Riding the Iron Rooster

1. The Train to Mongolia

The bigness of China makes you wonder. It is more like a whole world than a mere country. "All beneath the sky" (Tianxia) was one Chinese expression for their empire, and another was "All between the four seas" (Sihai). These days people go there to shop, or because they have a free week and the price of a plane ticket. I decided to go because I had a free year. And the Chinese proverb We can always fool a foreigner I took to be a personal challenge. To get to China without leaving the ground was my first objective. And then I wanted to stay for a while — in China, on the ground, going all over the place.

The railway was the answer. It was the best way of traveling to Peking (Beijing) from London, where I happened to be. Every modern account of Chinese travel I had read seemed weakened by jet lag — an unhappy combination of fatigue and insomnia. "We were very tired there," is a common remark by travelers to China, the gasping sightseers and bargain hunters. This desire to sit down could be maddening in a country where everyone else was full of beans. Wasn't that the whole point of the Chinese — that they were always on the go? Even after five thousand years of continuous civilization they were still at it. And one of the lessons of Chinese history is that they never know when to stop.

I had seen China in the winter of 1980. It looked bleak and exhausted, all baggy blue suits and unconvincing slogans on red banners. If you said, "Surely these people ought to be wearing something more than cloth slippers in this snow and ice," you were told how lucky they were and that they used to go barefoot. The whole country was dark brown from the soot and dust. There were few trees. I went bird-watching but saw only crows and sparrows and the sort of grubby pigeons that look like flying rats. The rarer birds the Chinese stuff into their mouths.

The Chinese, then, would point through the drizzle to where a factory was coughing up smoke at the end of a muddy lane; where bent-over people were dragging wooden carts loaded with pig iron. And they would say, 'This was once all prostitutes and bad elements and gambling and bright lights and dance halls." You were supposed to be glad this sinful frivolity was gone, and fascinated by the factories, but I just sighed. I saw young women destroying themselves in mills, smashing their pretty fingers on wooden looms, or blinding themselves doing finicky "forbidden-stitch" embroidery. An official Chinese statistic said that there were seventy million portraits of Chairman Mao on Chinese walls. People whispered when they mentioned his name. Stricken and overworked, they said, "Owing to the success of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution…" And they served me bowel-shattering meals.

Americans came back from China saying, Acupuncture! No flies! No tipping! They give you your used razor blades back! They work like dogs! They eat cats! They're so frisky! And Americans even praised Chairman Mao, unaware that many Chinese were privately sick of him.

But that was the past, my brother Gene said, and he told me that I would be a fool not to go now. China had become a different place, and it was changing from day to day. He knew what he was talking about: he had traveled to China 109 times since 1972, as a lawyer — one of the new taipans. I planned to go in the spring this time. I kept telling myself: New people, new scenes — fresh air and the pleasure of anonymity. There were two ways of doing it — the way of the English poet Philip Larkin, who said, "I wouldn't mind seeing China if I could come back the same day." And there was total immersion.

My idea was to take a train in London, go to Paris, keep going, head for Germany and Poland, maybe stop in Moscow, take the Trans-Siberian, get off in Irkutsk, take the Trans-Mongolian, and spend May Day in Ulan Bator. Essentially the way to China was the train to Mongolia. It was traveling slowly across Asia's wide forehead and then down into one of its eyes, Peking.

Going to Mongolia that way ought to be relaxing, I thought. And it ought to give me a feeling of accomplishment. I would read a little and make notes and eat regular meals and look out of the window. I pictured myself in a sleeping compartment, reading Elmer Gantry and hearing the hoot of the train whistle echoing on the steppes, and thinking: Pretty soon I'll be there — as I drew the blanket up to my chin. And then one day I would snap up the blind and see a yak standing in an immensity of brown sand and I would know it was the Gobi Desert. A day or so later, the landscape would be green and people would be standing knee-deep in rice fields, wearing lamp-shade hats — all of that — and I would step off the train into China.

It was not that simple. It never is, and so an explanation is necessary — this book. It was my good fortune to be wrong: being mistaken is the essence of the traveler's tale. What I had thought of as the simplest way of getting there — eight trains from London to the Chinese border — turned out to be odd and unexpected. Sometimes it seemed like real travel, full of those peculiar discoveries and satisfactions. But more often it was as if I had lost my footing in London and had fallen down a long flight of stairs, perhaps one of those endless staircases designed by a surrealist painter, and down I went, bump-bump-bump, and across the landing, and down again, bump-bump-bump, until I had fallen halfway around the world.

I was not alone — perhaps that was why. I joined a tour in London — twenty-odd people, old and young. I thought: I'll be invisible, just slip into this crowd of people — and off we'll go, smiling and chatting quietly as the sleet hits the windows. 1 had not had much experience of tours. I did not know the most elementary things — that the English go on tours to save money, and elderly couples like the Cathcarts would say, "We had ever such a nice time going overland to India last year, and in Eye-ran we'd make cups of tea in the back of the bus." I did not know that English youths went to places like the Bratsk Hydroelectric Dam on package tours in order to get drunk on cheap vodka, and that Eastern Europe was uproarious with nurses from Birmingham.

Americans took these tours to meet other people, and showed me snapshots from other trips.

"The ones in the straw hats are the Watermules, from San Diego. Lovely couple. We still get Christmas cards from them. That was the Galápagos trip. They're grandparents now. That's their son, Ricky. He's very big in semiconductors."

Americans also went on these tours to shop. Shopping seemed to be the whole point of their travel. I honestly had not known that. It seemed as good a reason as anything else, and much better than going to Russia to get drunk. And there were Australians, but wherever you see Australians in the world they always seem to be on their way home.

The other thing about tours I had not known was their utter lack of privacy. It was all swapping names and information, almost from the first moment, and if you forgot their names they reminded you. It was mostly couples — the Cathcarts, the Scoonses, Cyril and Bug Winkle, the Westbetters, the Wittricks, the Gurneys; and the single people, who all seemed a little sad and uncertain and too eager, Wilma Perrick, Morris Least and his friend Kicker, an old Californian who called himself Blind Bob, a smiling cockney called Ashley Relph and a man known only as Morthole. There was Miss Wilkie, who stood no nonsense: she was from Morningside in Edinburgh. There was the leader, Mr. Knowles. He was Chris. I was Paul. They preferred first names and never asked me my surname.

In London Ashley Relph said he was dead keen to get to Hong Kong, and blinked, and whispered, "I hear you can get a life-sized latex model of your dick somewhere in Hong Kong. One of these Chinese places. Costs about a fiver."

Morris Least was from Arizona, traveling with his old army buddy, a loud-voiced man who urged us to call him Kicker. Kicker had been in the war. He had a metal plate in his skull. Morris and Kicker had matching jackets and shoes. They wore the same sort of crushproof hat. The two American veterans were in their late sixties, and although they were bad-tempered, they agreed on everything. It seemed to me that these two men had entered into a profound sort of marriage.

Kicker said, "I've never been to Europe before. Amazing, huh? Like I was in the Marines for twenty-two years and never saw Europe. I was in China, though. Back in forty-six. Chingdow."

He had crooked teeth — a cruel smile. I asked him what he wanted to do most in Europe.

"See the Mona Lisa," he said. "And try the beer."

"I hear China's clean as a whistle," Rick Westbetter said.

Miss Wilkie said, "I've heard it's filthy."

Hoping to please her, Rick said, "But London's clean!"

"London's a shambles," Miss Wilkie said, and reminded him that she came from Edinburgh.

"London looks clean to us," Rick said, taking his wife's hand. Her name was Millie. She was sixty-three and wore track shoes. They were one of those oldish hand-holding couples who you're never quite sure are being happy or defiant.

"Of course it looks clean to you," Miss Wilkie said. "Americans have lower standards than we do."

Bella Scoons said in her Western Australian whine, "How far are you going, Miss Wilkie?"

"Hong Kong," the old lady said.

Then everyone thought: Ten thousand miles and six weeks of this. Good lord.

At least I did.

The Scoonses were from Perth — the other side of Australia. Bella always measured distances by comparing them to the trip to Kalgoorlie. The distance from London to Paris was to Kalgoorlie and back. The trip to Berlin was "To Kalgoorlie, and back, and back again to Kalgoorlie." Moscow was seven trips to Kalgoorlie. And once I heard her mumbling, working out the distance to Irkutsk, in Siberia, and I heard her finish, "and back to Kalgoorlie."

When we set off from Victoria Station that rainy Saturday in April, Bella said to her husband Jack, "It's less than to Kalgoorlie." She was referring to the distance to Folkestone.

We had eaten breakfast at the Grosvenor Hotel. The Americans sat together, and the Australians were at another table; the British were at two tables, and three old men were silently eating alone. At a solitary table there was a couple in hiking gear — knapsacks and sling bags and cameras. I was eating my breakfast thinking: Is this a mistake? One of the old men was staring at me. It made me very uneasy, the way he was gaping, but then I noticed that his glasses were very thick, and thought that perhaps he was not staring at me, but only looking out of his glasses, the way people look out of windows on rainy days.

When we got on the train, I sat next to him. He said, 'This trip is kind of a big thing for me. My oculist told me I'm going blind and if there was anything I wanted to do before I went blind I should do it this year. So I'm going to China, and boy am I going to keep my eyes open. I figure, hey, it's my last chance, and hey, I'm going to enjoy it."

Then he told me his nickname was Blind Bob and that he was from Barstow in California. When I looked around this train I realized that I was one of a large group and that I did not know any of these people. All I had to go on were their faces. But faces say a great deal. Theirs certainly did. The sight made me very apprehensive.

They stared out of the train windows at the houses, and the houses returned the stares. One of the disconcerting aspects of a railway journey is that the houses near the line seem to have their backs turned to the traveler — you see rear entrances and drains and kitchens and laundry. But these are more telling than porticoes and lawns. The depressing thing about the London suburbs is not that they look seedy, but rather that they also look eternal. It is a relief to look inside those houses and see lives being lived — the man redecorating the bathroom, the woman feeding the cat, the girl upstairs combing her hair, the boy fiddling with his radio, the old lady with her nose in the Express. It is wrong to pass by in a train and not wish them well. They are unaware that they are being scrutinized. It is one of the paradoxes of railway lines that the passengers can see the people in the houses, but those people cannot see anything of the train passengers.

We were ferried across the Channel. Morris and Kicker reminisced about D Day and the Normandy landings and how the American troops got the worst of it.

The water was leaden looking and it slopped against the ferry. The wind from the northeast was cold. It blew hard across the quay when we landed, and we shuffled through customs to have our passports examined. Our luggage was searched.

At Boulogne, the people in the tour amused each other by calling out, "All aboard! All aboard!" and I discovered myself next to an English woman who was fat and entirely bald and wore mittens and said she was planning to immigrate to New Zealand. Her name was Wilma Perrick and she was about thirty-two. She said she had just lost her job. She seemed very sad, and I was on the point of sympathizing with her about her baldness when she leaned over and said, "What are you writing?"

When the Paris train started, the man known as Morthole said, "You were probably wondering what I was doing in the train yard on those tracks."

No one had been wondering. No one had seen him. Anyway, who was Morthole talking to?

"I was collecting rocks," he said. "I collect rocks from every country. Listen, in a lot of places it's illegal — the South Pole for example. I've got some rocks from the South Pole. They could put me in jail for that. I've got them from everywhere. Canada. Ohio. London. Each one is the size of a golf ball. I've got hundreds. I'm a kind of geologist, I guess."

In Elmer Gantry I read, "Set in between the larger boulders [of the fireplace] were pebbles, pink and brown and earth-colored, which the good bishop had picked up all over the world. This pebble, the bishop would chirp, guiding you about the room, was from the shore of the Jordan; this was a fragment of the Great Wall of China…"

The east wind that had blown coldly across the Channel that morning had brought a dusting of snow to Picardy. Snow in April! It lay in a thin covering on hillsides, like long, torn bed sheets, the earth showing through in black streaks. It made the ordinary-looking landscape seem dramatic, the way New Jersey looks in bad weather, made houses and fences emphatic, and brought a sort of cubism to villages that would otherwise have been unmemorable. Each place became a little frozen portrait in black and white.

It seemed to me that railway lines like this needed a little variation. It was almost as if these hills and villages had been seen by so many people passing by that they had been worn away from being looked at. One of the attractions of China to me was that it had been closed to outsiders for such a long time that even the most hackneyed sight of a pagoda would seem fresh, and in distant Xinjiang a traveler might feel like Marco Polo, because no foreigner had been there for years. But this part of heavily traveled France had been rubbed away by the eyes of sightseers and railway passengers: most landscapes near busy railway lines had that same look of simplification, as if in a matter of time they would disappear from being looked at so much.

The people on the tour were still getting acquainted with each other. They asked me questions, too. Where was I from? What did I do? Was I married? Did I have children? Why was I taking this trip? What was that book in my lap? What were my plans in Paris? First time in China?

I was Paul, I was unemployed, I was evasive, and — how does Baudelaire put it? — "The real travelers are those who leave for the sake of leaving," and something about not knowing why but always saying Allons! An appropriate sentiment here in the environs of Amiens.

What I wanted to reply to these questions was something I heard a man say to an inquisitive woman at a dinner party in London.

"Please don't ask," he said softly."I don't have anything interesting to tell you. I've made a terrible mess of my life."

What kept me from saying that was that it was a sad memory, because about six months later that man killed himself. It seemed unlucky, and unkind to his memory, to repeat it.

The sad man called Blind Bob fumbled with the flap of his valise — his eyesight was terrible: his nose was against the hasp — and brought out two rolls of toilet paper.

People asked him what it was for — surely not Europe?

"For China," he said.

I decided not to say that the great sinologist Professor Joseph Needham had proven that the Chinese invented toilet paper. In the fourteenth century they were making perfumed toilet paper (it was three inches square) for the Imperial family, and everyone else used any paper they could lay their hands on. But some Chinese knew where to draw the line. In the sixth century a scholar, Yen Chih-t'ui, wrote, "Paper on which there are quotations or commentaries from the Five Classics or the names of sages, I dare not use for toilet purposes."

Ashley Relph said, "He's taking bog-roll to China!"

Mr. Cathcart said, "I think they've heard of loo paper in China."

"Sure, they've heard of it. Lots of people have heard of it. But do they have any, is the question. I'll bet they don't have any on the Trans-Siberian, and how much do you think they'll have in Mongolia, huh?"

No one was laughing at Blind Bob now. The thought of crossing Asia without toilet paper made everyone thoughtful; there was a sort of hum of reflection in the carriage after he had spoken.

We came to Paris and were met by a bus and brought to a hotel. This was in the 14th arrondissement, near the end of the Métro line, in a district that was indistinguishable from the outskirts of Chicago or South Boston. It was mainly postwar apartment blocks that had once been light stucco and were now gray. There were too many of them, and they were too close together, and people said: Is this Paris? Is this France? Where's the Eiffel Tower? The center of Paris is a masterpiece of preservation, but the suburbs such as this one are simple and awful. The brutal pavements and high windows of St.-Jacques seemed designed to encourage suicide.

Then I was told ("funnily enough") that Samuel Beckett lived in one of those apartment houses and indeed had been in it for years. That was where he wrote his stories and plays about the sheer pointlessness and utter misery of human existence. I thought, No wonder! I was told that he often came over to our hotel, the Hôtel St.-Jacques, to have a morning coffee. The hotel was a newish spick-and-span place that resembled the lonely hotels that are found just outside American airports, where people stay because there is nowhere else. Beckett came here for pleasure?

I walked the streets, I lurked in the coffee shop, I prayed for him to appear; but, nothing. It was a lesson though. When people read Samuel Beckett lives in exile in Paris they did not know that it meant a poky little apartment on the fifth floor of No. 32—a tall gray building in which residents waited for Godot by watching television. And it was a dozen stops on the Métro from the center of Paris, the Left Bank, the museums.

We went to the Jeu de Paume, the museum devoted to the Impressionists. I wandered behind the group, listening and looking at pictures.

In a room full of Sisleys, Richard Cathcart said, "I don't like any of these."

We passed Monet's series of Rouen Cathedral, bluish and purply and rose tinted.

"Now I would not mind having something like them in my home," Mrs. Wittrick said, and the Gurneys agreed and said they'd like to cart them back to Tasmania, except that they'd probably be arrested!

Of Rousseau's La Guerre. La Chevauchée de la Discorde, Rick Westbetter said, "Hey, I like these. These are good. These are more like American pictures."

A child staggering behind his parents in the Van Gogh room said, "But why was he mad?"

A little crowd formed around a Monet of Venice.

Bud Wittrick was saying, "That's the Grand Canal. That's Saint Mark's. That's where the Bridge of Sighs is — down that canal. And see, that's the hotel we stayed at. Of course it wasn't a hotel in those days. That's where we walked, and there's where we had the spaghetti, that's where I bought the postcards."

It rained, it snowed, and the snow silenced both pedestrians and traffic. Early one morning we left for Berlin.

It was a wet, black morning in Paris, the street sweepers and milkmen doing their solitary rounds by the light of the street lamps, and just as dawn broke over the eaves and chimney pots we plodded out of the Gare de l'Est. I thought we had left the suburbs behind in the Rue St.-Jacques, but there were more, and they were deeper and grimmer. The people in the group, with their faces at the windows of the train, were shocked and disillusioned. It wasn't gay Paree, it wasn't even Cleveland. The Americans looked very closely. We were unused to this. We put up suburbs too quickly and cheaply for them to wear well. We expected them to decline and collapse and be replaced; they weren't built to last, and they look temporary because they are temporary. But French suburbs — villas, terrace houses and apartment blocks — are solid and fairly ugly, and their most horrific aspect is that they look as though they will last forever. It had been the same in outer London: How could houses so old look so awful?

'That was a battlefield," Morris said, as we crossed into Belgium. He had been telling war stories since we crossed the Channel. "Some buddies of mine died there."

"— And over there, too," Morris said, looking at a map, and meaning more dead buddies in a wartime battlefield.

He was smirking at the bare trees, the young poplars standing like switches and whips; the dark sludge and stained froth in the black canals.

I was still reading Sinclair Lewis and scribbling notes on the flyleaf.

"Making notes?" Mrs. Wittrick said.

I denied it.

"Keeping a diary?"

I said no.

I hated being observed. One of the pleasures of travel is being anonymous. I had not realized how everyone was conspicuous in a group, and the person who kept to himself was a threat. I decided to make notes on those big blank postcards that look like filing cards.

Wilma, the bald girl, said, "I haven't seen anyone use those postcards for years."

And then I regretted that I had told her I was sending them back home, because it gave her the excuse to ask me where I was from.

"I do a little teaching," I said to Wilma.

As far as I could tell there were no readers in the group, no one likely to buttonhole me after lunch to talk about American fiction, or to be threatened by my scrutiny. I liked being a teacher. I liked the way the others looked at me and thought: Poor guy, doesn't seem to have a lot to say, might as well leave him alone.

It was extremely hard for me to appear to be a quiet, modest, incurious person. These people seemed to be illiterate, which was a virtue, because they didn't know me. But neither could they be trusted with the slightest piece of information. Not long after I told Wilma I happened to be living in London, Richard Cathcart came up to me and said, "I hear you live in London…"

At Namur, Bud Wittrick confided to me that Belgium was a hell of a lot uglier than America, and when I agreed that it did look hideous, he said, "You said it, Paul!"

When had I told him my name?

The only empty seat in the dining car at lunch was next to Wilma. It seemed as though everyone was avoiding her, but when I sat with her everyone avoided me. She told me she had been fired from her job, selling toys somewhere in London. She complained that the New Zealanders had made a hoo-hah about her immigrating, but that she was going there just the same, probably for good. She said she liked a challenge.

I made a note of the fact that we had just stopped at Liège. I had an idea that I could look it up later and write We passed Liège, famous for its lacemaking and its sausages, birthplace of Georges Simenon…

Wilma said, "You're always writing."

"No, I'm not," I said, too quickly, and I thought: Stop looking at me!

I dozed after lunch and was awakened by Morris saying, "Hey, Kicker, it's Aachen!" And both men stood in the aisle, blocking the traffic.

It was obvious that the Germans on the train were very irritated by these two loud Americans, and would probably have been very glad to throw them off. It was unlikely that the Germans were able to follow the loud twanging monologue in which Morris revealed that he had been in the three-week battle for Aachen during the war. This monkey was a liberator! It seemed poetic justice that he had returned to bore the pants off everyone within earshot.

At Cologne I noticed that there were four new people on the tour. They were French — three women and a man. They stayed together. They spoke to no one except themselves for almost the whole trip. They quarreled a great deal, but no one knew why. About one month later, in southern Mongolia, I saw one of these French women standing alone on a railway platform. We had just eaten a disgusting meal of cold potatoes and mutton fat.

I smiled and said in a companionable way, "Isn't the food dreadful?"

"When I am traveling I don't notice the food," this woman said. "But of course when I am in Paris I am very particular about what I eat and demand only the best."

That was all she ever said to me.

Even here in Germany I could tell that the French members of the tour were not extroverts. But that was fine. I was also keeping to myself, and it was agreeable not to be pestered with questions.

It was near the end of a long day. We passed Wuppertal, piled against a hillside — full of steep ugly tenements. There were slag heaps at Unna, and farther on at Hamm and Gütersloh, it seemed as though the Germans had succeeded in miniaturizing Indiana and putting it down here. The rain blackened Bielefeld, and I prayed for night to fall and simplify this landscape with darkness. Prosperity had disfigured Germany, and the whole country looked blighted with industrial civilization. Under the brown sky of Münsterland there were factories called Droop und Rein and Endler und Kumpf, which seemed like doom-laden names. The peculiar dreariness about this part of Germany was the absence of trees. The Germans identified with forests, but acid rain had killed half of them and the other half had been chopped down; the trees had been replaced with factory chimneys.

Earlier in the day, the people in the group had been talking like patients in a hospital. The travel had frightened and tired them. They dozed, and when they woke they asked each other questions. How did you sleep? How was the meal? What time is dinner? They began to describe the progress of their bowels. They reported on how they felt, and whether they were tired or hungry.

I watched closely for meaningful changes — women who begin to screech, men who stop shaving, or anyone who puts on a tracksuit.

At Helmstedt we crossed the border into East Germany. The train passed between a pair of barbed-wire fences, a passageway about as wide as a turnpike. Every few hundred yards there was a watchtower and bright lights and the silhouettes of soldiers standing sentry duty.

Beyond the border was a landscape of snow and mud — the spring mess in the slender trees of the postwar woods. What cities I could see seemed far drearier than any I had seen in West Germany, but the countryside was noticeably wilder and more wooded, with huddled farms and poorly lit roads. There were not many people visible, but those I saw here really did look like peasants.

We arrived at Zoo Station ("Hold on to your handbags, this place is full of drug addicts") in the dark. With its twinkling lights and the traffic, Berlin seemed romantic and lively to some members of the group — they regarded it as the last frontier of civilization. After this was Poland, then Russia, then Mongolia. Berlin was gaiety and sex, bookstores and fatsos. It looked richer than America.

But Berlin seemed to me a monstrosity and not much fun. It is such an odd specimen, such a special example of metropolitan schizophrenia, that its conceits and hypocrisies are fascinating. But it is also a fool's paradise, and it is hard to think of anyone living there for any length of time and remaining sane. It is an ancient city, and it was itself for 700 years; but under the Nazis it cracked, it stopped being a city and became a symbol, and then an idea, and after the war it was rethought and the idea reduced to an absurdity. It is still a bad idea and it is growing worse. Any sensible person has to find it a monumental illustration of stupidity, petulance and stubbornness. It would be laughable if it were not so pathetic, for as Nathanael West said, nothing is sadder than the truly monstrous.

Helmut Frielinghaus, a Düsseldorfer, was himself a visitor to the city. He said to me, "Do you want to see the most interesting place in Berlin?"

I said yes.

He took me to the "Ke De We," a huge department store that is known by its initials rather than its full name, Kauíhaus des Westens. What he wanted to show me were the floors devoted to food, and in particular the stalls and shops that retailed expensive and pretty delicacies.

'This is the new thing," Helmut said. 'The food culture. People are obsessional about it. You see? Two hundred kinds of cheese, forty kinds of coffee, twenty-eight sizes of sausage, and also food for vegetarians, food for health cranks, a whole shop selling fish eggs."

They were food boutiques, selling snob food, rare and indigestible items, all prettily arranged and beautifully wrapped. Pastries, fruit juice, ninety kinds of bread, a whole wall of tea caddies, every possible shape of pasta. At first glance it was not food at all, but specialist merchandise set out like expensive clothes. If there was such a thing as designer food, this was it. Perfect penile asparagus, each spear labeled, $20 a pound.

I developed a horror-interest in the meat section, where stall upon stall was laden with cuts of meat — gleaming red flesh that had been trimmed with great care: legs, shoulders, feet, rumps and elbows, a whole rack of tongues, a case of hearts, a brisket with a paper cap, pigs' heads wearing ruffled collars. Most of the meat was decorated in this way — a sort of dramatic presentation, so that the last thing you thought of was slaughter or butchery.

There were more browsers than shoppers, which was the weirdest thing of all — people gaping at food, and salivating and moving on ("Look at those fish cheeks, Wolfgang!"), and the effect of this scrutiny and obvious hunger was of the food being used to tempt and titillate, and so it all seemed to me — and the meat especially — the most modern kind of pornography.

"Good, no?" Helmut said. "If you see that, you understand Berlin."

We were leaving the "Ke De We" when we saw a stop-press edition of a German paper saying that American planes had bombed Libya. This was in retaliation for the bombing, supposedly by Libyan terrorists, of a dance hall here in Berlin. The news had traveled fast. Already, young Germans had started to gather near the Europa Center for a demonstration, and police vans — about thirty of them — were parked just off the Kurfürstendamm. Policemen were unloading steel barricades and stacking them by the roadside.

Helmut said, "We have only recently discovered how different we are from the Americans."

He spoke with slight bitterness. I decided not to remind him of Germany's uniquely horrible history.

"I think we bombed Libya because we have been dying to bomb someone in the Middle East ever since the hostage crisis," I said. "Iran humiliated us more than any other country has done in recent years. We still haven't gotten over it. I don't think the average American makes much distinction between Iranians and Libyans. They're seen as dangerous and worthless fanatics, so why should we waste our time being subtle with them?"

'That's the way Americans think about us," Helmut said.

"Not really."

If he mentions the war, I thought, I'm going to say You started it. But he didn't. He said he found Berlin very strange and provincial; it was mostly old people and had high unemployment. He said he couldn't wait to go back to Düsseldorf.

I spent the rest of the day shopping for provisions. I bought mint tea, sherry, chocolates and antibiotics. Tomorrow we would be in Warsaw, where such things might not be available.

The demonstration began in the early evening when about eight thousand youths chanting anti-American slogans marched towards the American cultural center called Amerikahaus, behind the Kurfürstendamm. The rumor was that they planned to set it on fire. But the police, with riot shields and tear gas, massed in front of it and behind the high steel barricades. The demonstration became unruly and turned into something approaching a riot. Rioters threw stones and broke the windows of American cars, and chased tourists and anyone who looked like an American.

I missed the riot. I was at the Deutsche Oper on Bismarckstrasse seeing Don Giovanni. I had gone on the spur of the moment when, back at the hotel, I heard the members of the group arguing about the bombing of Libya, and Kicker saying: "Them fucken Arabs have been asking for that." Do I want to listen to this? I asked myself. Mozart seemed preferable.

I went alone and found it pleasant to have an empty seat next to me, an entire armrest to lean on, and to enjoy this excellent production. But after the intermission the seat was taken by a young woman, and several times in the darkness, while Don Giovanni was gasconading or Dona Anna was singing, this woman was staring at my head.

"Do I know you?" she asked, when the opera ended.

I said no.

"I have this feeling that I do. What is it?"

I sensed what it was, but I didn't say anything. Until then I had been proud of the fact that no one on the tour had the slightest idea that I was a writer — and of travel books about train trips, too. I thought it would inhibit them or else, and just as bad, provoke them to importune me ("Boy, have I got a story for you"). Some of the members of the group I had told I was in publishing, and others I had told I was a teacher. I hardly ever entered a conversation. I listened, I smiled, I made notes. When Kicker was being outrageous I blinked and shuffled away. I was the man who got up from lunch before it was over and people started talking about themselves. I was the man who was constantly drifting away — the man with no last name. I was the man with the book that you didn't want to interrupt. I was the quiet, dim, dull fellow in the old mackintosh, standing and whistling tunelessly on the platform. I agreed with everything you said. You hardly knew me — in fact, it was only when you saw me on the train that you remembered I was on the trip, and even then I was unobtrusive and faintly barmy looking, just harmlessly scribbling.

"I've seen you on television," the woman said. "Haven't I?"

"Probably," I said, and told her my name.

"Amazing," she said. "My sister won't believe this — she's read all your books."

Her name was Rachel Tickler, and I found it a relief to tell her I was on my way to Mongolia and then China — yes, to do some writing — and that I had just come from London. What was that about the States? Oh, yes, I did spend part of the year on the Cape — yes, it's a wonderful place. A far cry from this trip, which was involving me in note taking. I told her everything, I bought her some tea and we sat up late so that I could be confessional. There was no risk. Unlike the members of the tour, Rachel Tickler was a perfect stranger.

It did me a lot of good to tell her these things, because I had been so secretive on the tour it was like being invisible. It certainly wasn't much fun to be the dim, dull fellow in the mackintosh, keeping out of every conversation. Keeping quiet gave me chest pains. I longed to lecture them about the Middle East, and if they gave me half a chance on the subject of travel, I could seize their wrists like the Ancient Mariner, and a tale unfold.

Rachel herself was in Berlin working on lawsuits connected with asbestos hazards, one of the current growth areas in lawsuits. A lawyer from New York, she was attending a conference of insurance companies — reading papers and evaluating information.

Having told her everything, I went to bed strengthened in my resolve. In one sense we were like an adulterous couple — or more accurately it was like a one-night stand. It was tender and I was eager to be candid, and she was a good listener. At five o'clock the next morning I rejoined the group, and it was like being back with a lot of distant relatives.

We had taken the train to East Berlin, and changed, and were now on the Warsaw train, making a slow trip to the Polish border. Police, customs officials, soldiers — it was impossible to tell them apart — got on, examined passports, demanded to see money, scribbled receipts. Theirs was a mysterious business. They all wore old, terrifying shoes.

Poland from the train looked altogether senile — exhausted fields, decaying apartment houses, broken roads, and great, dusty factories. It has the appearance of an elderly country — it is visibly doddering — but it has the most humane and polite people I have ever met, thoroughly gentle and civilized, which is probably the reason theirs is a history of being overrun and occupied.

In my compartment was a little group traveling together — mother, daughter, grandson. They were from Katowice, and being with the daughter reminded me that young Polish women are madly attractive, with clear skin and large, limpid eyes and lovely hair.

"Don't go to Mongolia," Ewa said. "Come to Katowice and I will show you interesting things."

The mother rolled her eyes and said, "She's crazy — pay no attention to her."

Woityek the little boy was solemn faced and sat without making a sound. A Polish man offered Woityek an apple, which the little boy took but didn't eat. That was another thing. The Poles seemed to me to be very kind and courteous to each other; the Germans were less so; the Russians not at all.

Ewa said, "We have relations in Chicago, in New Jersey, in Los Angeles, too. If it weren't for them we'd probably starve. They send us money. I'd like to go there — the States. Or maybe to Paris. I could learn French."

Ewa was twenty-eight and had been divorced for two years. She worked in a bank in the foreign exchange section. I told her I wanted to withdraw some money I had in a bank in Warsaw, the Bank Handlowy. She gave me precise instructions, the address, the telephone numbers. She said it would be easy.

When this family took out their lunch they offered me some sandwiches and fruit, and so I broke out one of my bottles of amontillado and we drank it together.

"Mongolia's so far away," Ewa said. And then it sounded as though she were saying to Woityek, "He's going all the way to Mongolia on the train!"

"They came here once, you know — the Mongols."

Battle of Liegnitz (1241), about eighty miles south of here: we had just stopped at Zbaszynek. The Mongols annihilated a combined army of Germans and Poles.

"Everyone came here," Ewa said. "That's why Poland is such a mess."

On the station platform, two fat, white-faced workmen slathered brown paint on an iron bench. The paint dripped and ran, and when they painted the feet of the bench they slopped paint on the platform. Some Poles watched disapprovingly but said nothing. They wore snap-brim hats and carried plastic briefcases. Most Poles seemed overweight; they talked constantly about food and food shortages — but that wasn't odd. Food is a frequent topic with fatties. They wore old clothes and had sour bready breath and lived in pockmarked houses.

Ewa and her mother and child got out at Poznan to catch the train for Katowice, but gave me their address.

"Send us a postcard from Mongolia…"

We were delayed in Konin. That was convenient. I could write without my arm being jogged. I wrote: In brown April, in Poland, it looks as though spring will never come — bare trees, dead grass like rags, cold winds, rubbly earth, apartments plastered with wet washing, furrowed fields with nothing sprouting, a man plowing with one skinny horse, men shoveling dust, muddy creeks and ditches, a plastic bag jammed on a stick to scare birds; such monotony… But this is the view in April, when things in Poland look so bleak that even the ducks seem to be drowning, and the chickens are frantic. In a month or so, things will be different: spring will come, the whole country will be in bloom. Yet it still seems an awful fate to be a Pole.

It seemed to me, as we set off again, that the only really interesting buildings were the churches — the only ones with curves, at any rate. The rest were all right angles and had flat roofs.

The landscape brightened in the environs of Sochaczew — patches of woods, better houses, birch groves — but the struggle continued. People labored everywhere, doing clumsy jobs, shoveling, breaking rocks, chopping wood. All the work looked very hard, and Poland seemed like a glimpse of the past.

Catholicism is obvious, not only in the churches, and the rosaries people wear around their necks, and the way they bless themselves before the train starts; but also in the statuary. There was a statue of the Virgin Mary forty feet high, on an eight-foot pedestal, on the forecourt of the railway station at Szymann. That was something I had never seen in Italy or Spain, or even in Ireland, which claimed the Blessed Virgin as the Queen of Ireland. There were more Virgin Marys on pedestals in bean fields, and in the distance, beyond the man plowing, was always a Virgin Mary.

They served a devotional purpose, and it was possible they were useful in scaring birds, but I felt there was yet another motive in their ubiquity. They were the classic Our Lady of Fatima statues, and what the commissars didn't know — but something every Catholic learns early — is that the message Mary gave to the three little children at Fatima in Portugal, in 1917, was that if they prayed very hard, Russia was going to be converted from atheistic communism to Catholicism. "And now we will pray for the conversion of Russia," priests announced throughout the fifties, all over America.

That's what this statue represents to most Catholics and probably to all Poles: the Mother of God at her most political.

I had finished Elmer Gantry and given it five stars, and now I was reading Balzac's Old Goriot. A Polish proverb was quoted in that book: "Hitch five oxen to your cart" — meaning take precautions so that nothing can go wrong. But reading this in Poland seemed very odd. There were no oxen at all, and the carts were rickety things. I spent an entire day traveling slowly through western Poland, almost 300 miles, from the East German border to Warsaw. I did not see any mechanized farming at all and not a single tractor. Instead, I saw the picturesque hopelessness of the farmer gently whipping his horse as the poor beast struggled with an old plowshare.

"It doesn't look too bad," Ellen Wittrick said, raising her eyes to Warsaw for the first time. The late-afternoon sun had gilded the facades of the narrow buildings on Jerozolomskie and given that whole block the look of Harrods.

"Get me out of here," Millie Westbetter whispered to Rick, who replied, "Take it easy, honey. We'll be back on the train tomorrow."

And then I gave them all the slip and plunged into Warsaw. Two men, one after the other, asked me to change money, at five times the official rate; that was outside the hotel. I crossed the street, and while I was looking at a big, clumsy chess set carved from purple wood, a man approached me with the same question. I was pursued by another man, and all the way down Marszalkowska asked the same money-changing question and quoted rates of exchange.

"Aren't you afraid of the police?" I said.

"The police change money, too," he said.

The merchandise in the shops looked substandard — the clothes, the radios, the pots and pans, even the food: it looked unappetizing, the fresh food somewhat wilted and dusty, the canned food dented and with faded labels. And in every shop, my arm was tugged and the same question whispered, "Change money?" Poverty can make people look bowed down and beaten, but just as often it can make them shameless, fearless, predatory and dangerous. I found all these apparent lawbreakers rather worrying, but when I mentioned it to one man he said, "Don't worry — it's a double morality. Everyone does it."

This look of bankruptcy in Warsaw was also a facial expression: stricken, demoralized, lonely and a bit desperate, a look of suffering on some, cynicism on others. It is surprising that people so victimized can have such dignity and can also be so polite and friendly. It is a good thing, too, because that courtliness takes the curse off their other side — the hunger that makes them food bores, the poverty that makes them seem grasping, the deprivation that has made them appear materialistic, and the economic policies that have turned them into religious nuts.

The bar of my hotel, the Forum, was crowded and smoky, so I wandered around, dropped into the Habana Nightclub and watched people jitterbugging. As I watched, a voice whispered in my ear, "Change money? Seven zlotys for one dollar."

"What would I do with all those zlotys?" I said, and turned.

A plump girl in a black dress was smiling at me. Perspiration had given a stickiness to her orange makeup, and there were little sooty flecks on her eyelashes.

"You can buy Polish vodka, you can buy curios. Poland is famous for amber. You can buy. Or stamps. You are staying at a hotel?"

"Yes, I am."

"I can visit you in your room. We make love. Fifty dollars."

"What about this amber?"

"Bursztyn," she said, explaining that it was the Polish word. "It is lovely. It comes from under the sea."

"My problem is that I have zlotys but not many dollars."

"I prefer dollars," she said. "We need dollars. In Poland it is impossible to do anything without dollars."

"Where do you get the dollars?"

"From you," she said.

"Not tonight."

I left, looked at the gloomy shop windows, marveled at the wide, empty streets, and went back to the Forum.

My challenge the next day was first to withdraw some Polish zlotys from Bank Handlowy — royalties that I could not take out of Poland; and then to spend them all before the train left. The bank opened at nine-thirty, the train was going two hours later. I estimated that I would have about an hour and a half to spend whatever amount I withdrew. In New York it would not have been difficult. But this was Warsaw.

I knew only my account number. The bank was in a modern building, a steel and glass tower, the top of which was wreathed in fog. It was a rainy day, and it seemed to me that I was on an absurd errand. But it would have been more foolish to leave my Polish money where it was and not try to withdraw some. I had vowed that I would never give it to Lech Walesa, leader of the Solidarity movement, because he had once publicly boasted that he had never read a book in his life. The last thing that man deserved was my book royalties.

I entered the bank. The entire ground floor was an open-plan office — hundreds of employees tapping on computers, calculators, typewriters, or else pushing stacks of tattered money around. Just looking at the enormity of the operation made me feel I didn't have a chance.

At the marble counter I explained to the woman that I had an external account and wanted to make a withdrawal.

"Please write your account number."

I did so on a scrap of paper.

"Passport, please."

I handed it over.

Without hesitating, and without leaving the counter, the woman stretched out her arm and fished a small wooden box, like an old cigar box, from beneath the marble slab. She glanced at my account number and plucked another scrap of paper out of the small box.

"How much do you want to withdraw?"

"How much have I got?"

"Two hundred and sixty thousand zlotys."

"I'll have a hundred thousand."

Six hundred dollars at the official rate.

The woman passed the scrap of paper she had initialed to the clerk, who called me over and counted out the money. The whole operation had taken less than five minutes.

My pockets were now bulging with Polish money.

"You could buy half a car," Gregory the taxi driver said, when I told him my problem. "You could buy a hundred thousand kilos of ham."

Gregory spoke perfect South Jersey English — he had worked for an Ocean City trucking company for two years. But then he had returned to Warsaw. He explained, "Warsaw is miserable, yes, but Warsaw is my city. My father was born here, my grandfather was born here, and so… and so…" He shrugged. "You like this song?"

A bouncy little ditty crackled from his car radio. I said yes, it was melodious.

"I sing it for you."

I thought, forget it.Cry, little woman, cry!

Go ahead and cry!

Cry, little woman, cry!

"Good, eh?"

"Wonderful," I said. "Maybe I could buy an antique with my money."

"The shops open at eleven-thirty," he said. "You'll miss your train."

"What about amber—bursztyn?"

"Very nice. We go to old city."

But the jewelry shops didn't open until ten-thirty. While we lurked in the old Warsaw — cobblestone streets, medieval buildings, the ramparts of a fort — Gregory told me he wasn't a member of Solidarity. "I don't need a party. My wife is my party. My kid — my family. That's my party."

A man accosted me and asked if I was interested in buying a very rare stamp of the German occupation. He showed me a head of Hitler with a Krakow postmark, and another stamp — Polish — depicting saints or angels, overprinted with swastikas.

"How many stamps have you got?"

From under his jacket he produced a stamp album — about twenty pages. He riffled through: more Hitlers, more angels, more overprinting and interesting postmarks; about 400 stamps.

"I'll give you ten thousand zlotys for it."

Without a word he handed over the album and took the money.

We passed a butcher shop. I said, "I could get some sausages."

"You need one of these." He showed me his meat ration book. He was allowed 2.5 kilograms of meat a month. That was his May book — with some coupons missing. He had used up his April book, though today was only the 16th of April. "Not much meat in Poland. We have to sell it — for dollars. I've seen more Polish ham in Ocean City than I've seen in Poland."

"Why not become a vegetarian?"

"No, no," he said, showing me his sharp carnivore's teeth. "And you know, Poles hate everything except cow meat and pig meat. They don't eat lamb, they don't eat chicken."

I said that surely there were some vegetarians in Poland.

He only knew one, he said — an old lady, whose doctor had forbidden her to eat meat. It seemed to me characteristic of Polish conservatism that they should be unwavering in their eating habits, and would spend all morning waiting in line in front of a butcher shop (Warsaw was full of such lines) instead of developing a taste for quiche or ratatouille. It occurred to me that people who refused to change their diet were not only stubborn and self-defeating but probably very superstitious as well.

When the jewelry shops opened I bought some amber, and on the way back to the hotel a half-dozen bottles of Polish champagne, some yellow caviar, pickled mushrooms and sardines. I paid Gregory and tipped him for helping me. I still had twenty-thousand zlotys left and nothing to buy with them.

It was then that I remembered Ewa and Woityek, from the train. Send us a postcard from Mongolia, Ewa had said, and scribbled her address. I put the remainder of the zlotys into and envelope with a note saying This is for Woityek and sent it to them. It was a wet day in Warsaw, rain completing the picture of utter misery; and rain was sweeping against the train as we set off for Moscow.

I had a crate of Polish provisions and decided to have a party in my compartment before we got to Brest Litovsk. I had invited Ashley, Morthole, Chris, and the less inquisitive members of the group.

We drank most of the champagne before we got to the Soviet border. Ashley was drunk and put his face against mine and said, "I've got a bet with Morthole that you're with the State Department."

"You lose," I said.

At the border, the train was searched by customs officials. One of my champagne bottles blew its cork while the customs woman was in my compartment, but she didn't blink. She was looking for guns, books, money, jewelry. "No guns," I said, and showed her what I had.

In the meantime the wheels of all the railway cars were changed — the wheel assemblies unhitched and wide-gauge ones attached.

'They took two of our guys!" It was Morris Least, yelling. He complained to the tour leader. "The Russians just marched them away." Morris was breathless and frightened. And yet he had been expecting this.

"I'm keeping my head down," Kicker said.

They had taken Bud Wittrick for questioning. He had apparently been flaunting a copy of The Economist. Was that a crime? And Rick Westbetter had been cleaning the windows of his compartment with the squeegee he had brought from Maryland. He had to be a spy — why else would he want clean windows?

Just before we set off for Moscow, Wittrick and Westbetter were returned to us, and over dinner they told stories of their captivity and interrogation.

I drank the last of my Polish champagne and read more of Old Goriot, and then went to sleep. We passed through Minsk and Smolensk in the night. I woke to snow on the fields and ice in the ditches beside the tracks. The dwellings were wooden huts and bungalows, and the bumpy roads showed wheel tracks through the mud-splashed ice crust.

"That's what Ohio looked like when I was growing up," Rick Westbetter said. "That's the nineteen thirties."

"No sight-seeing for me," I told the tour leader, when we arrived in Moscow. I decided to walk in the city, for in a few days we would be on the Trans-Siberian Express and unable to walk. In any case, the sights in Moscow were limited: the Kremlin Museum was closed, many of the churches were shut, because of restoration work, and what my fellow tourists were faced with was nothing more than a long bus ride around the city. I went to the Intourist hotel and bought tickets for The Nutcracker at the Bolshoi and a modern ballet at the Stanislavski Theatre. When I remarked that it seemed easy to get tickets, the clerk said, "Because you have dollars."

I walked to Saint Basil's, and to the Metropole Hotel, where I had stayed in 1968—it was now a sort of monument — and strolled through the GUM store, looking at the merchandise.

While I was staring at some very inferior-looking alarm clocks, I realized that the woman on my right and the one on my left were sidling nearer to me.

"Is nice clock? You like clock?"

I said, "Alarm clocks wake you up. That's why I hate them."

"Is funny," the woman on my right said. She was dark, in her early twenties. "You want to change rubles?"

The surprising thing to me was that one of these young women was pushing a little boy in a baby carriage, and the other had a bag of what looked like old laundry. They were pretty women, but obviously preoccupied with domestic chores — airing the baby, doing the wash. I invited them to the ballet — I had bought pairs of tickets. They said no, they had to cook dinner for their husbands and do the housework, but what about changing some money? The official rate was seventy-two cents to the ruble: they offered me ten times that.

"What would I do with all those rubles?"

"So many things."

The dark one was Olga, the blonde Natasha — a ballet dancer, she said. Olga spoke Italian; Natasha only Russian, and had a dancer's slimness and pallor, and china-blue eyes with a Slavic slant and an expressive Russian mouth.

I said I was walking — I needed the exercise.

"We will go with you!"

That was why, about ten minutes later, I came to be walking with a Russian woman on each arm, carrying Natasha's laundry — Olga pushing little Boris in his pram — down Karl Marx Prospekt. Olga was chatting to me in Italian and Natasha was laughing.

"You seem to be doing all right for yourself, Paul!"

It was a group of people from the tour, heading back to the bus. I was delighted that they saw me — what would they make of it?

The women and I stopped at a café and had a hot chocolate, and they said they wanted to see me again—"We can talk!" They made a fuss about the time, probably because they were deceiving their husbands, but we agreed on a time when they would call me.

That evening I went to the circus and was reminded of how much I hate circuses, especially communist ones. Everyone says: Rumanians are wonderful acrobats! Bulgarians are brilliant jugglers! You haven't lived until you've seen a Russian on a tightrope — and a Chinese performer can balance a whole set of crockery on a chopstick he's holding in his teeth! Why is this so? Why all the flying humans, and people tumbling like ferrets, and doing amazing things with stools?

This Moscow Circus had bears that walked and danced — big hairy things, slavering and pirouetting; and dogs that balanced on one leg, and seals that gleamed and manipulated balls with their flippers. All the animals looked human in their frightened way — walking stiffly and unnaturally on their hind legs, and giving pleading glances to their trainers, as if they were going to be kicked or electrocuted if they did the wrong dance step.

It all made me very uneasy; it seemed to me funless and frantic. Was I taking it too seriously in thinking that it was the most vulgar expression of peasant entertainment? It was what poor people did to get kopecks thrown at them in the bazaars and market squares. It was open-air amusement, and it made me think of serfs and slaves and gypsies: men leaping like dogs, dogs goose-stepping like men. And virtually all the interest in the women performers was inspired by their scanty costumes — so shocking in the puritan society of political commissars.

It is hard to imagine a well-educated and fair-minded society producing circus performers, or any sensitive person training a bear to dance. Circuses may flourish in some prosperous countries, but the artists, so-called, come from elsewhere. The Ringling brothers were Wisconsin farmboys — very poor — who liberated themselves by learning to juggle and tumble. Rudolf Ringling could balance a plow on his chin. Today, Ringling Brothers and Barnum and Bailey Circus gets most of its stars from either Eastern Europe or China.

The simplest explanation of the circus's popularity is that most people like a spectacle — music, tumbling, noise, sex, patriotism and cheap thrills. They enjoy watching white dwarfs riding elephants or one of the more popular acts that Ringling Brothers presents: twenty-five black people playing basketball on unicycles. There is another side to this. "The desire to turn men into animals was the principal motive for the development of slavery," Elias Canetti wrote in the chapter entitled "Transformation" in Crowds and Power. "It is as difficult to overestimate its strength as that of its opposite desire: to turn animals into men… popular amusements like the public exhibition of performing animals."

The spectacle of the Moscow Circus supported the truth of that statement. Nothing was more revealing of Soviet thought than a Russian lion tamer, and the process that lay behind that big brown bear's clumsy jig or the lobster quadrille said a great deal about the political system.

I also thought: What a stupid man I am to be sitting alone at a circus in Moscow. I could not imagine why I wasn't doing something vastly more enjoyable, like sailing off East Sandwich, Massachusetts. And then I remembered that I was on my way to Mongolia and China.

There was a message waiting for me when I got back to the Hotel Ukraine: Olga will call tomorrow at 12. She called on the stroke of noon the next day to say she would call again at two. At two she said she and Natasha would meet me at three-thirty. These phone calls had the effect of making our meeting seem necessary and inevitable. It was only when I was waiting on the hotel steps that it occurred to me that I had no idea why I was seeing them at all.

Natasha walked by but did not greet me. She was wearing old clothes and carrying a shopping basket. She winked at me; I followed her to a taxi in which Olga was already sitting and smoking. When I got in, Olga gave the driver an order and he drove off. After that they intermittently quarreled over whether this was the right direction or the quickest way.

After twenty minutes of this — we were now deep in the high-rise Moscow suburbs — I said, "Where are we going?"

"Not far."

There were people raking leaves and picking up trash from the streets. I had never seen so many street sweepers. I asked what was going on.

Olga said that this was the one day in the year when people worked for nothing, tidying up the city. The day was called subodnik and this work was given free to honor Lenin — his birthday was two days away.

"Don't you think you should be out there with a shovel, Olga?"

"I am too busy," she said, and her laugh said: Not on your life!

"Are we going to a house?"

"We are going to my girfriend's apartment."

Olga gave more directions to the driver. He turned right, entered a side street and then cut down a dirt road and cursed. That bad road connected one housing estate with another. He kept driving on these back roads among tall, bare apartment houses and then he stopped the car and babbled angrily.

"We can walk the rest of the way," Olga said. "You can pay him."

The driver snatched my rubles and drove off as we walked towards a sixteen-story building, through children playing and their parents sweeping the pavements in a good subodnik spirit.

No one took any notice of me. I was merely a man in a raincoat following two women down a muddy sidewalk, past walls that had been scribbled on, past broken windows and through a smashed door to a hallway where three baby carriages were parked and some of the floor tiles were missing. It could have been a housing estate in south London or the Bronx. The elevator had been vandalized but it still worked. It was varnished wood, with initials scratched onto it. We took it to the top floor.

"Excuse me," Olga said. "I couldn't get my friend on the phone. I must talk to her first."

But by now I had imagined that we had come to a place where I was going to be threatened and probably robbed. There were three huge Muscovites behind the door. They would seize me and empty my pockets, and then blindfold me and drop me somewhere in Moscow. They didn't go in for kidnapping. I asked myself whether I was worried, and answered: Kind of.

I was somewhat reassured when I saw a surprised and sluttish-looking woman answer the door. Her hair was tangled, she wore a bathrobe. It was late afternoon — she had just woken up. She whispered a little to Olga and then she let us in.

Her name was Tatyana and she was annoyed at having been disturbed — she had been watching television in bed. I asked to use the toilet and made a quick assessment of the apartment. It was large — four big rooms and a central hall with bookshelves. All the curtains were drawn. It smelled of vegetables and hair spray and that unmistakable odor that permeates places in which there are late-sleepers — the smell of bedclothes and bodies and feety aromas.

"You want tea?"

I said yes, and we all sat in the small kitchen. Tatyana brushed her hair and put on makeup as she boiled water in a kettle and made tea.

There were magazines on the table — two oldish copies of Vogue, and last month's Tatler and Harper's Bazaar. Seeing them in that place gave me what I was sure would be a lasting hatred for those magazines.

"My friend from Italy brings them for me," Tatyana said.

"She has many foreign friends," Olga said. "That is why I wanted you to meet her. Because you are our foreign friend. You want to change rubles?"

I said no — there was nothing I wanted to buy.

"We can find something for you," Olga said, "and you can give us U.S. dollars."

"What are you going to find?"

"You like Natasha. Natasha likes you. Why don't you make love to her?"

I stood up and went to the window. The three women stared at me, and when I looked at Natasha she smiled demurely and batted her eyelashes. Beside her was her shopping basket with a box of detergent, some fresh spinach wrapped in newspaper, some cans of food, a pack of plastic clothespins and a box of disposable diapers.

"Here?" I said. "Now?"

They all smiled at me. Out the window I saw people sweeping the sidewalks, raking leaves and shoveling up piles of rubbish — a little unselfish demonstration of civic pride for Lenin's birthday.

"How much will it cost me to make love to Natasha?"

"One hundred and seventy U.S. dollars."

'That's rather a precise figure," I said. "How did you arrive at that price?"

'That's how much a cassette recorder costs at the Berioska shop."

"I'll think about it."

"You have to decide now," Olga said sternly. "Do you have a credit card?"

"You take credit cards?"

"No, the Berioska shop can."

'That's an awful lot of money, Olga."

"Hah!" Tatyana jeered. "My boyfriends give me radios, tape recorders, cassettes, clothes — thousands of dollars. And you're arguing about a few hundred dollars."

"Listen, I'm not boasting — believe me. But if I like someone I don't usually buy her before we go to bed. In America we do it for fun."

Olga said, "If we don't have dollars we can't buy radios at the Berioska. It closes at six o'clock. What's wrong?"

"I don't like being hurried."

"All this talk! You could have finished by now!"

I hated this and had a strong desire to get away from the nagging. It was hot in the kitchen, the tea was bitter, all those people raking leaves sixteen floors down depressed me.

I said, "Why don't we go to the Berioska shop first?"

Tatyana dressed and we found a taxi. It was a twenty-minute ride and well after five by the time we arrived. But for me it was simply a way of saving face — and saving money. I had been disgusted with myself back there at the apartment.

Before we went into the shop the three women started bickering. Olga said that it was all my fault for not making love to Natasha when I should have. Tatyana had to meet her daughter at school, Natasha was due home because she was going to the Black Sea tomorrow with her husband and small child — and was counting on having a cassette recorder; and Olga herself had to be home to rook dinner. Vremya, Natasha said, vremya. Time, time.

I had never seen such expensive electronic equipment — overpriced radios and tape decks, a Sony Walkman for $300.

"Natasha wants one of those."

Olga was pointing to a $200 cassette machine.

"That's a ridiculous price."

"It's a good cassette. Japanese."

I was looking at Natasha and thinking how thoroughly out of touch these people were with market forces.

"Vremya," Natasha said urgently.

"These are nice," I began trying on the fur hats. "Wouldn't you like one of these?"

Olga said, "You must buy something now. Then we go."

And I imagined it — the cassette recorder in a Berioska bag, and the dash to Tatyana's, and the fumble upstairs with Natasha panting vremya, vremya, and then off I'd go, saying to myself: You've just been screwed.

I said, "Tatyana, your daughter's waiting at school. Olga, your husband's going to want his dinner on time. And Natasha, you're very nice, but if you don't go home and pack you'll never make it to the Black Sea with your husband."

"What are you doing?"

"I have an appointment," I said, and left, as the Berioska shop was closing.

I went to the Bolshoi, and I noticed at the coat check and the buffet and the bar, Russian women gave me frank looks. It was not lust or romance, merely curiosity because they had spotted a man who probably had hard currency. It was not the sort of look women usually offered. It was an unambiguous lingering gaze, a half smile that said: Alay be we can work something out.

Moscow had a chastening effect on the tour group. They became very quiet and rather wary. They seemed actually afraid — something I had not expected. Was it the glowering soldiers and police? Or perhaps the repeated security checks, and having to show your hotel ID card before you were allowed into the lobby? Or was it the big bare buildings and wide streets? Ashley said he felt very small in Moscow.

Kicker winked and told me that in his three days in Moscow he had not left the hotel. He said he was afraid of being picked up and never heard of again.

"Why would they do that?"

"I was a Marine," he said. "They kill you for things like that in Russia. Let's get out of here. That's what I say."

It was a dark rainy afternoon when we set off from Yaroslav Station on the Trans-Siberian. The people in the group were nervous and chatty — glad to be going but apprehensive about what it would be like. Some had never spent a night on a train. They were faced with four nights to Irkutsk, living at close quarters — Americans in one compartment, British in another, Australians in a third, the nameless French foursome together. From the moment I was assigned to my compartment I knew it would be a splendid trip: I was alone. I had my Polish provisions, and chocolate and champagne that 1 had bought in Moscow. 1 had books, and my shortwave radio. I was looking forward to four days of bliss.

It is an unusual feeling in the Soviet Union, because they do not cater to the individual — they hardly seem to notice that the solitary traveler exists. If a person enters a Russian restaurant alone, it takes ages for him to be served; but the group of thirty-five drunken Finns chanting "Suomi! Suomi!" (Finland! Finland!) are fussed over and fed and are back on their tour bus in less than an hour. The Soviets prefer to feed large groups of people; they like herding them and lecturing them and counting them and sending them on their way. The individual is often dangerous and always a nuisance. Why bother with individuals when it is so much easier to bully a whole mob of tourists? The solitary traveler is despised and feared, and if he manages to triumph over the bureaucracy, he will find it twice as expensive as traveling with a group. Soviet society does not recognize the individual. The answer is simple: travel with a group and, when it suits you, drop out.

Traveling on my own I would never have had a sleeping compartment to myself. But two whole coaches had been allotted to this tour, and as the tour only filled one and a half coaches, some of us lucked out and were on our own.

That was why, rolling towards Kirov that first day, I was very happy — reading, drinking, listening to the news on the BBC, and writing down the odd episode with Olga and Natasha. It seemed to me like a sort of rest cure — idleness, and undemanding scenery, and they woke you for meals. And because we were in a group we were served before anyone else.

The experience of the Trans-Siberian Express is both monotony and monkish beauty: all day outside the loud, hurrying train it is birch trees and undulant hills, and after the utter blackness of night on that line, you see more birch trees and more undulant hills; and all that day too, until it seems more like wallpaper than a landscape — the kind of wallpaper that is so simple and repetitious that you look at the seams rather than the design.

There is no more austere sight in nature than birch trees set among small snow-covered hills, a study in black and white that is made starker by the crows and their nests, the fat black birds in the branches or looking deranged, flapping in the white sky.

We went through Perm, and passed the East-West marker at 1100 miles; and then to Sverdlovsk. The dwellings diminish and change from concrete towers in cities, to brick apartments on the outskirts, and then to houses made of planks that grow rougher until huts made of split logs appear, and these are replaced in the hinterland by plain log cabins with turf jammed into the chinks. In fifty or a hundred miles you see the entire history of Russian architecture.

Over lunch I was sitting with Blind Bob, Wilma and Morthole. Morthole brought us up to date on his rock collection: one from Berlin that had been thrown by a rioter, a chunk from Warsaw, a pebble from Moscow. He was planning to snatch something interesting at the twelve-minute stop in Omsk.

"These houses are horrible," Wilma said. She was wearing a wool hat over her baldness.

Morthole hadn't shaved and was looking whiskery. It always seemed ominous to me when a man stopped shaving on such a trip.

I remarked that they didn't seem to paint many of their houses out here — usually it was just the trim. In the poorer villages there was no paint at all. The log cabins and shacks just blackened in the rain and sun. And there was the proof out of the window: a whole settlement of black, chubby huts.

Wilma said, "I'd like to read something about it."

Blind Bob said, "Did you read that book by Paul Theroux, about taking this train?"

"No," Wilma said, and addressed me, "Did you?"

Flattening my face against the window I said, "Look at those birches! Isn't it amazing that you never see a fat one? They're all slender. Why do you suppose—"

"I read it," Morthole said, across the table. "The Gurneys have one of his books, I don't know which one. I saw Malcolm reading it in his compartment."

I made a mental note to avoid the Gurneys, but even so — sitting here — I felt like a hypocrite. But what was I to do? I hated being an object of attention. I had paid for my ticket, and so I had a right to my privacy. I hadn't deceived anyone; I had merely been economical with the truth. The alternative could be irksome — not just the conversations about writing books and "You should get yourself a word processor," but what I feared would be the duties of an unpaid guide. I had been on this train before; therefore, I ought to know whether that thermos bottle thing was a church steeple, and the name of that river, and if you could buy film in Irkutsk.

It was easy for me to keep to myself. I had my own compartment — plenty of space, plenty of provisions, the grapes, cookies, chocolates and tea that made being on the Trans-Siberian like a luxurious form of convalescence. It was a surprise to me that my little radio worked inside the train. At certain times of day I got the BBC news, and at other times Radio Australia or Voice of America. I listened to the Top Twenty, and the report of a Shakespeare Festival in China, and the fallout from the bombing of Libya. From the samovar at the end of the sleeping car, I got hot water for tea. And I divided the day into three parts and set myself tasks to perform: reading and writing.

That night a full moon was shining in the cloudless sky, and beneath it, water was lying everywhere, the melted snow flooding the birches. At midnight the moon shone from above and below this water and made the earth a glittering mirror on which leafless trees trembled, looking frail.

Every day is the same on the Trans-Siberian: that is one of its reassuring aspects. In itself it is not interesting, which is why it is such a pleasure to be a passenger and so maddening to write about it. There is nothing to write about. This train is an occasion, not a subject. It is more like an ocean liner than any other train I know — the solid steady travel, the sameness of the view. But in the thirteen years since I had last been on it, it had changed in many ways, and most of those changes were improvements. I assumed Gorbachev's cost-efficient approach to Soviet life was behind this. He had publicly criticized the uncaring attitude of Soviet workers: the old, grizzled provodniks on the sleeping car were gone, and in their place was a young couple who occupied one small compartment and worked in shifts. Gorbachev had denounced the drunkenness that was common in the country — the Trans-Siberian reflected this: a trip on it was no longer a binge. There were a few drunks on the train, but none dared to enter the dining car, and no alcohol was sold. The carriages were cleaner, and the officials fairly good-natured, and the passengers more prosperous looking. Still, at the longer stops, when I was strolling down the station platform I was buttonholed by Russians who asked: Want to sell your shoes? Want to sell your jeans? Want to sell your T-shirt? Perhaps it was only my imagination, but it seemed to me that there was something fundamentally wrong with a country whose citizens asked to buy your underwear.

Each day I moved my watch back one hour: Irkutsk is five hours ahead of Moscow. Losing an hour a day did not cause jet lag. Just after I awoke on the third day I looked out and saw a huge lake to the south: Ozero Chany (Lake Chany). Very soon we stopped at Barabinsk, which was cold — below freezing. Zhenia, the sleeping-car attendant, squinted at the sky and hugged himself and muttered meg (snow). Morthole drew my attention to the fact that some of the birches on the Barabinsk steppe were as fat as beer barrels — thicker than any birch I had ever seen. These older birches had black, burst-open bark on their trunks.

We came to Novosibirsk, on the river Ob. It is strange that this Siberian city should be so large, though not stranger than that Chicago should be — and like Chicago it is a city the railway put on the map. Much odder than this was the sight of so many sea gulls on the river — black-headed gulls, diving among the ice floes, over 1000 miles from the sea. The Ob itself, at 3461 miles long, is the fourth longest river in the world — longer than the Yangtze.

Once, Malcolm Gurney quoted with approval this know-it-all traveler, Theroux, who had done the trip some years ago. Everyone at the table listened with interest and apparent agreement. It seemed as though I was the only person who didn't agree with the wild generalization, and so I excused myself and left.

But I wanted to reveal myself and tell them that this train was much better than the one I had taken in 1973. It was more orderly, and cleaner, and seemingly more tolerant. What I remembered was that the dining car had run out of decent food after a few days, and we had lived on eggs and watery soup and stale bread; and I had a very clear memory of the thin soup sloshing in the steel soup bowls as the train jolted around long curves.

Clouds were massing and building towards the dazzling white moon just before I turned in. It had grown cold. In the immensity of the Siberian forest, amid the blue pools of snow and spiky trees, there were wolves and wild dogs — farther on I saw their skins being stretched on frames. It seemed to me hateful that they should make wolves into hats. When the moon was lost in the cloud cover, a blackness overwhelmed the view. I awoke at Taishet the next morning to driving snow.

It was spring snow — sudden, heavy and deep. The whole landscape was buried in it, with only a few brown muddy creeks showing through — no water, just a creek shape of chocolate ice cream straggling through the snow. The strange silence and isolation that snow brings to a place was intensified here in Siberia — or technically Eastern Siberia, as it said in Russian on the sign at the little wooden station at Uk. It snowed all day, and at times, as the train rolled through it, the snow was so thick that everything was white — the sky, the earth: nothing but a blankness with a few faint tracings of trees.

I had Rick Westbetter's word that the wooden townships looked like small towns in the Midwest in the 1920s — one-story wooden houses with steeply pitched roofs; and outside town a couple of filthy factories whose smoke was the same browny-gray as the clouds, and all around an expanse of prairie — in this case the great Gromboolian Plain of the steppes. Those places a few hours out of Zima all looked like Gopher Prairie. I was now reading Main Street and marveling at the similarity: the boom town in the middle of nowhere.

The snowstorm lessened in the afternoon, and later as we approached Angarsk what looked like a blizzard was the wind whipping the snow from the ground; it had stopped falling. Where the ground had been scoured by the wind, the soil was light brown and dry, the sort of frozen ground you can stub your toe against. It was not until I saw a falcon roosting on a bare tree that I realized that there was little sign of life here — just bare ground and drifted snow under an iron-dark sky. The train raced along, and I looked for more. I thought I saw magpies and crows, but it might have been a trick of the light.

We arrived at Irkutsk, after four and a half days of the Trans-Siberian's crossing the vastness of the steppes. The astonishing thing is not that it took so long to get there, but that for anyone who chooses to go on to Vladivostok, there are four more days of it, and they are much the same. It was like crossing an ocean.

It was nine o'clock at night when we arrived at Irkutsk, but we did not stay in the city. We were directed to a bus and driven to a hotel forty miles away on the shore of Lake Baikal. The Wittricks called it Lake Bacall, like the actress.

The lake was frozen solid, with great shoved-up ice slabs at the shore, because of the pressure. Baikal is the largest lake in the world — it contains one-fifth of the earth's fresh water, and the Russians suggest that there are monsters in it as well as fat seals and numerous varieties of fish. The ice is two meters thick, they boasted. You can walk the length of it — over 400 miles. Or take a sleigh across to Babushkin, which they do to save time in winter. They had amazing things here at Baikal. Natural wonders! Over at Bashaiyarischka they had fur farms — they raised ermine and lynx and mink, and made them into hats. They trapped sable — the little devils wouldn't breed in captivity, but there were plenty of them around and they fetched $1000 a pelt. They had coral in the lake, they boasted. And just down the shore at Listvianka they had a church. There was a priest in the church — a real one.

They never boasted about the hotels. In Moscow it had been a vast and dusty place, with straw mattresses and a shriveled floor, ragged carpets, blankets blackened with cigarette burns, and stinking bathrooms — leaky pipes, cracked cisterns. "The bogs are tragic," Richard Cathcart said. I thought that was about right. The hotel at Baikal was marble and mausoleumlike, and it was clean. But I had to be shown three rooms until I found one with hot water, and in the last there was no toilet seat, and none of them had curtains on the windows. The babushkas dusted and mopped, but apart from that there was no maintenance — not only in the larger sense of the drains working or the water running, but in details: knobs were missing from dressers, and the latches from the windows, which didn't open in any case; the locks jammed, the lamps were either dead or bristling with bare wires. Repairs were carried out with bits of sticky tape and pieces of string. It is true that every traveler has to expect to put up with discomfort, but there were huge areas of Soviet life that seemed to me not simply uncomfortable but downright dangerous.

The members of the group were not happy here: it was too cold, the hotel was a wreck, the food was dreadful, and why didn't these Siberians smile?

Honeymooners came to the hotel — some stayed, some merely stood in front and had their pictures taken, some roistered there. On my second night the room next to mine was occupied by a pair of newlyweds playing Russian rock and roll on a cassette machine until, at two in the morning, I banged on their door and told them to shut up. The groom appeared, drunken and drooling and a foot taller than me, but when he saw I was a foreigner he decided not to attack me. Behind him in the room, a young woman encouraged him. In defiance, they turned the music even louder for about ten minutes, and then they switched it off.

It was a custom for just-married couples to drive to where the Angara River flowed from the lake — it was all eider ducks and ice floes — and these newlyweds parked by the shore, opened a bottle of champagne and toasted each other, while the driver took their picture. The bride wore a rented dress of white lace, and the groom a dark suit with a wide red ribbon worn as a sash. In the course of one walk in this direction I saw four couples do this — have a ceremonial drink, then pose for a picture. The shore was littered with champagne bottles.

I found this very depressing. Was it the ritual, or was it the fact that, because the Soviet divorce rate was so high, everything related to marriage there looked like a charade? It might have been nothing more than the cold: Baikal was freezing, and the lake looked like a plain of snow and ice in Antarctica. Well, after all it was winter in Siberia.

***

There were any number of people eager to explain why Irkutsk was the capital of Siberia, an education center, an Asiatic crossroads; but I thought Rick Westbetter had it just about right when he said, "Grand Rapids used to look like this, when I was a kid. Look, outdoor privies. We haven't seen those since the twenties." I told him that I had been reading Sinclair Lewis and that these Siberian cities and towns looked like tired versions of Zenith and Gopher Prairie: not only the wooden houses with the porches, but the main street and the old cars and the trolleys, and the wide-fronted department stores that looked as though they should be called The Bon-Ton Store. If there was a difference it was that the class system was probably more rigid in Siberia, and the local version of George F. Babbitt would be a party hack rather than a real-estate man.

An Estonian rock group called Radar was playing in Irkutsk, a freezing wind blew across the river, the toilet seat in my room had been cut from a flat and splintery piece of plywood. How had these people sent rockets to Mars?

Young men and fox-faced women lurked on the promenade and importuned what foreigners they could find.

"Want to sell—"

They wanted to buy blue jeans, T-shirts, track shoes, sport shoes, watches, sweaters, sweatshirts, lighters. They paid in rubles — or else I could have Annushka for an hour. Did I have a radio? And what about a pen?

That night, listening to my little shortwave radio, I heard the news on the BBC World Service. It was the usual headmistress's voice, but the message seemed portentous.

"Swedish officials say they have detected high radioactive levels in the atmosphere," she said, "and they link these with other reports that Finland, Denmark, and Norway have also detected much higher concentrations of radioactivity than usual. At first, it had been thought that the radioactive material had leaked from a Swedish plant near Uppsala, north of Stockholm. But officials from different parts of Sweden say they think the leak has come from the east, in other words from a nuclear power station in the Soviet Union. Easterly winds have been blowing over Scandinavia for several days. According to one report, radiation levels are up to six times above normal level in Finland and half as much again as is normal in Norway."

This was the first inkling of the disaster at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Station, near Kiev. It had happened two days before, when I was in the Soviet Union — in Baikal, cursing the Soviets for never bothering to fix leaky pipes.

In the morning we left Irkutsk for Mongolia. The people in the group complained that the train was three hours late, but that didn't seem bad — after all, it had come from Moscow, which was almost 4000 miles away. It was the direct Moscow-to-Mongolia train, following the route of the Trans-Siberian as far as Ulan-Ude and then becoming the Trans-Mongolian Express when it turned south from there. It takes in the most rugged and beautiful part of Siberia, the mountainous region south of Lake Baikal called Buryatskaya, inhabited by the nomadic Buryats. The train skirts the lake, passing the ice fishermen at Slyudyanka and keeping to the shore, to Babushkin and beyond. To the southwest there is a tremendous mountain range, the Khrebet Khamar Daban, very snowy, and with great peaks, one behind the other like the Rockies, and rising to 15,000 and 16,000 feet. These mountains constitute the frontier and it is necessary to travel around them in the flat valley of the Selenga River in order to enter Mongolia.

The last time I was here I did not see anything. I was going west, and the westbound trains round Baikal at night. So this was all new to me: icy mountains in brilliant sunshine. The sleeping car had a punished and dusty look; written on its side in Cyrillic were the words Mongolian Railways, and there was the Mongolian state seal — a galloping fur-hatted horseman. When we stopped, scores of flat-faced Mongolians in blue tracksuits jumped out of the train and began running in place on the platform. It was the prize-winning Mongolian wrestling team, on their way back from a successful series of matches in Moscow. One of the wrestlers told me that the horseman on the seal was the liberator of Mongolia, Suhe Baator. The name means "Suhe the Hero."

On Russian trains there are loudspeakers in all the coaches, sometimes broadcasting music, sometimes news or comment. The drone is always in the background, and the Russians appear not to notice it. It has a practical value, giving information about the next stop and how long the train will be there. In the past the volume could not be regulated — the knobs were removed from the volume control, and so it droned day and night. One of the improvements on Soviet trains has been the replacement of the volume control knobs. On Mongolian trains these knobs are missing, and the traveler is subjected to an ear-bashing in the Mongolian language.

"Isn't there anything they can do about it?" Miss Wilkie said pleadingly.

"I'd like to take an axe to that thing," Kicker said.

They petitioned the Mongolian attendant, a tough-looking woman, who waved them away — a don't-bother-me gesture.

"Maybe she doesn't have the knob," I said. "In which case, you're in luck. Because if you turn it off she won't be able to turn it back on."

A ducklike voice ranted from the loudspeaker.

"It's driving us nuts," the Westbetters said.

I made myself very popular with the group by showing them how to shut it off. I wrapped a rubber band around the metal stump and this rubber offered enough of a grip to shut the thing off. The beauty of it was that I could then take the rubber band away, and so it stayed off.

We crossed the Selenga, and it looked as though the wilderness went on forever. Mountain streams coursed out of the forest, and chunks of ice as big as cars floated on the river. The earth was brown and dusty, and though it was very cold, there were tiny buds on the trees. The Soviet city of Ulan-Ude sprawled in the wide, flat valley — low wooden houses and tall electric poles, and a marshaling yard full of freight cars loaded with tree trunks. It was a region of lumberjacks and trappers, though no one of this description boarded the train. In fact, from what I could see the train carried a great number of young Soviet soldiers.

Leaving the Trans-Siberian route and heading south, the train climbed the bare, brown hills and in the brown valley below was the river clogged with muddy ice and the hideous city smoking on its banks. Just a few miles south of Ulan-Ude the land is arid and desertlike, the gobi that is more or less changeless as far as China: big bushes rather than trees, and rough grasslands beaten by sand, and a few settlements, but even those few are sorry places. In many empty places, watching the train go by, was a man in a brown fur hat and padded jacket, smoking a cigarette. He was motionless and solitary, almost emblematic. How had he gotten there?

The great dune-shaped hills were covered with dust and yellow grass. There were no trees. Black goats browsed near some isolated cabins, and horses were tethered. The people did not show themselves. It seemed to me that almost nothing is known of these settlements — no foreigner is allowed in them, they produce no writing; they are mute. They were places of utter simplicity, too — their water came from holes in the ground, their heat from the firewood stacked against the cabin. It was a desolate part of the Soviet Union. It was as though we had already entered Mongolia. Outside the larger settlements were graveyards, each grave surrounded by a rectangle of fence, to prevent — what? Probably wolves from digging up the corpses.

At midnight we reached the Mongolian border, and spent several hours on each side going through formalities. The Russians and the Mongolians were equally rude. They searched luggage, they took beds apart and lifted the floorboards of the sleeping car.

"English books? English magazines?"

I showed them what I had, but they were not interested. Their great search was for pornography, I was told, which they considered vastly more dangerous than political propaganda. The Mongolians in particular felt pornography was evil.

Perhaps accustomed to outsiders not speaking their language, the Mongolians went about their business silently, hardly gesturing, only occasionally muttering — but when they muttered they did so in Russian. Mongolian men and women alike had boyish faces.

That was why I almost jumped out of my skin when the fierce attendant barked at me early the next morning. I had locked my compartment, but she had a master key. She knocked and an instant later whipped the door open and went "woof-woof!" She made me understand that she was saying Get up in her language. She wanted the bedding. But we hadn't been able to go to sleep until two in the morning — that was the hour we had left the frontier. It was now seven. We were due in Ulan Bator (Red Hero) at nine-thirty. I rolled over and went back to sleep.

Then this Mongolian attendant did an amazing thing — the sort of trick that clever adults attempt at children's parties. She reentered the compartment, barked softly, and seized the edges of my bedding in both hands. And in one swift maneuver ("Woof!") she jerked my bedding off me — sheets and blankets — leaving me shivering, and she hurried away on bandy legs.

We were traveling on long, straight tracks through the enormous expanse of grassland, among bulgey hills and smooth slopes. In sheltered and shadowy places there were crescent patches of snow. There was the occasional horseman, bundled up against the wind, making his way in the emptiness — no roads, no tracks, nothing but the circular tents known as yurts (the Mongols themselves call these ghurrs). It was an extraordinary landscape — pale yellow, under a blue sky — extraordinary because it was not a desert, but rather the largest pasture imaginable: here and there a herd of horses, here and there a camel, or a man, or a tent. It was inhabited, but with a sparseness that was impressive.

The Mongols reached the eastern limits of China. They rode to Afghanistan. They rode to Poland. They sacked Moscow, Warsaw and Vienna. They had stirrups — they introduced stirrups to Europe (and that made jousting possible and perhaps started the Age of Chivalry). They rode for years, in all seasons. When the Russians retired from their campaigns for the winter, the Mongols kept riding and recruiting in the snow. They devised an ingenious tactic for their winter raids: they waited for rivers to freeze and then they rode on the ice. In this way they could go anywhere and they surprised their enemies. They were tough and patient, and by the year 1280 they had conquered half the known world.

But they were not fearless, and looking at these great open spaces you could almost imagine what it was that spooked them. They had a dread of thunder and lightning. It was so easy to be struck by lightning here! When an electric storm started they made for their tents and burrowed into layers of black felt. If there were strangers among them they sent these people outside, considering them unlucky. They would not eat an animal that had been struck by lightning — they wouldn't go near it. Anything that would conduct lightning they avoided — even between storms; and one of their aims in life, along with plundering and marauding and pillaging was propitiating lightning.

As I was watching this wilderness of low hills, the city of Ulan Bator materialized in the distance, and a road hove into view, and dusty buses and trucks. My first impression of the city was that it was a military garrison; and that impression stayed with me. Every apartment block looked like a barracks, every parking lot like a motor pool, every street in the city looked as though it had been designed for a parade. Most of the vehicles were in fact Soviet army vehicles. Buildings were fenced in, with barbed wire on the especially important ones. A cynic might have said that the city resembled a prison, but if so the Mongolians were very cheery prisoners — it was a youthful, well-fed, well-dressed population. They had red cheeks, they wore mittens and boots: in this brown country they favored bright colors — it was not unusual to see an old man with a red hat and a purple frock coat, and blue trousers stuck into his multi-colored boots. But that way of dressing meant that the Russians were more conspicuous, even when they weren't soldiers. I say the city looked like a garrison, but it was clearly not a Mongolian one — it was Russian, and there was little to distinguish it from any other military garrison I had seen in Central Asia. We had been passing such big, dull places all the way from Irkutsk: barracks, radar dishes, unclimbable fences, batteries, ammo dumps, and surely those mounds that looked like tumuli were missile silos?

The hotel was bare and smelled of mutton fat. That was the smell of Ulan Bator. Mutton was in the air. If there had been a menu, mutton would have been on it. It was served at every meal: mutton and potatoes — gristly mutton and cold potatoes. The Mongolians had a way of making food inedible or disgusting, and they could transform even the most inoffensive meal into garbage, by serving it cold, or sprinkling it with black carrots, or garnishing it with a goat's ear. I made a point of visiting food stores, just to see what was available. I found fat black sausages, shriveled potatoes and turnips, black carrots, trays of grated cabbage, basins of yellow goats' ears, chunks of rancid mutton and chicken feet. The most appetizing thing I saw turned out to be a large bin of brown unwrapped laundry soap.

The shops sold Vietnamese pens (Iridium brand), North Korean teddy bears and toys, Russian radios. A Russian television set that was the size of a clothes closet, with an eighteen-inch screen, cost 4400 tugriks ($1500 at the official rate of exchange, or roughly a Mongolian's annual income). They made their own shoes, and they made lovely boots and saddles. They made holsters. They sold wolf pelts, and mink coats; and ermine, squirrel, sable and rabbit by the pelt. Their lambskin coats were cheap. I bought a sheepskin waistcoat for the cold. Ten dollars; and stamped in the skin, Made in Mongolia.

"Are you a hunter?" a Mongolian asked me on the street.

It seemed an odd question, but in fact most foreigners who stay in Mongolia — as opposed to those who are just passing through — are hunters. They rake light planes to the Altai Mountains in the west of the country and ambush bears and blow wolves' brains out and do handsome bucks to death.

I asked this man about the food — those goats' ears, that mutton. He said his favorite food was candy. Ulan Bator I subsequently discovered was full of candy stores. It was nothing fancy, it was hard candy, boiled sweets, which they sucked — probably because the air was so dry.

Almost no rain at all falls on Ulan Bator, and Mongolia itself gets only a few inches a year. The skies are eternally blue, and the ground hard and dusty. These people in boots and breeches, dressed for the desert, seemed unlikely residents of barracks. Half the populaton of Mongolia live in Ulan Bator but they could hardly be classified as urban — thirty-five percent of the city dwellers still live in tents.

The members of the tour had become travel weary — tired and grumpy and on each others' nerves. They did not complain out loud; they muttered their regrets. The Americans couldn't understand why there was so little to buy, the Australians hated the food—"Prison food," the Gurneys said; the French quarreled among themselves; the English people said "Mustn't grumble," and Miss Wilkie said, "I think I'm going mental."

I merely listened.

The BBC news sounded like Orson Welles' version of The War of the Worlds. After the initial report that high radiation had been detected in Finland and Denmark, more reports were broadcast of radiation in Germany and Switzerland. And then came the news a day later of a nuclear reactor on fire near Kiev. The disaster occurred on a Friday. Saturday was confusion. Sunday the news was still muddled and alarmist. I listened to a summary — this was on the Monday — of the British Sunday newspapers. They spoke of as many as four thousand people dead, of the mass evacuation of Kiev, of casualties in the tens of thousands and the fire out of control. These suppositions were modified on subsequent days, but it was clear something terrible had happened.

All this time travelers were arriving from Irkutsk. I asked the Russians what they knew of Chernobyl. They knew nothing; they said I was listening to propaganda, and a week later, when everyone in the west knew about the disaster, a Russian just arrived in Mongolia said that the news on Soviet television was that a nuclear power plant was being moved from Kiev.

I found it depressing that no one in Mongolia should know anything of Chernobyl, especially when they themselves had the same sort of nuclear power plants. It was bad enough that they had been colonized and occupied by the Soviets, but it was much worse that this paternalism was taken so literally that they were treated like children and not told anything. They were in the dark. And their conception of communism was very old-fashioned, typified by the thirty-foot bronze statue on the main street, of Joseph Stalin.

I joined the tour to the Mongolian State Museum and saw dinosaurs that looked like none I had ever seen before — with beaks and horns and claws — and huge simple monsters suggested by an eight-foot bone: 'That is its pelvis."

In a room filled with stringed instruments, the Mongolian guide said, "This we call morin huur. Its name comes from a very ancient story about a man who had a wonderful horse. He loved the horse very much. He rode the horse all over Mongolia. He loved the horse more than his family! He treated the horse as you would a loved one or a family. But eventually the horse died. The man was very, very sad. He was so sad he cut the horse to pieces and took out its bones and carved them into a sort of shape like a violin. The horse's tail he made into strings, and he made a bow as well, from bones and from the horse's hair. And he spent the rest of his life playing the violin and thinking of his horse. That is the meaning of morin huur—violin of the horse."

An air of palpable isolation hung over Mongolia. With half the population living in Ulan Bator — the easier for them to be regimented — the countryside was practically empty: it was wilderness, wolves and bears, dinosaur bones and scattered nomads. Ninety percent of the Mongolians outside Ulan Bator lived in tents, and the terrain was so barren — so like the landscape of New Mexico and Arizona — that East European countries made cowboy movies in Mongolia. The Yugoslavs had recently finished shooting Apache—a political cowboy movie, about exploitation.

On May Day, the entire population of Ulan Bator turned out for the parade — not to watch it but to join it. It was a Mongolian custom for everyone to be in the parade. The only spectators were tourists — some Finns and us: Kicker, Bud, Morris, Miss Wilkie, Wilma, Morthole, Ashley, the Gurneys and all the rest. I stood behind Blind Bob.

"Who are those people with the flags?"

They were the round-shouldered wrestlers from the train, but this time wearing their medals. There was something simian in their posture and in the way they walked. It seemed so sad that Blind Bob's last visions on earth should be the messy thaw in Poland, the dreariness of Russia, Siberian hotels and Mongolian wrestlers. Stepping off the sidewalk for a closer look, he tripped and fell.

"I'm all right!" he cried, rubbing his knee. "No harm done! My own darn fault!"

There were thirty people marching in a row, and a row passed me every two seconds. The parade lasted one hour and fifteen minutes. That was 450,000 Mongolians. They carried flags and banners; they dipped these when they passed the mausoleum, like Lenin's, of their leader from the 1920s, Suhe Baator.

There were no soldiers, no uniforms, no weapons at all — how inconvenient it would have been for the Soviets if the Mongolians had had an army. The faces on their banners were Marx, Engels, Lenin, Suhe Bator and Gorbachev. There were large banners bearing the likeness of (so I was told) Chairman Batmunkh, of the Mongolian Revolutionary People's Party, head of the Great People's Assembly.

Over a loudspeaker, a man howled, "May the Mongolian Revolutionary People's Party prosper!"

The parading people cheered and repeated this slogan.

Children wearing fur hats marched by, beating drums and singing.May the sun shine in the sky forever

May the sky be blue forever

May my mother live forever

May the world be peaceful forever

A big pictorial banner was paraded past, showing Lenin and Suhe Bator in 1921. Suhe had a big, bony skull and wore a traditional dresslike gown. Lenin wore his train-conductor's cap. The caption on the banner was Unforgettable Meeting.

There was another portrait, of the Mongolian cosmonaut, Gurragchaa who in 1981 went into space in a Soviet rocket and produced a detailed study of Mongolian topography.

Warsaw Pact for Peace, one banner said; and another: We are Followers of the Mongolian Revolutionary People's Party.

"What does that one say?"

The guide translated the banner, "Congratulations to Workers in Capitalist Countries."

"That's us," Rick Westbetter said.

That was the end of the parade.

At Mongolia's only working monastery the next day, listening to the monks in the watchtowers blowing conch shells as a summons to other monks to pray, I reflected on this country. Once there were 2000 monasteries, the monks all Buddhists of the Yellow Sect. Now there was only this wooden wreck of a place behind an apartment house. Once, Mongol armies had conquered the world. Now there was no army. Mongols had been Chinese emperors — the Manchus were a Mongol dynasty. That had ended. Once, these people had lived on the plains and in the mountains. Now they lived in two-room apartments in this lifeless and stark city. They were in every sense a subject race, and in this — one of the largest and emptiest countries on earth — they lived cheek by jowl. They lived out of the world, almost totally cut off. It had not made them angry. It had kept them innocent in many ways. There was something very sweet about the Mongolians.

Perhaps that was the whole point about Mongolia: that after a Soviet-inspired revolution in which everything was destroyed and swept away — religion, the old economy, the army, the social order — the country was so changed that it could not function without Soviet help. The Mongolians had been reduced to a state of infancy. All their old habits and institutions were gone. The Soviets stepped into this vacuum: they brought Soviet buildings and urban structures, Soviet railways and roads, Soviet schools, and the Soviet ideology displaced Buddhism. The Mongolian script was abolished and the Russian Cyrillic alphabet introduced. The old Mongolian hatred of the Chinese was whipped up, and the Mongolians gladly accepted forts and garrisons and Soviet missile installations until a simple town was practically unknown in Mongolia: every settlement of any size is a military establishment manned by Russian soldiers cursing their luck in having been posted there.

All this Soviet authority, meddling, advice and financial aid had a profound effect: it turned the Mongolians into children. It is hard to imagine a more dependent and helpless people. And they are dependent on the Soviet Union in a sort of frantic way, because they cannot be dependent on anyone else. They have no other friends in the world, no family ties. The very country that turned them into orphans adopted them and — since one of the grimmer features of the country is the permanence of the Soviet presence — won't let them grow up.

All Mongolian aggression is turned against the Chinese. The rockets and tanks and cannons are directed at the Chinese border, and the Chinese are portrayed as torturers and imperialists. (The Chinese reply by calling Mongolia an example of "rampant and reactionary hegemonism.") In its military and political guise this aggression takes the form of Russian divisions patrolling the edges of the Chinese provinces of Xinjiang and Inner Mongolia. Its simpler expression is stone throwing.

There was one Chinese sleeping car on the train I took from Ulan Bator to the border, and moments after leaving the station an enthusiastic Mongolian standing by the track flung a stone and broke a window. The Chinese — who can be nags and bores about the sanctity of state property — stopped the train, made a scene and demanded immediate restitution. They would not proceed unless the Mongolians swore that they would hand over a window. The Mongolians promised.

When I went to look at the broken window, Morthole was already outside the train. But he wasn't looking at the window.

"I'm trying to find that stone for my collection," he said.

He found one, but a policeman told him to put it back on the ground.

Then we left the dead center of Mongolia and headed south. The train climbed the brown hills outside the city, and after folding itself double on a series of hairpin bends, it rolled into the grasslands — the grass, and the whole landscape had the look of a fine sheepskin of carefully clipped fleece, the same color, a yellow that was whitish and then golden. It was the texture of the grass, it was the wind and sun. This seemingly barren gobi was full of live creatures — I saw gray cranes, herds of wild camels, eagles, hawks, buzzards, and brown, long-bodied, gopherlike animals that were probably marmots. But no yaks. Every time I looked out of the window I saw something living, and when there was not a wild animal there was a Mongol — one of those middle-of-nowhere horsemen, heading into the wind.

It was clear and sunny. Every day is clear and sunny in the gobi, every sunset is spectacular, the sun softening and sliding down in a red mass and soaking into the ground; and every night is cold.

That night, at dinner, we were served Chinese food.

"Tomorrow we'll be in China," Miss Wilkie said.

"And there I'll have to leave you, I'm afraid," I said.

"Whoever you are," Ashley said. 'Those French dicks call you 'lom mistair.'"

'That's me."

I looked around the dining car at sedate tables. After three weeks of steady travel the mood in this group had changed: it was slightly more irritable but less rambunctious. People knew exactly who to avoid, and which subjects were unwelcome in conversation, and who was crazy and who was safe. Gut also they kept pretty much to themselves: French, American, Australian, English, and the ones left out — Wilma because of her baldness, Blind Bob because he couldn't see, Morthole because of his obsession with rocks, Miss Wilkie because of her sharp tongue — made up a foursome.

I listened to my shortwave radio and learned that many of the earlier scare stories about Chernobyl had been wrong. But it was very bad and still dangerous; the fire had not yet been extinguished.

I slept fitfully, because of the cold, and just as I dropped into a slumber, there was a knock at the door and the Mongolian attendant demanded my bedding. When I hesitated, she employed the grip-and-snatch technique, removing everything from the bed except me, in one pull.

We were just outside the Mongolian border post at Dzamïn Üüd. It was the perfect distant frontier: sandy desert, blowing dust, nothing growing, a desolate wreck of a town looking absolutely on the edge. The railway station looked like the plaster version of a German town hall. But there were no formalities. I waited, watched birds, and four hours passed; the sun climbed to noon. So much of travel is waiting or delay.

The small blue thing in the desert was a Chinese engine. It chugged up the line and rammed us and was coupled, and then it took us across the border, in bright sunshine, from Mongolia into China.