- The Charcoal Man
Leningrad 1989
The charcoal man delivers charcoal to the cars on the Siberian Express. The charcoal is burned in the samovars so that tea is available at all times for the passengers.
We had ridden the Siberian Express from Irkutsk to Moscow and on to Leningrad, now called St. Petersburg again. It took about 3 days to get to Moscow and another 11 hours to Leningrad.
We shared a compartment with another American couple. The woman had been born in Russia and her parents had been exiled to Kazakhstan to work in the fields during Stalin’s reign. She remembered tagging along after her mother as she harvested carrots in the sun-beaten fields. The fears of those days still haunted her and she was always checking to see if anyone was watching her or listening to her conversation. She seemed paranoid to us but we hadn’t lived through what she had lived through.
There was a samovar in each car and the porter kept the fire going and the water topped up. He often asked if he could bring us tea and, of course, we said yes, as it made sitting there staring out the window at the endless steppes pleasant. Later, we discovered he expected a tip for this service which we thought was part of his job. This led to a little misunderstanding, but we immediately got some rubles together and all was calm again.
The workers on the train would take the provisions that were intended for us and sell them when the train stopped in outlying villages. Soon our supply of soft drinks was quite low and we were asked to ration our consumption. What do you think people did? We Americans, I mean. Do you think that we started to conserve? Well, I did, but I was brought up by nuns and strict parents, but some of the others ordered as many drinks as they could drink. Five or six bottles each…amazing. They were not going to have less than anyone. They were going to have their fair share or more than their fair share. And we were in no danger…we had all the hot tea we could drink. It was a lesson in human nature and not a very happy lesson to learn. Lucky for us we weren’t in a lifeboat adrift on the open sea.