He said, 'Thank God we're getting off this pretty soon. How far are you going?'
'Moscow; then the train to London.'
'Tough shitsky.'
'So they say.'
He said, 'I don't even know what day it is. It's going to be Christmas soon. Hey, did you see that house burning back there?'
'No.'
The previous day he had said, 'Did you see the truck that was crossing the river and crashed through the ice? Well, the back wheels anyway.' I wondered if he made it up. He was perpetually seeing disasters and events. I looked out the window and saw my anxious reflection.
I went back into the compartment and started to read New Grub Street again, but the combination of bad light and cold and drifting snow, and the decline of poor Edwin Reardon depressed me to the point of fatigue. I slept; I dreamed. I was in a mountain cabin with my wife and children. There was snow and a black mirror at the window. I was fretting: some people we knew, miles away, had to be told some tragic news. My feet were freezing, but I agreed to go and tell them this news. I kicked in a closet for a pair of boots and said, 'What about you, Anne? Aren't you coming?'
Anne said, 'It's so cold out! Anyway, I'm reading – I think I'll stay here.'
I addressed Annushka, the gorgon of the Rossiya dining car, who happened to be drinking tea in a corner of this cabin. 'You see? You see"? She always says she wants to go with me, but when the time comes she never does!'
Anne, my wife, said, 'You're just delaying! Go, if you're going – otherwise, shut the door and stop talking about it.'
I held the cabin door open. Outside, it was all emptiness. The cold wind blew into the room, throwing up the skirts of the tablecloth and rattling the lampshades. Snow sifted on to the log floor.
I said, 'Well, I'm going if no one else will.'
'Can I come too, Daddy?' I looked into my little boy's white face. He was pleading. His shoulders were pathetic.
'No,' I said. 'I have to go alone.'
'Shut the door!'
I woke up. My feet were cold. The compartment window was black and the carriage bounced (only the Trans-Siberian bounces, because the rails have square rather than staggered joints). The dream was an intimation of panic, guilty travelling, and a loneliness that made me lonelier still when I wrote it and examined it.
Vladimir had stopped sketching. He looked up and said, 'ChaiV
I understood. The Swahili word for tea is also chai. He hollered for the provodnik. Over tea and cookies I had my first Russian lesson, copying the words down phonetically on a notebook page: a dreary occupation, but it passed the time and was preferable to dozing into nightmares.
The dining car that night was empty and very cold. There was frost on the windows and such a chill in the air that the breath of the arguing employees was visible in steamy clouds. Vassily Prokofyevich, the manager, was doing his accounts, snapping his abacus. I had now been in the dining car enough times to know that by late afternoon Vassily, a short scar-faced man, was drunk. He jumped up and showed me his breath – vodka-scented steam – then dragged out a case of beer and demonstrated how the beer had frozen inside the bottles. He rubbed one in his hands to thaw it for me and barked at Nina, the black-haired girl. Nina brought me a plate of smoked salmon and some sliced bread. Vassily pointed to the salmon and said, 'Kita!'
I said, lEto karasho kita.'
Vassily was pleased. He told Nina to get me some more.
I tapped on the frosty window and said, 'Eto okhnor. '
'Da, da.' Vassily poured himself some more vodka. He guzzled it. He gave me an inch in a tumbler. I drank it and saw that Annushka was at her usual place, dipping bread into black tea and sucking the bread slice.
I motioned at her tea and said, 'Eto zhudki chai.'
'Da, da.' Vassily laughed and refilled my glass.
I showed him my copy of Gissing and said, 'Eto ganyiga.'
'Da, da? said Vassily. Nina came near with the plate of salmon. 'Eto Nina,' said Vassily, seizing the pretty girl, 'and these' – I translated his gestures – 'are Nina's tits!'
The mornings now were darker, another trick of time on the railroad that seemed to be speeding me further into paranoia. After eight hours' sleep I woke up in pitch blackness. In the dim light of the December moon, a silver sickle, the landscape was bare – no trees, no snow. And there was no wind. It was weird, as dawn approached (at nine-thirty by my watch), to see the villages on the banks of the Shilka and the Ingoda rivers, the small collections of wooden huts aged a deep brown, with the smoke rising straight up, a puffing from each chimney that made me think of an early form of wood-burning vehicle stranded on these deserted steppes. After hours of this desolation we came to Chita, a satanic city of belching chimneys and great heaps of smoking ashes dumped beside the tracks. Outside Chita there was a' frozen lake on which ice-fishermen crouched like the fat black crows with fluffed-out feathers that roosted in the larches at the verge of the lake.
I said, ' Vorona.'
'Nyet,' said Vladimir and he explained they were fishermen.
'Vorona.' I insisted on the crow image until he saw what I was driving at. But it didn't take much insisting, for the sentimental fanaticism I had detected in the Russians I had met was a flight from their literal-mindedness. Vladimir was in the habit of reciting -reciting rather than saying – long sentences, and then muttering, 'Pushkin' or 'Mayakovsky'. This compulsive behaviour is taken for granted in the Soviet Union, but I think if I were on the old Boston and Maine and a man began to quote, 'This is the forest primeval – ' I'd change my seat.
Vladimir bought a bottle of Hungarian wine and we played chess. He played aggressively, hovering over the board and moving his pieces as swiftly as checkers. Between moves he cracked his knuckles. I moved not to win – I knew that was beyond me – but to slow him down. He pushed at his chessmen; the train pushed into wind. Outside, the snow had returned and I saw that now we were getting two landscapes a day. The low Mongolian hills on the edge of the Gobi Desert were covered by cedars as finely formed as tropical ferns, and by four o'clock, as we made our slow approach to the Central Siberian Plateau, snow was blowing past the windows, tiny flakes in the trailing smoke. At a distance the snowstorm created the effect of fog, a whiteness over the Gobi that blended with the birch trunks and made the cedars seem especially frail. Siberia was wood and snow – even the railway buildings matched the forest: throughout Chitinskaya the stations were wooden structures made of many carefully slanted bare planks plastered with frost.
My chess worsened, but as long as the wine held out we continued to play. Two more games saw the end of the vodka and then, without drink, there seemed no point in going on. But we had the whole evening ahead of us. My napping had divided the days into many parts, each part resembling a whole day, a lengthened distortion of time familiar to a person with a high fever in a seldom-visited sickroom. At times this feeling of experiencing a futile convalescence on the Trans-Siberian turned into a simpler occasion for boredom; simulating my bad dream, it was like being snowed-up in a mountain cabin. It was cold, the light was poor, and it was hard to move around the train since most of the passengers, assigned to overcrowded compartments, preferred to stand in the corridors. And, really, there was nowhere to go.
I took out a sheet of paper and taught Vladimir tick-tack-toe. He found this, as he said, very interesting – the Russian word is similar – and soon discovered the trick of beating me at that, too. He introduced me to an immensely complicated Russian game for killing time. This consisted of drawing on graph paper ten figures of slightly varying geometric size, made up of squares. The more irregular the figure, the higher the score – or perhaps one was shooting for a low score? I never got the hang of this game. Vladimir finally gave up trying to teach me and returned to his sketching. I persuaded him to show me his sketch pad, and, amazingly, it was filled-with page after page of telephone poles, pylons, high-tension wires, pictures of girders with wires webbed to them, and skeletal-seeming apparatus. This was his hobby, sketching vertical monstrosities, though he might easily have been a spy. He showed me how to draw a telephone pole. I feigned an interest in this unappealing thing and he called to the provodnik for wine. Two more bottles of the Hungarian wine came – the provodnik wouldn't go until he got a glassful – and Vladimir drew a black cabin in a black and brown landscape, a low orangy red sun, and sky full of spiders. This he labelled 'Siberia'. Then he drew a picture of several spires, some large buildings, a blue sky, a sunny day.