Tallinn to Fushiki - Grounded: A Down to Earth Journey Around the World - page 31

flecked man hauled out of a platskartny carriage by a pair of angry policemen. (If there's one thing that
smells worse than a whole fish, it's a whole pool of vomit.)
There's also the issue that the fifty-odd platskartny passengers share a couple of painfully oversubscribed
toilets at the end of the car. We're much better off in spalny vagon , sharing a toilet with only fifteen or so
people. Though even in first class, the bathroom is bare-bones. It's all hard metal surfaces and constantly
reeks of bleach, which I suppose is better than reeking of dead fish. There is no shower, so people take
sponge baths using the sink.
On the floor next to the toilet is a flush pedal—which I'd assumed would trigger a rush of antiseptic blue
liquid, ushering the toilet bowl's contents into a chemical tank. Instead, pressing the pedal just opens a flap
at the bottom of the bowl. When this flap opens, it sends a shock of sunlight up into the bathroom, reveal-
ing the blur of the train tracks beneath the car and carpet-bombing the ground with human waste. We're not
permitted to use the toilet while the train is stopped at a station, for obvious reasons.
No matter which class we ride in, we will be forced to deal with a provodnitsa . Perhaps the most iconic
figure in Russian rail, the provodnitsa is the person (usually a woman—if he's a man he's called a pro-
vodnik ) who is in charge of each car. She rules her fiefdom with an iron fist. You can find her vacuuming
the hallways, restocking the bathroom with unnecessarily coarse toilet paper, and generally clucking at her
subjects as they disappoint her with their behavior.
Our car has two provodnitsas . They work in shifts and are constantly bickering. Both sport dyed hair
the color of maraschino cherries. At station stops, whichever one is off duty will stand on the platform in
a tattered robe and slippers, puffing on a cigarette and scowling at all who pass. If you step outside to get
some air, and are the least bit slow reboarding the train before it sets off again—perhaps because you are
fascinated by a transaction involving a fish—she will wag her finger at you and bark angrily in Russian.
A couple of hours and several stops outside Moscow, we move beyond the crowded city sprawl and into
the countryside. We begin to pass a series of mournful-looking towns. People walk aimlessly along the
train tracks, and feral animals roam about. The view out the window is sometimes patchy forest, sometimes
clusters of small wooden houses, and sometimes crumbling, cement-block factories surrounded by barbed-
wire fences and stagnant puddles of mud.
At each station stop, locals wait on the platform with baskets of food for sale. Sausages, cucumbers,
blocks of cheese, potato chips. Many of the merchants are wrinkly babushkas, with thick ankles and deep-
set, suspicious eyes. Often they wheel their goods around in baby strollers. Given the state of things in
these towns, it would not surprise me if some of these women were selling actual babies.
That evening, as our train rolls through a moonlit Russian forest, Rebecca fiddles with her GPS to see
where we are. She sits up straight in her bunk with a start. “Hey!” she says, still looking at the screen, wig-
gling her hand to get my attention. “We're about to be in Asia!”
The Ural mountain range marks the divide between the continents, with the official boundary falling at
just about 60 degrees east longitude. We turn off the lights in our cabin and press our faces to the window,
keeping our eyes peeled for some sort of marker. Rebecca glances down at her GPS to track our progress.
“Should be any second now. . . .”
And there it is. A small white obelisk by the side of the tracks. The train rumbles by it at 50 mph, but I
manage to make out Cyrillic letters spelling “Europe” and “Asia” etched into the stone, with corresponding
arrows pointing in opposite directions. There's nothing else here but a quiet glade of birch trees.
Unexpectedly, a wave of accomplishment passes over me. We've conquered the Atlantic Ocean, and now
Europe. An entire continent in our rearview mirror. To celebrate, Rebecca goes to the dining car and brings