The End of the Line
Beata Stasak
Police officers, civilians, poets...wherever you live, you'll find them if you get lost on the road. You don't have to retrace your steps, you can turn off at the next junction to find what you've been searching for.
I was traveling on a train through Russia, in my mind. The story went like this:
On a clear unhurried evening, the Moscow main station is a magical place. Floodlit and yet gloomy, it's covered in ornamental tiles and folkloric decorations. I shiver as I enter the castle gate that looms above me like a triumphal arch, ready to continue my journey to the north to see with my own eyes how Russia has evolved.
Historical St Petersburg is where I started my travel, back in history, early this morning. Feeling like Anna Karenina in disguise, a veil covers my powdered face and I hold a perfumed hankie to my nose as I sit in a tight corset, repeating verses in French. From a safe distance, I watch the world go by. After having spent too much money, I'm bored to death with life.
The day before I enjoyed a short but sweet trip along Russia's first railway line, built in 1837 by my countryman, a Bohemian engineer. So that the Russian aristocracy could reach their summer retreat in Pavlovsk.
But that's not the life that I really want to experience. Tolstoy's words are no longer celebrated the way they used to be. Russia doesn't feel like an integral part of Europe anymore.
While traveling from St Petersburg to Moscow, I overhead a conversation. It was said that a kink in the railway line was where Tsar Nicholas I's finger got in the way of his ruler, when he drew a line between two cities.
Whatever the truth of that, over the centuries, railways here have represented the will of an authoritarian ruler. The supremacy of state power, as a soldier enters to check my ticket, is proved to me by his stern and suspicious look.
Important in his uniform, he asked about my whereabouts. I said that I was just a traveler who'd lived abroad for years and that I was rediscovering my past. He replied in broken English: "You in Russia now so speak Russian!" I turned back to the window while he snooped around my compartment, looking for evidence of something that I could be accused of.
Nothing's changed in the boom of private capital or grand, mad projects of Soviet times. The terrors of Stalinism will never leave Russia, I'm afraid.
So here I am, in the capital city of post-Communist Russia. It takes more than a day to reach Archangel so there's plenty of time to converse with fellow travelers, or read and reflect.
The four-berth compartment's warm and cozy enough. The wheels click and clack as the calming sound of tea glasses clink on the table. You feel sleepy, until Ekaterina, the plump attendant pops in with a big smile. "I live on the train for two weeks at a time."
I try to remember the Russian that I learnt thirty years ago, when studying in Volgograd. "It must be hard," I say, but she laughs.
"We're the train people, that's who we are." She sees my surprise and explains: "We sleep on the train, we eat on the train, wash our clothes, meet and marry people who work on the train. And when we get stressed?" she smiled again, showing me some wool. "We knit and knit and knit. I've been here for twenty years. I'm good at it now." She sits beside me, her needles moving quickly in her hands as she talks.
"Railways are often referred to as 'threads', in Russian." She looked at me seriously. "They tie the country together and in previous decades, civilized it."
I nodded, thinking that these threads, like many others, had military roots. One of the first lines went from Warsaw, then a part of the Russian empire, to the border of Austria and Hungary, where my forebears were born. Strong Russian alliances were used by Nicholas I to send Russian troops to squash a Hungarian rebellion in 1848.
And what about Lenin, who arrived from Germany by train to lead the Bolshevik revolution? The rest is history. At least for my country, who lived under Russian Communist rule for fifty years.
For defensive reasons, Ekaterina whispers to me that Russian railway tracks have a wider gauge than European ones. Whereas Russia could transport its troops to borders, a train with foreign troops wouldn't be able to roll into Russia. We don't trust anyone, she sighs. And it's still like that to this day.
Train journey in Russia is measured in days and nights, rather than hours. There's enough time and space for thought or heart-searching. All one sees is forest, sky, clearings, uncultivated fields cloaked in winter by snow. Not a settlement or soul in sight.
"In Europe people die because their space is cramped and suffocating," Chekhov wrote in a letter. "In Russia they die because the space is an endless expanse."
Another traveler enters our compartment. A young forester from Archangel, Igor strikes up a conversation with Ekaterina about injustice and corruption. Someone has taken the money he paid for the repair of his truck and vanished with it. A local policeman asked him for a bribe of 10,000 roubles before he'd investigate.
Ekaterina pats his arm before continuing with her knitting. She hears stories like this every day. A few hundred miles out of Moscow, the train comes to a planned three hour stop for track maintenance.
Igor turns to me. "Russian history's often viewed as a track, that's been fixed from the past to the future." He smiled. "If you get lost on a road, you don't have to retrace your steps, but if your history is a railway line, you have to go all the way back in order to get on the right track."
"I agree," I replied. "Much of the energy of Mikhail Gorbachev's 1980 perestroika generation was spent looking for that wrong track, where the Soviet Union had lost its course."
Igor looks up as I continue. "For me personally, that happened in 1968 when the Soviet Union invaded Czechoslovakia, where I was born."
He shrugged. "For Putin and us, the wrong turn was perestroika itself, and our Soviet Union's collapse."
This doesn't bother Ekaterina, who keeps knitting as she smiles. "I've never been abroad and I don't want to. Why would I?"
"Because your salary's low, just like mine," Igor interrupts her angrily. "It's dropped by a third and maybe it'll go down even more."
She waved her hand at him. "Mr Putin brought our country up from its knees. He'll fix it."
"I've heard stories about the fabulous wealth and vast country estates of Mr. Putin and his cronies." I take hold of her hand. "There are so many oligarchs in Russia."
She laughs. "Where are they? Maybe where you come from, But for sure they don't travel on my train." She claps my hand into hers. "Look at me. I'm not allowed to sell vodka, but if you come and ask me quietly, I'll sell it to you."
After nearly twenty seven hours and a few too many glasses of vodka, our train arrives in Archangel, the dream port that led to free land in the vision of Russia to become the new Norway.
The city to which Emperor Alexander III sailed up by river, as the railway only reached the medieval Vologda, in the seventeenth century. He was fascinated by the Russian North. The peasantry there were of a pure Russian type, never conquered and seldom owning land.
As I walked through the city's elegant seventeenth century merchant yards overlooking the steely waters of the Diving, it felt like a different Russia - one that I'd have liked to see before the Tatar invasion of the thirteenth century.
I stopped traveling and opened my eyes to realize I am safely home in Australia. Knowing I never visit Russia again I offered my memories to few editors .But they replied: "It is an old story, someone else travelled on this train before you, before the war.”
Of course they did," I emailed back: "It's open to everyone who has a valid ticket. But they couldn't possibly see the railway through my eyes!"
The editing policeman entered my writing compartment: " We do not want Russian stories anyway but Ukrainian ones now, they are suffering in the war. Write as we tell you!"
What else was there to do but go all the way back to get on the right track?
Police officers, civilians, poets...wherever you live, you'll find them if you get lost on the road. You don't have to retrace your steps, you can turn off at the next junction to find what you've been searching for.
No matter how many times I close my eyes the only train I end up in was Ekaterina’s carriage that was put aside, railway stations emptied of people and all lights switched off. Frost was gathering covering the rust and she kept sitting inside shivering, waiting for the war to stop…
I was traveling on a train through Russia, in my mind. The story went like this:
On a clear unhurried evening, the Moscow main station is a magical place. Floodlit and yet gloomy, it's covered in ornamental tiles and folkloric decorations. I shiver as I enter the castle gate that looms above me like a triumphal arch, ready to continue my journey to the north to see with my own eyes how Russia has evolved.
Historical St Petersburg is where I started my travel, back in history, early this morning. Feeling like Anna Karenina in disguise, a veil covers my powdered face and I hold a perfumed hankie to my nose as I sit in a tight corset, repeating verses in French. From a safe distance, I watch the world go by. After having spent too much money, I'm bored to death with life.
The day before I enjoyed a short but sweet trip along Russia's first railway line, built in 1837 by my countryman, a Bohemian engineer. So that the Russian aristocracy could reach their summer retreat in Pavlovsk.
But that's not the life that I really want to experience. Tolstoy's words are no longer celebrated the way they used to be. Russia doesn't feel like an integral part of Europe anymore.
While traveling from St Petersburg to Moscow, I overhead a conversation. It was said that a kink in the railway line was where Tsar Nicholas I's finger got in the way of his ruler, when he drew a line between two cities.
Whatever the truth of that, over the centuries, railways here have represented the will of an authoritarian ruler. The supremacy of state power, as a soldier enters to check my ticket, is proved to me by his stern and suspicious look.
Important in his uniform, he asked about my whereabouts. I said that I was just a traveler who'd lived abroad for years and that I was rediscovering my past. He replied in broken English: "You in Russia now so speak Russian!" I turned back to the window while he snooped around my compartment, looking for evidence of something that I could be accused of.
Nothing's changed in the boom of private capital or grand, mad projects of Soviet times. The terrors of Stalinism will never leave Russia, I'm afraid.
So here I am, in the capital city of post-Communist Russia. It takes more than a day to reach Archangel so there's plenty of time to converse with fellow travelers, or read and reflect.
The four-berth compartment's warm and cozy enough. The wheels click and clack as the calming sound of tea glasses clink on the table. You feel sleepy, until Ekaterina, the plump attendant pops in with a big smile. "I live on the train for two weeks at a time."
I try to remember the Russian that I learnt thirty years ago, when studying in Volgograd. "It must be hard," I say, but she laughs.
"We're the train people, that's who we are." She sees my surprise and explains: "We sleep on the train, we eat on the train, wash our clothes, meet and marry people who work on the train. And when we get stressed?" she smiled again, showing me some wool. "We knit and knit and knit. I've been here for twenty years. I'm good at it now." She sits beside me, her needles moving quickly in her hands as she talks.
"Railways are often referred to as 'threads', in Russian." She looked at me seriously. "They tie the country together and in previous decades, civilized it."
I nodded, thinking that these threads, like many others, had military roots. One of the first lines went from Warsaw, then a part of the Russian empire, to the border of Austria and Hungary, where my forebears were born. Strong Russian alliances were used by Nicholas I to send Russian troops to squash a Hungarian rebellion in 1848.
And what about Lenin, who arrived from Germany by train to lead the Bolshevik revolution? The rest is history. At least for my country, who lived under Russian Communist rule for fifty years.
For defensive reasons, Ekaterina whispers to me that Russian railway tracks have a wider gauge than European ones. Whereas Russia could transport its troops to borders, a train with foreign troops wouldn't be able to roll into Russia. We don't trust anyone, she sighs. And it's still like that to this day.
Train journey in Russia is measured in days and nights, rather than hours. There's enough time and space for thought or heart-searching. All one sees is forest, sky, clearings, uncultivated fields cloaked in winter by snow. Not a settlement or soul in sight.
"In Europe people die because their space is cramped and suffocating," Chekhov wrote in a letter. "In Russia they die because the space is an endless expanse."
Another traveler enters our compartment. A young forester from Archangel, Igor strikes up a conversation with Ekaterina about injustice and corruption. Someone has taken the money he paid for the repair of his truck and vanished with it. A local policeman asked him for a bribe of 10,000 roubles before he'd investigate.
Ekaterina pats his arm before continuing with her knitting. She hears stories like this every day. A few hundred miles out of Moscow, the train comes to a planned three hour stop for track maintenance.
Igor turns to me. "Russian history's often viewed as a track, that's been fixed from the past to the future." He smiled. "If you get lost on a road, you don't have to retrace your steps, but if your history is a railway line, you have to go all the way back in order to get on the right track."
"I agree," I replied. "Much of the energy of Mikhail Gorbachev's 1980 perestroika generation was spent looking for that wrong track, where the Soviet Union had lost its course."
Igor looks up as I continue. "For me personally, that happened in 1968 when the Soviet Union invaded Czechoslovakia, where I was born."
He shrugged. "For Putin and us, the wrong turn was perestroika itself, and our Soviet Union's collapse."
This doesn't bother Ekaterina, who keeps knitting as she smiles. "I've never been abroad and I don't want to. Why would I?"
"Because your salary's low, just like mine," Igor interrupts her angrily. "It's dropped by a third and maybe it'll go down even more."
She waved her hand at him. "Mr Putin brought our country up from its knees. He'll fix it."
"I've heard stories about the fabulous wealth and vast country estates of Mr. Putin and his cronies." I take hold of her hand. "There are so many oligarchs in Russia."
She laughs. "Where are they? Maybe where you come from, But for sure they don't travel on my train." She claps my hand into hers. "Look at me. I'm not allowed to sell vodka, but if you come and ask me quietly, I'll sell it to you."
After nearly twenty seven hours and a few too many glasses of vodka, our train arrives in Archangel, the dream port that led to free land in the vision of Russia to become the new Norway.
The city to which Emperor Alexander III sailed up by river, as the railway only reached the medieval Vologda, in the seventeenth century. He was fascinated by the Russian North. The peasantry there were of a pure Russian type, never conquered and seldom owning land.
As I walked through the city's elegant seventeenth century merchant yards overlooking the steely waters of the Diving, it felt like a different Russia - one that I'd have liked to see before the Tatar invasion of the thirteenth century.
I stopped traveling and opened my eyes to realize I am safely home in Australia. Knowing I never visit Russia again I offered my memories to few editors .But they replied: "It is an old story, someone else travelled on this train before you, before the war.”
Of course they did," I emailed back: "It's open to everyone who has a valid ticket. But they couldn't possibly see the railway through my eyes!"
The editing policeman entered my writing compartment: " We do not want Russian stories anyway but Ukrainian ones now, they are suffering in the war. Write as we tell you!"
What else was there to do but go all the way back to get on the right track?
Police officers, civilians, poets...wherever you live, you'll find them if you get lost on the road. You don't have to retrace your steps, you can turn off at the next junction to find what you've been searching for.
No matter how many times I close my eyes the only train I end up in was Ekaterina’s carriage that was put aside, railway stations emptied of people and all lights switched off. Frost was gathering covering the rust and she kept sitting inside shivering, waiting for the war to stop…
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Beata Stasak is an Art and Eastern European Languages Teacher from Eastern Europe with upgraded teaching degrees in Early Childhood and Education Support Education. She teaches in the South Perth Metropolitan area After further study in Counselling for Drug and Alcohol Addiction, she has used her skills in Perth Counselling Services. Beata has been a farm caretaker on the organic olive farm in the South Perth Metropolitan area for the past thirty years.
Beata is a migrant from post-communist Eastern Europe, who settled in Western Australia. She came with her husband and children to meet her father, who she never knew. He was a dissident and refugee from Czechoslovakia, after his country was taken over by Russian communists after the unsuccessful uprising against the communists in 1968. |
