I recalled my childhood love of goods trains as I walked up and down the sidings at Bryansky station searching for wagon number 717 802 of the Riga–Orël railway line.
I found my fellow travellers, the Petrograd journalists, already inside. They had fixed themselves up in comfort and were having tea around a table made from an upturned crate and telling elegantly bawdy jokes. They paid no attention to me, barely returned my greeting, and made it quite clear they wanted nothing to do with me. Why, I wondered, did they ever even agree to take me with them? I racked my brain in search of an answer. Was it really just so that if they ran into trouble with the authorities, they could save their own necks by offering up mine? Their papers were all in order, but you never knew – the authorities were unpredictable and always looking for any excuse. In that case, somebody like me, with no travel pass or exit visa, would be a godsend. I was the perfect foil for them to play the role of loyal subjects of the Soviet government: ‘Dear Comrades, why are you picking on us, honest Soviet people, while this shady character without any documents has wormed his way into our wagon? It’s our duty to report the man. You should search him.’
I drove these thoughts away. I was ashamed of them. Five years ago I never would have thought so poorly of people I didn’t know. Nevertheless, I couldn’t get over my mistrust of these rather free and easy journalists. I was especially disgusted by a short man with round, oily eyes. He went by the name Andrei Borelli, but this was, of course, only a pseudonym he used for his sensational scoops in the papers. Among themselves, his fellow journalists called him Dodya. He was constantly hitching up his short khaki trousers and guffawing. Every time he laughed, he launched a shower of spit. The spongy, ashen skin of his face looked like rubber. He couldn’t stop making stupid puns and wisecracks which he delivered with a disgusting leer. Soviet Russia he called ‘Sovdepia’,fn1 Moscow was ‘the ancient Red Navel’ and the Bolsheviks ‘Comrade Bookbinders’. Even the leader of this corrupt gang – the jaundiced journalist in the grey spats – got fed up with him at times and snapped: ‘You’ve got a real genius for verbal fornication, Dodya. Stop your screwing around. We’re all sick and tired of it!’
‘If it’s white, you hate it with all your might, if it’s red, you love it until you’re dead,’ Dodya shot back without stopping to think.
At this point Grey Spats would threaten to toss Dodya from the train, and for a minute or two he would stop his twaddle. The night passed without incident.
The train was barely dragging itself along. I didn’t bother talking with my travel companions and was trying to think up an excuse to move to a different wagon. But it wasn’t possible. The others were full either of heavily armed Red Army soldiers and sailors from the Baltic fleet or of cavalry horses. The next day I noticed something quite odd. Strapped to Dodya’s suitcase was a heavily chipped and dented blue enamel teapot. What struck me as strange was that at every stop the journalists went to fetch boiling water with a big tin mug – not the larger teapot – even though the mug didn’t hold nearly enough water for all of them. The riddle was unexpectedly solved the following day. The train pulled haltingly into the station at Bryansk. A soldier from the wagon next to ours stuck his head in the door.
‘Mates, we’re in a bit of trouble,’ he said. ‘Fools that we are, we somehow managed to lose our teapot along the way. Government issue, no less! Enough to make you cry! You don’t happen to have a spare, do you?’
‘Nope!’ snapped Dodya. ‘We’ve been drinking out of a mug ourselves.’
‘You’ve got an enamelled one right there, strapped to your case,’ the soldier said good-naturedly. ‘Let us have it for the day. I promise to give it back safely.’
‘No, you can’t have this teapot,’ said Grey Spats, his pince-nez flashing angrily.
The soldier looked hurt. ‘Why not?’ he asked. ‘Is it made of gold or something?’
‘It leaks, that’s why. Get it? It leaks. It’s useless. Full of holes.’
A knowing grin spread over the soldier’s face. ‘Aren’t you a strange group!’ he said, as good-naturedly as before. ‘Can’t imagine why you’d be dragging such trash around with you. It’d be one thing if you all were poor, but that’s clearly not it. Here you are putting real sugar in your tea – no saccharine for you. Oh well, sorry for troubling you.’
The soldier left. My companions looked at each other, and then one of them hissed at Dodya: ‘Cretin! Did you have to leave your teapot sticking out like a sore thumb?’
I heard some low-voiced grumbling, and then they put a box on top of the suitcase and laid a coat over that.
‘Which wagon?’ someone asked outside. They didn’t sound pleased. ‘This one?’
‘Yes, Comrade Commissar. That one – from the Riga–Orël line.’
Dodya dived for the teapot, grabbed it, placed it on his lap, and then, straining so hard his eyes began to fill with tears, snapped the tin spout off and stuck it in his pocket. Just then an elderly, disgruntled commissar pulled himself up with a groan into the wagon followed by the soldier.
‘What’s all this business about a teapot?’ asked the commissar. ‘Where is it? Let me see.’
Dodya pulled the broken teapot out from under the box.
‘Well, look here – the spout’s gone!’ said the soldier. He gave a whistle. ‘Here a moment ago and now it’s flown off somewhere, just like a little bird.’
The commissar looked at the teapot, thought for a moment, and then said to the soldier: ‘All right then, go and fetch two of the security guards.’
He turned to the journalists. ‘Your documents.’
The journalists readily retrieved their documents, but their hands were shaking. The commissar waited patiently. He looked them over slowly and then placed them in his jacket pocket.
‘Our documents are all in order, Comrade Commissar,’ said Grey Spats. ‘Why are you taking them?’
‘I see they’re in order,’ the commissar answered before turning to me with an expectant look.
‘Comrade Commissar, there’s something you should know,’ Grey Spats spoke up again. ‘This citizen turned up in our wagon in Moscow, even though we told him to leave. As far as we know, he doesn’t have a travel permit or an exit visa. He’s the one you should be checking. As loyal Soviet citizens, we were planning on reporting him to you but simply didn’t have a chance.’
‘And how exactly did you, loyal Soviet citizens that you all are, come to the conclusion that he doesn’t have a permit or visa? Do you know him?’
‘No, not at all.’
‘To slander him, you need to know him,’ the commissar instructed. ‘And we know all about persons who like to hide diamonds in the spouts of teapots. We usually catch about five of them a week. You need to be creative in such matters. Creative, you hear me?’ The commissar rapped on the teapot with his knuckles. ‘And so, my good citizens, follow me. Let’s go and have a little talk. You can leave your things here for now. Sidorov, Yershikov,’ he said to two armed Red Army soldiers standing by the wagon, ‘take them to my office. This one’ – here he pointed at me – ‘we can leave for the time being. And make sure they don’t throw anything out of their pockets on the way. Understood?’