Needless to say, I spent a troubled night. Unless the missing goods were recovered, I could think of no alternative to abandoning my journey. By New Year's Eve it seemed unlikely anything would be returned to me. The detective who had sounded most optimistic in the first 24 hours now told Natasha that my personal items had most likely found their way out of Chernivtsi to be used for the relief of inmates in Romanian orphanages.
On the Sunday morning, having reached rock bottom the day before, I had a brainwave and began to reappraise my plight. While it was ridiculous to think of re-stocking my supplies in impoverished Ukraine, why not make an unplanned detour to the West? And what would the nearest Western country be? Germany. Whom did I know there? Lotti Villinger, a pharmacist I met during my African travels back in the 1980s and with whom I still correspond regularly. Who better than a pharmacist to know where I could get what I needed? Amex there should also be able to replace the traveller's cheques.
My hotel offered the use of its phone to ring Germany. Luck was in: Lotti was there (two weeks later and she would be off on a holiday break to the Canary Islands). More phone and fax calls yielded Amex's assurance that a sheaf of brand new cheques would be waiting for me in Mannheim.
At last I breathed easier. After a nine-day break in Germany, the journey would continue.
DAY 557 (1 JANUARY): KAMYANETS-PODILSKY
This bright, crisp New Year's morning, Andrei from the hotel's business centre drives me to the bus park (yes,
that
bus park) and, with a cautionary word to the driver that could mean âTake care of him, he's had a rough time'; or perhaps âTake care of him, he's trouble-prone', he wishes me âGood road.' God knows, Ukraine could do with a few.
DAY 559 (3 JANUARY): LVIV TO KRAKOW
This morning finds me heading west, on a bus bound for Krakow, Poland's cultural capital and the Pope's hometown, before taking a long-distance coach to Germany.
Now I am being honest with myself, the break couldn't have come at a better time, with the depletion of energy in this snow-blasted winter testing my stamina to the limit. Still, circumstances forced me to take the long view once before, in Ward 13 a dozen years ago. This expedition may have been blown off course but, whatever boundaries there are to my stamina, they mark out personal territory on which time's imprint will never fade.
Chapter 21
A BAD CASE OF MUSCOVITIS
The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting
.
MILAN KUNDERA
T
HE
B
OOK OF
L
AUGHTER AND
F
ORGETTING
JANUARY-MARCH 2003
My nine-day wander in and around Mannheim need not detain us here. I bought new catheters, urinals, polythene bags and sundry other urological items, as well as a smart new suitcase to put them in. I also bought a pair of expensive German-designed ski boots, with the brand name of Fesswarmers, which should enable me to hotfoot it to the Arctic Circle in comfort.
My friend Lotti, whom I hadn't seen for nearly fourteen years, had her own problems but seeing me evidently raised her spirits. We took a couple of out-of-town trips in her car, Max, after she had managed to disencumber it of a metre-deep drift of fresh snow in what was fast developing into the harshest winter Europe had experienced in two decades.
After Eastern Europe it took time to adjust to the smug materialism of the West and, by the time I just about had, the nine days were up and Lotti was waving me goodbye on the Eurolines coach to Krakow.
For most of Poland's existence it has been played like a concertina âsqueezed by Germany on the one hand and Russia on the other. The relationship between its slightly melancholic, self-regarding national character and an intellectual qualityâthe combination of feeling deeply and thinking deeplyâmakes it a rather intense country, perhaps too much so for the liking of many outsiders.
And then, of course, this is the most Catholic of countries: to be a Pole one does not have to be Catholic, but it helps. Over 1000 years, just to keep their place in Europe, Poles have driven off Mongols, Turks and communistsâall enemies of their faithâwith a steely determination.
Behind this insistence on faith lies a harsh historical lesson, learnt at least once every hundred years since the Middle Ages: unless Poles stand up for their beliefs, the ground under their feet tends to disappear.
POLAND: 14â26 JANUARY
Having plotted a course that would take me from southern Poland into the lands of the former Czechoslovakia and then back into Poland, I had asked for a multiple-entry visaâthe only one on the whole journey except for Uzbekistan. The Polish consul in Ljubljana, having informed me over the phone that this would cost US$90, then needed two reminders that from a US$100 note he owed me US$10 to complete the transaction.
DAY 561 (14 JANUARY): KRAKOW
Winter is turning in its sleep. Instead of the white carpet that Romania, Moldova and Ukraine laid out for December's visitor, above-zero temperatures have loosed a constant drizzle on southern Poland in mid-January.
Wet underfoot it may be, but only one foot at a time. To get the full benefit from my Fesswarmers, I have to charge two batteries overnight and then clip them to the top of my bootsâwhich, with the battery flex dangling down to the insoles, cannot be worn in comfort. One of the boots is just bearable, the other almost unwearable: it pinches my toes with a pain as acute as that which prompted me to buy these cure-alls in the first place.
When I first hit the street, the temperature of my right foot is perhaps 10°C while the left feels like a pincushion with sensation.
Krakow is a city for all seasons, a showpiece of medieval Europe in the modern world. This rainy night the Bistro Rozowy Slon (Pink Elephant), situated just inside the Old Town precinct, is kept busy satisfying students' palates.
I arrive just on closing time. Next door, quite unexpectedly, another restaurant has just opened up, and what have we here? It's the Golden Kangaroo, which bills itself without much fear of contradiction as Poland's only Australian restaurant. Steak is big, in both senses, but the clientele is small (ahem, it's just me actually) and the beers are Polish.
DAY 564 (17 JANUARY): ZAMOSC
The night train from Krakow cuts a jagged line east by north through wooded Malopolska, depositing me in this small but significant town at the break of another damp day.
On the way here I have struck up a good conversation with Radek Brodaczewski, a university student returning from the scholastic fray. We arrange to meet again later in the day for a personal tour of his hometown.
Zamosc was founded at the height of the Renaissance as a bulwark against the uncivilised Cossack and Tartar hordes out east. In 1992, with its period feel intact, the town was added to the World Heritage List, but even in fair weather it is not a potent tourist magnet.
The collegiate church, built in the last decade of the 16th century, commemorates Wladyslaw Zamoyski, the Polish premier who founded the town and after whom it is named.
Here, in an alcove where you would normally expect to see a more conventional religious diorama or relic, stands a silver suit of armour that, from metal toecaps to visored helmet, could have walked straight out of a book on the Crusades.
John Paul II, when he was Bishop Karol Wojtyla of Krakow, may not have exchanged his vestments for the battledress of a knight, but his tactics against the atheists who ruled his country were militant in their own wayâand Poles are not shy about telling you so. Zamosc's role in the defence of Christian Poland is a cause of national pride (pacifism is on shaky ground here), so it is no surprise that in the churchyard stands a statue of the late Polish Pope, marking a visit of his here in 1987.
DAY 566 (19 JANUARY): LUBLIN
From time to time I have stayed in monasteries but never before have I attained guest status at a nunnery. The sisters at Dom Rekolekcyjny offer hospitality as part of their vocation but are not in the business of seeking out âclients'. Still, in a city where the hotels are all kilometres away from the sights I have come to see and the convent is cheek by jowl with them, the sensible course is to go and ask.
The Mother Superior looks at me with hooded eyes and, for just a moment, I expect to be told this is an impossible request. Instead she asks me to wait and, fifteen minutes later, instructs one of the sisters to show me to her, now my, room. What impresses most is its simplicityâ the light, the bedside table, the icon of the Virgin Maryâas well as the no-fuss arrangements for dinner. Few words are exchanged but the sense of acceptance is profound.
On Grodzka, the main street of the medieval quarter, houses that still bear the scars of wartime ravage remain empty all these years on. On one or two façades you can still make out a faded Star of David. Suddenly I feel an outbreak of goose pimples that winter's chill alone cannot account for.
DAY 567 (20 JANUARY): CZESTOCHOWA
No site is more sacred to Polish Catholics than Jasna Gora monastery. Overlooking the town of Czestochowa, Jasna Gora has been a rallying point of tremendous significance in Poland's recent history. On his first tour as Pope, John Paul came here to proclaim âsolidarity' with the workers' movement of that name which was challenging the communists' right to rule. A million Poles stood shoulder to shoulder below the forbidding ramparts, and the scaffolding for the platform from which the new Pope addressed them remains in place today, now a landmark in its own right.
Every August half a million pilgrims come to Jasna Gora on foot, and even on this cold, wet Monday morning in January the monastery's pathways and chapels could hardly be called deserted.
Lech Walesa, the Solidarity leader and one-time president, donated his 1983 Nobel Peace Prize to Jasna Gora's main museum where it takes pride of place.
In the Chapel of the Black Madonna, home to the Poles' most venerated icon, serenity reigns supreme. The faithful believe that this icon has saved the country itself more than once, and just before descending a ramp into the chapel I am told that this is a special destination of pilgrimage for the disabled. I am rather unsettled on gazing up at a side wall to see wheelchair parts and crutches hanging there, but later it is explained that these have been donated by people cured of their disabilities through the Virgin's intercession.
DAY 569 (22 JANUARY): AUSCHWITZ
The morning train from Krakow judders to a stop at Oswiecim, the Polish version of the 20th century's most infamous place name.
The grim geometry of AuschwitzâBirkenau death camp will be etched into the consciousness of anyone who has viewed
Schindler's List
. Yet, as I pause in the bookshop and later at the ticket counter, the thought occurs:
What is wrong with me that I cannot take in what happened here?
While the question, and the numb detachment, contain their own logic, the fact is that anyone who
could
take in what happened here would go screaming through all the exhibit halls tortured by the psychic force of a million agonies.
Quarter of an hour spent watching the black-and-white official film in a theatrette only numbs me further: before my eyes is a true document of horror, but where is the horror itself? Even now, I remonstrate with myself, I am incapable of imagining a fraction of what happened here.
My chair takes a diagonal path across a field of grass to that sinister sign, âARBEIT MACHT FREI' (âWork makes you free'), at the entrance to the camp. Plaques in English, Polish and Hebrew are dotted throughout. The one here directs my gaze to the right. On that patch of ground, every day for years, stragglers from the exhausting work routine were shot down and left to lie in their own blood as a disincentive to others. Barbed wire still overhangs the perimeter fence, even if the Alsatians that once guarded it are long gone.
Recognising that many of my fellow visitors (âtourists' seems an obscenity in this context) will be preoccupied with the fate of family members, I shy away from asking anyone for help up the steps of the camp's perfectly preserved brick buildings.
But there is one exception: Block 27, specifically dedicated to the Jewish victims of AuschwitzâBirkenau. Here, I can imagine better now, while peering down a hallway whose walls from the height of my shoulders all the way up to the ceiling are studded with ID photos. It is a grim gallery that leaves no space blank. Each face now takes up a few square centimetres; once they filled a continent. These thousands, Jewish through their mother's line, were kidnapped from their homes all over Europe. The numbness has gone. Yes, now I can imagine vividly, and wish I couldn't.
Following the stony paths that separate the prison blocks, a few minutes' pushing brings me to a low-roofed structure unlike all the rest. Protruding from the roof is a chimney that points at a lowering sky. I wheel silently into the darkness. A guide whispers in Polish to a small knot of adults and points to the grey-fronted industrial oven, which is connected to the flue and the chimney now invisible.
Genocide. Holocaust. We have arrived at a point beyond words.
DAY 571 (24 JANUARY): KRAKOW
If Jasna Gora is the spiritual heart of Poland, the seat of its temporal power can be found high above Krakow at Wawel Castle. Not even Athens has an acropolis as commanding as this. Around the year AD 1000 the church and kingly courts occupied these heights, from where the country was governed continuously until the 17th century. Here today lie a hundred kings and queens, and it is here, seven months from now, that President Bush will be brought to see the glory of a state whose leadership gave active support to his Iraq campaign.
DAY 573 (26 JANUARY): POLISHâSLOVAK BORDER
This Sunday morning is sharp as a pin. The solar glint on the metal surface of our cable-car mirrors that of the snow-encrusted rock which we feel we could reach out and touch only because it's sliding past us two metres away and dropping out of sight.
The terminus is Mount Kasprowy Wierch, almost 2000 metres above sea level. Here the white glare is fierce; staying outside for more than a few minutes without proper body cover will earn you a degree in masochism. Where others have come to ski, throwing themselves into cable-drawn chairlifts with split-second accuracy before being whizzed off into Slovakia, I satisfy myself with a hearty breakfast in the cafeteria.
SLOVAKIA: 26 JANUARYâ4 FEBRUARY
From 1918 until 1993 Slovakia was the latter half of that country with the longer name. Both it and the Czech Republic under President Vaclav Havel deserve the credit they received for ending that 75-year marriage with such civility (in the so-called velvet divorce). But it is sad that Slovaks felt so overshadowed by the more urbane and affluent Czechs that they went their own way at all, because now Slovakia's struggle for power must focus on forgetting its economic disadvantages and making the most of its few assets.
Tourism is obviously at the forefront here and, among those assets, the High Tatra mountains and the national capital, Bratislava, are the blue chips. I plan to visit both.
DAYS 573â578 (26â31 JANUARY): POPRAD
Mountain scenery at these altitudes in midwinter never fails to enchant. But it was asking for trouble to go round clad in a jacket with only the thinnest of linings.
By evening, after hours of exposure to temperatures that must have been at least 10 degrees below zero, the first symptom, a front-of-head ache, came on. I had no appetite for dinner, and went to bed early. By midnight the headache had worsened into a fever.
Shivering my way to the toilet, I soon noticed (how could I not?) that my urine was the colour of blood. And, while I knew that this must be related to a shortage of bodily anti-freeze, just how serious an impact it was going to have on my travels was a worry that I would have to wait for the morning to resolve.
The hotel's sympathetic director called in a doctor friend who quickly diagnosed pneumonia and ordered me to stay inside, avoid all exertion, take the tablets he prescribed and rest, rest, rest.
As a result of time lost to the Great Suitcase Robbery, I had already decided to abandon any idea of spending half of April pushing my way north from St Petersburg to Murmansk.