#eastbound

Ponder this while you’re trying to fall asleep. I don’t sleep on planes. It’s impossible for me. I’ve tried trick after hack after sleep-schedule change—and it never works. Which isn’t great when I’m flying somewhere like China or Australia or back to my home in Chicago. Of course, now that I’m older, it’s not that easy for me to fly to any timezone outside glorious Central Standard Time, and I…

When this brief lyrical novel was first published in France, in 2012, Russia’s war against Ukraine was no more than a psychotic gleam in Vladimir Putin’s eye. Today, “Eastbound” is a story of our time. In a book whose only battlefield is a cross-continental train, Maylis de Kerangal vividly evokes the Russian military’s disorder and brutality and the desperation of the men who have been forced to serve in it.As the novel opens, more than a hundred new conscripts are packed, many of them standing, virtually all of them smoking, into the third-class cars of a trans-Siberian train going east. They haven’t been told their destination, a relatively small indignity. They’ve already been marked as losers for not having evaded Russia’s annual spring draft, as the more affluent and better-connected have. They expect to be hazed in their barracks by second-year conscripts who may rape them, burn their genitals with cigarettes or make them lick the toilets. You can imagine the esprit de corps.

One of the new recruits is 20-year-old Aliocha, not a fighter, not a drinker, woefully still a virgin, terrified of his increasingly drunken and belligerent fellow travelers. When two other conscripts attack him, beating him badly in his cramped compartment, Aliocha resolves to get off the train, perhaps the first meaningful decision he’s made in his life.

The young man shortly discovers that he’s too naïve to plan a successful desertion. He’s unfamiliar with the stations where the train will stop and the country that lies beyond. His first try draws the attention of his vicious sergeant — but then Aliocha encounters a Westerner who is traveling in first class. Hélène is a 35-year-old Frenchwoman who has impulsively gone AWOL herself. She’s fleeing her lover, a Russian émigré whom she had met in Paris and later joined in Krasnoyarsk, where he had returned to manage a hydroelectric plant. She speaks no Russian. She and Aliocha communicate with gestures and intuition. She fully comprehends the young man’s fear, but she has no plan, for either of them.

As Aliocha and Hélène evade detection, “Eastbound” becomes a novel of suspense that hurtles along with considerably more velocity than the train itself, which, de Kerangal notes, moves at 60 kilometers per hour. The would-be deserter and the privileged foreigner develop a languageless friendship unsettled by their unequal circumstances. Aliocha observes, “She’s helping me, yes, but she doesn’t trust me.” Their efforts to build trust suffer setbacks.

Siberia rolls by outside, “a woolly mauve wilderness,” the idea of Siberia even larger than the landscape: “a world turned inside out like a glove, raw, wild, empty.” The train lurches through “the night that never closes completely here, but stays ambiguous, charged with an electric luminosity that always makes you think day is about to break.” Then the day does break, “the dawn raising up the forest at full tilt, lifting each trunk to vertical, the bluish underbrush perforated by rays charged with a carnal light, the taiga like a magnetic cloth, modulated to infinity by the new thickness of the air.” The train runs along the shore of Lake Baikal, “the inland sea and the sky inversed, the chasm and the sanctuary.”

speed is distance through time