Having released my coffee from the push-button machine on the counter and rinsed the sleeping man’s empty beer glass, the barwoman settled on a stool, hooked one white stiletto into the chrome ring at its base, revolved away from the television and stared at the wall. Between the liquor bottles on the mirrored shelves behind the bar, her bleached hair and the brilliant green of her suit were reflected away, gleaming, into infinity.
From Vologda, on this cool quiet morning, Moscow seemed far away. Yet the sense of remoteness in this town is an illusion, Shalamov says. Vologda is a night train’s journey due north of Moscow. It is ‘part lace and part exile’; but it is not Siberia.
Shalamov, the son of a philo-Semitic dissident priest, was proud of the history of opposition to state power in his native town. As he describes in his memoir The Fourth Vologda, in the years of his education he absorbed the long history of the ‘liberation movement’ from the air. Any individual who ever opposed the power of the state is likely to have passed through Vologda. Between the middle of the nineteenth century and 1917, around ten thousand exiles registered with the local police. Dreams of utopia and quarrels about the meaning of life became part of Vologda’s spiritual climate, he said, turning it towards the West and the World, ‘with a capital letter’. Though it is famed for its sixteenth-century stone churches and its exquisitely carved wooden houses, Vologda was not just an architectural chronicle of Ivan the Terrible’s strengthening of the Russian state in the ‘Great North’. The constant presence of political exiles disposed the whole town to look towards future time, beyond the indeterminate murk of the present towards the radiant dawn of hope. Russia’s future was already present in discussions, disputes and lectures by rebels against the state, and in the books they gave, by exile tradition, to the local library when they left.
Vologda’s exiles range from Avvakum, the seventeenth-century schismatic priest, to the serial allegiance-changer Boris Savinkov (who transformed himself from socialist assassin before the Revolution into monarchist adventurer and companion-in-arms of Sidney Reilly in the conspiracies of 1918); from the daughters of Field Marshal Sheremetev to the philosopher Berdyaev (whom Lenin later deported from Russia on a steamship in 1922) to Lenin’s sister, the dedicated but rather ineffectual revolutionary Maria Ulyanova, whom the tsarist secret police found ludicrously easy to follow. Vologda was a transit point in lives filled with tension. In truth, as Shalamov explains, it was a tsarist compromise on political punishment. The statistics calmed the regime and delighted the liberals. For after the railway line was laid in the 1860s, the dawn of an exile’s most immediate hope came with a timetable. Vologda was only a night from the two capitals. From the exile’s point of view, Vologda is St Petersburg and Moscow, Shalamov says, ‘only be sure not to mention it within hearing of the authorities’.
*
Roused before dawn by the train conductor, I pulled aside the curtains of turquoise nylon lace to see the sun rise over the plain, as train No. 42 made its long decelerando through the allotments and semi-urban dereliction on the edge of Vologda. The birch trees which give rhythm to every Russian train journey grew more sparsely up here, the telegraph poles shone silver with age. Dead trees and fallen poles lay strewn and drying, their thin forms crisscrossed on the grey earth. (Trees in the north die lying down, Shalamov says in ‘Dry Ration’, just like people at the end of their ‘broken northern lives’.) The few other passengers in luxe – a pair of giggling redheads in leather mini-skirts who drank beer in the corridor half the night long in the company of a biznisman with a fancy Italian briefcase – were staying with the train on its onward journey to Vorkuta. The conductor had changed out of her short nylon housecoat and slippers and, having cleaned out the WC with pungent disinfectant, stood ready by the carriage door, her chest straining at the brass buttons of her uniform, her weight rebalanced on her heels so that she looked like an entirely different woman.
Trotsky despised the word luxe, but, though I have sometimes travelled like a proletarian, I now relish without shame the privilege of travelling en bourgeois on Russian trains. ‘The bourgeoisie must be preserved in its innocent aspect,’ Mandelstam wrote in The Fourth Prose, ‘it must be entertained with amateur theatricals, lulled on the springs of Pullman cars, tucked into envelopes of snow-white railway sleep.’ Writing about comfort at the end of NEP, when everyone had felt homeless, he wondered about the origin of the ‘fastidiousness and so-called decency’ of the bourgeois. ‘His decency is what makes the bourgeois kin to the animal,’ he reflected; ‘many Party members are at ease in the company of a bourgeois for the very same reason that grown-ups require the society of rosy-cheeked children.’ The true bourgeois is more innocent than the proletarian, Mandelstam said, ‘closer to the womb world, the baby, the kitten, the angel, the cherub’. But in Russia, he added, ‘there are very few of these innocent bourgeois, and that has a bad effect on the digestion of revolutionaries’.
The precision of Mandelstam’s image holds. Innocently tucked in luxe, in an envelope of snow-white linen, carried on my way with no power over the stopping or the going forward, I find the nature of railway sleep impossible to predict. Sometimes the springs of the train car will lull me quickly into the unconscious dark; sometimes they keep me half awake all night, stirring in the heat to the hard lights and shouting voices on station platforms as we pass, so that as we pull into some new town at dawn, I feel I have not slept at all.
The Russian railway system retains undiminished its power to stir a primitive geographical excitement in the traveller. Since the first rails were laid, passion and imagination have pulsed without cease along this circulatory system. Russian literature is full of trains, because (like prostitutes, who also populate the literature) they bring together places, social worlds and life stories that would otherwise never touch. Trains are vehicles of plot and destiny, adventure and tragedy, surprising thoughts and conversations, uniting the squalid and the sublime, iron and plush, making intimacy possible across the great reach of space. The architecture of Moscow’s railway stations rises gloriously to this excitement. The night before Vologda we were in the halls of the Yaroslavl Station, a fantasy pastiche made up of motifs from the architectural style of northern Old Rus and from its fairy-tale tradition, designed by Chekhov’s friend Shekhtel, from where trains leave Moscow for the north and east. Beneath wall friezes conjuring primordial wildness and space – wolves, bears, walruses, Sami huntsmen and their sleds – the ‘urban surf’ (as Shalamov called it) kept up its neverending roar. Travellers hurried to their platforms past kiosks and beggars, laden with big sacks in laminated plaid in which small-time market traders carry their wares all over Russia and beyond. The departures board announced trains to Komi, Ulan Bator and Peking. We made our way down the platform, past the female conductors standing at the door of each carriage in full uniform, with their air of important expectation about the night journey ahead. They simpered mockingly when we showed our luxe tickets. On the neighbouring track was a train bound for Pyongyang. A set of knives hung in the window of the galley kitchen next to the dining car, silhouetted in yellow-grey light through a blind. Already sunk in the torpor of the long, enclosed journey ahead, the travellers bound for North Korea had changed into tracksuits and taken off their shoes; lying in long carriages of unpartitioned berths, four high, their limbs pressed against the grimy windows, among bundled blankets, they looked out with vacant eyes.