Am I myself or someone else?
Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina
Leningradsky Station is no calmer today than it would have been for Anna. The building still glows with illuminated strips at the bottom of its windows, turning the snow on the grubby concourse an unpleasant shade of artificial yellow. Passengers still run from taxis, up station steps, slamming car boots, remembering, forgetting, remembering again. The central station tower does not quite win over the neighbouring metro, with its cupola and spire, but it jostles against it, in a spirit of solid competition. The four-sided railway clock looks down reproachfully. No escaping the time. Walking inside, the enormous departure board blurs, a line of black and grey. People move forward with bags, through pickpockets in black jackets framing the doorway, finding themselves faced with the large white-edged clock hanging above the main hall. Anyone can be in St Petersburg in four hours straight on the day train.
The shiny granite concourse opens out into the atrium. Everywhere the screens and arrows point you forward. The concourse and shopping mall are crowded with coffee stalls and mobile phone cover stands, and ranks of curved red seats. Beyond them are the security checks, people queuing to place their bags on the conveyor, shoving their worldly goods in through the vinyl fringe, to disappear temporarily, like coffins heading for the furnace.
The trains that run the Moscow to Petersburg line seem to have a life of their own. Always the trains wait, running to time like the vehicular equivalent of a row of grim reapers. Those collections of engines, those timetables, those lines, speak to us of the journeys we might take, the other lives we might begin, but also the choices we must make. We cannot ride more than one train at a time.
Walking up to the sleeper train itself is like entering a strange world of double time. The train is grey and red, the ubiquitous sleek-nosed metal bullet. But the attendants, standing by each door in their red uniforms, seem to come from an earlier world. Stepping up into the carriage, with its red swirled carpets and neatly pelmeted curtains, it is as if the furnishings are yearning, ever so quietly, for the age of steam. The two-bunk carriage is small and neat. The fake samovar cups are placed on each side of the table, a teabag wedged within. A print on the wall is a porthole to the nineteenth-century past. Even the complimentary chocolate bar looks backwards – its wrapper bears a picture of a steam locomotive, conjuring for the daily commuter or the tourist an image of the Grand Russia, the Russia of balls in the Winter Palace and high society steeplechases and white-tie opera. A train journey is inherently nostalgic. There’s something about this machine powering us forward that makes us think of the way things used to be. As they move towards their destination, trains take us back in time.
Anna left Moscow in a hurry. Something had happened the night before, the way that somethings do. She had gone to a ball, and she had appeared, impossibly beautiful, in a low-necked black velvet dress. Her arms were like ivory, her hair delicately escaping in tendrils down her perfect neck. People watched the dances, waiting to be claimed. She was not the youngest there. She was not even the most conventionally beautiful of women. (In the first drafts, Tolstoy made Anna ungainly, overweight, jolie laide.) But even in the redrafted version, she was not expected to be the headturner at that particular dance. Still, everyone noticed her, glancing as she walked in, watching the movement of her head and hands, watching her smile. Everyone, especially the Count Alexey Krillovich Vronsky, a young soldier, a gallant, a man about town. Nothing happened, to speak of. Some people at the ball danced with some other people. There was gossip, and cards, and planning. And Anna Karenina danced a mazurka with Alexey Vronsky.
It happened that night – that crackle of electricity between two people, when a possibility emerges, and an imaginary door opens. Something crossed her mind.
But it’s about a body as well as a mind. If you say goodbye on a pavement, there can be all the static crackle you like. You can have felt it, imagined it, known it could happen, known from their smile, as your heart beats faster. But it hasn’t. Nothing can be said to have happened, until one of you touches the other. It can be an accidental touch. The holding out of a hand to help someone from a car, or the brush of one hand against another, to help with a shopping bag. A foot under the table. The taking of a hand in a formal dance. A hand in a hand, a hand on a waist. The heat of a stranger.
Anna sends a telegram to her husband the very next morning, as if trying to forget it. She is coming home. Packing her bag, she feels almost as if she is about to start crying. She bends her face over the tiny bag, flushed with emotions. Everything is overflow. And as she fills it, her eyes keep filling with tears. Anna felt in that night, and in that moment itself, the solid foundations of her happy family being shaken. All happy families are alike. Now she was different. It was as if, for a moment, she had got on the wrong branch line, and suddenly decided that she rather liked the view. A world she’d never questioned before was at risk.
Later that day, she enters the station by carriage, climbing down in her fur-trimmed travelling coat, handing her smaller bags to her maid. Her brother, Stepan, tipsy from champagne, directs the coachman handing down the larger bags and trunks. Porters are criss-crossing with trolleys of suitcases and blankets. In the background, a mother and daughter are rushing towards the platform, where the lamps shine through the steam of the trains, which wait, chafing and bridling like the horses at their stands. At the platform, her brother is irritating her by standing in front of the entrance to the railway carriage, talking about his dinner. She listens with half an ear. His conversation is not enough to keep her mind from wandering back to the previous night – to that night, to the ball, to the possibility, to his touch.
Tolstoy hated trains. The railroad is to travel as a whore is to love, he wrote to a friend. But he was a trainspotter all the same. He noticed the way a passenger looked out of the train window or met another’s eyes. He looked at the quality of people’s baggage (he made shoes in his spare time), and collected the fragments of conversation that rose above the roar of the engine. The lines of steam run through his books – the bells and the comings and goings, the strangers meeting on the train, an eye for the little things that speak volumes.
In the beginning, trains are just things to play with. Anna’s nieces and nephews, playing at trains and conductors, with tickets and cardboard boxes, tumbling and shouting and waving imaginary flags. Later, Anna’s son plays trains again, with a bench and an uncle. These are games that soon turn sour, foreshadowing grief to come.
Anna’s relief as the door slammed is like the hiss of steam from the engine, as if, in getting on the train and closing the door, she has shut out that other world – the world of double time that she first encountered at the ball. She’s heading home at last. Now her good accustomed Petersburg life will go on, as if nothing has happened – just as it always was. She readies herself for the journey in her allotted space, as you might ready yourself for a red-eye flight, with deliberate care and a specific kind of pleasure. Her small hands deftly unlock her red bag. She takes out a small cushion (everything is travel-sized) for her knees, and locks up the bag. She wraps her feet with a travelling blanket to keep them warm, then sits down on her reclining fauteuil. It is a crowded carriage for a night journey, and she eyes the large lady opposite her, near the passage, and the invalid at the window, hoping they won’t cough too much, or be noisy. She feels on edge.
Train travel, in Anna Karenina’s time, was thought to be a risky business. Accidents aside, regular travellers were liable to shred their nerves, doctors said, and jar their brains. The Railway Passengers Assurance Company offered varying rates for loss of limbs, eyes, total or partial disablement or death, which can’t have helped anyone’s confidence. People thought that trains distorted thoughts, that they disturbed the mind. They thought that they changed the way we feel for the worse. Women, especially, might suffer from all those vibrations. For some, the vibrations were the whole point. A book with tips for those who wanted to get the full effect advises leaning forwards – but if no train is nearby, a sewing machine might provide a useful alternative, apparently. It’s no surprise that the very earliest filmed example of a kiss happens on a train.
It is an awkward attempt at luxury. The bumps and creaks of the night train experience are padded and smoothed over like the stuffed brocade seats, like a smile on a bad conscience. Anna’s maid hands her the portable reading lamp, a strange tin contraption that folds up to the size of a lunch box. She then opens her smaller handbag, and pulls out that English novel and a paper knife for the uncut pages, feeling the movement of the train over the tracks.
Anna begins to read again. It is, let us imagine, about eight o’clock in the evening, give or take.
Time, of course, is what it’s all about. Travelling by train puts us into a peculiar relationship with time’s everyday beat. Trains are not so much time capsules, as capsules that keep us apart from time. This goes both ways. If you’re trying to avoid getting home in time to cook the fish fingers, then accidentally getting on the stopping service from London to Oxford via Tilehurst and Didcot Parkway is a lucky break. If you’re late for a job interview, it’s a kind of hell. Sitting there, flicking through your notes, checking your watch, the names of each station ring in your ear like a kind of plangent omen. Goring & Streatley, Pangbourne, Twyford, Maidenhead.
And while we’re kept apart from the time-line of everyday life, we are, once on board the train, forced to enter an intimate world of space and time with a group of complete strangers. The shared time of trains is understood in silence. We acknowledge it only in our common movements – that posture of edgy anticipation as we lean forward on the platform, our bodies twisting to the left to see if the delayed train has somehow miraculously appeared, and in the quiet collective sigh when a train stops, then starts, then stops again, in the acknowledgement that we, on this train, on this day, are at the mercy of another kind of clock. Tolstoy writes a novella, much later, which relies on these effects. It’s the story of a man on a train, telling the story of the time he travelled on a train. A mise en abyme of train stories, tunnelling one into the other. The teller is afraid of railway carriages. He is horrified by the idea of them. Trains, for him, mean the loss of control. The human succumbs, and the body begins to recognise its own automatic impulses, its desire and its lust.
Somewhere between Hatfield & Stainforth and Kirk Sandall we enter a landscape of rubble and brush grass that looks like the Cornish coast of my childhood holidays, were it not for the derelict black quarrying machines on the bank. Then we enter farming country again, more yellow fields interrupted by rust-coloured copses, and then back to the backs of other people’s worlds, this time too fast to see anything but a blur of garden fences and satellite dishes. Before Doncaster, we slow down, crawling through the grid of criss-cross lines and bridges.
It’s a long stop, made longer by the heaving of buggies onto the train. Through the hexagonal beehive mesh attached to the train window, I watch the people standing on Platform Six. People waiting in stations have particular postures, ways of standing and being, to ward off time. One person is leaning forward, pacing from foot to foot. Another is phone checking, that familiar stance of head bent and hands cupped, as if in prayer. A third moves in a side-stepping circle, turning to look at the posters and the rails, again and again, as if creating a new form of dance. There’s a final flurry as the last family attempts to get their buggy, loaded with shopping, through the train’s inner sliding doors. The child runs forward into the crowded carriage. We move off. The child climbs back into her buggy, on top of the shopping, and sits majestically in the aisle.
Drawing out of the station, I look at the rails in the distance, crossing like spaghetti, and something that resembles an enormous concrete igloo. Someone opens a window and the sound of the wind thumping against the frame makes us all look up, around and down again. The man nearby is fingering the table in front of his seat, tracing the curve of three small c-shaped cuts on the melamine surface. The sun is streaming in as we speed up through the trees and quarries on the line, past Asda and Outdoor Living and the factory for Special Alloys and a yard full of stationary cranes. The run-up to Meadowhall interchange prefaced by endless car parks. Then on to Sheffield. Bottle green railings and dark stone walls sprouting horizontal bonsai trees and lichen. And the Forgemasters, through a forest of silver birch. Rubbish down the banks. Tyres and bottles. A rolled-up mattress oddly like a body.