Page 85 - Litteratteur Redefining World December issue

Litterateur redefining world December 2020

he watches the dark outline of trees rip by, and I take note of how good
he has become. The disappearing sun lay flat behind me, catching a
glint on his harp, and he looks older, like he belongs, like I am another
Russian passing between cars, and he is simply here, and it makes
sense and I listen to him somehow keep Guthrie’s repetitive melody
from being boring. He nods toward a blue shack with a solitary guard
and keeps playing, a talent he apparently managed to master while I was
passing through his youth on my way to work. We’ve been riding this
metaphoric train for twenty years, I think. And so far, it seems we’ve
managed to stay on track. So while I desire to experience all aspects of

our pilgrimage, from meeting passengers in third class to conversing
with the dining car attendants, I can’t help but admit how much more I
value our moments in the gangway connections, the music and quiet
conversations. He is carrying his harmonica and I have my journals,
separate arts, different means of communication, his more immediate
and spontaneous, mine more permanent and reflective, but in our
individual ways we come together here, in the passage, in the arts, in
this larger place we will forever remember as “our Siberian journey.”

Michael dips his harmonica. “’Take the ‘A’ Train’ by Ellington,” he says,
familiar with the tune I whistled for years. He plays louder to make a
reply more difficult to conceive, and he is right. Tonight’s round is on
me, even though I quickly recall a half-dozen compositions. Downtown
Train, Crazy Train, Casey Jones, and that Springsteen one which

escapes me at the moment. There’s something about the train motif
which all artists have borrowed and shared to satisfy our common
metaphor. “’Everyone loves the Sound of a Train in the Distance,’ Paul
Simon,” I say, but he shakes his head. It’s too late. We laugh.

These times we spend together in this passage have become our small
shared American space. When we enter our cabin or the dining car or
stand in the hallway looking out the wall-size windows at the landscape,
conversation inevitably occurs with other passengers and then we are
separate, he and I, two American travelers who happen to be father and
son barreling through a foreign land. But in the passageway, quiet, we
find something familiar. It is normal to need some place like this when
traveling—a pub, a church, a coffeeshop—a place to find one’s bearings
and catch one’s breath. It doesn’t need to be for long, the length of a
tune, perhaps.

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