The Night Train

The new people, places and situations that we encounter during our lives shape the way that we view the world. In late July 2008 I experienced all three at the same time, during an overnight train journey between Hungary and Ukraine in the middle of my vacation from the law firm in Kyiv where I had been working. The journey will stay in my mind for longer than the holiday itself.

An hour or so before dusk on a chilly late summer evening I stepped onto the train at Budapest Nyugati station. As we pulled away from the platform I stayed in the corridor for a while rather than going into my kupe compartment; twenty four hours is a long time to be confined to a musty six foot square cabin with nothing for company but a bunk bed, brown bedding and, more often than not, boredom.

I pressed my nose against the window and took one last look at the Hungarian countryside as it rolled past. Eastern Hungary is gorgeously European: arable fields reach all the way to the horizon; men on old bicycles unhurriedly make their way to and from neat villages, which have sumptuous names like Puspokladany and Nyíregyháza.

I reflected on the previous three days in Budapest. Against a background of grand architecture, summer rain and a mass of other tourists I had met a girl from Azerbaijan, who asked me to help to translate the screenplay that she had written. She introduced me to her neighbour, a Hungarian girl with a powerful imagination, whose dreams take the form of impromptu nineteenth century novels set in Italian castles. I had also said an indefinite goodbye to Jared, an American missionary and a close friend, whose sofa in Kyiv I had lived on for two weeks the previous winter. After months spent hunched over translations the week had been unusually sociable.

Statue, Budapest

The Hungarian houses of parliament

The Basilica, Budapest

Budapest panorama

Budapest skyline

Kiraly utca, Budapest

 

THE TEACHER

After a few minutes in the corridor I opened the door to my kupe and lifted my bag onto the top bed. My bunkmate for the journey to Kyiv was also returning from a holiday. He was a thick-set, handsome man in his late forties, who introduced himself, in English, as Ashur.

We sat on his lower bunk and – as so rarely happens with the strangers we are paired with on journeys – began to talk. The man had an untraceable accent and a strong, warm voice that would, I thought, be perfect for narrating Wilbur Smith books.

The conversation that followed from my predictable “So, where are you from?” was much deeper than I had expected. Ashur was born in the Iraqi part of Kurdistan in 1960, into an Assyrian Christian family. He had left his homeland in 1991 to escape the Gulf War, after the village where his family had lived for centuries was destroyed.

He explained that Iraqi Assyrians had been poorly treated for generations, and that their situation has become even worse since the American invasion of Iraq in 2003; Assyrians have been persecuted, even murdered, by both the country’s Sunnis and Shi’ites, for no reason other than the fact that they share the Christian faith with their common enemy.

At the time Ashur left Iraq I was six. I grew up with BBC news reports of the war in Bosnia each morning, not Iraq, and I knew next to nothing about the violence there which had started long before this decade’s war. As he described the suffering of his people so rationally and eloquently, I shrank into the corner of the cabin in discomfort. All I could do was nod.

He referred to the person responsible for the bloodshed as “that man”. The word ‘Saddam’ only came from his lips once – and even then it wasn’t so much said as spat out.

Many Assyrians have fled north to Syria – Ashur found his way to Sweden. He arrived in 1991, with no documents and no proof of the education that he had received. Gothenburg would be his home for the next eleven years.

Gothenburg gave him a chance to make a new start. He went to high school for the second time and learnt Swedish. It also let him develop his reading habit (he had just opened a novel as I appeared, and he illustrated many of his ideas about life with literary characters), but he became disillusioned with the country in 2002, when his Swedish classmates found jobs within weeks of graduating from the information technology course while he was left to work as a postman to make ends meet.

That autumn he left Gothenburg and threw in his lot with England – firstly in Reading, where he completed an information technology degree, then in 2005 he trained for a teaching qualification in Exeter, at the university where I too was studying.

During his time in England he met and fell in love with a Romanian woman. He wanted to find a place where they could live together that was closer to the land plot in Cugir, Romania, which he bought soon after their wedding for what will be a well-earned retirement. And so they moved to Ukraine.

Ashur had arrived in Kyiv two years ago, to teach IT at the British school. He lives with Caterina on the twelfth floor of a Stalin-era housing block in Svyatóshin, an ugly, unwelcoming kvartal  in the north-west of the city. He told me that it is lonely, but in his spare time he occupies himself with an Open University course; his latest essay is a comparison of the way that IT is used in schools in Great Britain and Canada.

Although he described with modesty the three moves that he had made during his life, they left me in awe. Each of his journeys had involved a jump into an unknown culture, with no guarantee of safety or success on the other side. I found it inspiring that, after so many years of being exposed to prejudice, Ashur had not only refused to give up on his desire to make the best of what life has thrown at him, but has enough faith left to choose a career that allows him to help other people.

We spoke about my own life: like his it has involved three major jumps, but, unlike his, they were made entirely selfishly and on a whim. I strive to see as much of the world as possible knowing that I can always return to the creature comforts of home when I run out of energy or money, but for many people stability at the end of a journey is something that is prayed for, not taken for granted. I said that I love to travel because of the chances it gives to meet and learn from people who have lived great lives, like him. He replied: “You think I’ve had a great life? I have seen death”.

I wondered at the improbability of two people born into such drastically different cultures having so much common history. We had been neighbours in three places before we met: in Exeter I had lived a five minute walk away from his house; in Kyiv we had lived just one stop on the metro away from each other. And we had chosen the same week and the same city for our summer holiday, which had led to our meeting on the train.

We had a similar outlook on life, too. Ashur shared my despair at how unfair Ukraine can be, namely, the racism that some thugs abide by, and the contempt that people treat strangers with. He told me a story about one of his students, the teenage daughter of a millionaire businessman, who for months sweetly promised him a new laptop without ever intending to give him one. It wasn’t the first time this year that I had asked myself: “What is the world coming to?”

We became tired, and our conversation petered out. As night came, shadows crept through the window of our cabin and over Ashur’s distinguished face, until it became a silhouette.

Before we called it quits for the night he recommended some books to me. He said that Fyodor Dostoevsky would be the perfect place to begin should I ever find time to read the Russian classics. When I said that one of my hobbies is travel writing, he prescribed Thomas Mann’s ‘You’ll Never Go Home Again’.

His was a monumental life story. At the same time the world seemed both big and small, worthy of both praise and despair.

 

MIDNIGHT

Having said goodnight to Ashur I lifted myself into the top bunk and tucked the brown duvet around myself, as a Georgian shaurma seller would wrap a thin slab of warm lavash bread around a chicken kebab. I took my camera out of my bag to skip through my photographs from Budapest – since which it felt as though four weeks has passed, not four hours.

It was after midnight when we pulled up to the Ukrainian border. Here we stopped for another four hours, while the train was jacked a couple of feet off the ground and its wheels were changed. The screeching of brakes woke us up, and the metallic clunking of hammers underneath the train kept us from going back to sleep. The exercise is a relic from the Second World War: to this day the Ukrainian railway tracks are a different shape to the Hungarian ones – it is said that this was to stop German troops from invading that way. Nowadays the place is symbolic for different reasons: it is the border between the European Union and the former Soviet Union, between the Magyars and the Slavs, and one of the points on the invisible line that meanders through Europe along which the Latin alphabet meets Cyrillic.

Guards made their way along the carriage to take our passports away to examine. I expected an interrogation, but the man was cheerful. He asked me suspiciously: “How do you know Russian?” – as if he had spent his evening reading spy novels.

The railings in the corridor of our carriage were cold to touch, and I put on a second jumper to once again press my nose against the window as I watched the workmen strut around on the tracks. Outside the night was eerie: a neglected wagon storage yard in the distance was lit by dull yellow lights; instead of an Iron Curtain, a mist filled the no-man’s land.

 

WAR AND PEACE

The workers finished their job, the guards disappeared, and we started to move again. The carriage at night is a peaceful place; the train gallops along quietly, and most passengers go to sleep.

Occasionally people stretch their legs in the corridor, still in their pyjamas, or walk to the smokers’ section between the carriages, or to the toilet at the end of the corridor (a place so dirty that, to use it, I thought up a method of opening its door and taps using five separate moist hand wipes).

In the near silence I became aware of noises from the cabin next to mine. There were hushed adult voices and excited children’s giggles. Their language was not like any I had heard before. It was punctuated by an abrasive kha sound, but was softer than Russian when the children were part of the conversation.

When the sounds moved into the corridor I went out to see who our neighbours were. There I found two small girls dressed in light t-shirts and cardigans, two even younger boys in rough-and-tumble jumpers and jeans, and two bright-eyed babies with bulging nappies.

The woman keeping an eye on them was about thirty. She had a round face, beautiful dark eyes, and black hair collected matter-of-factly into a ponytail. She was wearing a long white dress with an elaborate pattern. There was another woman with her, with the same dark hair and an identical dress; I guessed that it was her older sister, and the mother of some of the six children.

The first woman understood Russian. As we introduced ourselves she said that her name was Larissa. I asked:

- “Otkúda Vy?”

- “Iz Ávstrii”.

But they were not Austrian. The language I had overheard wasn’t German, and the children’s features – fair skin, beautiful large eyes – were more Central Asian than European. I wondered whether they were Kazakh, before curiosity got the better of me and I asked which language they were speaking:

- “A yazýk kakói?”

- “Chechénskii”.

Larissa explained that they now lived in Salzburg, and were visiting Kyiv for a month to see relatives. I wanted to ask more questions – about how and when her family had left Chechnya and how they had made it safely to Austria – but realised how tactless it would have sounded from a complete stranger.

The Caucasus is a region that I will travel to, one day. To judge from all that I have read it is a fascinating part of the world, a place where post-Soviet drabness meets with Middle Eastern flair, home to both churches and mosques, and where many cultures and identities coincide.

It is also a turbulent place. The West is mainly aware of Chechnya in the context of the Beslan school hostage tragedy of 1st September 2004. On that day a group of armed men entered School № 1 in Beslan, a small town in North Ossetia. The men locked more than a thousand people, many of who were primary school children, inside the building, and in the course of the following three days shot about 350 of them dead.

One of the details that I have remembered, besides the sheer horror of the event, is a festival called the ‘Day of Knowledge’, when a child’s entire family – parents, grandparents, uncles and aunties – accompany them to lessons on the first day of school. I had read that the family is especially cherished in Chechen culture, a fact that was exploited on that awful day.

There is still fighting in other parts of the Caucasus – Abkhazia, Nagorno-Karabakh, and Ossetia. I knew how often families had been ruined through death or evacuation. I remembered images by photographer Simon Roberts, of people living in the rubble of houses that had been shelled to the ground, or in refugee camps far from their homes. But as Larissa mentioned that her husband was also Chechen, I hoped that this family had been lucky and had not lost anyone.

I wondered how many children in Larissa’s homeland don’t know where their parents are; I counted myself lucky that the war in the background as I got ready for school each morning came at me only through the television.

We didn’t talk for much longer. I was certain that Russian wasn’t a language that Larissa enjoyed speaking in, even to me: the Beslan massacre had been a protest against years of Russian violence in the province, and Vladimir Putin, the then Russian president, had blamed the Chechen people for everything that went wrong in his country.

As we spoke, one of her children tiptoed along the corridor to join her. He had the talent that every toddler seems to have, of turning any unfamiliar place into an improvised play area. His favourite game was to climb along the corridor without touching the carpet – hands clinging on to the railings, feet stepping across the radiator grates, sometimes hiding behind the curtain.

Larissa went back into the cabin but the boy, Adam, stayed in the corridor. He was a charming child, with fair, thin hair and chubby cheeks. I reached my hand towards his and shook his sticky palm so he wouldn’t be afraid of me. With another sixteen hours on the train before we arrived in Kyiv I couldn’t bring myself to sacrifice the last piece of Hungarian chocolate from my bag, but took out my camera instead and tried to amuse him by either taking his photograph or showing him pictures of Budapest.

When he tired of climbing we kept each other company by sitting cross-legged on the floor of the corridor and communicating via hand gestures and funny faces. Eventually our second wind deserted us and we went back to our cabins to sleep again. 

 

 

LATTES WITH LENIN

It was only a few minutes after dawn when we arrived in rustic, ragged Lviv. The sun was still coming up as we travelled alongside the fields, streams and settlements of the countryside beyond. It was my first taste of Western Ukraine, and it was just as poetic as it had been described to me. Small cottages are dotted across the fields, some with chickens in the yard, some next to paddocks where cattle graze. At a small provincial station a wrinkly old babushka in a bright blue headscarf and black boots waded through thick, shoulder high grass to get to the platform. Another woman inched along a plank that bridged a small stream, careful not to drop her carrier bags full of vegetables into the water. In the villages men swigged vodka or homemade samohon straight from the bottle – I hadn’t even cleaned my teeth yet. At half past eight it was a Ukrainian setting as far removed from the shoving of the Kyiv commute as I could imagine.

I went to the carriage’s tiny kitchen to get a drink of my own. Tea and coffee are served from mugs that you have to beg from the provodnitsa. The mugs are narrow, clear plastic beakers, which loosely fit inside tarnished copper bases with a handle attached that is only big enough to fit two fingers inside. Some are so old that they have Communist symbols – stars, hammers and sickles – engraved into them. In the kitchen I held my mug under the urn and poured boiling water over the sachet of instant coffee that Ashur had given me. I nursed the cup between my hands and took small sips of the hot, sweet drink, gazing out of the window at the fields of Lvivska oblast as the caffeine trickled into my veins.

As soon as I finished the first cup I went back to the kitchen for another. One of the many mysteries about life in the former Soviet Union that I will never solve is, despite the appearance of dozens of expensive cappuccino bars in all of its cities, why the best tasting cups of coffee are the ones made with a sachet of 15 kopiyka Nescafé, sipped in a train corridor from one of those awkward glasses. Perhaps it was the view that soothed me, or the feeling of knowing that there was nothing I could do with the day ahead of me other than relax – a peaceful proposition that a volatile country like Ukraine doesn’t often afford.

 

WIE HEIßT DU?

Ashur and the boys from the next cabin had woken up in a bad mood. A night under the starchy sheets had given us all the oily skin, itchy eyes and greasy hair that no long distance train journey is complete without. The girls bore the discomfort better than us – Larissa was as beautiful as she had been the night before, and had dressed her two daughters in matching bright pink dresses and combed their hair straight.

In the worst mood of all of us men was the eldest boy, a pale child of about four in a checked shirt and braces, who brandished a toy gun and a mischievous grin. I wondered whether the infamous Caucasus hot-headedness was cultivated in childhood, as he earnestly stabbed my leg with a plastic fork. When the batteries from his gun ran out and the gadget stopped making its screeching sounds, the boy improvised using his very loudest Chechen kha-khas.

When I spoke Russian with the children they didn’t understand me; I guessed that those who were old enough to go to school in Austria would speak German. I had learned German at my own school, but most of the tiny amount that I ever knew has been usurped first by French, then by Russian and Ukrainian. I remembered how to say: “I have short dark hair”, which as the boy with the gun ripped strands from the side of my head was getting truer by the minute.

I wasn’t sure exactly where Salzburg is, but supposed that Budapest was only half way between it and Kyiv. Given what two days inside a cramped cabin and corridor must have done to a group of toddlers, their boisterousness was understandable. It struck me again how close the family was - although some of them were not yet able to talk, they were already great friends.

Speaking in front of more than two people in a foreign language usually brings me out in a cold sweat, but in the Chechen children I had a captive audience. “Ich bin drei und zwanzig jahre alt”, I boasted to my new friends; I almost swallowed my tongue after the second r, so long had it been (sieben jahre) since I stopped learning, but before lunchtime we had cheered each other up, despite - or possibly because of - my silly mistakes and clumsy accent.

The oldest girl looked at my camera over my shoulder as I scrolled through the previous nights’ pictures. As her brothers, sisters and cousins appeared on its screen I pointed to each face and asked “und das ist?”.

The girl’s name was Iman, and she was seven. She jotted down the names of her family in my notepad: the boy with the toy gun was called Ebiat, and her younger sister was called Hayana. Hayana was a sweet child with a permanent smile, who made the same designs for my arm hair that Ebiat had for my sideburns. Judging by the laughs that greeted each picture of Adam, he held a special place in all of their affections.

Our paths crossed a few more times before the end of the journey, but by the time we reached Vinnitsya oblast there wasn’t much else to say. The revelations of the previous evening and the sleepless night had caught up on me. My camera batteries died, and with them the moment.

As we packed our bags and got ready to arrive at Kyiv’s Miskiy station, the guards came again to return our passports. I stuffed my British one back into my jeans pocket. Ashur slipped his Swedish passport into his briefcase. I gave him my phone number and we agreed to meet for a beer at the Irish bar on vulytsya Zhytomyrska, as soon as he had finished his Open University dissertation. You don’t meet people whose stories inspire you every day.

Larissa carefully placed the handful of Austrian passports into the bottom of her rucksack. I scribbled my email address on a sheet of paper that I tore out of my notepad and offered to send her some of the pictures I had taken of her children. But none of the family was sorry to see me leave; they all had more important things to think about, as the eight of them gathered together on the platform and set about finding their way in Ukraine.

 

REFLECTIONS

I went home, but the next morning got up earlier than my body would have liked to catch a different train. It was crowded, sweaty, and I barely said a word to the passengers either side of me in the communal platzkart wagon during the eighteen-hour slog to the Crimea. I ended my trip in the Southern port of Yalta, where I rented a room in a small, humid stone cottage with an Armenian lady named Anna Vakhrudinovna, her two sons and their fiancées.

A week on Massandra beach gave me time to remember all the different personalities I had met during my trip, and the different things – history, pictures, language – that had allowed me to find common ground with such diverse people.

The journey’s legacy is the lessons it reminded me of: that even people who we meet accidentally are willing to share stories and wisdom; the soothing effect that open spaces have on us, and the importance of looking for them when our heads are tired; the potential that new situations bring out of us if we aren’t scared to make mistakes.

The beauty of travelling lies not only in what it can teach us about the world, but also what we learn about ourselves.

 

 

Love and the Lavra

A couple get married in the grounds of the Kievo-Pecherska Lavra, Kyiv, Ukraine.

In March I moved to  Kyiv’s Arsenal’na district, between Maidan Nezalezhnosti (Independence Square) and the right bank of the river Dnieper. It is one of the city’s most attractive areas, scattered with lush, sweet-smelling chestnut trees and punctuated by dozens of landmarks.

It is home to the Kievo-Pecherska Lavra (The Kyiv Cave Monastery, completed in 1015), a guardian of Eastern Orthodox Christianity, behind which stands the Rodina – Mat’ (Motherland) statue, her thick, silver arms and thick, silver sword thrusting defiantly – and symbolically – at the sky, on top of the Museum of the Great Patriotic War.

Both structures are faithful remains of the destroyed empires of which Kyiv was once a noble and influential part: Prince Volodymyr’s Kyivska Rus’, from which Russia grew in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, and the Soviet Union, which fought the Second World War heroically and to which the museum is dedicated.

Ukraine’s modern ambitions also thrive in Arsenal’na: the ten minute walk from the metro station to my flat takes me past restaurants that serve Czech and Vietnamese food, as well as the tiny café Alfredo (with room for two people), an ice rink, a De Beers boutique, and the city’s most imaginatively-stocked Sil’po supermarket. Banners across the street proclaim “Love Ukraine!” - quoting the Sosyura poem that motivated Ukrainian nationalists in the 1980’s to weaken the Soviet Union enough to make it crumble. In such a neighbourhood the order is very easy to follow.

My apartment is on the third floor of a clean, echoey building. It is the tallest of three such buildings within a courtyard surrounded by chestnut trees, so that the terrace outside my living room is not so much a balcony as a tree house. The block is almost deserted, save a Georgian family a couple of floors above us and some babushki and dedushki with intelligent faces and smart clothes.

Further along vulytsya Ivana Mazepy – a street named after Ivan Mazepa, a seventeenth century Cossack leader – is Park Slavy (’Glory Park’), where many people gather, either to sip beer and enjoy the view in the evening, or to lay wreaths beside the war memorial at the park’s highest point.

On a day off from work I spent an hour in Park Slavy, on a mid-May morning that felt more like an attritional November day. The view from the war memorial has always been one of my favourites in Kyiv: it stretches from the steep grass slope that runs into the Dnieper, to the light blue metro trains that slide over the bridge, to the thin yellow strip of beach at Hydropark, to the new office buildings and housing blocks of Livoberezhna, to scruffy Troeshchina and Darnytsya beyond them, to the hazy outline of Lisova on the horizon - the very easternmost edge of the city.

As I sat on a bench not far from the hotel Salyut, I spotted a wedding party below. It is a Ukrainian tradition for the bride and groom to be photographed in front of their city’s landmarks on their wedding day, and the couple were making their way from the Lavra to rest in one of the pagodas by the edge of the river. I couldn’t resist the urge to spy on them, and in doing so took the photograph above, a memento of another happy memory in Arsenal’na.

Winter in Ukraine

Over New Year I spent a week in Lviv, in the west of Ukraine near its border with Poland, and a week in Luhansk province, 1200 kilometres to the east, on the border with Russia. At both ends of the 26-hour train journey the snow on the ground was ankle-deep, sometimes falling in blizzards, and the temperature on some days was as low as minus 21 degrees celcius.

Winter in Ukraine has many different moods, and although a couple of hours outside each day was all my body could cope with, I stumbled across many scenes during my trip that reflect them.

Arrival

Winter Morning

Icicles on a washing line

Anywhere But Here

Dusk on the Steppe

Midnight Macho Munchies

London’s Cultural Collage

This photo, taken on Oxford Street in London just before Christmas, perfectly captures the mood of the city. Three symbols of British identity – fish and chips, a red London bus and tartan – are complemented by examples of the international faces, food and fashion that make life in the capital so wonderfully diverse.

 

The Night Train: photos

The Chechen family who I shared a train compartment with, on the way from Budapest to Kyiv.

Larissa (r) and sister

The two youngest children

Adam and sister

Adam

Ebiat

Iman

Hayana

 

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