Seven Nights on the Siberian Express

The first thing I notice about her is the sheer size of her suitcase, a monstrous, hard-shelled thing she wrestles through the narrow corridor of the carriage with a series of soft, frustrated grunts. The second thing I notice is how the flush of exertion makes her pale skin glow pink against the dark wool of her coat. I’m already in our compartment, perched on the edge of the lower bunk, claiming it by the simple, cowardly virtue of having arrived first. I watch her struggle through the doorway and feel a pang of guilt that is immediately smothered by territorial instinct.

“Here,” I say, standing too quickly and banging my knee on the small fold-down table. “Let me.”

“I’ve got it,” she says, her voice a low, warm timbre that carries a faint, unplaceable accent. She gives one final heave and the beast of a case slides in, taking up what feels like half the available floor space. She straightens, brushing a strand of honey-blonde hair from her forehead, and looks at me. Her eyes are a startling, clear grey, like the sky over Lake Baikal in winter, which, according to my guidebook, we will be passing in approximately three days. “You must be Sasha.”

“I am. And you’re Anya.”

We shake hands. Hers is cool, her grip firm. The formality of the gesture is absurd in the tiny, wood-paneled cell we will share for the next seven nights. The Siberian Express, Moscow to Vladivostok. Six thousand miles. One hundred and sixty-eight hours.

She assesses the compartment with a single, sweeping glance. The two bunks, upper and lower, covered in crisp, blue-striped linens. The small table under the window, currently housing my nervous clutter: a notebook, a pen, a half-empty bottle of water. The latch on the door. The heavy, red velvet curtain meant to provide privacy from the corridor. It smells of stale cigarette smoke, polished wood, and anticipation.

“Which bunk do you prefer?” I ask, though my body is already angled protectively toward the lower one. I am not climbing up to that coffin-like upper berth for a week.

“The top is fine,” she says, as if reading my mind. She smiles, a small, polite thing that doesn’t quite reach her eyes. “I don’t mind climbing. And it will give you more headroom.”

The tension in my shoulders eases a fraction. First hurdle cleared. We perform the awkward ballet of two strangers in a confined space, stowing luggage, arranging personal items. Her suitcase, once opened, reveals meticulously folded clothing, several books in Cyrillic script, and a silk eye mask. My own bag is a chaotic explosion of wool socks, crumpled paperbacks, and charging cords. I notice a small, worn leather notebook tucked beside her clothes, its edges softened from use.

The train gives a lurch and begins to move, the grand, soot-stained facade of Yaroslavl Station sliding past the window. The rhythmic clack-clack of the wheels on the tracks begins, a sound that will become the heartbeat of our world. Anya hoists herself onto the upper bunk with surprising grace, lying on her back, hands folded on her stomach. I sit by the window, watching Moscow’s outer suburbs give way to birch forests dusted with the first real snow of late autumn.

Silence stretches, thick and uncomfortable. It’s broken only by the train’s metallic song and the occasional rustle from above.

“Why Vladivostok?” I ask, finally, turning my head to look up at the underside of her bunk.

A pause. “A job. A one-year contract teaching English literature at the university.” Another pause, longer. “A fresh start, I suppose. And you?”

“Running away,” I say, the truth escaping before I can dress it up as something more respectable.

From above, a soft hum of acknowledgement. “From what?”

“A person. A life that felt like it belonged to someone else. The usual clichés.” I trace a finger through the condensation on the cold window. “I’ve never seen the Pacific Ocean.”

“It’s very grey there,” she says. “And windy. But it has its own beauty.” She shifts, and I hear the soft creak of the bunk. “My father was a fisherman, in the north. He said the sea is a good place to get lost. Or to be found. I could never tell which he meant.”

The small, personal detail hangs in the air, a thread offered. I don’t pull on it yet, afraid of snapping it.

The first evening settles in. We venture to the dining car, a time capsule of Soviet grandeur with white tablecloths and tarnished silver. We sit across from each other, sipping strong black tea from glass holders. The conversation is stilted, a polite exchange of biographical data. She’s from a small town near Yekaterinburg. She studied in St. Petersburg. She prefers Tolstoy to Dostoevsky. I’m from Chicago. I write freelance travel articles that barely pay my rent. I’ve never read either. I learn she has a habit of tracing the rim of her glass with her thumb when she’s thinking, a slow, absent-minded circle.

Back in the compartment, the intimacy of the coming night looms. We brush our teeth in the tiny sink at the end of the corridor, taking turns, avoiding each other’s eyes in the mirror. We change into sleeping clothes with the careful modesty of Victorians, me facing the wall, the rustle of her clothing from above a tantalizing hint of movement I refuse to picture.

I lie in the dark, the red emergency light from the corridor casting a faint glow. Her breathing from above is slow and even. I can smell a hint of her shampoo, something clean and herbal, mingling with the train’s old-soul scent. The vast, dark Russian night flies past the window. I feel a strange, aching loneliness, not for what I left behind, but for the unknown woman sleeping two feet above me, a loneliness pierced by a sharp, unexpected thread of desire. It’s ridiculous. It’s the confinement talking. It’s seven days of nothing but time.

---

Day two is a lesson in territorial negotiation and emerging patterns. We establish a silent routine. Mornings are for quiet reading by the window, sipping tea from our own supplies—she uses a delicate porcelain cup she unpacked, I drink from a chipped enamel mug. Afternoons are for the dining car, for longer walks through the rattling carriages to stretch our legs, noting the other passengers: the babushkas shelling sunflower seeds, the Mongolian traders playing cards, the silent men staring out windows. Evenings are for conversation that grows, inch by inch, less formal.

Her reserve begins to thaw as the endless forest rolls by. She tells me about her students in St. Petersburg, her voice warming with fondness. “They think Hemingway is the height of American romance,” she says, smiling. “They have no idea.” I tell her about the catastrophic series of bad dates that precipitated my flight, and she laughs, a real, rich sound that fills the small space. I learn to recognize the precursor to that laugh—a small, sharp intake of breath through her nose.

On the third morning, we stop at a small, snow-blanketed station for twenty minutes. We get out to stamp our feet on the icy platform, buying pirozhki from a woman in a steamed-up kiosk. The cold was a physical shock, the air so crisp it felt brittle in our lungs. Back on the train, huddled by the window with the pastries, our shoulders touched and neither of us moved away. The warmth where we connected felt more significant than the heater’s dry blast.

That afternoon, we pass Lake Baikal. We stand by the window in the corridor, shoulders almost touching, as the impossibly deep, frozen blue of the lake stretches to the horizon, mountains rising sharp and white on the far shore. The sheer scale of it steals my breath.

“It’s beautiful,” I whisper.

“It’s ancient,” she says, her reflection ghostly in the glass beside mine. “It holds one-fifth of all the unfrozen freshwater on Earth. You can see straight down forty meters in some places.” She glances at me. “It feels like looking into time. My father brought me here once. He said if you shouted a secret into the water, the lake would keep it forever. I believed him.”

“What did you shout?” I asked.

She looked back at the ice. “I don’t remember. Something a child thinks is important.” But her tone suggested otherwise, a private weight carried in the memory.

That night, after a dinner of pelmeni and vodka shots that leave us both pleasantly fuzzy, the atmosphere in the compartment shifts. The velvet curtain is drawn. The small reading lights are on, casting pools of warm gold. We are on our respective bunks, but it feels less like separate territories and more like a shared cave.

I’m on my back, reading. She is sitting cross-legged on the upper bunk, her legs dangling over the edge. She’s wearing soft, grey cotton pants and a thin, long-sleeved shirt. I can see the shape of her knees, the curve of her calf.

“What are you reading?” she asks.

I hold up my paperback. “A murder mystery. Set on a train, actually. It seemed thematic.”

She smiles. “And is it any good?”

“The prose is terrible, but I’m committed to finding out who did it.”

She swings her legs gently. “I could never read fiction on a journey like this. The real world outside is too compelling. It makes stories feel small.”

“What do you do, then?” I ask, putting the book down.

“I watch. I think.” She looks down at me, her grey eyes thoughtful in the low light. “I watch you, for instance.”

A small, electric shock goes through me. “Oh?”

“You have a very expressive face. When you read, your lips move slightly. When you look out the window, your eyes get this… faraway look. As if you’re not just seeing the trees, but imagining the lives being lived behind them.” She paused. “You also chew on the end of your pen when you’re writing. It’s a terrible habit. The plastic must taste awful.”

I laughed, surprised. “I didn’t know you’d noticed.”

“It’s a long journey,” she says softly. “There’s not much else to do but observe.”

She lowered herself down from the bunk, landing with a soft thud on the floor. Instead of retreating to her space, she sat on the very edge of my bunk, her hip just brushing my leg through the blanket. The compartment shrank. I could see the fine texture of her skin, the faint freckles across the bridge of her nose. I could smell the clean herbal scent of her, mixed now with the faint, warm smell of sleep.

“May I?” she asked, gesturing to the space beside me.

Wordlessly, I shifted over, making room. She lay down next to me, on top of the blanket, her body a warm line against my side. We were both looking up at the underside of her bunk, so close I could feel the heat radiating from her.

“This is better,” she murmured.

“For observing?” My voice was a little breathless.

“For talking.”

And we did. We talked about things that had nothing to do with biographies or travel plans. We talked about the first time we fell in love (hers was a girl in her philosophy seminar; mine was my high school best friend). We talked about our fears (hers was irrelevance, of becoming a ghost in her own life; mine was staying still, of letting my life become a waiting room). We talked until our voices were hushed and the train swayed us into a kind of waking dream. At some point, her hand found mine, resting on the blanket between us. Our fingers laced together. It felt neither casual nor accidental. It felt momentous.

We fell asleep like that, side by side on the narrow bunk, fully clothed, hands clasped. I woke in the deep night to find she had turned onto her side, facing me, her forehead almost touching my shoulder. I didn’t move. I listened to her breathe, and my heart hammered a frantic counter-rhythm to the steady clack-clack of the wheels.

---

The forced proximity became a chosen closeness. Days four and five blurred into a haze of shared confidences, shared silences, shared meals where our knees touched under the small table and stayed there. We passed through time zones, through vast, empty landscapes of snow and pine. The world outside became an abstract painting; the only reality was inside this wood-paneled room.

The tension was a living thing now. It was in the way our hands brushed when reaching for the tea tin, a spark of contact that lingered on my skin. It was in the lingering look she gave me when I emerged from the corridor, face washed, hair damp. It was in the deliberate slowness with which she changed her shirt in the mornings, her back to me, the elegant line of her spine, the shift of her shoulder blades, the flash of pale skin before the fabric fell. I was constantly, acutely aware of her. The sound of her voice, the curve of her smile, the way she bit her lower lip when she was thinking.

One afternoon, she read to me from her leather notebook—not personal entries, but descriptions. A list of things seen from the train: a lone horse standing in a frozen field, a child’s red mitten lost on a platform, the specific pattern of frost on our window one morning. “I want to remember how things looked,” she said. “Not just that they were.” Her voice was low, intimate in the quiet compartment. I wanted to be one of the things she remembered.

On the evening of the fifth day, something cracked. We’d had a bottle of rough, red Georgian wine with dinner. We were giddy with it, and with the sheer, accumulating weight of our isolation. Back in the compartment, she put on music from her phone—something melancholic and beautiful, a Russian singer with a voice like smoke. The sun was setting, painting the compartment in oranges and purples.

“Dance with me,” she said, simply.

“There’s no room,” I protested, laughing.

“There’s exactly enough room.”

She stood and held out her hand. I took it. She pulled me to my feet, into the sliver of space between the bunks. And we danced. Or rather, we swayed, our bodies pressed close from chest to thigh, my face buried in the soft hollow of her neck. Her arms were around me, holding me tight. We moved in a tiny circle, a slow rotation in the golden light. I could feel every contour of her against me. The softness of her breasts, the strength of her back under my hands, the firm line of her hips. The train rocked us, and we moved with it, a single entity swaying on the rails.

The song changed to something slower, even more aching. Her hand slid up my back, cupped the nape of my neck. Her fingers threaded into my hair. She leaned back just enough to look at me. Her eyes were dark, the grey almost black in the dim light. Her gaze flicked to my lips.

All the breath left my body. The air was charged, thick with the unsaid.

“Anya,” I whispered, a question and a plea.

Her answer was to lean in and brush her lips against mine. It was the softest, most tentative touch, a question. I answered by parting my lips, by kissing her back, by letting the five days of pent-up longing pour into that single point of contact. The kiss deepened, slowly, inevitably. Her mouth was warm and tasted of red wine and something uniquely her. A small sound escaped her, a sigh that vibrated against my lips, and it unraveled me.

We broke apart, breathing ragged, foreheads pressed together. Her eyes searched mine, wide and vulnerable.

“Is this…” she started, her voice a husky whisper. “Is this just the train? The wine?”

I brought my hands up to cradle her face, my thumbs stroking her cheeks. “No,” I said, the word solid and sure. “It’s you. It’s me. It’s this.” I kissed her again, less tentatively this time, a slow, savoring exploration. My hands slid down to her hips, pulling her tighter against me. I could feel her arousal, a matching heat. The train swayed, and we stumbled, laughing softly against each other’s mouths, falling onto the lower bunk in a tangle of limbs.

For a long time, we just kissed, exploring the shape and taste of each other, hands roaming over clothed backs, through hair. The desire was a slow, sweet burn, not a raging fire. We had time. I learned the sensitive spot just below her ear that made her shiver. She discovered that tracing the shell of my ear with her tongue made my breath hitch. We shed layers with agonizing slowness, each new expanse of skin a revelation met with lips and whispered praise. My sweater, her shirt, discarded onto the floor. The cool air raised goosebumps, soon soothed by the heat of our hands.

When I finally unhooked her bra, she let out a shaky breath. I kissed her collarbone, the slope of her breast, finally taking her nipple into my mouth. She arched into me with a gasp, her fingers tangling in my hair. “Bozhe moi,” she whispered, a prayer.

The train’s rhythm became part of us. As I kissed my way down her stomach, the steady clack-clack seemed to sync with my heartbeat. When I hooked my fingers into the waistband of her soft pants, I looked up. Her eyes were heavy-lidded, her lips swollen. She nodded, lifting her hips.

But then she stopped me, her hand on my wrist. “Wait,” she breathed. She leaned over, fumbling for something on the floor. It was her silk eye mask. She brought it to my face, not to blindfold me, but to let the soft, cool fabric brush against my cheek, then hers. “A souvenir,” she whispered, a private smile on her lips, before letting it fall aside.

I peeled her pants down, and she was bare beneath. I kissed the inside of her thigh, feeling the muscle tremble under my lips. She was all pale skin and gentle curves, and she smelled intoxicating, musky and sweet. I pressed my mouth to her center, and she gasped, her hands flying to my hair, not pushing, but holding, grounding me.

I took my time. The clack-clack of the train became the metronome of my movements. I tasted her, learned her, listened to the symphony of her breathing, her soft moans that grew more urgent, her whispered pleas in Russian that I didn’t understand but felt in my bones. As she neared the edge, her body tensed in time with a sudden lurch of the carriage around a curve, a perfect, jarring harmony of motion and release. She came with a choked cry that was swallowed by the train’s groan, her thighs tightening around my head, her back arching off the bunk, a shudder that seemed to travel from her core through the mattress and into me.

I crawled back up her body, kissing her stomach, her breasts, her throat, finally her mouth, letting her taste herself on my lips. She kissed me with a desperate, grateful intensity, then gently pushed me onto my back.

“My turn,” she whispered, her voice husky.

Her exploration was meticulous, worshipful. She used her lips, her tongue, the cool metal of her necklace that dipped between my breasts. She paid attention to places I didn’t know were erogenous—the sensitive skin behind my knee, the dip of my collarbone, the inside of my wrist where my pulse hammered. When her head finally dipped between my thighs, I was trembling, vibrating with a need amplified by the constant, rocking motion beneath us. She read my body’s responses like her favorite book, alternating slow, languorous strokes with focused, rhythmic pressure that soon had me writhing. As I fractured, my climax rolling through me in long, shuddering pulses, I grabbed not my own arm, but the blue-striped bedding, the very fabric of our temporary home, clutching it as I cried out, the sound lost in the rattling of the door in its frame. She held me through it, her lips soft against my inner thigh, until I was spent and boneless.

We collapsed together on the narrow bunk, a sweaty, sated mess of intertwined limbs. She pulled the blanket over us. I was pressed against her back, my arm around her waist, my nose buried in her hair. The train hurtled through the Siberian night. We didn’t speak. We just breathed together, hearts slowing to a synchronized beat, a final, quiet harmony.

---

The last two days were a different kind of journey. The physical barrier shattered, a deeper intimacy flooded in. We made love in the early morning light, slow and sleepy. We shared showers in the tiny, rattling cubicle at the end of the carriage, soaping each other’s backs, kissing under the lukewarm spray, her laughter echoing off the tin walls. We read passages of our books aloud, her voice giving new music to my English murder mystery. We pointed out the window at nothing in particular, just to have an excuse to lean into each other.

The world outside began to change. The endless forest gave way to more rugged, hilly terrain. The stations became more frequent. We were running out of track.

On the sixth night, after a quiet dinner in the compartment, she grew pensive. “When I was a girl,” she said, staring at her hands, “we moved twice for my father’s work. Each time, I had to leave a friend. We promised to write. We never did. You make these intense connections in transit, and then the landscape changes, and you have to become a different person to fit it.” She looked at me, her grey eyes serious. “Vladivostok feels like that. A place where I have to become the person who fits the contract, the apartment, the new sea. I’m afraid I’ll forget how to be the person who was here, with you.”

Her fear gave context to the suspended world we’d built. It was a sanctuary, but for her, also an escape from a looming transformation.

The final evening, a melancholy settled over us like fog. We sat at our little table, picking at a meal we’d ordered to the compartment. The reality of tomorrow pressed in.

“What happens?” I asked, my voice small.

She reached across the table and took my hand. “We arrive.”

“And then?”

She was quiet for a long time, her thumb stroking my knuckles. “I don’t know, Sasha. This… this has been a world apart. A beautiful, suspended world.”

“It doesn’t have to end,” I said, the desperation clear in my voice.

She smiled, but it was a sad smile. “Everything ends. Especially journeys. But that doesn’t make them less meaningful.”

That night, we made love with a kind of fierce, quiet desperation, a silent conversation of lips and hands and bodies trying to memorize, to imprint. We moved together in the dark, the only light the sporadic flash of a passing station lamp slicing through the curtain, illuminating her face in fleeting, golden fragments. Afterward, she cried, silent tears that slipped from the corners of her eyes onto the pillow we shared. I held her and didn’t ask why. I already knew.

---

The morning of the seventh day was a blur of packing, of the landscape becoming undeniably coastal, of the smell of salt air beginning to seep into the carriage, a new scent overwriting the old ones of wood and wool and us. We dressed in silence, putting back on the armor of our traveling clothes. We sat side by side by the window, watching the outskirts of Vladivostok appear—cranes, warehouses, Soviet-era apartment blocks clinging to hillsides. The sky was the exact shade of grey she’d described.

The train slowed, the rhythmic clack-clack degrading into a tired squeal of brakes. It came to a final stop. The journey was over.

We stood in the corridor, our suitcases at our feet, the monstrous one and the chaotic one. The compartment behind us was just an empty room again, the beds stripped bare by a provodnitsa who had already moved on.

She turned to me. Her grey eyes were clear, but her lower lip quivered just once. She cupped my face in her hands, her thumbs tracing my cheekbones, and kissed me, a deep, tender kiss that tasted of goodbye and of seven nights suspended in time.

“Thank you,” she whispered against my lips.

“For what?”

“For the company. For the observation.”

People jostled past us, eager to disembark, their voices loud and mundane. The spell was broken.

We stepped off the train onto the busy platform. The Pacific wind was indeed cold and grey, just as she’d said, and it whipped at our coats immediately. We stood there for a moment, surrounded by the chaos of arrival, of reunions and shouted directions.

“I have a taxi booked,” she said, nodding toward the queue, her voice already taking on a faint, formal distance.

“I’m going to walk to my hostel,” I said. “Get my bearings.”

Another moment of suspended animation. Then she leaned in, kissed my cheek, her lips warm against my wind-chilled skin. “Goodbye, Sasha.”

“Goodbye, Anya.”

She turned and walked away, pulling her giant suitcase behind her, its wheels catching on the uneven platform. I watched her go, her blonde hair whipped by the wind, her shoulders squaring as she moved toward the taxi rank, until she was swallowed by the crowd.

I stood on the platform for a long time, the smell of diesel and salt in my nostrils, the ghost of her herbal shampoo clinging to my sweater. The train, our world for seven days, sat empty and silent, already being prepared for its return journey west.

I turned and walked toward the city, the taste of her still on my lips, the memory of her body against mine in the rhythmic dark a new, permanent pulse beneath my own. The wind bit, but I felt it fully. The map of her was etched into me—the feel of her skin, the sound of her laugh, the way she made me feel seen—as clearly as the tracks across the continent were etched into the land. I walked into the windy, grey port city, alone, but somehow less so than when I began.