The lack of provisions left me no choice but to try out the food in the restaurant wagon. I hesitated till now, because I knew it wasn’t that brilliant from my previous experience on these trains.
I walked across corridors through many wagons and staggered into the restaurant wagon, which was decorated in deep blue. A Russian waiter in blue uniform appeared and, in a famously direct and head-on, London-Chinatown-Wong-Kei style, asked me to sit at the end table near the door.
Then the first thing he said to me when he came to my table was: ‘Where you from? I’m from Moscow. Where you from?’
‘I’m from Taiwan originally, but now I just came from London.’ That made him laugh, for some reasons. Then other customers called him over to their table.
The restaurant looked quite full, so I waited patiently for him to come back to take my order. But twenty minutes passed. The waiter didn’t come back.
Once he walked pass me, and simply said: ‘Wait, wait.’ OK, I’ll wait. Another twenty minutes went past, and he wouldn’t even look my way. I was beginning to think that maybe he had something against me, or against someone of my background?
The waiter came back to my table in the end. He leaned on the tables with both hands, as if he now had some time to spare. ‘My name is Andre. What is yours?’
When I answered him, he said to me, to my surprise: ‘The restaurant is very full now. No point waiting. If you come back at 9pm, you can be sure you will have a lot of food and not many people around. Can you come back?’
I was intrigued. I’ve always found rude people intriguing. I wondered if what he told me was true. Did he tell me to return to the restaurant wagon just to be funny, to play a joke on me, to insult me? Or, could he be serious – 9pm may be the best time to dine in their restaurant?
You know me – I went back to the restaurant wagon at 9pm sharp. There were no customers and the tables were all cleaned. So he did tell me the truth… Andre sat me down at his working table at the end of the aisle, and handed me a cup of black coffee. ‘Ah, very busy day today!’ he sighed, sitting down opposite me.
‘Do you always work this late?’ I asked.
‘Yes! Often!’ he said with his eyes wide open, with conviction, ‘I work eighteen hours a day.’
‘Eighteen hours?!’ I was surprised to hear how over-worked he is.
‘Vat is your job?’ he asked.
‘Oh, I do writing mostly.’
‘Writing? You said writing? That’s a job?’ he asked again, raising his eyebrows and shaking his head.
For him not to carry on belittling my work, I changed the subject: ‘May I have a look at your menu?’
‘Menu?’ he said as if he forgot his offer of my returning to eat here. ‘The restaurant is closed.’
‘But you told me there will be food and I can eat here after 9pm,’ I protested.
‘No. I said you come back at 9pm. Not for food, but drinks only,’ Andre debated without a look of concern.
Despite hunger, I didn’t want to make a fuss with him – if he is the man who runs the show here, I’d better just forget about the food offer tonight. What the hell, let’s drink.
Andre gave me a beer and handed me a Parliament cigarette. ‘Too much work, all the time,’ he continued talking about work. ‘I do everything here, you know – taking orders, keeping restaurant clean, doing paperwork. Everything.’
‘What paperwork?’
‘Accounts! Money!’ he grabbed a notebook of accounts and waved them in my face.
‘Moscow office want to see this when we finish the whole journey. I spend too much time doing these accounts.’
‘Is it the restaurant making much money on this route?’
‘No, no. Not enough money! I don’t understand why these Europe tourists don’t come to restaurant much. They must have money. But they always tell me restaurant is too expensive!’ he sneered.
I saw on the menu later that a basic full meal (with salad/soup and coffee) costs around £10 in the restaurant which is a lot for a route accompanied by cheap food outside the window all along.
But Andre carried on: ‘I don’t understand. Europe tourists are rich. Why they so tight?’ he clenched his fist, gesturing the stinginess of the Europeans.
‘Well, some tourists are on a tight budget. They aren’t all rich,’ I explained.
He shrugged in disbelief. I suddenly had a déjà vu of cynicism Russian-style.
But there is one thing about Andre that doesn’t conform to the stereotypical image of a Russian man – he doesn’t drink at all. Not one drop. This was puzzling in the knowledge that he was always stressed out and moaning.
‘I work on this train all my working life,’ he told me more, ‘Twenty long years! Twenty years of looking out this window…I work all the routes, the Moscow-Beijing line, the Moscow-Ulaanbaatar line, and the Moscow-Irkutsk line. I know the train like my home.’
Andre also knows the train’s history like his own diary. ‘It was not an easy job to build the railway, you know. The route must go through so, so many forests, rivers, mountains and quagmires. You imagine engineering at the time! And the use of labour was too difficult a job. They got workers from all over Russia and other countries. They worked from morning till night, in extreme weather conditions, too. Many workers died from diseases, or attacks from wild animals.’
‘The railway construction began in the southern Urals. We call it the western Siberia – where we are now. This section was the most easy part of the railway to build. Many workers at that time, you know, they came from the villages around. It was built from 1892-1896, some 1,440 kilometers, from Chelyabinsk through Omsk and the Ob River. But the train doesn’t go pass Chelyabinsk anymore.’
I tried to imagine what it’s like to live and work on the rail. For us travelers, Siberia is full of wild beauty. I wonder if the wilderness is still beautiful when it is a day-and-night routine? and whether Andre’s life has been sucked into this changeable landscape of wonders and harshness?
Andre gave me more clues: ‘Siberia is like a long, big job each time we set off the journey. I feel exhausted from the first moment of departure…I don’t see life outside the windows. On this route, me and my four colleagues do five days’ work, non-stop, from Moscow to Naushki, a dead town on the border.’
‘A dead town?’
‘Yes, and that’s where we have our five-day break. When you continue your journey to Ulaanbaatar or Beijing, we stay in Naushki on our wagons for five days. But I don’t really rest. I’m in charge of the restaurant so I need to do paperwork in my break. You know, I told you, doing accounts.’
I nodded.
‘After that, we work another five long days on the train back to Moscow.’
‘So you can spend time with your family then,’ I said.
‘We only have one to two days’ break in Moscow when they give us break. Not everytime they give us break, you see. They may send us to another route as soon as we get back to Moscow. It’s not real break.’
‘What do you do when you get a real break now and then?’
‘If they let me go home for my break, I just sleep for one to two days, to recover from my backache. I have back pain from my job on the train.’ Andre showed me his bent back. He looked as old as he sounded, unlike a man in his early forties.
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