4.

ON THE TURK-SIB

part 2

In my imagination, nomads, long hair and silken robes flowing out behind them, thundered across the steppe astride their beautifully caparisoned horses. In reality, the steppe was about as exciting as west Texas. I looked at my clock. Only ten-thirty in the morning. I had hoped it was going to read one-thirty at least. Forty-eight hours to go.

The train journey was a bit like being ill. It was something to be survived. I knew it would end sooner or later and I hoped I wouldn’t have to endure it again for a long time.

I certainly wasn’t on the Paris-Simplon Orient Express. The people on board were not sophisticated. They talked in loud voices at all hours of the day and night. They drank. They smoked up a storm. Smoking was prohibited in the compartments, but was allowed in the space between cars, and the smell invaded the cars every time the connecting doors opened, which they did with maddening consistency. But they were kind to me. The car conductor made sure I knew how much time we had at each station and herded me back on board so I wouldn’t be left behind. Valentina found me a cup so I could brew tea with hot water from the samovar located at one end of the car. A Kyrgyz guy sat with me for a while practicing his English. I was the first American he had ever met he told me. And Maxim gave me a chocolate bar, dark chocolate, my favorite. 

Maxim, when he was awake, was a nice, generous person. He shared his food and cigarettes with Nikolai, even buying him a beer. And Nikolai kept his hand out, never reciprocating Maxim’s generosity.

Nikolai had boarded the train with just a couple of beers and a loaf of bread in a plastic bag. But he wasn’t unusual. No one had any luggage. Valentina, who had traveled to Moscow from somewhere in Siberia that was closer to Alaska and then to Bishkek, had one small suitcase that as far as I could tell was filled with food and souvenirs, no clothes other than the outfit she had boarded the train in. The contents of Maxim’s duffle were the same. Where were their clothes?

Earlier in the morning we had been held up for hours at Shalshalichnaya for Russian passport control. The tedium of the wait was excruciating. We were locked on the train, unable to disembark even to stretch our legs. The nearly sleepless night had left my body aching. I looked like shit and hadn’t peed in hours. I had very little water left and was afraid I would add dehydration to my list of woes.

We had crossed the border to another long wait at Kazakh passport control. It took fifteen minutes to wake up Nikolai to get his passport. He didn’t remember a thing about his antics of the previous night and couldn’t understand why I was even more determined not to have any interaction with him.

In the afternoon we left the steppe and entered the Qyzyl Qum Desert (Red Sand), an even flatter, browner, hotter, more barren expanse, brutal and unforgiving. Dirt tracks leading to who knew where crisscrossed the landscape. Miles and miles of electrical lines followed alongside the train. There was not a cloud in the sky, which was the palest of blues becoming hazy brown where it met the horizon.

How odd it was to see women selling crayfish, and roasted fish that were more skin than meat. We must have been near the Aral Sea. I had no idea where we were; the stations were not very well identified. I tried to follow the route posted in our car, but we seemed to be making more stops than it listed.

Melons of every description were also for sale: watermelons, elongated cantaloupes, small orange and green melons that looked like squash. And there were hundreds of them, huge piles spread out along the platform; their sweet smell perfumed the air. I wanted to buy one, but what was I going to do with a huge melon? I had no way to cut it. 

Sometime during the third night Nikolai disembarked (Hurrah!) and his berth was taken over by the Kyrgyz National Snoring Champion. He was built more like a Samoan than like the other Kyrgyz I had seen on the train, who were short and slight. It was hard to imagine him zipping around expertly on a pony. I was so tired that even his recital of his greatest snoring hits couldn’t keep me awake.

Turkistan. Hot as hell. Shashlyk. For the uninitiated, shashlyk is hunks of meat and fat skewered and roasted over smoldering wood embers. One of the simplest yet most delicious things you will ever eat.

I had looked up the words for beef, lamb, and mutton in my Russian phrasebook, but I couldn’t remember them for more than two minutes so by the time I reached the shashlyk vendor my mind was a blank. I pointed to the grilling meat. I mooed. The man shook his head. I baaed. He nodded. Was it mutton or lamb? I put my hand at knee height. Again he nodded. Yummy, lamb. I ordered two skewers. I should have ordered a few more; the meat was greasy, fatty and delectably grilled.

The sellers were an odd mix. Some were gold-teethed Kazakh or Uzbek fraus in housecoats. Others were hoochi-mama Russian girls in mini skirts and camisoles, strutting around with trays of roasted chicken and stuffed intestines on their shoulders like they were trays of drinks in a nightclub.

I noticed that at every stop a man walked the length of the train carrying a stick topped with a metal head. He hit the brake boxes under each car ensuring they made the proper “clonk!” and “ding!” So far there hadn’t been a worrisome “thunk!” or “dong!” 

✢

Two in the morning and two hours at the Kazakh border. One of the border control agents was cute and spoke good English. He told me he worked as a translator and interpreter; I guess he moonlighted checking passports. He asked me why I wasn’t visiting Kazakhstan. I told him about Ella’s book and apologized that she hadn’t visited the country.

“You are very brave to travel alone,” he said. “Most Americans lump all the Stans together as dangerous places. Any country that ends in “stan” is a hotbed of Islamic fundamentalists.”

In actuality, the former soviet Central Asian republics are just the opposite. In Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and especially Uzbekistan, the governments have come down hard on any potential fundamentalist Islamic threat they perceive or concoct.

I woke up with a start. The train was quiet. Valentina had changed out of her train clothes. Had I over-slept? Had everyone disembarked?

“What happened?” I cried out to no one in particular.

The only thing that had happened was that the train had crossed into Kyrgyzstan. I didn’t know how long we’d been there. I guessed not too long because no one had asked for my passport. Soon enough there was young Kyrgyz woman in camo fatigues in the doorway asking for my passport. She signaled me to follow her. We went into the next car, which was the same class as mine but looked classier. It had a carpet running the length of the passageway and I didn’t catch a whiff of its toilet.

We stopped between that car and the next where another border agent and two passengers were congregating. One passenger was six-six and screamed American. He was dressed in Dockers and a white, short-sleeved Oxford shirt. I instantly thought of the Mormon missionaries I occasionally saw walking the roads back home. No nametag, however, was pinned to his breast pocket. He explained to me that all foreigners without CIS passports had to register with the police and we followed the border agent to building by the tracks.

The Lonely Planet wasn’t kidding when they said that the Moscow-Bishkek train wasn’t popular with European and American tourists. There were only six of us; the American, Jonathan, was traveling with his wife and two children and they had boarded at Shymkent in Kazakhstan.

I had had no idea when I followed the female agent that I would be getting off the train and I had left all my money hidden in my sleeping bag back in the compartment. I trusted Valentina, but what about the others? What if a group of thugs conked her on the head and made off with all my money. I didn’t know where they would go; the train was locked up, but that didn’t matter. What the hell was taking the police so long? Why couldn’t Jonathan have let me go first? He was registering four people; I was only one. Pacing back and forth in the hallway, I worked myself into a real panic. I was so agitated I could hardly sit still once it was my turn, and the officer was no comfort as he typed in my information with two fingers. I raced back to the compartment and as inconspicuously as I could shoved my hand into my sleeping bag. I didn’t want Valentina to think I suspected her of thievery. My purse was right where I had left it.