- best-of
The conductor barely glanced at the visas and invitation letters I’d carried so carefully all week.
“Passports.”
A hand outstretched.
She compared our faces against a handwritten ledger, nodded once, and stepped aside.
Inside, lace curtains hung in the windows. Instrumental music drifted through the speakers—dramatic enough to contrast the aging diesel train.
We found our seats and watched the last passengers climb aboard while another melody began.
The train lurched forward.
Three hours later it stopped again.
No announcement. Just silence.
A guard carrying a rifle walked down the aisle collecting passports. Another followed with a German shepherd whose attention settled almost entirely on the bananas Dani had brought.
The passports disappeared.
So did the train.
For the next few hours we moved in hundred-foot increments, stopped, waited, then moved again.
Somewhere beneath us workers lifted each carriage from its wheels so they could replace the European wheel-sets with wider Russian ones.
We never saw it happen.
We only felt the car rise, shudder, and settle back onto the new rails.
~
Earlier I’d walked toward the restroom and found a man smoking between the cars.
He wore black from head to toe. Tattoos covered his knuckles.
He said something as I passed.
I stammered.
“Sorry. English.”
He smiled, reached for his phone, and dropped it. The battery skittered one direction, the cover another.
For a moment we both stared at the pieces.
Then I picked them up and handed them back.
He nodded, and I took my seat.
Hours later, our passports returned. The woman who checked them, now dressed in civilian clothes, took a seat beside us.
Behind us, darkness set between the trees.
Ahead of us, the tracks multiplied into a forest of rails beneath steel canopies.
Then everyone crowded the vestibules before the train had stopped.
We joined them.
When the doors opened, we moved into the cold.
Two hours later, we were still shivering
~
The sticker on the window said “Nevsky,” but so did everything here. It was two in the morning, and we’d walked miles in the snow, trying to find our hotel.
A service entrance.
A bar.
An after-hours pharmacy.
A twenty-four-hour coffee shop.
All the doors so far had been wrong.
Now we stood at an unmarked building somewhere along Nevsky Prospect, following clues left in the comments of online reviews.
“Near the church,” one had said. It was all we had to go on.
I glanced at the bell towers rising behind me, then at the sticker on the window. Dani shivered beside me.
I pulled, and the door opened.
~
Inside, we passed a vacant security desk and a stairway. We climbed to the next landing, and then the third.
Nothing, but the online reviewer said “upstairs,” so we went further. At the fifth floor, Dani spotted another sticker matching the one taped to the front.
Nevsky.
“I think this is it.”
A speaker box hung next to it: old and industrial. Soviet.
I pressed the button and waited.
The speaker clicked and a garbled voice answered in Russian.
I waited for the noise to subside.
“Hello. We have reservations tonight. Can you let us in?”
The buzzing returned, longer, somehow angrier.
“Hello?”
Then I grabbed the handle and pulled.
It took all my effort, but the door opened.
~
Inside, we found an off-white hallway with linoleum tile and flickering bulbs.
A woman leaned out from her desk at the far end. She had short dark hair and bags hung under her eyes.
She said something and waived at us to step inside as the door slammed behind us.
Then she booted her desktop computer and began copying our passports, itineraries, invitation letters, and visas.
We waited.
Then she turned her attention back to Dani and me.
“This way. Tour.”
She pointed to my right.
A restroom and a shower, carved awkwardly from the hallway corners. Both smelled like mold.
Behind me, a kitchen. A hot-water dispenser and bags of black tea sat in a bowl. A washing machine stood beside a refrigerator.
Dani opened the fridge.
The shelves held nothing but half-empty packs of cigarettes.
She closed it.
The woman pointed down the hallway.
I followed.
I shuffled my feet left, as she lead us to our room: half a room, really.
The narrow hallways that flanked the reception counter had three doors running down both sides of them, each had a gold plastic room number hung from it, but the last door had two numbers.
We followed her as she opened this door to reveal a vestibule with two more doors dividing what once formed a single hotel room into smaller spaces.
“Room is eight dollars. Yes?”
I nodded, and she handed me a key.
It was long and thick with square-shaped teeth at the end.
“This is yours. Goodnight.”
And she crossed the hallway to her desk.
~
The key opened the last inner door—a small room, windowless, barely six inches longer and wider than the twin-size mattress sitting on the carpet.
We shimmied in beside the mattress, dropped our bags on the floor, and collapsed onto the bed.
It felt thin, made from several smaller mattresses with thick seams and springs that stabbed into my ribs.
I climbed in.
Dani was soon asleep.
For the first time in a week, so was I.