Jay and I had begun to share a fate early on after we had traveled to Xi’an. Often we laughed that our friendship just would not have been possible anywhere but in China. Here we were… a 22 year old,  former Eagle scout-tuba player and a woman creeping beyond middle age pretending confidence for the sake of the young… on a train that would take us through the lands of Genghis Khan and Siberia, a vast place of political and religious exiles… shamans and ascetic starets with long beards and felt boots walking out of the forest.

Coincidences had brought me to Beijing to take this train. I met two old German women in the early summer. They had traveled to the ends of the earth to places with unrecognizable names… places with impossible languages and unknown customs. They had just taken the Orient Express across Siberia. They told me stories about Ulan Ude and Ulaanbaatar that had held me transfixed. I would not be traveling on the Orient Express. There has always been  something about the people on the regular trains… something about the culture of that particular train… something about those lands… something beyond the sentimentality of shamans and exiles that circled back to experience the essential instead… just something…

I met a Greek man, Yannis,  in Beijing. We ate dinner in the hot evenings on the terrace over the garden for a week… the red lanterns illuminating our long conversations like song accompanied by the crickets of late August. He had just left Mongolia. He had met a Mongolian woman in Ulaanbaatar and still had such a longing for her. There was the faraway look in his eye… his distraction… and then he would return to stories of Mongolia, Siberia and his life on the train until the longing for the woman he had left behind trailed up through the conversation again. I would not really understand  Yannis or the draw of Mongolia until I went to Ulaanbaatar myself.

Jay and I traveled to Shanghai in the fall. One day we had wandered off on our own. Later, we compared notes about our day. We had visited the same collection of Russian prints in the art museum. Many had Siberian themes that reached out to me in ways that I had not felt for such a long time… my early love of the northern woods… Russian novel after Russian novel I had read as a young girl… and the mystique of my Bolshevik, Jewish great-great grandfather who had come all the way from Russia and married my Romanian Orthodox great-great grandmother in a tiny village surely not taken up with the love of Jews… one that was as backward and muddy as some we would see from the train windows. Jay was taciturn, but alert and waiting for something unexpressed that quivered in the air. The sun would set in Shanghai that day and, by the time we had eaten dinner and had gone for a walk in the glary neon and cool, autumn breezes, we had come to a decision as if it had already been made. All it had taken was a short exchange.

 

“Shall we go?”

“Ooohhh… yeah…”