Europe @ 2.4 km/h (3 page)

This is not an art book, but I must mention a few reasons why the Hermitage always leaves its visitors in awe. First, there is the grandeur of the green, white and gold palace itself. On the ceiling above the grand Jordan Staircase is a restored classical painting that shows the gods on Mt Olympus.

Unfamiliarity springs an early surprise in the form of a larger-than-life gilt diorama of a peacock atop a tree stump, flanked by an owl and a rooster that work this bizarre chronometer by hooting the minutes and crowing the seconds. Attributed to English horologist James Cox in the 1790s, the Peacock Clock was commissioned by minister Potemkin, more renowned for erecting village facades with nothing behind them to impress his lover, Tsarina Catherine, on her progress through rural Russia.

In Room 208 I make an early discovery in my European exploration, an anonymous work by a 15th-century Florentine painter that shows the baby Jesus with the whole world in his hands, an orb with Asia, Africa and — this is not a misspelling — Europia. I am intrigued by the suggestion of Utopia here, the notion that Europe — whatever else it may be — is an ideal called Europia to which the real-world entity only occasionally corresponds.

22 km

Inescapable on the way back to my hostel, lo and behold, Ivan, at his post in front of the Nevsky Palace. ‘The quality of mercy is not strained,’ he begins to recite, leaving me tongue-tied and strangely moved, as Portia’s speech from
The Merchant of Venice
is one that my 87-year-old father knows by heart. Clearly, Ivan is beefing up his emigration pitch. I smile appreciation and make a mental note: if ever Australia is desperately short of peasant-minded doormen who can quote Shakespeare, he will go to the head of the queue.

40 km

Five days, 8 km a day (it would have been less but this city’s underground railway, with no lifts down from street level, is off limits to wheelchair users). Tomorrow morning I head north to the boondocks.

It’s 10 pm now, and I hope to slink back to my hostel for a few hours’ sleep. Easy does it, if I can just avoid the drunks who swig from the bottle as they sway down the pavements on autopilot. Uh-oh, there’s Ivan under the Nevsky’s awning, beckoning. No escape.

Patiently I listen as he tells me of his son, now nineteen, who was left deformed by an injury sustained during his birth. He says he just wanted to tell me one thing. ‘I admire you. You do not’ — and here he declaims in a manner worthy of Hamlet — ‘surrender’ — his arm is outstretched, statue-like — ‘to despair’. How humbling. If only he knew …

I could have told him quite a lot about succumbing to Despair but compliments come along rarely enough in life that no good purpose is served by showing those kind enough to offer them how undeserved they are. Those days were a different time, and too different a place in my life, to make it any part of Ivan’s, and these days I hardly ever think of the time before and immediately after that fundamental divide in my life.

Still, the night you try to kill yourself is not one you’re likely to forget. Nor is the state of mind that drove you to the brink of self-annihilation.

But how could I hope to convey the devastating damage to the certainties of everyday life wrought by Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait on those working in ‘the next emirate down’, Bahrain, in the incandescent summer of 1990? How could I expect Ivan to comprehend the fear of that fight, and the pointlessness of flight when faced with a looming military threat just over the horizon?

To understand that, he would need a power of imagination to sense what it might be like to feel trapped and alone in the workplace but find no refuge at home from the menace abroad.

On the evening of August 19, the fuse to my suicide attempt was lit. Could Ivan, or anyone, appreciate why amid the disintegration of an entire society I snapped, and ran down the street yelling that this was the end of the world? Certainly he could understand why a police van would pick me up and its officers lock me up overnight — and even, perhaps with a shudder of horror, pity my reduced state, petrified and under near constant surveillance, in a Bahraini asylum for the next ten days where I was questioned, analysed and sedated, diagnosed ‘borderline manic depressive’, stabilised and at last released — not back to work but shipped home, a certified failure.

My decision to discard the lithium once out of any obvious external danger was logical enough, but no one apart from ‘the wretched of the earth’ can truly know the humiliating shame and naked dread that crippled my being as the ensuing months brought not recovery but a dousing of all the lights of hope, one by one.

You can’t say I didn’t put up a resistance. Whatever a ‘nervous wreck’ can do to restore himself to himself I did: seeking out psychiatric advice, the benefits of aromatherapy, relaxation and all manner of other cures for insomnia. When the fight had gone out of me, I turned to flight, quite literally. Year’s end found me again in London, where I had last tasted happiness before the crash. But now it was a capital of desolation, bereft of work and hope alike. That round-the-world ticket from Melbourne permitted me to go in only one direction, from the east towards the setting sun. I could only flee so far.

Everywhere I travelled in thrall to my principal enemy, Despair. Could a friend have helped? No way I could think of. Some agonies are so private they cannot be shared, the loss of one’s sanity above all.

Despair, to which Ivan does not see me surrendering now, had me comprehensively conquered then. I bowed my head to the counsel of Despair, ‘Don’t spread your Hell to others, you’ll only drag them down’. Yet not until I arrived back in Melbourne at the end of February 1991 — after a brief unavailing stopover in Vancouver — did I realise for a certainty that I’d come home to die.

Exits there are aplenty. I might have found another had I not been staying with an old journalistic colleague and her friends in an East Melbourne mansion block and they not all gone out for the evening. I might have spied another road to extinction if so many of them, troubled souls, hadn’t left a pharmacopoeia’s worth of tablets on their various bedside tables.

Even after the mind has surrendered to Despair, dear Ivan, let me assure you, every sinew of the body strains against oblivion. Nevertheless, I might have called off that deed if one of my fellow guests had come back early. But my animal need to stop this interminable pain found a path through these converging factors, and in a trice the only possible thing I must do was as obvious as the night that follows day. In the quietest spell of a warm March night, after hours of restless pacing, I sat imperturbably still on a window sill, four floors up, steadied myself featherlight against the frame, and gently let go …

The thud as my body hit 15 metres below was heard by the friend whose hospitality I was grievously abusing, and who had arrived home just minutes before. Seven months in the world-class Austin Hospital set me back on the road to happiness, which for curious old me requires journeys such as the 2007 crossing of Europe that I have interrupted for your benefit — leaving Ivan at his revolving door.

Today strangers who blurt out, ‘What happened to you?’ almost never get a straight answer, because these days I won’t waste my breath. But Ivan is far more perceptive than they. Language permitting, I tell myself, I might have disowned his compliment with an outpouring of revelations. Even that would have been a waste of breath, though, since a perfectly adequate response to his tribute ‘You do not surrender to despair’ would have been: No, Ivan, I most certainly don’t. I live with the consequences of doing so once.

42 km

More than 440 km north-east of what has long been Russia’s window on the world lies Petrozavodsk, the forgotten Petropolis, in the expanses of Karelia or, less grandly, the backwoods that Russians memorably term the
peripheria
.

Distance is not all that separates glitzy, go-getting Petersburg from Petrozavodsk — Peter’s Factory, so called because the Great one founded it to make armaments for the Great Northern War he was bent on prosecuting against those not-yet-peace-loving Swedes.

An overnight train service links the two, saving me the cost of a night’s lodgings. The fact that St Petersburg’s Ladozhsky Station has been newly refurbished doesn’t raise any expectation that it will have trains to match. Just as well, since it doesn’t. But, to my mild surprise, given the carriages’ Soviet-era vintage, an external hydraulic ramp is on the platform ready to winch me up onto night train No. 658. The
provodnik
(carriage attendant) —who remains a staple of long-distance Russian train travel, supplying everything from advice on connections to tea hot from the samovar — can barely wait to show his dexterity with the mechanical beast.

But once I’m on board his old habit of command and control reasserts itself. It is still forbidden for passengers to travel on inter-city trains without producing identity documents (and in a couple of months a bomb will explode on the St Petersburg-Moscow train, so perhaps the authorities have reason on their side).

But now Andrei holds up a queue of passengers practised in the art of patience as he sets about wresting an internal door from its hinges. ‘What are you doing that for?’ I cry, oblivious to the fact he cannot understand a word I am saying. Over my protests, Andrei continues to play the vandal until he is left holding this door, casting about in vain for a place to put it down.

I knew from previous journeys on these old rattlers that my chair would be too wide for the corridor even after such an operation. ‘The vestibule is good enough for me,’ I tell Andrei, and this time he relents with a good-natured shrug, as if to say, Well, I tried. I stifle my satisfaction but know that tonight, covered by a thick blanket (provided by the
provodnik
, who else?), I will sleep fitfully but at least as well as the five other passengers in the compartment containing my assigned seat.

44-45 km

Sunday afternoon in a café on Karl Marx St. — where street names are concerned, there’s been no revolution here since 1917 — and I fall into conversation with a couple at the next table. Fluent English-speakers are a rarity in the
peripheria
. Rustig and Angela Rstislav are both professors of European law at the University of Petrozavodsk: help is at hand in my Continental quest. Rustig — a tall, courtly man who always thinks before he speaks — tells me I can go nearly anywhere I want in Russia but that it will be impossible for me to visit Europe. What does he mean by that?