Tallinn to Fushiki - Grounded: A Down to Earth Journey Around the World - page 34

the endless ocean, and meanwhile you eat twenty-seven-odd meals, do laundry once or twice, and gener-
ally pass those 216 hours reading books or looking for whales or whatever. I imagine that for Fogg, this
downtime might have involved playing a lot of whist, his favorite card game. Perhaps he'd also bugger his
manservant Passepartout for kicks. (Who knows—the topic never fully addresses their relationship.) The
point is: Life continues, even in transit. You will get bored sometimes, guaranteed.
Luckily, there is a powerful weapon at our disposal in the war against boredom. It's called vodka. After
we finish off a bottle over the course of a lazy afternoon—and become fearful that we might lose our pleas-
ant buzz—Rebecca runs out to buy another liter from the dining car.
She returns moments later, mission successful. “Wow,” she slurs, a little giggly, “my Russian when I talk
to male bartenders is great . They totally love me!”
The fact is, not to drink vodka on the train would be to reject the cultural norms of the Trans-Siberian.
Even at our prodigious pace, we can't keep up with the gallons being consumed by all the Russian dudes
on board. The dining car actually runs out of liquor sometimes, in the face of constant demand.
Once, at a station stop, we watched a group of eight shirtless men leap off the train before it stopped
rolling. They sprinted off the platform and down a short slope to the village below. We knew exactly where
they were going. Only one thing on earth could compel a fat Russian man to move that fast. Sure enough,
the men were soon running back up the hill with their arms loaded full of booze. One fellow was balancing
so many bottles that I was obliged to hold open the carriage door for him, as he couldn't spare a free finger
to open it himself.
We've noticed that a lot of these shirtless dudes sport fat lips and swollen, black eyes. Rebecca's reason-
able theory: “Drunk people get in fights and hit each other a lot.”
THE towns roll past, one after another. We are officially in Siberia now—though it's harder to recognize
the place in summer, there being no snow, and no Dr. Zhivago zooming by on a sled.
In the middle of the night, our train reaches 103 degrees east—a spot exactly halfway around the world
from Washington, D.C., longitude-wise. Coincidentally, at almost this same moment the train slows to a
stop. I wake up, drowsy and disoriented. (I always wake up when the train stops in the night. It's the sudden
absence of that steady rocking motion, and that relaxing clackalack of wheels on tracks.) Loudspeakers on
the station platform suddenly blare to life. A stern male voice bellows something in Russian, and the words
echo out through the brisk night air. I squint, trying to look through the window. All I can see is thick fog,
diffusing the bright light from the lamp poles on the platform.
We're in a four-berth kupé cabin, and we have one roommate, who is presently sleeping on an upper
bunk. When this middle-aged man first boarded the train and entered the cabin, he said something to us
in Russian. Upon realizing we couldn't speak his language, he said not another word to us for the follow-
ing eighteen hours. Now I keep hoping he'll stir, and somehow—through his body language—convey that
there is nothing for me to be alarmed about. But he doesn't budge.
I am riding on a Russian train headed east, into deep Siberia. I am cold. I am confused. And I swear I'm
experiencing an embedded cultural memory handed down from my mother's eastern European ancestors.
When I hear a cluster of loud bangs coming from somewhere down the platform, I figure it's about fifty-
fifty: They might be linking up a new locomotive, or they might be shooting Jews and wealthy landowners.
I decide that either way it's out of my hands, and drift back to sleep.