A Merry Dance Around the World With Eric Newby (35 page)

I was terribly tempted. If I did decide to go I would have made the entire journey from the Nevsky Prospekt across Asia, a street of which Sacheverell Sitwell wrote (in
Valse des Fleurs
):

Down at the far end, which tails off as the crow flies, towards Moscow, the buildings, the people, and even the colour of the sky are already Asiatic, in the extent to which the word means wars and plagues and barbarian invasions. The first suburbs of another and an endless world, all plains and distance.

This is what, in spite of feeling rather ill, my heart yearned for at this moment – those vast nomadic steppes which in their southern parts extend for more than 4000 miles without interruption from the Danube to the Great Wall of China. For I am one who believes that a golden opportunity once rejected is seldom put on offer again.

With me I had everything I needed: a Russian visa which was valid for another ten days and which, as a transit passenger on the railway, I would have little difficulty in extending if the need arose. Even if I failed to get an exit permit at Nakhodka for Yokohama or Hong Kong, neither of which was the exit point named on it, I could always fly back from Khabarovsk to Moscow and get my exit visas there for Poland and East Germany. For once I even had plenty of money on my person. There was time, too, to buy food for the journey, which seemed a good idea as ‘Roasted Duck wit Garnisch’ would presumably, more often than not, be ‘off’. Anyway, with a couple of kilos of caviar I would not lack for friends
en route
, and if I did I could always stick it on the front of an engine.

It would be a quiet time, something in parentheses in a life that was sometimes almost too full of movement, and yet I would be moving, cocooned in the white sheets and with the heavy water decanter to hand (I would steer clear of burly men in black suits and button-down collars who gave me 200-gramme slugs of Ukrainian Pepper Vodka and bear-hugs at midnight into the bargain), and I would re-read Tolstoy’s
Resurrection
, something of which currently I was badly in need.

But this moment of euphoria soon passed. I was also a newspaperman with a piece to transmit to London, and there were others to be written in Moscow in the next few days. How I wished I had a brace or two of carrier pigeons which I could release at intervals beyond the Urals. ‘National Hotel,’ I said, sadly, when my turn came to board a taxi. More than twelve years were to pass before I finally caught the
Rossiya
from the Yaroslavl Station and made the journey of the Trans-Siberian Railway.

For eleven years I roared around the world, but during that time the opportunity to travel on the Trans-Siberian Railway never arose, although I often thought of writing a book about it. Railways, like rivers, are difficult subjects for writers because they go on and on. They are less difficult for writers of fiction who can populate their trains with corpses, villains, beautiful people and
wagons-lits
attendants with seven o’clock shadows. If they get bored they can blow them up or derail them. A non-fiction writer is lucky if anyone pulls the communication cord.

When the opportunity finally arose I discovered that there were three possibilities open to me. One was simply to apply for a transit visa for the USSR, buy a ticket from Intourist in London and make the journey from Moscow to Nakhodka without getting off the train at all, except to inspire fresh air on the station platforms along the route. An alternative would be to make the journey, stopping over for a day or two at Novosibirsk, Irkutsk and Khabarovsk, these being the only cities along the route open to foreign visitors in 1977. The third way, and the most complicated and expensive, was to make the journey under the aegis of the Russians themselves and let The Novosti Agency provide one of their representatives to accompany me. The Agency is regarded by Western intelligence services as an arm of the KGB. The theoretical advantage of this was that it might be possible to stop off at places that were not on the normal Intourist agenda and see things denied to ordinary foreign tourists, and this was the course that I eventually decided upon. It required a Finnish publisher to pay a large sum of money to Novosti, which they eventually did.

Which was why, in the depths of Arctic January 1977, I found myself keeping a tryst with a senior representative of The Agency in a sauna bath in the West, not much more than a biscuit’s toss from the Iron Curtain.

Mr Oblomov (for that is what I shall call him to spare his blushes), whom I was now regarding through a haze of steam in this subterranean hothouse, was a splendidly endowed fellow in every way, both physically and mentally. Dressed in a Western bespoke suit he had been impressive; now, wearing nothing but a piece of towelling and flagellating himself with a bunch of birch twigs, he looked like a pentathlon gold medallist, and when we plunged into the spacious pool after the torture was over he swam like one.

Later, when I had swum two lengths of the bath under water to show him that, although I was not in the same class as he, I also kept fit, we sat swathed in towels, drinking beer and mapping out a programme for him to present to his superiors.

Two days and three bottles of whisky later – there were others in on this act – I left for London. It had been a thoroughly successful meeting so far as I was concerned. Mr Oblomov had a list of Siberian Wonders as long as your arm, which if I was able to see only a few of them would have turned me into a Siberian Marco Polo. It included visits to active volcanoes, to the coldest place in Siberia where the temperature descends to – 90°F, to the descendants of the Golds, aboriginals, who until comparatively recently had worn suits of fish skin, to railway construction sites in the remotest wilderness, to gold and diamond mines, ginseng root-collectors and bring-them-back-alive Siberian tiger-hunters. ‘I shall also,’ said Mr Oblomov, ‘recommend that at least part of your journey should take place while there is still snow on the ground. A visit to Siberia without seeing it under snow is like …

‘A rose without a thorn?’ I suggested.

‘I was going to say,’ he said, mischievously, ‘like a writer without a head.’

The day after I got back to London I received a message to say that I would not be able to make the journey through Siberia with snow on the ground. No reason was given. I suppose they think it makes the place look untidy.

‘Your other proposals,’ the message said, ‘are being considered.’

They were still being considered when I caught the train.

There were four of us travelling to Siberia together: Otto, a German photographer on a mission of his own, who was Jewish and with whom we were travelling as it was cheaper to share an interpreter; Mischa, a member of the Agency, who had spent some time in India and who was almost certainly godless; me, as British as a Bath bun and a lapsed member of the Church of England (although still crazy about old churches, preferably with singing going on inside); and lastly Wanda, my wife, a Slovene and a Roman Catholic, who dislikes Mass in the vernacular and whose observations during our long journey together in the two-berth ‘soft-class’ compartment on the
Rossiya
were interesting to record. Put all these unlikely ingredients in the same compartment, stir in a bottle and a half of vodka, leave to simmer for a couple of hours, light the blue touch paper and stand clear!

Besides being singularly ill-assorted, we were also exceptionally heavily laden, apart from Mischa who was apparently set on going a quarter of the way round the world and back with two shirts and a mohair pullover. It was not altogether our fault. We had been warned to ‘dress as you would for an English spring’, which is a damn sight more difficult than being told that you are going to the Sahara in summer, or the Arctic in winter; besides which, we were loaded with the tools of our trade.

I had a barely portable library of Siberiana and all sorts of other works which included a timetable for the entire route in Cyrillic. I also had two 1:5,000,000 maps which took in European Russia, Siberia and most of the rest of the USSR.

These maps were contained in a four-foot-long cardboard tube which drove everyone mad who had the custody of it for more than two minutes, including myself. I also had, among others, an underwater camera (because it was also dustproof), six Eagle H pencils, a rubber, a pencil sharpener, three pens and a Challenge duplicate book. All of which worked extremely well throughout. Otto had a large, highly professional metal box, which although made of aluminium was as heavy as lead, full of cameras, and a tripod which also drove everyone mad who had anything to do with it.

On the way to the Yaroslavl Station, the boarding point in Moscow for the Trans-Siberian train, we made a detour to the National Hotel in Manezhnaya, now ‘Jubilee of the Revolution’, Square where Lenin, who had as keen an eye for the bourgeois comforts of the bed and the board as any of his successors, put up for a spell in March 1918. As we drove to it we passed through Dzerzhinsky Square, so named after the Pole, Felix Dzerzhinsky, whose statue has brooded over it since 1958. Dzerzhinsky was head of the Secret Police from its formation in December 1917, when it was called the CHEKA (Extraordinary Commission for Combating Counter-Revolution and Sabotage), until his death in 1926 from natural causes, something rare in his profession, by which time it had become the OGPU (the State Political Administration). Now, in 1977, its direct lineal descendant the KGB was, almost unbelievably, preparing to celebrate the first sixty Glorious Years of the existence of the Secret Police by giving parties.

At the top end of this square, which is the size of a modest airfield, an immense wedge-shaped reddish building rises on a desirable island site. The pre-revolutionary headquarters of an insurance company, it has been added to and rebuilt many times, the last time in 1946. The back of these premises faces on to a dark and draughty street which for years was shunned by Muscovites like the Black Death, and by almost everyone else in the USSR who happened to be in its vicinity – and still is by those who cannot rid themselves of the habit.

‘What’s that building?’ I asked Mischa. It was intended as a joke. I knew what it was, or what it had been, as well as he did, and so did everyone else in Moscow, where it was as well known as Wormwood Scrubs and the Bloody Tower to Londoners, or the Tombs to the inhabitants of New York – so infamous that some years previously my son, while still a schoolboy of the smaller sort, had tempted providence by photographing it with a rather noisy camera. ‘It’s some kind of office block,’ Mischa said airily. I was damned if I was going to take this from anyone, let alone a ‘fellow journalist’, even if he was a card-carrying member of the you-know-what. ‘
You
know what it is, don’t you?’ I said to the taxi driver, a cheerful fellow who spoke some English. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I know what it is.’ ‘Well, what is it?’ ‘It’s the Lubyanka,’ he said.
^*
And he roared with laughter, exposing a perfect row of stainless steel teeth in the upper storey.

The station, at which we arrived one-and-a-half hours before the train left, is an astonishing building, even in Moscow, where this epithet, especially when applied to architecture, can become seriously over-used. From the outside it looks like the work of a horde of gnomes of the class of 1900, although actually built in 1907 by F. O. Schechtel.

The inside is very different. Entering the waiting room, I had expected to find the customers perched on toadstools. Instead I found myself on an Eisenstein set for a twentieth-century sequel to
Ivan the Terrible
– medieval-looking chandeliers powered by electricity, a complete absence of natural light, squat black marble columns with granite capitals, and filled to the brim with all the extras waiting for the stars to appear and the cameras to roll, hundreds of what could have been Tartars, Komis, Udmurts, Mordvins, Nanays, Chuvashs, Buryats, Koreans, Latvians, Germans, Kazakhs, Bashkirs, Maris, Evenks, Tofas, Ukrainians and possibly some genuine Russians – just some of the people who inhabit the regions through which the Trans-Siberian Railway passes on its way to the Soviet Far East.

I say ‘could have been’ because even an ethnologist might have found himself stumped, unless he had an identikit with him. None of them, apart from a few Uzbeks in little round hats, whom even I could identify, having once visited their country, wore anything remotely resembling a national costume, so well had the rationalists done their work. The men were dressed in Western-type suits that looked as if they had been cut with a chopper – the Soviet tailoring industry shares the same master-cutter with the Turks – although some of the younger ones were wearing plastic jackets. Most of the adult males had on the sort of cloth caps worn by British working men before the war. The women wore headscarves and velour topcoats which made them look as if they had been dumped in the waiting room in sacks.

The Uzbeks were at the wrong station, anyway, although they probably didn’t know it and if they did, being Uzbeks (and therefore by nature nomads), probably didn’t care. They should have been next door, at the Kazan Station (architect A. W. Shchusev, who was also responsible for Lenin’s Tomb), waiting for Train No. 24 – ‘soft’ and ‘hard’ class, with dining car – to whirl them to their capital Tashkent, 2094 miles away, beyond the Aral Sea. They had plenty of time to find out that it wasn’t the Kazan Station – their train didn’t leave until 11.20 p.m., and it was now 8.30 a.m.

As in every other railway waiting room in every other communist country I had ever visited, this one was the exclusive preserve of the
lumpen proletariat
, the hoi-polloi. There was not a single traveller to be seen in it of what one might call the administrative or managerial class. I knew, from previous experience, that if any such chose to travel by train they would arrive at the station by taxi or office car, as we had, not as the occupants of the waiting room appeared to have done, on foot and a couple of days early; and they would arrive just before the advertised time of departure. Then their neat luggage would be wheeled up the platform in front of them by porters to whom they would give tips, just as their counterparts in East and West Berlin, Paris, Prague, Warsaw, Rome, Bucharest or Peking would do; everything here is just as it was under the last of the tsars, and just as it still is at Waterloo, King’s Cross, Victoria, Euston, Paddington and Liverpool Street under Elizabeth II in my own country – that is, if anyone can find a porter to tip at any of these six last-named termini.