Europe @ 2.4 km/h (4 page)

‘Well, it’s like this, Ken. You see, Europe is not discovered yet. What it will be in 50 years’ time no one can tell. To my mind, nationalism is the big danger. We in Russia have a big danger of finding ourselves under a new dictator. This is because we Russians have limited experience of democracy.’

The Rstislavs invite me to stroll a few blocks from the café. They want to show me an object of controversy: a statue of Yuri Andropov, Putin’s old boss at the KGB. Andropov headed the local chapter of the Communist Youth League here in the 1930s, between two towering peaks of barbarity: the famine-producing collectivisation drive of 1932 and the Great Purges later in the decade.

What Rustig wants to show me is not just the statue — whose very existence was criticised as a piece of dreadful nostalgia — but its siting: opposite the KGB headquarters which, he tells me (lowering his voice) is what it remains, albeit with a change of name to the FSB, its successor as the state security arm. I photograph Andropov and, more stealthily, Spook Central, before high-tailing it away.

48 km

You don’t have to be black to be on the receiving end of a xenophobic outburst in ‘modern’ Russia. Fifty metres from my hotel I’m confronted on the footpath by a frenzied man barely taller than myself but carrying a wicked-looking stave which he raises without a word between us, all the while muttering imprecations. Somehow he has sensed his quarry is not Russian. I yell ‘Tourist!’ (as if this word might elicit respect). But only when a woman appears on the scene, talking rapidly to distract him, can I make my getaway.

53 km

9 May, Victory (
Pobiede
) Day, in a nation where the Great Patriotic War — known to the rest of us as World War II — continues to have an impact far beyond what it has retained in other Allied nations. But while Russians lay wreaths on their granite memorials to the honoured dead of 65 years ago I am preoccupied with a more immediate concern: finding a place to stay tonight.

Kem has the air of a frontier town. Adults don’t bid you good day, even in Russian; children scowl; and a policeman asks for my papers, even though we are a long way inland — a sure sign that foreigners in these here parts are as exotic as democracy.

But, in comparison with Belomorsk — that forsaken town down the line I’ve just come from — it’s a home away from home. There tall, eagle-eyed Yuri and his dumpy, perpetually drunk sidekick, Sasha, shadowed me into the only hotel in that overgrown village. In the morning — the hotel’s toilet being unreachable — I had to cajole the local ‘tourist officer’ into opening the adjacent school (closed and locked up for the holidays) so that I could use the facilities there, of which I spare you any description in case this is being read over breakfast.

Then, after I’d bought Yuri and Sasha a couple of farewell beers at the pub opposite the station (Sasha looking crestfallen because vodka is his preferred tipple), my backpack went missing for a crucial minute just as the ‘upbound’ train was about to depart, and by the time Yuri retrieved it from Sasha’s slippery grasp the train had pulled out of the station before I noticed that 660 roubles — about A$33, or a good half dozen vodkas — had disappeared from my wallet. Gasping, I dug further into the rucksack. My fingers ‘sighted’ my passport before my eyes. Deep relief: things could have been so much worse.

Kem holds no intrinsic attractions for the traveller except that it satisfies an urge to witness the ‘real Russia’, that vast mass of squalor where dogs run wild and the metropolitan mafia and money merchants are sighted only on TV screens. So why I am here? Because Kem happens to be 10 km or so from the White Sea coast and, if I can establish that the summer boat service to the Solovetsky Islands has resumed, I will be able to fly from Archangelsk to the medieval monastery out there and catch a boat back here, before resuming my rail journey north to Murmansk. Thus endeth Plan A.

After Belomorsk my luck turns. Three students from Moscow Technical University — Pavel, Alexei and Dmitri — who are returning from a river-rafting expedition in the Far North also have Solovetsky in their sights so we all pile into a taxi for the ride out to the coast.

Diss May. The ice has thawed, but this year the first boat will not sail until 1 June, three days after my Russian visa expires. ‘Navigation’ is given as the reason, though clearly they mean the absence of it.

The official holiday has trapped us in this backwater till tomorrow, but only one hotel has any rooms. The receptionist welcomes my new best friends and registers them at once, but takes one look at my wheelchair and shows me the door. While I refuse to leave the moderate warmth of the foyer for 3 °C or so outside — and now sleet begins lashing down — she makes a show of ringing the owner and tells Pavel he has ordered her to call the police.

This is surreal: my reflex is to cite equality of access under the European Constitution, except there isn’t one yet and, even if there were, it wouldn’t apply here. So I prepare to bluff my way through with a little spiel along the lines of ‘You can’t do this: we’re in Europe’. But she can, and in the only sense that matters we’re not.

At this point Pavel persuades me to leave rather than provoke further unpleasantness. Outside, he assures me he has a plan. I must hide in town until nightfall and then we will all return to the hotel and he will smuggle me in. The plan nearly works. But then we realise that, with their room full, I will still need one of my own. After all, I can hardly sleep on the corridor floor. Fortunately, the night receptionist is a different character — the owner’s wife — and, unlike him, she is loath to throw me out.

With Pavel by turns reasoning and translating, we reach an understanding that I can have a room if I leave before nine in the morning (she knows her husband well enough to be sure he will not surface before that hour, and it’s no problem for us: the students have an early train going south to Moscow; and I have one going way out east to Archangelsk). What can I do but agree? Operation Barbarossa was doomed to fail: this may be the eleventh hour, but Victory Day has come just in time.
Pobiede
!

58 km

Good riddance to Kem. Quarter to seven this dismal wet morning finds my Muscovite friends and me at the station. After joining forces to hoist me aboard the Archangelsk train, which leaves before theirs, they depart for another platform.

A frisson of anticipation always courses through my veins immediately before my little world and I are jolted into motion. Check my watch: seconds to departure. Suddenly Pavel and Alexei have returned, and — before I can quiz either — Alexei, by far the more impetuous of the pair, has leapt aboard. Now the train is pulling out, Pavel jogs alongside the carriage, shouting, ‘Alexei will go with you.’ And, even more incredibly, ‘He will save you money.’

This sudden change of plan, if that is what it is, fills me with alarm as I sense he has made a terrible error of judgement which — worse still — will place me under some unspecified obligation. This is going to be painful. The unfamiliarity principle has sprung a whopping great surprise with this impromptu acquisition of a travelling companion, and I’m not sure whether the drama we’re in for will be a tragedy or a farce.

I have only one word for Alexei, whose English is as halting as, well, a Russian long-distance train, and it’s one he happens to know. ‘Why?’

‘I am top Russian agent,’ he begins — I burst out laughing, but he is not to be put off — ‘for Swedish company Cricket matches’. He unzips his jacket to reveal a T-shirt proclaiming ‘Cricket Matches’.

‘You play cricket?’ I say, doing my best to simulate an on drive within the confines of a vestibule barely a metre wide. ‘No, no,’ he says. ‘Matches’ — and lights an imaginary cigarette. ‘Oh!’ I say, my incomprehension only slightly abated.

So why, I ask myself while exploring his puppy-like countenance, does a river-rafting student who doubles as a travelling salesman abandon his mates to go 1000 km out of his way with an Australian he can barely hold a conversation with?

One word — and it’s a key to the enigma of the ‘Russian character’ — insinuates itself into my brain: ‘impulsiveness’. At least Phileas Fogg could choose his own valet. Intently studying my map of Europe, this Passepartout of the North makes it plain he would be happy to accompany me all the way to Portugal. OK, so farce it is.

‘
Sprechen Sie Deutsch
?’ I ask him.

‘
Nein
,’ he replies with no apparent sense of irony.

‘
Parlez-vous anglais
?

‘
Non
,’ he says, confirming it.

‘So,’ I berate him, ‘you see? This is Europe;
Das ist Europa
;
C’est
l’Europe
!’ For a moment I could swear I’m channelling Basil Fawlty. Alexei — my poor Manuel — is reduced to nodding.

Sometime after midnight, Passepartoutski — having snaffled me a blanket from the indifferent
provodnik
— retreats into the body of the carriage at my insistence, like a faithful dog turned out by its master.

It’s 2 am and I’m dozing off when Alexei bursts out of the corridor, breathless, clutching a newspaper with a full-page crossword. ‘Kyen,’ he pleads. ‘Three sisters, English.’ He mimes someone writing. What a rare chance to show off in this unlikeliest of settings. 'Brontë,’ I tell him. Gleefully he fills in the spaces before disappearing back into the carriage.

To the puzzle of his own presence, though, I haven’t a clue. When we reach Archangelsk he will carry my bags into the hotel and stay a night — I feel like a heel, insisting on separate rooms, but after the recent robbery I’m taking no chances — and in the morning he is off. An acquaintance later speculates that Alexei may have thought he could save me money if I weren’t travelling solo. But surely they must charge me foreigner’s price anyway?

Lacking a Jules Verne to analyse his real motivation, it would only be in the last days of my sojourn in Russia that a credible explanation for Alexei’s behaviour offered itself. A Russian drinker at the Red Pub — a revolutionary kitsch bar on the outskirts of Murmansk — inquired, ‘Where is your team?’ Before I could frame the words ‘They’re lying twelfth and another wooden spoon is on the cards’, I realised he could know nothing of the AFL and that ‘team’ had to mean ‘group’, so his query was a variation on the common refrain of, ‘Why are you travelling alone?’

At last the kopek dropped. Wolves in waistcoats would be more comprehensible to the average Russian for whom holidays are often collective enterprises; there is even a word for a man who tows the family off to his weekender:
dachnik
.

The Lone Ranger might thrive in Texas; in this physically forbidding terrain, comprising the planet’s farthest habitable reaches, individualism was the road to death. In the eyes of a Russian, travelling solo — and, moreover, doing so in a
kaliaska
, the beautiful Russian word for a wheelchair — is the sign of a lost soul.

A couple of hours out of Archangelsk I see a shy, melancholy woman at the carriage window opposite, gazing into the night sky. Then she sees me, and introduces herself: Elena Kokanova, a post-secondary English teacher who has travelled all the way to Norway only to be stood up by a ‘friend’. The cost, in money and trust, must be enormous. My heart goes out to her. At other times we would have much to say, Elena and I, but now I sense her preference for silence. Before parting, we exchange email addresses and promise to keep in touch.

Another person with whom I click instantly is Nadezhda Pestovskaya, the flame-haired receptionist at the Hotel Dvina and the soul of efficiency in getting me a room where I sleep for twelve hours straight. Fiftyish and open-faced, Nadezhda is explicit from the outset that she will look after me, that it is special to have someone come from so far away — and she means it. When possible (the boss is clearly not her best friend), Nadezhda makes the hard road easy. Outside the hotel she is powerless to assist, and when on my third morning at the Dvina I awaken to the sound of jackhammers directly below my room, demolishing the only ramp in town leading up to a first-floor café, I don’t know whether to laugh or groan.

Within her domain, though, Nadezhda negotiates 25 per cent off the price of the laundry, wangles a free phone call to Australia, and gives me two cakes of soap as ‘a present’ — this last gesture such a small thing except that, in a town where a can of shaving cream costs $30, soap has never held such appeal as a substitute lather.

Sometimes, when there’s hardly anyone at the bar, Nadezhda — who looks a lot like Janet Frame in
An Angel at My Table
— will wax philosophical.

‘Ken, I know you will think me strange,’ she says one day, ‘but I really miss the Soviet Union.’

‘That’s not strange,’ I say, willing her to explain why.

‘Everyone had health care. We had free education. Now I hesitate to give my daughter the best of education because we cannot afford it.’

And then, after a pause to see that I really understand what she has been telling me, Nadezhda produces the most precious gift of all. Scarcely bigger than my thumb, it will rest on my desk as I type these words — a painted icon of St Nadezhda.

‘Here, Ken, have this,’ says her earthly namesake who leaves tomorrow to take her annual holidays, this year in Egypt. ‘She is my angel, and she will look after you on your journey.’

These words are to prove prophetic but just now my rational mind revolts at her patent superstition — even as my eyes, inexplicably, glisten. How odd, I reproach myself, less than two weeks in the country, and already I’m becoming Russian. One face of Russia, Elena had shown me acceptance in response to humiliation; another face of Russia, Nadezhda displayed candour and compassion. Apart from one menacing moment in Petrozavodsk, I hadn’t seen the face of Russian racism — that hostility to foreigners supposedly ingrained in the national character. But my journey was still young.

59 km

So here I am in Archangelsk, the port whose resupply by Britain and the US after Hitler struck east in mid-1941 became the stuff of legend. Just over a degree south of the Arctic Circle, it marks the most easterly point of my circuitous route, 41 degrees from Greenwich. I note on my map that this is due north of Saudi Arabia. At journey’s end, in western Portugal, I’ll be 50 degrees west of here — almost one-seventh of the way around the world. Yes, the journey is indeed young.