History bookshelf:
Next book on the shelf is The Great Railway Bazaar : By Train Through Asia by Paul Theroux. First published in 1975 – this is the story of Paul Theroux going by train from London to Vietnam – and then home again by the Trans-Siberian Express. It’s the kind of trip I would love to take, as odd and extended as it would be. Ryzsard Kapuscinski did a similar thing … and Colin Thubron (who I love, and whose books I will get to shortly!!) did as well … submitting to the hardships of travel by train … submitting to the monotony – It’s not about the destination, it’s about the journey. Especially when you’re traveling through the USSR by train.
I’ll post a bit from the last leg of his journey, as he travels “home” through Russia. Now remember – this is the early 1970s.
From The Great Railway Bazaar : By Train Through Asia by Paul Theroux.
Afterward, whenever I thought of the Trans-Siberian Express, I saw stainless-steel bowls of borscht spilling in the dining car of the Rossiya as it rounded a bend on its way to Moscow, and at the curve a clear sight from the window of our green and black steam locomotive — from Skovorodino onward its eruptions of steamy smoke diffused the sunlight and drifted into the forest so that the birches smoldered and the magpies made for the sky. I saw the gold-tipped pines at sunset and the snow lying softly around clumps of brown grass like cream poured over the ground; the yacht-like snowplows at Zima; the ocherous flare of the floodlit factory chimneys at Irkutsk; the sight of Marinsk in early morning, black cranes and black buildings and escaping figures casting long shadows on the tracks as they ran toward the lighted station — something terrible in that combination of cold, dark, and little people tripping over Siberian tracks; the ice chest of frost between the cars; the protrusion of Lenin’s white forehead at every stop; and the passengers imprisoned in Hard Class: fur hats, fur leggings, blue gym suits, crying children, and such a powerful smell of sardines, body odor, cabbage, and stale tobacco that even at the five-minute stops the Russians jumped onto the snowy platform to risk pneumonia for a breath of fresh air; the bad food; the stupid economies; and the men and women (“No distinction is made with regard to sex in assigning compartments” — Intourist brochure), strangers to each other, who shared the same compartment and sat jon opposite bunks, mustached male mirroring mustached female from their grubby nightcaps and the blankets they wore as shawls, down to their hefty ankles stuck in crushed slippers. Most of all, I thought of it as an experience in which time had the trick distortions of a dream: the Rossiya ran on Moscow time, and after a lunch of cold yellow potatoes, a soup of fat lumps called solyanka, and a carafe of port that tasted like cough syrup, I would ask the time and be told it was four o’clock in the morning.
The Rossiya was not like the Vostok; it was new. The sleeping cars of East German make were steel syringes, insulated in grey plastic and heated by coal-fired boilers attached to furnace and samovar that gave the front end of each carriage the look of a cartoon atom smasher. The provodnik often forgot to stoke the furnace, and then the carriage took on a chill that somehow induced nightmares in me while at the same time denying me sleep. The other passengers in Soft were either suspicious, drunk, or unpleasant: a Goldi and his White Russian wife and small leathery child who rode in a nest of boots and blankets, two aggrieved Canadians who ranted to the two Australian librarians about the insolence of the provodnik, an elderly Russian lady who did the whole trip wearing the same frilly nightgown, a Georgian who looked as if he had problems at the other end, and several alcoholics who played noisy games of dominoes in their pajamas. Conversation was hopeless, sleep was alarming, and the perversity of the clocks confounded my appetite. That first day I wrote in my diary Despair makes me hungry.