I got to know her on the Russian train from Ulaanbaatar to Ulan Ude. I noticed her when we had picked up the Russian train in Ulaanbaatar that would take us directly to Irkutsk. She stood in the corridor looking out of the window. We met there several times. She seemed intuitive… a person who knew how to be alone. She was delicate and pretty… middle-aged. She seemed refined… a flower. Her name was Olga. We began to talk during the long evening with the sound of the train over the rails that moved our conversation forward. Olga had been a successful genetic biologist with a nice job… a secure life… and then, came the collapse of the Soviet Union. She had become passé… Russian intelligentsia. Her life changed. She now traveled to China to buy cheap clothes to sell them in the market of Khabarovsk. She hated the long train trips and what had become of her life. She described her life, but did not talk about regrets if she had them… no Anna Karenina, Olga. Instead of throwing herself under the carriage wheels, she rode the train back and forth, back and forth… Russia, Mongolia, China… China, Mongolia, Russia… month in, month out. She may have not liked the way life had changed, but she had accepted things as they were now.

Olga had a daughter who had an undergraduate degree in English and would soon be working on a graduate degree. Everything Olga did was for her daughter. Her face lit up as she talked about the pride and love she had for her. Her daughter was the reason for the way her life was now. She had told me that.

Olga said good-bye before it was time for her to change trains at Ulan Ude in the Buryat Republic for the final leg of her journey east and then south back toward China to Khabarovsk… just another point on the railroad before heading to the end of the line in Vladivostok. Khabarovsk was an old, Eastern place I would probably never see… a place of Russian explorers… a place that had once been coveted by the Chinese… the final Russian place that the last Qing emperor of China, Puyi, had lived for five years after the war before being deported back to China. I knew little else of Khabarovsk except now, that a woman named Olga whose life had dramatically changed, lived there.

Jay would disembark in the Ulan Ude train station to forage for food. I would stay to keep an eye on the baggage that we had already been told would come up missing if we didn’t keep a close watch. Jay would have a hysterical experience in the Ulan Ude train station. The authorities would take one look at his cheap, military garbage man coat from China and ask for his papers. We laughed when he came back. We had gone in search of that coat for him in Jinan. After searching all afternoon, we had spied the garbage man coat at a shop selling plumbing supplies. With youthful exuberance he tried on the khaki, military coat with the cheap brass buttons. He’d paired it with his grandfather’s old cap with fur ear flaps. Later, I’d buy a military coat in Beijing… and, looking like two rejects from the former Soviet Union, we’d take off warm to a winter in Siberia. Much like Olga, we were passé.

Jay boarded the train again when the horn blasted. We were off again and had a ravenous feast of shriveled apples and more noodles and tea. I’d walk past the coupe where Olga had been. The light was switched off over her bed. Her book was gone… had been closed and packed into a suitcase awhile back. Her tea glass had disappeared from the train table in front of the window. Her subtle essence lingered for a while and, then… just as subtly, it was gone.

I admired Olga’s courage and perseverance. Already, I could understand the exhaustion and potential difficulties of so much of one’s life spent on a train. Somewhere out there now as I write, Olga is on a train sitting alone perhaps, looking out onto the Mongolian grasslands of summer or reading by the soft light over the bed… drinking tea from the glass… turning over for a few hours of sleep…  dreaming of a stalwart wooden house that does not sway on iron rails…  geraniums in the window… the lace curtain shielding her deepest self from naked eyes in dark, smoky corridors somewhere far off in Ulan Ude…Ulaanbaator…Beijing.

What do we really know of people’s lives?