Trans-Siberian Express (5 page)

“I travel the rails whenever I can,” Miss Peterson said proudly. “People who don’t travel trains miss all the fun.”

“Waitress,” the general’s voice boomed out. “Where is the waitress?” He stood up, a big, heavyset man, his face flushed as he looked in either direction and made his way to the kitchen. “What kind of a train is this?” he shouted.

The manager emerged, the surly waitress behind him. “This is a disgrace,” the general’s voice boomed. “I want more wine.”

“Good for him,” Miss Peterson said. “The squeaky wheel gets the most oil.”

With a frightened look at the red-haired man, the harassed manager responded quickly to the general’s obvious authority, rushing toward him with another bottle of wine. With a shaking hand, he pulled out the cork and poured a tumblerful of wine into the general’s glass. The general nodded, picked up the filled glass and lifted it in Alex’s direction.

“And take care of those Americans,” he said. “What kind of hospitality do you offer here? You are a disgrace to the country, to the railroad.” He drank the glass off in one swallow.

The little man came closer, nodding obsequiously, as Alex rattled out orders for more tea and a plate of stew. The waitress went to the kitchen and was back with the food almost immediately.

“And a bottle of wine,” Alex added.

In a moment the wine had been opened and poured.

“I drink to you, sir,” Alex said to the general.

“By all means,” Miss Peterson said, lifting her tea glass.

“And to you,” Alex called to the red-haired man, who looked up, scowling. Alex drank the wine quickly. It was too sweet, but he was grateful for the way it soothed him. The waitress had put a wine glass in front of Miss Peterson, but when he attempted to fill it, the American woman covered it with her hands and smiled benignly.

“Dear no,” she said, with the innate primness of the maiden lady, although there seemed in her an uncharacteristic streak of toughness. He felt drawn to Miss Peterson, whose sheer innocent enthusiastic Americanness was like a whiff of freedom in the paranoid Russian atmosphere. Even her quotations from Baedecker were oddly refreshing.

“The Trans-Siberian Railroad was begun in 1891, in the time of Alexander the Third; Nicholas the Second turned the first shovelful of earth in Vladivostok. I always believe in knowing about the history of things when I travel. Don’t you agree?”

He hesitated, wondering if he would be triggering an endless history lesson. “Yes,” he said finally, sipping his wine.

“Are you going all the way to Nakhodka, Dr. Cousins?” she asked.

“Yes,” he whispered, trying to swallow his answer. He had wanted to say, “Hopefully.” Would they ever let him reach that destination? he wondered.

“Then you’ll be taking the boat to Yokohama.”

“Yes.” Please, yes, he thought.

“I took it in 1960. The
Khaborousk
it was called. Same name as the city, both named for a man, actually. He was a fur trapper and trader, quite ruthless.” She sipped her tea. “But I’m more at home on trains than on boats. On this trip I’ve gone straight through from Victoria Station.”

Alex stole a quick glance at the red-haired man. His long conversation with Miss Peterson might be putting her in danger. But he felt incapable of rudeness.

“The silliest thing is their wide-gauged track. They actually thought it would save them from invasion. So now, when you cross their borders, giant cranes have to change the axles of your train. Quite ridiculous, don’t you think?”

“Typically Russian,” he mumbled, remembering Dimitrov.

“They didn’t foresee airplanes,” she continued. But Alex was no longer listening.

The restaurant car was beginning to fill up now, although all the seats were still not taken. He noticed that the man who ran the car seemed to be deliberately leaving the two seats at their table empty. The man in pajamas finally rose and disappeared through the exit. The din increased as more people crowded into the car. Relaxed by the wine, Alex watched the faces.

In the Yaroslav railroad station, under their heavy coats, all the people had seemed nondescript. But now he could read in their faces evidence of the vast spectrum of peoples that occupied the Siberian land mass. Skin tones varied from the pinkness of the European White Russian to the reddish-darkness of the Mongol, the olive tones of the Armenian, and all the variations in between. He saw eye shapes varying from the Caucasian through the Tartar to the Oriental; round heads, flat heads, wide fleshless noses, some delicate aquiline noses. It was the oddest assortment of humans he had ever observed in a single place. He marveled at the diversity, remembering Dimitrov’s boast: “If we can control this hodgepodge, we can control anything.”

“The Americans are not too bad at it, either,” Alex had replied.

“You melt; we paste,” Dimitrov had responded cryptically. Alex had not understood until now.

“Oh dear,” Miss Peterson said suddenly, looking anxiously toward the group of waiting people. “Now I
am
taking up room.” She looked at the check and fished an Intourist food coupon from her bag, placing it carefully on top of the check.

“You will see that it gets into the proper hands, Dr. Cousins?”

“Of course,” he said, relieved that she was leaving. He stood up to make way. She was remarkably small at full height, slender and compact. She held out her hand.

“I am sure we will see each other again,” she said. “We should have plenty of time for a nice long chat.”

“It would be my pleasure,” Alex said, conscious of his insincerity. Watching her move down the aisle, he felt mildly disturbed. The food lay like lead in his stomach. He looked quickly at the red-haired man, who averted his eyes.

Damn, Alex mumbled, throwing some kopecks on the table. He started toward the door of the restaurant car, pausing briefly to confirm that the red-haired man was following him. “Beware of the jackals,” Dimitrov had said. But wasn’t it he who had set them on Alex in the first place?

PUSHING
open the door of his compartment, Alex found Mrs. Valentinov lying across the bottom bunk. She had changed to a long dressing gown and hung her dress next to one of his suits. She had also pinned her hair in an upsweep, revealing a long stretch of soft pink neck. She lay on her side, supporting her head in her palm. The pose had disarranged the top of her robe, revealing the upper portion of her large breasts.

Beside her on the table was an open bottle of vodka and an empty tea glass. The scene had a calming effect on him, a sense of coming home. She had taken off her makeup and when she looked up at him, her eyes had an innocent girlish look.

“Satisfy the human clock?” she asked, flashing a wide smile.

“Satisfy is hardly the correct word,” he said. He threw the medical journal onto the top bunk and sat down heavily on the chair.

“I should have warned you.” She laughed and he felt their tension ease.

“Where are we?” He looked at his watch. It was 7:30 Moscow time.

“You sound like Pyotor,” she said.

“Who’s that?”

“My son. Whenever we take him on the train, he asks every five minutes where we are.” Then, pointing to the vodka bottle, she asked, “Can I offer you a drink? What good is it being Russian if one has to drink by oneself?”

He nodded, wondering if her friendliness was sincere. What does it matter? he asked himself. He got up and opened the washroom door. Inside was a tiny sink with a gleaming shower attachment hooked on the wall. He found a glass on a shelf above. Reaching for it he glanced at himself in the mirror, noting the flush along his cheeks and nose. His eyes were bloodshot and under them dark hollows had deepened. He looked exhausted. He went back to his chair and poured himself a drink.

“To answer your question, I’d say we were an hour or so from Yaroslav; we cross the Volga during the night. And late tomorrow we will be in Asia.”

He sipped the vodka, feeling the spreading inner warmth.

“I’ve never been there,” he said, lifting his glass. “To Asia.”

“We make that vodka in Irkutsk,” Mrs. Valentinov said, rolling over so that she lay on her stomach facing him, her breasts flattened under her. Irkutsk! He hesitated for a moment, feeling the urge to explain his own vision of that city, the dream that sprang from his grandfather’s recollections. He rolled the vodka on his tongue, feeling in its warmth the compelling link of the generations, Russian to Russian, grandfather to father to son.

Irkutsk! The very name could send shivers up his back and straighten the hairs on his neck. He envisioned a jumble of wooden houses, log cabins and stretches of plank sidewalks. His grandfather had told him tales of lurking thieves, who had escaped from the penal colony outside the village. The strong ones had lived off the villagers, pillaging, robbing to survive. The weaker ones, miscalculating the brutality of the Siberian wastes, had attempted to make it back to European Russia. They rarely, if ever, succeeded; their corpses were found the following spring, perfectly preserved in the ice. “Spring flowers” his grandfather had said they were called. It was remarkable, Alex thought, the power of the old man’s recollections and the effect on his own sense of reality. Even now!

But he did not speak of this to Mrs. Valentinov, inhibited, perhaps, by Dimitrov’s strange admonitions: “Tell them nothing. Give them no information.”

“What is it like in Irkutsk now?” he asked, wondering if his use of the word “now” might provoke her curiosity. But, he reasoned, if she was one of them, she would know all that.

“It is beautiful,” she whispered. He strained to hear. “We are more than three hundred years old, but we are a young city. Young people are everywhere. That is the way you must think of our city—young, fresh, strong. Like the Angarra itself.”

“Angarra?” he repeated, remembering the mention of it somewhere in his own past.

“The beautiful daughter of Lake Baikal. You know Lake Baikal?” It was the first question she had put to him.

He nodded. “One of the most ancient lakes on earth. Deepest fresh water body in the world—” He checked himself.

“It is fed by more than three hundred rivers, but only one, the Angarra, flows from it.” She had the same force, the same yearning as his grandfather. It was an aberration, he thought, this passionate territoriality that afflicted the Russian psyche.

“We are a city of half a million souls living on the edge of death,” she went on. Could she know? But she was speaking of the rock tremors that could unleash the waters of Lake Baikal.

“Your family has a long history in Irkutsk?” It was half statement, half question. Was he taking some bait? But it was tantalizing, irresistible.

“We have found evidence of five generations in the cemeteries on my mother’s side. My father was a soldier who arrived in the thirties. He was a Russian.” Alex thought he detected a slight curl of contempt on her full lips. “On my mother’s side we are mixed up—Yakut, Evenkis, Buryat blood.” She pointed to her eyes, the high cheekbones, the almond shape. “Can you see the hint of Genghis Khan?”

Her glass was empty and he refilled it as well as his own. Lulled by the vodka, the voice of the woman, and the rhythm of the train, Alex felt a strong need to tell the story of his grandfather and to explain the reasons for this pilgrimage across Siberia. Certainly the tales were harmless, his caution and suspicion irrational. But still he hesitated to speak.

“People from Irkutsk were explorers and fur traders,” she continued. “Did you know that it was men from Irkutsk that crossed the Aleutians, claimed Alaska and put a Russian flag in California?” She had been watching him. Was he being overly cautious? he asked himself. Was he expected to stay alone and keep his mouth shut for eight days? Despite his suspicions he felt drawn to Mrs. Valentinov. She lay on her stomach, her large breasts ballooning beneath her, her body deliciously relaxed, languid. He was surprised at his own awkwardness as he turned his eyes from hers, assailed by a youthful shyness he hadn’t felt in years.

“You’re not going to eat?” he asked, feeling the banality of the question.

She reached for her glass of vodka and lifted it to her lips.

“Quite enough caloric content in this,” she said with a smile, her eyes glistening as she sipped while watching him.

“Very bad for the brain cells,” he said. “The alcohol destroys them.”

He felt increasingly silly, bantering with her, wondering if she would respond to his cautious overtures. His comparative celibacy and the tension of the last six weeks was reawakening his lust. Seduction had always been difficult for him and now his old fear of rejection was bubbling upward, eroding his self-assurance. The episode at Dimitrov’s dacha with the chubby nurse had been furtive, a quick groping in the dark. His disappointing performance had made the woman irritable, bitchy, and he had finally maneuvered her transfer, though not without guilt.

And yet, he had been strong and authoritative in his medical dealings with Dimitrov. Imperious, in fact, and Dimitrov had allowed it, believing that Alex held his life in his hands. Did Mrs. Valentinov understand her effect on him, the intimacy, the privacy of their surroundings as the train chugged its way into the mysterious land mass of Siberia? Of course, he thought. It is all orchestrated. But why? To what end?

He stood up suddenly, balancing himself against the edge of the upper berth, feeling a bit dizzy. He sensed her eyes on him, following his face. The vodka had made him looser, unguarded. He wondered if she could detect the bulge in his pants as he returned the medical journal to his bookbag that lay on his bunk.

But as he reached into the bookbag, alertness suddenly returned. His head cleared. The bag had been tampered with, he was certain, the journals removed and thumbed through. Again he remembered Dimitrov’s warning. The jackals are everywhere. Or was his imagination playing tricks with him? Had the vodka turned his head?

“How much time?” Dimitrov had asked again and again.

“I’m not God,” he would reply.

“That is the point,” Dimitrov chuckled. “They will want to know, and no one can answer.” He had slapped Alex on the back. “They will try everything to find out. It is precisely the bit of information they will require. We will fool them, Kuznetsov.”