'Leningrad?'
'Nyet,' he said. 'London.' He wrote 'London' on the picture. He did another picture of London – a harbour scene, a schooner, ships at anchor, a sunny day. He did one of New York – tall buildings, a sunny day. But they were fantasy pictures: Vladimir had never been out of the Soviet Union.
Because he had insisted on paying for the wine, I broke out my box of cigars. Vladimir smoked five of them, puffing them like cigarettes, and the wine and the cigars and the knowledge that we were now travelling along the shores of Lake Baikal, returned Vladimir to his own language. He strode up and down the compartment, waving away the smoke, telling me what a deep ozero Baikal was, and finally slipped his hand inside his coat and, blowing a great cloud of smoke, said, in the halting momentous voice Russians reserved for quotations, but coughing as he did so,
'I dym otechestva nam sladok i pryaten!'
and raised his eyes.
I said, 'Eh?'
'Pooshkin,' he said. 'Eugen Onegin!'
(Months later, in London, I recited my phonetic transcription of this verse to a Russian-speaker, who assured me that it was indeed Pushkin and that it could be rendered in English as, 'Even the smoke of our motherland is sweet and pleasant to us.')
In the dark corridor early the next morning the Australian librarians and the Canadian couple sat on their suitcases. Irkutsk was two hours away, but they said that they were afraid of oversleeping and missing the place. I thought then, and I think now, that missing Irkutsk cannot be everyone's idea of a tragedy. It was still dark as Irkutsk's flaming chimneys appeared above a plain of shuttered bungalows with tarpaper roofs. It is not the steel fences or even the tall cell blocks where the workers live that give these Russian cities the look of concentration camps; it is the harsh light – searchlights and glaring lamps fixed to poles – that does it, diminishing the mittened figures and making them look like prisoners in an exercise yard. Vladimir shook my hand and said a sentimental farewell. I was moved and thought charitably about the poor fellow, stuck in Irkutsk for life, until I went back to the compartment and discovered that he had stolen my box of cigars.
The provodnik entered the compartment, gathered up Vladimir's blankets, and threw a new set of blankets on the berth. He was followed by a tall pale man who, although it was midmorning, put on a pair of pyjamas and a bathrobe and sat down to solve complicated, equations on a clipboard pad. The man did not speak until, at a small station, he said, 'Here – salt!'
That was the extent of his conversation, the news of a salt mine. But he had made his point: we were truly in Siberia. Until then we had been travelling in the Soviet Far East, two thousand miles of all but nameless territory on the borders of China and Mongolia. From now on, the Siberian forest, the taiga, thickened, blurring the distant hills with smudges of trees and hiding the settlements that had swallowed so many banished Russians. In places this dense forest disappeared for twenty miles; then there was tundra, a plain of flawless snow on which rows of light-poles trailed into the distance, getting smaller and smaller, like those diagrammatic pictures that illustrate perspective, the last light-pole a dot. The hugeness of Russia overwhelmed me. I had been travelling for five days over these landscapes and still more than half the country remained to be crossed. I scanned the window for some new detail that would intimate we were getting closer to Moscow. But the differences from day to day were slight; the snow was endless, the stops were brief, and the sun, which shone so brightly on the taiga, was always eclipsed by the towns we passed through: an impenetrable cloud of smoky fog hung over every town, shutting out the sun. The small villages were different; they lay in sunlight, precariously, between the taiga and the tracks, their silence so great it was nearly visible.
I was now the only Westerner on the train. I felt like the last Mohican. Deprived of friendly conversation, denied rest by my bad dreams, irritated by the mute man in pyjamas and his pages of equations, doubled up with cramps from the greasy stews of the dining car – and, guiltily remembering my four months' absence, missing my family – I bribed Vassily for a bottle of vodka (he said they'd run out, but for two rubles he discovered some) and spent an entire day emptying it. The day I bought it I met a young man who told me in fractured German that he was taking his sick father to a hospital in Sverdlovsk.
I said, 'Serious?'
He said, 'Sehr schliml'
The young man bought a bottle of champagne and took it back to his compartment, which was in my sleeping car. He offered me a drink. We sat down; in the berth opposite the old man lay sleeping, the blankets drawn up to his chin. His face was grey, waxen with illness, and strained; he looked as if he were painfully swallowing the toad of death, and certainly the compartment had the dull underground smell of death about it, a clammy tomb here on the train. The young man clucked, poured himself more champagne, and drank it. He tried to give me more, but I found the whole affair appalling – the dying man in the narrow berth, his son beside him steadily drinking champagne, and at the window the snowy forests of Central Russia.
I went to my own compartment to drink my vodka and saw in my solitary activity something of the Russians' sense of desolation. In fact they did nothing else but drink. They drank all the time and they drank everything – cognac that tasted like hair tonic, sour watery beer, the red wine that was indistinguishable from cough syrup, the nine-dollar bottles of champagne, and the smooth vodka. Every day it was something new: first the vodka ran out, then the beer, then the cognac, and after Irkutsk one saw loutish men who had pooled their money for champagne, passing the bottle like bums in a doorway. Between drinking they slept, and I grew to recognize the confirmed alcoholics from the way they were dressed – they wore fur hats and fur leggings because their circulation was so poor; their hands and lips were always blue. Most of the arguments and all the fights I saw were the result of drunkenness. There was generally a fist fight in Hard Class after lunch, and Vassily provoked quarrels at every meal. If the man he quarrelled with happened to be sober, the man would call for the complaints' book and scribble angrily in it.
'Tovarich!' the customer would shout, requesting the complaints' book. I only heard the word used in sarcasm.
There was a nasty fight at Zima. Two boys – one in an army uniform – snarled at a conductor on the platform. The conductor was a rough-looking man dressed in black. He did not react immediately, but when the boys boarded he ran up the stairs behind them and leaped on them from behind, punching them both. A crowd gathered to watch. One of the boys yelled, 'I'm a soldier! I'm a soldier!' and the men in the crowd muttered, 'A fine soldier he is.' The conductor went on beating them up in the vestibule of the Hard-Class car. The interesting thing was not that the boys were drunk and the conductor sober, but that all three were drunk.