Requiem, of Sorts, for Erick
It's(1) 3:00am in Mongolia(1.5). We passed the Russian border with some difficulty around 7 and in +/-three hours we'll disembark for a 5 day trek outside Ulaanbatar. Much of the population of the train is headed for UB too and as such today has felt like the end of something -- tonight in the dining car a young man named David celebrated his 21st birthday and the car sang to him and his coupe-mates hugged him and took photographs and it's somewhere in that breakneck speed with which relationships are picked up and dropped that the source of this train's charm rests as does the melancholy we've felt as we looked at today's schedule. Earlier we spent three hours kind of trudging hopelessly around the terminally grim Russian border town Naushki -- wild dogs followed us throughout; men on aged motorcycles begged us for money; a herd of hollow-eyed cattle fed and scratched themselves on the dead scrub and overgrowth of a park festooned with decayed monuments to a collapsed empire; and the thirty or so Dutch from our train quietly drank cans of beer they purchased from a shop whose Pepsi refrigerator is controlled by a key fob because: crime It took nearly seven stultified hours to finally pass through Russian/Mongolian customs -- seven hours for the train to travel ten miles(1.75) -- and when we weren't allowed off the train we killed time with our new roommate John Wang (real name) of Beijing who peppered us with arbitrary factoids not unlike those from the little boy in Jerry Maguirre: "The United States has two political parties" he said during a particularly long silence; after another, "Oh Russian women. Vodka"(2).
We were packing up our bags when Erick again alighted our doorway. Erick has had a difficult 24 hours - his group has had it with him (it's the drinking and the smoking and the language and the hygiene) and last night he was in something very close to a fist-fight with one provanista while another tried to drag him away and an hour after midnight he was found sort of lost by the samovar in only the same tee-shirt he's worn these past five days and a revealing pair of black briefs. Tonight at last he's changed his clothing and he says to us, "Have you seen the star beneath the moon?" and as we look out the window he comes in and sits down. His hubris all gone, tonight he is sober and middle-aged and sad and when he talks there isn't a thing he says that doesn't sound like regret. Later he tells me that his mother is 76 years old and divorcing and his brother doesn't care and it's all on him to sort it out. I think about how far we've come since he was calling me stupid in the galley. Then his voice cracks and he says, "This woman birthed me and she wiped my (omitted) and she fed me from her breast. That's not a debt I can just ignore, you know?". I don't say anything. To stop from crying he does this heartbreaking thing where he fumbles in his bag and finds a business card and passes it off to me and as he leaves he says, "You look at your parents, and all you see is your own mess" and in that moment the world is again a lonely and beautiful and unknowable place.
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(1) A note on format: I'm writing this on an iPhone in the Notes app somewhere in Siberia where Internet access is extraordinarily expensive. Apologies for: brevity, lack of clarity, and extreme sloppiness in presentation/typography/etc).
(1.5) You aren't stupid, and I don't want to hide behind the construct that, like, at 3:00am I wrote the following blog entry and posted it and that's that. In truth: one major supposed thrill of the TSR is to disembark at Irkutsk and see Lake Balkail but to disembark the TSR is also to create a series of logistical nightmares because there are only a few TSR trains and to get off is to have to wait for up to seven full days to get back on and because we're both old/married/etc our timeline for this trip is pretty finite and once our ticketing agent told us our only ticketing options included 6 nights in Mongolia we were pretty much stuck with not-seeing the lake (which is apparently as beautiful a lake as there is [subjectivity understood]. We were told we'd be passing the lake sometime around 3 - which is just-about-sunup on the train - and we stayed up long enough to not see the lake because of a poorly timed storm, and then I turned on my iPhone and began fat-fingering away. In all likelihood 85 minutes passed between word 1 and actual posting, and then I went to the sort of pigeon-sleep that you get on the TSR.
(1.75). I'm making up the mileage here, but not hyperbolically -- border crossing is real drudgery/inefficiency (which isn't to say I don't understand there are complications here; just that it seems like it could pass more quickly). Strangely, crossing out of Russia is significantly more exacting a process than crossing in -- for sixty minutes or so you are quite literally locked on the train: all windows are ordered closed, as are all blinds, and Russian soldiers go from coupe to coupe inspecting bags and storage bins and passports and visas with varying rigor (for example -- the soldier in our car banged on the coupe walls with a nightstick [not a joke], opened our storage bin, looked at [but not in] our bags, and moved on; the soldier in our other-friend-David's compartment opened his bags and unpacked them, demanded to see evidence that his daughter was in fact his daughter, etc. etc), and drug dogs search each car. Then the train is emptied and another two hours are killed walking around town and being harassed by terrifying locals. Then the train is re-boarded and the +/-10 miles into Mongolia are traveled, and then the Mongolian customs agents come on board and perform a much lighter version of the previous. Seven hours after the Russian Border is first encountered, the train rolls on.
(2). Verbatim.