The next day we boarded our final train at around 10:00 a.m. It would be a three-day journey to Vladivostok from here. We briefly talked about getting off and exploring Khabarovsk, but it didn’t work out, as you’ll see. Liz and I were getting sicker and sicker. Soon I started improving, but she didn’t.We were both well enough at this point to talk to our cabin mates. One was an old pensioner who introduced himself as “Dyadya Volodya,” or Uncle Volodya. The other was originally from Tashkent, Uzbekistan. He said life in Uzbekistan was much harder than in Russia. He had immigrated to Russia and was now in either the militsiya or the army, I wasn’t too clear. But he was very nice to talk to.
Another few guys came and joined us. One talked business a lot and grilled me on my views on American and Russian economics. Whatever I said he turned it around so that it agreed with him, and he seemed quite pleased with himself. We all shared a round of little plastic cups of Volodya’s vodka. It was cheap even by Soviet standards, even worse than the Polarsky Grubny turpentine we had had in Apatity. The men seemed to treat me as an equal during our discussions, but they laughed when I made a face at the first taste of the paint thinner in my cup.
Volodya and I talked a little after the others left. He praised me drunkenly for knowing and loving Russia and being a link between the countries. Sometimes he would just clasp his hands and say over and over in Russian, “We understand, you and me, we know, we are the same, America and Russia, we are brothers, our two nations, and you understand. Thank you. Thank you.” He was very drunk, but it was interesting that such positive feelings came from him.
When I got hungry, I asked Liz to come to the restaurant car with me. We walked there and sat down and ordered some chicken and kasha (it was all they had that looked remotely appetizing). A guy at a nearby table had a tiny, shoddy tape player on which he was playing an obnoxious worn-out tape of Russian music VERY LOUDLY. He was sitting opposite an older guy who didn’t look Russian. I was sitting on the tail end of a headache, and I kept shooting him murderous looks, but the ear-splitting music never stopped. He kept looking back at me, though, with a mischievous kind of smirk in his eyes.
In a few minutes, some champagne appeared at our table. My first instinct was that our waiter was doing the typical crooked former-Soviet waiter thing and bringing us something expensive that we didn’t order, hoping we’d eat or drink it, and charging us for it. I insisted we didn’t order it, but he just shrugged and popped the top and walked away. I glanced over at the obnoxious guy’s table and saw him looking at us, and I realized it must be from him. I didn’t know what was the appropriate response, but I assumed he wanted us to invite them over.
I motioned him over, and he kind of reluctantly got up and came and poured us each a glass. I asked him his name, and he said some sardonic joke I didn’t understand, and then went back and sat down. But after a short while he and his crony came to sit with us. He told us his name was Igor and he was 30 years old. He looked about 24. The other guy looked about 50, and he said he was of German descent. Igor was pretty sloshed, I soon realized, and he kept playing the tape, loud as ever, right in front of us even as we were trying to speak in halting Russian. Finally I reached over and turned it off, which seemed to surprise him.
He had spiky short black hair and a tattoo of the Angel of Death on his chest, which was bare under his thin windbreaker. He sat across from me while his German henchman sat stiffly beside me. We talked for a while about music, jobs, and our families. Igor claimed he had a website and tried to write its address on a small piece of paper towel. But his wobbly WWW.STiUr took up the whole thing. So he gave up and told us it was at www.stinger.sniper.ru. (I found later that it doesn’t really exist.) He used to be a sniper in Chechnya, which he said was “easy work,” but had moved on for reasons I wasn’t clear on. Maybe he got into another line of work after the first war ended.
I’d already had the cup of Volodya’s vodka, and because of that and the champagne and illness and tiredness, I was feeling kind of woozy. I mentioned it, probably as an excuse to leave and go to sleep. I guess I said something about the vodka, because that was all he picked up on, and he ordered us each a shot. I thought it would be impolite to refuse, so I took the shot with him. It was quality. He ordered another one, and I refused, but he insisted, so I took it also. Oh well, I thought, it will help me sleep. But I told him firmly that that was it. After the third one, I only sipped the fourth shot since I’d be in the hospital (um... what hospital?) if it went on like this. He protested and reached over to pick it up and give it to me and spilled it all over me. So that was that. The German guy gave me his handkerchief, and I wiped myself off, put it in my pocket, and forgot about it. I found it a few days later still in my pocket.
Throughout the conversation, Igor kept elbowing Liz and saying things like, “Ona krasivaya, da? Kak Anna Karenina.” (She’s beautiful, yes? Like Anna Karenina.) His intentions were fairly transparent (especially since Anna Karenina is a character in a book and doesn't actually look like anything), and after I was good and drunk, he motioned for me to come back to his cabin with him. Even in my state I knew it wasn’t a good idea.
When I thought about it later with a clearer head, it occurred to me that these guys were probably mafiosi. They had first-class cabins and were throwing money around buying us drinks, and Igor said he had a $100 silk tie he would wear for his ‘business’ in Chita. They were nice enough, but they had a weird vibe, kind of an edge to them, that I didn’t notice in the warmth of most people I met. They seemed hardened somehow. I saw something in Igor that might have been nice not too long ago, but now there was not much left. In hindsight, I wish I had thought to talk to him about the workings of the Russian mafia, but maybe it’s better that I got away from him when I did.
In any case, the main result of all this was that when I was stumbling back to my coupee, the train lurched and I ended up stepping really hard on the metal lip that divides our coupee from the hall, and it bruised my instep badly. Sometimes after that it hurt to walk by the end of the day.
I also realized the next day that Igor had slipped the offending tape of loud Russian music into my coat pocket at some point, and now, as I’m writing this, I’m listening to it loud on my stereo. It sounds much better on my stereo than it did on Igor’s little tape player. And it’s a pretty nice compilation of popular Russian music, including Zemfira’s Do Svidaniya, which played continuously at every other CD kiosk in Moscow, and Zdob si Zdub’s Videli Noch’, which they played at the Viktor Tsoi cover concert, KinoProby, in Moscow. The song has a frantic, happy rolling rhythm to it that carried every single person in a wave of jumping, screaming exultation in the huge arena. “Videli noch’, guliali vsiu noch’ do utraaa!!! ”
These guys got off at Chita, same as our friend from Tashkent. A guy named Sasha who looked about 25 years old joined us in our coupee. He was very handsome in a boyish way. We only chatted briefly before I fell asleep, and I was kind of hammered, so I thought I had made a bad first impression. But I was too tired to care.
Day 9--Sasha from Smolensk