Losing Track: Beijing to Moscow on the train
Posted in Beijing-CHINA, Travel article on 09/27/2008 05:28 pm by SimonOn the fourth day I stopped caring about time. I thought it was the fourth day, but it might have been the third. Beijing was a receding memory, Moscow impossibly distant. I had slipped into the habit of sleeping for four hours and then getting up for four hours, it didn’t matter whether it was light or dark. Life inside the train bore no relation to the outside world -Siberia- which barreled past, cold, unwelcoming and as predictable as wallpaper; birch trees, hills, birch trees, plains, birch trees.
‘I hate those trees,’ said the elderly German in my compartment, ‘I want to cut them all down.’
Occasionally we passed an untidy village of wooden cabins but mostly the only human touch to the epic landscape was the telegraph poles at the side of the track.
My first Russian was a young guy in a shellsuit with a moustache and an anarchy tattoo. ‘The Beatles,’ he said, on hearing I was British.
‘The Rolling Stones,’ I countered.
He nodded. ‘The Doors.’
‘Pearl Jam?’ I inquired.
‘Nirvana,’ he asserted, ‘Napalm Death.’ Which seemed to seal the matter.
Once or twice a day the train stopped and I’d emerge for fresh air, dizzy and blinking, onto a platform swarming with frenzied shoppers. Traders stood in the carriage door and the townsflok, who had waited all week for two minutes of consumerism, rioted to get to them. To save time the traders threw money over their shoulders into the corridor to be collected by colleagues. They sold world cup t-shirts, plastic jewellery and Mickey Mouse umbrellas. Even the man from the dining car had a cupboard of trainers, which was perhaps why he could only offer gherkins and soup in his official capacity.
I played cards then slept, battleships, slept, charades, slept. It was an invalid’s life – a long slow delirium in comfortable confinement. But on the seventh day, or perhaps it was the sixth, when grey housing blocks started appearing and Moscow was imminent, I felt nostalgic for that easy sloth. When I finally got off, something felt terribly wrong; it took me a while to figure it out – oh yes, the ground wasn’t moving.