Riding the Rails

Five days is a long time to be on a train. I understood this as an abstract concept as I planned my trip from home, but the concept only solidified into reality during the 100-plus hours of my journey. A lot can happen in five days. A lot of nothing can also happen in five days on a train. There is plenty of time for both.

After we had been underway for a while and the tickets had been collected and belongings stowed, it was time to explore my new little world. I was heartened to learn that the blustering fellow would not be the only English-speaking person along for the ride. Instead, I found a group of 7 people of approximately my own age in my very own carriage. They were from England, Scotland, and Australia and ranged in age from 19 to 24. They were doing an organized tour called The Vodka Train, and they were predictably in the mood for a good time. The first evening, they shared both their good spirits and their clear spirits with me. I had a blast discovering what drinking games are like in their parts of the world (answer: they always seem to involve lots of yelling/loud singing) and chatting about what had brought each of us to this train car through Siberia.

At some point, the loud fellow next door came and pulled me aside, asking if I knew what was going on in my room. I went to check it out, finding that the owner of the handbags had taken up residence there. My would-be protector worried about whether this Mongolian truly was assigned to my cabin, but I wasn’t worried. This guy spoke a bit of English, and we bonded over a mutual annoyance at the antics of Mr. Loud.

The Brits, Aussies, and I decided to explore the train a bit more together, and that’s when we found Ola. She was furiously smoking a cigarette in the area between two of the cars, and she replied with equal ferocity to someone’s question of whether she was Russian. Ola is Polish, and does not at all appreciate being taken for a Russian. Ola, as it turns out, is also perhaps the most unlucky person to ever ride the rails from Moscow to UB. As she was boarding the train, her phone was stolen. Not only was this an item of material value, but it also contained all of her pictures from a lengthy trip to Japan and the contact numbers she needed to use upon reaching Ulaanbaatar to get in touch with the faculty who arranged her year-long educational exchange to the National University of Mongolia. The thief had passed the stolen phone to his compatriots, and police let him go after ascertaining that he did not have it on him. In addition to an unhappy Ola, we also found a car of Russians that we were not welcome in and a dining car were a glowering fellow snapped, “What do YOU want?” as we passed through.

Right around this point, the monotony set in. There comes a point when the typical small talk has all been exhausted, and yet the level of contact is too casual to afford the chance to dig deeper without feeling like you are prying. This led to seemingly endless rounds of asking each other what we had been up to, with the obvious answers being either reading, sleeping, or eating. I divided my time mainly between watching the forests of rod-straight trees pass and hungrily devouring the books I had brought along. This routine was occasionally broken by stops at stations, which ranged from less than 5 minutes to around 25 minutes at the longest. At these stops, traders like the man I was sharing a room with would flock to the platform and hawk their wares.

I got to know my cabin mate a bit better. He informed me that his name was Choy, which I thought a bit strange for a Mongolian. He seemed quite embarrassed by his line of work, repeatedly asserting that he was unable to find a job in Mongolia and he had a baby to feed back home. He bought me ice cream and made me tea. Then, in the night, he covered me with his blanket. After that, he touched me. I will never know if he was innocently tucking the blanket around me or if his motives were less pure. There was no groping, and it wasn’t anywhere on my body that would prove his actions unambiguously impure. He was such a genuinely nice person that I have decided to think the best of this situation, but I still left immediately and bunked with Ola thereafter.

The following day was pretty much the same as any other, until it wasn’t. I had spent most of the day in Ola’s cabin, talking and watching as the scenery rolled past. She was gracious enough to share with me a Polish dessert called liquid jelly, which turned out to be quite tasty, if unusually-textured. In the evening, we sought out the Vodka Train folks to see what they were up to. We decided to join them for a few drinks, and at some point Ola slipped out to get something to eat. The next time I saw her, she was bursting into the room covered in blood, verging on hysterics as she told us that she had almost been raped.

She had fallen asleep, she said, after eating a sandwich in her cabin. She awoke to find a man in her room, touching her and trying to undo her pants. He had also taken off her money belt, which contained her passport. She pulled out a knife she had taken to carrying after her phone was stolen and refused to let the man go unless he returned her passport. At some point, she bit his arm and cut him several times about the arms and neck. A cleaning lady alerted the police, who arrived and confiscated her knife.

She left the door unlocked for me. Because she expected me to be coming to bed. If I hadn’t asked to stay with her, she would have locked it. Because of me, she didn’t.

That night, we all jumped into overdrive. We had to do something, but what was there to do? One member of the group got on the phone to his lawyer parents, and we did what we could to comfort Ola. Eventually, filled with tension and uncertainty, we all fell asleep in one of their cabins. Ola slept on their spare bed, and I spread my sleeping bag out on the floor.

Ola wanted her knife back. It was a relief to have a concrete goal that we had a chance of accomplishing. She and I set out to find the policemen who had taken it, and we soon found ourselves in the middle of a full-blown police interview. “What would you have done if you had killed this man?” What kind of a question is that? Did they expect her to say that she'd have chucked the body out the window and carried on with her nap? Ola is shaking, and I take her hand. I think about everything I have learned, read, or seen about re-victimization. The room fills with more and more men who stare at Ola as she recounts her tale. She keeps her eyes on her lap or toward the lone female officer in attendance. She rearranges the band of fabric she has wound around her watch to deter thieves, trying in vain to conceal the dark brown bloodstains that cover not only this fabric but also that of her shirt and pants. She is terrified that she will be sent to prison, and I promise not to leave her alone to such a fate.

In the end, we were told that it would be too dangerous to return the knife now, but that they will give it back when we reach Ulaanbaatar. They feared she would track down her attacker and kill him. “What do you want to do to this man now?” they asked.

We returned to my carriage, now hers as well. My Mongolian friend had disembarked, so we had my room to ourselves. Hours passed, and eventually there was sleep. There was no party that night.

I awoke early, thrilled to find that we were passing Lake Baikal. The endless expanse of water, sparsely populated by fishermen in rowboats, was a mesmerizing sight. There is so much beauty in our imperfect world.

I emerged to find that we had acquired new neighbors in the night. The first thing I did was help them deal with the police to get a report written about the phone and wallet that had been stolen as they got on the train. The police clearly recognized me. I wonder if by that point they figured I was running some sort of an insurance scam. They were very polite; the report was written and they even asked me how Ola was doing.

Bu the final day on the train, we had all become quite adept at waiting. We waited, of course, for the train to arrive in Ulaanbaatar. We waited for the next station at which the train would stop, and then we waited to get underway again. We waited to get together in the evening, and we waited until everyone woke up in the morning. But none of this prepared me for the level of waiting I was to experience that day.

I spent the early part of the day waiting to reach the Russian border with Mongolia. When this finally happened, it meant several hours of suspended animation. We sat in semi-darkness, curtains drawn across the windows to obscure our surroundings, which we were told were "confidential." We were given forms to fill out, and we sat for hours waiting for someone to collect them. Finally, after each passenger's form was stamped not once, not twice, but but FIVE times and a cursory search of the cabins showed no concealed cannons or ax murders, we were on our way. This meant we crossed a forbidding no-man's land into Mongolia, where we were subjected to more forms and more waiting. A few hours later, we were on our way again. After one last hurrah with the Vodka Train group, I packed the last of my things and fell asleep, to awaken a few hours later as the train pulled into the station at Ulaanbaatar.

I made it!