Long Way Round

The train leaves at 07:40. At 07:30 the platform fills: women with bags tied in sheets, men with their lunch in a tin, a student with a guitar in a bag, two soldiers going home on leave. By 07:38 everybody is in. By 07:40 nobody has moved, and the train leaves.

The conductor of my carriage is Valentina Bondar, 59. She has worked on this line since 1989. In her carriage everything is exact: the bedding is counted (3 som), the tea is a glass in a metal holder, the doors are locked at the stations she knows will have thieves, and open at the ones where the grandmothers sell boiled potatoes through the window.

"The track is single. When two trains meet, one has to wait. Thirty years I have been waiting at Loop 17. It's where I do my knitting."

At Loop 17, in the middle of nowhere, the train stops for twenty minutes, doors open, passengers step out onto the gravel to stretch their legs. A steppe silence descends. Then, from the east, a small noise, a bigger one, and the other train arrives, the No. 2, and passes at a walking pace, faces at every window, a hundred people looking at a hundred people. A child waves from the window. Our child waves back. They are both nine.

The ticket is 18 som for the open carriage, 31 for the compartment. You can buy it only at the window, in cash, and the cashier will tell you the number of your seat, and the age of your neighbour, and a joke. In my carriage a man has been travelling to Nurzhan to see his brother every month for twenty years. He does not talk. He sleeps with his hat over his face from the first station to the last. When the train slows for Nurzhan he wakes up, adjusts the hat, and says to nobody: "Well. Here again."