The train looked much like every other overnight train we’d ridden. Four bunks filled each compartment, separated from the hallway by heavy curtains.
Except these curtains were knitted.
Pink.
They looked handmade.
We shared our compartment with two older women traveling to Moscow. They waved goodbye to their husbands through the window, then turned toward each other and began talking.
Next to them, we unpacked our dumplings, climbed into our bunks, and tried to make room for boots, coats, and backpacks.
Below us, one woman began reading something aloud.
She whispered.
She also never stopped.
Long after the lights went out, her voice continued beneath us, rising and falling with the rhythm of the train.
~
Then the conductor was shaking me.
Gently.
“Vladimir. Time to get up.”
Dani was already sitting up in her own bunk. The women were gone.
I checked the time: four in the morning.
We stepped off the train into falling snow.
It came down harder here than anywhere else on our trip, reducing everyone exiting the cars to the same hunched shape.
We followed them up a metal staircase over the tracks and into the station.
The clock overhead read four.
Nothing in the city would open for hours.
We found a row of plastic chairs facing the windows and sat beneath the fluorescent lights to wait for morning.
Dani listened to an audiobook through one earbud and handed me the other whenever one of our favorite scenes approached.
Above us, television screens played looping public-service announcements.
The same actors appeared in every video.
In one, an old woman stopped her husband from shooting robbers and called the police instead, using a cordless phone with an antenna almost as long as the gun.
In another, a punk with a green Mohawk abandoned a backpack labeled TNT in the station while a police officer flirted with a woman nearby.
Then a Rottweiler found the bomb and saved the day.
The videos repeated every few minutes.
Eventually, I knew what came next.
I spent the remaining hours sounding out the Cyrillic letters on the station signs.
Л
L
З
Z
I would find one I recognized, then lose another. Slowly, the symbols stopped looking decorative.
They started becoming language.
Across from us, another traveler slept beneath the television screens.
He sat folded over in the chair, boots off, mouth hanging open. Drool glistened on his chin.
When the clock neared six, he woke.
For a while, he just sat there.
Then he pulled on yesterday’s socks and laced up his tall black boots. He zipped himself into a heavy military-style coat and tightened the collar around his neck.
A few minutes earlier, he had looked almost defenseless.
Now he looked ready to leave.
When the ticket counters opened, he stood and walked toward them.
Dani nudged me.
“Seven o’clock.”
We finally stood, stretched the stiffness from our legs, and stepped outside into the gray morning.
~
We’d passed the cathedral earlier that morning, five golden domes rising from white stone and snow like lamps in the fog.
Dani had tried the door then, but it wouldn’t budge.
A groundskeeper intercepted us, a bearded man in a thick coat and heavy boots, half-lost in the morning snow as he shoveled the steps clear.
We didn’t understand his words, but his meaning was clear: come back later.
we moved on.
At end of the boulevard rose the Golden Gate. It no longer guarded anything. Traffic circled it instead.
The old city walls had disappeared centuries earlier, leaving the gate stranded in the middle of an intersection. We waited for a break in the cars, hurried across the pavement, and squeezed onto a traffic island barely large enough for the two of us.
A plain door opened into one of the round towers.
We climbed a narrow spiral staircase until it ended—not in a gallery or lobby—but at a ticket desk.
The attendant pointed at a sign:
5₽
About seven cents.
We paid and stepped through the doorway.
The museum occupied a single room.
Behind a sheet of glass stood its only exhibit: a three-meter diorama of the Golden Gate as it once looked, complete with walls, soldiers, smoke, and tiny fires climbing toward the battlements.
As we approached, a woman disappeared behind the display.
The lights went out.
One spotlight found a prince.
Another found the burning city.
A narrator began introducing names we had never heard before. The lights jumped from one corner of the battlefield to another. Armies advanced. Castles burned. Somewhere in the middle of it all, the “Hero of Russia” appeared, although I never became certain which tiny figure he was supposed to be.
The room brightened again.
The woman emerged from behind the display and looked at me holding my camera.
She smiled and motioned toward the model.
“Photo,” she said.
I stepped closer.
From a distance it had seemed almost comically small for an entire museum. Up close, I noticed hundreds of tiny soldiers, each painted by hand. Every wall stone had been placed individually. Smoke curled above miniature rooftops no bigger than my thumbnail.
“Photo,” she said again.
So I raised my camera.
~
Outside, we returned to the Cathedral.
Dani grabbed the handle.
“Want to try again?”
I reached for it too, feeling the worn iron against my fingers, and together we heaved the wooden doors open.
It took a moment for my eyes to adjust to the darkness.
No electric lights—only candles and shafts of winter light filtered through narrow stained-glass slits in the stone.
A row of folding chairs sat on one side of velvet ropes. I set down my pack and found a seat. Dani sat too.
Even the hard metal felt nice after so much walking.
Past the rope, icons of Mary, Jesus, and saints covered the walls. Small crimson glass lamps hung before them. The faces were dulled by centuries and soot, yet the flickering oil lights made them seem briefly alive again.
Worshipers moved through the shadows, crossing themselves three times before kissing the icons.
I didn’t know what any of it meant.
Near the entrance, a small counter sold candles and icons. Among the postcards and candles, Dani spotted a crucifix featuring a small figure of Jesus on the cross. She bought one for her mother.
“Do you want one too? You know … for your mom?”
I hesitated.
Before I’d left for this trip, my mom called.
“Are there any Christians in Russia?”
I told her that Russian towns had an overwhelming density of Orthodox churches.
She paused.
“I know they have Orthodox churches, but do they have any Christian ones?”
I didn’t know what to say.
I looked back into the sanctuary. Smoke drifted between the faces, moving through the oil light like visible breath.
Then back to the figure in the case.
The woman handed it to me.
I turned it over once in my hands, feeling its familiar shape.
“No. I don’t think I will.”
~
We rode a bus then.
The bus looked older than me. Faded green paint showed beneath newer coats, curtains hung in the windows, and decades-old advertisements ghosted through the peeling sides.
A woman wearing a white cap worked her way down the aisle.
A spool of red paper tickets hung from a string around her neck, resting upright against her chest like an oversized jewel.
As the bus accelerated, she released the handrail and let the motion carry her down the aisle, sliding over the icy floor.
She handed us two tickets, lifted her heels, and slid away.
Ten minutes later blue monastery domes appeared above the snow.
Our path looked simple on the map.
From Bogolyubsky Monastery, the map showed a simple route: down the road, beside the river, across the railroad tracks.
Somewhere beyond them stood the Church of the Intercession on the Nerl.
Instead, we found fences.
Warning signs hung from the wire.
German shepherds paced behind it, watching us long before we reached the gate.
The trail continued straight through the checkpoint as though nothing were unusual.
We stopped.
The dogs paced behind the fence.
We turned around.
Back near the monastery Dani unfolded the map again.
“I think we turned too soon.” She said
A second trail climbed onto a pedestrian bridge instead.
Blue glass enclosed the walkway over the tracks, its elevator towers rising above the snow like something transplanted from another century.
As we crossed, the monastery bells began to ring.
Not in steady intervals.
Different bells answered one another—high, low, fast, slow—until the scattered notes gathered into something that sounded almost like singing.
We stopped in the middle of the bridge and listened until the last notes disappeared into the snow.
Beyond the bridge the path vanished.
Fresh snow covered everything.
Only a narrow strip of packed footprints hinted where the trail might be.
We followed it carefully, testing each step before trusting our weight to it.
Then the storm thickened.
The church appeared at last.
Far ahead, barely more than a white shape floating above an endless white field.
I held out my hand. The church was smaller than my thumb.
“What is that? A mile? Two?”
Dani shrugged.
We walked another few minutes.
The sky darkened.
I checked the time.
Five o’clock.
The sky was already darkening.
We looked at the church.
Then at each other.
Neither of us wanted to say it first.
A few minutes later a group of Russians passed us heading toward the church.
“Already giving up?”
We smiled back and kept walking.
When we reached the bridge, the church had disappeared behind the falling snow.
Darkness followed.