Trans-Siberian Express Read Online Free PDF

difficult to put up with the signs of Dimitrov’s surveillance. In the restaurant car, he ducked into the toilet and listened, his ear cocked against the door, until the red-haired man passed.
     
    The restaurant car had the same old-fashioned look as his compartment. Heavyset women wearing brown aprons and a kind of cloth tiara moved about, serving the diners in the half-filled car. Toward the far end Alex spotted the red-haired man, his nose buried in the large menu. Vaguely uncomfortable and disoriented, Alex wondered if he was supposed to wait or to seat himself. Finally, a small, officious man came up and tapped him on the shoulder. Alex held up a single finger and the man led him to a table in the center of the car where a man in striped pajamas was drinking borscht from a stainless-steel bowl. A drop of red juice was hanging from his chin.
    Alex smiled politely. “Is it good?” he asked in Russian.
    “ Nyet ,” the man said with some annoyance.
    Picking up the lacquered menu, Alex began to thumb through it. It was fifteen pages thick. Hundreds of items were listed, a compendium of every conceivable dish available in the Soviet Union. His eye picked out the word “ Pilmenis ,” and he suddenly remembered his grandmother’s specialty, minced meat in envelopes of dough, which he had eaten with huge globs of cream and dabs of mustard sauce.
    He could feel the yearning in his stomach as the waitress arrived.
    “ Nyet ,” she said flatly when he asked for the dish.
    He was disappointed. Like a stone thrown into a well, the pilmenis had stirred the deep waters of nostalgia. Many of the dishes listed were part of his grandfather’s stories. Salmon caviar covered with cream and honey and sprinkled with bilberries; bear steak; cream of reindeer milk with wild raspberries laced with Kvas; kissel, a liquid jam made of cranberries. He was sure he had tasted that, eaten it with a spoon.
    “I’ll have the herring with vegetables,” he told the waitress.
    “ Nyet, ” she said.
    “And the roast pork?”
    “ Nyet .” She seemed to be enjoying herself.
    “And the fried liver?”
    “ Nyet. ”
    He was perversely tempted to read the entire fifteen-page menu.
    “ Nyet seems to be the operative word,” he said.
    A woman giggled behind him. Turning, he saw the little woman who had worn the pink coat and the bunny hat. Her blue eyes sparkled with laughter behind rimless wire glasses. Her hair was gray with a liberal coloring of blue rinse, giving it a peculiar sheen in the yellow lit car. She wore a primly cut, high-collared black dress with a single strand of pearls. She must have been about sixty, the perfect maiden lady. Beside her on the table was a book entitled Eurail .
    “They do have borscht and stew,” she said in American-accented English.
    Alex looked about the restaurant car as if to confirm her observation. Across the aisle he observed the large-faced man whom Zeldovich had identified as General Grivetsky. He was eating a slightly burned omelet and drinking great quantities of red wine from a water tumbler.
    “And omelets,” the woman said.
    “I’ll start with the borscht,” Alex said. The waitress sneered and walked away slowly, her big haunches packed firmly beneath her tight smock.
    “The Eurail book offers subtle forewarning,” the little woman said. Alex turned to her again. She was sitting alone, drinking a cup of tea. “The trains run on time,” she continued, “but the restaurant car is beyond hope.”
    “That’s why it’s so empty?” he asked, marveling at the easy way Americans befriended each other.
    “Most of the Russians supposedly eat in their compartments, except these brave fellows. And us.”
    “May I join you?” Alex asked, suddenly eager for the company of an American, feeling his foreignness in what he had begun to regard as the hostile environment of the restaurant car. He moved to her table and noticed the red-haired man’s eyes flicker at his movement.
    “Alex