Sixty Degrees North (22 page)

Repin had been the most important and influential of the Wanderers, a group of artists dedicated to portraying the social problems and realities of their country. His most famous painting,
Barge Haulers on the Volga
, hangs now in the Russian Museum in St Petersburg. It portrays a group of peasants dragging a boat up the river, ropes tied over their shoulders. The faces of the men tell the story: of oppression, suffering and deprivation. The image is both beautiful and horrifying at once, a vision of social injustice that is, also, an explicit demand for change.

Repino seemed like a small place, but I had no map and there were no obvious signs that might point me in the right direction. Having walked back and forth around the building for a few moments, I returned to the car park, where
elderly women were selling fruit and vegetables from pots and buckets on the street. In one corner of the car park was a noticeboard, and I scoured it for something helpful. Among a plethora of signs, I found one that was in English. It said, simply, ‘This Way', with an arrow that pointed towards a lane in the forest. Other than these two words there was nothing I could understand. Nor was there anything to indicate what might be found in that direction. But since I had plenty of time and nowhere in particular to go, I followed it, enjoying the absence of logic in my choice. ‘This Way' could lead anywhere at all, but anywhere was better than nowhere, and so I continued. I followed the path down the hill between the trees, noting the myriad little trails that branched off into the forest, to places unseen and unknown. A light rain shivered among the pines and dribbled down my neck and shoulders.

When I reached the end of the path another road lay in front of me. Beyond, I could see the sun glittering on the Gulf of Finland. I turned right and walked along the shore path. A wide golden beach stretches along this part of the coast, and offers somewhere to stroll for the spa visitors and rich dacha or apartment owners. Above the beach, expensive restaurants and hotels mingled with brand new apartments, some unfinished and advertising for owners. There was plenty of money in this town, it seemed. From the beach I looked out over the water, then turned to see the outline of the city to the south east, with the glittering dome of St Isaac's Cathedral clearly visible at its centre.

When the spas and restaurants thinned out I stopped and turned round, then tried the other direction. My feet and legs were getting wet and coated with sand from the path, and I was beginning to feel disheartened. Once or twice I walked down from the road to the beach to see if I could locate the museum from the sea side, but I couldn't, and so I just continued walking. Again, when the buildings
thinned out I returned to where I'd first emerged from the forest. Without much thought I took another road that led away from the water, but again, in the end, I turned back without success. Twice I stopped to ask fellow walkers where I might find the museum, but each time I was met with a shake of the head and a ‘Nyet!' It was impossible to know whether they'd failed to understand or whether they didn't know the answer. Or whether, even, they just didn't want to tell me.

By then I'd been walking for more than two hours and I still had no idea where I was going. I was searching for a building that I'd never seen before, in a place I didn't know, without a map, without directions, without a single clue. I realised then that I wasn't going to get there. I wasn't going to find what I was looking for.

Deflated, I walked back through the trees to the place where I had begun, at the restaurant and supermarket. My feet were damp and muddy and sandy. I felt hungry and irritated. I looked again at the noticeboard and its little arrow saying ‘This way', and I made a mental note: the only sign you are able to read is not necessarily the right one.

Crossing the road back to the station, I stood on the platform waiting for the next train. Beside me, an elderly couple talked quietly to each other. In his hands, the man held a wicker basket, brimming with fat, golden mushrooms, plucked from the forest. Together we made our way back towards the city.

On a Sunday afternoon, in dappled sunshine, I stopped for a coffee on Yelagin Island, to the north of the city centre. The island is a popular weekend destination, a wooded park, with young people rollerblading and families out walking. Half-tame squirrels roamed the pathways, pursued by screeching children. The deciduous trees were turning
bronze and yellow, smouldering among the evergreens, and a chilly wind brought leaves and acorns tumbling to the ground.

I sat in the café courtyard looking out at a large metal cage, just across the path. The cage held three ravens, for the amusement of customers, most of whom ignored them. The birds stood apart from one another, each staring out in a different direction. They watched as people passed by, and sometimes they cawed pathetically out towards the trees. But there was nothing that could respond. There were no other ravens around. Everywhere I had travelled on the sixtieth parallel I had seen ravens. They are the great circumpolar bird, the avian natives of the north. At times they had felt rather like companions on this journey, and until that moment I had always found pleasure in the sight of them. Playful and intelligent, graceful and violent, they are creatures of both dreams and nightmares; they are scavengers and acrobats, murderers and artists, tricksters and prophets. I could not help but feel depressed by the sight of those three individuals, calling out to their imagined kindred. For them, home would always be in clear sight, but forever unreachable.

Like many people, I find myself both attracted and repelled by cities. I am drawn in by the choices they offer and by the freedom they promise, but I am left sometimes feeling lonely, particularly on short visits such as this one. In cities I can be struck, without warning, by a sense of alienation and by a feeling that, while there, I am separated from something important, or essential, even. When I finished university I moved, almost by accident, to Prague. I went for a month to train as a teacher of English as a foreign language, but at the end of my course I was offered a job and decided to stay. And so with little more than a shrug of my shoulders I found myself a resident of one of the most beautiful cities in Europe. It is a city that, over the
year that followed, I came to know and to think of with intense fondness.

That year was one of the happiest of my life, but it was also one of the most surprising. Surprising because, in the midst of that happiness, caught up in the novelty of being where I was, something began to niggle at me. It was at first only a minor distraction, an encroachment on my least occupied moments, when my thoughts would turn north without warning. But it grew. Steadily, certainly, those thoughts grew. Until, in the end, I was almost obsessed. And this was not some vague, undirected nostalgia. This was not the ache I had known since I was ten years old. This was homesickness. It was a longing for one specific place: Shetland.

Though I had called the islands home for a long time by then, I don't think I had ever really imagined them as such. For years Shetland was just the place in which my family lived, and in which I stayed not really by choice but by necessity. It was not until I was in Prague that I really began to think about home, about what that word meant and why. ‘Where are you from?' people would ask. ‘I am from Shetland,' I said. But what did I mean by that? What did that ‘from' imply, beyond the bare fact of my former residence in an archipelago of that name?

In Prague it occurred to me, I think for the first time, that it really did mean something. Previously my nostalgia had always been for things I couldn't bring back: for a childhood that was gone, in a place that would never be home again, with a father who was dead. But suddenly I understood that there was more to it: a bond I had not recognised before, or had refused to see. It was a thread or a leash, even, with me at one end and the islands at the other. Mad as it may seem, the thought that my homesickness could be pinned to a real place – to the place, indeed, that had been home for most of my life – was revelatory. I felt much as those ravens might feel if, after years of calling out
hopelessly into the forest, they found that their cage door had been open all along. And so, after my year in Prague was up, I went home. And that, I suppose, was all I had ever wanted to do.

FINLAND and ÅLAND

neither one thing nor the other

Through a narrow crack in the curtains, I could see the morning coming to life. It was after eight but the sky was still dim, and paled by a haze of snow. From outside I could hear the squeal of metal on tarmac as ploughs roamed the streets, carving smooth trails through the night's fall. I drew the covers close around me and lay there in bed, listening, until I felt ready for the day.

I rose and showered, then reached into my bag for clothes. I pulled on two T-shirts, two pairs of socks, a pair of thermal long-johns, jeans and a thick, woollen jumper, then my jacket, scarf, hat and gloves. It was a ritual I undertook with anticipatory pleasure, because I like the cold. Not the blustery, biting chill of Shetland, but the calm, still degrees just below zero; the cold that fully fills the air, and necessitates the wearing of ‘sensible clothes'. There is a cleanness to it, and a satisfaction that comes with the knowledge that it can be held at bay. The slap of frozen air against the face; the sharp gasp, deep in the lungs; the sting of pleasure that puckers the skin. It is as sensual and reviving as the thickest of tropical heats, and though I felt well-padded and well-prepared, I was looking forward to that first gulp of frost.

The town of Ekenäs lies at the very tip of Finland, southwest of Helsinki, where the body of the country peters out in a splutter of islets and skerries. In summer it is a tourist resort, offering access to the national park that sprawls across 5,000 hectares of the region's archipelago. Campers, kayakers, walkers and anglers can all find their fun around these shores. But in winter things are different. In winter it feels like a town waiting for something to happen. At half past nine, as I left the hotel, the light was still tentative, and though the flurries of early morning had ceased, an iron sky was glowering above. After the frantic rush of St Petersburg, Ekenäs was a haven of quiet. The snow muffled and dampened all noise. It gathered and enclosed, covered and concealed. It swaddled the town like the scarves and jackets that swaddled its red-faced pedestrians. Such weather insists on movement, on the necessity of keeping warm by activity, but thick clothing and icy pavements insist otherwise, and make moving difficult. So with heads bowed, the town's walkers hurried, slowly, in their various directions, breath billowing in the morning air.

As I trudged through the town, there were white piles of clean snow on the verges and brown piles of dirty snow along the kerbs. Winter turns orderly Nordic streets into messy thoroughfares. The pavements were slippery and uneven. Trees, in parks and in gardens, looked ghostly in their white coats. Conifers slouched beneath the frozen burden of their branches.

From somewhere nearby I could hear the ploughs still working their way through the town, mounding up the snow, as they did day after day. It is a Sisyphean task, this constant clearing of the streets. The snow falls and is shifted out of the way. More falls and that is shifted, too. Time and money are swallowed just pushing snow around, from one place to another. The Finns talk of
sisu
, a kind of stoic perseverance in the face of adversity. It is a stubbornness and a refusal to give in that is considered a personal quality as well as something of a national trait. And perhaps this might be an example of sisu right here: the men in their ploughs each morning and the families clearing drives and pathways with broad-mouthed shovels, then doing it all over again tomorrow. Over and over again tomorrow. Despite its practical
necessity, this heroic repetition still feels faintly absurd and overwhelming. But perhaps, as Albert Camus concluded, ‘One must imagine Sisyphus happy'.

Although there has most likely been a settlement in this area since at least the thirteenth century, the town of Ekenäs was officially born in the winter of 1546, by royal decree. At that time, as for much of its history, Finland was under the control of its neighbour to the west, and when the Swedish king, Gustav Vasa, decided to create a new town to compete for trade with Tallinn (then called Reval), Ekenäs was chosen to be that town. Money, materials and men were sent to the region to make the development as swift and effective as possible. And so it grew. But Gustav was not a patient man, and when Ekenäs failed after five years to live up to his expectations, he founded Helsinki a little further north, and concentrated his efforts there instead. Many of this town's early residents were ordered to relocate to the new settlement, and were not allowed to return until after Gustav's death.