Scenes from the Soviet Train and Communion

There’s a meditativeness to riding the train at night.  The whole things sways and breathes and churns, the noise of track whooshing out from behind you, like the whooshing breaths of the people who sleep curled into berths.   You sway and breathe and woosh with it.

When you arrive, you bump past the other people, but you don’t mumble apologies.  They are in your way.  The train is about business, when it comes to getting on and getting off.  There are six berths in your little quadrat- two run along the side of the train, one up, one down.  The lower one has a little table that flips up.  The aisle also runs along the length of the train of course, along these two bunks.  Across from it there are four sandwiched in between wall-like partitions.

You heft your bags into the hidden cupboard beneath your berth, arrange the provided sheets and thin fabric mattress not according to how you like it, but according to tradition.  As the train begins to move, it is no longer business, it is chai.

Each quadrat has a hodge-podge family – whomever you are, where ever you’ve come from, whatever you had or didn’t have, you now have a family.  Your food is their food, their food is your food.  Your story becomes their story (because as time drags on down the tracks, they will tell your story a hundred times to anyone who will listen).  Their food becomes your food.  Their story is now tangled up in your own, a random arrangement of people who meet at a singularly precise moment in their lives, to live a handful of long hours together.

There are children, of course.  They race up and down the aisle, bumping into feet of sleeping grandmothers, squealing with delight.  Arms of women thrust deftly from the banks of berths to scoop them up, vigorously rub the rosily-dirty cheeks and then thrust the piglets back into the aisle.  You want to play too of course, except somehow it seems the cutest of them never speaks the languages you know, and for a moment you feel disenfranchised by the unluckiness of it all – and worse, that you are an adult.

The ultimate disenfranchisement.

A few words bubble up in the back of your mind, like people long forgotten – friends, ones you parted with on good terms, friends you’re glad to think of again.

You make a joke to one of the piglets when the train lurches.  ’As-ta-roj-na!’ you intone,  ’Be careful!’ and the child squeals with the delight of a child who understands that fear isn’t funny at all, but pretend fear is, and therefore hilarity is warrented.

Of course, now, for the next sixteen hours of the train ride, you will hear ‘Astarojna’ accompanied by peals of raccous laughter each time the train lurches.  At least once every 15 minutes.

You drink tea with your quadrat family, eat with them, drift in and out of conversations with them.  For a little while you find solace in your iPod, in Ingrid Michaelson telling you to ‘just keep breathing.’  Really, it’d be impossible not to.  You’ve become part of the organism of the train now, a tiny, interlocking part.  You have to breathe with it.  It’s a complusion.

Some men have formed a tight knot, and you listen to them talk about things they know nothing about, but assert with prowess of voice and fists that bash madly in the air.  It’s better, even, when they talk about the country you are from.  Your very presence in the train has provoked them, somehow unsettled this very local culture.  Women chime in, their mouths unwilling to stop, gossip and barefaced lies dripping from their chins.  The fumes from the ignorance are like pepper spray.  They think you don’t understand them, but you do.

One woman glances your way, and comments, “What a mess.”  You catch her eye, “Can I help you?”  Her eyes snap open, startled from the lull of comforting lies, and she turns to her companions.  ”She understands,” she murmurs under her breath.

You have peace again.

And then comes the night.  You slip your feet from the tapiski, and pull yourself up and up into your top bunk bed.  Curling into a ‘c’ you sit there in the dark.  Swallowed whole by the train and the people and the woosh of the rails.

The baby breathes ”Astarojna’ and giggles softly.  The mother hushes.

The train lurches on and on.

Ingrid Michaelson is playing again, but this time only in your mind.

This is peace.