'I don't think so.'
'He looked seedy this morning. Lips all cracked, glassy eyes, running a temperature. Intourist took him to a hospital. I think he got pneumonia in that fucking ship.'
We walked back to the hotel. Jeff said, 'It's not a bad place. It looks like it's coming up.'
'It doesn't look that way to me.'
We passed a shop where about 150 people were lined up. The ones at the end of the line stared at us, but in the front of the line, at the half-open door, they were quarrelling, and if you looked closely you could see them crashing through the narrow entrance, all elbows, one at a time. I wanted to see what they were queuing for – obviously something in short supply – but Jeff said, 'On your right,' and I turned to see an enormous policeman gesturing for me to move along.
There were some oriental-looking people in the crowd; Khabarovsk seemed to be full of them, plump Chinese with square dark faces. They are the aboriginal people of the region, distant cousins of the American Eskimos, and are called Goldis. 'A sartorially practical tribe,' writes Harmon Tupper in his history of the Trans-Siberian, remarking that they changed from wearing fish skins in summer to dog skins in winter. But in Khabarovsk that December day they were dressed the same as everyone else, in felt boots and mittens, overcoats and fur hats. Jeff wondered who they were. I told him.
He said, 'That's funny, they don't look like abos.'
In the hotel restaurant Jeff made a beeline for a table where two pretty Russian girls sat eating. They were sisters, they said. Zhenyia was studying English; Nastasya's subject was Russian literature ('I say Russian literature, not Soviet literature – this I do not like'). We talked about books: Nastasya's favourite author was Chekhov, Zhenyia's was J. D. Salinger – 'Kholden Khaulfield is best character in every literature.' I said I was an admirer of Zamyatin, but they had not heard of the author of We (a novel that inspired Orwell to write 1984, which it resembles), who died in Paris in the twenties trying to write a biography of Attila the Hun. I asked if there were any novelists in Khabarovsk.
'Chekhov was here,' said Nastasya.
In 1890, Anton Chekhov visited Sakhalin, an island of convicts, 700 miles from Khabarovsk. But in Siberia all distances are relative: Sakhalin was right next door.
'Who else do you like?' I asked.
Nastasya said, 'Now you want to ask me about Solzhenitsyn.'
'I wasn't going to,' I said. 'But since you mentioned him, what do you think?'
'I do not like.'
'Have you read him?'
'No.'
'Do you think there's any truth in the statement that socialist realism is anti-Marxist?' I asked.
'Ask my sister this question,' said Nastasya.
But Jeff was talking to Zhenyia and making her blush. Then he addressed both girls. 'Look, suppose you could go to any country you liked. Where would you go?'
Zhenyia thought a moment. Finally she said, 'Spam.'
'Yes, I think so,' said Nastasya. 'For me – Spam.'
'Spam!' shouted Jeff.
'Because it is always hot there, I think,' said Zhenyia. The sisters rose and paid their bill. They put on their coats and scarves and mittens and pulled their woollen pompom caps down to their eyes, and they set off into the driving wind and snow.
Later the Intourist lady took me on a tour of the city. I said I wanted to see the river. She said, 'First, factory!' There were five factories. They made, she said, 'Kebles, weenches, poolies, bults.' In front of each one were six-foot portraits of hard-faced men, 'Workers of the Month', but they might easily have been photographs of a Chicago bowling team. I said they looked tough. The Intourist lady said, 'They have an opera company.' This is meant to rebuke the visitor: these monkeys have an opera company! But opera is politically neutral and the Khabarovsk opera house was vacant most of the time. If there was an alley they'd have had a bowling team. There wasn't much to do in Khabarovsk – even the Intourist lady admitted that. After various obelisks and monuments and a tour of the museum, which was full of dusty tigers and seals, all facing extinction, we went to the east bank of the Amur River. The Intourist lady said she would wait in the car. She didn't like the cold (she wanted to go to Italy and work for Aeroflot).
The river at this point is half a mile wide. From where I was standing I could see dozens of men, huddled on the ice, each one near a cluster of holes. They were ice-fishermen, mainly aged men who spent the winter days like this, watching for a tug on their lines. I scrambled down the bank and, marching into a stiff wind, made my way across the ice to where an old man stood, watching me come near. I said hello and counted his lines; he had chopped fourteen holes in the two-foot-thick ice with a blunt axe. He had caught six fish, the largest about nine inches, the smallest about four inches, and all of them frozen solid. He made me understand that he had been fishing since eight o'clock that morning; it was then half-past four. I asked him if I could take his picture. 'Nyet!' he said and showed me his ragged overcoat, his torn cap, the rips in his boots. He urged me to take a picture of one of his fish, but, as I was about to snap, something caught my eye. It was the comb of a fish spine, flecked with blood, the head and tail still attached.
'What happened to him?' I picked up the bones.
The old man laughed and made eating movements with his mittens, champing on his decayed teeth. So he had caught seven fish: the seventh was his lunch.
After ten minutes of this I was stiff with cold and wanted to go. I fumbled in my pockets and brought out a box of Japanese matches. Did he want them? Yes, very much! He took them, thanked me, and when I turned to go he hurried over to show them to a man fishing fifty yards away.
The ice-fishermen, the old ladies sweeping the gutters with twig brooms, the quarrelling line of people at the shop on Karl Marx Street; but there was another side to Khabarovsk. That night the restaurant of the hotel filled with army officers and some truly villainous-looking women. The tables were covered with empty vodka bottles, and many ate their Siberian dumplings (pelmenye) with champagne. I lingered, talking to a fierce captain about the declining Soviet birthrate.
'What about family planning?' I asked.
'We are trying to stop it!'
'Are you succeeding?'
'Not yet. But I think we can increase production.'
The band began to play, a saxophone, a piano, snare drums: 'Blue Moon'. And the army officers were dancing. The women, who wore sweaters under their low-cut dresses, hitched their clothes and staggered with their partners. Some men were singing. There were shouts. A waltzing couple bumped the arm of a man stuffing a dumpling into his mouth. A bottle crashed to the floor; there was a scuffle. The captain said to me, 'Now you must go.'
3. THE ROSSIYA
Afterwards, whenever I thought of the Trans-Siberian Express, I saw stainless steel bowls of borscht spilling in the dining car of the Rossiya as it rounded a bend on its way to Moscow, and at the curve a clear sight from the window of our green and black steam locomotive – from Skovorodino onwards its eruptions of steamy smoke diffused the sunlight and drifted into the forest so that the birches smouldered and the magpies made for the sky. I saw the gold-tipped pines at sunset and the snow lying softly around clumps of brown grass like cream poured over the ground; the yachtlike snowploughs at Zima; the ochreous flare of the floodlit factory chimneys at Irkutsk; the sight of Marinsk in early morning, black cranes and black buildings and escaping figures casting long shadows on the tracks as they ran towards the lighted station – something terrible in that combination of cold, dark, and little people tripping over Siberian tracks; the ice-chest of frost between the cars; the protrusion of Lenin's white forehead at every stop; and the passengers imprisoned in Hard Class: fur hats, fur leggings, blue gym suits, crying children, and such a powerful smell of sardines, body odour, cabbage, and stale tobacco that even at the five-minute stops the Russians jumped on to the snowy platform to risk pneumonia for a breath of fresh air; the bad food; the stupid economies; and the men and women ('No distinction is made with regard to sex in assigning compartments' – Intourist brochure), strangers to each other, who shared the same compartment and sat on opposite bunks, moustached male mirroring moustached female from their grubby nightcaps and the blankets they wore as shawls, down to their hefty ankles stuck in crushed slippers. Most of all, I thought of it as an experience in which time had the trick distortions of a dream: the Rossiya ran on Moscow time, and after a lunch of cold yellow potatoes, a soup of fat lumps called solyanka, and a carafe of port that tasted like cough syrup, I would ask the time and be told it was four o'clock in the morning.