Free Midnight in Siberia: A Train Journey into the Heart of Russia by David Greene Page B

cents). Sergei and I say yes to both. The train lurches forward and backward a few times, acting like an aging person revving up the momentum to crawl out of bed. And finally, train No. 240 settles on to her path out of Moscow, picking up speed. It seems like Sergei and I will be alone in the compartment tonight. Sure, it means more space and more privacy. And yet I’m disappointed.

4 • ANOTHER SERGEI
    A S THE TRAIN moves away from the station, a younger woman, perhaps in her late twenties, and a man around Sergei’s age appear outside the door to our compartment. They are lurking quietly—as it turns out, waiting for me and Sergei to move. They boarded at the last minute and are just now making it to their compartment— our compartment.
    Following a custom Sergei taught me, we lower-bed dwellers politely move out of the compartment, allowing our roommates space to spread out their linens and make their upper beds. This requires using our lower beds as footspace while reaching above to arrange things. The four of us finally make our beds and get situated, and all seem exhausted. We chat enough for me to learn that the young woman is Ilona. Her long blond hair is pulled back in a ponytail, with a Russian Orthodox cross dangling down over her brown sweater. Travel fatigue is evident in her eyes. “I live in two places right now.” She is speaking Russian, Sergei is translating, and I am keeping my questions to a minimum as we are way past bedtime. “My boyfriend lives in Moscow. I was visiting him. Now I’m heading home to central Russia.” Traveling so often, Ilona sees the train as a third home.
    The Russian rails carry nearly a billion riders per year. Ilona is in second class on a ten-hour trip, a ticket that likely cost her in the neighborhood of three thousand rubles (about one hundred dollars). Had she chosen third class, she could have made the trip for perhaps half that. Our ticket for the four-hour journey to Yaroslavl was 1,200 rubles per person (forty dollars). Much depends on the quality of the particular train, but it’s possible to get a third-class seat from Moscow to Vladivostok—six days, six thousand miles—for as little as two hundred dollars one way. More well-off Russians use the train to see family whenever they wish, or to travel to somewhere like Moscow or St. Petersburg for vacation. Russians with less money, especially in remote villages, might spend months or even years scraping together enough money for one third-class ticket to see a family member in a place that takes a few days to reach.
    Rounding out our foursome tonight is Viktor, whom I recognize as a fellow member of the team admonished for using electronic ticketing.
    Outside our window, everything is masked by darkness. But I know what’s out there, since I left Moscow for Vladivostok in daylight last time. The landscape is whizzing by. Vast, sprawling Moscow first: endless blocks of bland Soviet-style apartment buildings, colorful mega-malls with IKEA furniture stores, flower shops, and produktys , or minimarts. Then the city will give way to snowy forests and the occasional crumbling village, with smoke rising from a few chimneys. By far, Russia takes up more of the earth than any other country. I knew this. But the earlier Trans-Siberian trip I did back in 2011 made me feel it. Four, five, six hours would pass, and all we would see outside was empty, white wilderness. Then a forest. Then a small city, with some decaying buildings—often an empty Soviet factory. Then hours more of nothing. The map would show that these hours barely made a dent in the trip across the country.
    Last time I did this leg from Moscow to Yaroslavl, I wandered into the adjacent compartment and sat down for a while with a man named Sergei Yovlev, an employee of Russian Railways. He’s in his fifties and often travels by train back and forth between Moscow and his hometown of Yaroslavl. Sergei is a midlevel bureaucrat, and I got the feeling his