Agonisingly, I retrace my steps to the apartment, running all the way, discovering reluctant reserves of stamina, heartbeats clinging to my ribs in irregular clumps. The passport, naturally, is carefully stowed in the bag I had planned to take with me on the trip, but replaced at the last minute with a different one. Muscles leaking lactic acid, I make it back to Leningradsky just as boarding begins.
The kupe is inoffensively modern: patterned orange upholstery on comfortable bunks, a fold-down table in the middle carrying small bags with toiletries, snacks in clear plastic cases with children's drink boxes, bread, the usual mucusy yogurt and vacuum-packed slices of sausage. I make lazy conversation with fellow travellers, trying not to seem like all I want is to wade into clouds of luxurious sleep. Through the open sliding door of the kupe, uniformed young women offer tea and coffee, heels catching in the folds of the long cloth that covers the carpet in the aisle. I had earlier confronted this object with perplexed resentment as it curdled round the wheels of my suitcase; it lay there obstinate like a towel that someone had accidentally pulled all the way out of the dispenser in a public washroom.
In the morning, we stumble weak-eyed from the train, onto a platform whose coffered concrete roof hovers in monumental tension, stretching towards a distant horizon of unrealised Soviet futurism. A bus takes us to a canape reception across from Kazan cathedral. Its mottled black columns submerge me momentarily in the ocean, Neptune's palace encrusted with molluscs, as the guests pop tiny amber embryos on their tongues.
For reasons known only to the gods of carbonated soda (fizz be upon them), we are taken on a tour of the Coca-Cola bottling plant outside St Petersburg. A study in red and white. The familiar curlicue letters coil around every available surface, from the cheap plastic wall-clock to the pens and notepads on the table. The vending machines, naturally, contain only Coke-derived fluids. Such Freudian levels of overcompensation recall the flags draped from coast to coast in the US of A. No object is too ignoble to be splashed proudly with the stars and stripes. And the dichrome world of the plant is the world that Coca-Cola would create, if it could, on the outside; and the endless bottles jostling down conveyor belts are nothing less than the exact equivalent, in terms of their value to the corporation, of each person who will consume them. Capitalism*, in equating the individual with the uniform product, tends towards totalitarianism, from which we are saved just as long as competing brands burn, bright enough that we can still see ourselves, even if we are nothing more than their reflection.
One bottle is different. It sits on the table while the Russian plant managers recite a standard-issue presentation, deadpan delivery of the jargon of corporate responsibility, as superfluous English text, neither understood nor relevant, slides across the screen behind. The bottle makes silent comment on this awkward coexistence of East and West. Made of white porcelain, its classic all-American curves painted with traditional Russian folk patterns, it teeters on the edge between beauty and kitsch, authenticity and corruption.
By chance, an hour or so later we are wandering through the Imperial Porcelain museum, attached to the factory that created the promotional bottle. Here too we are surrounded by Western forms taken to Russian extremes. Among giant rococco vases gilded with the faces of forgotten nobility, we wait for our cruise ship to come in.
*Capitalism here, before anyone objects, is meant as a shorthand for the current model of economic growth (advertising and mass production) rather than in the strict sense of a system of capital accumulation.
