Trans-Siberian Express (3 page)

ALEX
and Zeldovich strode past the rows of glistening green railway cars. They were strikingly clean and shiny after the gloom of the waiting room. The carriages seemed taller than the American variety and certainly wider, since the Russian railroad track gauge was the widest in the world. Excited faces peered from the windows as he passed and he could see people already on their bunks in the “hard” class carriages, the cheap sections which housed four in each compartment.

Zeldovich clattered up the metal stairs of a carriage near the front of the train. A woman in a linen smock met them at the passageway entrance and quietly exchanged words with Zeldovich. She was a large woman, big-breasted. When she opened her mouth in a half smile, a stainless-steel eyetooth glistened.

“I am pleased to meet you, Dr. Cousins,” the woman said, holding out her hand.

“She is the attendant in this carriage,” Zeldovich said, poking his head beyond her to see into the passageway. “I know she will make your trip very comfortable.”

“I’m sure,” Alex said politely.

Zeldovich turned and pulled off his glove, a deliberate act of courtesy, and held out his hand. Alex was surprised. He had hardly expected Zeldovich to let him out of his sight. Could he have been wrong? he wondered.

“I hope you have a pleasant journey,” Zeldovich said, his little eyes blank as he pumped Alex’s hand vigorously in the heavy Russian way. Then he clattered down the metal steps, leaving Alex to ponder his unexpected retreat. They are giving me a false sense of security, he thought. Or throwing me to the jackals.

Following the attendant down the passageway, over an Oriental patterned carpet, Alex peered into each compartment as he passed. By American standards, they were commodious. Two bunks were ranged along one side of the wall. Over each bunk was a net catchall. There was also a table, covered with a cloth, on which stood a lamp with a tasseled shade. An Oriental rug covered the floor and red velvet curtains hung at either side of the window. The walls were done in deep-toned mahogany. There was a hint of the Victorian in the decor and, after the bleakness at the station, Alex found it particularly inviting.

Looking down the passageway, he could see a shiny metal samovar, laid on a faintly glowing bed of charcoal. Large pails of charcoal stood on the floor beneath it. A small metal scoop was sticking up from one of them. Apparently this apparatus was meant to be the principal source of heat for the train.

At the entrance to compartment four, the attendant turned and took Alex’s bookbag from him. As she carried it inside, Alex could not resist glancing into the next compartment down the hall. Sitting there was the general Alex had seen in the station. He had already usurped the only chair and was staring out of the window, his head bathed in heavy clouds of cigar smoke.

The attendant returned to the passageway. “If there is anything you wish, ring the buzzer inside,” she said. Then she whispered, almost conspiratorially, “My name is Tania.”

The moment Alex stepped into the compartment, he felt a decided change in atmosphere. A heavy smell of perfume hung in the air, Russian perfume. It was the same overpowering scent worn by the nurses in Dimitrov’s dacha. It smelled as if it had been made in one gigantic vat of strawberries.

Someone had already arrived and opted for the lower bunk. It was obviously a woman. This, Alex had already learned, was another quirk of the Russians, who championed sexual equality to the point of arranging accommodations with stubborn disregard for the sex of the passengers. Alex felt a tug of excitement. Except for a brief unsatisfactory episode with one of Dimitrov’s heavy-thighed nurses, he had been celibate for the past six weeks.

A suitcase lay open revealing feminine underthings, unusually frilly for a Russian—pink panties, a garter belt, brassiere with a dainty little ribbon between the cups. There were dresses too, hanging on a bar at one end of the compartment. Alex flung his bookbag on the upper bunk and hoisted himself up two steps of the wooden ladder to feel the mattress. It was firm, and the pillow seemed well stuffed. Alex smiled with relief. At least his nights on the train would not be as uncomfortable as he’d feared.

He noted that both his suitcases had been placed neatly under the lower bunk. He slid them out. They were heavy, difficult to swing to the upper bunk. As he did so, he accidentally bumped the woman’s suitcase, disarranging a scarf. His eye caught a gleaming bottle of vodka stuck in one corner of her suitcase. He looked around, not without a twinge of guilt, then carefully covered it with the scarf again.

Opening one of his own suitcases, he felt under his pajamas for his leather toiletry case. It wasn’t there. Pushing down with his palms, he could feel its outlines under layers of clothing. Someone had searched his belongings. He shrugged, feeling a surge of paranoia, his brief sense of freedom at Zeldovich’s departure dissipated. They were watching, after all.

He removed the toilet kit, placing it in the net bag over his bunk. He hung his two suits in the open closet next to the dresses and felt a sudden intimacy. Like home, he thought, although Janice and he had separate closets. He felt the material of one of the dresses, jersey, smooth. As he moved toward his suitcase again, he glanced into the passageway and saw the squat man whom the train agent had tried to humiliate. He waddled past, looking quickly at Alex, in a sudden movement, then looking forward again.

Removing his pajamas and robe, he hung them on a hook next to the flowered robe of the anonymous woman. His long coat and fur hat he hung next to his suits, embarrassed that he had taken up so much room. When he had finished with all the details of settling down, his ear began to register an undercurrent of music, faintly audible. Following the direction of the sound, he saw the perforated disc of a speaker built into the wall and beside it the volume knob.

He turned the knob to the right, but the volume did not change. The knob had to be broken. He was in for it now, he thought, making a note to call the attendant. He knew the music could become an annoying sound, like the maddening drip-drip of water from a loose spigot.

With great creaking noises, as the coupling strained and the wheels rolled on the wide-gauged track, the train began to move. It gained momentum slowly, picking its way cautiously through the railyards. Peering out through the grayness, he watched the swarm of babushkas sweeping under harsh floodlights. Beyond, on the edge of the light, Alex could see the decaying boilers of aged steam locomotives and the rusting hulks of old carriages ready for the scrap heap. He pressed his head sideways against the cold glass and watched the train station recede. Behind him was the darkening, barely visible skyline of Moscow.

“The tea is lovely,” a woman’s voice said in English. He turned quickly, embarrassed at being caught in such an odd position. She was standing inside the compartment, holding a glass of tea held gracefully in her long, graceful fingers. The glass was fitted into a silver-filigreed metal container. He watched her settle into the single chair of red velvet. She crossed long, well-muscled legs and watched him through her brown lashes. He recognized her as the woman who had intimidated the train agent with her sexuality. He was not immune to it himself, he discovered.

“The tea in this car is excellent,” she said. “Just press the buzzer. The Petrovina will get you a glass.”

She had meant to be charming, he realized, but instead he felt slightly intimidated. He pressed the buzzer, more to recover his calm, than out of a desire for tea.

“I speak Russian,” he said. Was it meant to be a lion’s roar? It came out as a bleat.

“Wonderful,” she said, in English again.

She leaned her head back, smiling broadly, showing a line of gold fillings. He calculated she was somewhere in her mid-thirties. It was her size that must have caused his sudden anxiety. She was close to six feet, he reckoned, with a figure that was beautifully proportioned to her size, but was extraordinary compared to those of other females. She was the ideal of Russian beauty, like the paintings of sturdy peasant girls smiling in the wheatfields that were hung everywhere in Dimitrov’s dacha.

“Well then, what shall it be?” she asked. Her voice had depth and timbre. It was her aggressiveness, too, that had caught him by surprise.

“Russian train. Russian tongue,” he said, slipping onto the lower bunk, which obviously served as the only other seat in the compartment.

“Okay,” she said in English, then laughed and switched to Russian. “I wanted to practice my English,” she said. “Perhaps later, okay?” She laughed again, raised her tea and touched her full lips to the edge of the glass.

Tania appeared in the doorway, waiting for orders.

“Tea, please,” Alex said. She nodded, departing.

“I am Anna Petrovna Valentinov,” the blonde woman said, extending her hand. He took the long fingers in his, feeling their heat and strength.

“Alex Cousins.” She probably knew that already.

“I’m going to Irkutsk,” she volunteered.

“The Paris of Siberia,” he commented, suddenly cautious, remembering Dimitrov’s odd warning. “Be discreet,” he had urged, repeating it over and over in the last days. Why discreet? Alex had wondered. Dimitrov held all the cards. And this woman was probably his agent.

“My husband has an important post with the university in Irkutsk,” she said. He imagined he caught a slight sigh. “I myself am a Professor of History there.”

Alex was not surprised. If they were going to vest her with a profession, why not choose one that was esoteric? Or was it? Everywhere in the Soviet Union there were women in professions dominated by men in America—doctors, lawyers, trainmen, construction workers, professors. There was, he had learned, a surplus of twenty million women in the Soviet Union, the result of long years of war. He studied Mrs. Valentinov. Underneath the sexuality, which he could not erase from his mind or his senses, he detected a hard earnestness and intellectual power. She was certainly different from his wife, Janice, the archetypal American housewife, who was motivated by acquisitiveness and all the anxieties and insecurities it created. Not that this Russian woman was without her little vanities. He noted how carefully she applied her mascara; the light, artistic rouging of the high cheekbones; the delicate painting of her lips. He remembered the lacy underwear he had seen in her suitcase. They are outflanking us everywhere, he thought with some amusement.

Tania appeared in the compartment again with a glass of tea on a small tray. Alex removed two unwrapped lumps of sugar from the steel bowl Tania offered, then watched her depart. Blowing on the tea, he peered out of the window. They were passing through a tunnel. The total blackness beyond the window created a dark mirror in which he could see himself and Mrs. Valentinov. They looked like a contented Victorian couple ensconced in their cozy living room.

“It’s been two months.” Mrs. Valentinov sighed. “I had to attend an important seminar at Moscow University. They are redoing the Russian encyclopedia, a mammoth task. The mass of details is enormous.”

He had been watching the woman, but listening only peripherally. The train was picking up speed now, the sensation of bouncing becoming more pronounced. On one bounce the tea slopped over his fingers. The woman laughed.

“The roadbed,” she said. “Roadbeds in other countries, they say, make the trains sway. Ours bounce. They put the tracks together in an odd way.” There was a very long pause.

“The Russians have to be different,” he said, filling the vacuum with an expected response.

“You notice that about us.”

“Is the Pope Catholic?”

He was sorry he had said it, wondering if the wisecrack would be misinterpreted as sarcasm. His experience with Russians had discouraged his propensity for wisecracks. At Dimitrov’s dacha he had discovered that each casual one-liner needed further explanation, until by the end, the humor was gone. But the woman seated across from him had blinked her eyes and nodded with a wry smile, as if she had understood. Did she, he wondered, or was she simply trying to be ingratiating?

Through the open compartment door he watched the parade of people. Most took sly little looks inside, then turned away. One well-dressed gentleman turned and smiled. A little boy was dragged past. He stuck his tongue out at Alex.

“Vladimir!” The sharp, dominating voice of his mother rang through the passageway.

A man passed wearing striped pajamas. Alex stared, and Mrs. Valentinov laughed.

“It’s a Russian traveling costume,” she said.

“Pajamas?”

“It’s quite practical. Very comfortable and saves wear and tear on the clothes.” She paused. “It’s quite respectable, really.”

Perhaps it was the use of the word respectable. Suddenly Alex’s thoughts took an odd turn as he watched the woman, larger than life, slumped in her chair, her long legs crossed, a bit of white skin showing where the garters met the tops of her stockings. His imagination followed the whiteness up her thighs, beyond, and he could feel himself stiffen. It was one of those male fantasies come true, he thought. How many times had he wished that chance would create opportunity? Like now. This beautiful Amazon dropping from heaven less than a yard from him.

“My husband prefers to fly,” she went on. “He can’t understand why I’d want to spend four nights on a bouncing train when the jet trip takes only seven hours.”

Alex sensed that she was deliberately explaining her presence. Yet, despite his suspicions, he could understand the compelling sense of isolated time and space that a train journey induced, a suspension, an interruption of the life cycle. He could define his feelings about it quite accurately, and yet he had only slept on a train once before in his life, when he had first taken the sleeper down from New York to Washington. He had had an upper berth then, but even after twenty years he could still recall the excitement of finding himself tucked into the cozy shelf while the wheels churned somewhere below, moving him securely over a mysterious road to nowhere.

However calculated her intent, Mrs. Valentinov’s comment had served to eliminate her husband from this experience, and, despite his caution, he felt a commonality between them, a sharing of more than space.