Mary was that mother mild, Jesus Christ, her little child…
I went into the compartment and held the radio to my ear until the broadcast ended, a programme of Christmas music from the BBC. Dawn never came that day. We travelled in thick fog and through whorls of brown blowing mist, which made the woods ghostly. It was not cold outside: some snow had melted, and the roads -more frequent now – were rutted and muddy. All morning the tree trunks, black with dampness, were silhouettes in the fog, and the pine groves at the very limit of visibility in the mist took on the appearance of cathedrals with dark spires. In places the trees were so dim, they were like an after-image on the eye. I had never felt close to the country, but the fog distanced me even more, and I felt, after 6,000 miles and all those days in the train, only a great remoteness; every reminder of Russia – the women in orange canvas jackets working on the line with shovels, the sight of a Lenin statue, the station signboards stuck in yellow ice, and the startled magpies croaking in Russian at the gliding train – all this annoyed me. I resented Russia's size; I wanted to be home.
The dining car was locked at nine. I tried again at ten and found it empty. Vassily explained that, as we would be in Moscow soon, the dining car was closed. I swore at him, surprising myself with my own anger. Under protest he made me an omelette; he handed it to me with a slice of bread and a glass of tea. While I was eating, a woman came in. She wore a black coat and had a Soviet Railway badge pinned to her black hat. She spoke to Vassily: 'Kleb* (bread). Vassily waved her away: 'Nyet klebV She pointed at my meal and repeated her request for bread. Vassily shouted at her. She stood her ground and got an almighty shove from Vassily, who smiled at me apologetically as he delivered the blow. The woman came back and put out her hand and screamed loudly at him. This infuriated Vassily. His eyes became small, and he threw himself on her, beating her with his fists. He twisted her arm behind her back and kicked her hard. The woman howled and was gone.
Vassily said to me, 'Nikarasho!' The fight had left him breathless. He smiled his idiotic smile. I was ashamed of myself for not helping the woman. I pushed my food away.
'Pavel?' Vassily blinked at me.
'You are a fucking monkey.'
'Pozhal'sta,' said Vassily, in glad welcome.
The train was going at half-speed for the approach to Moscow. I walked down the corridors of Hard Class to my compartment, to pack my belongings. The other passengers were already packed. They stood in their arrival suits, smoking by the windows. I passed each one, seeing criminality and fraud in their faces, brutish-ness in their little eyes, fists protruding from unusually long sleeves.
'Monkey,' I said, squeezing through a group of soldiers.
A man stroking his fur hat blocked my way. I went up to him. He agitated his enormous jaw with a yawn.
'Monkey!' He moved aside.
Monkey to the provodnik, monkey to the man at the samovar, monkey to the army officer in Soft Class; and, still muttering, I found the zombie sitting by the window in an overcoat, his jam-flecked thumb on Mockba. 'Monkey!' I wished him a Merry Christmas and gave him two pipe cleaners, a can of Japanese sardines, and a ballpoint pen that would run out of ink as soon as he wrote his name.
That was the end of my trip, but it was not the end of my journey. I still had a ticket to London, and, hoping to catch the next train west, I cancelled my hotel reservation and spent the afternoon arranging for a de luxe berth on the train to the Hook of Holland, via Warsaw and Berlin. I was packed and ready, and I arrived at the station on Christmas night with an hour to spare. The Intourist guide brought me to the barrier and said goodbye. I stood for forty-five minutes on the platform, waiting to be shown to my compartment.
It was not a porter who inquired about my destination, but an immigration official. He leafed through my passport, rattling the pages. He shook his head.
'Polish visa?'
'I'm not stopping in Poland,' I said. 'I'm just passing through.'
'Transit visa,' he said.
'What do you mean?' I said. 'Hey, this train's going to leave!'
'You must have Polish transit visa.'
'I'll get it at the border.'
'Impossible. They will send you back.'
'Look' – the whistle blew – 'I've got to get on this train. Please – it's going to leave without me!' I picked up my suitcase. The man held me by the arm. A signalman passed by, motioning with his green flag. The train began to move.
'I can't stay here!' But I let the man hold on to my sleeve and watched the Holland-bound express tooting its way out of the station: frseeeeeeeeefronnng. There were travellers' faces at the windows. They were happy, safely leaving. It's Christmas, darling, they were saying, and we're off. It was the end, I thought, as I saw the train receding, taking my heart with it. It's the end: duffilled!
Two days later I was able to leave Moscow, but the trip to London was not outwardly remarkable. I tried to collect my wits for the arrival; I slept through Warsaw, glared at Berlin, and entered Holland with a stone in my stomach. I felt flayed by the four months of train traveclass="underline" it was as if I had undergone some harrowing cure, sickening myself on my addiction in order to be free of it. To invert the cliche, I had had a bellyful of travelling hopefully – I wanted to arrive. The whistle blew at level crossings – a long moronic hoot – and I was mocked by it, not bewitched. I had been right: anything was possible on a train, even the urge to get off. I drank to deafen myself, but still I heard the racket of the wheels.
All travel is circular. I had been jerked through Asia, making a parabola on one of the planet's hemispheres. After all, the grand tour is just the inspired man's way of heading home.
And I had learned what I had always secretly believed, that the difference between travel writing and fiction is the difference between recording what the eye sees and discovering what the imagination knows. Fiction is pure joy – how sad that I could not reinvent the trip as fiction. It would have had (now we were boarding a blue ferry at the Hook) such a pleasing shape if I had artfully distributed light and shadow and played with the grammar of delay. I would have plotted myself into danger: Sadik would have had a switchblade and gold teeth, the Hue track an erupting mine, the Orient Express a lavish dining car, and Nina – imploring me – would have rapped softly on my compartment door and flung off her uniform as we crossed the Volga. It did not happen that way, and in any case I might have been too busy for that gusto. I had worked every day, bent over my rocking notebook like Trollope scribbling between postal assignments remembering to put it all in the past tense.
Gladly, made nimble by sanity's seamless glee, I boarded the train for London – correction: I am now leaving Harwich (there were often twenty miles between clauses and a hundred more before I finished a sentence) and setting my face at the hairless January fields. On my lap I have four thick notebooks. One has a Madras water stain on it, another has been slopped with borscht, the blue one (lettered, in gold, Punjab Stationery Mart) has the ring from a damp glass on its front, and the red one's colour has been diluted to pink by the Turkish sun. These stains are like notations. The trip is finished and so is the book, and in a moment I will turn to the first page, and to amuse myself on the way to London will read with some satisfaction the trip that begins, Ever since childhood, when I lived within earshot of the Boston and Maine, I have seldom heard a train go by and not wished I was on it.