A Merry Dance Around the World With Eric Newby (34 page)

After dinner, having ascertained that there was no official camp site in Cetinje and therefore no camping, which put us in a rather difficult position, we drove hurriedly away and hid the van and ourselves with it behind one of the walls of what had been the royal park, outside the Crnojevic Monastery, otherwise the Monastery of the Virgin, so named after Ivan Crnojević who built it in 1484. This original monastery, which he surrounded with a moat and heavily fortified, was razed to the ground by the Turks in 1692, again in 1712, and again in 1785. Above it on a hill, when I had last been in Cetinje, there had been a round tower called the Tablja which the Montenegrins used to decorate with the skulls of Turks, emulating by so doing the Turks who built the Celé Kula, the Tower of Skulls, at Niš in Serbia which they decorated with a thousand Serbian skulls, a few of which are still in position. Whether the Tablja was still standing or whether it had fallen a victim to the earthquake it was impossible to say because it was dark, and the following day, with the fog still persisting, we forgot to ask.

What with earthquakes, the Turks who had set fire to it and destroyed it three times, and the Austrians, Italians and Germans, who had each consigned it twice to the flames, it was a wonder that there was anything left of Cetinje at all. One of its proudest possessions, now in the Treasury of the Monastery, is the skull of the Vizier Mahmut-Pasha Busatlija of Shkodër in Albania, one of Montenegro’s greatest enemies and the last Turkish leader to fight his way into Cetinje and destroy it and the Monastery, in 1785, who was killed in a great battle with Petar I Njegoš in 1796.

We also saw the residence of Petar II Petrović Njegoš who reigned from 1830 to 1851 and was six feet eight inches in his socks, ex-monk, poet, traveller, crack shot, player of the
guslar
and a thorn in the sides of the Austrians and Turks. His palace was called the Biljarda because it was to it that the Prince had a full-size, slate-bedded billiard table from England manhandled three thousand feet up what was then a mule track from Kotor to the Lovcen Pass, then over the Krivačko Ždrelo Pass And Then 2000 Feet Down Through A Chaos Of Limestone To The Palace Where It Was Installed Without The Slate Being Broken.

There, Behind The Wall, We Spent, As We Anticipated We Would, An Awful Night, Which Not Even The Good Red Wine Of Vranac Plavka We Had Drunk Alleviated. Soon After We Arrived Some Policemen Drove Up In A Car To The Monastery, Obviously In Search Of Us, And We Only Narrowly Escaped Discovery.

Meanwhile the rain, which had become torrential again, drummed on the tinny roof of the van making sleep impossible. Finally, in the early hours of the morning, when the rain had finally ceased and we had at last succeeded in dropping off, we were besieged by a pack of savage dogs, one of a number of such packs that infested the park and which had already made the night hideous with their barking and fighting. Why they chose to surround our van was a mystery. Perhaps they could smell a salami that we had hanging up in it.

At the Art Gallery of the Socialist Republic of Montenegro, which is housed in the former Government House, the Vladin Dom, the largest building in Montenegro, we were kindly received by the Director, a cultivated man who was very upset about the siting of the ‘Obod’ electrical appliance factory, which had been plonked down in a prominent position in the town and had done nothing to improve its appearance. He himself, as director of the gallery, had suffered an almost worse aesthetic misfortune in the form of an enormous inheritance of paintings known as the Milica Sarić-Vukmanović Bequest which, although it did contain a number of good paintings, including works by foreign artists, was largely made up of post-war kitsch of a particularly awful sort which he had not only been forced to accept but put on permanent display, completely swamping what was otherwise an interesting and representative collection of Montenegrin art from the seventeenth century to the present.

Then, having admired the outsides of various buildings, some of which had once housed the Russian, Austro-Hungarian, Turkish, French, English and Italian diplomatic missions, some of them wonderfully eccentric buildings, and having failed to find the Girls’ Institute, one of the first girls’ schools in the Balkans, founded in 1869 by the Empress Maria Alexandrovna of Russia, with which Montenegro had a close relationship before the First World War, we left Cetinje with genuine regret, and took the road to Albania.

^*
David Davidson was the author of an enormous book
The Great Pyramid: Its Divine Message
(London, 1932).

^*
The
selham
is the Moroccan version of the burnous. It is made from a rectangle of fine woollen material, white or dark blue, with a hood made from the trimmings cut from the fronts, which are not joined together as they are in the
jellab
. The
selham
is a much more aristocratic garment than the
jellab
and is, or was, the only one permitted to be worn in the presence of king or sultan. It is sometimes worn over the
k’sa
.

Leningrad is a city of canals, a northern Venice of such beauty that there is no absurdity in the comparison, and as the taxi raced down the Nevski Prospekt, here nearly 120 feet wide, over what looked like pure ice to the station where I was to catch the night express to Moscow, it seemed, with the huge flakes of snow drifting down into it out of the darkness of the northern night, yet another enchanted, frozen waterway, brilliantly lit.

It was New Year’s Eve 1964. At 11.30 p.m., having entrusted a two-kilo tin of the finest procurable caviar to the engine driver who stuck it on the front of his steam locomotive in order to keep it cool, I boarded the
Krasnaya Strela
(the
Red Arrow
), and after disposing of my baggage took a seat in the restaurant car.

The
Krasnaya Strela
is one of the Soviet Union’s most famous trains. It covers the 410 almost dead straight and completely bumpless miles to Moscow in eight hours and thirty minutes, arriving at the Leningrad Station on Komsomolskaya Square at 8.25 the following morning, on the dot. The line has a sentimental place in the hearts of Russian rail-waymen as it was the first major line to be built entirely within the frontiers of Russia; it took 50,000 serfs working from sunrise to sunset – and who were flogged for the privilege of doing so – eight years to complete. Thousands of them died.

Almost everything about the
Krasnaya Strela
was good. It was warm, even too warm, and the dark blue brass-buttoned greatcoats and fur hats worn by the conductresses who sometimes smiled, sometimes scowled, sometimes were inscrutable – Russian officials of either sex are as unpredictable as fruit machines – were of the finest quality. And it was not only the conductresses who were fitted out in a sumptuous manner: the appointments of the two-berth ‘soft-class’ compartments, which is how the Russians describe their first-class
wagons-lits
, were redolent of another age – the headboards fitted with linen covers embellished with drawn-thread work, the dark green curtains, the pleated silk shades on the massive cast-iron table lights, the glittering water decanters, the long druggets in the corridors (instantly soiled by the snow-covered hooves of the passengers as soon as they boarded the train), the dazzling white curtains and bed linen, the multiplicity of mirrors – all were satisfactory to the most exacting bourgeois taste and therefore not only to me but to the sort of Russians who were my fellow travellers in ‘soft class’, many of whom had the air of commuters. It was not surprising that at one period of the war this rolling stock had been used by Hitler and other top members of the Nazi Party, or so someone told me later that night.

In fact, the only remotely criticizable thing about the
Krasnaya Strela
, apart from the thought that I might be occupying a berth once used by Himmler, which was rather off-putting, was the menu in the restaurant car, of which I had been offered an English translation covered with gravy stains, in which all the more agreeable items and most of the less agreeable ones were unavailable. ‘Beluga Belly Flesh’, ‘Goose’, ‘Roasted Duck wit Garnisch’ and ‘Plum Cake “Stolichny”’ were all out of stock. All that was currently on offer was some luke-warm noodle soup, great gobbets of some unidentifiable meat which looked as if it had been hacked to pieces by a maniac with an axe, and what were literally smashed potatoes.

It was therefore little wonder that I and my fellow diners, all of whom were Russians and therefore endowed with the native facility of making the best of what would have been disastrous for anyone else, had recourse to the bottles with which the restaurant car was well supplied, and on which they had already made a start before I arrived.

The only other passenger at my table was a large man as tall as an early Romanov with glossy black hair, wearing an expensive, hand-built black suit, a black knit tie and a white shirt with a Madison Avenue-type button-down collar with a fashionable swerve to it. He was in his early forties and looked a formidable customer. Anywhere west of the Iron Curtain I would have put him down as the man in charge of the J. and B. Rare or the Smirnoff Account. Here, I identified him as a member of the
apparat
, and a trusty one who had spent a lot of time abroad.

He was uncommunicative – just a very curt nod – but hospitable. He had just filled a glass with Stolichnaya from a bottle and now he did the same for me, which emptied it. We clinked the big glasses and turned them bottoms up in the Russian fashion. I ordered another bottle. Into the Valley of Death.

It was now a quarter to twelve.

‘Where are you going?’ he said suddenly. He spoke English with a fine voice as deep as he was.

‘To Moscow.’

‘Of course,’ he said impatiently, making me feel like a small boy of about seven, ‘but after Moscow?’

‘To London.’

And that was the end of that conversation. At 11.50 the
Krasnaya Strela
left for Moscow.

In the course of the next ten minutes of what was becoming a New Year’s Eve carouse we emptied the second, smaller bottle. I must say it is a boring way of drinking, this ritual. Then, having ordered a bottle of Ukrainian pepper vodka a minute or two before midnight by the restaurant clock, he leant forward across the table and said, portentously, ‘Do you know Nakhodka?’

It was like the beginning of that boring joke that begins, ‘Do you know Omsk?’, which I had heard so many times in my years as a commercial traveller, but instead of waiting for a couple of hundred
versts
to pass as do the protagonist and the blundering reciters of this chestnut half as old as time, he carried straight on.

‘You should go to Nakhodka,’ he said, ‘by the Trans-Siberian Train. From it you will see Siberia and the great progress our peoples have made in developing the country. It is the longest railway in the world and it was built by Russians.’

By now, somewhere in the outer suburbs of Leningrad, it was 1 January 1965, and any further conversation of a coherent sort in the restaurant car was rendered impossible by great gusts of singing, the drinking of further enormous toasts and an outbreak of bear-hugging among the entire company. It was half past one before I finally got to bed, having sung ‘Auld Lang Syne’ three times by popular request to great applause and having drunk to peace in our time in beer so often that it should last at least two thousand years, leaving the rest of them still hard at it. Nevertheless, overcome as I was, the man in the black suit had planted the seed of an idea in my fuddled brain.

At 8.26 a.m. I was decanted on to the platform of the Leningrad Station in a city still shrouded in gelid night and one that I have never really grown to like however hard I have tried. There I repossessed myself of my two-kilo can of
beluga malossol
which was thickly coated with hard snow – it had been a risky business sticking it on the front of the engine as caviar begins to disintegrate around 20°F, but less risky than having it simmering itself into a Russian version of
bouillabaisse
inside the
Krasnaya Strela
where the temperature was up in the 70°s and 80°s.

Then I queued for a taxi to take me to the National Hotel, where I planned to leave my treasured possession in a cool caviar chamber for the next week or so before taking the Ost-West Express to Liverpool Street by way of Brest, Warsaw, Berlin, Rotterdam and the Hook. It was a long queue with few taxis at the end of it, and while I was shuffling forward in it I suddenly recalled through a haze of distilled potato juice the words of my brief acquaintance whom I was to see no more.

‘You should go to Nakhodka [wherever that was by the Trans-Siberian Train. It is the longest railway in the world and it was built by Russians.’

In my hand luggage I had a copy of
Cook’s Continental Timetable
and in a few moments I was deep in the uss section of that heady work, studying the timetable headed
MOSKVA-IRKUTSK-KHABAROVSK-
NAKHODKA. TRANS-SIBERIAN RAILWAY.

The whole thing appeared even more simple than my perennial optimism about travel would have allowed me to believe. The train, which was called the
Rossiya
(the
Russia
), was due to leave for Vladivostok in approximately one-and-a-half hours’ time from the Yaroslavl Station, which was so close that I could see it from where I was standing. There was no need for a taxi and I already had a porter.

By reading the small print I discovered that, being a foreigner and therefore not allowed to enter Vladivostok, which was a naval base, I would have to change trains at Khabarovsk on the Amur River, 5331 miles from Moscow and would arrive at Nakhodka on the Sea of Japan on the morning of the ninth day from Moscow. From Nakhodka I could take either a Russian steamer to Yokohama in about 52 hours or one to Hong Kong in 174.