‘Naushki! Naushki!’ We have finally arrived at this border town at 1:07pm. We were now 5,895 kilometers from our starting point Moscow. We’ve come a long way. We were now told by the Chinese conductors to sit tight in the cabin to wait for Russian immigration officers. When they got on the train, no passenger was allowed to leave the cabin. The border controls are known to be harsh and I’d experienced this myself in 1997. Back then, the border control officers could chain people up on the spot if they believed you were smuggling goods across the borders. I had witnessed a Mongolian trader being handled in a rough manner, taken to the back of the wagon, handcuffed and chained to the train throughout the trip to Ulaanbaatar. The man’s five-year-old daughter sobbed all night because she didn’t understand what had happened to her father. I remember her swollen eyes the next morning when I pointed the landscape to her, comforting her that we will arrive soon at Ulaanbaatar.
An officer turned up at our cabin door. ‘Passport,’ he said. He took all our passports, and asked us for declaration forms which we had filled in an hour before reaching Naushki. I had no worry of bringing too much roubles out of the country – I was in fact running out of it. There was no Mongolian traders in our wagon. Thus no reason for suspicion from the officers who tend to see every Mongolian person as a potential law-breaker.
As the immigration officers left the train with all our passports, we were then allowed to get off the train for two hours while waiting for them to come back with the passports. It started raining a little. The sky was gloomy and the while-painted Naushki station looked as dull and lifeless as I could remember.
I strolled purposelessly on the platform with Urnaa and Gunje. Looking ahead, I saw two wagons – one is the restaurant wagon and the other is the catering staff wagon - a hundred meters from us in the distance, long disconnected from our train. They look discarded and lonely.
Urnaa got talking with Oleg again. He was looking out the window from his wagon, refusing to come out of the train because of the rain.
‘Hallo!’ a familiar voice called out behind me. It was Andre. He’d walked up to our train from his detached wagon.
‘You want to see Naushki?’ he asked. That sounded like an adventure. So we sneaked out of the station from the side door, and walked into town.
It was raining harder and harder. I tried to cover my camera under my jacket. The town in front of us looked deserted. No one was around. The only human traces were a few closed shops that had had their windows broken.
‘A ghost town,’ I said.
‘Yes. Dead.’
‘Look,’ he pointed to a park ahead. A chilling place. It was quietly littered with syringes and coke cans.
‘The young people in this town are all doing drugs,’ Andre told me. ‘No blame them – There is nothing else to do here. No good school. No job. No opportunities. If they stay in this town, they will just do drugs.’
‘Are most young people moving out of this dump then?’ I asked.
‘Yes. Yes. Many left.’
Andre walked me through the park. ‘See. They come and enjoy here.’ He said, shaking his head and swearing in Russian. ‘This is a paradise village!’
I can understand Andre’s frustration. Naushki is one of many such outlying villages and towns that have been abandoned for the absence of employment and basic decent living standards in the post-Soviet Siberia. A new rich has been bred out of this anarchy where privatization has led to a small minority profiting from the control over resources. The gap of wealth is growing fast. The poor get poorer. As a result, those without opportunities are leaving Siberia in waves.
We walked pass a warehouse-looking building outside of the park which Andre said is their only disco in town. We walked a few more streets and still hadn’t seen one person about. It was just depressing.
Then a semi-derelict wooden house appeared, with a public phone outside the door. I tried to peek through the window to see if anyone’s in there. It was empty. ‘This is where the villagers send a telegram,’ Andre told me. ‘To their sons or daughters working in other bigger towns in Siberia, or even Moscow!’
Andre reminded me that it might be time to head back to the train. The passport check might have been finished and the train could leave in the next half hour. I fastened my steps as Andre said to me: ‘You don’t want to be left here in Naushki!’
Urnaa was still talking to Oleg at the window by the time we got back to the train. I wondered if they were going to meet again in Ulaanbaatar.
Andre waved me good-bye outside my train, and slowly dragged himself, with a bent back, back to his wagon. He looked so much older in the distance. I watched his figure gradually out of sight, into the dusk.
Our train departed from Naushki at 4:40pm.
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