The Great Railway Bazaar

I. THE MV KHABAROVSK

At its eastern limit the Trans-Siberian Express is a stale-smelling Russian ship that sails two or three times a month out of the dust-storm smog of Yokohama, through the windy Tsugaru Straits and the Sea of Japan – in whose bucking currents whole blizzards vanish – to Nakhodka, in freezing Primorsk, a stone's throw from Vladivostok. It is the only way west to Nakhodka, the pneumonia route through gales to the rail head. Like the train, the ship follows Soviet custom: it is riddled with class distinctions so subtle, it takes a trained Marxist to appreciate them. I was in a four-berth cabin at the waterline, one of the subclassifications of 'Hard Class' (a truer description than the other class Intourist advertises as 'Soft'). Bruce and Jeff, the Australians in the upper bunks, were nervous about going to Siberia. Anders, a young Swede, carbuncular, with one of those unthawed Scandinavian faces that speaks of sexual smugness and a famished imagination, was in the bunk opposite. He listened to the Australians, and when he said, 'Hey, I hear it's cold in Siberia,' I knew it would be a rough crossing.

By late afternoon on the first day the coastline of Honshu was snowy and we were entering the straits. Already the bow and foredeck of the Khabarovsk were sealed in blue ice. Apart from the occasional lighthouse and a few rusty trawlers pitching wildly in the strong current, there were no signs of life. The shore and the mountains behind it were bleak. 'That is Osorayama,' said one of the Japanese students, motioning to a mountain. 'There are demons who live on the top. So people never go near here.' The Japanese stood at the rail, snapping pictures of this bewitched place. They took turns photographing each other, holding a little slate with the date, time, and place chalked on it: the poses were always the same, but the information on the slate altered rapidly. They were mostly students; some were tourists. There were a score of them, and they were going everywhere, but only one spoke English. The sociologist on his way to the Sorbonne did not speak French, nor did the man on his way to the Max Planck Institute speak German. They had phrase books. These they thumbed continually. But the phrase books weren't much help in conversation. They had been compiled by fastidious Japanese and contained such Japanese sentences as 'The room does not suit me!' in German, English, Italian, French, and Russian.

I took New Grub Street to the bar, but there were interruptions: Japanese students drew up chairs and sat in a circle, holding their phrase books like choristers with hymnals, inquiring about the price of a room in London; an American couple wanted to know what I was reading; and there was Jeff, the older Australian, on his way to Germany. Jeff had three days' growth of beard and he habitually wore a beret to cover his baldness. He hated the ship, but he was hopeful.

'Ever been on a ship like this?' he asked.

I said no.

'Listen, I had a friend who was on a ship like this. He was going from Sydney to Hong Kong, I think. He said everyone was very nice when they got on board, but as soon as they were at sea they started going crazy. You know what I mean? Doing things they didn't normally do.' He leered. 'Kind of losing their marbles.'

That night there was a film about Minsk in the lounge. Jeff went and later described it to me. It depicted Minsk as a sunny city of fashion shows and football games, and closed with detailed shots of a steel mill. Afterwards the Russian stewards got their instruments and organized a dance, but it was poorly attended. Two Yugoslav shipping officials danced with the librarians from Adelaide; the American danced with his wife; the Japanese watched, clutching their phrase books.

'Anyone lose his marbles?' I asked.

'This is no voyage,' said Jeff. 'This is like a Sunday-school outing. If you ask me, I think it's because the Russians are in charge.'

The bartender, a muscular blonde lady in pink ankle socks, listened to Jeff's complaint. She said, 'You don't like?'

'I like,' said Jeff. 'It's just that I'm not used to it.'

Nikola, the Yugoslav, joined us. He said he'd had a wonderful time at the dance. He wanted to know the name of the shorter librarian. He said, 'I'm divorced -ha, ha!'

'Galina Petrovna,' I said to the bartender. 'Another beer, please.'

The blonde put down her knitting, and, mumbling to Nikola in Russian, filled my glass.

Nikola said, 'She wants you to call her Galya. It's more friendly.'

'I don't think I have anything to gain by calling her Galya.'

'You are right.' He winked. 'Nothing to gain.'

We talked about Yugoslavia. Nikola said, 'In Yugoslavia we have three things – freedom, women, and drinking!'

'But not all at the same time surely?' I said. The mention of freedom brought the conversation around to Djilas, the persecuted Yugoslav writer.

'This Djilas,' said Nikola. 'I tell you steury. I am in school. They make me rat Djilas. I have to rat all he has reet. About Staleen. He say, hum, Staleen same as Zayoosh. Zayoosh, the Greek gat. Not he theenk like Zayoosh, but look like Zayoosh – big face and great head. I call Djilas traitor of communeesh. This is why. He reet book – big book – call it, hum, Conversation with Staleen. But, hum! he says now Staleen is monstra. Monstra! First Zayoosh, then monstra. I ask you why. Why? Because Djilas is traitor – '

Nikola had been the captain of a Yugoslav ship. He was now an official with a shipping company, on his way to Nakhodka to inspect a damaged freighter. He wished he was still a captain, and he reminisced about the time his ship had nearly sunk in a storm in these Tsugaru Straits. We were passing through dangerous currents, he said. 'Sometimes you have to pray, but don't let the men see you!'

Late at night the bar of the Khabarovsk held only the American couple, Nikola, a gloomy Pole whose name I never learned, and me. The American couple said they were 'into the occult'. I asked them for proof. They told me ghost stories. One was about a Japanese doll they had been given; it had a chipped nose. 'Get rid of it! It's alive!' a Japanese man told them. It had a soul. They went to a temple, sprinkled salt in a circle, and performed a purification ceremony. 'Or else something might have happened to our faces.' I said this was pure speculation. They told me another story. This happened in New Orleans. They were given a strange book. Dinner guests remarked on how depressing their house had become; the book was giving off emanations. They burned the book in an ash can, and a week later their house burned to the ground – no one knew why.

'I know a dealer in old prints,' I said, and began to tell them the most frightening story I know, 'The Mezzotint', by M. R. James.

'Yike!' said the woman when I finished. Her husband said, 'Hey, are you into the occult, too?'

The next morning we were out of the straits; I thought the Sea of Japan would be calmer, but it was much worse. Nikola explained that there were two currents in the Sea of Japan, the warm Kyushu current from the south, and the cold current from the Sea of Okhotsk: they met and made great turbulence. All day the ship rolled in a snow storm into the deepness of the swelling sea, at the far trough of each swell thumping an enormous wave that shook the windows. The dropping ship gave me a sensation of weightlessness, which the shuddering screws a moment later turned into nausea. The seasickness was half fear – that the ship would founder in that icy sea, that we would have to cope with the snow and those waves in frail lifeboats.

The Pole said I looked ill.

'I feel ill.’

'Get drunk.'

I tried, on Georgian wine, but felt worse afterwards, as if I had drunk turpentine. The ship was rocking tremendously; and it was loud with the explosions of waves on the hull, banging doors and loose cupboards and walls so shrill with vibrations it seemed they were about to burst apart. I went to my cabin. Anders was already in his bunk, looking ghastly. Jeff and Bruce were moaning. Now the ship seemed to be leaping clear of the sea, staying airborne for five noisy seconds, and then dropping sideways with a terrific wrenching of woodwork. I didn't take off my clothes. Lifeboat Seven was mine. In his sleep, Anders shrieked, 'No!'

Just before dawn the sea was at its roughest. Again and again I was thrown upwards from my bunk, and once I hit my head on the bunk's frame. At dawn – the light showed through the ice on the porthole – the sea was calmer. I slept for an hour, before being awakened by another bump to hear the following exchange.

'Hey, Bruce.'

'Mm?'

'How's your little Ned Kelly?'

'Mawright.'

'Ya throw ya voice?'

'Naw.'

'Gee, it's rough! These beds make a hell of a racket.'

Jeff was silent for a while. Anders groaned. I tried to tune the radio I had bought in Yokohama.

'I wonder what's for brekkie?'Jeff said at last.

Breakfast (salami, olives, runny eggs, damp bread) was served to eight passengers. The rest, including all the Japanese, were seasick. I sat with the Pole and Nikola. The Pole and I were talking about Joseph Conrad. The Pole called him by his original family name, Korzen-iowski. Nikola wondered at my interest and said, 'He writes about Staleen too, this Korzeniowski?'

That was our last day on the Khabarovsk. It was sunny, but the temperature was well below zero – much too cold to spend more than a few minutes on deck. I stayed in the bar reading Gissing. Around noon Nikola showed up with an old grizzled Russian in tow. They drank vodka, and, once primed, the Russian began telling stories about the war. The Russian (Nikola translated) had been a mate on a ship called the Vanzetti - its sister ship was the Sacco – a decrepit freighter captained by a notorious drunkard. In a convoy of fifty ships crossing the Atlantic the Vanzetti was so slow it dropped far behind, and one day, when the convoy was almost out of sight, a German submarine approached. The captain radioed for assistance, but the convoy sped away, leaving the Vanzetti to fend for herself. The Vanzetti somehow eluded two German torpedoes. The sub surfaced for a look, but the drunken captain had swung his rusty cannon around; he fired once, puncturing the sub and sinking it. The Germans came to believe that this hulk, manned by incompetents, was a secret weapon, and gave the convoy no further trouble. When the Vanzetti limped into Reykjavik, the British organized a special party for the Russians, who showed up two hours late, bellowing obscene songs, and the captain, paralytic with drink, was awarded a medal.

I saw seagulls in the afternoon, but it was five o'clock before the Soviet coast came into view. Surprisingly, it was bare of snow. It was brown, flat, and treeless, the grimmest landscape I had ever laid eyes on, like an immense beach of frozen dirt washed by an oily black sea. The Russian passengers, who until then had sloped around the ship in old clothes and felt slippers, put on wrinkled suits and fur hats for the arrival, and along the starboard deck I saw them pinning medals ('Exemplary Worker', 'Yakutsk Cooperative Society', 'Blagoveshchensk Youth League') to their breast pockets. The ship was a long time docking at Nakhodka. I found a sheltered spot on the deck, fiddled with my radio, and got gypsy music – violins scraping like a chorus of ripsaws. A deck hand in a mangy fur hat and ragged coat crouched by the davit. He asked me, in English (he had been to Seattle!), to turn the music louder. It was the Moldavian half-hour on Moscow Radio. He smiled sadly, showing me his metal dentures. He was from Moldavia, and far from home.

2. THE VOSTOK

The Siberian port of Nakhodka in December gives the impression of being on the very edge of the world, in an atmosphere that does not quite support life. The slender trees are leafless; the ground is packed hard, and no grass grows on it; the streets have no traffic, the sidewalks no people. There are lights burning, but they are like lighthouse beacons positioned to warn people who stray near Nakhodka that it is a place of danger and there is only emptiness beyond it. The subzero weather makes it odourless and not a single sound wrinkles its silence. It is the sort of place that gives rise to the notion that the earth is flat.

At the station ('Proper name is Tikhookeanskaya Station' – Intourist brochure), a building with the stucco and proportions of the Kabul madhouse, I paid six rubles to change from Hard Class to Soft. The clerk said this was highly irregular, but I insisted. There were two berths in the Soft-Class compartments, four in Hard, and I had found the cabin in the Khabarovsk a salutary lesson in overcrowding. Russian travel had already made me class-conscious; I demanded luxury. And the demand, which would have got me nowhere in Japan, where not even the prime minister has his own railway compartment (though the emperor has eleven carriages), got me a plush berth in Car Five of the Vostok.

'Yes, you have question please?' said a lady in a fur hat. The platform was freezing, crisscrossed with the moulds of footprints in ice. The woman breathed clouds of vapour.

'I'm looking for Car Number Five.'

'Car Number Five is now Car Number Four. Please go to Car Number Four and show voucher. Thank you.' She strode away.

A chilly group of complaining people stood at the entrance to the car the lady had indicated. I asked if it was Car Number Four.

'This is it,' said the American occultist.

'But they won't let us in,' said his wife. 'The guy told us to wait.'

A workman came, dressed like a grizzly bear. He set up a ladder with the meaningless mechanical care of an actor in an experimental play whose purpose is to baffle a bored audience. My feet had turned to ice, my Japanese gloves admitted the wind, my nose burned with frostbite – even my knees were cold. The man's paws fumbled with metal plates.

'Jeepers, I'm cold!' said the woman. She let out a sob.

'Don't cry, honey,' said her husband. To me he said, 'Ever see anything like it?'

The man on the ladder had removed the 4 from the side of the car. He slipped 5 into the slot, pounded it with his fist, descended the ladder, and, clapping the uprights together, signalled for us to go inside.

I found my compartment and thought, How strange. But I was relieved, and almost delirious with the purest joy a traveller can know: the sight of the plushest, most comfortable room I had seen in thirty trains. Here, on the Vostok, parked on a platform in what seemed the most godforsaken town in the Soviet Far East, was a compartment that could only be described as High Victorian. It was certainly pre-revolution. The car itself had the look of a narrow lounge in a posh London pub. The passage floor was carpeted; there were mirrors everywhere; the polished brass fittings were reflected in varnished wood; poppies were etched on the glass globes of the pairs of lamps beside the mirrors, lighting the tasselled curtains of red velvet and the Roman numerals on the compartment doors. Mine was VII. I had an easy chair on which crocheted antimacassars had been neatly pinned, a thick rug on the floor, and another one in the toilet, where a gleaming shower hose lay coiled next to the sink. I punched my pillow: it was full of warm goose feathers. And I was alone. I walked up and down the room, rubbing my hands, then set out pipes and tobacco, slippers, Gissing, my new Japanese bathrobe, and poured myself a large vodka. I threw myself on the bed, congratulating myself that 6,000 miles lay between Nakhodka and Moscow, the longest train journey in the world.

To get to the dining car that evening I had to pass through four carriages, and between them in the rubber booth over the coupling was a yard of Arctic. An icy wind blew through the rips in the rubber, there was snow on the floor, a thickness of heavy crystals on the car wall, and the door handles were coated with frost. I lost the skin from my fingertips on the door handles, and thereafter, whenever I moved between the cars of the Trans-Siberian Express, I wore my gloves. Two babushkas acknowledged me. In white smocks and turbans they stood with their red arms in a sink. More old ladies were sweeping the passage with brushwood brooms – a nation of stooping, labouring grannies. Dinner was sardines and stew, made palatable by two tots of vodka. I was joined halfway through by the American occultists. They ordered wine. The wife said, 'We're celebrating. Bernie's just finished his internship.'

'I had no idea occultists served internships,' I said.

Bernie frowned. He said, 'I'm an MD.'

'Ah, a real doctor!' I said.

'We're celebrating by going around the world,' said the wife. 'We're on our way to Poland – I mean, after Irkutsk.'

'So you're really living it up.'

'Sort of’

'Bernie,' I said, 'you're not going to go back and become one of those quacks that charge the earth for curing halitosis, are you?'

'It costs a lot of money to go to medical school,' he muttered, which was a way of saying he was. He said he owed $20,000. He had spent years learning his job. Textbooks were expensive. His wife had had to work. It didn't sound much of an ordeal, I said. I owed more money than that. He said, 'I even had to sell my blood.'

'Why is it,' I said, 'that doctors are always telling people how they sold their blood as students? Don't you see that selling blood by the pint is just another example of your avarice?'

Bernie said, 'I don't have to take this from you.' He grabbed his wife by the arm and led her out of the dining car.

'The great occultist,' I said, and realized that I was drunk. I went back to Number VII, and just before I switched off the table lamp I looked out the window. There was snow on the ground, and in the distance, under a cold moon, those leafless sticklike trees.

It was pitch dark when I woke up, but my watch said it was past eight o'clock. There was a pale dawn breaking at the bleak horizon, a narrow semicircle of light, like the quick of a fingernail. An hour later this glowed, a winter fluorescence on the icy flatness of Primorsk, lighting the small wooden bungalows, like henhouses with smoking chimneys, surrounded by fields of stubble and snowdrifts. Some people were already up, dressed for the cold in thick black coats and heavy felt boots that made them look clubfooted. They walked like roly-poly dolls, their heavily padded sleeves making their arms stick out. In the slow winter dawn I saw one especially agile man sliding down a slope, steering his feet like skis; he carried a yoke and two buckets. After breakfast I saw more of these scenes, bucket-carriers, a horse-drawn sleigh with a man in it who looked too cold to crack his whip, and another man pulling his children on a sled. But there were not many people out at that hour, nor were there many settlements, and there were no roads: the low smoking huts were set without any discernible pattern in trackless fields.

The sun broke through the band of haze and then shone in a cloudless sky, warming the curtains and rugs of the sleeping car. There were occasional stations, wood-framed, with gingerbread peaks, but we stopped long enough only to view the posters, portraits of Lenin, portraits of workers, and murals showing people of various colours looking courageous and linking arms. I looked for a reaction on the faces of the Japanese in the Vostok; they remained impassive. Perhaps the murals depicted Chinese and Russians? It was possible. This was a disputed area. All the way to Khabarovsk we travelled along the Chinese border, which is at that point the Ussuri River. But maps are misleading – this corner of China was no different from the Soviet Union: it lay frozen under deep snow and in the bright sunlight there were crooked forests of silver birch.

The city of Khabarovsk appeared in the snow at noon, and over the next week I grew accustomed to this deadly sight of a Soviet city approaching on the Trans-Siberian line, buried at the bottom of a heavy sky: first the acres of wooden bungalows on the outskirts; then, where the tracks divided, the work-gangs of women chipping ice from the switches; the huffing steam locomotives and the snow gradually blackening with fallen soot, and the buildings piling up, until the city itself surrounded the train with its dwellings, log cabins and cell blocks. But in the history of the Trans-Siberian Railway, Khabarovsk is an important place. The great railway, proposed in 1857 by the American Perry McDonough Collins and finally begun in 1891 under Tsarevich Nicholas, was completed here in 1916. The last link was the Khabarovsk Bridge over the Amur River; then the way was open by rail from Calais to Vladivostok (now off-limits to foreigners for military reasons).

Everyone got off the Vostok Express, most of them to catch a plane for the nine-hour flight to Moscow, some – including myself – to spend the night in Khabarovsk before taking the Rossiya Express. I jumped on to the platform, was seared by the cold, and ran back into the Vostok to put on another sweater.

'No,' said the Intourist lady. 'You will stay here on platform please.'

I said it seemed a little nippy out there.

'It is thairty-five below tzero,' she said. 'Ha, ha! But not Celsius!'

In the bus she asked whether there was anything special I'd like to do in Khabarovsk. I was stumped for a moment, then said, 'How about a concert or an opera?'

She smiled, as anyone in Bangor, Maine, might have if asked the same question. She said, 'There is musical comedy. You like musical comedy?'

I said no.

'Good, I do not recommend.'

After lunch I went in search of pipe tobacco. I was running low and faced six smokeless days to'Moscow if I couldn't find any. I crossed Lenin Square, where a statue of the great man (who never visited the city) showed him posed with his arm thrust out in the gesture of a man hailing a taxi. On Karl Marx Street newspaper sellers in kiosks said they had no tabak but offered me Pravda with headlines of the 'Khabarovsk Heavy Industry Workers Applaud Smolensk Sugar Beet Workers on a Record Harvest' variety; then to a lunch counter. My glasses steamed up; I saw misty people in overcoats standing against a wall eating buns. No tabak. Outside, the steam turned to frost and blinded me. This I corrected in a grocery store, piled with butter and big cheeses and shelves of pickles and bread. I entered stores at random: the State Bank of the USSR, where a vast portrait of Marx glowered at depositors; the Youth League Headquarters; a jewellery store, filled with hideous clocks and watches and people gaping as if in a museum. At the end of the street I found a small envelope of Bulgarian pipe tobacco. Coming out of the store I saw a familiar face.

'Hear about Bruce?' It was Jeff. His nose was red, his beret was pulled over his ears like a shower cap, his scarf was wound around his mouth, and he was dancing with the cold. He plucked at the scarf and said, 'He's butcher's hook.'

'What's that?'

'You don't know the lingo. Jesus, it's cold! That's rhyming slang.'

'Butcher's hook' in cockney rhyming slang means 'look'. He's look? It didn't make sense. I said, 'What's it rhyming slang for?'

'He's crook,' said Jeff, hopping, attracting the stares of passing Siberians. 'Crook – don't they say that in the States when someone's sick?'

'I don't think so.'

'He looked seedy this morning. Lips all cracked, glassy eyes, running a temperature. Intourist took him to a hospital. I think he got pneumonia in that fucking ship.'

We walked back to the hotel. Jeff said, 'It's not a bad place. It looks like it's coming up.'

'It doesn't look that way to me.'

We passed a shop where about 150 people were lined up. The ones at the end of the line stared at us, but in the front of the line, at the half-open door, they were quarrelling, and if you looked closely you could see them crashing through the narrow entrance, all elbows, one at a time. I wanted to see what they were queuing for – obviously something in short supply – but Jeff said, 'On your right,' and I turned to see an enormous policeman gesturing for me to move along.

There were some oriental-looking people in the crowd; Khabarovsk seemed to be full of them, plump Chinese with square dark faces. They are the aboriginal people of the region, distant cousins of the American Eskimos, and are called Goldis. 'A sartorially practical tribe,' writes Harmon Tupper in his history of the Trans-Siberian, remarking that they changed from wearing fish skins in summer to dog skins in winter. But in Khabarovsk that December day they were dressed the same as everyone else, in felt boots and mittens, overcoats and fur hats. Jeff wondered who they were. I told him.

He said, 'That's funny, they don't look like abos.'

In the hotel restaurant Jeff made a beeline for a table where two pretty Russian girls sat eating. They were sisters, they said. Zhenyia was studying English; Nastasya's subject was Russian literature ('I say Russian literature, not Soviet literature – this I do not like'). We talked about books: Nastasya's favourite author was Chekhov, Zhenyia's was J. D. Salinger – 'Kholden Khaulfield is best character in every literature.' I said I was an admirer of Zamyatin, but they had not heard of the author of We (a novel that inspired Orwell to write 1984, which it resembles), who died in Paris in the twenties trying to write a biography of Attila the Hun. I asked if there were any novelists in Khabarovsk.

'Chekhov was here,' said Nastasya.

In 1890, Anton Chekhov visited Sakhalin, an island of convicts, 700 miles from Khabarovsk. But in Siberia all distances are relative: Sakhalin was right next door.

'Who else do you like?' I asked.

Nastasya said, 'Now you want to ask me about Solzhenitsyn.'

'I wasn't going to,' I said. 'But since you mentioned him, what do you think?'

'I do not like.'

'Have you read him?'

'No.'

'Do you think there's any truth in the statement that socialist realism is anti-Marxist?' I asked.

'Ask my sister this question,' said Nastasya.

But Jeff was talking to Zhenyia and making her blush. Then he addressed both girls. 'Look, suppose you could go to any country you liked. Where would you go?'

Zhenyia thought a moment. Finally she said, 'Spam.'

'Yes, I think so,' said Nastasya. 'For me – Spam.'

'Spam!' shouted Jeff.

'Because it is always hot there, I think,' said Zhenyia. The sisters rose and paid their bill. They put on their coats and scarves and mittens and pulled their woollen pompom caps down to their eyes, and they set off into the driving wind and snow.

Later the Intourist lady took me on a tour of the city. I said I wanted to see the river. She said, 'First, factory!' There were five factories. They made, she said, 'Kebles, weenches, poolies, bults.' In front of each one were six-foot portraits of hard-faced men, 'Workers of the Month', but they might easily have been photographs of a Chicago bowling team. I said they looked tough. The Intourist lady said, 'They have an opera company.' This is meant to rebuke the visitor: these monkeys have an opera company! But opera is politically neutral and the Khabarovsk opera house was vacant most of the time. If there was an alley they'd have had a bowling team. There wasn't much to do in Khabarovsk – even the Intourist lady admitted that. After various obelisks and monuments and a tour of the museum, which was full of dusty tigers and seals, all facing extinction, we went to the east bank of the Amur River. The Intourist lady said she would wait in the car. She didn't like the cold (she wanted to go to Italy and work for Aeroflot).

The river at this point is half a mile wide. From where I was standing I could see dozens of men, huddled on the ice, each one near a cluster of holes. They were ice-fishermen, mainly aged men who spent the winter days like this, watching for a tug on their lines. I scrambled down the bank and, marching into a stiff wind, made my way across the ice to where an old man stood, watching me come near. I said hello and counted his lines; he had chopped fourteen holes in the two-foot-thick ice with a blunt axe. He had caught six fish, the largest about nine inches, the smallest about four inches, and all of them frozen solid. He made me understand that he had been fishing since eight o'clock that morning; it was then half-past four. I asked him if I could take his picture. 'Nyet!' he said and showed me his ragged overcoat, his torn cap, the rips in his boots. He urged me to take a picture of one of his fish, but, as I was about to snap, something caught my eye. It was the comb of a fish spine, flecked with blood, the head and tail still attached.

'What happened to him?' I picked up the bones.

The old man laughed and made eating movements with his mittens, champing on his decayed teeth. So he had caught seven fish: the seventh was his lunch.

After ten minutes of this I was stiff with cold and wanted to go. I fumbled in my pockets and brought out a box of Japanese matches. Did he want them? Yes, very much! He took them, thanked me, and when I turned to go he hurried over to show them to a man fishing fifty yards away.

The ice-fishermen, the old ladies sweeping the gutters with twig brooms, the quarrelling line of people at the shop on Karl Marx Street; but there was another side to Khabarovsk. That night the restaurant of the hotel filled with army officers and some truly villainous-looking women. The tables were covered with empty vodka bottles, and many ate their Siberian dumplings (pelmenye) with champagne. I lingered, talking to a fierce captain about the declining Soviet birthrate.

'What about family planning?' I asked.

'We are trying to stop it!'

'Are you succeeding?'

'Not yet. But I think we can increase production.'

The band began to play, a saxophone, a piano, snare drums: 'Blue Moon'. And the army officers were dancing. The women, who wore sweaters under their low-cut dresses, hitched their clothes and staggered with their partners. Some men were singing. There were shouts. A waltzing couple bumped the arm of a man stuffing a dumpling into his mouth. A bottle crashed to the floor; there was a scuffle. The captain said to me, 'Now you must go.'

3. THE ROSSIYA

Afterwards, whenever I thought of the Trans-Siberian Express, I saw stainless steel bowls of borscht spilling in the dining car of the Rossiya as it rounded a bend on its way to Moscow, and at the curve a clear sight from the window of our green and black steam locomotive – from Skovorodino onwards its eruptions of steamy smoke diffused the sunlight and drifted into the forest so that the birches smouldered and the magpies made for the sky. I saw the gold-tipped pines at sunset and the snow lying softly around clumps of brown grass like cream poured over the ground; the yachtlike snowploughs at Zima; the ochreous flare of the floodlit factory chimneys at Irkutsk; the sight of Marinsk in early morning, black cranes and black buildings and escaping figures casting long shadows on the tracks as they ran towards the lighted station – something terrible in that combination of cold, dark, and little people tripping over Siberian tracks; the ice-chest of frost between the cars; the protrusion of Lenin's white forehead at every stop; and the passengers imprisoned in Hard Class: fur hats, fur leggings, blue gym suits, crying children, and such a powerful smell of sardines, body odour, cabbage, and stale tobacco that even at the five-minute stops the Russians jumped on to the snowy platform to risk pneumonia for a breath of fresh air; the bad food; the stupid economies; and the men and women ('No distinction is made with regard to sex in assigning compartments' – Intourist brochure), strangers to each other, who shared the same compartment and sat on opposite bunks, moustached male mirroring moustached female from their grubby nightcaps and the blankets they wore as shawls, down to their hefty ankles stuck in crushed slippers. Most of all, I thought of it as an experience in which time had the trick distortions of a dream: the Rossiya ran on Moscow time, and after a lunch of cold yellow potatoes, a soup of fat lumps called solyanka, and a carafe of port that tasted like cough syrup, I would ask the time and be told it was four o'clock in the morning.

The Rossiya was not like the Vostok; it was new. The sleeping cars of East German make were steel syringes, insulated in grey plastic and heated by coal-fired boilers attached to furnace and samovar that gave the front end of each carriage the look of a cartoon atom smasher. The provodnik often forgot to stoke the furnace, and then the carriage took on a chill that somehow induced nightmares in me while at the same time denying me sleep. The other passengers in Soft were either suspicious, drunk, or unpleasant: a Goldi and his white Russian wife and small leathery child rode in a nest of boots and blankets, two aggrieved Canadians who ranted to the two Australian librarians about the insolence of the provodnik, an elderly Russian lady who did the whole trip wearing the same frilly nightgown, a Georgian who looked as if he had problems at the other end, and several alcoholics who played noisy games of dominoes in their pyjamas. Conversation was hopeless, sleep was alarming, and the perversity of the clocks confounded my appetite. That first day I wrote in my diary, Despair makes me hungry.

The dining car was packed. Everyone had vegetable soup, then an omelette wrapped around a Wiener schnitzel, served by two waitresses – a very fat lady who bossed the diners incessantly, and a pretty black-haired girl who doubled as scullion and looked as if she might jump off the train at the next clear opportunity. I ate my lunch, and the three Russians at my table tried to bum cigarettes from me. As I had none we attempted a conversation: they were going to Omsk; I was an American. Then they left. I cursed myself for not buying a Russian phrase book in Tokyo.

A man sat down with me. His hands were shaking. He ordered. Twenty minutes later the fat lady gave him a carafe of yellow wine. He splashed it into his glass and drank it in two gulps. He had a wound on his thumb, which he gnawed as he looked worriedly around the car. The fat lady gave his shoulder a slap and he was off, moving tipsily in the direction of Hard. But the fat lady left me in peace. I stayed in the dining car, sipping the sticky wine, watching the scenery change from flat snow fields to hills – the first since Nakhodka. The drooping sun gilded them beautifully and I expected to see people in the shallow woods. I stared for an hour, but saw none.

Nor could I establish where we were. My Japanese map of the Soviet Union was not helpful, and it was only in the evening that I learned we had passed through Poshkovo, on the Chinese border. This added to my disorientation: I seldom knew where we were, I never knew the correct time, and I grew to hate the three freezers I had to pass through to get to the dining car.

The fat lady's name was Anna Feyodorovna and, though she screamed at her fellow countrymen, she was pleasant to me, and urged me to call her Annushka. I did and she rewarded me with a special dish, cold potatoes and chicken – dark sinewy meat that was like some dense textile. Annushka watched me eat. She winked over her glass of tea (she dipped bread into the tea and sucked it) and then cursed a cripple who sat down at my table. Eventually she banged a steel plate of potatoes and fatty meat in front of him.

The cripple ate slowly, lengthening the awful meal by sawing carefully at his meat. A waiter went by and there was a smash. The waiter had dropped an empty carafe on to our table, shattering the cripple's glass. The cripple went on eating with exquisite sang-froid, refusing to acknowledge the waiter, who was muttering apologies as he picked up pieces of broken glass from the table. Then the waiter plucked an enormous sliver of glass from the cripple's mashed potatoes. The cripple choked and pushed the plate away. The waiter got him a new meal.

'Sprechen Sie Deutsch?' asked the cripple.

'Yes, but very badly.'

'I speak a little,' he said in German. 'I learned it in Berlin. Where are you from?'

I told him. He said, 'What do you think of the food here?'

'Not bad, but not very good.'

'I think it's very bad,' he said. 'What's the food like in America?'

'Wonderful,'I said.

He said, 'Capitalist! You are a capitalist!'

'Perhaps.'

'Capitalism bad, communism good.'

'Bullshit,' I said in English, then in German, 'You think so?'

'In America people kill each other with pistols. Pah! Pah! Pah! Like that.'

'I don't have a pistol.'

'What about the Negroes? The black people?'

'What about them?'

'You kill them.'

'Who tells you these things?'

'Newspapers. I read it for myself. Also it's on the radio all the time.'

'Soviet radio,' I said.

'Soviet radio is good radio,' he said.

The radio in the dining car was playing jazzy organ music. It was on all day, and even in the compartments

– each one had a loudspeaker – it continued to mutter because it could not be turned off completely. I jerked my thumb at the loudspeaker and said, 'Soviet radio is too loud.'

He guffawed. Then he said, 'I'm an invalid. Look here

– no foot, just a leg. No foot, no foot!'

He raised his felt boot and squashed the toe with the ferrule of his cane. He said, 'I was in Kiev during the war, fighting the Germans. They were shooting – Pah! Pah! – like that. I jumped into the water and started swimming. It was winter – cold water – very cold water! They shot my foot off, but I didn't stop swimming. Then another time my captain said to me, "Look, more Germans – " and in the snow – very deep snow – '

That night I slept poorly on my bench-sized bunk, dreaming of goose-stepping Germans with pitchforks, wearing helmets like the Rossiya's soup bowls; they forced me into an icy river. I woke. My feet lay exposed in the draught of the cold window; the blanket had slipped off, and the blue night light of the compartment made me think of an operating theatre. I took an aspirin and slept until it was light enough in the corridor to find the toilet. That day, around noon, we stopped at Skovo-rodino. The provodnik, my jailer, showed a young bearded man into my compartment. This was Vladimir. He was going to Irkutsk, which was two days away. For the rest of the afternoon Vladimir said no more. He read Russian paperbacks with patriotic pictures on their covers, and I looked out the window. Once I had thought of a train window as allowing me freedom to gape at the world; now it seemed an imprisoning thing and at times took on the opacity of a cell wall.

At one bend outside Skovorodino I saw we were being pulled by a giant steam locomotive. I diverted myself by trying (although Vladimir sucked his teeth in disapproval) to snap a picture of it as it rounded curves, shooting plumes of smoke out its side. The smoke rolled beside the train and rose slowly through the forests of birch and the Siberian cedars, where there were footprints on the ground and signs of dead fires, but not a soul to be seen. The countryside then was so changeless it might have been a picture pasted against the window. It put me to sleep. I dreamed of a particular cellar in Medford High School, then woke and saw Siberia and almost cried. Vladimir had stopped reading. He sat against the wall sketching on a pad with coloured pencils, a picture of telephone poles. I crept into the corridor. One of the Canadians had his face turned to the miles of snow.

He said, 'Thank God we're getting off this pretty soon. How far are you going?'

'Moscow; then the train to London.'

'Tough shitsky.'

'So they say.'

He said, 'I don't even know what day it is. It's going to be Christmas soon. Hey, did you see that house burning back there?'

'No.'

The previous day he had said, 'Did you see the truck that was crossing the river and crashed through the ice? Well, the back wheels anyway.' I wondered if he made it up. He was perpetually seeing disasters and events. I looked out the window and saw my anxious reflection.

I went back into the compartment and started to read New Grub Street again, but the combination of bad light and cold and drifting snow, and the decline of poor Edwin Reardon depressed me to the point of fatigue. I slept; I dreamed. I was in a mountain cabin with my wife and children. There was snow and a black mirror at the window. I was fretting: some people we knew, miles away, had to be told some tragic news. My feet were freezing, but I agreed to go and tell them this news. I kicked in a closet for a pair of boots and said, 'What about you, Anne? Aren't you coming?'

Anne said, 'It's so cold out! Anyway, I'm reading – I think I'll stay here.'

I addressed Annushka, the gorgon of the Rossiya dining car, who happened to be drinking tea in a corner of this cabin. 'You see? You see"? She always says she wants to go with me, but when the time comes she never does!'

Anne, my wife, said, 'You're just delaying! Go, if you're going – otherwise, shut the door and stop talking about it.'

I held the cabin door open. Outside, it was all emptiness. The cold wind blew into the room, throwing up the skirts of the tablecloth and rattling the lampshades. Snow sifted on to the log floor.

I said, 'Well, I'm going if no one else will.'

'Can I come too, Daddy?' I looked into my little boy's white face. He was pleading. His shoulders were pathetic.

'No,' I said. 'I have to go alone.'

'Shut the door!'

I woke up. My feet were cold. The compartment window was black and the carriage bounced (only the Trans-Siberian bounces, because the rails have square rather than staggered joints). The dream was an intimation of panic, guilty travelling, and a loneliness that made me lonelier still when I wrote it and examined it.

Vladimir had stopped sketching. He looked up and said, 'ChaiV

I understood. The Swahili word for tea is also chai. He hollered for the provodnik. Over tea and cookies I had my first Russian lesson, copying the words down phonetically on a notebook page: a dreary occupation, but it passed the time and was preferable to dozing into nightmares.

The dining car that night was empty and very cold. There was frost on the windows and such a chill in the air that the breath of the arguing employees was visible in steamy clouds. Vassily Prokofyevich, the manager, was doing his accounts, snapping his abacus. I had now been in the dining car enough times to know that by late afternoon Vassily, a short scar-faced man, was drunk. He jumped up and showed me his breath – vodka-scented steam – then dragged out a case of beer and demonstrated how the beer had frozen inside the bottles. He rubbed one in his hands to thaw it for me and barked at Nina, the black-haired girl. Nina brought me a plate of smoked salmon and some sliced bread. Vassily pointed to the salmon and said, 'Kita!'

I said, ^lEto karasho kita.'

Vassily was pleased. He told Nina to get me some more.

I tapped on the frosty window and said, 'Eto okhnor. '

'Da, da.' Vassily poured himself some more vodka. He guzzled it. He gave me an inch in a tumbler. I drank it and saw that Annushka was at her usual place, dipping bread into black tea and sucking the bread slice.

I motioned at her tea and said, 'Eto zhudki chai.'

'Da, da.' Vassily laughed and refilled my glass.

I showed him my copy of Gissing and said, 'Eto ganyiga.'

'Da, da? said Vassily. Nina came near with the plate of salmon. 'Eto Nina,' said Vassily, seizing the pretty girl, 'and these' – I translated his gestures – 'are Nina's tits!'

The mornings now were darker, another trick of time on the railroad that seemed to be speeding me further into paranoia. After eight hours' sleep I woke up in pitch blackness. In the dim light of the December moon, a silver sickle, the landscape was bare – no trees, no snow. And there was no wind. It was weird, as dawn approached (at nine-thirty by my watch), to see the villages on the banks of the Shilka and the Ingoda rivers, the small collections of wooden huts aged a deep brown, with the smoke rising straight up, a puffing from each chimney that made me think of an early form of wood-burning vehicle stranded on these deserted steppes. After hours of this desolation we came to Chita, a satanic city of belching chimneys and great heaps of smoking ashes dumped beside the tracks. Outside Chita there was a' frozen lake on which ice-fishermen crouched like the fat black crows with fluffed-out feathers that roosted in the larches at the verge of the lake.

I said, ' Vorona.'

'Nyet,' said Vladimir and he explained they were fishermen.

'Vorona.' I insisted on the crow image until he saw what I was driving at. But it didn't take much insisting, for the sentimental fanaticism I had detected in the Russians I had met was a flight from their literal-mindedness. Vladimir was in the habit of reciting -reciting rather than saying – long sentences, and then muttering, 'Pushkin' or 'Mayakovsky'. This compulsive behaviour is taken for granted in the Soviet Union, but I think if I were on the old Boston and Maine and a man began to quote, 'This is the forest primeval – ' I'd change my seat.

Vladimir bought a bottle of Hungarian wine and we played chess. He played aggressively, hovering over the board and moving his pieces as swiftly as checkers. Between moves he cracked his knuckles. I moved not to win – I knew that was beyond me – but to slow him down. He pushed at his chessmen; the train pushed into wind. Outside, the snow had returned and I saw that now we were getting two landscapes a day. The low Mongolian hills on the edge of the Gobi Desert were covered by cedars as finely formed as tropical ferns, and by four o'clock, as we made our slow approach to the Central Siberian Plateau, snow was blowing past the windows, tiny flakes in the trailing smoke. At a distance the snowstorm created the effect of fog, a whiteness over the Gobi that blended with the birch trunks and made the cedars seem especially frail. Siberia was wood and snow – even the railway buildings matched the forest: throughout Chitinskaya the stations were wooden structures made of many carefully slanted bare planks plastered with frost.

My chess worsened, but as long as the wine held out we continued to play. Two more games saw the end of the vodka and then, without drink, there seemed no point in going on. But we had the whole evening ahead of us. My napping had divided the days into many parts, each part resembling a whole day, a lengthened distortion of time familiar to a person with a high fever in a seldom-visited sickroom. At times this feeling of experiencing a futile convalescence on the Trans-Siberian turned into a simpler occasion for boredom; simulating my bad dream, it was like being snowed-up in a mountain cabin. It was cold, the light was poor, and it was hard to move around the train since most of the passengers, assigned to overcrowded compartments, preferred to stand in the corridors. And, really, there was nowhere to go.

I took out a sheet of paper and taught Vladimir tick-tack-toe. He found this, as he said, very interesting – the Russian word is similar – and soon discovered the trick of beating me at that, too. He introduced me to an immensely complicated Russian game for killing time. This consisted of drawing on graph paper ten figures of slightly varying geometric size, made up of squares. The more irregular the figure, the higher the score – or perhaps one was shooting for a low score? I never got the hang of this game. Vladimir finally gave up trying to teach me and returned to his sketching. I persuaded him to show me his sketch pad, and, amazingly, it was filled-with page after page of telephone poles, pylons, high-tension wires, pictures of girders with wires webbed to them, and skeletal-seeming apparatus. This was his hobby, sketching vertical monstrosities, though he might easily have been a spy. He showed me how to draw a telephone pole. I feigned an interest in this unappealing thing and he called to the provodnik for wine. Two more bottles of the Hungarian wine came – the provodnik wouldn't go until he got a glassful – and Vladimir drew a black cabin in a black and brown landscape, a low orangy red sun, and sky full of spiders. This he labelled 'Siberia'. Then he drew a picture of several spires, some large buildings, a blue sky, a sunny day.

'Leningrad?'

'Nyet,' he said. 'London.' He wrote 'London' on the picture. He did another picture of London – a harbour scene, a schooner, ships at anchor, a sunny day. He did one of New York – tall buildings, a sunny day. But they were fantasy pictures: Vladimir had never been out of the Soviet Union.

Because he had insisted on paying for the wine, I broke out my box of cigars. Vladimir smoked five of them, puffing them like cigarettes, and the wine and the cigars and the knowledge that we were now travelling along the shores of Lake Baikal, returned Vladimir to his own language. He strode up and down the compartment, waving away the smoke, telling me what a deep ozero Baikal was, and finally slipped his hand inside his coat and, blowing a great cloud of smoke, said, in the halting momentous voice Russians reserved for quotations, but coughing as he did so,

'I dym otechestva nam sladok i pryaten!'

and raised his eyes.

I said, 'Eh?'

'Pooshkin,' he said. 'Eugen Onegin!'

(Months later, in London, I recited my phonetic transcription of this verse to a Russian-speaker, who assured me that it was indeed Pushkin and that it could be rendered in English as, 'Even the smoke of our motherland is sweet and pleasant to us.')

In the dark corridor early the next morning the Australian librarians and the Canadian couple sat on their suitcases. Irkutsk was two hours away, but they said that they were afraid of oversleeping and missing the place. I thought then, and I think now, that missing Irkutsk cannot be everyone's idea of a tragedy. It was still dark as Irkutsk's flaming chimneys appeared above a plain of shuttered bungalows with tarpaper roofs. It is not the steel fences or even the tall cell blocks where the workers live that give these Russian cities the look of concentration camps; it is the harsh light – searchlights and glaring lamps fixed to poles – that does it, diminishing the mittened figures and making them look like prisoners in an exercise yard. Vladimir shook my hand and said a sentimental farewell. I was moved and thought charitably about the poor fellow, stuck in Irkutsk for life, until I went back to the compartment and discovered that he had stolen my box of cigars.

The provodnik entered the compartment, gathered up Vladimir's blankets, and threw a new set of blankets on the berth. He was followed by a tall pale man who, although it was midmorning, put on a pair of pyjamas and a bathrobe and sat down to solve complicated, equations on a clipboard pad. The man did not speak until, at a small station, he said, 'Here – salt!'

That was the extent of his conversation, the news of a salt mine. But he had made his point: we were truly in Siberia. Until then we had been travelling in the Soviet Far East, two thousand miles of all but nameless territory on the borders of China and Mongolia. From now on, the Siberian forest, the taiga, thickened, blurring the distant hills with smudges of trees and hiding the settlements that had swallowed so many banished Russians. In places this dense forest disappeared for twenty miles; then there was tundra, a plain of flawless snow on which rows of light-poles trailed into the distance, getting smaller and smaller, like those diagrammatic pictures that illustrate perspective, the last light-pole a dot. The hugeness of Russia overwhelmed me. I had been travelling for five days over these landscapes and still more than half the country remained to be crossed. I scanned the window for some new detail that would intimate we were getting closer to Moscow. But the differences from day to day were slight; the snow was endless, the stops were brief, and the sun, which shone so brightly on the taiga, was always eclipsed by the towns we passed through: an impenetrable cloud of smoky fog hung over every town, shutting out the sun. The small villages were different; they lay in sunlight, precariously, between the taiga and the tracks, their silence so great it was nearly visible.

I was now the only Westerner on the train. I felt like the last Mohican. Deprived of friendly conversation, denied rest by my bad dreams, irritated by the mute man in pyjamas and his pages of equations, doubled up with cramps from the greasy stews of the dining car – and, guiltily remembering my four months' absence, missing my family – I bribed Vassily for a bottle of vodka (he said they'd run out, but for two rubles he discovered some) and spent an entire day emptying it. The day I bought it I met a young man who told me in fractured German that he was taking his sick father to a hospital in Sverdlovsk.

I said, 'Serious?'

He said, 'Sehr schliml'

The young man bought a bottle of champagne and took it back to his compartment, which was in my sleeping car. He offered me a drink. We sat down; in the berth opposite the old man lay sleeping, the blankets drawn up to his chin. His face was grey, waxen with illness, and strained; he looked as if he were painfully swallowing the toad of death, and certainly the compartment had the dull underground smell of death about it, a clammy tomb here on the train. The young man clucked, poured himself more champagne, and drank it. He tried to give me more, but I found the whole affair appalling – the dying man in the narrow berth, his son beside him steadily drinking champagne, and at the window the snowy forests of Central Russia.

I went to my own compartment to drink my vodka and saw in my solitary activity something of the Russians' sense of desolation. In fact they did nothing else but drink. They drank all the time and they drank everything – cognac that tasted like hair tonic, sour watery beer, the red wine that was indistinguishable from cough syrup, the nine-dollar bottles of champagne, and the smooth vodka. Every day it was something new: first the vodka ran out, then the beer, then the cognac, and after Irkutsk one saw loutish men who had pooled their money for champagne, passing the bottle like bums in a doorway. Between drinking they slept, and I grew to recognize the confirmed alcoholics from the way they were dressed – they wore fur hats and fur leggings because their circulation was so poor; their hands and lips were always blue. Most of the arguments and all the fights I saw were the result of drunkenness. There was generally a fist fight in Hard Class after lunch, and Vassily provoked quarrels at every meal. If the man he quarrelled with happened to be sober, the man would call for the complaints' book and scribble angrily in it.

'Tovarich!' the customer would shout, requesting the complaints' book. I only heard the word used in sarcasm.

There was a nasty fight at Zima. Two boys – one in an army uniform – snarled at a conductor on the platform. The conductor was a rough-looking man dressed in black. He did not react immediately, but when the boys boarded he ran up the stairs behind them and leaped on them from behind, punching them both. A crowd gathered to watch. One of the boys yelled, 'I'm a soldier! I'm a soldier!' and the men in the crowd muttered, 'A fine soldier he is.' The conductor went on beating them up in the vestibule of the Hard-Class car. The interesting thing was not that the boys were drunk and the conductor sober, but that all three were drunk.

Another day, another night, a thousand miles; the snow deepened and we were at Novosibirsk. Foreigners generally get off at Novosibirsk for an overnight stop, but I stayed on the train. I would not be home for Christmas, as I had promised – it was now 23 December and we were more than two days from Moscow – but if I made good connections I might be home before New Year's. The tall pale man changed from pyjamas into furs, put his equations away, and got off the train. I cleared his berth and decided that what I needed was a routine. I would start shaving regularly, taking fruit salts in the morning, and doing push-ups before breakfast; no naps; I would finish New Grub Street, start Borges' Labyrinths, and begin a short story, writing in the afternoon and not taking a drink until seven, or six at the earliest, or five if the light was too poor to write by. I was glad for the privacy: my mind needed tidying.

That morning I spent putting my thoughts into order, sorting out my anxieties and deciding to start my short story immediately. A woman of forty falls in love with a boy of nineteen. The boy wants to marry her. The woman agrees to meet the boy's mother. They meet -they're the same age – and hit it off, discussing their divorces, their affairs, ignoring the boy who, callow, inexperienced, only embarrasses them both by his surly insistence on marriage. So:

The Strangs had one of those marriages that goes on happily for years, filling friends with envious generosity, and then falls to pieces in an afternoon of astonishing abuse that threatens every other marriage for miles around. Friends were relieved when, instead of lingering in New York and persuading them to support her in her bitter quarrel with Ralph, Milly chose to go to…

The door flew open with a bang and a man entered carrying a cloth bundle and several paper parcels. He smiled. He was about fifty, baldness revealing irregular contours on his head, with large red hands. He had the rodent's eyes of someone very nearsighted. He threw the cloth bundle on his berth and placed a loaf of brown bread and a quart jar of maroon jam on my story.

I put my pen down and left the compartment. When I returned he had changed into a blue track suit (a little hero-medal pinned to his chest), and, staring through the eye-enlarging lenses of a pair of glasses askew on his nose, he was slapping jam on a slice of bread with a jack-knife. I put my story away. He munched his jam sandwich and, between bites, belched. He finished his sandwich, undid a newspaper parcel, and took out a chunk of grey meat. He cut a plug from it, put it in his mouth, wrapped the meat, and took off his glasses. He sniffed at the table, picked up my yellow sleeve of pipe cleaners, put on his glasses, and studied the writing. Then he looked at his watch and sighed. He monkeyed with my pipe, my matches, tobacco, pen, radio, timetable, Borges' Labyrinths, checking his watch beneath each item and sniffing, as if his nose would reveal what his eyes could not.

This went on for the rest of the day, defeating what plans I had for establishing a routine and eliminating any possibility of my writing a story. His prying motions made me hate him almost immediately and I imagined him thinking, as he tapped his watch crystal between sniffs of my belongings, 'Well, there's thirty seconds gone.' He had a little book of Russian railway maps. At each station he put on his glasses and found its name on the map. There were about fifteen stations on each map, so he dirtied the pages in sequence with his thumbs before the train moved to a new page, and I grew to recognize from the jam smears and thuftibprints on his maps how far the Rossiya had gone. He read nothing else for the rest of the trip. He didn't speak; he didn't sleep. How did he pass the time? Well, he yawned: he could sustain a yawn for five seconds, sampling it with his tongue, working it around his jaws, and finally biting it with a loud growl. He sighed, he groaned, he sucked his teeth, he grunted, and he made each into a separate activity that he timed, always looking at his watch when he had completed a yawn or a sigh. He also coughed and choked in the same deliberate way, studying his eructations, belching with disgusting thoroughness as he exhausted himself of wind in three keys. In between times he looked out the window or stared at me, smiling when our eyes met. His teeth were stainless steel.

I find it very difficult to read and impossible to write with another person near by. If the person is staring at me over a quart of jam and a crumbling loaf of bread, I am driven to distraction. So I did nothing but watch him because there was nothing but that to do. He was odd in another way: if I glanced out the window, so did he; if I went into the corridor, he followed; if I talked to the boy next door, whose father lay dying among empty champagne bottles, the zombie was at my heels and then peering over my shoulder. I couldn't rid myself of him -and I tried.

Fearing that I would be left behind, I had not gotten off the train at any of the brief stops. But when this haunting creature parked himself in my compartment and shadowed me everywhere, I conceived a plan for ditching him in Omsk. It would be a simple duffilling: I would get off the train and lead him some distance away, and then, just as the train started up, I'd spring over and leap aboard, pausing on the stairs to block him from gaining a foothold. I tried this in Barabinsk. He followed me to the door, but no further. Omsk, three hours later, was a better opportunity. I encouraged him to follow me, led him to a kiosk doing a brisk trade in buns, and then lost him. I entered the train at the last minute, believing he was duffilled, but found him back in the compartment sniffing over his maps. After that he never left the compartment. Perhaps he suspected I was trying to ditch him.

He had his own food, this simpleton, so he had no need of the dining car. His meals were extraordinary. He surrounded himself with the food he had brought: a fist of butter in greasy paper, the bread loaf, the hunk of meat and another newspaper parcel of pickles, the jar of jam. He tore off a segment of bread and slathered it with a jack-knife blade of butter. Then he set out a pickle and a plug of meat and took a bite of each in turn, pickle, bread, meat, then a spoonful of jam; then another bite of the pickle, and so forth, filling his mouth before he began to chew. I could no longer bear to watch him. I spent more and more time in the dining car.

When the drunken soldiers had been turned out of the dining car, and the others, either very gaunt or very fat, lifted their faces from their metal bowls and left, scuffling their boots, the dining-car doors were locked and the kitchen employees cleaned the place up. They allowed me to stay, because, under the terms of our agreement, Vassily continued to supply me with bottles of Hungarian white wine as long as I bribed him for it and shared it with him. Vassily turned the accounts over to his assistant, Volodya, who had his own abacus; Sergei, the cook, ogled Nina from the kitchen door; Annushka wiped the tables; and Viktor, a waiter – who later told me that he paid Anna to do his work (he said she would do anything for five rubles) – Viktor sat with Vassily and me and pumped me for information about hockey teams: 'Bostabroons, Doront Mupplekhleef, Moondroolkana-deens, and Cheegago Blekaks.' Viktor often stood behind Vassily and scratched his right cheek, meaning that Vassily was a drunkard.

There was a young black-haired man who swept the floor and rarely spoke to anyone. Viktor pointed him out to me and said, 'Gitler! Gitler!'

The man ignored him, but to make his point Viktor stamped on the floor and ground his boot as if killing a cockroach. Vassily put his forefinger under his nose to make a moustache and said, 'Heil Gitler!' So the young man might have been an anti-Semite or, since Russian mockery is not very subtle, he might have been a Jew.

One afternoon the young man came over to me and said, 'Angela Davis!'

'Gitler!' said Viktor, grinning.

'Angela Davis karasho,' said Gitler and began to rant in Russian about the way Angela Davis had been persecuted in America. He shook his broom at me, his hair falling over his eyes, and he continued quite loudly until Vassily banged on the table.

'Politics!' said Vassily. 'We don't want politics here.

This is a restaurant, not a university.' He spoke in Russian, but his message was plain and he was obviously very angry with Gitler.

The rest were embarrassed. They sent Gitler to the kitchen and brought another bottle of wine. Vassily said, 'Gitler – ni karashoV But it was Viktor who was the most conciliatory. He stood up and folded his arms, and, shushing the kitchen staff, he said in a little voice:

Zee fearst of My,

Zee'art of spreeng!

Oh, leetle seeng,

En everyseeng we do,

Remember always to say 'pliz'

En dun forget 'sank you'!

Later, Viktor took me to his compartment to show me his new fur hat. He was very proud of it since it cost him nearly a week's pay. Nina was also in the compartment, which was shared by Vassily and Anna – quite a crowd for a space no bigger than an average-sized clothes closet. Nina showed me her passport and the picture of her mother and, while this was going on, Viktor disappeared. I put my arm around Nina and with my free hand took off her white scullion's cap. Her black hair fell to her shoulders. I held her tightly and kissed her, tasting the kitchen. The train was racing. But the compartment door was open, and Nina pulled away and said softly, 'Nyet, nyet, nyet.¹

On the day before Christmas, in the afternoon, we arrived at Sverdlovsk. The sky was leaden and it was very cold. I hopped out the door and watched the old man being taken down the stairs to the platform. While he was being moved, the blankets had slipped down to his chest, where his hands lay rigid, two grey claws, their colour matching his face. The son went over and pulled the blankets high to cover his mouth. He knelt in the ice and packed a towel around the old man's head.

Seeing me standing near by, the son said in German, 'Sverdlovsk. This is where Europe begins and Asia ends. Here are the Urals.' He pointed towards the back of the train and said, 'Asia,' and then towards the engine, 'Europe.'

'How is your father?' I asked, when the stretcher-bearers arrived and put on their harnesses. The stretcher was a hammock, slung between them.

'I think he's dead,' he said. 'Das vedanya.'

My depression increased as we sped towards Perm in a whirling snowstorm. The logging camps and villages lay half-buried and behind them were birches a foot thick, the ice on their branches giving them the appearance of silver filigree. I could see children crossing a frozen river in the storm, moving so slowly in the direction of some huts, they broke my heart. I lay back on my berth and took my radio, its plastic cold from standing by the window, and tried to find a station. I put up the antenna – the zombie watched me from behind his clutter of uncovered food. A lot of static, then a French station, then 'Jingle Bells'. The zombie smiled. I switched it off.

Late on Christmas Eve I knocked on the door of the dining car and was admitted by Vassily. He told me, with gestures of shrugging, that the place was closed. I said, 'It's Christmas Eve.' He shrugged. I gave him five rubles. He let me in and got a bottle of champagne, and, as he shot off the cork, I looked around at the deserted car. In the best of times it was cold, but without the trickle of warmth from the stove and buffeted by the snowy wind, it was colder than usual – lighted by a single fluorescent tube and holding only the two of us. I could not imagine anything worse for watching Christmas approach. In the funereal chill Vassily drew up a chair and poured us both a drink. He tossed his back, as if the champagne were rotgut, screwing up his face and saying, 'Yagh!'

We sat facing each other, drinking, not speaking, until Vassily lifted his glass and said, 'USA!'

By then I was drunk enough to remember one of the Russian lessons Vladimir had given me. I touched Vassily's glass with mine and said, Soyuz Sovietski Sosialistichiski Respublik.'

'Steppe!' hollered Vassily. He was singing. 'Steppe! Steppe!'

We finished the bottle, got another, and Vassily continued to sing. Around midnight he broke into a military song that I recognized – the tune at least. I hummed along with him, and he said, 'Da, da!' urging me to sing. I sang the only words I knew, Italian obscenities to his patriotic Russian verses:

Compagna Polacca,

Hai fatto una cacca?

Si, Vassili!

Ho fatto venti kili!

Io ho fatto nelle grande steppe…

Vassily applauded and joined with me in Russian. We stood in the dining car, singing our duet, drinking between verses.

Compagna Tatyana,

Hai fatto un' putana?

Si, Bonanno!

Ho fatto per un' anno,

Io ho fatto nelle grande steppe…

'Merry Christmas,' I said when the fourth bottle appeared. Vassily was smiling and nodding and chuckling hoarsely. He showed me a sheaf of restaurant bills he had been adding up. He shook them and then threw them into the air: 'Wheel' We sat down again, and Vassily, too drunk to remember that I couldn't speak Russian, harangued me for fifteen minutes. I suppose he was saying, 'Look at me. Fifty-five years old and I'm running this crummy dining car. Urp. Back and forth, every two weeks, from Moscow to Vladivostok, sleeping in Hard Class, too busy to take a piss, everyone giving me lip. Urp. You call that a life?' Towards the end of his harangue his head grew heavy, his eyelids drooped, and his speech became thick. He put his head down on the table, and, still holding tight to the bottle, he went to sleep.

'Merry Christmas.'

I finished my drink and went back to my compartment through the bouncing train.

The next morning, Christmas, I woke and looked over at the zombie sleeping with his arms folded on his chest like a mummy's. The provodnik told me it was six o'clock Moscow time. My watch said eight. I put it back two hours and waited for dawn, surprised that so many people in the car had decided to do the same thing. In darkness we stood at the windows, watching our reflections. Shortly afterwards I saw why they were there. We entered the outskirts of Yaroslavl and I heard the others whispering to themselves. The old lady in the frilly nightgown, the Goldi man and his wife and child, the domino-playing drunks, even the zombie who had been monkeying with my radio: they pressed their faces against the windows as we began rattling across a long bridge. Beneath us, half-frozen, very black, and in places reflecting the flames of Yaroslavl's chimneys, was the Volga.

… Royal David's city, Stood a lowly cattle shed…

What was that? Sweet voices, as clear as organ tones, drifted from my compartment. I froze and listened. The Russians, awestruck by the sight of the Volga, had fallen silent; they were hunched, staring down at the water. But the holy music, fragrant and slight, moved through the air, warming it like an aroma.

Where a mother laid her baby In a manger, for his bed…

The hymn wavered, but the silent reverence of the Russians and the slowness of the train allowed the soft children's voices to perfume the corridor. My listening became a meditation of almost unbearable sadness, as if joy's highest refinement was borne on a needlepoint of pain.

Mary was that mother mild, Jesus Christ, her little child…

I went into the compartment and held the radio to my ear until the broadcast ended, a programme of Christmas music from the BBC. Dawn never came that day. We travelled in thick fog and through whorls of brown blowing mist, which made the woods ghostly. It was not cold outside: some snow had melted, and the roads -more frequent now – were rutted and muddy. All morning the tree trunks, black with dampness, were silhouettes in the fog, and the pine groves at the very limit of visibility in the mist took on the appearance of cathedrals with dark spires. In places the trees were so dim, they were like an after-image on the eye. I had never felt close to the country, but the fog distanced me even more, and I felt, after 6,000 miles and all those days in the train, only a great remoteness; every reminder of Russia – the women in orange canvas jackets working on the line with shovels, the sight of a Lenin statue, the station signboards stuck in yellow ice, and the startled magpies croaking in Russian at the gliding train – all this annoyed me. I resented Russia's size; I wanted to be home.

The dining car was locked at nine. I tried again at ten and found it empty. Vassily explained that, as we would be in Moscow soon, the dining car was closed. I swore at him, surprising myself with my own anger. Under protest he made me an omelette; he handed it to me with a slice of bread and a glass of tea. While I was eating, a woman came in. She wore a black coat and had a Soviet Railway badge pinned to her black hat. She spoke to Vassily: 'Kleb* (bread). Vassily waved her away: 'Nyet klebV She pointed at my meal and repeated her request for bread. Vassily shouted at her. She stood her ground and got an almighty shove from Vassily, who smiled at me apologetically as he delivered the blow. The woman came back and put out her hand and screamed loudly at him. This infuriated Vassily. His eyes became small, and he threw himself on her, beating her with his fists. He twisted her arm behind her back and kicked her hard. The woman howled and was gone.

Vassily said to me, 'Nikarasho!' The fight had left him breathless. He smiled his idiotic smile. I was ashamed of myself for not helping the woman. I pushed my food away.

'Pavel?' Vassily blinked at me.

'You are a fucking monkey.'

'Pozhal'sta,' said Vassily, in glad welcome.

The train was going at half-speed for the approach to Moscow. I walked down the corridors of Hard Class to my compartment, to pack my belongings. The other passengers were already packed. They stood in their arrival suits, smoking by the windows. I passed each one, seeing criminality and fraud in their faces, brutish-ness in their little eyes, fists protruding from unusually long sleeves.

'Monkey,' I said, squeezing through a group of soldiers.

A man stroking his fur hat blocked my way. I went up to him. He agitated his enormous jaw with a yawn.

'Monkey!' He moved aside.

Monkey to the provodnik, monkey to the man at the samovar, monkey to the army officer in Soft Class; and, still muttering, I found the zombie sitting by the window in an overcoat, his jam-flecked thumb on Mockba. 'Monkey!' I wished him a Merry Christmas and gave him two pipe cleaners, a can of Japanese sardines, and a ballpoint pen that would run out of ink as soon as he wrote his name.

That was the end of my trip, but it was not the end of my journey. I still had a ticket to London, and, hoping to catch the next train west, I cancelled my hotel reservation and spent the afternoon arranging for a de luxe berth on the train to the Hook of Holland, via Warsaw and Berlin. I was packed and ready, and I arrived at the station on Christmas night with an hour to spare. The Intourist guide brought me to the barrier and said goodbye. I stood for forty-five minutes on the platform, waiting to be shown to my compartment.

It was not a porter who inquired about my destination, but an immigration official. He leafed through my passport, rattling the pages. He shook his head.

'Polish visa?'

'I'm not stopping in Poland,' I said. 'I'm just passing through.'

'Transit visa,' he said.

'What do you mean?' I said. 'Hey, this train's going to leave!'

'You must have Polish transit visa.'

'I'll get it at the border.'

'Impossible. They will send you back.'

'Look' – the whistle blew – 'I've got to get on this train. Please – it's going to leave without me!' I picked up my suitcase. The man held me by the arm. A signalman passed by, motioning with his green flag. The train began to move.

'I can't stay here!' But I let the man hold on to my sleeve and watched the Holland-bound express tooting its way out of the station: frseeeeeeeeefronnng. There were travellers' faces at the windows. They were happy, safely leaving. It's Christmas, darling, they were saying, and we're off. It was the end, I thought, as I saw the train receding, taking my heart with it. It's the end: duffilled!

Two days later I was able to leave Moscow, but the trip to London was not outwardly remarkable. I tried to collect my wits for the arrival; I slept through Warsaw, glared at Berlin, and entered Holland with a stone in my stomach. I felt flayed by the four months of train travel: it was as if I had undergone some harrowing cure, sickening myself on my addiction in order to be free of it. To invert the cliche, I had had a bellyful of travelling hopefully – I wanted to arrive. The whistle blew at level crossings – a long moronic hoot – and I was mocked by it, not bewitched. I had been right: anything was possible on a train, even the urge to get off. I drank to deafen myself, but still I heard the racket of the wheels.

All travel is circular. I had been jerked through Asia, making a parabola on one of the planet's hemispheres. After all, the grand tour is just the inspired man's way of heading home.

And I had learned what I had always secretly believed, that the difference between travel writing and fiction is the difference between recording what the eye sees and discovering what the imagination knows. Fiction is pure joy – how sad that I could not reinvent the trip as fiction. It would have had (now we were boarding a blue ferry at the Hook) such a pleasing shape if I had artfully distributed light and shadow and played with the grammar of delay. I would have plotted myself into danger: Sadik would have had a switchblade and gold teeth, the Hue track an erupting mine, the Orient Express a lavish dining car, and Nina – imploring me – would have rapped softly on my compartment door and flung off her uniform as we crossed the Volga. It did not happen that way, and in any case I might have been too busy for that gusto. I had worked every day, bent over my rocking notebook like Trollope scribbling between postal assignments remembering to put it all in the past tense.

Gladly, made nimble by sanity's seamless glee, I boarded the train for London – correction: I am now leaving Harwich (there were often twenty miles between clauses and a hundred more before I finished a sentence) and setting my face at the hairless January fields. On my lap I have four thick notebooks. One has a Madras water stain on it, another has been slopped with borscht, the blue one (lettered, in gold, Punjab Stationery Mart) has the ring from a damp glass on its front, and the red one's colour has been diluted to pink by the Turkish sun. These stains are like notations. The trip is finished and so is the book, and in a moment I will turn to the first page, and to amuse myself on the way to London will read with some satisfaction the trip that begins, Ever since childhood, when I lived within earshot of the Boston and Maine, I have seldom heard a train go by and not wished I was on it.