A Fortune-Teller Told Me (55 page)

The journey from Ulan Bator to Moscow takes five days. To me the term “Trans-Siberian” has always suggested something
démodé
and romantic. In his book
Overland to China
, Archibald Colquhoun, who made the trip in 1898, describes deluxe carriages with bathrooms, a library, a gym and a music room with a piano. I knew it was not like
that anymore, but the image remained in my mind, so when the ticket seller asked, “Deluxe?” I automatically answered yes.

On boarding the train, however, I found that in my deluxe compartment there was hardly room to sit down. It was piled high with huge sacks and bundles, on top of which sat a corpulent red-cheeked Mongol of about thirty: my new traveling companion.

“Businessman?” I asked him in English, using the word that by now is everywhere a synonym for prestige.

He nodded. Thank goodness we discovered we could communicate in Chinese. The whole train was full of these businessmen. Every single compartment was crammed with bags and boxes, all jam-packed with goods. The space under the couchette-seats was taken up by more bundles and boxes, and so were the corridors and toilets. In the whole very long train there was apparently not a single ordinary traveler with just a suitcase.

It was a Russian train. Someone had warned me that in Russia everything that has to do with food is now in the hands of the Georgian mafia. Just to check, as soon as we started I went to inspect the restaurant car. And sure enough the headwaiter, Vladimir, was from Tbilisi. I introduced myself, handing him a $10 bill, and asked him to look after me. It worked like a dream: for the whole trip I had a clean place at the table, fresh caviar and iced vodka.

As soon as the train had crossed the frontier into Russia I saw what the new Trans-Siberian Railway was like. At the first station the Mongols began to open their sacks and lean out of the windows, waving merchandise to attract the Russians: my romantic Trans-Siberian had dwindled to a prosaic traveling bazaar, assailed at every station by a crowd thirsting for bargains. Most of them were women: as if possessed they threw themselves against the sides of the train to grab the plastic overalls, raincoats, flip-flops and children’s clothes which the Mongols dangled out of reach over their heads until they had the desired price in their hands.

For a long time the track ran along the shore of Lake Baikal, as big as a sea, very flat and calm. The night was lit by a splendid slice of moon that looked like shining mercury. We passed Irkutsk. Outside the windows the
taiga
continued, just like the day before—the same thin white
birches, the same green meadows full of flowers, and little log houses with blue and white window frames. Every time the train slowed down and we felt it rumbling over the switches before a station the Mongols would swing into action, opening their sacks and pulling their reserve stocks out from under the seats.

“Krasnoyarsk!” yelled the woman in charge of the deluxe carriages, and we stopped in the radiance of another Siberian sunset. Ossendowski’s city! It was from here that he had set out! On the platform a crowd flung itself on the train like a beast on its prey—pretty girls in miniskirts, stout old women with headscarves—all scrambling to get hold of a sweater, a raincoat, a pair of plastic shoes. The only ones who did not join the fray were a few dirty and unshaven drunks who crouched at the feet of two electric pylons and smiled philosophically at the bargains they were missing.

Passing through Krasnoyarsk, where his odyssey began, I felt that my journey with Ossendowski had come full circle. Perhaps he would have liked to get off there, and go and see how little progress the people of the city had made since the day he fled for his life—since the revolution, so abhorred by the baron, had taken root. There, I thought, was the place for us to separate. I picked up the book, thanked it for the magnificent company it had kept me, and just for fun opened it at random, telling myself that what I read would be his farewell to me. My eyes fell on the first line: “… terrible bloody Baron. No one can decide his own fate.” I put the book into an envelope. I would post it home at the next stop.

Tomsk, Novosibirsk, Omsk: day after day, in every station, small or large, the same spectacle was repeated. As soon as the people heard the whistle of that train of wonders, they came pouring out of their houses and rushed excitedly to the station. At times it looked as if the whole population was running beside the tracks. Deals were clinched in seconds: grab the goods, hand over the money and off goes the train, leaving behind a few lucky purchasers to admire an ugly anorak or a pair of sandals, and the disappointed ones who had not managed to buy anything. For another chance they would have to wait two more days.

Between stops the Mongols drank and slept. Outside, the silver birches slid past monotonously.

Such is the strange destiny of the Trans-Siberian Railway. Built as a
line of defense against China a hundred years ago, at the height of Russia’s imperial ambitions, it has now become the supply line which enables the poor Russians, defeated by history, to dress in trashy Chinese clothes. Instead of the duchesses and spies and generals and adventurers of half of Europe, today the Trans-Siberian carries the descendants of Genghis Khan along the path of ancient Mongolian conquests. But they too have come down in the world, traveling not as conquerors but as peddlers.

Waking up each morning I saw the endless
taiga
outside the window, and spread on a newspaper on the table the same old mutton-filled ravioli that stank up the compartment. “It keeps, without going bad, more than a week,” said my businessman companion. He told me that in Ulan Bator, toward the end of October, every family buys a whole ox, skins it and puts it out on the porch. With the cold the meat freezes, and over the winter they eat it a bit at a time. They do the same with a couple of sheep.

Among the passengers in a nearby compartment was a beautiful woman, a former mining engineer, forced now to make a living buying and selling leather jackets; another was a student of French literature who traveled with a consignment of flip-flops, tracksuits and anoraks. Normally this was her brother’s work, but their grandfather had read his future with stones and had seen that this trip would not be propitious for him, so the family had sent her instead. Each of the Mongols had invested something like $1,000 in merchandise, and figured on returning to Ulan Bator with about $3,000. They have no problem replenishing their stocks in China, and they do not require visas to enter Russia, so they profit from being in the middle.

At Marinsk, Vladimir, the headwaiter, told me to lock the door of the carriage, and the compartment door as well: that was the station of the mafia and the gangsters.

“Skolka? Skolka?”
yelled the faceless crowd in the middle of the night as the train entered the station of Ekaterinburg, where the tsar and his family had been slaughtered by the Bolsheviks. “How much? How much?” they cried, without seeing what they were buying. Handfuls of money and plastic bags of goods changed hands in the darkness. My Mongol took the opportunity to get rid of some mismatched shoes and a raincoat with a big oil stain.

Halfway through the journey I realized that I was not the only European on the train. In the last carriage was a young Frenchman with his bride, a pretty girl from the Central African Republic. In the other deluxe carriage were a Bulgarian diplomat and an elegant Parisian gentleman of seventy-four who turned out to be an architect. He had spent two weeks in Mongolia. “Interested in Buddhism?” I asked. Yes and no. His wife, he told me, was a famous clairvoyant. She had recently been paralyzed and had sent him to get “recharged” with the energy which, she said, abounds in Mongolia. She used that energy to restore people to health.

“She doesn’t claim to cure cancer, though she’s been successful with some cases, but she is particularly good with mental illnesses,” said the architect. A session with his wife lasted at least two hours. Her method was to have the patient draw first a tree—because the tree is the source, the symbol of life, he said—and then a man and a woman. Each of us, he said, is protected by seven layers of skin, some of them luminous. He enthusiastically described his last journey with his wife to the “high” places of France, those where something particularly spiritual had happened. There too she had gone to absorb energy. Once again, was it by chance that I met him?

The man was very warm and friendly, and felt much more at ease when I told him why I too was on that train. He said I must definitely go to Paris to meet his wife, and gave me his card. I kept it in my pocket for two days. Then one afternoon, watching the everlasting monotonous birches passing outside the window, it struck me that I might spend the rest of my life going from one place to another in search of fortune-tellers and seers. There would always be one who might be the best of all, always the next one. I let the wind whip the card from my hand. Watching it flutter away, I felt that I had reasserted my freedom of choice. I also decided not to go to Bulgaria to look for Vanga, and not to see any fortune-tellers in Moscow.

Another stop, another frightening mass assault on the train. It was the morning of a normal working day, but the whole town, including children who should have been in school and workers who should have been in the factory, seemed to be on the platform. Tremendous uproar, tremendous dealings. As the train began to move off again, a desperate old woman was weeping and vainly beating the door that had just
closed. She screamed that she had paid but had not been given her tracksuit. The Mongols said they had given it to her but a thief had snatched it out of her hand. There was nothing they could do.

The crowd chased after the departing train, raising a cloud of dust that obscured the station. “Africa! Africa!” said Vladimir. “Russian people great history, but system, system no good,” and he laughed. As the train gathered speed I saw the old woman disconsolately readjust the kerchief on her head and disappear amidst the dust-covered crowd.

At Barabinsk I myself was infected with the selling bug. I asked my Mongol for a raincoat. How much should I sell it for? Twenty thousand rubles. I stood for a few minutes shouting that price to the crowds, who came, felt and dashed off again. Then a young man thrust two 10,000-ruble notes into my hand and I gave him the raincoat.

Back on the train, I proudly handed the Mongol his money. He burst out laughing: I had been tricked! These were 1,000-ruble notes to which someone had skillfully added a zero. All you had to do was to rub them with a bit of saliva and off it came.

In the long hours we visited each other, back and forth. The young Frenchman came to see me with his beautiful Central African wife. He too had a story of clairvoyance to tell. A friend of his in Africa had gone to have his diarrhea cured by a witch doctor, who drew some stylized figures of men in the sand, and told him that within fifteen days he would receive news that a woman very close to him was pregnant. He refused to believe it, but a week and a half later he had a letter from his sister telling him she was expecting a child.

What can one say? That everyone has a story in which he believes. “My wife believes that in Africa there are men who turn into crocodiles,” said the Frenchman. “For her, the creatures that eat children in the river cannot just be crocodiles. She has to believe they are evil men who have become crocodiles.”

Slowly the compartment emptied out. After the city of Perm my Mongol, whose cheeks got redder and redder from beer and vodka, had sold all he had. At the following stations Russians began boarding the train with things to sell to the Mongols, who by now were loaded with money. A man came with a case full of medicines, two girls brought German pistols. My Mongol bought one of them for $150, to defend himself against the “Moscow gangsters.” Another young Russian had
nothing but a pack of cards, but with that he organized a little gambling den. At the station of Daniloff two pretty, provocative Russian women got on with their pimp, and compartment 5 of my deluxe carriage was suddenly transformed into a brothel.

All night long the train panted its way up through the Urals, leaving Siberia and its birches behind at last. At dawn the landscape opened out in broad plains full of ripe grain and dotted with houses no longer built of logs.

The restaurant car filled more and more with young “businessmen.” They boldly accosted Vladimir, ordered beer and vodka, drank, got red in the face and slumped over the tables.

Vladimir knew life, and held decided views about how the world went round. For him everything that was good, orderly, beautiful and clean was “normal.” Freedom of enterprise? “Normal.” Loving women? “Normal.” What was no longer “normal” was Russia, because there was no more order, no longer any difference between the mafia, gangsters and police—he waved his hand—“all the same,” one like another, all mixed up. “Mafia? No normal. Democracy? No normal. Russian people need dictator. Big dictator for Russia is normal. Stalin for Russia is normal.” I do not believe he said this just because Stalin was a fellow Georgian. He said it because, with the failure of Communism and the fall of the Soviet empire, people like him no longer know what to hope for; they see no one to whom they can entrust their fate.