The Last Man in Russia by Oliver Bullough

Author:Oliver Bullough [Bullough, Oliver]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780465074976
Publisher: Basic Books

WINTER

8

It’s like a plague

A Russian train in winter is a far better place than the same train in summer. With snow and the long dark night outside, inside was snug and warm. In summer, a top bunk is torment, but now I was happy to wrap myself in my blanket and, if I felt a little too hot, to hold my fingers against the ice on the windowpane. I could melt through it and leave little clear circles, then watch the crystals crawl over them once more.

The platform of the Yaroslavl station in Moscow had been hard-pressed snow and dirt. A man stood selling power tools. He had a heap of drills around his feet, and a cattle prod in his hand that he crackled at me as I walked past. On the opposite platform stood a train with destination boards proclaiming Ulan Bator and Beijing in three languages. It pulled out five minutes before us. In a few days’ time, we would be thousands of miles apart.

Just before our departure, a man came swinging down the train flogging knock-off phones. A woman, one of my neighbours, asked what he had.

‘Are you going to buy,’ he asked aggressively. She hesitated. ‘Then what’s the sense in showing them to you?’

The woman looked around at us in surprise at his sales technique, and we shrugged and grunted and introduced ourselves. On the top bunk opposite me was Andrei, a snub-nosed woodsman in a vest – ‘I am a driver, a sawyer and a boss. See, that’s four jobs’ – with strong opinions, particularly about people from Chechnya – ‘They should all be killed, they don’t work and see how much money we give them.’ Just a couple of weeks before, a suicide bomber had attacked one of Moscow’s main international airports, killing thirty-seven people. His sister had passed through the airport ten minutes previously, he said, so that may have been the source of his strong feelings, although the suicide bomber had not in fact been from Chechnya.

Beneath Andrei was a sulky-looking girl who spoke on the phone for most of the first evening, and slept for most of the next day. Opposite her, and directly beneath me, was Yekaterina, a pretty girl from Vorkuta who listened to everyone’s conversations and smiled without saying much.

Most of the conversation over the next day was driven by our neighbours on the other side of the aisle. They were a mother and daughter from Ukhta. The mother – her name was Angelina – had learned English a long time ago and was delighted to show off to the carriage by holding exclusive conversations with me about Prince Charles. I spoke to her in Welsh for a while when she asked me what this place Wales was that he was prince of. She then happily explained to our neighbours that she had not understood a word. They had not understood a word of the exchange that led up to it, so probably did not realize I had been speaking in a different language at all, but she did not let this undermine her triumph.

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