A Merry Dance Around the World With Eric Newby (37 page)

‘Where is everyone?’ Otto said, loaded down with equipment and fed up with all this. ‘How am I supposed to take photographs of a factory with no workers in it?’

‘This is the dinner break,’ said Mr Beresnev. ‘All the workers are in the canteen.’

‘Well, then, let’s go to the canteen.’

When we reached the canteen, it was populated by about forty or fifty men and women, many of them elderly, some of them wearing white coats – none of them wearing the sort of dungarees that the machine-minders had on. It was obvious from their garb that, whoever they were, they all hailed from the clean-hands departments, and that this was
their
canteen. There was not a single grease mark of the sort that the grimy beings we had seen could not have failed to leave on the surface of the spotless tables; and, anyway, the canteen was much too small to accommodate even a third part of the day shift. Wherever the workers ate it was not here.

‘Well, where are the workers?’ Otto said.

‘Unfortunately,’ said Mr Beresnev, ‘they have just gone back on shift. But now,’ he went on, indicating a table at which other managerial persons were hovering, waiting for us to join them, covered with a spotless cloth and with a whole battery of wine and other glasses at each place setting, ‘it is time for us to eat.’

‘Tell me,’ Mr Beresnev asked, leaning across the table towards me, in the course of what was proving to be a copious and excellent luncheon. ‘Do you believe in God?’

It was an unusual question to be asked by the technical information bureau chief of a wire factory, even though it was 5300 miles east of Moscow.

‘Mr Beresnev,’ I said, ‘I don’t know what your feelings are about this matter, but one thing I am certain about is that, if there is no such thing as God, you wouldn’t be showing me round your wire factory.’

Later that afternoon a small, highly intelligent woman, who had an excellent command of English, took us round the Arboretum of the Far East Forestry Research Institute. It was a charming, old-fashioned place, founded in 1935 on the site of a tree nursery, set up about 100 years ago to supply Khabarovsk with saplings. Now hemmed in by buildings, it was almost miraculously preserved, together with its 1300 sorts of trees and shrubs indigenous to the Soviet Far East.

While we were ambling about it, Mischa showed signs of impatience, as he always did whenever we visited anything faintly old or of pre-revolutionary date; but at last he succeeded in getting us back into the waiting cars. There was a further delay while our guide went off to get for me the last copy the Arboretum possessed, other than its file copy, of a descriptive pamphlet to it written in English.

‘Vod is dis life,’ she said, ignoring Mischa and his colleagues, as she presented it to me, ‘if full of care, ve haf no time to stand and stare.’

That evening at 6.25 p.m. local time (11.25 a.m. Moscow time) we boarded the
Vostok
, the night train to Nakhodka. By this time the
Rossiya
had already been six hours in Vladivostok, and in another four hours fifty minutes would be starting on the return journey to Moscow.

The
Vostok
was made up of a half-dozen green passenger cars, drawn by an electric engine, and from the outside looked no different to any normal Russian passenger train. On the inside it was fantastic, a train-that-never-was, something that might have been designed by Beaton for Garbo, using for money the three-year box office take from
My Fair Lady
: the perfect train, kept forever behind the wall in Plato’s Cave, of which only distorted shadows are seen in the outer world, all shining mahogany, brass and scintillating glass.

Each of the two-berth compartments was loaded with mahogany, some of it gilded. The mahogany armchair was covered in red plush (and so was the brass door chain) and the coved roof was also banded with mahogany. The finely chased door furniture was solid brass, and the screws in the brass door hinges had been aligned by some artisan so that each of the cuts in the heads of the screws was parallel with the ones below it and next to it. The mahogany table had a brass rim round it; there were brass rails around the luggage compartment overhead to stop the cabin trunks crashing between one’s ears, the ashtrays were solid brass, and the cut-glass ceiling light had a brass finial on it.

On the floor there was a thick red and green Turkey carpet. On the beds snow-white pillows had been arranged in a manner that suggested that this work had been performed by a parlourmaid who had majored in household management around 1903. The sheets were freshly ironed and so were the white voile curtains which were also supported on a brass rail.

In the bathroom, with which the compartment was connected by way of a mahogany door, there was a full-length looking glass, a stainless steel washbasin as big as a font, furnished with nickel-plated taps (the sort that stay on once you have turned them on), and the stainless steel lavatory basin had a polished mahogany seat. The shower head was attached to a flexible tube. The towels were thick and sumptuous and the heavy water carafe held two litres. Illumination in the bathroom was provided by a frosted glass window which gave on to the corridor. On the outside this window was embellished with an art-nouveau motif, also in solid brass, and in the corridor this motif was echoed in the decoration of the ceiling lights. The corridor, in which golden curtains oscillated with the movement of the train (which, admittedly was far more bumpy than that of the
Rossiya)
, was provided with a number of tip-up seats, also upholstered in red plush, for those who had grown weary while on the way to and from the restaurant car, and the carpet was the same as those in the compartments.

And everything worked. If this was not enough, our particular car was equipped with the most beautiful conductress I had seen on the Russian or any other railway system. She was reputed to be of Czech origin. Perhaps the whole thing came from Czechoslovakia, for it was newly built, and she with it. If it was built in Russia, where had the Russians found the artisans to build it? From the same source that produced the men and women who refurbished the Summer Palace at Tsarskoye Selo?

The train trundled out of Khabarovsk past allotment plots, soldiers laying track in a siding; over level crossings with long queues of lorries, their drivers fuming; through marshalling yards in which disembodied, gravelly voices were giving instructions through loudspeakers mounted on poles; past long trains of red, yellow and black tank waggons being shoved up inclines by bright green diesels, the
Vostok
mooing, the factory chimneys belching black and yellow smoke; running past stagnant ponds and fatigued-looking trees, out into the country where the ponds were clearer, red in the now-setting sun: out between the two hills, now with mist rising around them, that we had seen from the one-time site of Muravyev-Amursky’s statue that morning. On to Vyazemskiy, a very-close-to-the-Chinese-frontier town which was immediately to the west across the always invisible Ussuri. There the train halted for five minutes, long enough for Wanda to borrow a bike from the station-mistress and go for a ride on it.

It was a brilliant evening. To the east the country was open and rolling. The fields along the line of the railway were full of strawberries in flower, currants and raspberries and sweetcorn.

All through the twilight the
Vostok
rolled along the frontier with long views, across expanses of open plain, of hills and mountains that were in China. To the right of the line in one section there was a continuous wire fence with a splayed top. It was about seven feet high and showed signs of being electrified. Beyond it there was a wide strip of freshly raked earth. At kilometre mark 8672 the fence turned away westwards towards the heights above the Ussuri on the Russian side, where the watch towers were silhouetted against an apple green sky that had small, black bands of cloud floating in it.

Then we had dinner. If the restaurant car was anything to go by, there was not a single Russian passenger on this train. In fact, the
Vostok
was not a train run for the benefit of Russians. It was the boat train for the Russian ferry service from Nakhodka to Yokohama and Hong Kong, and the passengers, all of whom were from capitalist countries, were bearers of valuable foreign currency. The Japanese on board were nothing like the little men in black suits who work for Mitsubishi and get married by numbers, but up-to-date people who regarded a suit as something you got buried in. The Americans were mostly one-time love children from Haight-Ashbury, now grown up and thinking about their mortgages: the men had moustaches and suits from the Cable Car Clothiers, and their girls were in easy-to-pack cotton jersey; and from what one could hear, all of them had made the great leap forward into the Psychobabble era while living in Marin.

But it was fun in the restaurant car with the lovely big drinks coming. No shortages on this train, of anything, and the pretty waitresses smiled and stopped to chat, after bringing to you items that were always ‘off on the
Rossiya
. But in spite of it all I still thought nostalgically of the
Rossiya
, simply because we had spent so much time together.

‘And now,’ Mischa said, ‘we are going to a conference with the Mayor of Nakhodka.’

We were sitting in the lounge of a hotel on the outskirts of the town. From its windows there was a view that included Partizanskaya Creek, the sugar loaf hill which was called the ‘Sister’, and some spoil barges. It was as cold and grey as ever. With us was a ‘journalist’ who never left us and never opened his mouth in our presence, except to put food in it: if he was a journalist, which seemed highly unlikely, he must have worked for a paper catering for the deaf and dumb. There was also a rather nice girl from Intourist.

‘Listen Mischa,’ I said. ‘As we were coming into Nakhodka on the
Vostok
you asked me if I wanted to meet the Mayor and I said I didn’t. Remember?’

‘I don’t want to meet the Mayor, either,’ said Otto.

‘There isn’t any point in my meeting the Mayor,’ Wanda said. ‘I don’t want to photograph him and I don’t want to interview him.’

‘What we really do want to see is the fishing port, and we also want to go on board one of the big fishing ships,’ I said. ‘And before that we want to see the ferry leave for Yokohama.’

‘It is all arranged, the meeting with the Mayor. He is already waiting for us. It was arranged from Khabarovsk. Besides, there is no fishing port at Nakhodka,’ Mischa said. By this time he was becoming angry.

‘Well if there’s no fishing port, how do you account for Nakhodka being the base for your ocean-going fishing fleet in the Far East?’

‘That is so,’ said the girl from Intourist, proud of her native place. ‘There is a fishing port. It is the biggest.’

‘You’re playing us a dirty trick, Mischa,’ I said, really very angry myself by this time. ‘Just because you want to get some copy out of the Mayor of Nakhodka there’s no earthly reason why we have to go too. You go. We want to see the ferry leave for Yokohama.’

‘Watch what you’re saying, Newby, or it will be the worse for you,’ he shouted, and went off in a fury, taking the journalist and the Intourist girl with him, no doubt to give her a rocket for letting him down over the fishing fleet.

After a few minutes he came back, with the journalist but without her, having cooled down a bit by this time.

‘The fishing port is being reconstructed, and you cannot visit it,’ he said. ‘I have cancelled your visit to the Mayor, and will go and see him myself. He was extremely displeased. This gentleman and the Intourist guide will accompany you to the ferry terminus.’

We stood on the quay outside the ferry terminal building, which resembled a huge, old wooden hunting lodge in Red Indian country, watching the other passengers from the
Vostok
going up the gangplank of the good ship
Baikal
past a frontier guard who stood at the foot of it. The Japanese were so heavily laden with loot from Europe that some of them failed to get up the gangplank with it and had to make two journeys. Soon the ship’s side was manned by dozens of our newly found, and equally soon to be lost, friends, all waving.

They continued to wave for the next thirty minutes until twelve noon, when the
Baikal
cast off and the tugs began to take her out, until she was far from the quay, and we had no alternative but to wave back at them all this time, without stopping, as the three of us were the only people seeing them off.

‘Lucky bastards,’ Otto said. ‘Providing they don’t run into a typhoon in a couple of days they’ll be sniffing cherry blossom.’

‘In June, in Yokohama?’ I said. ‘You must be joking.’

Late the following afternoon I stood with Wanda on some high ground above the port area beside an enormous hoarding with a poster stuck on it which showed a female worker making
WHAM! POW!
with her clenched fist and shouting ‘Peace to the People!’ There was a bitter wind from the north-east, the sea was choppy and the temperature was around 41°F. Looking down on the fishing port, which in spite of what Mischa said seemed to be flourishing, its fish-canning and can-making factories, its miles of quay, its shipbuilding yards, its 300-ton floating crane, one of two in the USSR (the other is in the Black Sea) which had been towed round the Cape of Good Hope, and its big dry dock which had been brought 15,000 miles from Klaipedia in Lithuania by the same route, it was difficult to believe that at the end of the war there had been nothing here but a few shacks. Now Nakhodka was a city of 120,000 people and the biggest commercial port in the Soviet Far East; and when Vostochnyy, the Eastern Port, really gets going, around 1990, it will have five times the annual turnover of Nakhodka, which is now 9 million tons a year, 75 per cent of which is foreign trade cargo. We had been to Vostochnyy, by boat across the bay, and had damn nearly frozen to death there. It was almost completely automated and utterly eerie, out there in the wilderness, with huge yards for exporting lumber which was moved about by Hitachi travelling gantries each of which could lift 16 tons; and it was also a stop-off for containers from the United States and Japan which from here were sent by the Trans-Continental Route to Europe. It was being built with Japanese capital, and somewhere there on the shores of Vrangel Bay the 10,000 men and women who were building it were living in huts, although we saw no more than half a dozen all the time we were there.