When the tracks disappear into the black night, we sit around the table. There’s a basket of fruit we could eat, but we had supper in Moscow. The only thing that awakens everyone’s interest is a gleaming bottle of vodka, which we immediately open. We drink and talk about everything but the journey, because that is the present, not the past. We drink some more and begin to reveal what we all expect from the coming days. We continue to drink, and an infectious joy fills the room. Suddenly, it’s as if we’ve known one another all our lives.
The translator tells me something of his life and passions: literature, traveling, and the martial arts. As it happens, I learned aikido when I was young, and he says that if we get bored at any point and run out of conversation, we can always do a little training in the tiny corridor beside the compartments.
Hilal is talking to the same editor who hadn’t wanted her to get into the carriage. I know that both are trying to patch up their misunderstanding, but I know, too, that tomorrow is another day, and confinement together in a small space tends to exacerbate conflicts. Another argument is sure to break out. Not for a while, though, I hope.
The translator appears to have read my thoughts. He pours everyone more vodka and talks about how conflicts are resolved in aikido.
“It’s not really fighting. What we aim to do is calm the spirit and get in touch with the source from which everything comes, removing any trace of malice or egotism. If you spend too much time trying to find out what is good or bad about someone else, you’ll forget your own soul and end up exhausted and defeated by the energy you have wasted in judging others.”
No one seems very interested in what a man of seventy has to say. The initial euphoria provoked by the vodka gives way to a collective weariness. At one point, I get up to go to the toilet, and when I return, the room is empty.
Apart from Hilal, of course.
“Where is everyone?” I ask.
“They were being polite and waiting for you to leave so that they could go to bed.”
“You’d better do the same.”
“But there’s an empty compartment here—”
I pick up her backpack and bag, take her gently by the arm, and lead her to the end of the carriage.
“Don’t push your luck. Good night.”
She looks at me but says nothing and heads for her compartment, although I have no idea where that is.
I retire to my room, and my excitement becomes intense weariness. I place my computer on the table and my saints—who go everywhere with me—beside the bed, then I go to the bathroom to clean my teeth. This turns out to be a far harder task than I’d imagined. The glass of mineral water in my hand keeps lurching about with the movement of the train. After various attempts, I achieve my objective.
I put on the T-shirt I wear in bed, smoke a cigarette, turn off the light, close my eyes, and imagine that the swaying is rather like being inside the womb and that I will spend a night blessed by the angels. A vain hope.
Hilal’s Eyes
WHEN DAY FINALLY DAWNS, I get up, change my clothes, and go into the lounge. Everyone else is there, too, including Hilal.
“You have to write a note giving me permission to come back here,” she announces, before she has even said “Good morning.” “I had a terrible time getting here today, and the guards in every carriage said that they would let me through only if—”
I ignore her last words and greet the others. I ask if they had a good night.
“No,” comes the collective response.
So it wasn’t just me.
“I slept really well,” says Hilal, unaware that she is provoking the general wrath of her fellow travelers. “My carriage is right in the middle of the train, and so it doesn’t lurch about so much. This is the worst possible carriage to be traveling in.”
My publisher seems as though he’s about to make some rude comment but restrains himself. His wife looks out the window and lights a cigarette to disguise her irritation. My editor pulls a face that says more clearly than any words: “Didn’t I tell you she’d be in the way?”
“Every day I’m going to write down a thought and stick it on the mirror,” says Yao, who also appears to have slept well.
He gets up, goes over to the mirror in the lounge, and sticks a bit of paper on it, which says: “If you want to see a rainbow you have to learn to like the rain.”
No one is too keen on this optimistic saying. One doesn’t have to be a mind reader to know what’s going through everyone’s head: “Good grief, is this what it’s going to be like for another nine thousand kilometers?”
“I’ve got a photo on my cell phone I’d like to show you,” says Hilal. “And I brought my violin with me, too, if anyone wants to listen to some music.”
We’re already listening to the music from the radio in the kitchen. The tension in the carriage is rising. Any moment now, someone is going to explode, and I won’t be able to do anything about it.
“Look, just let us eat our breakfast in peace. You’re welcome to join us if you want. Then I’m going to try to get some sleep. I’ll look at your photo later.”
There is a noise like thunder. A train passes, traveling in the opposite direction, something that happened throughout the night with frightening regularity. And far from reminding me of the gentle rocking of a cradle, the swaying of the carriage felt much more like being inside a cocktail shaker. I feel physically ill and very guilty for having dragged all these other people along on my adventure. I’m beginning to understand why, in Portuguese, a fairground roller coaster is called a
Hilal and Yao the translator make several attempts to start a conversation, but no one at the table—the two publishers, the wife of one of the publishers, the writer whose idea this trip was—takes them up. We eat our breakfast in silence. Outside, the landscape repeats itself over and over—small towns, forests, small towns, forests.
One of the publishers asks Yao, “How long before we reach Ekaterinburg?”
“Just after midnight.”
There is a general sigh of relief. Perhaps we can change our minds and say that enough is enough. You don’t need to climb a mountain in order to know that it’s high; you don’t have to go all the way to Vladivostok to be able to say that you’ve traveled on the Trans-Siberian Railway.
“Right. I’m going to try and get some sleep.”
I stand up. Hilal stands up, too.
“What about the piece of paper? And the photo on my cell phone?”
Piece of paper? Ah, of course, the permission she needs to be able to visit our carriage. Before I can say anything, Yao has written something in Russian for me to sign. Everyone—including me—glares at him.
“Would you mind adding ‘once a day,’ please?”
Yao does this, then gets up and says that he’ll go in search of a guard willing to stamp the document.
“And what about the photo?”
By now, I’ll agree to anything if I can just return to my compartment and sleep, but I don’t want to annoy my companions, who are, after all, paying for this trip. I ask Hilal to go with me to the other end of the carriage. We open the first door and find ourselves in a small area with two exterior doors and a third leading to the next carriage. The noise there is unbearable because, as well as the racket made by the wheels on the rails, there is the grinding noise made by the metal plates linking the carriages.
Hilal shows me the photo on her cell phone, possibly taken just after dawn. It’s a photo of a long cloud in the sky.
“Do you see?”
Yes, I can see a cloud.
“We’re being accompanied on this journey.”
