Happy international women’s day, everybody!
It was the 7th of March four years ago, when I once forgot about the peculiarity of this day and needed to be hauntingly reminded of its vital importance. Vital, that is, for international friendship, of course. Exactly four years ago, I was sitting on the trans-siberian railway, around kilometer 3300 or so. More than 24 hours before, we had left Ekaterinburgh for Irkutsk, a train ride of about 56 hours. The Ural had been long behind us, we had just crossed the river Ob for a short stop in Novosibirsk, the capital of the district of Siberia. Outside lay the vast Barbara steppe in which many lives had been lost in the past due to a total lack of orientation reference points. On this day, it was only about -18° Celsius, and an endless snow cover hid everything except the tops of occasional birch groves or lonely bushes. Inside the train, though, it was quite cosy – the curtains in our cabin were crimson with a floral pattern. There even were flowerpots hanging in the windows (Plastic? I can’t remember.)
In Novosibirsk, a young man entered our cabin. He smiled very brightly and stood in the door case for a couple of minutes which led us to think that he wanted to sell something, only we couldn’t make out what. Our next guess was that he might not have a ticket and wanted us to hide him. My companion was getting uneasy and went to get the проводница (female conductor). Everything turned out to be alright – the man had his ticket as well as two very glassy eyes. His wild gestures were only to tell us that he wouldn’t stay long, only for a few stops (i.e. four hours). Sasha, as he told me his name was, and I then started communicating – aided by my excuisitely bad Russian, his likewise poor English, arms, legs, and my German-Russian dictionary. Sasha told me a lot about himself and his family and that he was going home for somebody’s (his wife’s?) birthday which would incidentally conincide with his mother’s wedding anniversary and the international women’s day. This very fact striked him so amazingly odd and of such existential significance that he kept on repeating it over and over again – It INTERNATIONAL, IN-TER-NATIO-NAL vomen’s day! – and there seemed nothing important enough to distract him. Until I caught the glimpse of a bottle cap in his bag and asked him what type of artefact it might possibly belong to. Surprisingly enough, he pulled out a two-liter bottle of beer which we collaborately drank with him noticably babbling and making weirder and weirder grimaces just as if he was a burlesque of a Russian drinker. Our short, but very successful acquaintanceship, ended in the town of Taiga, and I only hope he found his way to his beloved wife who will surely have awaited him with indulgence.
