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I ignore her last words and greet the others. I ask if they had a good night.
“No,” comes the collective response.
So it wasn’t just me.
“I slept really well,” says Hilal, unaware that she is provoking the general wrath of her fellow travelers. “My carriage is right in the middle of the train, and so it doesn’t lurch about so much. This is the worst possible carriage to be traveling in.”
My publisher seems as though he’s about to make some rude comment but restrains himself. His wife looks out the window and lights a cigarette to disguise her irritation. My editor pulls a face that says more clearly than any words: “Didn’t I tell you she’d be in the way?”
“Every day I’m going to write down a thought and stick it on the mirror,” says Yao, who also appears to have slept well.
He gets up, goes over to the mirror in the lounge, and sticks a bit of paper on it, which says: “If you want to see a rainbow you have to learn to like the rain.”
No one is too keen on this optimistic saying. One doesn’t have to be a mind reader to know what’s going through everyone’s head: “Good grief, is this what it’s going to be like for another nine thousand kilometers?”
“I’ve got a photo on my cell phone I’d like to show you,” says Hilal. “And I brought my violin with me, too, if anyone wants to listen to some music.”
We’re already listening to the music from the radio in the kitchen. The tension in the carriage is rising. Any moment now, someone is going to explode, and I won’t be able to do anything about it.
“Look, just let us eat our breakfast in peace. You’re welcome to join us if you want. Then I’m going to try to get some sleep. I’ll look at your photo later.”
There is a noise like thunder. A train passes, traveling in the opposite direction, something that happened throughout the night with frightening regularity. And far from reminding me of the gentle rocking of a cradle, the swaying of the carriage felt much more like being inside a cocktail shaker. I feel physically ill and very guilty for having dragged all these other people along on my adventure. I’m beginning to understand why, in Portuguese, a fairground roller coaster is called a montanha-russa, or Russian mountain.
Hilal and Yao the translator make several attempts to start a conversation, but no one at the table—the two publishers, the wife of one of the publishers, the writer whose idea this trip was—takes them up. We eat our breakfast in silence. Outside, the landscape repeats itself over and over—small towns, forests, small towns, forests.
One of the publishers asks Yao, “How long before we reach Ekaterinburg?”
“Just after midnight.”
There is a general sigh of relief. Perhaps we can change our minds and say that enough is enough. You don’t need to climb a mountain in order to know that it’s high; you don’t have to go all the way to Vladivostok to be able to say that you’ve traveled on the Trans-Siberian Railway.
“Right. I’m going to try and get some sleep.”
I stand up. Hilal stands up, too.
“What about the piece of paper? And the photo on my cell phone?”
Piece of paper? Ah, of course, the permission she needs to be able to visit our carriage. Before I can say anything, Yao has written something in Russian for me to sign. Everyone—including me—glares at him.
“Would you mind adding ‘once a day,’ please?”
Yao does this, then gets up and says that he’ll go in search of a guard willing to stamp the document.
“And what about the photo?”
By now, I’ll agree to anything if I can just return to my compartment and sleep, but I don’t want to annoy my companions, who are, after all, paying for this trip. I ask Hilal to go with me to the other end of the carriage. We open the first door and find ourselves in a small area with two exterior doors and a third leading to the next carriage. The noise there is unbearable because, as well as the racket made by the wheels on the rails, there is the grinding noise made by the metal plates linking the carriages.
Hilal shows me the photo on her cell phone, possibly taken just after dawn. It’s a photo of a long cloud in the sky.
“Do you see?”
Yes, I can see a cloud.
“We’re being accompanied on this journey.”
We’re being accompanied by a cloud that will long since have disappeared forever. I continue to acquiesce in the hope that the conversation will soon be over.
“Yes, you’re right. But let’s talk about it later. Now go back to your own compartment.”
