Tallinn to Fushiki - Grounded: A Down to Earth Journey Around the World - page 30

THE next afternoon, we go to Yaroslavl Station to catch a train out of town. The station's enormous waiting
room is filled with battered-looking luggage and even-more-battered-looking people. Scowling faces. Sul-
len children. And, oh, the clothes. There are men in sleeveless mesh muscle shirts. There are women in
sleeveless mesh muscle shirts. Beer bellies strain at threadbare polyester. Enormous bosoms erupt from
spandex tube tops.
The female fashions in particular are . . . provocative. As Rebecca delicately observes, “The women here
all look like eight-dollar hookers.”
“That's an unfair stereotype,” I tell her. “Some of them look like at least fifteen-dollar hookers.”
We find a small space to situate ourselves amid the waiting-room masses, and Rebecca goes off hunting
for provisions for the trip. There's no air-conditioning in the station and the air is fetid and still. By the
time Rebecca returns with some snacks, she finds me sprawled across our backpacks, my shirt unbuttoned
far down my sweaty chest, a look of utterly resigned doom on my face. In other words: I blend right in.
“Dude,” says Rebecca, “you've gone Russian.” She says this with equal parts apprehension and respect.
When we board the train, we can see other passengers through the half-open doors of their private cabins.
They are in various states of undress, wilting in the heat of the motionless train. Clothes are strewn about
the cabins. Large, shirtless men wallow on their bunks like postcoital sea lions.
When we get to our own cabin, Rebecca closes the door behind us and gives in. “I'm going Russian,”
she declares, wiping sweat from her forehead. She unhooks her bra and slips it out from under her shirt.
She flops supine on her bunk with a guttural sigh. “Going Russian is awesome,” she says to the ceiling.
THE train itself actually has an elegant shabbiness to it. Our carpeted first-class cabin is paneled with dark,
worn wood. There's a stately picture window and a small wooden table with a little white tablecloth. The
two narrow bunks are made up with crisp sheets and firm pillows. This genteel mood is dampened by the
bad Russian pop that plays through a speaker bolted into the ceiling. (There's a knob on the speaker that
reduces the volume but—in a rather Orwellian detail—there is no way to turn the music all the way off.)
We'll be riding in this cabin for three days and two nights. The nine-hundred-mile trip east from Moscow
to the city of Yekaterinburg is at least three times longer than either of our previous rail journeys, from
Antwerp to Rostock and from Tallinn to Moscow. We're giving ourselves a sudden, full-on immersion in
the culture of the Trans-Siberian.
There are three classes of tickets on Russian trains. First class (called spalny vagon ), which we're riding
in now, has private cabins with two bunks each. Second class (called kupé ) has four-bed cabins, much like
the one that we shared with Vladimir and Alexandr on the train from Tallinn. Third class (called platskart-
ny ) stuffs fifty-four bunks into a single, open carriage.
We're intimidated by platskartny . It's a lot of humanity in not a lot of space. When our train makes its
first station stop, we watch the platskartny passengers piling out like escapees from a P.O.W. camp and at
that moment basically rule out the idea of ever casting our lot with them. A pair of incidents at subsequent
stops reinforces our feelings on this matter: 1) We watch a platskartny rider buy a whole fish—eyes intact,
slimy gleam reflecting off its scales—from an old woman on a station platform, which he then brings back
onto the train. (You could smell this thing from thirty yards away. I have no idea how he planned to cook
or eat the fish, and I wept for the other people in his carriage.) 2) At another stop, we see a drunk, vomit-