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.