4. Fellow Travellers

The child of the train is quick and clever. She has never grown as tall as she had hoped, so she can still squeeze into the smallest spaces and scramble up into the train's hidden corners. She has learned all the secrets of the train—how to duck through the kitchen carriages and steal a hot dumpling on the way; how to tiptoe through the garden carriage without disturbing the bad-tempered chickens; how to get to the pipework and wires when things go wrong (and they do go wrong—more often than the Company would like, or would ever reveal to their investors). She runs in time with the rhythm of the train, a rolling, lolloping gait, slaloming between the walls of the narrow corridors along the sides of carriages, dodging passengers still unsteady on their feet and leaving them spinning in her wake, pausing only to sneak into the Third Class kitchen and swipe a handful of dried fruits from underneath the nose of the sleepy kitchen boys.

"Zhang Weiwei, don't put on that innocent look with me, I know you're up to no good!" Anya Kasharina, the Third Class Cook, is ever-wakeful. Weiwei turns, spreading her hands and shrugging her shoulders. Anya gives one of her famous belly laughs and cuffs one of the kitchen boys over the head. "Who let rats into my nice clean kitchen, eh? You need to be more careful in the future!"

Weiwei makes herself scarce before the kitchen boys can take revenge.

Between the kitchens for First and Third Class is a cramped space known to the rail workers as the Divide, or sometimes, sarcastically, as Second Class. Weiwei has never managed to find a straight answer to why the train has a First and a Third class, but not a Second. In his book Rostov argues that the original architects of the Company overstretched themselves and ran out of money, but many of the crew claim that the architects of the train simply forgot. Whatever the reason, on the Trans-Siberian Express, Second Class exists only in this dividing space, where cooks and hands from both kitchens come to snooze or exchange gossip about the passengers. This gives it an unusual neutrality, above the class divisions among the passengers which tend to be replicated in the staff who serve them. And even though the First Class Cook states that the food in Third is not fit for street vermin, and even though Anya Kasharina maintains that the food in First wouldn't fill up the belly of a gnat, the two cooks have been known to sit on the narrow benches in the Divide, sharing a pot of tea and a slow game of cards.

It is also where the crew come for a moment's respite from the passengers, so Weiwei is accustomed to putting her ear to the door before entry, in case she should hear any of the gossip that oils the long running of the journey. She listens.

"… but what's she going to do? Had her own way for too long, is what they think."

"She wouldn't run the risk of a crossing, though, would she? Not if she really thought…"

"What you're forgetting is, she don't see risk the same as we do. That's their mistake too, going along thinking she's as terrified as they are. That's not how her mind works, is it?"

Two of the stewards, both of them frequent inhabitants of Second Class. They are speaking of the Captain. They all speak of her like this, half-admiring, half-afraid.

"But to risk everyone, after last time… Even she wouldn't…"

"Wouldn't she?"

The stewards' voices fade in and out. Weiwei imagines them checking over their shoulders. The Captain knows when you're talking about her, say the crew. They say she's behind the door before you've had time to take a breath. They tell so many stories about her that it is hard to untangle what is real and what has grown into train lore.

This much they are sure is true—that her people had come from the land which is now just within the Wall, that they had grazed their cattle and ridden their horses over the grass, until they were driven away when the changes began; the skin of their animals turning translucent, birds falling from the sky, seedlings bursting through the soil like bubbles through water, too fast to make sense of, sprouting unfamiliar leaves. And so the Captain returns again and again to a lost ancestral land, she forces the train over the traitorous soil and she dares the Wastelands to rise up against her.

But the stories that Weiwei likes best are about the Captain when she was a young woman—when she cut off her hair and joined a train crew, disguised as a boy. Stories of how she worked her way up to become a driver, her secret so well hidden that nobody ever suspected. Stories of how she was one of the very first crew members on the Trans-Siberian Express, and of how the day she was made Captain she announced to the Company directors that she was a woman and they were so shocked (the story goes) that by the time they had gathered their wits she had already reached the train, and her ascent to the lookout tower had been captured by photographers from the world's press, so it was too late for them to go back on their word.

Weiwei checks over her own shoulder, half expecting the Captain to appear, having read her thoughts—something which she had seemed to do regularly during Weiwei's childhood, usually when she was sneaking about and listening at doors, just like this. But the corridor is empty, and she feels a twinge of disappointment. She would be happy, this time, to see the Captain approach.

"I tell you," one of the stewards is saying, "it's a bad sign. They should have let us hold the Blessing…"

A pause. Time for an awkward scuffing of a shoe, a worried scratch of the nose.

"Ill-omened, that's what this journey is." She hears one of the stewards spit on his palm and tap the iron on the windows. "And they know it, the Company, just like the Captain does, even though she's not saying anything. They know it to be true."

She turns away, not wanting to hear more. The Blessing sets them safely on their journey. Each crew member takes their turn to scatter water on the engine, using a sheaf of willow twigs, watching it sizzle and steam. The water is in a vat containing the fruit and leaves of the season, and soil from the station grounds, and so the train will carry the earth of Beijing or Moscow with it, to help keep it safe from the unkinder land beneath its wheels.

But not on this journey. This journey, the train has gone unblessed.

The Company had always disliked anything they perceived as superstitious or backward, but until recently an uneasy truce had existed. The crew could keep their small rituals, their icons and gods, as long as they were discreet, as long as the passengers found them charming. But now, they have been told, it is time for a change. A new century is approaching—the passengers do not want mysticism, they want modernity. There is no place for these rituals anymore, said the Company.

And so the crew complain among themselves that the banning of the Blessing is yet another sign that the dusty men in their offices do not understand the needs of the train, and does it not bode ill for this crossing, of all crossings? Have there not been other signs and portents? Wasn't a white owl seen in the daytime at the Pinghe Temple? Hadn't a turtle been caught in the river with two heads and with markings on its shell in the shape of a bird in flight?

Two of the porters, recently hired, left for safer work on the South-Eastern line. The Third Class under-steward handed in his notice just the previous day. He had a newborn at home, he said, not meeting anyone's eye; he had struggled with himself but couldn't in all good conscience board that train again.

Weiwei has never known the Blessing not to be held. Its absence feels like a weight they are carrying, pulling them back. When she chews on her nails there is no earthy taste.

Third Class smells of sweat, anxiety, food already on the turn. There are two sleeping cars, each holding thirty bunks, arranged in blocks of three. Both cars are full, and stifling already. The Company has lowered the price of tickets, fearful in case passengers decide to stay away. But there are plenty who are desperate to make the journey, despite its dangers. As she passes through, they reach out to tug at her jacket—"Where are the bathrooms, where is the water, how does this work?" Their questions are as impatient and irritating as their grasping hands, though she knows what they are really asking: "Is it safe? Have we done the right thing?" and she cannot give them the answers they want to hear.

In the first of the two carriages passengers huddle alone or in pairs, as if holding their fears around them like a cloak. In the second, however, a little community has already formed: a woman handing around bright-red sugar plums; two traders dealing out bamboo cards and passing a tarnished silver flask between them; a young priest reading aloud from a leather-bound book in a language Weiwei doesn't recognize, a string of wooden beads between his fingers.

No one is looking out of the windows.

No one but a man with a mop of unruly silver curls, who has folded his long limbs onto one of the small seats that pull out from the wall along one side of the carriage, and who is staring outside so intently that he doesn't seem to notice the other passengers as they barge past, the dribbles of tea spilling down the back of his coat, the trays of food being whisked past his head.

"Professor?" she says, in Russian, touching his shoulder. He spins around as if scalded, but when he looks up at her his face splits into a smile, deepening its lines, and he enfolds her into an awkward, bony hug. She feels a flood of relief. Not everything has changed. Even after everything that has happened, some things remain in their place.

The Professor is not a real professor, though he looks just like her idea of one, and as soon as she was old enough he had taken her under his wing, determined that she should gain a proper education, "seeing as the crew of this train do not seem to be providing you with one." She had pointed out that the stokers and the engineers, the stewards and the porters and even the Captain herself all seemed determined that she should learn every last inch of the train and every last thing about it. "An education with books," the Professor had said.

He has never, as far as she knows, had enough money to pursue his own studies at a university, because everything he has earned, for all of his life, has been spent on tickets for the train, so that he could study the landscape outside. Members of the Society for the Study of the Changes in Greater Siberia—the Wastelands Society, as it is more commonly known—often travel on the train, and the crew have always felt a certain sympathy with them, recognizing a shared preoccupation, though they look pityingly on those scholars who explore Greater Siberia only in books, and who then insist on writing books themselves, so that their Wastelands are nothing but paper forests and rivers of ink, as insubstantial as the scholars themselves.

The Professor, though, is practically train folk himself, and unlike some members of the Society, has other interests to fill his time. He had taught himself Chinese, which Weiwei would sometimes help him with, and he could speak it adequately if unmelodiously, in an accent that always put her in mind of rusting pans rubbing together.

"Did you not want to study here?" she asked him once, as they stood in front of the great stone building that he had taken her to, on one of their stays in Moscow. When he told her that this was a place that men went to learn about the world, she was puzzled, because the walls were high and thick as though to keep the world out instead. They watched young men race inside, books beneath their arms, collars high and coats flapping, and she wondered how they were not afraid of being crushed, with all that stone above them. But the Professor just laughed and spread his arms wide. "What need do we have for those dusty classrooms?" It was what he always said when they were on the train—"All this," he would say, wonderingly, stretching out his arms to encompass the landscape outside. "We have all this."

"Child!" he cries, now, holding her at arm's length as if to get a proper look at her. "I wondered when we were going to be graced by your presence. ‘Has she become too important for Third?' I asked myself. ‘Has it been so long that she has forgotten her old friends?'"

"You have only yourself to blame," says Weiwei. "I am now so educated that I barely have a moment to spare from answering questions. Even the Cartographer insists on consulting me on his new maps."

The Professor coughs theatrically. "Ah, if only that were true."

Weiwei gives him a mock scowl. Despite all his efforts, she has never been a good student—always too restless, too easily distracted. "Well, it is true that I've been busy," she says. "Some of the crew haven't come back, and the Company is making us all work twice as hard. And of course, there are troublesome passengers to deal with, some of whom are particularly difficult."

"I am sure you will deal with them in a fair and just manner. Though of course, if you worked harder at your studies you could gain a promotion, and no longer have to be responsible for such troublemakers."

Weiwei ignores this, and the twitch of his lips. "And your work? Does it go well?" She says it in a conversational tone, but she watches him carefully.

He doesn't answer straight away, turning to look out of the window at the grasslands rolling past. "I think an old man like me deserves a rest now and again," he says, eventually. "After everything that happened."

He looks up at her. But before he can say more he stiffens. She follows his gaze to the doorway, where two men stand, surveying the carriage. They are dressed in black, in suits with tails that could look, if you saw them in the right light, like wings.

"Ah," the Professor says quietly. "Our very own birds of ill-omen."

They are heralded by the clinking of their shoes, polished black and in the European style, with buckles. It is their only affectation: from the feet up, they are as forgettable as the rest of the Company men, in their dark suits and wire-rimmed glasses and humorless smiles.

Li Huangjin and Leonid Petrov are, to use their official titles, consultants, but the crew call them Crows. Doubled, like all Company consultants—one from China, one from Russia; a balance that the Directors in London are careful to uphold. They speak in the dry, long-winded English of the Company, so that Weiwei has forgotten the beginning of their sentences before they get to the end. The Crows rattle their shiny buckles and they peck and peck at the train and its crew. Not even the Captain can keep them away, although Weiwei can see that they do not like the way she fixes them with an icy politeness and an eye as cold as theirs.

Once, in the middle of a crossing, when Weiwei was racing down the corridors, trying to hold her breath between doors (pretending that the poisonous air of the Wastelands had crept its way into the train), she crashed straight into one of the Crows. She staggered backward and he caught her by the shoulder to steady her.

"And where are you running to so fast?" He seemed immensely tall to her, and she couldn't see his eyes through his glasses, which only reflected her back. She had always done her best to scurry away from the Crows. Their doubleness always frightened her, although she couldn't say why. But now here was just one of them, and she was struck by the sudden conviction that he would unfold his twin from his own body like another limb.

He leaned down, his hands on his knees, and he beamed at her, a smile that scared her more than any of the quick tempers of the stewards. "Well now, are you the child of the train or a Wastelands child, running wild like this? You are a member of the Company, and must behave like one."

She stared at him, speechless.

"What happens to those who do not maintain our standards?" He led her to the closest of the vestibule doors, the ones that open into a narrow space, before another door that opens to the outside. Taking out a heavy bunch of keys, he unlocked the inner door. The space between was just big enough for two people to stand, closing the door behind them before opening the one to the outside. He kept his hand on the back of her neck. Through the small window she could see the tundra flashing past, glimpses of bone white beneath the grass. He pushed her further toward the door and reached over to the handle of the outer door, and she let out the terrified squeal she had been desperately holding in.

He stood back from the door, but retained his hold on her neck, forcing her to look out of the window. "We leave them outside, where they belong."

There are times when she still feels that same clutch of fear when passing the doors, and is always relieved on those crossings when the Crows have stayed behind in Moscow or Beijing, rather than joining the crew on the train. Yet in recent years, as the Company has insisted the train make more crossings, their presence has become increasingly frequent. In spite of this, she notices that they still move awkwardly, unable to coordinate their strides to the movement of the train. You should let yourself work with the rails, not fight against them, any rail rat knows that.

Now, they walk past the rows of bunks, smiling and nodding at the passengers. Mr. Petrov (they insist on the Mr, as if their own names are too weak to stand up by themselves) even bends down to ruffle the hair of a small boy, who gazes back at him, impassively. Weiwei rolls her eyes. They do not stop for long, she sees. They will be on their way to First, to mingle with the passengers the Company prefers, who better fit their image of themselves.

"Try not to look too much like you're giving them the evil eye," murmurs the Professor.

But she can't smooth her features into the mask the Company likes.

When they reach the middle of the carriage she stands up straighter, feeling the Professor tense beside her. The Crows give her a cursory nod. "We are glad that our most loyal traveller has joined us again," says Mr. Li to the Professor. "We have heard that there have been differences within the Society of late. We do hope that these have been resolved?"

The Professor gives a vague smile and squints short-sightedly at them through his glasses, the very picture of a harmless scholar. "Ah, but differences are the life-blood of scientific discourse, are they not?"

"Indeed they are, indeed they are." The Crows smile back.

"What did he mean, ‘differences'?" asks Weiwei, when they are gone, but the Professor just shakes his head.

"Not now," he says, quietly, looking down the carriage as if expecting to see the Crows swooping back.

Weiwei waits for more explanation, but the Professor seems disinclined to talk.

A crow is a sign of sin, the crew say. When the changes began, crows were the only birds that would fly over the Wall, eating carrion from the changed lands, returning with trinkets or bright stones clutched in their claws. This is why people in the north of China throw stones at them; they are tainted.

When she was small she would imagine the Company men flying. She believed that they had wings that unfurled from the black cloth of their coats, that they would take off into the air like the shadow birds in the Wastelands. That they would open their mouths wide and call to each other in clipped and cluttered English, and they would hold all the sins of the train in their claws like a stone, so hard and bright that it hurt to look at it.