Four & a half days on the great pea-green viper (No. 004, Chinese: Yingwoche, sixteen cars long, Moscow to Ulan Bator, Mongolia, thus far) is just long enough to forget there’s any destination at all. My Finnish friend Tiina & I find ourselves in a tourist carriage jammed with northern Europeans with rucksacks full of vodka & drinking games & songs & Nordic good cheer. The Chinese major-domo sips tea. He shells sunflower seeds, brushing his black hair at his little windowside table.
The Chinese major-domo will not smile but presides over our dreams with grace, shelling dreams, a retainer of the underworld, on this single endless passageway. Our Kafka, our Dalì, our Murakami. He transcribes my rêve, the one about breathing underwater, into his log. He scowls over the sink, elbow-deep in pig viscera.
In daytime the dream brightens, but veiled. We pull out of the turquoise Omsk station, pass its broken-legged grain elevators, its old women sweeping snow with their armfuls of sticks. Countless towns of great fuel tanks like the discarded coffee cups of gods. Dmitri, lonesome & hammered, smashes the small table with his fist & roars “это нормально!” soaking one of the Dutch girls with gherkin juice. The tall birch trees of Kirov reach for heaven but give up part way. We do not have enough blood to stain this snow, not all of it.
It’s a mistake to think of the train on a single track, or that we are moving through time, or that we are moving at all. We’re so still it’s unbearable. Thus the fantasy of such fluid movement, in which we take childlike joy, like birthing or breathing that rocks us to sleep & permits us to enter our dreams as through a door left ajar by the Chinese major-domo. It’s a mistake to think the train exists in space. It provides us with the blur-line of snow because that is all we can comprehend. If you hear a baby crying or a chicken skreighing behind a door, ignore them, ignore all the cubbyholes of lovers, card-players, shadowy readers, whispering quarrelers, the way you might ignore one of your own chaotic or murderous thoughts.
Suddenly a frozen river, the scroll unfolds, eternity, still as ever. But we shake, the samovar drips, the moon rises over the tall hats of Krasnoyarsk. And, as everywhere, technology is mankind’s imbecil. Men huddle before an oil tank, before a lime-green power shack. Electrical poles, our mute witnesses, arms broken, die in the snow. In Novosibirsk, tinny speakers bleat the ontology of discipline.
The rusted stairs of Tyumen! Potato piroshki five roubles. Lumber, lumber, lumber. Shaving is hard, water freezing. Snow collects between cars. Houses yellow as the constant toilet urine. The snowy roofs of Angarsk! The green fences of Ilanskaya! The train thinks for us, works for us, like a prophet, & we do not thank it or even notice. We who are separate, scared, tired, lonely, clean. Too clean. The train asks us, How did you get this clean? Our melancholy, we say. Our delight. Boo-huh, it breathes, boo-huh, boo-huh . . .
Imagining there is a train is a misconception. Yet on Day Three you have always been inside it & it breathes, drifts away from a sunset bleak as if the man you loved had vanished around a corner, or had never existed. They are rolling bones in the next cabin, you can feel it, the sky yellow, almost-white, going blue. Pink. Grey. Purple. When the stars appear colour drains. Snow falls like nothingness, leaving houses grey & shrunken, infinite cobalt blue. The referent vanishes & all you believed to be true is true, & near.
Howdy from Halifax. Nice piece vivid. I am practicing my viola. Peace.
Howard