4. 

ON THE TURK-SIB

Right on time, eleven-forty pm, the train began to move. I felt the first stirrings of excitement build in me as it gathered speed. Sharing my compartment was Valentina, a “healthy” Russian – Irina’s euphemism for plump – from Siberia traveling to Bishkek to visit her sister. Any lingering fear I had about Russian trains (I had read stories of thefts) was dispelled when I saw her. She had an open and honest face, and looked tough enough to fend off anyone who tried to mess with my stuff. I snuggled under the covers and when sleep came I dreamt I was on a train headed to Central Asia.

In the morning, as the train rattled across the Russian landscape, men and women plied the corridors selling drinks, food and souvenirs: jewelry, singing mechanical birds, gaudily painted champagne flutes and frog prince snow globes that played Jingle Bells. 

Valentina was an easy mark. She bought a set of flutes, and pointing to an illustration of a handsome bridal couple on the box, shook her head and said with a laugh, “Not me.” She also bought a blood pressure monitor that she fiddled around with for hours but couldn’t get to work.

Nikolai, a smelly, crew cut, snubbed-nosed thuggish Russian with manners to match joined us in the late morning. Valentina knew right away that he was a drinker and warned me. The nasty cuts on the knuckles of his left hand, revealed when he removed a dirty piece of gauze, were probably from a drunken brawl or fall on the way home from a bar. And he only got worse over time. He strutted around the train sans shirt treating the other passengers to his overripe scent and his lightly chiseled physique. He never asked if he could sit on my berth, he’d just push my legs out of the way. I wished I had the nerve to hand him a bar of soap and tell him not to return to the compartment until he washed.

But who was I to talk. I wasn’t going to be much to look at by the time we arrived in Bishkek. No shower for four days. My skin was already breaking out. My muscles were atrophying from lack of use. I was swimming in perspiration.

The train had become a furnace hurtling down the track. There was little breeze or cross ventilation to offer a modicum of relief. I changed out of my jeans and shirt into cotton fleece shorts and a tank top, which were actually my pajamas, and I kept them on for the rest of the trip. All the passengers had put on their “train clothes,” sweat pants, shorts or cotton housedresses, and plastic sandals, changing out of them only when we were approaching their destination.

Quite soon the toilet would be too disgusting to go near. Every once in a while its foul stench wafted into our compartment located right next door.

During the day our passports were checked three times; first by a man with an official-looking name tag; second by a man flashing an official-looking i.d. card, and third by the compartment conductor, who had shed his uniform of the night before and was now sporting an old orange t-shirt. Before night fell our passports were checked a fourth time and we weren’t going to reach the Russian/Kazakh border until the next morning.

✢

The second night was not the worst night of my life (the night a man I was crazy about broke my heart or a bus ride in Bolivia spring to mind), maybe not even in the top ten, but it was pretty awful.

Nikolai spent the evening somewhere on the train getting wasted. He wasn’t the only one drinking, most of the men spent the day hitting the bottle, but he was the only one drinking from our compartment. He arrived back long after Valentina, Maxim, a young Russian who had boarded the train in the afternoon, and I had turned in. He threw open the door, light from the corridor flooding in, and stood in the doorway loudly conversing with his drinking buddy.

 “You’re either in or out, but not both,” I told him sharply in English, my tone of voice getting the message across, as I moved to shut the door. He chose in.

Time passed. I lay awake, my brain in overdrive flitting from one thought to the next; one thought being where was that rank odor hanging in the air coming from. Nikolai’s feet.

I eventually dozed off only to be awakened by Nikolai, straddling Valentina’s and my berths and shouting about his passport. While Valentina attempted to reason with him, I, a lot less patient, shouted,  “Get the hell off my kravat (Russian for bed)!” Not getting the desired response, I darted under his legs and took off down the corridor to find the conductor.

He wasn’t around so I enlisted the help of another man. We returned to find Nikolai stretched out on my berth. I remained in the passageway as Valentina and the man cajoled Nikolai back into his bed. Nikolai’s drinking buddy strolled by and thought it was a good time to get the lowdown on me; was I an American, where was I going, among other questions that I refused to answer. Throughout the contretemps, Maxim never stirred. He was either one of the world’s heaviest sleepers or he was completely passed out. 

Ella, exhausted by her mad dash to get all her gear and make it to the station, slept solidly her first thirty-six hours on the train. If only. Sleep for me was an impossibility the rest of that night, first because I was so keyed up and second because our compartment became a stopover for other passengers who popped in on their way to and from the toilet or a cigarette break.

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