The Captive Mind

“Eyes that have seen should not be shut; hands that have touched should not forget when they take up a pen.” – Czeslaw Milosz, The Captive Mind

I could see out the train window that we were leaving the Soviet Union. There were no signs that said “Leaving the Soviet Union” or “Entering Finland.” But what I did see was clear enough: a tall, barbed wire fence, on the other side of which was a wide swath of closely cropped meadow, then another tall, barbed wire fence.

We were on a train for the short trip from Leningrad (now called Saint Petersburg) to Helsinki. And what I was looking at was the border between the Soviet Union and Finland. The idea was that if you wanted to escape and miraculously managed to scale the first fence, you might be seen running across the meadow—or the footprints you’d leave behind would be seen—and if you made it over the second fence, you’d eventually be hunted down in the thick conifer forest that straddled both countries, and be dragged back and locked up. I had learned all this from a man in Leningrad who, a few years before, had tried to escape and ended up in prison.

We—my then wife and myself—were nearing the end of a year and half of living, working, and traveling in the world’s few remaining communist countries. We had been teachers of English as a second language at a university in Beijing from February 1986 until June 1987. For our return to the United States, we had decided that, instead of hopping on a plane and flying back east across the Pacific Ocean, we’d go by train north through China, Mongolia, then west through the Soviet Union, then to Finland, Sweden, Denmark, and finally to Holland, where we’d catch a cheap flight from Amsterdam to New York City. At the end of this trip, we would have circled the globe. Not only that; I would return a completely changed man from the time I’d left the United States a year and a half before.

We departed from Beijing on a sunny, hot afternoon in August for the five-day, Trans-Siberian Railway journey to Moscow. We were travelling with two American teaching colleagues in a compartment with four berths. One of our colleagues spoke Russian. And with him and a driver we had to hire—back then before the fall of the Soviet Union foreign tourists were not allowed to wander around on their own—we toured Moscow and a few surrounding towns before we went our separate ways. My wife and I took a train north to Leningrad, where we pinched from the sparse but free hotel breakfasts enough scraps of fatty cold cuts, limp slices of cheese, and a hunk of bread to last us to the next morning. We were quickly going broke outside of China and needed to make sure we had enough money in traveler’s checks to last us until we got to Amsterdam and our flight home.

We were also growing bone tired. Life in China had been rough. One of the things I remember most was how everyone was still picking through the physical and emotional ruins of some forty years of Maoist carnage in which upwards of 80 million souls were executed or starved to death or killed themselves. We lived and worked among the survivors and became unwitting witnesses to tales of brutality and butchery depicting the horrors that a dictatorship can rain down on a country and its people. That in itself wore us down as so many of our students confided in us what life was like for themselves and their families under Mao. For most of them, it was the first time they’d been able to talk to a foreigner about this, and they struggled with their broken English and with their traumatic memories. Time and again they would say to us, “You cannot imagine….” I would agree; no, I couldn’t.

Now, our train slowed to a crawl and continued like that for miles. Then it stopped nowhere near any buildings. Suddenly we saw armed Soviet soldiers outside, looking under the train cars. German shepherds straining on their leashes crawled under the cars. Searching for people trying to escape, I figured. We were in a compartment of four seats. I don’t recall the nationalities of the other two passengers but they were not American. We looked at each other and shrugged our shoulders and sat in silence waiting for the train to start moving again. Presently, we heard the thumps of heavy boots come down the aisle of the train. We heard compartment doors slide open. We heard muffled voices. It sounded as if passengers were being questioned and having their luggage searched. Then we heard the doors slide shut again.

As the sounds came closer, I panicked. I remembered that in my suitcase I had copious, scathing journal entries of our time in China. I had photos of people and places that maybe I should not have had. I had some Chinese renminbi and some Soviet rubles and kopecks. I had a Chinese flag. And I had a Russian flag that I had scored in a trade with the man in Leningrad who had tried to escape. We’d given him and his wife some of our American clothes in exchange. Had they been KGB spies who’d tricked us? Were we in trouble now?

Our compartment door rolled opened. A soldier filled up the doorway. He questioned us while he reviewed our passports and looked around. Where had we come from? Where were we going? How long had we been in the Soviet Union? What did we do? Who did we talk to? He spotted our bags above us on the rack. He wanted to know what was in them. Some clothes, some books, and some photos, I said, playing it cool. I wondered: Was he going to open our bags? What would happen if he found the flags? Is it even legal to take a Chinese flag or a Russian flag out of the country? And what about the Chinese and Soviet money? I had no idea. I was frozen by the thought that we had done something wrong, that we would be hauled off the train, hustled into some military vehicle, and thrown in jail. Such is the nature of a mind battered by a totalitarian regime. Perpetual paranoia.

The soldier slid the door closed and soon the train started moving again. Silently relieved, I sat back in my seat and gazed out the window into the shadows and the sunlight of the endless forest. After a few more minutes the train stopped again. Now we were at some sort of station. All I could see were warehouses and other track lines. Then, again, I heard heavy footfalls come down the aisle, the sound of compartment doors sliding open, voices. As the sound drew closer to us, I grew frightened again. Were we still in the Soviet Union? What was going on? Then our compartment door flung open. A tall, thin man with a tanned face, a big smile, and brilliantly white teeth and dressed in a bright blue uniform and cap poked his head in and, with a flourish, said, “Welcome to Finland!”

At that moment everything changed inside and all around me. I can’t remember what I said but I’ll remember forever how I felt: ecstatic. Almost dizzy with relief and joy, so inexpressible yet so simple. An intense and perfect happiness and inner peace. I might have laughed; I was so giddy. Freedom, that’s what it was. After a year and a half of watching what I said and who I talked to, I could now say whatever I wanted to whomever I wanted. I felt no one could search my bags, take my journals, and haul me off to be locked up for something I had that the government did not want me to have. I felt I could write what I wanted to write and about anything I wanted to write. I think the feeling was so startling because it was so unexpected. All of this welled up in me in a matter of seconds, like Scrooge waking from his nightmare with the dreadful Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come and realizing it was all just a dream.

Our sliding door remained open this time and outside on the other side I saw a cafe. We got off the train for a short break. Finland greeted us with all its Nordic splendor. The air was cool, the sky deep blue, the sun brilliant, the clouds big and fluffy. We went into the café, the first in the free world we’d seen in a year and a half. I was awestruck. It was like I’d never seen anything like this before. I saw on a countertop a basket of oranges the size of softballs, a far cry from the shriveled lumps I’d seen just over the border. I saw sandwiches of all sorts made from huge loaves of bread and thick slices of meat and cheese. I saw boxes of crackers and cookies and jars of jams and cellophane bags of candy all neatly lined up on the shelves. And all the time I was thinking that no one just over the border in the Soviet Union or way back in China could touch me now. That was the best feeling of all. It was behind me. It was over.

I bought a cup of coffee, a sandwich, and some oranges. I didn’t even ask what anything cost because I didn’t care. I wanted to buy everything, broke as we were. No, I just wanted to look. It was a feast for the mind hungry for simple beauty and abundance, for the long-starving soul. I was so exhilarated that I wanted to hug the heavyset woman at the cash register. At a small table we ate our sandwiches and an orange and I sipped my coffee as, remarkably, Aaron Copland’s Fanfare for the Common Man floated softly through the air. I could have cried a river from relief and happiness. But that was not all. I also felt sad for leaving all my desperate students back in China, some of whom had become my friends. I even felt sad for the couple who had traded us a Russian flag for some clothes off our backs, and who, as we were parting at the Leningrad train station, complained bitterly, “Why is it that you can go anywhere you want and we can’t? It’s not fair. It’s not right.”

That memory haunts me still.

But another, happier memory, has stayed with me, too. We strolled outside to get back on the train to Helsinki. I saw a sign of the station name: Vainikkala. I looked past the sign and down the tracks toward the direction from which we’d just come, toward the vast Soviet Union looming like a forbidden planet out there in the woods. So near yet so far. I was still lost in a daze of complex emotions, thinking about how far we’d come and so grateful we’d made it to where we now stood, when an American woman we’d seen in the café brushed past us and breathlessly said, “I don’t want the train to leave without me.” I turned to my wife and said, “The train can leave without me. I’m in no hurry to go anywhere now. The train could leave me here and that would be just fine.”

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