A Merry Dance Around the World With Eric Newby (36 page)

It was a bit different in the waiting room. Here, the submerged classes, most of whom displayed a stoic attitude which under the circumstances was most surprising, were laid out for inspection, in some cases quite literally. The majority of them were sitting or sprawling on the varnished wooden settees with which, just as in every other waiting room in a main station anywhere, this one was inadequately provided: sleeping, sawing away at huge, dark loaves as if they were cellos, talking, quarrelling, belching, smoking cigarettes, laughing, crying, taking milk from the breast, extracting gobbets of meat from horribly greasy parcels, engaging in dreadful spasms of coughing, or just sitting, surrounded by black bags made from American cloth, cheap suitcases and cardboard boxes, all bulging at the seams and held together with bits of string. Those who could not find a seat – and I never saw one unoccupied for an instant unless it was piled high with bags or coats which indicated that it was already somebody’s property – either stood, supporting themselves with unfurled, unopened umbrellas, or squatted among their possessions with which they had walled themselves in like settlers preparing to resist an attack by Red Indians. Some simply lay on the floor. Of these, the most determined to find peace and quiet had flaked out in a little enclave that led off the ticket hall one floor up, built in 1964; vast, airy, full of natural light, the complete opposite of this lugubrious place, but almost empty because there was nothing to sit on except the floor.

Meanwhile, down on the ground floor others queued to buy lumps of boiled chicken and equally pallid sausages, Scotch eggs and delicious-looking macaroons, washing these delicacies down with Russian coke, squash or coffee – no beer, vodka or even tea available at the station, apparently, except possibly in the restaurant on the upper floor, outside which a queue had formed. A good thing, too, judging by the Bacchanalian scenes enacted outside in the vicinity of Komsomolskaya (Young Communists’) Square, even at this unseemly hour, by what I hoped were non-fellow-travellers.

Over all hung the smell of Russians
en masse;
no worse than the smell of an
en masse
of English or Italians, or inhabitants of the Cote d’lvoire, or any other nationality; but just different. A smell that one traveller compared, I think inaccurately, to that of a laundry basket on the weekly collection morning; inaccurate not because it is impolite – it is impossible to describe smells of people
en masse
politely – but because the smell to my mind is more pungent, and I think comes in part from eating the strong, black bread. I wondered what we smell like to them.

In these surroundings it was not surprising that Otto, a somewhat conspicuous figure in Russia, although he could never understand why (his jeans – the going black market rate for which was in the region of £100 – his Nikons and Leicaflexes were under continual offer from the locals) contrived to get himself arrested twice in the space of an hour: the first time by the Railway Police for photographing an elderly lady on one of the platforms in the rain (which, apart from one miraculous day, had been falling more or less incessantly ever since our arrival in the country); the second time, which was far more serious, by the Military Police, for taking pictures of some conscripts from the borders of Outer Mongolia, who were on their way to be turned into soldiers elsewhere in the Soviet Union.

The clothing of the conscripts was exiguous. Mischa explained that they were wearing their oldest clothes because, on their arrival at their training depot, their clothes would be burned, as was the Red Army custom. One had a paper hat on made from a sheet of
Pravda
. It seemed a shame to burn that. They looked cold, tired, hungry, fed up, and far from home. I felt sorry for them and I felt alarm for Otto, but I also sympathized with the lieutenant in charge of the draft who had called on the Military Police to take Otto away to their home-from-home in the station. He was as grumpy as an Irish Guards officer would have been at Paddington Station, lumbered with a similar collection of recruits straight from the back blocks of Connemara and Mayo and on his way with them to the Training Depot at Pirbright, if he found them being photographed by a Russian.

It was fortunate that I saw Otto being marched off as Mischa was elsewhere; otherwise we would have started looking under trains for him or calling up hospitals. As it was, Mischa had to produce the small, oblong red pass entombed in plastic, the one I never managed to get a really close-up look at in the weeks to come, which sometimes worked in difficult situations. This time it did work; but only after much serious telephoning.

At around 0.55 on 29 May, the third day of our progression across Europe and Asia (God knows what it was locally – the time-zone map was vague about demarcations), the
Rossiya
pulled into Ishim on the Ishim River. It was pitch dark and there were no signs in sight. I only knew it was Ishim because some fellow, presumably employed to do so (usually it is done over a loudspeaker which no one can understand, even Russians), was walking past outside chanting ‘Ishim … Ishim!’ reminding me of the man who plods past the Simplon Express, 288 miles from Paris at its first stop in Switzerland, groaning ‘Vallorbe … Vallorbe’. At the same time a colleague, who also meant well, was tapping the axles.

Of Ishim I knew nothing, and at 12.55 a.m. cared less. It was not until I returned to England that I discovered that this was a place where Friedrich Heinrich Alexander, Baron von Humboldt, the famous scientific explorer, was taken for a secret agent and very nearly shot.

At about half past one I woke again, this time to experience a new, more gentle motion. Dawn had just broken (about four-thirty local time), and as if to show respect for it the
Rossiya
had stopped behaving like an overloaded plane trying to take off. Instead, it was drifting through a world only a fraction of which seemed to be made up of landscape, an enormous, endless prairie covered with rich, fine, gently waving grass, interspersed with fields of black earth in which crops were already sprouting, groves of silver birch and here and there, where there was a stream or marshy place, a few aspens and willows. And there were flowers, too, thousands of them: anemones, buttercups, kingcups, forget-me-nots, dandelions. The rest, about 90 per cent, was sky, still streaked with high cirrus, as it had been over Tyumen the previous evening but now, in these brief minutes before the sun would transfigure it, the colour of the lees of wine.

We were in the Steppe of Ishim, just a small part of the vast plain which, under various names, stretches out from the foot of the Urals across the Irtysh, the Ob and the Yenisei over 3 5 degrees of longitude and about 20 degrees of latitude before breaking at the foot of the Siberian upland in the Krasnoyarsky Kray almost 1200 miles to the east. We were in Siberia, and it was large. There was no doubt about that. Just as I had imagined it. You could put the whole of the United States into it and all of Europe except Russia and still have several hundred thousand square miles to spare. And apparently it was empty, this bit of Siberia between the Urals and the Yenisei and the Altai Mountains to the south, although statistics show that more than 13 million people live in it.

The
Rossiya
stole on to the south-east with her living cargo, most of whom were asleep, as if she was under sail, a ship moving through a Sargasso Sea of grass, so quietly that, as in a sailing ship, I could hear the creaking of tackle and her rivets working: a ship in which, ever since it had been towed by a diesel, the cabins had been covered with a fine layer of metallic dust which smudged like grated carbon when it was touched. The only other passenger on view was a boy with a Ronald Colman moustache, coming off shift after another night of lipstick with his conductress.

And now, from the general direction of the Pacific on which it had been shining for a good five hours, the sun came shooting up over an horizon that looked as if it had been ruled with one of my H pencils, into a sky that turned first an improbable shade of puce then a fiery red, as if someone was stoking a furnace. Soon it was a great, bloody sphere, sometimes over the
Rossiya’
s port bow, then, as the line wove its way among some sunken, half-dry watercourses, over the port quarter. Then for a while it was invisible while we ran past a halted freight train that must have been more than half a mile long, made up of sealed vans and flat cars loaded with secret-looking objects covered with tarpaulins, and hauled by four giant diesel locomotives. After that we halted at a little station for a rare, non-scheduled stop. As if by magic Lilya appeared from her little boudoir, looking remarkably spruce, and let down the steps to the line. We were on the frontiers of the second and third time-zones and it was either 3.30 or 4.30 a.m. local time.

There was not a soul in sight, not even a male or female station-master. Except for a disembodied voice coming from a crackly loudspeaker stuck up on an iron pole, addressing a world that was still asleep, the place might have been deserted. Then that too ceased. The silence was uncanny.

Beyond the station there was a village of low log houses with iron roofs, now shining in the light of a sun that looked as if it was on a collision course with the earth with about five minutes to go. The only living things on view were half a dozen magpies which were using a telephone wire as a trampoline. Ahead, the track, two parallel but apparently converging lines (something about which I had learned in the chapter on perspective in the
Wonder Book of Why and What
when I was small), stretched away into Siberia. A light, warm breeze was blowing up from the south, bringing with it the smell of earth, grass, a whiff of wood smoke and a feeling that it emanated from vast, nomadic spaces.

‘Good place,’ said Lilya, giving me one of her golden smiles that to me, any day, were worth about double whatever was the current price of a fine ounce of the product, and were more bracing than a whole bottle of Wincarnis tonic wine. ‘No pipple.’

It was Sunday morning.

‘Listen, Mischa,’ I said at breakfast, which we consumed together with the local rep from The Agency, after arriving at Khabarovsk, 5331 miles from Moscow, ‘I know we’ve only got one day in Khabarovsk now, but on the way back from Nakhodka we’ve got another day or two here if we want them. Before we came to Russia I sent your people a list of things I would really like to see. For instance, I would like to go to some village in the
taiga
, and see how the people live.’

‘Unfortunately it is impossible to visit a village in the
taiga
, because of the insect that causes encephalitis.’

‘The
clesh
?’

‘Yes. None of you have been inoculated against it.’

‘Well, why can’t we visit that man who captures Siberian tigers alive? Ivan Bogachev, I think his name is?’

‘Ivan Bogachev is dead and, besides, the reserve is near the Ussuri River and you are not allowed to go without special permission.’

‘But I asked for special permission.’

‘It has not come through.’

‘Well, what about visiting the men who look for
ginseng
roots, or the ones who go after the deer for their horns, the
panti
. I asked for permission to see them, too.’

‘The permissions for these have also not come through,’ Mischa said, rather wearily, as if he was answering a lot of unanswerable questions posed by a child, which in effect was what he was doing.

‘Well, at least, can we see the Arboretum?’

‘Yes, you can see the Arboretum this afternoon,’ said Mischa, ‘but this morning we are going to Amurkabel.’

‘What’s Amurkabel?’ Otto asked, emerging from what appeared to be a trance.

‘Amurkabel is the largest wire-making plant in the Far East. It employs 2500 workers.’

‘Listen, Mischa,’ I said. ‘You and Wanda and Otto can all go to the wire-making factory if you want to. Personally, I’ve seen so much wire in so many wire factories in my life that if it was all put into a heap it would cover more ground than the Matto Grosso.’

‘If you do not go to Amurkabel,’ Mischa said – by now he was becoming very angry – ‘you will cause grave offence and I will be forced to report to Moscow that you are a trouble-maker. You are a writer, and you are supposed to be writing a book about Siberia and the Trans-Siberian Railway. I do not care whether you write it or not, but you must go to Amurkabel.’

We all went to Amurkabel.

Amurkabel was housed in a largish factory on the outskirts of the city. Next to it there were some blocks of flats that housed the workers. When we arrived the technical information bureau chief, a Mr Beresnev, and a number of faceless satellites were waiting for us.

‘The cars of the workers,’ said Mr Beresnev proudly, pointing to fourteen vehicles parked outside, as we swept through doors held open by professional door-openers into the administration building.

‘But there are 2500 workers. Do only fourteen have cars?’

‘Only half the workers are on shift,’ said Mr Beresnev, completely unperturbed. ‘This is the day shift.’

‘But the day shift’s 1250 people!’

‘They don’t need their cars because they live next door,’ said Mr Beresnev, and I began to wonder if I was going round the bend.

After enduring the
mineralniye vody
treatment for an hour or so in the boardroom we were taken on a tour of the plant, shown the various machines that reeled up cable core coming from a continuous-process vulcanizer, coated the wire with enamel, and braided it with fibre glass, as well as machines for drawing the wire out from whatever stuff it was made from, and so on. Amazingly, none of them was working, and apart from one or two men and women who were either repairing machines or walking around stroking them with oily cloths, there were no workers.