OLGA - Midnight in Siberia: A Train Journey into the Heart of Russia - page 159

20 • OLGA
L ATE IN THE AFTERNOON , we drag our suitcases past the snow-draped jumbo menorah outside
the station in Birobidzhan and board the train for the last time.
It's train No. 002, the Rossiya , the train that leaves Yaroslavsky Station in Moscow as an
old Soviet march echoes through the hall. Sergei and I were not able to take that train out of
Moscow, but we make sure to ride it on our final leg. The train is decorated, on the outside,
like Russia's flag—a light shade of blue, red, and white. The provodnik seems a little more
formal—and a little more friendly. We splurge a bit on this leg, because there is no third
class—just closed cabins.
This overnight leg of the journey flies by—perhaps because the digs are so comfortable,
I sleep peacefully for hours. After heading east from Birobidzhan, our train makes a hard
right turn southward, down a narrow patch of Russia that lies between China and the Pacific
Ocean. Early in the morning, as the sun rises, we pull into Vladivostok. The station sits right
alongside the city's bustling harbor, which flows into a bay and out to the Pacific. It's a cold
morning, but bearable, with an ocean breeze pulling in some moist, warmer air. Sergei and I
walk down the platform and pay our second visit to a special monument.
It reads “9288”—the number of kilometers you travel on the Trans-Siberian Railway
from Moscow to this point. I feel pretty lucky to have completed this journey—twice.
Sergei and I walk up a hill from the station, dragging our suitcases over ice clumps, to
a hotel and rent a room. He quickly showers and calls a taxi to go to the airport. He has to
catch a flight to Moscow to get back to work—with NPR's new correspondent there.
“Sergei, what else can I say but thank you? I know this won't be our last adventure to-
gether, though.”
“No, no way, David. Please, please tell Rose I send my best again. And wish her good
luck with the business. This is very, very exciting.”
Sergei went above and beyond to make me and Rose comfortable, secure, and fulfilled in
our years in Russia. He took enormous pride in doing that. He would truly do anything for
me. What's more, he was genuinely interested, personally, in the reporting we did—all the
stories, including those on this train trip.
I consider him one of my closest friends in the world. But I often do think about how, in
some ways, he is an enigma to me, surely as I am to him. There's a distance—some of it,