Ghost Train to the Eastern Star

THE TRANS-SIBERIAN EXPRESS

VLADIVOSTOK, so far from Moscow — almost six thousand miles — still retained many of its Soviet trappings: a gesticulating Lenin statue, a decaying GUM store, government offices with patriotic heroes in bronze waving from the roof, and that enduring Soviet trait, stone-faced bureaucracy. It had always been a city of delay and death, and now it was poverty-stricken as well, distant, out of touch, and underfunded. Beset by woolly sea fog, and yellow slush and black snow in early February, it couldn't have looked grimmer when it had been the fearsome railway junction for prisoners and slave laborers, victims of Stalin's Great Purge, sent to be worked to death in the far northern mines of Kolyma and Magadan. Some didn't make it that far. The great poet Osip Mandelstam (and many other prisoners) died in a nearby transit prison. His chief crime had been to write a poem in which he satirized Stalin as a ludicrous brute, in lines such as "His fingers are fat as grubs" and "His cockroach whiskers leer" and "All we hear is the Kremlin mountaineer / The murderer and peasant-slayer."

The new Russia showed in Vladivostok's dreary casinos, the Mercedes dealership, the girlie shows that catered to sailors, and the piles of Russian tit-and-bum magazines that were sold by shivering old ladies in ragged overcoats all over town. Ignored and neglected, a decaying city and a navy base at the edge of the frozen world, Vladivostok had become one of the Siberian centers of skinhead gang activity. These chalky-faced and blue-headed thugs in boots and black leather jackets were straight out of A Clockwork Orange, even speaking an argot similar to that which Anthony Burgess had fashioned for his characters from Russian: droogs and chelovek and glazzies. But the skinheads were meaner and racist, with Hitlerian views. They swaggered the slushy streets, looking for dusky foreigners to beat to a pulp, and misspelling English graffiti (WITE POWER was one) with spray cans on walls, along with swastikas.

But just when I thought that this icebound city represented nothing more than a glacial point of departure, I was sitting in the hotel bar and the gods of travel delivered to me a horse's ass. He was a honking Englishman, almost unbelievable in his prejudices and pomposities, fresh off the plane from Moscow for a business meeting, monologuing to his Russian friend, who was either very tired or else, like him, drunk.

"What you need to do is to bring back the monarchy," the Englishman said in the screechy confident voice the English use on foreigners. He thumped his table and looked out on the thawing city of muddy slush, the wind blowing off the steppe.

"Da," the Russian said with no enthusiasm.

"Romanovs aren't hard to find. And Putin is useless, the place is corrupt. Mind you, I like corrupt countries — at least one knows where one stands. Get the czar back on the throne, if you see what I mean. Get him out and about, shaking hands, a proper figurehead like our queen."

"Da," the Russian said, but it was more of a question.

"But England's finished. It'll take twenty years to recover from the damage Blair's done. He's destroyed the place completely. They don't give a stuff about the general populace. Blair's wrecked it."

The Russian seemed to be dozing and didn't reply to the squeaking, grinning voice, the middle-aged Englishman in full cry, wailing about his destitution as an aristocrat.

"We're the fifty-first state. We're just an appendage of America. It's pathetic. But look — Vladivostok! We've flown seven hours and we're still in Russia. It's amazing. This is still Europe!"

I was going to say, Europe? But I thought: No, this is too good to interrupt.

"Soviets don't interest me. Soviet history is a bore. Borodino! That's more like it. I was there the other day. Lovely. It's all been preserved. Russia is monumental. Did I say I didn't mind the corruption? I don't mind. It gives an edge to the country. But Britain — you can have it. Viktor?"

"Da?"

"Bring the czar back!"

That was the second night, after I'd recovered from arriving in the dark, at the faraway airport, and quarreling with the taxi drivers, who demanded $100 to drive me here. When I refused, they drove away, leaving me standing in the snow; but who doesn't have a rapacious-taxi-driver story?

Killing time at the post office on the third day, I saw a young woman of twenty-two or so, rather earnest and plain, wearing a heavy coat, sitting at one of the littered wooden tables, hunched over, making a fair copy of a letter that began, Dear Sirs! I wish to introduce myself to Philip Morris Company…

"Maybe I can help you," I said. "Are you looking for a job?"

My eye fell on another line: I have unique vast experience to think outside the box.

"Who are you?" she demanded, scowling at me. "What do you want?"

"I used to be an English teacher," I said. That got her attention. "Mind if I look?"

It was a letter of introduction, to accompany an application for a job at a tobacco company based in Switzerland. The dense full-page paragraph, rather old-fashioned in expression and handwriting flourishes, was scattered with grammatical errors. I made some suggestions, corrected the grammar, and advised her to break it into shorter paragraphs, to make it easier to read.

"Thank you," she said.

"It would help if you got it typed and printed."

She shook her head. "That is too expensive."

"It would make a better impression. I'll pay for it," I said, and took out some rubles and looked at her signature. "An investment in your future, Anna."

She became fierce and snatched up the letter. "I will never accept charity from you!"

This attracted the attention of the other people at the big post office table — some old women, a young woman with a baby, and a bearded old man in felt boots who'd been sleeping on his arms. They looked at me and then at Anna, and they waited for another outburst.

But Anna began to whisper in a harsh voice. She was strangely stubborn and full of warnings. She wanted to leave Vladivostok. She said I should do the same.

"I'm leaving tonight," I said.

"Leave now. You are not safe here," she said. "People will steal your mobile phone. They will find the password. Yes! They have so many ways to do it. You don't know. Why did you come here?"

"To take the train."

"There is so much crime in this city. You can write me a letter, but maybe someone will steal it out of my mail container."

"What about this letter?"

"It will be stolen! I want to work. I have sent five letters. But my dream? It is to have my own business. Information technology."

In this cold and chaotic place, she sat in the stinking post office in her old coat, sending out letters, plotting to leave, as I was. I tramped around the snowy streets as soot drifted from the sky, and I encountered the inevitable pair of American Mormons. One of them, Elder Hogue from Salt Lake City, was buttonholing strangers and passing out invitations.

"What's happening?"

"A film," Elder Hogue said. "You're welcome to come and see it."

I glanced at the leaflet. It was a screening of a film dramatizing one of the great events adumbrated in Mormon doctrine, the visit of Jesus Christ to Central America after he was crucified, in the year 33. Jesus had preached to the Mayans.

"I've seen that film already," I said. "Jesus giving a sermon on the pyramid. I'm wondering if it really happened."

"Surely it happened," Elder Hogue said, chuckling at my doubt. He had the torpid smile and steady gaze of the evangelist, which was also the expression of the car salesman sizing up a flat-footed customer. I was impressed that, in this terrible place, he looked so presentable and healthy, and he and his fellow missionary were possibly the only people in Vladivostok wearing a white shirt and a necktie.

"How's things in Vladivostok?"

"We're meeting some people," he said. That seemed ambiguous. I asked him to explain. He said, "We knock on doors. But it's a sad place. Gangs. Drugs. Corruption. Thievery. I've been robbed. They took my computer. The place is going downhill — just look at it. I've got another whole year."

"You can set them on the right path," I said.

"I know we can," he said, and made a dive at a passerby, an old man who took the leaflet, and Elder Hogue began chatting with him in fluent Russian, framing the Mormon message.

***

VLADIVOSTOK STATION BULKED against the harbor, a weirdly pretentious example of Russian railway design, with dense walls and great sloping roofs and cupolas and steeples wearing witches' hats, and a clock showing the right time. The whole thing was impressive until I went inside, where its bare interior was echoey and cold. The waiting room was filled with wooden benches, like church pews. Although the station was unheated and rather stark, some of the public rooms had colorful murals of railway scenes.

I was leaning on the banister that led to the outside platform, reading Murakami's Sputnik Sweetheart. A young Japanese man approached me.

"I like Dance Dance Dance," he said.

His name was Nobuatsu Sekine. A persevering traveler, Nobu was taking the Rossiya to Moscow and doing a grand tour of Europe. Like me, he had arrived a few days before in Vladivostok.

"What do you think so far?"

"Very primitive. Very dirty," he said.

He pointed out that the station had no conveniences, no shops, no bar, no newsstand, not even any heat. He was burdened by a heavy backpack and a bulging shopping bag.

"What have you got there?"

"Noodles, beer, bottles of water. You don't have any?"

I said no, it hadn't occurred to me to buy provisions. "But I have half a pound of powdered green tea from Kyoto."

"I'll watch your bag if you want to go buy food. There's a market across the street."

Taking his suggestion, I hurried out of the station and into the nighttime snow flurry to the market. I bought noodles, beer, water, and chocolate cookies, and over the next seven days, whenever I saw Nobu, I thanked him for his suggestion. I did not see him often. He was traveling hard class and I was in soft.

We watched an express train pull out of the station for China. It would arrive in Harbin, capital of Heilongjiang Province, the following morning. Most of the passengers were Chinese traders who had come to Vladivostok to sell clothes and household goods and electronics. They were taking nothing back to China but money. They looked delighted to be heading home.

About an hour before the Rossiya left, I found my coach and introduced myself to the conductor, a woman in a Russian Railways uniform — black jacket with gold braid, black skirt, black boots. She showed me to my compartment, calling it a kupe, where a dark balding man with Levantine features was already sitting, talking on the phone.

"Where are you going?" I asked. If he said Moscow, I would have him as a roommate for seven days.

"Khabarovsk," he said.

"Tomorrow?" I said.

He confirmed this. He said there was no flight there — in most of Siberia the only reliable way to get around was the railway. He added that his English wasn't very good. But it wasn't bad, though he had a heavy accent. His name was Rashid. He was about fifty, a Kurd, originally from Iraq but had been brought to Armenia with his parents in the 1960s. For close to twenty years he had been living in remote Kamchatka, a frozen appendage of far eastern Siberia in the Sea of Okhotsk. He was a businessman in Petropavlovsk. He had four children — he showed me their pictures, stored on his cell phone.

"You're nearer to Alaska than Moscow."

"I been Yeleska." He'd done a circuit, starting and finishing in the Arctic: Kamchatka-Yeleska-Meeamee-Yolando-Deesnee Whorl-Teexah-Yeleska-Kamchatka.

As we were talking, the train whistle blew and we left Vladivostok, heading north to Khabarovsk and then turning left for the long haul around northeastern China.

Seeing that I had pulled out my map, Rashid put his finger on Afghanistan and said, "I was here, too. And here. And here."

"What doing?"

"Fighting."

Moving his finger, he traced his route through towns to the east and south of Mazar-i-Sharif, the places where he had fought in the Soviet army from 1985 to 1987, marching with his battalion, dragging cannons, firing on Afghan positions. He smiled as he read the names of the towns he'd bivouacked in: "Kunduz!…Baghlan!"

"What do you think about that war?"

"Big mistake."

"For you?"

"For us. For you. For anyone. Afghanistan" — and he smiled again—"I seenk no one can win in Afghanistan, except Afghanistan people."

Rashid made a few more phone calls while I sorted out papers. To keep busy, I intended to write notes for a memory of my father. Since his death, I had been unable to write about him without becoming sad; but now, almost twelve years on, I felt it was time. He was a loving father, a private man, and a hard worker without any obvious ambition. Although he was a reader of history, of classic novels, he had never read anything I'd written; or, if he had, he'd never mentioned the fact to me.

With a week of solitude on the train ahead of me, I knew I could write a portrait of this kind and somewhat mysterious man.

Suddenly Rashid said, "Why America doesn't like Azerbaijan?"

"I'm not sure."

"They are on side of Georgia."

"There aren't many Armenians in America, but they're powerful. They want the U.S. government to settle the Nagorno-Karabakh problem."

"Political problem! It's all stupid." He laughed. He pointed to himself. "I live in Kamchatka!"

It was like saying he was from another planet, and a glance at the map confirmed it. He said he'd gone to Kamchatka after he'd finished fighting in Afghanistan and left the army. I had the impression that his wish was to get as far away from political follies as possible.

I said, "Rashid, you're a Muslim?"

"Not Muslim. Zoroastrian. When the sun comes up, I pray."

"Where else are there Zoroastrians?"

"Plenty in Iraq. Plenty in Turkey. India — many."

This led to talk of the Iraq War.

"America in Iraq," he said, shaking his head. "Yes, Saddam was a problem. He killed my people. He gassed them, he bombed them. Not good. But this American war? It is" — he spread his hands for emphasis— "disaster."

He went back to phoning, I went back to reading the history of the yakuza I'd bought in Niigata. Then I was drowsing, and I turned my reading light off. Rashid did the same. Then I heard him clear his throat.

"Who will be next president?" he said in the darkness, over the banging of the train's wheels.

"I don't know."

"Maybe Gillary," he said.

"Gillary?"

"Gillary Cleenton."

"I like Obama."

"Black one. Good one, I seenk," he said.

I slept soundly, and the next morning at nine we arrived in Khabarovsk. Rashid gave me a bag of tangerines he'd bought in Vladivostok and stepped into the snow.

As the train pulled out, I went to breakfast. I was the only customer. The ornate wood-paneled dining car, with mirrors and lace curtains, was dirty, the tablecloths spattered and stained with food, the floor littered, the woodwork scummy. One end of the car was stacked with beer crates. An unshaven knob-nosed man with wild hair sat at one of the tables, tapping on a computer with black fingernails, a cigarette between his lips.

After a while he surprised me by getting up and handing me a bilingual menu. His hands were grubby. He scribbled my order and went to the kitchen. He was gone a long time. I imagined his dirty hands and drooping cigarette. A submissive old woman, who was probably his wife, brought me a cup of coffee and the omelet I'd ordered. When I asked for bread—khlyeb, one of the Russian words I knew — the wild-haired man yelled at his wife and she brought it.

This experience gave me a taste for instant noodles and green tea in my compartment on succeeding mornings, easily prepared using the samovar that is provided on every Russian train — always accessible, always steaming.

The sun was up, the day was bright. Somewhere, bathed in sunbeams, Rashid was murmuring a Zoroastrian prayer. Out the window the land was flat, scattered with emblematic birch trees, some of them bulked with crows' nests. The snow was thin enough so that brown tussocks showed through.

I settled down and began to write about my father, and a few hours later, at a brief stop, the provodnitsa introduced herself as Olga. We were, she said, at Birobidzhan.

One station sign was spelled out in Hebrew letters, the other in Cyrillic. The station building was newish, red brick, and empty. In the distance I could see a gold-domed church, barracks-like tenements, thick birch logs stacked in railway cars, and a large factory. Even in the glorious snow-gleam, the sun shining in the frost-sparkle, the icy-bright trees, it looked like an open prison. Birobidzhan, at the edge of China, in the heart of eastern Siberia, was the capital of Yevreyskaya Oblast, the Jewish autonomous region. No one got off or on the train.

The proof that Siberia was a simple world simplified even further by snow was the market on the snowy platform at Obluche in the middle of that first afternoon. Old women sold dumplings (verenike) filled with cabbage and potato, fried fish, hard-boiled eggs, bottles of water, and squares of chocolate. It was the sort of merchandise you'd see on a railway platform in Africa. Little tables of hopeful hawkers, a few rubles changing hands, and they begin packing up as the train leaves, the arrival of the train being the big event of the day.

I soon saw why. Obluche was a place of wooden cabins and snowbound cottages, huts at the outskirts, like a scene of a nineteenth-century settlement in a Minnesota winter — the small cabins, the picket fences, the thick icicles, and the chimneys sending up smoke, and beyond them a great emptiness of snowfields. No footsteps, no car tracks, not another human being or a vehicle, and China was just beneath the horizon, within walking distance if you had snowshoes.

Even at the larger stations no people appeared, nothing stirred. Bureya was a low town of square Siberian cottages, some prettified with gingerbread, with smoking chimneys. Where the fences had fallen and the birches iced up, the delicacy of black and white, the land looked like an Andy Wyeth snowscape.

Most days were to be like that, villages of low smoking huts, like Amazar on the Shilka River, hundreds of chimneys sending up white smoke, huddled behind flimsy wooden fences, many miles apart, birch groves, bare trees, a monumental emptiness of snow and sky, the Trans-Siberian moving across the snow like a ship across a frozen sea.

After two days and two nights we had penetrated to an even more desolate region. I had my yakuza book to read, some more Simenons. And I had some writing to do — notes on this trip and the memoir of my father, who, every day as I wrote about him, seemed to recede, smiling pityingly at me.

When I boarded this train in the winter of 1973-V41 had no clear idea how many days it would take to get to Moscow. With delays and blizzards, it ran late, and I ended up spending Christmas on it, feeling miserable and homesick. Now I had my kupe to myself. I could not have been more content, sitting in this privacy, watching the cooling gold light from the sinking sun redden the snow and the birch bark, making the world seem so far away. I was released from all concerns, floating across the snowfields.

I made another visit to the dining car. The knob-nosed waiter-chef was a whole day dirtier and grouchier. His fingernails were still rimmed with black; he wore a black cotton hoodie and dark woolen trousers and heavy boots. His thick glasses were smeared with grease. He smoked and tapped on his old computer, but when he took my order he scribbled with a pencil on torn scraps of paper.

"Salyanka" I said. Stew. And, enunciating slowly, "Ya-ich-nitsa" Fried eggs.

With the sort of frustrated intelligence that made him impatient and resentful, he had the look of a Dostoyevskian anarchist or a dissident. But of course he was neither, just an underpaid slob who ran the unpopular dining car with his wife. All this woman ever did was roll paper napkins on a stick to make them into tubes that she placed in vases on the tables to mimic bouquets. Apart from a few drunks, I never saw any other diners. I began to avoid the dining car.

A few days later, I encountered the waiter-chef's wife in the vestibule of one of the cars. It was thick with layers of frozen ice and blown-in snow.

She gabbled at me. I was sure she was saying, "Where have you been? Come and eat!" But by then I was living on noodles and the smoked fish and sausages I bought on the railway platforms.

Mogocha, one of those platforms, was a sprawl of houses, some big wolf-like dogs frolicking in the snow, a man in a fur hat lifting his boots high because of the deep drifts, and a bus chugging down a riverbank and across a frozen river. Many of the cottages had carved and ornamented blue shutters — a small wood-burning town, looking centuries old, as perhaps it was.

In the past I had sneered at a half-buried place like this and wanted to move on. Now I saw it as not bleak but peaceful, a quiet refuge, muffled by snowdrifts, entirely self-sufficient, too far from Moscow for anyone to care about it, the sort of place I might live in if it weren't so damnably cold.

For hundreds of years this region had been a place of exile. At dusk that day we came to Chernyshevsk-Zabaikalsky. It was as remote and cozy-looking as Mogocha, and it had been a prison for the literary critic and novelist Nikolai Chernyshevsky, who had been exiled there in 1864. His was another typical story of the dangers of expressing an opinion in Russia, but he was a czarist victim. He had advocated the freeing of serfs and the emancipation of women, and he had argued in many essays that art needed a purpose. After enduring a mock execution, he spent twenty-five years in hard labor and Siberian exile. His crime? "Subversion." Four months after returning home from Siberia, he died, aged sixty-one. He had written a novel while in exile, called What Is to Be Done? (Shto Delat?), and it became a socialist tract, which was why there was a brooding silver statue of the man in front of the railway station.

I was reminded here, and elsewhere on this train, of something Nabokov wrote in one of his essays — that much of Russian literature has the smell of the prison library.

***

BEING ON THE TRANS-SIBERIAN was indeed like being on a ship, not any old ship, and not a cruise liner, but an old iron freighter plowing through a frozen sea, complete with grumpy deckhands, bad food, and an invisible captain. And with the same sort of smugness for the passenger inside that I happened to be, warm and comfortable, the deadly elements out the window, the sleet sometimes lashing the glass.

If there was a Trans-Siberian challenge, the seven nights and days on the long-distance train, it wasn't getting the visa or the ticket or finding one's way to Vladivostok; it was the usual obstacle in travel, the mental challenge. Russians overcame it by staying drunk — the men, anyway. So when I roamed around the train, all I saw were people drinking beer or vodka or else sleeping it off. For a Russian, a train journey of this length was a bender, and because of this, most of them were incoherent.

Nobu was hopping to keep warm on the snowy platform of Ulan-Ude in the early morning. I asked him how he was managing.

"The men in my compartment are very alcoholic," Nobu said. "They start in the morning when they wake up. They drink all day."

He didn't drink. He was snapping pictures and making notes. Now and then we met in a vestibule and talked about Murakami's novels or tried to guess how cold it was outside.

A Mongolian-looking man approached me at Ulan-Ude — squat, round-cheeked, Asiatic. As this was the railway junction for the line to Mongolia and China, I was curious to know his ethnicity. He told me he was a Buryat, and would I like to buy some manti7?

They were steaming meat-filled dumplings — I knew the word because I'd heard manti for dumpling in Turkey and elsewhere.

As he wrapped them, he said, "You American?"

"Yes, American."

"Mee-sippi," he said. "Al-bama. Flodda."

"I'm from Boston."

"Boston Bruins," he said without hesitating, still wrapping the dumplings.

"You like hockey?"

"New York Rangers," he said and handed me the package of dumplings. "Good manti. Sank you. Good journey."

What sent this cheery soul away was the sight of three drunks from the train staggering towards us. It was not yet nine in the morning. They were crapulous and carrying blue cans of beer, one of them with a can in each hand.

"We Marine!" one of them said to me. He told me his name was Fyodor and that they were based on a ship in Vladivostok.

The others began to shout incoherently. They wore track suits and slippers. They were going to Nizhni Novgorod, three days west of here.

When they had gone, I saw Nobu taking a picture of Ulan-Ude Station, where, under the station sign, the temperature was given in a lozenge of red lights. It was minus-17 Celsius.

My surprise in this frozen station in the middle of the Siberian steppe was that my BlackBerry buzzed with messages, some of them from Penelope, quite a few urging me to buy Viagra or to have my penis enlarged or to invest in promising stocks. Spam in the wilderness. But a mile out of Ulan-Ude it went dead — as it had been through the whole of Japan — and its only use was as a night light or (as I had used it for months) an emergency flashlight when I woke at night and groped down the carriage to take a piss.

Rolling through deepening snow — the effect of Lake Baikal — I spent the day writing about my father and thinking how nothing had changed on the line since I'd last taken it, thirty-three years ago. The train was still a big clanking antique, the food was still filthy, the trackside villages were still collections of wood-burning bungalows. The railway personnel, especially the women, were diligent about knocking the ice out of the drains with a long-handled ax and keeping the samovar going, but apart from that, there was no service to speak of. They were inattentive to passengers, but scrupulous about standing at attention in uniform by the coach at every stop.

What seemed a sprinkling of snow chips in the late afternoon under a darkened sky thickened to a whirling mass of snowflakes and finally a blizzard that entirely obscured Baikal — quite a storm, since it was the largest lake in the world. Out of the snowstorm at Slyudyanka a mob of hawkers, old men and women in fur hats, lifted bags of smoked fish and jostled in the doorway.

"What is this?" I asked Dimitri, who was in a kupe in my coach.

"Is omul. Good wiz beer," Dimitri said.

Omul was a sort of salmon trout found only in Lake Baikal. Prized by Russians, who made an effort to travel all this way to buy this fish, it was sold cold-smoked (stiff and dried) or warm-smoked (soft and fleshy and aromatic). I bought two bags of each.

The fishmongers in the falling snow at Slyudyanka were a glimpse of old Russia, not just their beautiful fur hats and big bulgy coats and thick mittens, but their dark frozen faces, their deeply pitted noses, as they pushed the bags of fish to the potential buyers on the train. A hundred years ago it could not have looked any different: the same boots, the same mittens and furs and ragged scarves, the same waiting on the platform in the storm for the brief stop of the long-distance train, the same look of urgency.

We stopped again at Irkutsk while I feasted on the fish. Darkness fell, the train plowed slowly through the night, and in the morning frost-sparkle, four days on from Vladivostok, in another time zone, one of eight on this train trip, the landscape was unchanged: birches and black saplings in the snowfields passing the mud-flecked window.

A settlement of small cottages covered a whole slope of a hillside.

"Dachas?" I asked Dimitri, just a guess, because there was no smoke in the chimneys. As soon as I said it, I thought: It's a surmise, because travelers are always inventing the country they're passing through.

"Yes," he said. "People from Krasnoyarsk, they come here in the summer."

"It's a whole village."

"Not a village," Dimitri said. "A station."

"What's the difference?"

"No post office. No shop. No school," he said. He was making a distinction between a seasonal camp and a real settlement.

Dimitri was from Krasnoyarsk, an hour down the line. He had studied mining at the local university. It was a city of mines — I saw many from the train — some of them gold mines, surface diggings. Gold has been mined this way in Russia for more than three hundred years.

What interested me about Dimitri was that he was completely satisfied, as a Russian worker, a resident of Krasnoyarsk, a voter and householder and citizen. As we were talking in the corridor of the train, his cell phone rang.

He answered it, and when he was through talking he said, "That was my boss. He knew I was on the train. He wants me to work today. It's okay. I like my work."

He was employed by a company that made mining equipment that was shipped all over the country, even to distant Kolyma and Vladivostok.

Dimitri was about thirty, not tall but muscular. He skied in the hills around Krasnoyarsk, he rode his motorcycle in better weather, he lifted weights. He had his own apartment but was looking for a bigger one, "maybe when I get married." He drove a new Toyota Corolla. He wanted a Lexus. He was ambitious but contented, not a boozer, a nonsmoker — that rare individual, a sober, happy Russian.

He had no desire to travel, except to Moscow and St. Petersburg. He said he wished he spoke English better.

"Your English is fine."

He tapped his front teeth. "You say 'teef' or 'teet'?"

"Teeth."

"Teef," he said.

"I have thirty-two teeth."

"I have feerty-two teef," he said.

Muttering this mantra, he got off the train with the paperbacks I'd read — three Simenons, the Murakami, and the yakuza book. I bought apple juice, yogurt, salami, bread, and smoked salmon from a babushka at the improvised market on the platform at Krasnoyarsk, and I picnicked in my compartment and watched Siberia go past.

Snow, birches, huddled cottages, crows, distant ridges "eyelashed with firs," trackless snow all day, and then another night in the train. By now I was stuporous in the daytime and spent my nights dreaming, waking exhausted from the variety. Memorial services figured in two dreams, orations (by me) in one, flying (by me) in two, and in a memorable dream I was visited by my dead father, who explained, "I'm just checking in."

The previous night, my fifth on the train, we passed through Omsk, where Dostoyevsky had spent four years imprisoned. He'd written about it vividly in The House of the Dead.

Staring at the dense pine forest — the taiga — I drowsed all day, intermittently writing about my father, knowing that towards midnight on this sixth day I would be getting off at the city of Perm. We passed Ishim, where there were tire tracks on the frozen rivers: in winter, Siberian rivers serve as thoroughfares for vehicles. At Tyumen around noon, I bought some chicken from an old woman on the snowy platform, and late in the afternoon, around five, at Yekaterinburg, city of regicide. Guided tours were advertised of the site where the czar and his family had been shot in 1918. Yekaterinburg was the first substantial city I'd come to on the line — it had been named Sverdlovsk on my earlier trip, when I'd arrived on Christmas Eve, at precisely the same time of day. Then, watching a boy hoist his dead father in a stretcher off the train, my depression was complete. This time, I thought: We're on time, we'll arrive in Perm at midnight, and — as I had not washed for a week — I'll probably have a bath.

***

"PERM IS A MODERN INDUSTRIAL city that most travelers could bear to miss," the guidebook said. But surely that was just as inaccurate as this same guidebook's rubbishing my Great Railway Bazaar as "caustic," with travel guide solemnity and philistinism. My visit to Perm was to be memorable and enlightening, especially in the snow-muffled silence of the Siberian winter.

"We were on a secret Pentagon list of Soviet cities to be destroyed!" a Permian man boasted to me soon after I arrived. Because of its rocket factories, its cannon plants, and its manufacture of explosives, Perm was closed to foreigners when I passed through in 1973. Perm was another transit point for Siberian slave labor — had been so since czarist times — and out of town had some of the largest and fiercest prisons in the gulag. Rocket-making, arbitrary incarceration, and torture were the industries in Perm until just the other day when, in February 1992, the prison here was closed and foreigners were allowed to visit, to attend the ballet, to eat juicy posikunchiki ("pissing dumplings") in the good restaurants, to wander the snowy streets, to watch the local fatties jump naked into holes chopped in icy ponds, to drive among the empty hills, the taiga, the mixed forest, through tiny wooden one-story villages, and to see the worst gulag, Perm 36—all of which I managed to do.

Tiny crystals of frost shone in the lights of the main station — not the same station that Yuri Zhivago detrains at in the second part ("Train to the Urals") of Doctor Zhivago, when he first sets eyes on the city. Perm looked much the same today: "It clung to the summit of the hill in tiers, house by house and street by street, with a big church in the middle of the top, as in a cheap color print of a desert monastery or of Mount Athos." Much of the action of that mournful fifty-year-old novel of love and struggle takes place in Perm, called Yuriatin, "another territory, a different, provincial world, which had a center of gravity of its own."

A city or a landscape that has been described in a novel, even in a distorted way, is made more visible and accessible, even hallowed, with a quality of everlastingness. So I was happy to be in Perm and off the train, but I had become so used to the train's vibrations and my narrow berth, I could hardly sleep in my hotel bed. I was like a startled child in a cradle that had ceased to rock.

In the dark early morning, I met my guide, Sergei, and his translator, Yelena. They'd brought a friend, Viktor Shmirov, an authority on the gulag system and one of its historians. We got into Sergei's car and began driving on the white streets of packed snow, under sulfurous streetlamps.

"Why does the guidebook write that about Perm?" Sergei asked when I mentioned the jibe. "This city is full of history. Dostoyevsky stopped here on his way to Omsk. The Diaghilev family is from here. Chekhov of course — this is the setting for Three Sisters. And Pasternak's book. The city is full of history!"

Dostoyevsky was on his way to prison and had spent only one night here. Sergei Diaghilev fled the city and spent his life in Paris as a balletomane. For Chekhov it was the epitome of stifling provincial cities ("When can we go to Moscow?" the three sisters keep moaning), and Pasternak had been regarded as a literary pariah until fifteen years ago.

I mentioned that Three Sisters depicted Perm unfavorably, the stifled sisters longing to leave for Moscow.

"Because Chekhov had a problem," Sergei said. Sergei's English was not bad, but he preferred to speak Russian. Yelena sat behind me, translating. "He was turned away from a building because he was wearing the wrong clothes. He never forgave them for this."

This episode is not mentioned by any of Chekhov's biographers, only the fact that in 1890 he arrived by river in Perm at two o'clock one April morning and left the same day at six in the evening, on a train heading east. He was on his long Siberian trip — eighty-one days from Moscow to Vladivostok, on his way to the penal settlement at Sakhalin. Still, sixteen hours in Perm was enough for a genius like Chekhov to sum up the city as stifling.

"It's like this," Sergei said. "What if you went to a city and found a cockroach in your soup?" A big beefy man, he was hunched over the wheel, steering us through the snow. He turned heavily in his seat and faced me, his hands still on the wheel of the slowly moving car. "You wouldn't like that city, would you? You'd always remember it. 'Ah, Perm, that's where I had the cockroach in my soup!'"

"But we have no cockroaches," Yelena said.

"Five years ago, all the cockroaches left Perm," Sergei said. "Was it radiation? Did they sense trouble coming? The professors can't answer this question."

"And now we are passing Bashaya Smirti," Viktor said.

"The Tower of Death," Yelena said and pointed up ahead at a wide gray tower, like a silo with a sloping roof, attached to a gray, ecclesiastical-looking building pierced by small windows.

"There was a wave of repression in the early 1950s," Viktor said as we made a circuit around the grim-looking tower. "The Tower of Death was built then for the KGB. People were taken here for interrogation."

I asked who those suspects might be.

"People regarded as 'cosmopolitan,'" he said. "Westernized. Not patriotic. Also what were known as 'left radicals.' Anti-Stalinists."

The terrifying tower loomed like an oversized crematorium near the center of Perm, so I asked the obvious question: "Did people in Perm call it the Tower of Death?"

"They didn't say it out loud. They whispered it," Viktor said. "Under Khrushchev they said it a little louder."

I mentioned that my favorite writer about the gulag, a man who had been extensively interrogated, was Varlam Shalamov, the author of Kolyma Tales.

"This is Shalamov's centenary," Viktor said, brightening. "His father was a priest, but Shalamov wasn't religious at all. It's amazing that someone with such a huge experience of prison life didn't become a Christian."

"Unlike Solzhenitsyn."

"Yes, and unlike Solzhenitsyn, he did twenty-seven years in Siberia. At the end, he lived in great poverty in Moscow. He died in obscurity."

Solzhenitsyn was the West's most famous zek, or prisoner. Yet in her exhaustive history of the prison system, Gulag, Anne Applebaum writes that his prison time was not onerous: "[Solzhenitsyn] was an unremarkable prisoner. He flirted with the authorities, served as an informer before seeing the light, and wound up working as a bricklayer." And Shalamov's Kolyma Tales, which she praises, she also describes as "among the bitterest in the entire camp genre."

We had left the outskirts of Perm and were headed northeast, into the snow and pine forests along an unplowed road. Aside from a few cars and heavy trucks, there was almost no traffic. The early morning darkness had lifted; we were traveling through slanting snowfall under a low gray sky.

"I want to tell you a story about the organs of power," Viktor said, Yelena translating. "I once had a chance to interview a peasant woman in the northern Perm region. She told me she had never left her village, except once. She had gone to Chernaya, a biggish town. She was very impressed because it was so beautiful. She was sitting quietly, admiring the place, when she heard someone say, 'Apoga is coming.'

"She knew the name. Apoga was the chairman of the Emergency Committee of the Cheka."

The Cheka was one of the previous incarnations of the KGB, now known as the FSB. It has undergone nineteen name changes since 1919, yet it is the same organization, devoted to spying, torture, and murder.

"Apoga was a frightening name to the woman. And the idea of seeing him was just terrible. Everyone was scared by the prospect of seeing this man. The woman left as soon as she could — went back to her village and never left again." Viktor raised his hands. His face was fixed in an expression of helpless pain. "People could be imprisoned for nothing. That man's name, Apoga, represented terror and fear."

I said, "The paradox is that at exactly the same time — the 1950s — we had McCarthy in the U.S. persecuting people for sympathizing with the Soviet Union."

Sergei was clucking "Nyet, nyet, nyet" before I could finish. "I've been to America," he said. "I know about McCarthyism. The problems were not on the same scale."

I had to agree, though the motives, the witch-hunts, the betrayals, the stink of fear — of ruined lives and lost jobs and disgrace — that hung over McCarthyism were similar.

"Here's a story," Sergei said. "Viktor says people were afraid. It's true. I know it from my own family. My grandmother's family was from Kirov" — Kirov was on the railway line, about eight hours west of Perm—"and they had eleven children, seven girls, four boys. My grandmother was considered educated, because she'd graduated from primary school with honors."

Yelena said, "Is also a joke, Paul."

"I get it." I also understood that he kept referring to his grandmother as babushka.

"Her father was a well-known butcher. This man was strong physically, a muscular man. Fifty years later he was still remembered in this province. At the time of the revolution," said Sergei, "my grandmother was seventeen. She got married at nineteen, and for eight years all was well. They were in that remote place. The secret police couldn't reach them.

"In the 1920s, Stalin wanted collectivization, so they came to my grandparents. Her father the butcher was a kulak" — a rich peasant, or one defying authority. "He had a beautiful house that he'd built himself. The inspector wanted the house for his own family. The house was very dear to the butcher.

"'Go to Siberia,' the government inspector said.

"What? Until then he had never worried about the powers of government. He was so upset he just lay down and died of a heart attack.

"His two sons — my great-uncles — ran away to fight against this unfair government. My grandmother stayed in the village. But she was scared. She knew the police were looking for her two brothers. At the same time, she was giving bread to her brothers when they sneaked home. The special police wanted to kill them. This was around 1930 or '31. A few years later they were found and shot by the police.

"My grandmother — her name was Matryona — wanted to bury her brothers but couldn't find their bodies. And her grief didn't end there. After World War Two there was a big famine. As the daughter of a kulak, with primary school honors — ha! — she was made head of a farm. There were no strong men left. She was suffering from hunger.

"In 1946, her son — my seventeen-year-old uncle — went looking for food. They were so hungry they'd go to the fields to look for grains of wheat that had been left behind after the harvest. He found a few grains. And he was seen. He was arrested for theft.

"He screamed at the police, 'You are monsters! You have food and we have nothing!'

"For saying that, he was given a twenty-five-year sentence. He spent it in Magadan and Kolyma, washing gravel for gold. There was almost no communication with his mother. In 1954 when Stalin died, he was rehabilitated. He died three years ago and — you know? — he would never speak a word about his imprisonment.

"My grandmother was so afraid of the KGB that when the name was mentioned she made a face. The worst document she'd ever seen in her life was that of her son's sentence. Imagine, twenty-five years. He would have got ten years for theft, but he screamed 'You monsters,' so he got fifteen more."

Now we were in the deep countryside, no other cars at all, and the road was buried in snow. The landscape was like a charcoal drawing on white paper — the black woods and the smudged sky and the whiteness of the blizzard.

"There are thousands of such stories," Viktor said. "It's a story of terror. People were afraid of anyone in power. The system was cruel. The whole basis of it was that Stalin wanted slave labor."

All this time, Yelena was translating and I was writing in the notebook on my knee, which was easy because of the pauses between the men speaking and Yelena's translation.

"And you couldn't trust anyone," Sergei said. "I had a problem myself. I was on file, someone had betrayed me."

"What had you done?"

"Told political jokes," Sergei said. "But I found out about my file in a roundabout way. I was working for Komsomol" — the communist youth organization—"in the Political Education Department. It was the eighties. We were dealing with vets from Afghanistan. They had severe stress and trauma, and they found it hard to adjust to life.

"I was stressed too, from the work. I wanted to travel abroad. I put in my application. I was told I'd need a reason. I gave one. They said, 'No, Sergei. Sorry, Sergei.'

"What? I was very surprised that I was not allowed to go. Five years later, after the USSR broke up, I found out the reason. The KGB gave me the information. That's a funny story. In 1989 I was in Czechoslovakia, the Velvet Revolution, when Havel became president. I was there the whole time. I was running a travel agency.

"The KGB came to me — some guys. They said, 'What happened? What's this Velvet Revolution? We don't want the same thing here.'

"I decided to blackmail them. I said, 'I'll tell you about the Czechs if you show me my file.'

"They finally agreed. I looked through my file and I was amazed. It turned out the informant was a girl I knew, a colleague in the Komsomol. After office parties, she wrote reports about who was telling jokes. I had trusted her!"

Big-shouldered, bearish, funny Sergei was hunched over the wheel, squinting into the snowstorm and the road ahead, and reminiscing. I could imagine him with a glass of vodka in his hand, drunk and yakking, being the life and soul of a party.

"Here's the really funny part," he said. "At the time, I sincerely believed in communism! I was deputy secretary, responsible for the ideology of the young people. We were believers! I discovered that there were three other spies in my office. And it was an ideological organization!"

"Were you scared when you found out about your file?" I asked.

"Not scared. I was very disappointed. I was disgusted. Here I was, intelligent. I thought our system was the best. But the trouble was, our leaders were old. Brezhnev, Andropov, Gorbachev. Old men!"

"Tell me a political joke," I said.

"I can only think of Putin jokes."

I said, "Surely the jokes are the same, and only the names of the men change."

"No. There are specific jokes. Brezhnev jokes were different altogether."

"Such as?"

Viktor chipped in. "Here's one. A man is talking to another. He says, 'Have you heard that Brezhnev had an operation for chest expansion? More room for medals!'"

"It sounds better in Russian," Yelena added after she'd translated.

Sergei then told a long and bewildering joke about Brezhnev overhearing his neighbors watching a hockey game on television. He said. They said. He said. I wrote it down but didn't understand it.

When I didn't laugh at the punch line, Sergei said, "Jokes about Brezhnev are kindhearted. For one thing, he wasn't well. For another, compared to Stalin and Khrushchev, he was good. But Andropov was a problem. He initiated more repression of dissidents."

"What about the woman who reported on your jokes?" I asked. "What happened to her?"

"I saw her a few years later," Sergei said, chuckling at the memory. "I gave her a few shots of vodka, then told her what I knew. I asked, 'Why did you do it?'

"She just looked at me. 'I was doing my duty,' she says."

"So she didn't apologize?"

"Not at all. She said, 'I wanted to report everyone who was two-faced.' Listen, Paul, I have a huge file. Ha!"

We had gone sixty or more miles into the snow-covered pine forest of Chusovskoy Oblast, the snow blowing across the road in some places, the wind creating sharply pleated drifts. It was another vast but oversimple black-and-white landscape, beautiful and terrifying in its starkness. Just the way the snow danced in the headlights, swirling and funneling in the gusts, took my attention away from the stories of betrayal. I tried to imagine being a prisoner in this storm, on foot or in the back of a locked truck. There had been millions. Everything that made this place lovely for me, for a prisoner meant only death.

"This is Kuchino," Yelena said, as Sergei slowed and took a sharp right into very deep snow, going slowly past a village of dark wooden cottages. The half-buried buildings had scalloped, gingerbreaded shutters and wooden ornaments — flowers and squiggles — and some were log cabins, which dated from czarist times.

Boys and men wandered in the road, dangerously close to our car, peering at us from under fur hats. Their faces were red with cold, snot glistening under their noses, their mouths open as though calling out to us.

"Everyone here is feeble-minded," Yelena said. "They were sent here, to the hospital."

But it wasn't really a hospital. It was an old-fashioned asylum where the patients had been rusticated, and during the day many of them were turned out to wander in the snow. Until they were sent here, they had been locked in a gold-domed cathedral — decommissioned to serve as a madhouse — near the city of Kungur, ninety miles down the Siberian road.

A few miles beyond Kuchino, we came to a steel wall surrounded by trees, and a big gate, and a sign beside it saying that we'd come to Perm 36. A former corrective labor colony, I read, and the rest was obscured by the falling snow.

One of the patients from the asylum had followed us to the big gate and began pleading in Russian as we drove through.

The compound was so simplified by the snowfall it could have been a Boy Scout camp, but that was a first and fleeting impression. The barbed wire at the top of the high walls and near every entrance told a truer story. So did the small barred windows, the windowless truck in which prisoners were transported, and, when I went inside, the cells, the bunks, the barracks, the torture chambers.

Perm 36 is the only intact gulag prison remaining in Russia. In Gulag, Anne Applebaum writes of Perm 36 as "a Stalinist-era lagpunkt [camp division], later one of the harshest political camps of the 1970s and 1980s." All the other prisons have been destroyed or were converted to different uses. Perm 36 still exists because of the efforts of former prisoners, gulag historians such as Viktor Shmirov, and, as I learned later, money from the Ford Foundation.

"Not the Russian government?" I asked, though I suspected what the answer might be.

Sergei laughed and said, "Many of the people in this government were responsible for the prison" — for the fact was that Perm 36, which had operated for more than forty years, had been shut down only recently. Fifteen years ago, this had been a place of torture, forced labor, virtual slavery, and death.

"Who was sent here?" I asked as we walked from cell to cell.

"The same people as in other camps. Fifteen percent anti-Soviet, ten percent criminals, and all the others — three quarters — ordinary people accused of 'misbehavior.'"

"Petty crime?"

"No, no," Viktor said. "Missing workdays — say, if you missed three, they'd send you here for ten years. Or lateness. Or taking something from the government."

"Taking what, for example?"

"A peasant — a hungry peasant — who took three tassels of grain would be arrested and brought here. Like Sergei's uncles. But never mind these things. You have to keep in mind that people were needed. We had a bad economy. Stalin had started a program of economic modernization. You know what Churchill said: Stalin found Russia working with wooden plows and left it equipped with nuclear bombs."

"Let's keep moving," I said. Inside, even with the heat on, the barracks and cells were very cold. They had been repainted, but still they were primitive examples of inhumanity and terror.

"For twenty-four years under Stalin we became powerful," Viktor said, "but at the expense of freedom. We had no loans or credit from other countries. We had to do it all ourselves. The only source of labor was the people" — and he gestured to the workshop we were entering—"Russian people, prisoners, slaves."

Here at Perm 36 the "politicals," the criminals, the tardy workers, labored in the machine shop, making small metal Y-shaped connectors to attach wires to electrical terminals. I'd seen them on plugs, on carburetors, on batteries. Viktor said they had to be made by hand, and Perm 36 produced hundreds of thousands of them.

"Government needed labor," Viktor said, "so it enacted harsh legislation, creating fear and exploitation. This produced huge numbers of prisoners. And because they were slaves, they were an extremely mobile labor force."

As we tramped through the snowdrifts to the punishment cells, Viktor said that it was not only these slave laborers who suffered. He recalled that in his own family there was never enough food. "We were always hungry."

Perm 36 had gone through a number of phases. After 1953, some prisoners got their freedom, though they had been almost destroyed by their time in the labor camp. Then a power struggle between Khrushchev and his spy chief, Lavrenty Beria, resulted in Beria's being convicted as a spy and shot. Eight hundred of Beria's men were sent to Perm to suffer and work. Because they were canny — most of them had been spies or agents — security was increased, walls were heightened, and the camp was expanded. In 1973—and I reminded myself that I had rattled past Perm on the Trans-Siberian at that time, feeling sorry for myself — Perm was "only one of two political camps" in the Soviet Union, Anne Applebaum wrote. Perm was restocked with political prisoners. In the 1980s, Soviet leader Yuri Andropov, a former director of the KGB, had arrested many thousands. "The prisoners were educated and had been powerful. Some had lawyers!" More camps were built, including others around Perm.

"They built a toilet over there in 1972," Viktor said, pointing from an iced-up doorway to an outhouse in a distant part of the prison compound. "It had to serve five hundred and sixty prisoners. They lined up to use it. How did they do it? Yes, quickly."

Sergei said, "It was just another tool to humiliate prisoners."

"Exhaustion, frost, hunger, and endless humiliations," Shalamov had written of prison certainties.

I asked Viktor about the death rate at Perm 36.

"In general, prisoners were worked to death. Six percent or more died every year. But many were too sick to work. In 1984, only seven percent of the prisoners here were capable of hard work. The rest were sick or handicapped."

In the midday snowstorm, under a gunmetal sky, the snowdrifts piled to the windows, the damp rooms and dark corridors too cold to linger in, the outside temperature around 0° Fahrenheit, and crazies from the nearby asylum banging on the high iron gate, it seemed an appropriate day to visit a gulag. I did not want to see it in the summer, surrounded by high grass and picturesque log cabins and wildflowers and tweeting birds. It was most enlightening to see it at its worst, when the broken bunks and the exhibit of prisoners' artifacts — dented bowls and twisted spoons and ragged gloves — were given more meaning by the cold despair I could feel in my bones.

Viktor showed me an exhibit of photographs of well-known Soviet political prisoners: Osip Mandelstam, Isaac Babel, Varlam Shalamov; and they could have included Natan Sharansky, who had served six years in Perm 35, not far away. A leader of the struggle for Lithuanian independence, Balis Gayauskas, had been locked up for thirty-five years. One of his crimes was translating Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago into Lithuanian. He subsequently became head of state security in the Lithuanian government.

"He comes back from time to time," Viktor said.

In The First Circle, Solzhenitsyn had written: "A great writer is, so to speak, a second government. That's why no regime anywhere has ever loved its great writers, only its minor ones."

A Ukrainian dissident, Lenko Luk'ianenko, was sentenced to death; his sentence was reduced to fifteen years, which he served here, but before he was released he was given ten more years. A fellow Ukrainian, a poet named Vasyl Stus—"not a dissident," Viktor said, "but had the sort of spirit they didn't want" — spent fifteen years here, after being arrested and rearrested. A Nobel Prize candidate in 1980, Stus had lost out to Czeslaw Milosz, a Polish poet who had immigrated to California, where he wrote lyric poems in the Berkeley sunshine while Stus sat in an isolation or punishment cell translating Rilke from memory and made metal connectors in the machine shop. Stus died in the prison in 1985, "in mysterious circumstances," Viktor said. But what was the mystery? I saw Stus's horrible little cell and the narrow board of a shelf that was his bunk. I would not have lasted two days.

"I want to explain the slavery of this system," Viktor said. "I've been to the U.S. My friends there would say to me, 'We had slaves. It's like American slavery.' I said no. Here's the difference. You know Cato, the Roman? He said, To keep a slave you must give him meat, bread, and two bottles of not very good wine every week. Eh?" He let this sink in, and then he said, "On the Southern plantations, the slaves were fed because they were worth something. They were kept well. They had families and households. They had value." He smiled grimly and went on, "Gulag prisoners were slaves who were worth nothing!"

"The word the guards used for gulag prisoners," a middle-aged Russian woman who was also a historian later told me, "was dust—pwl" She also said, "Stalin introduced fear. We lived in fear." His announced intention in setting up the gulag was "to isolate those who might possibly doubt our resolution and achievements in the great revolution."

"And look what we lost," the historian said. "Forty million in the purges from 1918 to 1953. Twenty-six million in World War Two. The best people. It's a wonder we're still here."

"What little freedom an American slave had was more than that of any gulag slave," Viktor said.

I went back to the old photographs to look at Varlam Shalamov's tormented, martyred-looking face. I had read his books but never seen his face. Where Solzhenitsyn served up piety, and redemption through suffering, Shalamov was clear-sighted about how everyone involved with the camps — prisoners and guards and party hacks — was debased: the camps represented "the corruption of the human soul." "The camps are in every way schools of the negative," he writes in one story. "Every minute of camp life is a poisoned minute." The prisoner clings to life but without any illusions because "we understood that death was no worse than life, and we feared neither." In another story, a fellow prisoner says flatly, "I'm going to Magadan. To be shot." All this in temperatures of 60 below. The wonder was that this highly intelligent man had survived, and in Kolyma Tales he had created a masterpiece out of the experience. "A human being survives by his ability to forget," he writes early in the book, and near the end, in a line that no writer would disagree with, "It's easier to bear a thing if you write it down."

Our last visit was to the isolation, or punishment, cells, each a bare cement box with four wooden shelves. I stepped in, and Sergei, in an exuberant fit of macabre humor, slammed the door shut and yelled at me through the door slit. I stood in the semi-darkness shivering, though some warmth was palpable on the pipes bolted to the wall. Trying to conceal my alarm, I shouldered the door open.

Viktor said, "A former prisoner told me, 'I remember every night I spent in that cell. I woke up five times a night. I rubbed my body against the pipes. I did exercises to stop shivering. We had no blanket.'"

Many former prisoners told Viktor the same story of the isolation cell. It was a torture chamber, he said as we walked outside into the snow. The prisoners got a quarter of the food the others were given. A zek, Anne Applebaum wrote, could be punished for sitting on his bed in the daytime, for not wearing socks, or for walking too slowly. And a sick or injured man might end up being held (as in one well-documented case) for two months "before being taken to the hospital."

All this history was well within the memory of most people I met. These were the sentiments of a woman activist, one Madam Alexeev, who appeared in a short film about Perm 36: "To see that this is not a labor camp but a museum is to realize what an incredible step we've taken from our years of slavery."

True, but the film had been underwritten by the Ford Foundation, and many of the prison guards, the floggers, the torturers, the spies, the men hissing the word "dust" at the suffering slave laborers, the hacks and political flunkies who had made this prison possible, were in the Russian government now — including Russian president Vladimir Putin, who had headed the KGB when Perm 36 had been a place of great suffering and death.

In the lowering darkness of late afternoon we drove back to the city of Perm on the empty roads. The snowstorm had not abated. The landscape seemed much bleaker and colder for my having seen the slave labor camp hidden in the hills.

***

FOR ALL THE UPBEAT TALK of Perm as the setting of Doctor Zhivago and Chekhov's Three Sisters, I still could not ease my mind after I'd seen the gulag. Many places in Perm, some of them innocent-looking, were associated with repression or imprisonment. Sergei only depressed me more when he said things like "Dostoyevsky walked down this street on his way to prison in Omsk!" and, at the Kama River, "Look at this river — barges brought prisoners here from Moscow, before the railway! Even in czarist times."

And long afterwards, too. In Hope Against Hope, Nadezhda Mandelstam recounts her experience of misery and suffering passing through Perm on a barge with her husband, Osip. The Perm Public Library had mounted an exhibit about Pasternak, which was also a recounting of repression, imprisonment, and book banning — the 1957 novel had not appeared in Perm until more than thirty years later.

And the churches, too, every one that I saw — lovely eighteenth-century onion-domed buildings, not just in Perm but in Kungur, down the Siberian Road, and the Belogorsky Monastery high on a hill outside the village of Kalinino — had served as either a prison or a madhouse, many of the rooms used for torture or solitary confinement. Some of these handsome buildings had functioned as prisons until 1990.

"See the bullet marks?" Sergei said.

He traced his gloved fingers on the deeply pitted brickwork of the Belogorsky Cathedral wall as we stood averting our faces from the sharp freezing wind. The wind was so strong it tipped my body, and I had trouble standing upright. This hilltop in the Urals was the coldest place I'd been in Russia. The whole wall was plastered with blown snow and ice, but the gouged bricks were unusual.

"After Stalin took over this church in 1930 and made it a prison, the police lined up seventy-four monks against this wall, five at a time, and shot them."

Later, a Russian told me in passing, "You know why people were imprisoned and tortured in churches? Huh? Because of the thick walls and the strong construction. They were soundproof. No one outside could hear the screams."

The next day, more memories of misery at the Peter and Paul Cathedral, the oldest stone building in Perm — and another former prison, like Belogorsky, and St. Nicholas in Kungur. Up to their knees in snow, nine children stood looking hopeful — most of them skinny and pale-faced adolescents who were very cold — with their hands out, begging as the snow fell on their heads.

"They are from poor families," Yelena said.

But after the experience of Perm 36, even their sadness was an anticlimax. We went to the ice caves outside the city of Kungur; they were dungeon-like, like a deep freeze three miles deep, just darkness, tumbled boulders, and slimy stalactites. The entrance was protected by clanking steel doors, making me think that these caves, too, might have served as a prison in earlier times.

On another day, in another snowstorm, I saw some naked, fattish, middle-aged couples in Speedos jumping into a hole that had been cut through the ice in a lake. Barefoot in the snow, they gasped from the cold, their skin blotchy pink, their body hair prickling with ice.

That frosty night at Perm's Tchaikovsky Theater, I sat, drowsy with champagne from the lobby bar, and watched the ballet Sleeping Beauty. In the audience were children, families, old women, stuffed shirts, old couples holding hands, and local beauties in stylish boots, tight sweaters, and fur hats. The atmosphere could not have been sweeter, nor the music more beguiling. Yet my mind, ruminative with the melodies and the wine, wandered back. I imagined this same theater, perhaps the same ballet, fifteen years ago: the lovely sets, the costumed dancers, the music, the warmth and well-being — and up the road the prisoners regarded as slaves.

"Next to the right to create, the right to criticize is the richest gift that liberty of thought can offer," Nabokov wrote, with Soviet prisoners in mind, adding that the American living in freedom "may be apt to regard stories of prison life coming from remote lands as exaggerated accounts spread by panting fugitives."

Perm 36 represented forty years of the starved and dying, half frozen, benumbed in their plank bunks, shivering in rags, waking up from a state of near mortification every few hours in the cold, turned into slave labor, reduced to dust, because of something they said or wrote.

"This is posikunchiki" Yelena said, helping me to some dumplings in a restaurant in Perm on our last evening, a farewell delicacy. "They squirt when you eat them. 'Pissing dumplings.'"

Sergei poured vodka. He raised his glass. "Friendship!"

We ate dumpling soup (pelmenye), Tatar buns with spinach (potchmak), and mushroom stew in pots (garshochki). We toasted one another with vodka, saying that we would stay in touch, that we'd meet again in warmer weather — and I drank, and drank again, and drunkenly agreed to return, and made more extravagant promises, as travelers do just before they move on.

***

IT WAS STILL SNOWING AS the overnight train, the Kama Express, named for the river, left Perm for Moscow. This was around noon. I was bewildered by the thought that a habit of travel I'd acquired was now ending — the long backtrack that had begun many months before in London and become a way of living, as long journeys do. We were crossing the Urals, the Asiatic dividing line; now, out of Asia, I felt restless, inattentive, thinking only of the way home.

This train was luxurious by Russian standards: I had a private compartment (cushions, lace curtains, tassels), I drank my Kyoto green tea, and the provodnitsa brought me cookies. Throughout the afternoon, hawkers in the driving snow on unshoveled railway platforms sold dried fish and handicrafts and home-knitted wool shawls, the cottage industries of an earlier time, my whole railway experience a throwback, complete with belligerent drunks and demanding beggars at many stations.

Before Kirov — formerly Vyatka — where Sergei's babushka had suffered political repression, I was standing at the window looking at the passing birch forest when a man setting his luggage down asked where I happened to be from. When I told him, he smiled, almost in pity. I knew what he was thinking, so I asked him for his opinion.

"Do Russians talk about us fighting in Iraq?" I asked.

"Russian people don't pay much attention. Yes, they talk about it sometimes." He said no more about that, implying: I'm not going to insult you by repeating what people say. "It's not really in the news. We have our own wars."

I was surprised by how good his English was; though it was heavily inflected, he was fluent and direct.

"We were in Afghanistan," he said. "It's unwinnable. Because there's no government. Iraq, though…"He nodded almost approvingly. "The effect has been to put the oil price up. This is good for us. Now I must say goodbye. Have a good trip. This is my station."

He got off at Kirov. Night had fallen. At some stations after that, people rushed out of the darkness in thick fur hats and big felt boots selling fish on sticks jammed through their gills. Though we were less than ten hours from Moscow on the main line, it might have been a scene from the earliest years of the Trans-Siberian.

The night passed quickly. I was roused by a rapping at the door—"Moskva!" I woke and yawned and, as always, took a vitamin pill and shaved with my battery-powered razor and brushed my teeth. Then I walked into Yaroslavl Station, jostled by the crowd — people bright-eyed with fatigue, yawning, sleepwalking along the platform through the falling snow.

After the usual give-and-take with a taxi driver — half quarrel, half negotiation — and a slow trip along unplowed city streets, I found my hotel. The desk clerk wouldn't admit me because I was too early. I went outside and walked. As I passed a sushi bar in the predawn snowfall, a woman on a stool leaned at the window and beckoned to me — a prostitute, still alert and willing in the early morning. She represented a new Russian tendency: having been relieved of the burden of unsmiling dogma, they seemed restlessly preoccupied with the worst excesses of the West, not just the flesh, but money and crime, the joyless greed and promiscuity I had seen in the new China too.

I walked for several hours, enjoying the emptiness of the city, looking magical in the snow. After I checked into the hotel and had a bath, I went on a walking tour with a woman who was a historian of the city. I wanted to know how it was different from the Moscow I had seen in 1973.

"It's a completely different place," she said. "Though 1973 was better than 1988, when we had nothing."

The country had collapsed in 1988, and for the next few years food was scarce and consumer goods were almost unobtainable, she said. This woman's children liked cheese. She made cheese at home in her kitchen, squeezing milk through a cloth bag. She wanted to buy bunk beds for them. She was put on a six-month waiting list.

"You know the joke?" she said. "A woman wants to buy a car. She is given a voucher and told, 'It will be delivered in ten years.' 'Morning or afternoon?' she asks. 'Why do you want to know?' She says, 'Because the plumber is coming in the morning.' It was like that."

But the economic tide turned in 1995. Putin kept his promises and things improved. My guide didn't say so, but it was well known that the Russian government was filled with crooks, embezzlers, and opportunists.

We strolled around, from Beria's house ("he buried bodies on his grounds") to Gorki's house (oceanic theme, sea creatures and coral) to the mansion that housed the Union of Russian Writers on Porvaskaya Street, which is mentioned as Rostov's house in War and Peace.

"Our history is that of the government fighting against its own people," she said as we crossed New Arbat Street. She helped me buy tickets for performances at the Moscow Conservatory, and then she said goodbye.

I went to a Mahler concert and in the middle of the lugubrious music remembered the long days I'd spent on the train passing Siberian birches and snowfields. The next night I sat through half of a Poulenc opera, and when I asked for my coat the woman spoke fiercely in Russian, and I knew she was saying, "But it's not over yet!" It was over for me. Tchaikovsky the next night: passionate and dramatic, and I reflected on the forbidding place that Russia had been that first time: the closed cities, the repression, the gulag, no magazines to speak of, hardly any restaurants. And here were sushi bars and pizza parlors and Mexican restaurants and coffee shops and newsstands selling Time and the International Herald Tribune and bookstores with my own books in them, in Russian and English. In one of those stores, I was chatting up a Russian woman, telling her my travels. I told only half of what I'd seen, because she would never have believed me. Yet she wasn't impressed. She just said, "Why do you travel alone?" as though I was out of my mind.

And why was I still here? I felt I was killing time, especially in Russia, which, in spite of all the talk of change and reform, seemed exactly the same place as it had ever been: a pretentious empire with a cruel government that was helpless without secret police.

I was at the conservatory in the L. L. Bean boots that I had been tramping around in since Japan, listening to Tchaikovsky, "Variations on a Rococo Theme," with a wonderful cello soloist, and in the mythomania that all travelers indulge in, I was thinking that it was like the closing theme music to my trip: cue the violins.