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1
The river came quickly. Quickly we were moving, now, at a steady speed along its bank, unable to get any closer to the immensity of dark blue crested water that was moving in the same direction as the train. How had it even come to this? Only moments ago we had not left the station. Guzal and I had boarded and sat down as if taking up residence. Yet now that felt long ago: now was the river, and current, and flow, now the hiss of wheels on steel rails. Something had been set in motion.
We would not be by the river for long. Ours was to be a journey across a wide stretch of steppe, linking one river to another, a day and a half apart. But the crossing from one river to the other was what defined it, so the river took precedence.
Movement was so gentle, unannounced. We edged out of the station, rumbled over points and across sidings, past warehouses, yards, sheds, tracks, run-down industry of all kinds. So gentle as to feel ghostly, yet the movement was for real, it was now: it would have to end somewhere and sometime. And before either of us had settled to the windows, we were by, and at, and with the river, chasing it, overtaking it, under its order. The west bank, the European side, if you could still say that. So was the gravitation of the river the cause of our motion? Had we come to the river or had the river approached us?
Guzal, going home, seemed preoccupied and did not pay much attention to the river. I however stood in the corridor outside our compartment, magnetised and pulled along as if by it, as if it exerted a gravitational force on both the train and my own body. The train, a lumpen thing, was animated now, though not as much as the river; it gathered speed, wheels hissing on rails, and was to go on for three days hence, across inhospitable spaces, to a new continent and new rivers.
The earth rang under us, we tore past the ragged river’s edge, past islands, past heavy cargo boats going the other way. The city receded fast. Which of us was in fact moving and which was still depended on the position of the observer. Who was in fact travelling, and where, seemed unfixed. And in the end the river, knowing both flow and stillness, would be the arbiter.
2
The train on the platform is the wrong one. Long, new, in the fresh livery of the Russian railway network, it is the prestigious Moscow overnight express. Later it will be stacked high with businessmen, two by two in bunks, and will bear them through the night, through a dreamland most have forgotten, to deposit them in the Russian capital sometime tomorrow. It is probably the same train that gathered me up from the night junction of Bogoyavlensk in the small hours of this morning, with a smartly dressed guard who packed me into a high berth among snoring commuters.
My ticket is in the other direction however: the rivers, the steppe, Asia. It was booked three months ago and two thousand miles away, online, from a bedroom in my parents’ house in England. Nervously I check the departure board: does the Saratov-Tashkent stopping train really exist, and will it run today? Yes. Relieved, I go back to checking the platforms. The answer lies in a series of chimneys, protruding up from behind the Moscow carriages. Those chimneys are on the roof of a very different train, and certainly mine. They speak to me at once of solid-fuel heating, of gigantic diesel locomotives, of slow steppe crossings between unmarked stations. Yes! This is my train. The three-day trundle – down to the Volga delta, then through a westernmost finger of Kazakhstan, rounding the top of the Caspian Sea and entering Karakalpakstan, finally reaching Samarkand and Tashkent, uses old rolling-stock, with an electric samovar in each carriage, blissfully allowing unlimited hot water for glasses of slightly metallic-tasting sweet black tea, once the alternator has been running long enough to boil the water. It also features Soviet-era compartments with glossy mock teak finish and toilets that are locked whenever we are near a station or a border, sometimes for hours at a time. Foreknowledge is everything. Grubby, painted in the white and green livery of Uzbekistan Railways, it looks foreign here, proudly so in this post-Soviet landscape. Somehow I sense that the years of slow border crossings and vast distances have caused it to shrivel. In an era of faster travel by road and air, this Soviet-era institution has the air of being marooned out of time, nostalgic – but still serves a more or less vital function. Coming aboard, meanwhile, there is a feeling of ease and homeliness. There is Tashkentsu mineral water, a pure Turkic, and salfetkalar (napkins) – a Turkish plural on a Russian noun. And for me, nearly two days of sipping tea and watching for subtle changes in the ocean steppe between the river here, the lower Volga, and our destination in the land of two other rivers, the Amu-Darya and the Syr-Darya, the classical Oxus and Jaxartes.
This journey is both exploration and homecoming. I remember these trains well from other journeys. I have passed through Saratov before, travelling west, and have been to the land of the two rivers. I am familiar with border crossings in these parts and have nothing to declare. And some twenty-five years earlier, in 1992, a group of us travelled along much of this line to reach Tajikistan, three and a half days from Moscow even before there were the border crossings. So I settle in and feel at ease, excited for the new journey. And the train settles into its motion, our new routine, its native combination of gliding and lurching, gentle hissing and sudden clanks and the smoothness with which the world moves past at stately speed. Certainly there is no trace of hurry here.
3
Now we are set in motion, our guard walks up and down, visiting each compartment. He speaks some German – though I think is Uzbek – and bounds into ours from time to time to declaim Meine Damen und Herren! or Geht es Ihnen gut?. But there are not many passengers yet. That will change once we are in Uzbekistan, he reassures us. And who anyway, I wonder, would choose to spend thirty-six hours on this clanking screeching swaying thing with its interminable border halts if they had an alternative?
The only other occupant of the compartment for now is Guzal, in her late forties and up from Tashkent to visit her son and grandson in Saratov and now heading home. Not, she adds, that it is really home; her family are strangers to Tashkent, one side Iranian and the other from Nagorno-Karabagh. She has divorced her drunken husband, but depends on him for her apartment. He could throw her out at any time. Her son has just seen her off from Saratov, holding the boy of eight months, and shook my hand before turning away. Guzal quickly relaxes in my company now, and perhaps that is why. Now her son is somewhere in the hairline horizon of the city, receding beyond the window as the river draws us on.
4
The river did not keep us for long. Barely an hour into the journey, and we lurched abruptly and swung out over the river, high on a girder bridge, as though catapulted. We could not stay, of course, and how else to break the river’s field of attraction? Perhaps we had been tensioning the sling ever since our departure, with this the inescapable consequence. Or perhaps it was the river playing with us, giving us a playful tug, as if to pull us right in, but with the bridge to hold us. So now we glided airily over the water, the noise of wheels and chassis up here light and hollow. Below were more of the reedy islands, in dark blue water roughened here and there by wind, and more cargo river boats. The river was so wide that it seemed a good half hour before we could reliably say we had crossed: the far bank seemed indistinct, the land emerging from the water in boggy clumps of tall reeds and giant seed heads that blocked our view, that gradually came together until there was more land than water, and maybe capable of supporting the train’s weight. The river had dominion over the land hereabouts and did not let go easily. For so long the land submitted, but then slowly rose just far enough to free itself. Now there was a village of old wooden houses, its back to us. Otherwise, nothing to focus the eye on, a seemingly featureless space after the vivid visual form of the river. A tabula rasa. If Asia was going to start somewhere, it might as well be here.
What was beyond the river I couldn’t make out. It is as though the water washed out, or erased, any memory of whatever flat, empty expanses were there. And the light quickly began to fail, though it was scarcely early evening yet. What was there here? Were there villages, roads? Were we heading east, as my mental map assumed? Soon – abnormally soon – it was quite dark, though only early evening. We could be anywhere and going anywhere. This might have been exciting, but I felt tired and wanted to sleep – or to fast-forward, get past this blankness, to say that we had arrived somewhere.
So it was hard to believe, from this seeming nothingness, that this well-worn old train was bound for no less than Samarkand, city of the imagination – and had called there twice a week in each direction for years or decades, reaching it across the wastes of the Caspian Depression as though the place were perfectly ordinary. I would get off well before Samarkand and make my way there by degrees – and somehow it seemed to behove me to approach the city in small steps, slightly in the manner of a pilgrimage. All my life I had dreamed of Samarkand, though with little of a picture of it, beyond old photographs of some of what Tamerlane had left to history, fabulous mosques and mausolea and an astronomical observatory. The mythical Samarkand of my mind would surely clash with whatever I found with my senses, and this train was the first symbol of that city as a living presence. That the train ran there at all was a sign that I would see it soon enough. That it ran there regularly, on a timetable, indicated to me that the imaginal image of Samarkand would not be broken by its modern everyday appearance. All my expectations – years of dreaming, months of planning and saving and already a colourful journey just to get to this point – were now motionless, exchanged for the actual displacement towards that final point. And what if – just supposing – the long border checkpoints are not there to search for contraband and illegal substances but rather to verify that we, the travellers, are fit and suitable for the fabled city? Nonsense of course, yet something in this thought appealed. Asia, maybe.
5
I can’t get over how early and how fast night fell yesterday. As if a spell had been cast by some Volga river spirit or something lurking in those unending marshes. It is as though we are flying east at 500 mph into accelerated dawn and dusk, rather than lumbering along on a passazhirsky (stopping) train. We seem to be straining at the lines of longitude, to bend and break them in order to make a leap to the East: at least that is what I am thinking now. Even the passage of day and night has fallen out of equilibrium. Or perhaps the half-waking, half-hallucinatory state that is common on overnight trains is already prowling the sleepers. Moreover this is mid-September, the equinox, and so half of everything we pass will be in darkness. It feels chilly and damp, but Guzal says that when she came the other way twelve days ago, it was hot and dry.
Later in the evening there is a moon, almost full. High, bright, dully lighting the fen-flat surroundings, the train no longer travelling blind, but still I cannot discern any feature. Meanwhile Guzal relaxes and opens up a little more. A grandmother at 47 – they don’t waste time around here. She was originally a railway engineer, and is full of facts about the line we are travelling; a pity that my vocabulary can’t keep up. The load-bearing capacity of the steppe subsoil, how a railway was first thrown across it, the temperatures in which the locomotives have to operate… She is lean and compact and has a plain, manly nature, concise, reserved. Clearly she has backbone and grit. But she is anxious about going back to Tashkent and her ex-husband. Husbands, she explains, come in two types: useful (sober) and useless (drunk). Her son has married a girl in Saratov and is trying to get work in Moscow, the only place that pays a more or less living wage, but the competition and the high rents are wearing him down. Guzal has two other children and hopes to marry them off soon – a perfunctory operation, not much to do with romantic love, more with economic foresight. She would like to move to Saratov herself, to join her son, if only she could find somewhere affordable to live. She would shed no tears on leaving Tashkent: ‘everyone is leaving’, she says, ‘except maybe the Karakalpak’. These, evidently, are in no position to complain.
Once her own children were old enough, Guzal retrained as a teacher of young children and clearly enjoyed the work, teaching them dancing and other creative skills. She was looking forward to more grandchildren – the one in Saratov was her first. And so she went on. I can’t make out whether she is still working with children or is unemployed. Nor how she ended up in Tashkent. A living specimen of Homo sovieticus, in this case a woman originally trained in a ‘male’ profession but now long practiced in making sense of the post-Soviet jungle. Retraining, like many of them, in a new profession that might give them a living, or might even be more to their taste. A manly manner grafted onto her natural femininity, making for a kind of superwoman, with a materialist-atheistic upbringing, her spirit habited in pragmatism and Marxist philosophy, yet not a whit deceived. Though worn thin, I still detect traces of an ideology, or at least an ideal. She is also assured and confident, with no sense of a victim mentality. Her badge of honour is her family, particularly her children, and she talks about them on and on.
After the conversation I ponder on her situation – everything hanging on finding lodgings and an income, after all that she has known and done. Along with the astrophysicists and doctors and concert pianists who found themselves in 1993 suddenly driving taxis to put food on the table, their prestigious professions vaporised overnight. No job, no income (and perhaps no sense of identification) and not much out there for them. So they apply their many skills to the no less demanding task of treading water, feeding their families, holding their lives together until such time as some kind of ground reappears under their feet. An almost ubiquitous situation throughout the former Soviet Union, though also hardly unknown in most other places.
I am touched that she opens up to me, a stranger from what may as well be a distant planet and forced into close proximity for two days, and shares her concerns that are evidently familiar on planets everywhere.
Be_flummoxed 