Midnight in Siberia: A Train Journey into the Heart of Russia by David Greene

Author:David Greene [Greene, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 2014-10-20T00:00:00+00:00

. . .

WE FINISH UP dinner and tea at the hotel restaurant in the center of Izhevsk, and cab to the train station. Our FSB friends are still with us. We saw them ask for their check at the restaurant as soon as we did. We saw them leave the lobby of the hotel just after us. Now we see them on the platform. Since we have no family to bid us farewell here, this almost makes me feel special, that a couple of thuggish strangers are seeing us off!

To reach Izhevsk we had to detour off the Trans-Siberian main line. Tonight we are heading north to the Russian city of Perm, on the western edge of the Ural Mountains. We have to lay over there for a few hours, then rejoin the main line, cross the Ural Mountains, and reach Ekaterinburg where Andrei is picking us up for our trip to Sagra.

The trip has been grueling, frustrating, exciting, with unexpected twists at every step—but you fall into a routine that gets you by. Often I’m especially in the dark because I don’t know the language. It strikes me—what a metaphor for how Russians approach their lives. In a way I feel that’s how the Russian government keeps citizens in the dark—laws are never clear, courts are unreliable, punishments are arbitrary—it’s like living in a place where the people in charge are speaking a language you never understand. And consider what that does to any impulse to speak up.

I remember on one Russian Trans-Siberian train a pleasant young woman with dyed blond hair stumbled into my compartment and seemed delighted to have found a foreigner. She was holding a plate of pirozhki, little stuffed pies—these had cabbage—and said in very broken English, “You get all, twelve hundred rubles. Deal good, very good.” I wasn’t understanding, so I asked if I could find my translator. “No, no. No. good deal. Pay, please.” I wasn’t inclined to fight with an employee with whom I would be sharing a train for days, so I handed over twelve hundred rubles—roughly forty dollars. The woman left the plate of cabbage pies and scurried away. They turned out to be stale and lacking in cabbage. Sergei came by, saw the plate, and burst out laughing. I had apparently fallen for the oldest trick in the book, handing over a fistful of money for day-old dough that was the end of the batch after the cook ran out of cabbage. Humorous as that was, in truth, I feel that Russians lead their lives in a chaotic and confused world, protecting themselves as best they can but with little incentive to make waves. I could have gone to find the vendor to get my money back—but I didn’t.

Our train pulls out of Izhevsk, and I am already settled into the humdrum routine. I make some tea, make my bed, and smile at the woman in the berth across from me. She is already tucked under her blanket, reading.

My first solid night of sleep in a while ends with shouting.

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