heavy Industry Workers Applaud Smolensk Sugar Beet Workers on a Record Harvest' variety; then to a lunch counter. My glasses steamed up; I saw misty people in overcoats standing against a wall eating buns. No tabak. Outside, the steam turned to frost and blinded me. This I corrected in a grocery store, piled with butter and big cheeses and shelves of pickles and bread. I entered stores at random: the State Bank of the USSR, where a vast portrait of Marx glowered at depositors; the Youth League Headquarters; a jewellery store, filled with hideous clocks and watches and people gaping as if in a museum. At the end of the street I found a small envelope of Bulgarian pipe tobacco. Coming out of the store I saw a familiar face.
'Hear about Bruce?' It was Jeff. His nose was red, his beret was pulled over his ears like a shower cap, his scarf was wound around his mouth, and he was dancing with the cold. He plucked at the scarf and said, 'He's butcher's hook.'
'What's that?'
'You don't know the lingo. Jesus, it's cold! That's rhyming slang.'
'Butcher's hook' in cockney rhyming slang means 'look'. He's look? It didn't make sense. I said, 'What's it rhyming slang for?'
'He's crook,' said Jeff, hopping, attracting the stares of passing Siberians. 'Crook – don't they say that in the States when someone's sick?'