In Japan they said it was easy to call England. True, but no one answered. And then I had to leave. I was on a Soviet ship in the Sea of Japan — high waves and blowing slop; then in the cold brown city of Nakhodka; then on another train to Khabarovsk. Why was there so little snow in Siberia?
In those days before group tours to the Soviet Union the solitary traveler was escorted by an Intourist guide, who had a car and a driver. It was usually a large black limousine, and the driver a bad-tempered man or woman dressed like a bricklayer. The arrangement was intended to keep travelers in line — the guide a sort of jailer and nanny, of intimidating size. But I was not intimidated. I felt special. I was flattered that they thought I might be dangerous and needed to be watched. I enjoyed imagining that I was a spy. I liked having my own guide. I was very lonely.
After four months of continuous travel I suspected I was half crazy. I had forgotten why I had set out on the trip. But it no longer mattered, because I was on my way home.
That was why the phone call was so urgent. I needed to be reassured that home was still there, that they were waiting, that I was loved and expected. I had been sending letters into the dark.
In Khabarovsk, Irina said—“Is unusual”—and she implied that any unusual request was impossible. She meant the phone call.
Irina was my guide. She was from the Siberian city of Irkutsk, which she considered a cosmopolitan place. She had been posted here against her will, but she was making the best of it. She was young and very heavy, and she smelled strongly of perfume and of her hairy fox-furs. She was disappointed in me.
She said, “Where is your overcoat? Where is your scarf? And you have only these shoes?”
My coat was Japanese. It was too small. I had bought it for its rabbit fur collar. I had thin wool gloves and a ski cap lettered Hokkaido.
“I thought I could buy a scarf and boots in Khabarovsk.”
“Is not possible to buy such things here,” she said, and she laughed. That bitter laugh was the first indication I’d had that she hated being in the city where these simple necessities seemed like preposterous luxuries.
Irina was also disappointed in me because I was not interested in her. “From Scotland,” she said of her thick woolen scarf. “Made in Italia,” she said of her gloves. I could not understand her being so label-conscious, but I got the message. I kept my Intourist vouchers in a lovely leather pouch that I had bought in Thailand.
“Is nice,” she said the first time she saw it. “Is expensive?”
“Frogskin,” I said. That was true. “Very cheap.”
She sighed and looked out the window of the car. I knew I had failed her. She wanted me to woo her a little, give her a present — perhaps some perfume, or a trinket; and she would let me overpower her, if it happened to be convenient. Then she would shriek a little and demand me again. Afterwards she would put on all those clothes — the two sweaters, the boots, the furs, the Scottish scarf, the Italian gloves, and having reapplied all that makeup, off she’d go. Sank you.
Instead, all I asked was the chance to make a phone call to London.
She didn’t like the request. No one used telephones in the Soviet Union. They sent telegrams on thick brownish paper. The words in the message were counted twice and initialed and stamped, and reread, and examined, until it was not a message at all but simply capital letters turned into rubles.
“Is necessary?” she said doubtfully.
She meant: What was the point in going on a long trip, and visiting interesting places like Siberia, if your main aim in being in those places was to call home?
“It’s urgent,” I said.
“Is not easy to find telephone.”
Her frown said: If all you want from me is this phone call you are wasting my time.
But I knew this was the only way I could go home, by phoning first, and I said, “There must be lots of telephones here.”
“Of course,” she said in that insulted tone that I associated with people in poor countries: Do you think we’re savages?
“I meant for international calls.”
She shrugged, using her furs, which made it a theatrical gesture. She said, “We can be able to telephone Kiev. We can be able to telephone Leningrad. We have trunk line. Trunk call.”
Why was it only foreigners who used words like “trunk line” and “purchase” and “clad”? Was it because the words went out of date by the time they reached these distant countries?
I said, “What about London?”
I wanted her to say Of course with the same indignant certainty she had used before.
She said, “First is necessary to book the telephone.”
“Yes.”
“And then is necessary to telephone Moscow.”
“Yes,” I said, and waited for more. But she was thinking.
“And then we must make inquiry.”
“I want you to do this for me, Irina, please.”
“Is breakfast time,” she said, “in Moscow,” and squeezed her tiny watch-face between two large dimpled fingers. “We go to museum now. Famous museum.”
Stuffed animals with bright glass eyes, dusty birds, dinosaur bones wired together, fossils, paintings of mustachioed men, baskets and ancient tattered aboriginal mittens, and pots and weapons that made me think: Could they cook with these? Could they kill with those? The building was overheated. Everything I saw was dead, and the way the floorboards creaked made me sad.
“Now we visit to factory.”
“What about my phone call?”
“Is important factory, making poolies, weenches—”
“Irina, please.”
She did not reply. She spoke in Russian to the driver. I had no idea we were going back to the hotel until we arrived there. Irina muttered and got out, but when I attempted to follow her the driver said something Russian to me in a scolding voice, and I sat back in the stuffy car.
“Is booked,” Irina said, when she returned to the car. “Now we visit to factory. Then we see river. Is coming darkness soon.”
“What do you mean ‘booked’? Booked to London?”
“To Moscow.”
“Will they connect me to London?”
“I think so. I hope so.” She saw my face and smiled at me. She said gently, “Don’t worry.”
In the late afternoon, which was dark, I was walking up the steep riverbank to the car, and it struck me that I had gone too far. I had been away too long. What was I doing, slipping on this ice in this freezing place? The dark, the cold, and the stillness were all Siberian. I should never have come here.
Siberia seemed like death but was less final. It was more like a fatal illness, an especially anxious and even painful sort of waiting. A shallow heartbeat marked the time passing like the soft tick of a clock. It was a condition I had just begun to know: Siberia meant suspense. It was not death, but dying.
Back at the hotel I wrote my notes — about Irina and the factory, the museum, the bank, the statue in the main square, the look of the houses, the river, and the way the old men had been fishing through holes in the ice. In these notes I was expert at leaving things out. I said nothing of the phone call. There were in my travels certain simultaneous anxieties that I did not have to write down to remember. In fact, not writing them down meant that they were always passing in my mind.
Irina had said the call would come at eight. It didn’t — I did not expect it to be punctual in Siberia. I was surprised when the phone rang just before eight-thirty: Moscow.
“I am calling London,” I said.
“Number, please?”
I said it slowly, I repeated it, and I was so preoccupied I did not hear the operator nagging me to put the phone down until she began to shout.