15:50. In three minutes the train from Almaty leaves for Astana, and in Lucy’s 4-bed cabin everyone has begun to settle, unpacking books from bags, searching for charging ports and opening tea flasks to cool. The train hums and conductors shout, so begins the 18-hour journey. The song of two local languages fills the room, a young businessman taking a phone call in Kazakh as two older women chatter in Russian. Lucy listens, picking out the words she knows in Russian to decipher if these two ladies are friends, as they don’t talk like strangers. Figuring she has done enough translation practice, Lucy rummages through her bag for her headphones and water bottle, planning to dissociate and stare at the landscape, fantasising about the possibilities of a new city. Except she finds neither, her stomach drops and in her mind’s eye is the small plastic bag with her train journey provisions sat by her hotel room door, still sat there.
Time passes, between the eternal steppe and the noise of the cabin Lucy is entertained but thirsty. The two women in the lower bunks are locked in a game of chess, and she watches as she tries to will time backwards so she can pick up that stupid, essential, bag. She catches the eye of the woman sat on the bunk opposite, who begins to chat in her direction. “Я не знаю” Lucy replies, which is the truth – she does not know. The woman motions Lucy down and sits her in her place, says something about ‘toilet’ and leaves. A silent game of chess ensues until Lucy’s opponent brings out her phone, opens her translator app, and introduces herself as Anvarova, . Over the course of the next hour the three women get to know each other through staggered conversation with emphatic head nods and beaming smiles as the translations load, and each tell the series of events that have led to their transitory slumber party. Anvarova and Dinara, strangers-turned-friends, sip from still steamy flasks insisting that Lucy drink too. The women share all they have, as is their culture, and treat Lucy as though she’s the guest they have expected all along. The warmth in the way the women communicate, the instant interest in each other made Lucy unusually grateful for her womanhood amongst strangers. They translated into the night, until the slumber portion of the party was unavoidable.
The train rolls into the Astana-1 station at 09:55, and the three women shuffle sleepily out of the cabin onto the platform, Anvarova insisting Lucy take her number so she could visit for tea, kissing her good-bye. The new city awaits, beating the journey would be tough. Lucy had aimed to travel cost effectively and sustainably and had achieved her goals, but she also now understood that in the cabins of the trains and bodies of the busses taking these long and slow journeys exist unique communities created by chance. She would not give up on the opportunity again.
