THE BLOG @ TIR

Our editor-in-chief, Russell Valentino, is writing a series of posts from a trip across Eurasia via ferry, plane, and Trans-Siberian Railway.

I’m buying my ticket, having waited in line for the last twenty minutes. I lean down to talk through the space between the glass and the counter, aware that everyone behind me and to the left and right is listening. Just as I’m getting ready to pay, a guy from the South—I’m guessing the Caucasus but possibly Central Asia, Russian speaking, but with an accent—comes up, apologizes to me, says he’s in a big hurry and needs to pay for a piece of luggage for his train that’s leaving in three minutes. The woman in the window snaps at him, can’t he see that she’s in the middle of something, he yells back that his train is leaving, she yells back that that’s not her fault, he yells back that he just needs to pay for that one thing, she shouts she’s busy and he has to go to another window, he curses and says you’re all busy at all the windows, she curses louder back that that’s not her fault either, he slams a fist on the wood next to me with a final curse, and disappears. She looks at me (by this time she has seen my passport) and says, “We have that kind here sometimes, too.”

At which I have no idea what to say so just take out my credit card to pay, at which she says, oh no, you’re paying with a credit card, and I ask, is it a problem? Well, she’s already prepared the ticket for cash (a different process). The money machine in the adjoining room might work, and I might be able to take out enough cash—I say I’ll try, and she says she’ll hold onto the ticket (and my passport) in case it works. I’ve got the cash now and, thinking I’ve already stood once, I should be able to skip that part, but I also know that Russians are constantly on the lookout for line cutters, so I stand sort of on the side in the front and ask the next guy waiting, if you’re not in too much of a hurry, I just have to pay, she already prepared the ticket, it’ll only take a second. He says, my auntie is waiting for me outside. Of course, I know what that feels like so fine. The second guy doesn’t even let me get past the if you’re not in too much of a hurry part: but I am in a hurry, he says, I’m even starting to get nervous about making my train because that witch up ahead of us just now was talking so much. Well I’m not in a hurry, my train isn’t leaving until 2:30 in the morning, so in the local parlance, I “stand again.” Problem solved. But no.

Two Russian guys are sitting on the window sill. I ask if they’re in line. Yes, we’re behind her, one slurs, none too distinctly. Okay, I say, putting my stuff down. There is a ritual here. I remember reading about it first in Hedrick Smith’s book (I lied before, I read it) and then experiencing it first-hand during previous stays: when you’re behind someone in line but you’re not actually standing there physically all the time—maybe you’ve got other stuff to do; maybe you’re too plastered to stay on your feet—that person needs to acknowledge it. I am behind you, says one. The other needs to respond, confirm, yes, you are behind me. It means in effect that she or he accepts responsibility for upholding your case before others in line, especially those farther back. She or he becomes a potential advocate. But it’s an agreement, and the person ahead has to agree. What I noticed when the two zombies on the window sill said we’re behind her was that she didn’t even look back. I was just going to keep my place and see if they even noticed. I didn’t think they would, but if they suddenly opened their eyes a crack and said, hey, that’s our place, I would have just said okay, sorry about that, and let them in. And when another guy came up and asked who was last and I said me and he said I’m behind you, I had no problem saying yes, you are behind me (and feeling a slight wave of preparatory righteous indignation at anyone who might want to challenge me on this point), and he went away to do something else. But then the ticket clerk saw me, said what are you doing back there, come up here, you’ve already stood once (which, of course, I knew, but what was I going to do, say these people right here wouldn’t let me in? so I just smiled and said I wasn’t in a hurry, at which she shook her head and chuckled), and had me come up to pay, well, then we had a problem. The woman behind whom the two drunks had claimed to be standing was still in line, but now the guy whose case I would have defended with all the rhetorical skills at my disposal was technically behind the guys on the sill, and when he came back and I told him this, he looked at the two inebriated souls, uttered a quiet curse, and looked down at the floor. Then he looked at me, nodded, and moved to another line.

(When I told my oldest Russian friend this story, she smiled sadly and said that for twenty some years of her life something like that could have been a weekly, even at times a daily occurrence, and that’s why to this day her stomach roils at the thought of “standing,” and she will pay much more in order to avoid it.)

I’ve taken the greyhound train, the cheaper variation, mainly because the schedule was right. It’s just as fast as the Rossiya (they both can get from Vladivostok to Moscow in six and a half days) but this one’s older, not as sleek on the outside or nice on the inside, and doesn’t have the same level of service. This means fewer foreigners, too, in fact none that I am aware of—I don’t see a single one for the entire crossing—, and also a different class of native passengers, with suitcases that tend to be taped up. At first I’m alone in my four-berth compartment, but somewhere around 4 a.m. I am awakened by the arrival of two others, who settle themselves in beneath me in the dark. In the morning, we exchange a quiet hello. They’re a little shy of me at first, but slowly we get acquainted. We’ve got time.

Anna (Anya) and Fyodor (Fedya) have three grown children and two grand-children, one who’s just two years old and calls them on their cell phone every once in a while, his voice ringing throughout the compartment (Grandma, when are you coming home? I have to do potty. Well, tell your mama or papa. I did, but come home soon because I have to go.) They’re on their way from Vladivostok to Ukraine to visit relatives, by train the whole way because she doesn’t fly—17 days of travel in all.

They’ve known each other since they were in school together and have been married for thirty years. They talk with each other constantly, often sitting at the table attached to the window and looking out, one on each side. I wake up sometimes to the patter of the tracks under us or, more often, when we’ve stopped and it’s dark and quiet, I hear them whispering, laughing softly. They fill the compartment, partly because they’re not small people, but mostly with their personalities, their hominess. They seem, in fact, to have brought a good chunk of their home with them: tomatoes, cucumbers, and fresh dill from their garden, which Anya chops up and mixes with a dressing she put together before leaving, boiled potatoes (also from her garden), apples, two kinds of bread, dried and salted fish, Russian and Chinese candies (they live not far from the border), brandy, two kinds of tea, sugar, sliced up lemon. At any station with more than a ten-minute stop, they step off and stroll up and down the platform, arm-in-arm, talking with the vendors, haggling, buying smoked fish, chicken, pirogi, fruit, or bread. (Anya uses a wonderfully colorful verb to describe what they’re doing, “shastat’,” which means something like “mooching about.”)

Sometimes vendors get on the train and travel between two stops, making their way from compartment to compartment with items like hand-knitted wool scarves, cosmetics, or stuffed animals, and Anya has them come in and lay out their things on the lower bunks. She asks them questions, dickers, and makes occasional purchases. On one occasion she places an order for some baby clothes and a shawl to be knitted, and arranges to have the things delivered on the train as they pass through the same area on their way home in a few weeks’ time.

Fedya likes to eat. Actually, they both do, and the sound of munching spills out into the hallway. He doesn’t drink beer or wine, which are always on sale among the platform vendors, but he often manages to find someone selling contraband vodka (there’s a law against selling hard stuff at the stations), which he drinks with his meals, including me after our first couple of days together. Actually, by the end of the trip, we’re sharing all our meals, and I’m doing my best to coordinate my own purchases to supplement the household. The one time I almost miss the train is when I venture out too far into Novosibirsk in search of cognac for Fedya (his favorite drink) and have to run to get back, with only three minutes to spare. I apologize to Sasha, our car attendant, who was worried about me, and nine-year-old Polina from two compartments over scolds me: “You're the last one! We were waiting for you!” Fedya’s eyes sparkle when he sees what I’ve brought.

He makes Anya laugh a lot. He often pretends to complain about how she isn’t feeding him enough and he’s going hungry, and she says things like, “Oh, I can tell by looking at you,” at which he puts both hands on his round belly and says, “What, this? It’s just water!” He reads the signs of towns we pass, and she corrects his pronunciation, moving the stress to the end of a word or the middle, and he repeats the name the way she has just said it and adds, “Akh, who the hell knows anyway?” at which she responds, “I do,” and he says “besides you.” Sometimes he and I stand in the hall and look out the windows at the country passing. As we go by a tiny village of run-down shacks somewhere east of Baikal with unpainted wood and corrugated steel sheets as roofs and a single, deeply-rutted muddy path leading in and out, Fedya says, “Man is the kind of swine that can get used to living just about anywhere.” Later we stop at the formerly off-limits (to foreigners) town of Skorovodino, but they cut the stop short and won’t let us out because we’re behind schedule. Fedya recalls a saying from when he was in the service there many years before: God created the Crimea and Sochi, but the devil made Skorovodino and Mogocha (another town in the area).

They are from Spassk-Dal’nii, a town of 40,000 in the Primorskii krai to the south of Vladivostok. It’s one of the places that Vladimir Arseniev, author of Dersu the Trapper (the basis of the film Dersu Uzala), passed through in his Far Eastern travels. There’s a small river named after him not far from their home. They have their own large garden, some livestock, and don’t buy much food at the store, mostly dried goods and bread. And they managed to set up all three of their children in apartments or houses nearby, and all without taking out a single loan. A head taller than her husband, solid and thick all around, Anya is good with numbers, quick at calculating, and somewhat proud of the fact that she managed to steer them through the most difficult years of the immediate post-Soviet period, “when people lost everything,” she says. She made a conscious choice. The system was too unstable. Banks fail, people get robbed. Better not to enter that world, she says.

They read newspapers and do the crosswords. Anya picked up a romance on the train, but usually they don't read books. I don't like what they're writing now, she says. She remembers poetry from school and can still recite it by heart. Esenin especially, Nekrasov. But they've changed so much of the curriculum now, and most of it isn't worth much. They talk about our heroes from the past only to criticize them. And why does everything have to get reduced to people's sexual orientation anyway? She never understood Mayakovsky or Akhmatova, she says. She's never heard of Aksyonov or Sinyavsky. Solzhenitsyn is too heavy. No, these days she'd rather play a video game when she gets home from work.

Just west of Chita, they turn on the train’s heater after a chilly night. Anya and Fedya are pleased. They froze last night, they say. Didn't I? Fedya asks if he can ask me a personal question. They wear their wedding rings on their right hand, but mine is on my left. Is that a Catholic thing? Anya says maybe I can visit with my family one day and laughs, "They'll never want to come back after they see how we live!"  Fedya asks how I'll get to St. Petersburg after we arrive in Moscow, and in one of the long pauses, I say, it's a beautiful city, to which Anya replies with a sigh that she's heard as much, but they've never been to Leningrad.

Later that day, the sky is dappled with enormous cumulous clouds, and it suddenly feels like fall. I get some potatoes with butter on them at one of the stops near Ulan Ude, and Anya  insists on putting her nose in the plastic bag to smell them. They seem okay to me, but she's positive--oh, no, sour, can’t eat those. Here, she says, have some of ours.

Our editor-in-chief, Russell Valentino, is writing a series of posts from a trip across Eurasia via ferry, plane, and Trans-Siberian Railway.

The first time I went to Russia, it was 1987, Gorbachev was barely into his third year as General Secretary of the Communist Party of the USSR, perestroika and glasnost were sexy new words, and my exchange-student compatriots and I had to be prepared in a three-day orientation held in Helsinki, Finland before crossing the border. There were lots of rules. Do not sit on tables, do not skip class, do not spend nights outside the accommodations provided, do not make phone calls from the lobbies of hotels or dormitories, do not sell or trade your belongings with Soviets, do not smoke hash or marijuana, do not see a doctor on your own, do not take part in political demonstrations of any kind, do not leave the group during excursions, do not venture beyond a forty-kilometer limit outside the city, do not change money on the black market, at least not with strangers on the street, and, if you do and worst comes to worst, do not forget the following phrase: “Ya imeiu pravo pozvonit’ v amerikanskoe posol’stvo”—I have the right to call the American embassy. I think they told us to write it down, memorize it, and then swallow the paper.

Our orienteers related horror stories of student arrests, nights spent in the drunk tank, inconvenient, often painful hospital stays, interrogations, and life-altering, albeit infrequent, deportations. They were of course attempting to curtail the behavior of their rambunctious charges by reflecting, perhaps in part unconsciously, the society in which those charges would soon be immersed. They wanted neither complete disappearances nor public spectacles, but rather well-behaved, courteous cultural ambassadors, polite Americans, if you will. Better known, in some circles at least, as Canadians.

What this meant in practice was that, in contrast to the many variations on studying abroad in, say, England, France, Italy, or elsewhere in Western Europe, American experiences of the USSR tended to be as alike as two Socialist Realist placards. Pretty much everyone studied the same subjects with the same textbooks and the same teachers in the same classrooms term after term, year after year. We all saw the same sights with the same guides and their same, theoretically incognito, KGB escorts. We all stayed in the same two tightly controlled dormitories with the same floor monitors, the same clingy Soviet roommates, the same indifferent cafeteria attendants, the same kasha, and the same student informants, whom everyone learned to recognize in the first week and avoid thereafter. It was a remarkably stable system. Even friends were passed on from group to group, both among the two dozen or so North American colleges and universities that routinely sent their students abroad and among the tight-knit culture of the intelligentsia, what was left of it, in Moscow and Leningrad.

That was then, before perestroika had become a mere metaphor in the speeches of American university administrators advocating for their own kinds of reform. How soon we forget. I pointed out to one such administrator that, actually, perestroika was a failure that not only hadn’t worked very well, it had destroyed the very institution it was intended to reform, a whole country. “Right,” he had answered after a brief look of fear crossed his face and was quickly replaced by his usual practiced confidence, “and the world is a better place for it.” I wish we could all be so casual about applying the lessons of history. I think he’s a university president somewhere now.

This time, before crossing the Russian border, I’m reading Ian Frazer’s Travels in Siberia and Bryn Thomas’ Trans-Siberian Handbook in hotel rooms in Sapporo and Wakkanai, making train, ferry, plane, and hotel reservations by email and online, calling travel agencies (!) in Vladivostok and Ulan Ude (priezhaite! they all tell me—come!), and trying to imagine in which situations I might really need flip flops, a battery charger for a camera whose battery lasts for weeks, a map of the Urals, or extra cotton swabs. Some things don’t seem to have changed much. The need for a visa, for instance, and an “invitation” from someone in the country in order to get it (here is a picture of my visa—this is to show what it looks like and also in case my passport is lost or stolen, please store a copy on your hard drive); the requirement of a personal interview upon entry, along with surrendering one’s passport for an ill-defined length of time; or the horror stories, of which everyone who writes about traveling there seems to have at least one. Most recent in my mind is a charming little bit Frazer recounts about some U.S. Coast Guard guys “not even drunk,” on the way back to their ship in port in Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk in the early morning, getting beaten up and robbed by a group of Russian sailors. That’s bad, but it’s not high intrigue. It’s just crime, though maybe an especially Russian form of it.

When Frazer answers someone’s question about what kind of literature he writes by saying the true kind, it reminds me that I didn’t read nonfiction to find out things before traveling to Russia that first time, as I am now. I suppose that says something about me then, my head in the clouds and all, and the practicality that becomes difficult to avoid when you get older. But I think it also says something about the place we all thought we were visiting, the imaginary space, the construct in our minds. Predrag Matvejevic several times notes in his Eastern Epistolary the literary filter through which he and his generation saw all things Russian. I don’t know to what extent that filter exists anymore, or is colored in quite the same shades. Then it was rather a Tolstoevsky base with shades of Akhmatova and Turgenev, Gogol and Mandelshtam, Pushkin in his more gothic moments, a tinge of Zhivago (as much from David Lean as from Pasternak) and big splotches of undigested Solzhenitsyn (sorry, this is getting a little gross). You could put Chagall and Kandinsky, Mussorgsky, Stravinsky, or Shostakovich over that and the whole would be no less harmonious. But Hedrick Smith? Russia was a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma. Reading to find things out was never going to explain it to you. You needed to commune, soul ready, head securely in the clouds. Put on some Tchaikovsky. Be ready to weep.

I’m sure I must be mis-representing us though, making it seem as though we were all a bunch of Philip Careys (not the actor, the character) heading off to learn that shadows have colors in them, too, only instead of Paris, we were simply trekking farther east, generally as naïve and ill-prepared as Maugham's doubtful hero. That’s not the case. Nor, now that I think more about it, is it true that we weren’t reading nonfiction in preparation for our trip. It just wasn’t travel literature. It was Marx and Lenin, and Herzen and Berdiaev, along with Richard Pipes (at one end of a spectrum) and Albert Szymanski (at another), the historian Nicolas Riazanovsky, the economist Marie Lavigne, and many others. And then there was the Russian, years and years of it in preparation, with phonetics and syntax, reading, composition, and “intonational constructions” (1, 2, 3, and 4—“kakie rozy!”—what roses!—was a 4, if I remember correctly).

Some of us had attended multiple schools; some, I believe, had additional training that they didn’t talk about. I had my suspicions about one particularly affable fellow, Peter, I think his name was, somewhat tall and athletic but always somehow underdressed and wearing a goofy grin that, as far as I was concerned, was the perfect disguise for a spook, of the Graham Greene variety, I mean. I got a postcard one day from him some years after our return home, a picture of the earth from outer space with what appeared to be a Russian message written on it. But I couldn’t understand the words, not a single one. I stood in the middle of the post office, sounding each set of characters out carefully until I realized with a start that it was English, only written in Cyrillic. It said (transliterated Library of Congress style): uish iyu uer khir! Had a spook’s sense of humor, too.

As I’ve been writing this, on the train headed north, I’ve begun to spot more Russians, well, one or two, but signs with Cyrillic characters, quite a few. English in the middle, which strikes me as symbolic, historical, but it’s perhaps just practical. Anyway, I know I’m getting close. Tomorrow I cross the border, which I’ll write about in my next post. A hearty thank you to Professor Tonai Yuzuru and his lovely staff at the Slavic Center Library of Hokkaido University, for providing me with a place to work during my short stay. (Had to catch up on my Tolstoevsky.) And to the public library of Wakkanai, the northern-most city in Japan, but certainly one of the warmest hearted. I could see Russia from there.