Sleeping on trains is a tricky thing. It’s the most common pastime since it requires no props or preparation, like playing games or eating, but passengers have to find the perfect balance of daytime bored-napping versus nighttime actual-slumber. You should also take into account that at night the car is always dimly lit, light too low to read by but light too present to ignore completely. Also the train continues making stops at all hours, rejecting and accepting travelers no matter the time of day.
One memorable incident—the same night I awoke to the nearly naked boy—someone was using my bunk as a stool to yank luggage down from the top shelf. Urgent whispers and the blind movements of three women in the dark, one passenger and two conductors helping her gather her belongings, woke up everyone in the vicinity. A woman had almost overslept her stop; one of the three-minute stops and it was all hands on deck to get this woman off the train on time.
After her successful disembarking, there was a collective sigh of relief and some nervous giggles. The Russian circus performer, who had unknowingly been sleeping on top of this woman’s baggage, and had been rudely and urgently awoken, gave up on sleeping again altogether.
It was also this very same night that one drunken man, in his sleep, was shouting obscenities. Russians have a whole sub-language devoted to curse words and this man was making wide use of the dirty dictionary. One of our berth-mates, a sweet younger woman who previously worked on Russian trains, was threatening to kick him off at the next stop if he continued yelling these unmentionable words. I don’t know if her intimidations reached his subconscious, but even he quieted down eventually.
Sleep for me included a jumbled dream world of old friends and random acquaintances, people I usually only dream about if I read about their recent activity on Facebook before falling asleep. But there was no Facebook on this train, only the faces of panicked passengers, desperate to get off at their home station in the dead of night, faces of traveling circus performers, resigned to their sleep being snatched from them, faces of young boys sleeping peacefully as the air caressed their exposed skin, and the faces of two foreign girls, smirking in the dark because what other option do you have but to take in all in and say, “well, this is Russia.”