Starting To Look Endearing

The dining car is really a godsend.  I can sit at a table, drink a cup of coffee and charge my devices, write, read, and at least in the morning have comparative silence, once they open the car up.  There are a few interruptions this morning.  I don’t have a charger.  I suppose I’ll get that later.  I don’t have a phone.  I’d better get that later.  I can’t go and look for these things because a young woman with a baby is sleeping in “my” bed.  Let me explain. 

My stepson did a wonderful job of arranging to secure the train tickets for everyone.  But at the last minute he wrote the train office about the possibility of cancelling his ticket.  They immediately cancelled his ticket.  He called to say “no!”  But it was too late.  So he bought one at the Vladivostok station.  It was, of course, in another car.  When we boarded the train we found out that this meant we were not four people together in one car.  Rather, we were three together and one, upper bunk, next door.  My son’s seat then, all the way down in another car.  The night we boarded a man was in our cabin.  I offered him 1000 rubles to take the bunk next door and . . . he accepted.  But he knew he was only going to Chita. 

Last night at 11:00PM we rolled into Chita.  I was prepared to offer two thousand or three thousand if necessary.  A determined woman, as women with babies generally, are stormed into “our” cabin.  Our pleas, typed on my phone’s translate app, for her to consider the spot next door were to no avail.  My suggestion that two or three thousand rubbles might change her mind were similarly met with a “niet.”  Yes.  Well.  That’s that, then. 

I gathered my things, threw open the cab next door where two men and a woman sleeping started up, ever so glad to meet me and I began to make my top bunk.  In the process of bringing things over remembering what else I might need I misplaced my phone.  It’s ten hours later and I still don’t know where it is.  I remember showing my phone to the woman.  I remember bringing my computer and coat and things and flopping them on my top bunk.  It was dark.  Meanwhile in my old room, the lady was breast feeding on what used to be my spot.  

With only the greatest discipline I let it go and went to bed.  The other guy on the top bunk was watching something on his phone.  I was, of course, horribly jealous.  Was it him or the idiot downstairs who was listening to tinny club music on his phone.  Maybe it was my phone.  All the Slavic faces that were just starting to look endearing now seemed capable of base thievery.  In theory, I reckoned, as I tossed and turned, trying to get comfortable, one of these two, (it couldn’t have been the woman, I reasoned) had looked over and swiped my phone swiftly, and put it somewhere.  It’s possible.  It’s unlikely.  But it’s possible.   I’ve seen worse things transpire. 

In the morning, I was up before any of my new neighbors.  I relieved myself.  I read a few chapters of old Peter Kropotkin’s “Memoirs of a Revolutionist.”  I’ve read this book before.  When I was seventeen and found it in the Poughkeepsie Public Library.  It was, as I recall one of my first exposures to a Russian life.   And most importantly I remember his ride out to Siberia as a young geologist.  I don’t usually read things “again.”  In fact I never do, though I have been reading wonderful, beloved books aloud to my daughters as they’ve grown.  This book was a turning point for the teenage me, as I recall.  And, as I achingly tossed and turned in my bed, debating whether or not to pass gas.  I was quite happy to be back with Kropotkin and his remarkable tales of sitting on the Tsar Nicholas knee and asking for biscuits.  

Soon, I will go an mount the search for phone.  Without the phone I have no Wifi.  Without the phone I have no camera.  I have no ability to translate text.  We all know this.  These damned things have become indispensable.  Soon, I hope, I will dispel the gnawing doubt I have about my fellow man in the bunk below me. 

Wednesday 6/27/18