Six or seven hours into the train ride, Igor and I decide to check out the dining car. The tight corridors of the train remind me of the cramped, stuffy hallways common in St. Petersburg apartments. The sliding, wood-panelled doors to each coupe look like the doors to wardrobes.
A trio of little girls block our way. Igor doesn’t take kindly to having his way blocked by little girls. “Blin, devochki,” he mutters. One of the girls puts her hand on her hip and glares at him. “Blin sam,” she says. (The literal translation of this exchange is wonderful. The light curse blin means “pancake,” and is also a euphemism for the stronger Russian swear word blyad, “whore.” In literal translation, then: “Pancake, girls,” Igor says. “Pancake, yourself!” the little girl replies.)
The waitress in the dining car, the same one Igor flirted with earlier, says to us, “Buy me a bottle of champagne.” Igor asks how much. She tells us it costs nine hundred rubles. “No,” Igor says. Instead, we buy her a juice box and one hundred grams of cognac. Russians bartenders measure alcohol in the units North Americans reserve for cocaine and saturated fat. Lena accepts the juice box and cognac—she sits down to drink with us—but does not hide her disappointment.
Lena and Igor step between the cars to smoke. I glance around. There are Orthodox icons taped to the windows and TVs mounted on the ceilings. Three girls in their early thirties dressed in bright sleeping outfits occupy one booth. The table at each booth is set for four. Each table has a little vase of flowers and a tall glass with a silverware set wrapped in a pink napkin. The place settings vibrate with the train’s movement. The crackling speakers play a song by Pink.
When they return, Igor refers to Lena as Lenochka. We order two more beers. Lenochka combs through receipts at one of the booths with a Cruella De Vil type more than six feet tall. The table is essentially their office: cash register and folders, calculator, pencil holder.
Periodically, Lenochka gets up and runs to one side of the car or the other. “Buy me champagne. Buy me champagne,” she implores when she passes us.
Igor explains to me the ploy with the champagne. She buys a couple of bottles for ninety rubles before each shift. Then she flirts with guys on the train, asking them to buy one for her for nine hundred rubles. She makes a tidy profit, which she splits with her director, and drinks the champagne to boot. This type of scam may be familiar from Western strip joints and escort clubs, but in Russia it comes into play anywhere a service worker wants to make an extra buck. Corruption on the micro level.
I’m a bit loopy from last night’s hangover, the lingering jet lag, the constant movement of the train, and the continuous drinking.
“I have never been so drunk on a train,” I announce to Igor, and we return to the coupe.
Igor passes out by 8:38 p.m. I lie there on my sleeping shelf listening to the rhythm of the train in the spaces between Igor’s profound snoring. Sometimes the train goes thump-a-thump, thump-a-thump and sometimes it goes clack-clack-clack-clack-clack-clack-clack.
I read from John Steinbeck’s A Russia Journal. “What do people wear there? What do they serve at dinner? Do they have parties? What food is there? How do they make love and how do they die?” At one time or another, I have put all of these questions to Igor.
What do people wear there? Igor wears jeans and New Balance sneakers and button-up shirts with English sayings such as You may think you are free but you are already hooked on me. What do they serve at dinner? What food is there? At dinner, Igor’s mother often serves his favourite, pasta with chicken hearts. Other foods there include kholodets (meat jelly), pickled herring, salads (many with beets and potatoes), pirozhki (the aforementioned mashed potatoes baked into bread), and pancakes. Do they have parties? Yes, they have parties. They party, Mr. Steinbeck. Igor and his friends have parties in the woods near his St. Petersburg neighbourhood known as Piskaryovka on the edge of the infamous Piskaryovskoye Memorial Cemetery, where around half a million who died in the siege of Leningrad are buried. The parties of Igor and his friends involve drinking vodka around a campfire in which they later explode the empty bottles. How do they make love and how do they die? No comment on the former, but on the fortieth day after a loved one’s death, many Russians visit the grave to see the soul off into the afterlife.
And then there are Igor’s sleeping habits. He snores like, I’m sorry, a bear. The sounds he produces drown out those produced by thousands of tons of train rolling across the Russian countryside. It’s impossible to sleep. I punch his arm and tell him to shut up. He barely stirs to consciousness and immediately falls out again. I climb to the top bunk to put as much distance between us as possible.
And just as I begin to fall asleep, around three a.m., the bear roars back to life. He opens a bottle of beer and says, “I am just wondering, why is it this samovar on the train is called titan?”
“How should I know?” I say.
He fidgets around with my laptop. Then he watches Waiting, a medium-crappy film about American kids working in an Applebee’s-style restaurant. He laughs hysterically when one of the kitchen workers refers to the technique of pulling taut the skin of his scrotum as the “batwing.”
“Jeff, you remember this part?” he says. “It’s exactly how it is. Restaurant life. Truth, man, truth. Excellent.”
He plays Frank Sinatra on his phone and sings along with “Fly Me to the Moon.” I lapse in and out of consciousness, half dreaming for millisecond bursts. A little later I hear some shutter clicks. I peer over the edge of the bed and see that he is taking photos of the coupe and of me sleeping, and he is laughing loudly at the photos. He shows me a photo with my foot hanging off the bed and another of me with my bare chest covered by a small pink kitchen towel placed there, apparently, as a prop.
So it is impossible to sleep when Igor is asleep and impossible to sleep when he is awake. I remember that, for most of my life, he was my enemy. And now, seventeen years later, he attacks via sleep deprivation.
“Stop fucking my brain,” I say in Russian, and he applauds.
“Goodie!” he says. “Excellent one.”
“Fucking my brain” is the literal translation of a not-uncommon expression in Igor’s circles. One might back-translate it as “Screwing with me,” but that doesn’t quite match the imagery of the original, does it? To be screwed, even to be fucked, and to have one’s brain either screwed or fucked—these are very different things.
I give in, sit up and eat half a chicken with his mom’s homemade spicy sauce and bread, and listen to him. He wants to talk to someone. It’s almost four in the morning.
“Man, it’s pity I slept through Moscow,” he says. The mutual loathing between Muscovites and Petersburgers is legendary. “When I am on the train,” he says, “I get out there just to spit on it.”
In the morning, Lenochka pushes her cart of chips and drinks through our train car, demanding again that we buy her a bottle of champagne. She invites us to the restaurant car for breakfast. It’s clear she is bored to tears with her job as dining car bait. Igor asks when we will get coupe-mates. At every stop, we’ve expected the pensioners and their legions of grandchildren to invade our coupe. But no one. She tells us the train is barely half full. Crisis.
She asks Igor where he is from. He says from Peter. She says she knew it, she can tell by the accent. She is returning a few days after our return. “Change the ticket,” she says to Igor. “Ride back with me.”
“Can’t. Have two cats,” Igor says. “Stop playing with us.”
We sit in the coupe and look out the window. Thump-a-thump, thump-a-thump. It’s sunny outside, maybe twenty-five degrees, nothing like the rainy dreariness of Petersburg. Birch and pine tree forests, blue sky with not a cloud in it. Today is a holiday.
It seems that it’s a rare day that is not a holiday of one type or another in Russia. There are the big public holidays: New Year’s Day on January 1 and Christmas on January 7 (the date of Christ’s birth according to the Julian calendar, a holiday that was instituted in 1991 after the demise of the atheistic Soviet state). There’s the Defender of the Fatherland Day on February 23, when the country honours the armed forces; International Women’s Day on March 8; Labour Day on May 1, formerly International Worker’s Day; Victory Day on May 9, one of the biggest Russian holidays, which celebrates the victory over Nazi Germany in World War II; Russia Day on June 12, Russian independence day; and National Flag Day on August 22, celebrating the 1991 defeat of the putschists. Then there are unofficial holidays, such as the Old New Year (according to the Julian calendar) on January 14; Tatiana Day (or Russian Students Day) on January 25, when all students get drunk; Cosmonautics Day on April 12, to celebrate the first manned space flight on April 12, 1961, when Yuri Gagarin circled the Earth; Ivan Kupala Day on July 7, the pagan celebration when miscreants throughout Siberian cities douse each other with buckets of water and wander around in the woods looking for ferns; Paratroopers Day on August 2, when members of the military unit the VDV get drunk in the streets and make sport of terrorizing non-white Russians or immigrant workers; Saviour of the Apple Feast Day on August 19; the Day of the Great October Socialist Revolution on November 7 (October 25 by the Julian calendar), when Bolsheviks seized power in St. Petersburg; and many others. On top of all that, there are commemorative days such as the Memorial Day of Radiation Accidents and Catastrophes on April 26, the Day of the Russian Language on June 6, the Day of Remembrance of the Victims of Political Repressions on October 30, and the Day of the Detention Centres and Prison Workers on October 31. And so on and so on.
In Igor’s words: “People cannot track all these holidays. People cannot even remember them all. Just okay, day off. Or not. Whatever.”
Today is Holy Trinity Day, fifty days after Easter. All the cemeteries we pass are decked out with flowers and arrangements.
The railway radio station plays a constant mix of old Russian rock and pop contemporary through the crackling coupe speaker. It’s seven a.m. Only twenty-four hours to go.
“You have to understand,” Igor says, “on the train either you are drinking or you are looking out the window, sometime sleeping.”
“It would be nice to sleep,” I say.
The attendants have brought each of us a metal goblet called a podstakannik. Literally, this word means “under the glass.” It is metal and is designed to hold a small glass. We go to the titan, the mysteriously named train samovar, and fill the glasses with hot water. At this moment, Lenochka passes by again. Igor asks her why the titan is called titan and she says, “Why are you called Igor Yurievitch? That’s how it is.”
“No one knows,” he says to me.
We put the goblets on the little table dividing our coupe and dip cheap black tea bags into the hot water. The metal podstakannik instantly transmits the temperature of whatever you’re drinking to your hand. The metal handle of the podstakannik is scalding.
At a stop in a town called Liski, fleets of peddlers swarm the platform, selling strawberries, cherries, cigarettes, clothes, beer, water, chicken, potatoes, sweaters, toys. They jump on and off the train car and the attendants yell at them, mostly old women in sandals and head scarves. They seem bitterly disappointed by the lack of passengers.
Igor jumps out of the train and rolls his ankle on the stones. He is the big, gregarious drunk guy on vacation. He seems to instantaneously inspire in people either genuine fondness or emphatic loathing. He negotiates with one of the old-woman peddlers for some perogies, which Russians call varenyky, that he has no intention of buying. He just likes engaging in the negotiation. After he establishes how little he could get them for, he says, “No thanks.”
We hang out—Igor smokes—for about ten minutes under a federal billboard that reads An honest taxpayer makes a rich country. Then everyone boards the train again.
One of the peddlers curses us. “I’ve sold more eggs to trains of ghosts,” she says.
Igor plugs his phone charger into the outlet above our table. It doesn’t work. He tries to switch on the train radio. It also doesn’t work anymore. “Man, I don’t know where we are at,” he says. “I have no fucking clue.”
“We’re leaving Liski,” I say.
“Where the fuck is it? GPS not working, electricity not working, nothing is working.”
A little while later, we stop in Rossosh. Peddlers here offer huge platters of crawfish and dangle smoked fish strung through the eyeballs. There are stands selling honey and kvass, malted black bread, in clear plastic bottles.
As we’ve travelled farther and farther south, it’s begun to get hot outside and hot in the train. Igor seems able to absorb any amount of beer. With the exception of a cup of hot tea here and there, it’s all he drinks. The train radio crackles again. I drift in and out of sleep.
“You are not spry!” Igor shouts at me. “You are like a bacteria. An amoeba. I am filled with enthusiasm. I know where I’m going. You don’t. On the way back, you will understand.” He slams the coupe door.
Other men who love to talk immediately identify Igor as one of their own, as he does them. Not long after dark—I have yet to sleep—there’s a knock. Seryozha again, but not the security services Seryozha whom the train cops busted us with. Another Seryozha, this one from Murmansk, is here to chat. Igor met him on the platform. I realize that it’s possible on any given train trip for Igor to befriend an infinite number of Seryozhas. This Seryozha is in his fifties and has lots of recommendations for our travels.
Seryozha says to me, “Russky mat?” Do I understand Russian cursing?
“I am studying with the best,” I say, indicating Igor.
When Sergey leaves, he and Igor embrace like old friends.
A little later, Seryozha’s (the other Sergey’s) daughter Katya comes to hang out with us. She is maybe fifteen. Her parents are boring, she says. She talks to us for an hour. She and Igor sing along with ABBA’s “SOS” from the crackling train speaker.
I lie on my person-sized shelf listening to them and thinking about the train trip described in a Russian novel I’d given Igor about a year ago.
It takes me forever to read a book in Russian, but Igor burns through them. He consumed a book a day at work as he sat behind the bar of the Atrium ignoring cappuccino-seeking tourists. So at some point we had arranged for him to read those that interested me, or those that I’d heard good things about, and report back. Then I’d have at least a suspect opinion as to whether or not they were worth it.
Like most Russians, and for that matter like most North Americans, he reads pure unadulterated crap. I had passed along to him the Mikhail Zoshchenko short story about the Russian bathhouse—in which he ridiculed the ubiquitous Soviet bureaucracy requiring a naked man in the bathhouse to tie a ticket to his leg in order to reclaim his clothes after washing—thinking he would find it funny (he did not) and the comic absurdist Daniil Kharms (he didn’t like that either) and even the Russian drinking novel Moscow to the End of the Line by Venedikt Erofeev (nope—at least not until some time later, when he listened to it on audiobook and finally appreciated it).
I’d had more success passing him novels by American writers who had attended the writers’ festival I was working for—we brought established North American writers to St. Petersburg to teach workshops to younger writers and meet with their Russian counterparts—and this impressed me the most. The fact that this guy, who wasn’t by any stretch of the imagination an intellectual, who’d been booted from school in ninth grade and had mostly refined his English on his own since then, working in foreigners’ bars—that he could read and get contemporary American fiction was astonishing to me. It helped that he had the personal connections. He’d met a lot of the writers. They tended to frequent the Atrium, and he gave them all discounts on their cappuccinos.
His enthusiastic reaction to the train novel I was thinking about had surprised me too. The novel was called Rossiya: Obshchy Vagon by Natalya Klyucharyova, a young writer from the Moscow region. The title is tricky to translate. It’s been called, in literary circles, Russia on Wheels. But that’s too goofy. Obshchy vagon translates as “common wagon,” and refers to the lowest class on Russian trains. So the idea is something like Russia by Common Wagon or All of Russia is a Common Wagon …
I gave it to him one morning, and that evening, near the end of his shift, he handed it back to me. There was an Atrium receipt in the book, on the back of which he’d written his report. “Read it while I clean up,” he said.
Story about lost love. Nikita is trying to fill emptiness in his soul by travelling and talking with people he is meeting with. Trying to help and understand. He found the advantages in downshifting. At last he found the reason of living (while he was in fever) and going in village forever. Story made like puzzle with pieces from different times of Nikita’s life, which in the end becoming one long story. While reading some episodes there is feeling that there is a lack of something, but in common I recommending it to read. Fucking good emotional transmission.
Igor’s summary is much more eloquent than anything I could do. But there was one word in particular that I didn’t get. “What does ‘downshifting’ mean?” I asked.
“It means when the man is tired to live in big city, he is going fucking far away from that place,” Igor shouted as he mopped the area behind the bar. “While I was reading this book, I was crying. Like I wrote you, fucking good emotional transmission.” Later, I read it and even had occasion to speak with the author. She said something that stuck with me: “The plot of the road is the plot of the road in my life, both actual and allegorical—in fact, we are all on the road.”
The novel’s hero, Nikita, found that he had lost part of his soul living in post-Soviet urban Russia, a recurring theme among contemporary writers. Nikita’s train trip into the “real Russia” was undertaken to restore himself.
As Igor and Seryozha’s daughter Katya jubilantly howl along with ABBA, I understand that Igor, unemployed in the middle of Crisis Russia, has embarked on a similar downshifting mission. I understand why the book had such powerful fucking emotional transmission for him.
Because he felt that he’d lost part of his soul as well.