Gadfly in Russia Read online

  As far as possible from the noise I drank coffee, and talked to a black man of twenty-five who sipped Coca-Cola. He told me – as well as his age – that he was going to live in Finland. He’d spent some years in Sweden but decided that it had no soul. He’d heard that Finland was more complicated in that respect.

  I told him I didn’t agree with his views on Sweden, and in any case people were more or less the same everywhere. He’d become fed up and wanted a change. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘I know what I’m talking about. I lived five years in Sweden, where I earned a living teaching English. I hope to do the same in Helsinki.’ I wished him luck.

  The estuary widened, islands and shoreline more distant, sun burning but wind flapping across the boat on its way through calm water. To be cut off from the past seemed the purest state of contentment, though an antisocial zone of grace that sociologists deplore and psychiatrists strive to rob one of.

  A sense of emptiness spun me down into a cul-de-sac, while the drug of the pure sky spurred me to annoyance at the plodding rate of the boat. I was eager to be back on land and driving east, with the devil behind and new scenery in front, to rejuvenate the soul yet not blacken the heart, a healing process, as I sat on deck in the sun and planned (and imagined) one motoring expedition after another, taking enough zigzags across the map to last a lifetime, and never thinking to go home again.

  The ship rocked slightly and began to turn as I totted up the distances between Kiev and Karaganda, Paris and Peking, Sofia and Saigon, Cape Town and Komsomolsk-on-the-Amur. What trips, Pip! The longest highways in the world would one day be possible by Peugeot and Opel, Ford and Volvo, their drivers without passports and visas. The odd few might die of thirst in desert or salt marsh while travelling from Tiflis to Astrakhan, but what the hell!

  I went to my second-class cabin for a change of handkerchief, and found a man of great corpulency packed into the top bunk, snoring louder than the engines. Jacket and shirt collar hung by the sink, shoes on the floor tripped me, and the air was so heavy with alcohol fumes I wouldn’t have dared light a match, unless there was time for me to reach a lifeboat. He was a child of heaven so drunk I wondered why he had put himself to the effort of achieving the higher place instead of wedging his parcel shape into the bottom one. Perhaps he’d imagined he was already in it, and the sea had been a bit rough in throwing him so high.

  White birds chipped at the masts, and the music went on as if providing power for the boat to steer by. I asked a tall dark girl with large eyes and white skin where she had come from and where she was going. Set apart from everyone, she looked suspicious, as if I might be an evil traveller only wanting to get her into my cabin. On such a crowded boat, for God’s sake?

  As I talked, obviously without malign intent, she told me she was going home after serving five years in a mission station on the Greenland coast, working as a printer of Eskimo newspapers. We discussed the explorer and anthropologist Rasmussen, whose book I had recently read at Ted Hughes’s place in Devon, but soon we had no more to say, locked too deeply in our separate musings for further connection to be made. Perhaps she had not seen her boyfriend since going to Greenland, and was on her way back to marry him. He would be on the quay to meet her in the morning, and the prospect of domestic bliss had even now lost any attraction for her. The thoughts she wanted to be alone with at the moment seemed more comforting than those a husband would be able to tolerate.

  Threading the Åland Islands was something I had done before, but being alone gave a different state of mind, more prosaic and free. The deep blue sea rippled, and the horizon became a rose-coloured band rising to orange and yellow, the faint green above dissolving into steeliness, then a universal door holding back real darkness.

  At midnight the boat steadily ploughed, a buoy so close to the porthole I could almost have put out an arm and touched it. The manic accordian still played, and probably would till morning.

  Night wouldn’t come no matter how long I waited. The sun just above grey water watched the boat go by, and I couldn’t sleep under its bland stare, though a white fluorescent sickle of moon eventually persuaded me into a sort of unconsciousness, and at one o’clock I got into bed hoping that the heavy man above wouldn’t wake before breakfast. He lay in an oblivion that knew neither sun nor moon.

  Friday, 16 June

  I was too knocked up after the disturbed night to take in the impressive approach to Helsinki, so can’t describe it. As the boat docked a band on the quay played to receive our load of tourists who had kept up their high-stepping for all of the voyage back to their homeland. To similar tunes they filed down the gangway waving and laughing at waiting friends, a wall of noise loud enough for the ship to lean against, and so vibrating the eardrums that I too began to feel part of the welcome.

  I stood on the quayside for a few minutes before the car descended, meanwhile studying a plan of the city. A girl from one of the oil companies asked if I needed any motoring information. Like an angel of light, though with dark hair (which maybe all angels have) she handed out maps and pamphlets. I’d noticed in Stockholm that the left and right blinkers of the Peugeot were not flashing when switched on to turn or overtake, a serious matter driving on the right side of the road and with the car seat in the English position. To lessen the possibility of accidents it had to be seen to as soon as possible, so I asked the young woman the name of the nearest Peugeot garage and what street it was on. She explained everything with the utmost economy of sweetness, before moving on to another dazed motorist.

  Navigating more by intuition and luck I followed the cobbled boulevard and found the garage on Arkadiankatu. The supervisor looked at the bulbs and fuses bought in London and said none were of the type to solve the problem, but he had the necessary parts and would have the job done in a couple of hours.

  The Otava Publishing Company was a mere half mile away. I was shown into the opulent office of the managing director, Mr Erkii Reenpaa, a tall slim man in his forties, formally dressed (unlike myself) as a person of status, his somewhat draculous aspect belied by a glittery-eyed sense of humour.

  Talking about my onward travels he said, as we smoked our cigars, that his firm was about to produce a complete guide to the Intourist motor routes currently open in the Soviet Union. The problem was that no detailed maps of the country were available.

  From my briefcase I showed the elaborate tracings made of the road from Leningrad to Moscow and Kiev, on the scale of eight miles to an inch, based on British War Office maps and printed by the Royal Engineers. I had inked in villages, spot heights and water features, as well as additions from a few Russian maps. Also marked was the latest AA and Intourist information, indicating petrol pumps, hotels and service stations (few and far between) along the way. I had also altered those placenames which once had ‘Stalin’ in them. Spread out as well were the larger scale Austrian survey maps of southwest Russia between Kiev and Rumania which, though out of date, would still be useful. Other navigation equipment, I told him, included a prismatic compass readable to one degree, binoculars, and my shortwave radio receiver.

  He was too much of a Finn – and a gentleman – to raise his hands in shock at my irresponsible naïvety, yet real concern came into his voice. I ought not, he said, to let the Soviet customs officers see such detailed maps. If found they would certainly be confiscated, and even supposing they still let you in you would be under surveillance for the whole of your stay. And if you do manage to smuggle them through don’t flaunt them too readily by the roadside. As for the radio you must have it marked in your passport at the frontier, otherwise there’ll be a fuss when you try to take it out.

  I had spent many enjoyable and therapeutic hours making those maps, so they would certainly be used, to get the most out of my trip. I didn’t after all want to lose my way. An enticing stretch of scenery or piece of architecture would have to be marked so that I would remember exactly where it had been. In any case, I told him, I never travelled without the best maps, and a
s for spying over the fair land of secretive Mother Russia, weren’t United States satellites already photographing every building and footpath, and from them constructing maps that would make mine look as accurate as a seaman’s chart in the fifteenth century?

  He smiled indulgently at my supposed recklessness, then invited me to his house for dinner, adding that I could spend the night as well. When I told him that my last stop in Finland would be at Virolahti, just before the Russian frontier, he picked up the telephone and spoke to a friend who was a bookseller in that village. It was arranged that I would lodge overnight at the man’s summerhouse on the shore of the Gulf. ‘And if you’d like a sauna’ – he smiled on my saying I would – ‘you’ll get a good one there.’

  Back at the garage I was told by the fair and buxom receptionist that all the car lights had been checked and were now in working order. ‘Are you going to the Arctic Circle?’ she asked.

  ‘No. I’m going to Russia.’

  ‘In that case you must buy a spare set of windscreen wipers, because those you have at the moment are sure to disappear if you leave your car unguarded even for five minutes in that country. It happens to everyone.’

  I already knew there were plenty of thieves in Moscow, having lost an expensive fountain pen from a pickpocket on a previous visit. I’d always assumed stealing to have some legitimacy if in need of bread to eat – well, maybe as long as it wasn’t from me. Pilfering was a fact of life that had to be guarded against, such as never walking around with a wallet showing from your back pocket. You can’t relax for a moment, and though Karl Marx had said that ‘property was theft’ I supposed he would have squealed like a stuck pig if he’d gone into a shop and found his money missing when he came to pay at the till.

  Since I seemed liable to lose my windscreen wipers in Russia I took the woman’s advice and bought an extra set. With vigilance they might not be stolen, so the spare ones would no doubt go to rust in the back of the car. In general I trusted my neighbour while at the same time regarding everyone as potentially light fingered. Even so, on hearing that ‘all men are brothers’ my instinct is to take to the hills with a quantity of tobacco and a rifle.

  I browsed in Stockman’s department store, from one treasure hall to the next, but wasn’t tempted to buy anything among the crowds of silent jostlers. Finding it too hot to stay indoors I headed twenty miles out of the city, forking on to a track from the main road and going through fields and patches of forest. I got out of the car at an isolated place, to lie down and let the sky be my blanket. No sounds except from birds in pine and birch trees, I couldn’t nevertheless do justice to the advantage and fall asleep. I smoked, wrote notes and letters, making myself as much at home as possible. I read more of a novel by Väinö Linna called The Unknown Soldier, one of the best war novels I’d so far come across, describing the fight of the Finnish army against the overwhelming Russians during the Winter War of 1939–40. I sacrificed sleep to go on with it, yet wondered what I would do when it was finished. I could of course start the Everyman two volumes of The Kalevala, which would certainly keep me going.

  On the way back to Helsinki the sideblinkers packed up again. Driving on the motorway and even unable to use hand signals was a nightmare, for I was now on the unfamiliar right side of the road as well. I had to cut my speed and take extra care, while cursing those at the garage as potential murderers.

  Saturday, 17 June

  My first stop was at the Peugeot establishment, where I gave a few black looks and asked them to fix the bloody blinkers, this time for keeps. For all their silence they had been in some way incompetent, and I stood over the mechanic during the half hour’s work and final testing, till he assured me I would have no further trouble.

  With most of the fine day to drive only 200 kilometres I pulled up for a couple of young men by the roadside who gave the autostop sign. They knew some English, and in chatting told me they were amateur long distance runners. Realising I was English they expressed great admiration for the champion Gordon Pirie.

  Two years previously, in the same month almost to the day, with Ruth and David in the car, I was voyaging northeast towards Karelia in very different weather. Veils of rain slicked from low cloud, our plucky Austin A40 Countryman ploughing through with little trouble. At a café between road and lake for coffee and cakes, and milk for three-year-old David, I pushed a few coins into a juke box to amuse him with the latest Finnish top of the pops. A man took a liking to him – as who would not? – and carried him out to the water’s edge, where he broke up a couple of sweet buns for what looked like four thousand fishes which, to David’s delight, poked their snouts above the water to snap them up.

  The weather grew worse for us beyond Lappeenranta, and the unpaved road, marked red on the map, which we had almost to ourselves, widened to a hundred yards of slippery oxblood mud. Rain cut visibility until we seemed to be swaying along underwater, wind blasting from the Soviet border to the east. After a hundred miles of such piloting I turned northwest for Savonlinna, and a hotel in which the kindly Mr Reenpaa had booked a room for us. I moored the car by the pavement about midnight, and a band with singer performed in the almost empty dining room, where we were too exhausted to take in anything but soup.

  Next day in better weather we backtracked to Punkaharju for a sauna at the Hotel Finlandia. Before entering the steam room the resident old lady in attendance loofered our naked bodies from top to bottom. Her job was to keep the place clean, stoke the stove and provide towels – as well as bundles of birch twigs.

  We decided to introduce David to the same hot mill, on the assumption that it would be fun, good for his body and soul, and an experience to remember, but the washing and splashing and steaming and beating scared him, and he escaped outside to play in the sand, watched over by the woman.

  After the ordeal I ran along the wooden jetty and went down like a naked arrow into the water, revitalised for further travelling, then through the trees for lemon tea in the hotel lounge.

  Back to the future, I drove with pipe and cigar smoke drifting from four open windows. An enormous lorry, going almost as fast as myself, was there for overtaking on the empty treelined road. I glanced at the side mirrors, gauged his speed, pressed on the blinkers now fully operating, swung out, dropped gear on drawing level, and shot by with a roar. I then upped the gears to get well ahead, and settled my speed at just over seventy.

  Such travelling should have brought out the supposedly eternal faculties of a writer – memory, observation, and imagination – but they weren’t apparent, my brain being empty on driving alone through new territory and having to use all practical sense to stay alive.

  By now a long way from London I thought it best not to wonder how far there was still to go before edging homewards. I was a nonentity at his machine on a conveyor belt of road, churning out miles, only interested in how many I would clock up that day. People close to me had drifted away, for the moment anyway. No one was necessary to define my identity or place, which was why I had set out on the road. It was an agreeable state, that of a hermit perhaps, or misanthrope, alone at last and with few thoughts straying in.

  At Hamina I went into the bus station café for lunch, and though people watched from close by I wasn’t inclined to get into conversation. I ate the meal hurriedly and left, glad to get to Virolahti where Pekko Tulkki was to meet me on his way back from a wedding. His bookshop was closed until that time, so I sat in a café writing postcards to Ruth and David, and to Ted Hughes and David Storey. I went through my address book to see who else I could send one to. No one in the place spoke English, and for the first time I used the phrase list from Baedeker, though the pronunciation must have mystified my words. But some got through when buying stamps from the post office later. The girls behind the bar talked slyly and in whispers, so that even if I’d known a fair amount of their language it would have been impossible to understand them. The situation reminded me of that in Ingmar Bergman’s film The Silence.

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bsp; Pekko Tulkki was about fifty, neat, fair, balding, and amiable, his gnome-like Finnish eyes seeming to reflect the lakes and forests of his fascinating country. I recalled giving a lift to a man during our time in Karelia, who stood by the road far from house or village. Sparse woods and marsh went into infinity, the summery sky about to let down rain. He was slight of build, wore shirt, trousers, and local shoes like exotic carpet slippers. He gave no indication of wanting to hitchhike, but when I stopped he climbed in without a word and sat with David in the back. There was no common language except for him to take in where we had come from that day, and recognise the name of Koli on Lake Pielinen where we were going. I couldn’t be sure how much the placenames meant to him, yet he was keen on getting into communication. He had short incredibly white hair, and skin corked by the sun. His pale eyes glistened like opals, restless yet deep and piercing when he spoke. Though his skin was wrinkled he seemed no more than forty, and filled the car with the aura of a troll, or ghost, smiling with thin narrow lips.

  David, an infallible litmus paper, was happy to be sitting by him as I drove along the unpaved road, till after about thirty kilometres he made signs that we were where he wanted to be. We also got out of the car and, being hungry, I jabbed a finger at my mouth to find out whether he cared for anything to eat, with a further sign that he was welcome to join us. He declined, but asked for pencil and paper, so I passed the current map on whose corner he wrote with some effort the shaky letters of his name: Pektti Hannolau – as far as I could make out. He wanted our names in return, so I put them down in block capitals using paper he could take away. After shaking hands we left him by the roadside, his arm lifted in farewell.