The babies are asleep, and all of us are rocked in the huge cradle with them; back and forth we sway. On an unexpected jolt I catch the eye of the old lady who got on at Shkodra and we smile at each other.
My friend who joined us at Clapham Junction has caught the eye of a guy in a suit and I watch them jiggling together with the movement down the rails. If there was a soundtrack playing you could imagine we were at a nightclub, standing squeezed into a small space, moving in time with one another, and Janine holding the gaze of the businessman a moment longer than she should. Flirting’s safe here; like me and the old lady from Shkodra, they’ll never see each other again.
I am travelling across India on this train. It is not a journey; it’s a way of life. You can spend all day on your bunk, like being in hospital. You are excused all duties: no-one even expects you to make your own food, and children with coin-bright eyes will smilingly – as if offering a gift – pass through the window to you breads that look like hat brims, or flat cap chapattis. And the group opposite unfold lunch bundles as if it’s someone’s birthday, and teach you the names of the foods, the names of their children. We can all be family here.
The next station is Yaroslavski, preparing for the journey across Siberia. We join the train with a man with many cases. He tells us he’s a salesman but we will find out that they are mostly filled with vodka, and by Ulan Bator it will be he who is mostly filled with vodka. He’s old enough to remember when people were sent to Siberia to be imprisoned. Now the journey somehow liberates; it uncorks his bottle. Passing the open door of his cabin is to walk through a belch of spirits.
My friend has liberated something else from inside her; she lies on her bunk with her back to the cabin and as we pass through the six time zones each seems to beat her down, invisible blows sending her backwards through biography until she sobs like a child amid the pastel painted houses of the steppe.
I’m set free in a different way: no socket, so no laptop; no signal, so no phone. No junctions so no decisions to be made. I am on a train ‘trans-Siberia’. I am a hyphen; I am not going to Siberia, but I am defined by what I pass through. This journey is my destination.
I change trains at London Paddington. I will catch the connection to the Duchy of Cornwall. We will travel along the edge of the coast, where the tides of Dawlish Warren hiss onto the line. We all stare together here, imagining stories and escape, watching the huge screens of the window like a cinema audience.
The sleeper will take me to Istanbul. No mimed oxygen masks before we settle, and we board without frisking; we move without effort: this is travel as magic as a carpet.
About the Author: Elizabeth Gowing is the author of ‘Travels in Blood and Honey; becoming a beekeeper in Kosovo’ (Signal Books, 2011) – partly written on a train – and ‘Edith and I; on the trail of an Edwardian traveller in Kosovo’ (2013). She is the co-founder of the Kosovan charity, The Ideas Partnership.
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