One afternoon the young man came over to me and said, “Angela Davis!”
“Gitler!” said Viktor, grinning.
“Angela Davis karasho,” said Gitler and began to rant in Russian about the way Angela Davis had been persecuted in America. He shook his broom at me, his hair falling over his eyes, and he continued quite loudly until Vassily banged on the table.
“Politics!” said Vassily. “We don’t want politics here. This is a restaurant, not a university.” He spoke in Russian, but his message was plain and he was obviously very angry with Gitler.
The rest were embarrassed. They sent Gitler to the kitchen and brought another bottle of wine. Vassily said, “Gitler — ni karasho!” But it was Viktor who was the most conciliatory. He stood up and folded his arms, and, shushing the kitchen staff, he said in a little voice:
Zee fearst of My,
Zee ’art of sprreng!
Oh, leetle seeng,
En everyseen we do,
Remember always to say “pliz”
En dun forget “sank you”!
Later, Viktor took me to his compartment to show me his new fur hat. He was very proud of it, since it had cost him nearly a week’s pay. The pretty waitress, Nina, was also in the compartment, which was shared by Vassily and Anna — quite a crowd for a space no bigger than an average-sized clothes closet. Nina showed me her passport and the picture of her mother and, while this was going on, Viktor disappeared. I put my arm around Nina and with my free hand took off her white scullion’s cap. Her black hair fell to her shoulders. I held her tightly and kissed her, tasting the kitchen. The train was racing. But the compartment door was open, and Nina pulled away and said softly, “Nyet, nyet, nyet.”
On the day before Christmas, in the afternoon, we arrived at Sverdlovsk. The sky was leaden and it was very cold. I hopped out the door and watched an old man being taken down the stairs to the platform. While he was being moved, the blankets had slipped down to his chest, where his hands lay rigid, two gray claws, their color matching his face. His son went over and pulled the blankets high to cover his mouth. He knelt in the ice and packed a towel around the old man’s head.
Seeing me standing nearby, the son said in German, “Sverdlovsk. This is where Europe begins and Asia ends. Here are the Urals.” He pointed toward the back of the train and said, “Asia,” and then toward the engine, “Europe.”
“How is your father?” I asked, when the stretcher bearers arrived and put on their harnesses. The stretcher was a hammock, slung between them.
“I think he’s dead,” he said. “Das vedanya.”
My depression increased as we sped toward Perm in a whirling snowstorm. The logging camps and villages lay half-buried, and behind them were birches a foot thick, the ice on their branches giving them the appearance of silver filigree. I could see children crossing a frozen river in the storm, moving so slowly in the direction of some huts, they broke my heart. I lay back on my berth and took my radio, its plastic cold from standing by the window, and tried to find a station. I put up the antenna — the zombie now sharing my compartment watched me from behind his clutter of uncovered food. A lot of static, then a French station, then “Jingle Bells.” The zombie smiled. I switched it off.
The next morning, Christmas, I woke and looked over at the zombie sleeping with his arms folded on his chest like a mummy’s. The provodnik told me it was six o’clock Moscow time. My watch said eight. I put it back two hours and waited for dawn, surprised that so many people in the car had decided to do the same thing. In darkness we stood at the windows, watching our reflections. Shortly afterward I saw why they were there. We entered the outskirts of Yaroslavl and I heard the others whispering to themselves. The old lady in the frilly nightgown, the Goldi man and his wife and child, the domino-playing drunks, even the zombie who had been monkeying with my radio: they pressed their faces against the windows as we began rattling across a long bridge. Beneath us, half-frozen, very black, and in places reflecting the flames of Yaroslavl’s chimneys, was the Volga.
… Royal David’s city,
Stood a lowly cattle shed …
What was that? Sweet voices, as clear as organ tones, drifted from my compartment. I froze and listened. The Russians, awestruck by the sight of the Volga, had fallen silent; they were hunched, staring down at the water. But the holy music, fragrant and slight, moved through the air, warming it like an aroma.
Where a Mother laid her Baby
In a manger for His bed …
The hymn wavered, but the silent reverence of the Russians and the slowness of the train allowed the soft children’s voices to perfume the corridor. My listening became a meditation of almost unbearable sadness, as if joy’s highest refinement was borne on a needle point of pain.
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 program of Christmas music from the BBC. Dawn never came that day. We traveled 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 afterimage on the eye. I had never felt close to the country, but the fog distanced me even more, and I felt, after six thousand 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 Old Patagonian Express
Travel Is a Vanishing Act
TRAVEL IS A VANISHING ACT, A SOLITARY TRIP DOWN A pinched line of geography to oblivion.
What’s become of Waring
Since he gave us all the slip?
But a travel book is the opposite, the loner bouncing back bigger than life to tell the story of his experiment with space. It is the simplest sort of narrative, an explanation which is its own excuse for the gathering up and the going. It is motion given order by its repetition in words. That sort of disappearance is elemental, but few come back silent. And yet the convention is to telescope travel writing, to start — as so many novels do — in the middle of things, to beach the reader in a bizarre place without having first guided him there. “The white ants had made a meal of my hammock,” the book might begin; or “Down there, the Patagonian valley deepened to gray rock, wearing its eons’ stripes and split by floods.” Or, to choose actual first sentences at random from three books within arm’s reach:
It was towards noon on March 1, 1898, that I first found myself entering the narrow and somewhat dangerous harbour of Mombasa, on the east coast of Africa. (The Man-Eaters of Tsavo, by Lt. Col. J. H. Patterson)
“Welcome!” says the big signboard by the side of the road as the car completes the corkscrew ascent from the heat of the South Indian plains into an almost alarming coolness. (Ooty Preserved, by Mollie Panter-Downes)