Three Moscow Winters, and the Trains I Took Away from Them

At half past three this morning, with our daughter asleep against my shoulder, I found a Moscow train ticket inside a book. I had taken the book off the shelf because the cover was coming loose and I wanted something to read with one hand. The ticket slipped onto the floor. Picking it up without waking her took more planning than the trip itself had.

She was born last December. Our flat in Hanoi now contains little cotton clothes on almost every available surface, and my wife and I speak in unfinished sentences about who slept when. Russia feels distant until an ordinary thing brings it back: a radiator ticking in a film, a glass of tea, a ticket folded into quarters.

I spent three years in Moscow for my master's, from 2018 to 2021. Most days were classes, a desk, the supermarket and the same route underground. On occasional weekends I went somewhere else. I keep remembering those trips together with the errands around them. The packet of noodles bought before a train. A wet glove left on a radiator. Getting back to my room and finding that somebody had used my mug.

The first snow

The first snow I remember properly arrived while I was inside doing something unimportant on a computer. Someone knocked on the door and pointed at the window. Outside, flakes were gathering on the dark rail of the balcony. I put my jacket on over a T-shirt and went down without gloves.

I am from Đồng Hới. As a boy I knew hot pavement, summer wind that dried everything, and autumn rain that made the adults start moving furniture. In Hanoi I had learned to complain about damp winter clothes. Snow belonged to television. I stood outside in it with my phone held up until the fingers holding the phone began to hurt.

By morning the new white surface had tyre marks across it. Near the entrance it had turned into something grey that got into the seams of my shoes. A friend explained that I needed footwear chosen for the pavement after the snow, rather than for the photograph during it. That was useful information. I had already taken the photograph.

The difficult part of winter was often the repeated business of getting dressed. Gloves came off to find the travel card, went back on, came off again because the card had dropped inside my bag. I learned to put it in the same pocket. In a heated room I could become uncomfortably hot before I had finished taking the layers off.

My mother, calling from Quảng Bình, wanted to see whether I had enough clothes. I turned the camera toward the coat hanging by the door. She asked where the hat was. I showed her. Our winter conversations often began like that. She had never been to Moscow, but she was quite prepared to inspect it through my wardrobe.

"Does it cover your ears?" she asked, leaning closer to her phone.

A table on the thirty-first

My first New Year there taught me how little shopping I could fit into one fridge shelf. Friends were arranging a meal for the evening of 31 December. I volunteered to buy fruit and came back with enough mandarins to make opening the fridge difficult.

By nine we had pushed tables together. Someone was chopping potatoes for Olivier salad. Someone else was defending the amount of mayonnaise already in the bowl. I had brought a dish I could make without looking anything up, then spent too long worrying that it had become cold. Nobody else seemed concerned. Plates went round, and the room gradually became louder.

I knew Novy God meant New Year. I hadn't understood how much of the occasion lived in the preparation: buying the right things, finding more chairs, ringing people in other cities. The television was on, but the conversation kept going over it. Whenever I thought the meal had finished, another plate appeared.

Near midnight we moved closer together so everyone could hear the chimes. I had rehearsed saying S Novym godom and still managed to hesitate. A friend corrected my ending, then handed me a mandarin. I sent my parents a photograph of the table. By the time my mother saw it, her own morning was starting.

Another winter memory belongs to a public banya. I went with someone who knew where to leave the shoes and how long to stay. I followed him as far as the changing room, where following stopped being a sufficient plan. There were sheets, benches, felt hats and people conducting ordinary conversations while I tried to decide what to carry.

Inside I lasted much less time than I expected. I went out and sat down with tea, embarrassed by how quickly I had retreated. Nobody took any interest in my embarrassment. A man asked where I was from, and we discussed the distance to Vietnam while I cooled down. I declined the cold pool. The afternoon passed without anyone making a test of it.

I remember the heavy door closing behind us afterwards, the clean shirt against my back, and searching my pockets for the gloves I had carefully packed. One was inside the hat.

The route below the street

The metro became familiar before the city above it did. At first I memorised the colours of the lines and counted stops. Later I recognised the sound before a familiar announcement and could get a book out without worrying that I would miss the change.

I still stopped to look at stations when I had time. At Komsomolskaya I would step out of the main flow of people and look along the lit hall. At Mayakovskaya I liked the small ceiling mosaics, though looking straight up with a backpack on is an excellent way to lose track of the person you are travelling with. My friend would be waiting several metres away with the expression of someone accompanying a child.

At Ploshchad Revolyutsii I watched people touch the bronze dog's nose as they passed. Some barely slowed down. Others made a small ceremony of it. Before an exam I touched it too, then went back to my room and studied. I didn't want to leave the dog responsible for everything.

The practical details mattered more than my list of beautiful stations. A station could have several exits, and the exit I wanted was often the one I had just walked past. Once I came up on the wrong side of a broad road with my shopping, looked across at where I needed to be, and went straight back down. On the next trip I paid attention to the exit signs.

A woman once helped me through a change after I asked a badly assembled question in Russian. She walked with me until I could see the platform, pointed, and returned in the direction she had come. I had made her retrace part of her route. She accepted my thanks with a quick nod and left before I could add another sentence.

I used to practise short phrases while the escalator carried me up: asking for a bag, asking whether a place was open, saying that I hadn't understood. Of those, the last was the most reliable. It often earned me a slower repetition and a finger pointing at exactly the thing I had failed to see.

Above the Volga

On a spring trip to Nizhny Novgorod, I spent the first afternoon walking along the Kremlin walls and stopping wherever the river appeared between buildings. The ground rose and fell more than I had expected. I had put a pin on a map and imagined a short walk. My legs disagreed by lunchtime.

The red walls sit high above the water. From the viewpoints I kept trying to work out where the Oka entered the Volga. I had seen that meeting of rivers on a map; standing above it made the scale difficult to fit into the little diagram in my head. There were wide stretches of water, low land beyond, and a sky that made my phone photographs look flat.

I walked down the Chkalov staircase slowly and then made the mistake of looking back up. The stairs curve across the slope in a great figure of eight. From below, people near the top looked small enough to be moved about with a finger. I had no good reason to climb up immediately, so I bought something to eat and sat for a while.

The cable car to Bor was the part I had circled in my notes. I expected it to feel like a short amusement ride. It was quieter than that. The cabin moved away from the bank, the view opened beneath us, and a man opposite checked his phone as though crossing above an enormous river were a normal interruption to his day.

For him it probably was. People use the crossing to get between Bor and Nizhny. I was the passenger who kept shifting toward the window and then apologising for blocking it. When we passed a support, the cabin made a small sound and I stopped moving for several seconds. The man looked up once and returned to his phone.

I stayed in Bor long enough to walk a little and find a hot drink, then went back across. On the return I put the phone away for part of the ride. Through the glass I could see the riverbank getting closer and the buildings gradually separating into individual windows. I had spent most of the day wanting to get somewhere high enough to see everything. Coming back, I was thinking about finding dinner and somewhere to sit with my shoes off.

A light night in Petersburg

I went to Saint Petersburg in June 2019. After Moscow's winter afternoons, the amount of light seemed like a mistake in the clock. We came out after dinner and the sky still looked usable. There was always enough time for one more walk, which meant we walked far more than we had planned.

Along the Neva, people were gathering near the embankment to watch the bridges open. I had seen pictures of the Palace Bridge with its two sides raised. In person, what held me was the slow movement, the gap getting wider while everyone stood facing the same way. There was chatter, then a burst of phones coming up, then the sound of water again.

I checked the time, expecting it to explain how tired I felt. It was well after midnight. The sky remained pale enough to show the outlines of buildings. Someone in our little group asked whether we should get food. It sounded perfectly sensible until I remembered that breakfast would follow in a few hours.

We had checked which side of the river our room was on before staying out. I was grateful for that small piece of preparation. Watching a bridge rise is a different experience when you aren't also trying to work out how to cross it. We took our time along the embankment, then went back with sore feet and the curtains drawn as tightly as possible.

The next day I ate hot pyshki with powdered sugar that ended up on my jacket. There was a queue, a simple counter and coffee sweeter than the coffee I make at home. I remember brushing sugar off one sleeve and immediately putting the other sleeve through more of it. The people beside me were having a serious conversation. I was occupied by a doughnut.

Tea on a moving table

I used both the Sapsan and overnight trains during those years. The faster trips were convenient when the dates were tight. On a slower journey I liked having a berth, putting the bag away, and realising I could stop carrying it for several hours. A train ticket bought early enough could turn a free weekend into a trip without requiring much else.

On an overnight train the compartment settled in stages. Bags went above the seats. Shoes disappeared underneath. Someone asked about the light. I would make tea, hold the glass by its metal holder and watch the surface tilt with the carriage. Reading was less successful. I tended to reread the same page until I gave up and listened.

One return to Moscow ended with an early arrival and a journey straight back to my room. I had class notes to catch up on and laundry to do. The person I had been travelling with asked where we should go next. I told him I wanted to get through that week first. By the following weekend we were looking at the map again.

When I left in 2021 I packed the practical things more carefully than the souvenirs. Documents stayed together. Books went where their weight could be managed. I thought I had thrown away most of the old tickets. Evidently I hadn't checked every page.

This morning I slid the one I found back into the book. My daughter made a small noise against my shoulder, so I stood up and walked the length of our living room. From the bedroom my wife asked whether I needed a turn to sleep. I said yes, and passed her our daughter before the kettle finished boiling.

— John