Time Zones

On the fourth morning, the train was somewhere west of Novosibirsk. Polly checked the small clock above the compartment door. It read 06:30. The clock had not been changed since Moscow. All Trans-Siberian timetables run on Moscow time, the whole length of the line, for seven days and seven time zones. This is a Soviet-era practical decision: you cannot run a railway across eight thousand kilometres if every station has a different watch.

Local time outside the window, however, was about 10:30. The sun had been up for six hours. The fields were already warm.

This dislocation of train-time and outside-time was, the conductor had told her, one of the small mental challenges of the journey. By Vladivostok the train clock would say one thing and the local sun would say something seven hours different. Many passengers found this disorienting. Some adjusted. Some did not.

Polly hopped down from her perch on the back of the bunk and went exploring.

The dining car was three carriages down. Polly walked the length of three carriages, hopping from bunk to bunk and along the corridor rail. Each carriage was a long wood-panelled tunnel with eight compartments to the side, a samovar at the end, and a conductor's room at the other end. The conductors, in green uniforms, sat with their feet up reading newspapers between station stops. They did not look surprised to see a parrot. The train had been running for seven days a week for over a hundred years. It had seen things.

The dining car was painted a faded red on the outside and an unexpected pale blue inside. Heavy lace curtains. Wooden booths. A small kitchen at the far end where a cook in a white apron was making something that smelled like cabbage. Two passengers were already eating. Polly took a perch at the empty booth by the window.

A waiter in a slightly too-large jacket appeared. He set a menu on the table. The menu was in Russian, then English, then Chinese. Borscht. Pelmeni, which were small Russian dumplings stuffed with meat. Salmon caviar on dark bread. Tea. Vodka. Beer.

The waiter waited. Polly tilted her head. He smiled, took the menu back, and disappeared. Two minutes later he returned with a small plate of bread, butter, and a piece of dark herring. He placed it on the booth bench at Polly's height.

"Compliments of the kitchen," he said, in English.

The herring was salt-cured and pungent. Polly tried a small piece. It was strong but good. The bread had a faint sourness she had never tasted before, a result of three days of fermentation. The butter was unsalted. The combination, in the right order, was a thing Russians had been eating in long-distance train carriages for a hundred and twenty years.

The train ran on. Outside the dining car window, the taiga had thinned into a high open grassland, the southern fringe of the West Siberian Plain. A herd of cows was grazing near a small wooden house. A man on a bicycle waited at a level crossing.

The waiter went back to the kitchen. A radio played, somewhere in the back, a song Polly did not recognise but which she suspected was very popular in this part of the world. She finished the herring. She perched at the window. The train moved.