The Story of a Life

78

The Riga–Orël Goods Wagon

Ever since childhood I’ve been in love with railways. Maybe it has something to do with the fact that my father worked on them. Not surprisingly, my love in those days expressed itself in childish ways. Whenever our family passed the summer holidays near a railway station, I spent hours there meeting and seeing off every single train together with the station guard in his red cap. Even now, every last thing about railways still has for me the poetry of travel about it, all the way down to the smell of the coal smoke from the engine.

I would watch with amazement as the oily, green locomotive, its shiny pistons churning ever slower, came to a stop near the water tower and released a great, whistling stream of steam into the sky as though panting from exertion. I could see before my eyes the engine’s iron breast piercing fierce winds, the dark of night and dense forests, making its way through the flowering wilderness of the earth, its whistle echoing far from the tracks, perhaps all the way to some cottage in the woods where a little boy like myself was imagining the fiery express racing through the barren night, and a fox, its paw raised, watched it from a distance and yelped with an inexpressible pain – or perhaps with joy.

After the passenger train pulled out, the station sank back into a drowsy silence. The hot boredom of the station reclaimed its rightful place. Warm water dripped from the green tub on the platform. Impudent hens strutted back and forth over the rails. The flowering tobacco plants closed themselves to wait for evening. The glare from the rails, polished by the wheels of hundreds of carriages, was blinding. Tethered to the back of a goods wagon standing on the sidings, a chestnut mare slept. Now and then the skin on her back twitched to shake off the persistent flies.

Then a trembling, piercing whistle was heard in the distance. This was a non-stop goods train. Beyond the station, the tracks curved in a big, wide arc before disappearing into the pine woods. The trains always exploded out of the woods unexpectedly, twisting and leaning on the curve. I thought it was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen. The train flew into the station at full speed, pouring thick steam, and swept past, a rush of clanking metal, pounding wheels and tornadoes of dust. It made my head spin. I sometimes thought the train was about to take flight, to leave the rails and pull all of us off the platform and up into the air in its wake like so many dried leaves. The first to go, naturally, would be the station guard in his red cap.

The goods trains flashed by so fast it hurt my eyes, but sometimes I managed to read the white letters painted on their sides that indicated the various rail lines: RO (Riga–Orël), MKV (Moscow–Kiev–Voronezh), SW (South-West), SPBW (St Petersburg–Warsaw), RU (Ryazan–Urals), PRIV (Privislinskaya line), MVR (Moscow–Vindavo–Rybinsk), SV (Syzran–Vyazma), MKhS (Moscow–Kharkov–Sevastopol) and dozens more. Occasionally, I saw some I didn’t know – USS or SPBS – and then I’d ask my father and he’d tell me that that was the Ussurskaya line in the Far East or the St Petersburg–Sestroretsk line, a short stretch of tracks that ran north from the old capital along the Gulf of Finland. I envied those inanimate carriages because they never knew where they would be sent next – perhaps to Vladivostok, and from there to Vyatka, and on to Grodno, Feodosia and then the little station of Navlya in the heart of the dense Bryansk forest.

Were it possible, I would have climbed aboard any one of those goods trains and let it take me away. What lovely days I would have spent on the sidings where goods trains were always getting held up for a few hours. I would have stretched out in the warm grass at the foot of a hill, drunk tea with the station guards at the back of the wagon, bought wild strawberries from the leggy peasant girls, and swum in the cool water of the little river nearby where the yellow water lilies blossomed. Once under way, I would have sat dangling my legs in the open doors of the wagon, the wind, warmed by the earth, hitting me in the face, as the long, running shadow of the train raced over the fields and the sun, like a golden shield, sank into the hazy distance of the Russian plain that rolled on and on, leaving behind its wine-gold trace on the burnt-out sky.

I recalled my childhood love of goods trains as I walked up and down the sidings at Bryansky station searching for wagon number 717 802 of the Riga–Orël railway line.

I found my fellow travellers, the Petrograd journalists, already inside. They had fixed themselves up in comfort and were having tea around a table made from an upturned crate and telling elegantly bawdy jokes. They paid no attention to me, barely returned my greeting, and made it quite clear they wanted nothing to do with me. Why, I wondered, did they ever even agree to take me with them? I racked my brain in search of an answer. Was it really just so that if they ran into trouble with the authorities, they could save their own necks by offering up mine? Their papers were all in order, but you never knew – the authorities were unpredictable and always looking for any excuse. In that case, somebody like me, with no travel pass or exit visa, would be a godsend. I was the perfect foil for them to play the role of loyal subjects of the Soviet government: ‘Dear Comrades, why are you picking on us, honest Soviet people, while this shady character without any documents has wormed his way into our wagon? It’s our duty to report the man. You should search him.’

I drove these thoughts away. I was ashamed of them. Five years ago I never would have thought so poorly of people I didn’t know. Nevertheless, I couldn’t get over my mistrust of these rather free and easy journalists. I was especially disgusted by a short man with round, oily eyes. He went by the name Andrei Borelli, but this was, of course, only a pseudonym he used for his sensational scoops in the papers. Among themselves, his fellow journalists called him Dodya. He was constantly hitching up his short khaki trousers and guffawing. Every time he laughed, he launched a shower of spit. The spongy, ashen skin of his face looked like rubber. He couldn’t stop making stupid puns and wisecracks which he delivered with a disgusting leer. Soviet Russia he called ‘Sovdepia’,fn1 Moscow was ‘the ancient Red Navel’ and the Bolsheviks ‘Comrade Bookbinders’. Even the leader of this corrupt gang – the jaundiced journalist in the grey spats – got fed up with him at times and snapped: ‘You’ve got a real genius for verbal fornication, Dodya. Stop your screwing around. We’re all sick and tired of it!’

‘If it’s white, you hate it with all your might, if it’s red, you love it until you’re dead,’ Dodya shot back without stopping to think.

At this point Grey Spats would threaten to toss Dodya from the train, and for a minute or two he would stop his twaddle. The night passed without incident.

The train was barely dragging itself along. I didn’t bother talking with my travel companions and was trying to think up an excuse to move to a different wagon. But it wasn’t possible. The others were full either of heavily armed Red Army soldiers and sailors from the Baltic fleet or of cavalry horses. The next day I noticed something quite odd. Strapped to Dodya’s suitcase was a heavily chipped and dented blue enamel teapot. What struck me as strange was that at every stop the journalists went to fetch boiling water with a big tin mug – not the larger teapot – even though the mug didn’t hold nearly enough water for all of them. The riddle was unexpectedly solved the following day. The train pulled haltingly into the station at Bryansk. A soldier from the wagon next to ours stuck his head in the door.

‘Mates, we’re in a bit of trouble,’ he said. ‘Fools that we are, we somehow managed to lose our teapot along the way. Government issue, no less! Enough to make you cry! You don’t happen to have a spare, do you?’

‘Nope!’ snapped Dodya. ‘We’ve been drinking out of a mug ourselves.’

‘You’ve got an enamelled one right there, strapped to your case,’ the soldier said good-naturedly. ‘Let us have it for the day. I promise to give it back safely.’

‘No, you can’t have this teapot,’ said Grey Spats, his pince-nez flashing angrily.

The soldier looked hurt. ‘Why not?’ he asked. ‘Is it made of gold or something?’

‘It leaks, that’s why. Get it? It leaks. It’s useless. Full of holes.’

A knowing grin spread over the soldier’s face. ‘Aren’t you a strange group!’ he said, as good-naturedly as before. ‘Can’t imagine why you’d be dragging such trash around with you. It’d be one thing if you all were poor, but that’s clearly not it. Here you are putting real sugar in your tea – no saccharine for you. Oh well, sorry for troubling you.’

The soldier left. My companions looked at each other, and then one of them hissed at Dodya: ‘Cretin! Did you have to leave your teapot sticking out like a sore thumb?’

I heard some low-voiced grumbling, and then they put a box on top of the suitcase and laid a coat over that.

‘Which wagon?’ someone asked outside. They didn’t sound pleased. ‘This one?’

‘Yes, Comrade Commissar. That one – from the Riga–Orël line.’

Dodya dived for the teapot, grabbed it, placed it on his lap, and then, straining so hard his eyes began to fill with tears, snapped the tin spout off and stuck it in his pocket. Just then an elderly, disgruntled commissar pulled himself up with a groan into the wagon followed by the soldier.

‘What’s all this business about a teapot?’ asked the commissar. ‘Where is it? Let me see.’

Dodya pulled the broken teapot out from under the box.

‘Well, look here – the spout’s gone!’ said the soldier. He gave a whistle. ‘Here a moment ago and now it’s flown off somewhere, just like a little bird.’

The commissar looked at the teapot, thought for a moment, and then said to the soldier: ‘All right then, go and fetch two of the security guards.’

He turned to the journalists. ‘Your documents.’

The journalists readily retrieved their documents, but their hands were shaking. The commissar waited patiently. He looked them over slowly and then placed them in his jacket pocket.

‘Our documents are all in order, Comrade Commissar,’ said Grey Spats. ‘Why are you taking them?’

‘I see they’re in order,’ the commissar answered before turning to me with an expectant look.

‘Comrade Commissar, there’s something you should know,’ Grey Spats spoke up again. ‘This citizen turned up in our wagon in Moscow, even though we told him to leave. As far as we know, he doesn’t have a travel permit or an exit visa. He’s the one you should be checking. As loyal Soviet citizens, we were planning on reporting him to you but simply didn’t have a chance.’

‘And how exactly did you, loyal Soviet citizens that you all are, come to the conclusion that he doesn’t have a permit or visa? Do you know him?’

‘No, not at all.’

‘To slander him, you need to know him,’ the commissar instructed. ‘And we know all about persons who like to hide diamonds in the spouts of teapots. We usually catch about five of them a week. You need to be creative in such matters. Creative, you hear me?’ The commissar rapped on the teapot with his knuckles. ‘And so, my good citizens, follow me. Let’s go and have a little talk. You can leave your things here for now. Sidorov, Yershikov,’ he said to two armed Red Army soldiers standing by the wagon, ‘take them to my office. This one’ – here he pointed at me – ‘we can leave for the time being. And make sure they don’t throw anything out of their pockets on the way. Understood?’

‘Yes, sir!’ they replied. ‘This isn’t the first time, Comrade Commissar.’

The journalists were led away followed by the commissar. I remained alone in the wagon. It wasn’t long before the soldiers returned and took the journalists’ things. I waited. An hour passed. From a nearby agitprop wagon, a sleepy-looking man, barefoot and shirtless and sporting a huge, tousled mane of hair and beard, climbed down. He dragged out after him a sheet of plywood, some brushes and cans of paint, propped the wood up against the wagon, spat on his hands, grabbed a brush and with a single stroke drew a fat man in a black top hat. Money poured from the man’s belly, which had been slit open by a bayonet. The bushy man scratched the back of his head and then wrote in red down one side of the plywood: ‘The bourgeois belly, fat with gold, Never expected a strike so bold.’

The sailors in the neighbouring wagon howled with laughter. He paid them no attention, sat down on the wagon’s steps and began rolling a thick makhorka cigarette. Just then a soldier appeared and told me to follow him to the commissar’s office. This would be my end. I grabbed my suitcase and off we went. His office was in a coach that stood in a siding overgrown with dandelions. A shiny new machine-gun stood in the door. The commissar was sitting and smoking at a table made from a few rough boards. He looked at me thoughtfully for a long time.

‘Let me hear it, every last bit,’ he finally said. ‘Where are you heading and for what reason? And let me see your documents as well.’

I realised I had to come clean. I told him about the troubles I had had trying to get a visa. ‘And as for documents, the most important one I have is this letter,’ I said, placing Galya’s letter on the table in front of him. ‘I am afraid I don’t have any others.’

The commissar frowned and began to slowly read the letter. As he read, he glanced up at me from time to time. Then he folded the letter, placed it back in the envelope, and handed it to me.

‘The document is clearly authentic,’ he said. ‘Do you have identification on you?’

I handed him my only identity card.

‘Have a seat,’ he said, and then pulled out a form with an official stamp and carefully filled it in, looking now and then at my card.

‘Here you are!’ he said at last, handing me the form. ‘Here’s your exit visa!’

‘Thank you,’ I said, overcome with emotion. My voice cracked. I couldn’t believe my luck.

‘There, there!’ the commissar said, embarrassed. He stood up and patted me on the shoulder. ‘Best not to get upset. My compliments to your dear mother. From Commissar Anokhin, Pavel Zakharovich, tell her. She must be a remarkable woman. To think of walking all the way to Moscow.’

He stretched out his hand. I shook it firmly but couldn’t get a word out. He straightened his belt and his holstered Mauser and said: ‘We’ll have to liquidate that little runt with the diamonds in the teapot. But we’ve let the others go. I’ve ordered you to be moved to a different wagon. You can’t be riding with those types. Well, farewell. And don’t forget to give your mother my compliments.’

I walked out in a daze. I could barely hold back my tears. The soldier leading me noticed. ‘I’d die twice for a commissar like him,’ he said. ‘He’s a worker from Petrograd, from the Obukhov Factory. Remember his name – Anokhin, Pavel Zakharovich. You might just meet him again.’

They took me to a wagon with only two people in it – an elderly singer and a skinny, talkative boy named Vadik. He was clumsy and simple-hearted, but kind. Both of them were travelling from Petrograd – the singer to his only daughter, a doctor in Vinnitsa, and Vadik to his mother in Odessa. Vadik had left Odessa to spend the winter holidays with his grandfather in 1917 and got stuck there for a year and a half. He found the whole thing a marvellous adventure. We travelled without any further incidents to the station at Zërnovo (Seredyna-Buda), which at the time marked the frontier between Russia and Ukraine.

We stopped at a halfway halt on the edge of a forest the night before reaching Zërnovo. The Bryansk forests stretched off to the north from here, and nearby were all the wonderful places I had often visited as a child. I couldn’t sleep. The singer and I hopped down out of our wagon and went for a walk down a dirt road that took us along the edge of the woods and out into some dark fields. Summer lightning flashed low over the swaying grain. We sat on an old elm blown down by a storm at the side of the road. These massive dead elms, lying alone among the fields and meadows, always reminded me for some reason of tough old men in homespun tunics, their grey beards blowing in the wind. The singer said after a silence: ‘Everyone believes in Russia in their own way, and for their own reasons.’

‘What are yours?’

‘I’m a singer. So you can imagine what mine are.’ He was quiet for a while and then began to sing, sorrowfully and slowly:

I walk out alone onto the road,

Through the fog the stony path shines.

The night is quiet, the wilderness hearkens to God,

And overhead star speaks to star.

I have long believed this poem of Lermontov’s to be the greatest work in all Russian poetry.fn2 And despite his saying that he had neither hope for the future nor regret for the past, it was obvious that Lermontov said all this precisely because he did regret the past and he did expect life to grant him a few fleeting, even if illusory, moments of happiness.

The wind stirred the fields. The agitated corn waved with a scattering whisper. The lightning flashed brighter, and the thunder groaned drowsily in the distance. We walked back to the station. I picked a handful of grass as we made our way through the darkness, and only in the morning did I notice that it was scented clover, what is for me the most precious of all Russian flowers.