DAY 603 (25 FEBRUARY): HEL
At long last I have taken the advice my friends have been offering me for years and gone to Helâbut I came back!
Hel, I can now say from experience, is a Polish seaside resort visited in winter. But right now it is perfect weather for Baltic seals, which may be why the only tourist attraction open at this time of year is the
fokarium.
Foka
means âseal' in Polish and the refuge is dedicated to protecting this endangered species, of which six adult specimens live here in saltwater pools. My English-speaking guide, Magda, looks a little startled to have a visitor from overseas at the tail-end of February, as if I had come up out of the water myself. But, for a change, my timing is fortuitous because just yesterday Unda Marina, one of the two female grey seals, gave birth.
Her cub, resembling an orange muff with teardrop eyes, is unnamed as yet. A staff photographer wants to record the first feed, but Unda Marina emits a piteous whinnying sound, perhaps unable to distinguish his videocamera from her
foka
memory of a harpoon. Although she gobbles a fish whole, leaving nothing for her newborn, Unda Marina's maternal instinct is not entirely dormant, as she wildly slaps her shiny skin with one flipper while shielding her cub with the other.
DAY 606 (28 FEBRUARY): WARSAW
The Polish capital was comprehensively flattened in World War II, and I have no time for re-creations of Warsaw âas it was'. Mindful of the civic authorities' eagerness to give Warsaw's residents a sense of continuity, it just sticks in the craw to kid oneself that castles dating all the way back to the 1950s are really from the 1590s.
The places I will remember Warsaw for are ones stumbled across while getting to know the city, like the starkly simple memorial on Jerusalem Street where the plaque reads, â102 Poles were executed here by the Nazis (
“Hitlerowcy”
) on 28 January 1944.' The remarkable thing to dwell on here is not the commemorative stone itself but the commemorative flowers in front of it. They are fresh.
BELARUS: 1â10 MARCH
At the turn of the millennium, the authoritarian president of Belarus, Alexander Lukashenko, actually asked his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin, to take his country (whose name means White Russia) back into an enlarged Russian Federation. No fool, Putin spurned that request, but in the context of regional history it was not so odd. Belarus has never been fully independent for longâat one stage it was virtually a Polish colony; at another, Lithuanianâand had only just emerged from 200 years under Russia's wing.
Under Lukashenko, human rights are suppressed, the media are his mouthpieces and the door to the West, in the form of the European Union, is closed, locked and bolted. To visit Belarus now, it is often said, is like visiting the Soviet Union 20 years ago. In 1985, travelling across the USSR, I caught a glimpse of what it was like to live under Brezhnev's heirs, and now I brace myself for a fortnight of petty complications. But the end of the road is not far off and I tell myself that most of the lessons lying in wait on this one-man roadshow have already been inflicted.
So this is the month when Iraq will be invaded, everyone feels it in his bones. Bush is rattling the dice and about to cast them. In the Europe I have left behind, feelings are crystallising against military action. But this is Europe in the geographic sense only. Military adventures are old news here: 1918 was just yesterday and a quarter of all Belarussians died in World War II (what a staggering fact). Life goes on as normal.
DAY 607 (1 MARCH): WARSAW TO BREST
On the bus from Warsaw I strike up a conversation with a family of three (father, mother and teenage son) returning home to Belarus after they have cleared the last diplomatic hurdle in readiness for their emigration to Canada at the end of the year.
The father, Oleg, speaks English, and invites me to visit the family at their home in Globukoye, a small provincial town not on my intended route but not so far off it either. Taking his number down, I promise to think about it. One nagging worry stops me saying yes right away: if I agree to stay and then find they don't have a Western-style toilet, well, I won't be able to stay. But this would be a rude response to such a generous request.
DAY 611 (5 MARCH): MINSK
Stalin died 50 years ago today, so how odd it is that I should arrive right now in one of the few places where he would feel right at home if (perish the thought) he were to come back. To mark the occasion, Minsk turns on a blizzard.
In common with many other ex-Soviet republics, Belarus has retained the âvisa support' system that I last encountered in Central Asia, with the state's own tourism agency, Belarus Intourist, issuing the visa invitations.
It is time to meet and greet Tatyana, my visa-supporting agent at what trendy Belarussians like to shorten to Belintourist.
A dark-haired beauty, Tatyana is in her early to mid-twenties, I estimate, as we shake hands in Belintourist's downstairs office on the corner of Lenin Street and Prospekt Masherava. With a relaxing chat in mind, I suggest we adjourn to a hotel, but Tatyana pleads such urgent pressure of business that we end up going next door to a coffee shop.
How foolish and unimaginative of me not to have guessed this earlier: her dream is to travel. Working dutifully for a tourist agency, travel has always been beyond her meansâtherein lies the ironyâand from what she says I gather that the barrier to getting a passport is still set formidably high and the costs are extortionate (for which read âcorruption'). Tatyana is staring through a window to the West but has no way to open it.
I have decided what to do about Oleg's invitation to stay with his family in the country. As going to Globukoye entails only a minor detour on my way back to Minsk this Sunday, perhaps I could convert it into a lunch invitation and spend a few hours there, between train arrival and bus departure. I ring Oleg: he consults his wife and comes back on line, âYes, that will be fantastic. Your train will arrive at 12 noon, and there will be a bus leaving for Minsk at three o'clock.' He seems to have known what my answer would be before I myself did.
DAY 613 (7 MARCH): VITEBSK
My coach to the country's far north-east has precisely two people on it: driver Anatoly, and me. We have little to say to each other on the 400-kilometre journeyâAnatoly speaks no Englishâbut we get on superbly.
If someone's behaviour exceeds what is acceptable, people say it is âbeyond the pale', a term stemming from the tsarist setting of a boundary to Jewish settlement. Vitebsk was âwithin the Pale', and in their isolation that community produced one family, the Chagalls, who produced one son, Marc, whose name will forever be linked with this town.
Now you might think that Vitebsk's city authorities would make the most of the fact that Marc Chagall, world-famous surrealist and postmodernist artist, hailed from here. But this is Belarus, where no one in power is in a hurry to escape the past, and to glorify an individualist who set his own stamp on modern art would be, well, beyond the pale.
There is, however, a modest museum dedicated to the artist. Julia, the museum's curator, who obviously knows her subject, tells me that well into his 98th year Chagall died between the second and third floors while in a Paris lift. Ascending.
DAY 615 (9 MARCH): GLOBUKOYE
The sylvan scenes of dense forest and snow-covered clearings witnessed from my window seat on the train to Globukoye are like something out of Tolstoy. Catching a glimpse of a horse-drawn sled at a halfway halt, I grab my camera but the sled isn't nearly close enough to get the picture I want.
Primed for my descent to the platform, I am greeted by Oleg and his family right on time. Ten minutes later I doff my jacket in the family's apartment, on the first floor of a 1970s housing block. His wife, Marina, has prepared a traditional thick stew, which I consume with an appetite sharpened by my having gone without breakfast.
As soon as Marina goes off to the kitchen to prepare the tea, Oleg hands me a gift for the road. It is a silver fob watch with an inscription on the backâsomething so unexpected and obviously valuable that I shrink from presenting my own humble token of appreciation.
It really
is
nothing, compared to the watch, but from my rucksack I sheepishly produce it anyway: a box of Belgian chocolates bought at the Soviet-style department store in Vitebsk two days ago.
âMy wife doesn't like chocolates,' blue-eyed Oleg tells me in a neutral voice.
Honesty must be a virtue even more highly regarded here than at home, where such a response might be considered a trifle brusque.
Stumped for anything to say, I can only manage, âWell, I hope you enjoy eating them for her.'
DAY 616 (10 MARCH): MINSK
This morning the BBC radio news continues to chronicle the slide to war.
Near Victory Square I pause to buy radio batteries at a kiosk before trying to pinpoint the precise apartment block where Lee Harvey Oswald, alleged assassin of President Kennedy, lived with his Belarussian girlfriend back in the early 1960s.
Suddenly a voice over my shoulder announces, âIt's not here at all; it's on the next street down.'
Looking up, I meet the smiling gaze of a buxom woman of 50 with a fox-fur wrap that would get her lynched in London these days. My stunned look seems only to inspire her efforts at enlightening me. âYou are looking for Lee Harvey Oswald's apartment, aren't you?'
âYes,' I stammer. (
Is it so obvious?
)
âWell, it's not here. The original one was, but â¦
âWhat other one is there? Oswald hasn't been back, has he?' I say, deadpan.
âNo, of course not, but in 1985 my good friend Alexei made a film for television here in Belarus and they used an apartment at 4 Vulitsa Communistinay, which is the next street down. Come, I will show it to you.'
Pausing long enough to get a photo of Oswald's real-life domicile, I then accompany the mystery woman (strangely, I never ask her name and she doesn't volunteer it) to the chosen apartment block one street down. It fascinates me that this has greater resonance for her than the actual historical site, simply because of her good friend Alexei.
Negotiating Minsk station is an experience I'm not keen to repeat. Parties hauling me downstairs to the platform for country trains are amazed to hear that I want the international train, yes, the one to Vilnius. Then comes the exhausting challenge of trying to get to the right platform during rush hourâarguing with super-suspicious security goons at every turnâbut a semblance of order is finally restored when I am lifted on board the correct train with half an hour to spare.
We churn through the frosty night towards the Lithuanian border.
Unlike their Belarussian counterparts, the border guards who come to stamp me into Lithuania see nothing unusual in my end-of-the-carriage location, necessitated by the narrow corridor: to them I'm just another passenger. Taking my passport, handed up with a smile, they open it to the page featuring my mug shot and process me without question. Turning Kundera on his head, I conclude that the struggle of Power against Man must be to forget everything else and memorise our faces.
Chapter 22
THE USUAL DELINQUENCIES
The Head of the State and the Ministers can be brought to trial for the usual delinquencies according to the decision of the State Assembly â¦
ALBERT PULLERITS (ED.)
T
HE
E
STONIAN
Y
EARBOOK
1927
MARCH-APRIL 2003
Though grouped together as the Baltic States, the three mini-nations on the eastern seaboard of that pond of the same name are subtly different. Take the word for âstreet': in Vilnius it's
gatve;
in Riga
iela;
in Tallinn
tanav
.
Their religious beliefs, economies and ânational character' also underscore how each state differs from its neighbours.
But, given their common experience of having been annexed by the Soviet Union, the Russian influence remains a common denominator for all three. Each has sizeable, but increasingly discontented, Russian minorities and Russian remains a lingua franca that will get you by in any of them.
LITHUANIA: 10â25 MARCH
DAY 617 (11 MARCH): VILNIUS
Unlike Riga, which is the biggest city in the Baltics, Vilnius is graced by winding streets that give it the ambience of a friendly town on a human scale. Here, if you meet a familiar face in the crowd, both of you are likely to forget any prior plans and chat in the street, or adjourn to a coffee shop, rather than limit yourselves to nodding acquaintance and hurrying on.
By severe contrast with Minsk, everyone is technologically up to the minute here, with no shortage of mobile phones. As for keeping in touch with home, that is no problem once I stumble upon a customer-friendly internet café in a downtown arcade. The manager, a young man in a wheelchair, offers me a free coffee and a brochure featuring a city map on which Vilnius Old Town appears next to the âUzupio Republic'.
âWhat is this?' I ask him. A suburb of the capital that has declared itself a self-governing state, he tells me. What an excellent jest it sounds, and I make a note to check it out.
DAY 621 (15 MARCH): VILNIUS
On Gedimino Prospektas, Vilnius's most fashionable address, behind a cairn dedicated to the victims of the 50-year Soviet occupation, stands the old stone KGB building. With the assistance of donations from Lithuanians living in the United States, the names of those who died within its hidden recesses are now carved into the stonework. While its counterparts in Belarus are still following the old order's orders, this KGB âhouse of terror' stands as a memorial to its victims.
In 1992, after the structure was renamed the Museum of the Genocide of the Lithuanian People, former KGB prisoners were employed as tour guides. At first it seems a little disappointing that they have now been replaced by younger âprofessionals' such as Livijus, although I soon learn of his close personal connection with the place.
Officially, 1037 people were executed somewhere under our feet, intones Livijus, but the real toll is known to be much greater. Twelve were executed on one occasion, he tells me, and then, obviously struggling to maintain his professional objectivity, he adds softly, âMy grandfather was among them.'
By 1947, KGB prisoners in this building (originally and ironically named the Palace of Justice) occupied 50 âordinary' cells and two set aside for solitary confinement. Nocturnal interrogations continued for weeks on end; âactive interrogation' was code for physical torture. Most notorious of all the torture chambers was the âcold pool room' where a swimming pool was covered in a thick sheet of ice. Prisoners were ordered to stand on a plank extending out over the pool, and when they eventually dozed off they would fall from it. Succinctly, one ex-prisoner described their fate thus, âEventually they would end up on the bloodstained ice floor.'
DAY 622 (16 MARCH): VILNIUS
It would have to happen on a Sunday. At the youth hostel where I am staying, a short ride from the Gates of Dawn, I am stuck fast. Thick ice wedged in both axles has âglued' my wheels to the mainframe, and the two principal antidotesâforce and anti-freezeâare equally ineffective.
The YHA's English warden calls on the services of a Russian-speaking handyman she employs for sundry emergencies. A combination of uncommon sense and judicious application of anti-freeze eventually detaches the wheels from the chair's iron grip, and a grateful guest goes on his way.
Before independence the square in front of Vilnius Cathedral was a well-known rallying point for opponents of Soviet rule and, as I cross it in the evening twilight, I see about two dozen young people (university students, it turns out) holding a candlelight vigil there. âIraq?' I probe, almost intuitively. They nod silently, not knowing if the armed might they oppose is being unleashed even as they gather.
DAY 623 (17 MARCH): VILNIUS
A signpost beside Vilnia rivulet announces that you are about to enter the Republic of Uzupio, which is really an artists' colony in one of the capital's pleasantest parishes. These Uzupians have discovered that one of the surest routes to publicity is to keep yourself apart.
The joke is now six years old and still drawing them in. Billing itself as the Baltic answer to Paris's Montmartre, the trendy quarter has become a haven for eccentrics, anarchists and
bons vivants
of all descriptions. Of course, its founders do have to pretend to be governing the place, but the choice of Uzupio Café, a pub-restaurant nestled by the stream in the shadow of a 13th-century Orthodox church, must at least enhance the likelihood of its Cabinet meetings drowning in consensus.
Every year Uzupio marks its independence on April Fool's Day, and on 1 May it holds a World Championship of Fools in which the competition is inevitably keen.
While at the Uzupio Café, I am introduced to Alois Lekivicius, who is described as Lithuania's leading exponent of slow pipe-smoking. This, I openly admit, is a new sport to me. Lekivicius takes this as a cue to produce from an attaché case his prized collection of pipe-smoking competition photos. With impressive sincerity he informs me that he has smoked a pipe in one hour 45 minutes, but that the European slothful-puffing record is three hours 15 minutes. Shifting in my seat, I scramble for an exit line. It's been a pleasant evening, but I must have an early night.
For me, the jury is no longer out on Lithuanians' reputation for eccentricity, even if they do have a habit of calling themselves Uzupians instead.
DAY 626 (20 MARCH): VILNIUS
The invasion of Iraq has begun.
Shock and awe may be on my menu, but they are off that of the newly opened New York-style diner in the centre of town. It is filling up with an early-evening crowd, none of whom is paying any attention to the MTV music rocking away on the large television screen at one end of the room.
A waitress saunters over. âMay I help you, sir?' âYes,' I reply, âI will be ordering a meal. But first, I was wondering, do you have CNN or BBC on your television? I particularly wanted to watch it tonight.'
A look of extreme consternation blots out her smile. âI'm sorry but you cannot watch that,' she coos. âThey have a war on, didn't you hear?'
âActually I did,' I say, meeting her steady gaze. âThat's what I wanted to look at.'
This obviously strikes her as an odd request. She crosses the room and, after an intense consultation with her boss, some invisible hand flicks a remote-control and Eminem disappears, to be replaced by a stranger percussion stillâthat of the aerial cannonade bombing and battering Baghdad.
By the time my meal arrives fifteen minutes later, the whole room is transfixed by the pyrotechnics on the screen. Flashes of light and the rumbling thunder of heavy ordnance hold us mesmerised. There is nothing wrong with the meal, but I will never remember what I had.
DAY 628 (22 MARCH): KAUNAS
What Kaunas has to offer the visitor is reassurance that the quirkily eccentric national character is not confined to the capital. Two of the most offbeat museum collections so far encountered on this overland ramble are to be found right here. At No. 106 on the main drag of Laisves aleja (Freedom Avenue) stands the Zoological Museum, the result of one man's lifelong obsession with taxidermy. Inside are some 13 000 stuffed animals (I'm perfectly willing to accept the museum's word on that). Among this menagerie of the inert are a great anteater from South America, a tigress with her cubs from the Russo-Chinese borderlands, and a dingo (from you know where).
DAY 629 (23 MARCH): KAUNAS
This morning I am ready to tackle another of Kaunas's unique contributions to world culture. Christianity was a latecomer to Lithuania, but still, to find a permanent exhibition devoted to (art) works of the Devil is enough to raise eyebrows even in one who thought that by now he had seen everything.
Antanas Zmuidzinavicius (1876â1966) kicked off his miscellany of satanic images with thirteen Lithuanian examples. In Lithuania, as in the West, 13 attracts a horde of superstitions, but it did not turn out to be at all unlucky for Kaunas's leading devil-worshipper.
As the years wore on, the diabolist broadened his assortment of artworks, until he had 260 of them by the time of his death. Again, death was a good career move for the Kaunas monomaniac: today the number of exhibits stands at 2000 plus.
DAY 630 (24 MARCH): SIAULIAI
Amazingly enough, even Kaunas must yield to Siauliai when it comes to collections of the unusual and downright weird. This morning I spent an hour in utter thraldom at the town's Water Supply and Wastewater Enterprise Museum, a monument to sewerage that deserves better treatment than I can give it here. On top of this, the town's Cat Museum is said to be the world's best of its typeâwhich is entirely plausibleâand only my pressing schedule prevents my writing expertly on the Anti-fire Protection Museum, the Bicycle Museum and the Zaliukiai Windmill Institute. This last-mentioned establishment illustrates the âlong history of the windmill' by reference to a local specimen that âno longer operates'.
LATVIA: 25 MARCHâ3 APRIL
DAY 633 (27 MARCH): RIGA
Item in the
Baltic Times:
The war in Iraq is not deterring people who plan to travel to Riga for the Eurovision Song Contest 2003, according to tour operators in Latvia's capital.
If the Latvian capital is somewhat behind the times (punk is big in the Riga fashion world right now), its quaintness is bound to attract backpackers in years to come, I am sure, after Europe's more flamboyant attractions have palled.
For reasons that escape me and probably always will, Riga has one of the world's best collections of Art Nouveau architecture. At exactly 100 years of age, a bank on Baron Street serves as a classic example, while prime specimens of
Jugendstil
, Art Nouveau German-style combining classicism and flair in stunning façades, are seen to best advantage on Alberta iela (street) in the newer suburbs.
DAY 634 (28 MARCH): RIGA
Exhibits in the Museum of the Occupation of Latvia (1940â1991) deal systematically with Latvia's domination by two great powers.
In June 1940, two days after Paris fell to the Nazis, the Russians marched into Riga. Mass deportations, which began instantly and accelerated in 1941âthat period labelled the Year of Horror by the Red Crossâare commemorated in a re-created Gulag barracks.
In August 1991, when Mikhail Gorbachev was held captive at his Black Sea dacha and the fortunes of the Soviet Union reached a turning point, I followed those dramatic events on TV in the rehabilitation ward of the Austin Hospital.
For Latvia, and the other two Baltic republics, the same events provided the opportunity to reassert their long-lost independence. So weakened was Moscow by the drift of events out of its control, and the ultimate defeat of the attempted coup, that on 24 August the USSR itself recognised the independence of all three states.
Strange to say, the museum's exhibits add up to an indictment of most Latvians for supporting either the Nazis or the Sovietsâand that seems to be the historical truth of the matter. Yet it is hard to voice confidence that any society as geographically vulnerable would have acted more nobly.
Latvians pride themselves on their hearty, even gutsy, approach to the business of eating. On Caka iela just along from the Hotel Viktorija is Staburags, an all-you-can-eat restaurant.
Here the speciality of the day, every day, is roast pig leg, washed down with excellent Latvian beer. Actually, all-you-can-eat is a bit of a misnomer: more-than-you-could-possibly-eat-if-you-stayed-here-all-day-and-half-of-the-night is more like it. Burp.
DAY 636 (30 MARCH): RIGA
On the outskirts of the capital, housed in an ugly steel-and-glass building that could easily be mistaken for a tyre warehouse, is the Riga Motormuseum, whose assemblage of antique, veteran and downright classy automobiles is guaranteed to have car lovers salivating.
One suspects wry intent behind the caption for the 1914 Hansa torpedo race-car, one of the many fascinating exhibits, when it says, âIn 1914 German racers made a journey from Berlin to Moscow. It was supposed to be the first stage of a journey round the world. Unfortunately the World War I spoiled this activity.' How thoughtless of the Kaiser.
The most remarkable exhibit of all is a Rolls-Royce Silver Shadow with a wax dummy of ex-Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev at the wheel. Brezhnev was a keen driver, we are assured: it was just that his passion for cars outran his capacity to drive them safely.
âIn 1980 on one of his drives near Moscow, Brezhnev himself at the wheel, the car met with an accidentâcollided with a truck. Luckily Brezhnev was not injured.'
Many Latvians must swallow hard when they come to that âluckily', but what makes the exhibit so memorable is that âBrezhnev' is sitting up with a bloody gash over one eyebrow and looking suitably concussed.