Night Train to Leningrad

On Discovering the Importance of My Own Company

The author in Red Square, 1984. I have blurred other faces for privacy.

“No, nyet—leave them open. I like to see the snow. Na snegu,” I said.
She put her hands together and rested her head on them, closing her eyes, as if to say “sleep.”
“Nyet. No sleep. Just leave the curtains open. It’s good. Yeto khorosho.”
“Chai?”
“No, I’m fine. Nyet chai. Spasiba.”
She left, shaking her head.

I didn’t want to sleep; I wanted to watch the snow fall. I wanted to watch Russia pass by in the darklight of winter. I had one week left in this mysterious place, and it wasn’t likely I’d ever find myself on a night train from Moscow to Leningrad again. Why would I sleep? How could anyone sleep with the moon casting silver on the snow, the rooftops, the golden onion domes that glinted now and then like secrets? The window was small, but the view immense—field after luminous field dotted with farms and sleeping villages as the landscape slipped by.

I was curled on my side, legs wrapped around a pillow as thin as the dry, black pumpernickel served at almost every meal. Even the familiar was foreign there. One morning, we’d been given an orange with our black bread and herring. It was the size of a tennis ball, hollow enough to bounce, its rind pocked and tinged green, nearly impossible to peel. I felt guilty not eating it. When the waiter presented it with his open smile, it felt like he was offering a Fabergé egg.

Tropical fruit was rare in 1984’s Russia. So was toilet paper. I’d been warned to bring my own, since what could be found resembled sandpaper that had aged in an attic for decades, like the linens on our train bunks—scratchy, brittle. The mattresses were stiff as gym mats. My friend was snoring blissfully in one of them. She was also blissfully drunk.

I’d skipped the vodka-laced tea our carriage hostess had poured so freely all evening. I’d overdone it the night before, on our maiden voyage by rail. We had left Moscow at sunrise and headed south to Nizhny Novgorod, birthplace of Maxim Gorky, and then farther north to the older city of Novgorod. We stayed overnight in an 11th-century monastery, a place once ravaged under Stalin. The architecture had been painstakingly restored by the Orthodox Church, but the accommodations remained ascetic. Thin beds. Rough blankets. There was, however, a deep porcelain bathtub—my first bath in a week. The water ran from the spigot like amber ale, thick with iron, but I didn’t care. I sank in until it covered my shoulders and let the warmth wrap around me, the steam rising like incense from a sacred altar.

This night we were on our way to Leningrad, bound for the edge of the continent where Russia meets the Baltic Sea. It was an overnight ride, and our group of twenty-four filled two cars on the train. Ilyena, the stout carriage hostess who had tried to coax me to sleep, was likely in her fifties, though she seemed far older to us, with her toothless grin and lack of modern conveniences—no hair dye, no tweezers, no dental floss. She didn’t speak English and our Russian was clumsy at best, but we learned quickly how to coax her smile.

She wore a flowered scarf tied under her chin, and a dark shawl crossed tightly over her chest and knotted in the back. I was captivated. She could have stepped from a painting or a dream. She tended to us with care, turning down the beds, delivering threadbare towels and slivers of soap, filling our glass mugs with bitter tea and, if we wanted it, vodka. I had left our compartment door cracked for air, and she shuffled past now and then, peeking in like a mother hen. After her last attempt to close the drapes, she didn’t return again until morning.

I leaned across and nudged my friend in her berth.
“What?” she mumbled.
“You’re missing everything.”
“What time is it?”
“I don’t know. Late. Early?”
“Look at your watch.”
“You know I don’t wear a watch.”
“Are we almost there?”
“Not until seven, I think.”
“Then wake me at seven. Jesus. Go to sleep.”
It was no use. I’d have to enjoy it alone.

I closed the door, changed into my oversized tee for sleeping, and opened the curtains as wide as they would go. Back in bed, I pulled the covers to my chin. The cold reached me now that I was in my nightshirt.

My boyfriend had chosen a trip to the Ivory Coast instead of traveling to Russia with me. He wanted beaches and sun, not snow and history. I missed him. I imagined him lying beside me, awake, watching the snow with the same quiet wonder. We would make love through the night and trace the golden domes in the air with our fingertips—but then I shook the daydream away. I knew better. He’d be asleep, just like everyone else. Yes, maybe we would have made love as the sun sank behind the trees—but then I’d still be there, alone with the moon, the train, the window, and the dream of a long winter’s ride right out of Zhivago.

And it was enough.
It was more than enough.

Image created from my memory with Substack’s image generator.

I watched the night give way to the slow bloom of morning, lavender shadows brushing across the fields. Somewhere within that long, four-hundred-thirty-eight mile silver passage through snow-covered Russia, I came to know the pleasure—the importance—of my own company. It didn’t matter that no one else found it romantic. I had found the solace, the spaciousness, the quiet delight of solitude.

I didn’t have the words for it then, but I see it more clearly now, forty years later—something shifted in me that night. I stopped waiting for someone else to reflect the wonder back to me, to say yes, I see it too. It was enough that I saw it. Enough that I was awake to it. That I could witness something entirely on my own, feel it fully, and be changed by it. It seems so obvious now, but as a twenty-year-old girl it was transformational.

I’ve returned to that memory more times than I can count—the snow, the slow-lit fields, the golden glint of a dome barely glimpsed in the dark. Not because something dramatic happened, but because nothing did. No one shared it with me. No one had to. It was beautiful, and I—that girl awake on the train while the world slept—was there to see it. That was the whole miracle. That I once kept company with myself in a foreign land, and it was enough.

It was beautiful.