Train No. 2
We had good times in Moscow. The nightlife, people, culture, and architecture of the city never ceased to amaze me. My host babushka (grandmother), Margarita, was a former dramaturg for a Moscow theater. She spoke no English, and during my four months in Moscow she cooked for me, helped me learn Russian, told me stories, took me shopping, and ran to get me when President Putin or Al Gore or a good ballet was on TV. I was sad to leave her and my little apartment overlooking Kievsky Station. I said good-bye to her and my three host cats, Vasya, Zaika, and Shurik, and caught a cab in front of our apartments.
It wasn’t a real taxi. There are few official taxicabs in Russia, and most people flag down random cars on the street for a cheap ride. Driving people around is a good way to make some money and avoid taxes in Russia. A Russian politics professor told me their tax system is so screwed up that sometimes taxes are more than 100% of income for small businesses. They’re trying out reforms, but we’ll see if people trust the government enough to make it work.
My driver’s name was Alek. I introduced myself and told him where I was from. He said he’d never want to live in America because things were too predictable and everything was scheduled and regulated and boring. He preferred Russia, where you didn’t even know who might be in your car in the next five minutes. I asked if he knew any English, and he said, “Hello, my name is Alek,” and laughed like he was embarrassed. “Yeshchyo?” I prodded (Anything more?). He laughed again and said what every self-respecting citizen of the world knows nowadays: “Ya znaiyu f**k you.” He knew another phrase, but it took him a while to remember. Finally he smiled and said, “Give me please one dollar!” I laughed, and we chatted until we arrived at the Finance Academy an hour late because we got lost trying to take a shortcut.
I got there in time for the last hour of the last party with the Stanford in Moscow folks. We talked and reminisced, ate bad Russian cakes (I don’t think I’ve ever had a good Russian cake), and said good-bye to our amazing directors, professors, and language teachers. Then it was time to head to Yaroslavsky Station and get out of Dodge.
We took the metro to the station and found our train. As we were waiting to load up, a man around 50-ish who looked like a cross between Robin Williams and Steven Spielberg, only grizzlier and less coherent, saw my cowboy hat sitting on top of my backpack. (My grandpa had given me the hat back in Oklahoma to wear to a cultural fair in Denmark.) He came up to me and said, “Real cowboy, yeah? Ot kuda?” (Where are you from?) I told him, and he helped me carry my luggage to our coupee. When we got there, he kissed my hand and winked and said officially, “Russky gentleman.”
Rob, Liz and I shared a four-bed compartment called a coupee (coo-PAY) with an old babushka from Vladivostok named Zoya. She had served in the Red Army as a communications officer, and she proudly showed off her “INVALIDOV” documents. She gets free ground transportation once a year as a benefit of her retirement from the service, and she was using it now to visit her family in the Crimea (in the southern Ukraine on the Black Sea).
Second class cars on Russian trains contain nine small compartments called coupees in a row down one side. Each coupee has four fold-down sleeping cabinets, two on each side, with enough room in the middle to turn around without quite hitting your shoulders. At one end of the coupee are a small table and a window, and at the other end is the lockable door. Each passenger gets a thin mattress, a set of sheets, a pillow, and places overhead or under the bed to stuff his or her baggage. The bottom bunks tend to become the party bunks, and the top ones are for reading and napping. So depending on whether you want smelly people snoozing in your bed or smelly people dropping crumbs and jam on your bed, you pick one. (Actually, despite the lack of showers, I almost never noticed anyone smelling bad. Maybe it was because we all smelled about the same.)
Each car has a corridor with big windows down the side opposite the coupee doors. At one end of the car lives the provodnik or provodnitsa, the overseer of his or her train car. They keep things clean, fix the samovar (a big communal hot water pot), stoke the coals for the heater, hand out fresh linens, make tea if you’re too lazy to do it yourself (and charge you), and in some cases search very skillfully for something to gripe about. But if you treat them both with respect and as a friendly equal, they are generally a kind and fun ally to have. Our provodnik on the Rossiya spoke a little English, and he was a nice guy, very droll and intelligent. He claimed he had once been President Putin’s provodnik. The provodnitsa was twentysomething and had bleached blonde hair and smirked a lot. We liked her right away.
At the other end of each car is the public toilet. You can use the black plastic toilet seats over the metal bowls for about the first half-hour of the seven-day trip. After that, with all the jolting and drunkenness, accidents happen. I have become highly skilled at peeing standing up. The provodnik/nitsa generally puts one roll of toilet paper in the bathroom at the very beginning, and apparently that’s all that is in their job description, because that’s it. It’s gone in an hour, which means you’d better bring a few rolls with you. We, being savvy Russian travelers by now, had plenty.
The annoying part was that it seemed you always had to go just as the train was pulling into a station. When you flush, it goes right out the bottom of the train, and you can imagine the sanitation problems if they let trains use their bathrooms in towns and while stopped at stations. So all bathrooms were locked at every stop. Sometimes they were locked only for a few minutes, but often in the bigger cities they stayed locked from thirty minutes before you hit the station, through the 20-minute stop, until 30 minutes after you left. That could be torture.
Food was decent and very cheap. We had access to free hot water all the time, and we’d brought packages of instant oatmeal, instant soups, coffee, and tea. I had a jar of peanut butter from the States and some Nutella from Moscow. The restaurant car was expensive by Russian standards, and although there was an extensive menu, the only things reliably available were a lot of vodka, nasty sausage soup, and what Russians call ‘salad’ and Americans call ‘sliced cucumbers and tomatoes with mayonnaise’. We got most of our food when we stopped at stations along the way. As soon we stepped off the train, we were usually swarmed by people selling fresh bread, boiled potatoes, pirozhki (dough with savory filling), pelmeni or vereniki (boiled dumplings), dried fish, pickles, eggs, jam, yogurt, bottled water, magazines, etc. Sometimes, though, the only food available was a choice between cabbage and dough, meat and dough, or potatoes and dough. The dough could be boiled or fried, so that doubled your possibilities. But at these times we often broke down and went to the restaurant car. It turned out to be a nice way to meet folks from other cars.
Soon the Robin Williams guy came back to our cabin and introduced himself as Pasha. He hung out in our coupee and talked for hours, only pausing to bite the cap off his next beer. For some reason he would only call me Pol’ or Polya, never my real name. He sang song lyrics in English like, “American voman...” or “Smoke on de vaaater.” Every time he entered our coupee, he began by saying prophetically in English, “To be orrrr not to be: hvat a qveshen.” He knew his Pushkin better than his Shakespeare, though, and sometimes he and Zoya sat next to each other and recited lines from Eugene Onegin together. It was mesmerizing to watch them recite poetry in one voice with such feeling. I found it hard to imagine two Americans a generation apart doing the same.
By the time we were settled in on the first evening and had exhausted a good deal of our Russian small-talk skills with Pasha and Zoya, it was just about dinnertime. At a thirty-minute stop, Liz and Rob and I got out and bought a baggie full of warm boiled potatoes and dill, two jars of jam (one raspberry and one blueberry), some fresh baked bread, boiled eggs, and several bags of fresh pickles. They were the most amazing pickles I had ever eaten, very fresh and crisp and cold and sour and juicy. We ate them (probably 15 giant dill pickles) until we were fighting over the last one. And the jam was amazing, so sweet and flavorful. There’s nothing like it in America. It wasn’t jelled like jelly, but thick and runny, and the berries floated at the top so that you could pick them out and eat them or dip your bread in the sweet ooze around them. Jam, bread, pickles, potatoes and eggs, and two Russian characters to share it with. It was a happy feast.
That night we settled in and wrote in our journals as the dark, sugar-frosted forest flashed by under a hazy gibbous moon. We also listened in as Pasha blathered drunkenly but good-humoredly while Babazoya, as he called her, admonished him that she never drank or smoked and nobody else should either.
That night and the next day we passed over the Ural Mountains. They are more ancient and worn-down than that Appalachians and are easy to miss if you don’t pay attention. We passed the obelisk that marks the transition from Europe to Asia some time in the darkness of the early morning.
Day 2--The First Soldier 