The Cyclist Who Went Out in the Cold Read online

  ‘Otkryt! Otkryt!’ After a tattoo of stick-taps I dropped to my wet knees and yanked desperately at the strap with clawed and useless hands; it didn’t budge but the bike keeled over. A tiny, broken whimper escaped my white lips; I looked beseechingly at the guard and met a mask of cast iron. ‘Otkryt,’ it said.

  I levered the strap off with a screwdriver in the end, then stood in a juddering hunch as he flicked his stick impassively through a tarmac harvest of soggy snack wrappings and toiletries. How dearly I wished to injure him. When the poking unearthed a forgotten stash of Pro Plus pills his expression hardened; he bent down and picked up the crumpled foil sachet between a gloved thumb and forefinger.

  ‘It’s only a stimul … it just kind of makes you feel … ’

  With a maturity beyond his years he allowed his features to settle into the look of beatific calm that comes over experienced enforcement officials when they sense a babbling suspect is about to incriminate himself.

  ‘Look, no, really, it’s just caffeine. Coffee.’

  ‘Corfyeah,’ he said, nodding slowly at least twenty times. Then he dropped the sachet into my damp belongings and flicked his stick towards Poland.

  9. POLAND

  I was too far gone to celebrate the many ways in which Poland was not Russia. Before slipping into the groggy indifference of undernourished hypothermia, there was only time to rue the principal fashion in which it was not all the other countries I’d been through: the Poles don’t have the euro. How cruel to see the Steaming Kebab of Salvation brusquely whipped from the counter on sight of my debit card and a soggy mess of non-zloty notes. And how wonderful when at sodden, hollowed length I sloshed woodenly into a fish shop in the little port of Frombork, offered a wodge of rouble pulp to the sweet young woman behind the till, and presently found myself installed by a blazing wood burner with a big plate of fried sea stuff in my steaming lap. It was an act of humbling and very unRussian kindness, and one which I chose to reward by removing nearly all of my clothes, wringing them out behind the kindling bucket and draping the lot over the stove. I fell asleep in my shorts and was woken by the smell of molten gardening glove.

  But the rain didn’t get bored, and throughout the afternoon much of it was delivered in a permeating suspension of fog. A downpour finale plastered me in a coat of mulched catkin, and I presented myself at a rather smart townhouse hotel on Elbla˛g’s cathedral square looking as if I’d swum through a river of muesli to get there. The receptionist blinked bravely at my approach, and recoiled a little when my rain-bloated passport hit her desk with a fishmonger’s slap. How enduringly grateful I was that at this time of year no hotel could even pretend to be full.

  My room was briefly delightful; in minutes I had spattered its gleaming, down-lit shower in hosed-off pannier detritus and blocked the free-standing dome basin with plant matter and bits of Russia. The complimentary fruit bowl was reduced to pips and skin in a dozen savage bites, and the sleek wenge furniture disappeared beneath dank belongings: literally everything I owned had been drenched during my border ordeal, and was also, I now noted, deeply infused with the muscular scents of woodsmoke and fried fish. I had to bag-up before going out to eat, and it would be three full days before my shoes dried.

  Over breakfast I learned I was now in Pomerania, which sounded like a carefree story-book kingdom, but in the harsh light of an après-deluge morning didn’t look like one. I had by now regularly fallen foul of an ongoing power struggle to determine the precise passage of EV13; my hard-copy route guide was in a three-way fight with online maps and the sparse signage. A compromise between many suggested options now cast me across a fallow plain of sunlit mud, skidding ponderously and pushing the MIFA for two hours through unnavigable sections that made brown footballs of my feet. On days like this it seemed I had spent most of my life bouncing and rattling with painful sloth towards some desolate horizon of snow, sand or mud, passing the very occasional incredulous local with his hands on his hips and a sagging jaw.

  Tim Moore

  @mrtimmoore

  There’s an ongoing power struggle to determine the route of EV13. As ever the endurance shopping cyclist is the loser.

  It was one of those lonely tribulations that empties the human head, then fills it with daft rage. I gazed at skeletal trees clotted with thriving mistletoe tumours and developed a sudden hatred for this sap-sucking parasite. How had it inveigled itself into our festive celebrations? We might as well snog Vladimir Putin under a sprig of swastikas. And what about all the cuckoos I kept hearing of late? ‘The cuckoo’s a fine bird, he sings as he flies; he brings us good tidings, he tells us no lies.’ So I had sung at primary school, and so I now bellowed across the churned nothingness. In adulterated form, to reflect the fact that the cuckoo wasn’t a fine bird, and that the perpetrator of some of the animal kingdom’s most appalling behaviour might be more accurately described as a massive wanker. It didn’t scan too well, but my word it felt good. Did you know that if a host bird expels a cuckoo’s egg from its nest, the cuckoo’s mum comes back and metes out the revenge atrocity of ‘total clutch destruction’?

  At length I emerged from parasitical metaphors for Soviet occupation into more concrete reminders, passing social-realist monoliths that welcomed me into towns ringed with Khrushchyovka tenement blocks. Words familiar from a generation of Polish influence in Britain looked down from commercial awnings and rang out through the open doors beneath: sklep, dziękuję, kiełbasa, dzień dobry – shop, thank you, sausage, good morning – and the ubiquitous epithet kurwa. After my two-decade dealings with ex-pat tradesmen and cleaners, it felt strange to encounter Poles who didn’t speak a word of English and exhibited only a patchy eagerness to please. The captain of a river ferry perpetrated the most shameless, clumsy attempt at short-changing I have ever experienced, clearly confident that foreigners were all so boundlessly stupid that any answer to the conundrum of subtracting five from 100 would satisfy them. I shook my head and kept shaking it until his condescending smile faded and, zloty by grudging zloty, he filled my outstretched hand with the requisite coinage. After disembarking I treated him to a word that wasn’t sausage.

  For some hours I trundled across a flat, wet and very Dutch landscape, pedalling along raised dykes beneath a big blue sky and crossing wide, straight bodies of water by chain ferry. Then a distant jostle of petrochemical chimneys and dockside cranes poked up from the sun-spangled horizon: Gdan´sk, home to more defining moments in recent history than any other city in Europe. The Nazi bombardment of its eastern waterfront on 1 September 1939 marked the start of the Second World War; forty-one years later those same docksides saw the birth of Lech Wałęsa’s Solidarity movement, the inspirational beginning of the end for one-party Communist rule across the Eastern Bloc.

  Poles have always seemed a little more adventurous than their regional rivals. On our 1990 trip we started seeing their tiny little Polski Fiats in Denmark, labouring under the wheel-splaying weight of human numbers and mercantile cargo. After that they were everywhere, boldly going where for fifty years no East European had ever gone: out in the Swedish fields harvesting produce, by the Austrian roadside flogging home-made pickles, a dominant presence at every car-boot sale from Bergen to Bergamo. Their itinerant quest for a fast buck knew no bounds in every sense, with regard to the deckchair pimps we spotted outside a row of Warsaw-plated caravans bucking about in the corner of a Berlin car park. We even saw Polish tat-traders in desperate, foodless Romania, making a very slow buck. It was a pioneering display of the venturesome enterprise that would later make them the first-wave East Europeans to arrive in Britain.

  Old Gdan´sk was the venerable incarnation of this spirit, a colourful parade of slender, lofty merchant homes topped with scalloped gables and grand, elaborate civic structures clustered in finials and clock towers, handsomely restored legacies of its sixteenth-century heyday as the Hanseatic League’s richest port. I weaved the mud-slathered MIFA through the tourists and came out of the cobbles onto an
urban expressway. It went on for hours, endlessly flanked by office and apartment blocks that would deny me a closer glimpse of what were once the Lenin shipyards, where in the 1980s a different sort of Pole pushed a different sort of boundary.

  Poland was the biggest of the Soviet’s satellite states, and the most perennially bothersome. When bad things happened, Poles made a serious fuss with little regard for the repressive consequences: in 1956, an uprising in Poznan´ against pay cuts left fifty-six protestors dead. There was rarely a shortage of bad things to fuss about. A hushed-up 1970s research project by native economists established that the average Polish woman of working age woke at 5 a.m., and padded out her 9–5 job with two daily hours of commuting, ninety minutes of cooking and housework, plus fifty-three minutes in food queues. Being Polish, she didn’t suffer in silence: when in 1970 the nation’s woes were compounded by a 36 per cent hike in food prices, more protests swept the nation. In Gdan´sk forty-four people were shot dead.

  By 1980 most Warsaw Pact colonies were functionally bankrupt, and with all those weapons to build and stockpile the motherland was in no position to bail them out. Poland was the brokest of the broke: its foreign debt doubled every year, and in 1981 hit sixty-six billion dollars. Further huge rises in food prices ensued, stoking further unrest. The Solidarity trade union was formed in the Gdan´sk shipyards after a strike in the summer of 1980: within eight weeks it had eight million members across the country, more than twice as many as the Communist Party. In the good old, bad old days the Russians would have sent in the tanks, but by 1981 they had lost 2,000 men in Afghanistan and had no appetite for meddling beyond their borders. The Polish authorities imposed martial law: for eighteen months a curfew held, and men in uniforms read the TV news. But without Soviet back-up their hearts weren’t really in it, and in 1986 they opened negotiations with Solidarity that paved the way for free elections. How curiously ironic that the first true workers’ revolution in history should effectively overthrow a Communist state.

  A busy roadside bike path delivered me at non-contemplative speed through this seat of the anti-Soviet revolution, and the drawn-out balance of the Three Cities conurbation: Gdan´sk and its industrial-dockside partner Gdynia bookend the seaside resort of Sopot, where that terrible Commie Song Contest was held. The sun was now low and huge, casting a comely golden light on even the dreariest distribution centre, but I took almost nothing in. While lunching outside the gates of a refinery I’d remembered the Pro Plus that had nearly bagged me a border strip-search, and for no obvious reason necked down four with my new afternoon refreshment of choice: Magic Man energy drink. The combined effect, when it took full hold, was that of an adrenaline enema; thus wired I had made a blur of the Sopot boardwalk and Gdynia’s crane forest, my unblinking eyes fixed on the odometer. The path fairly swarmed with the Three Cities’ many student cyclists, but this wasn’t about wheel-to-wheel combat. Perhaps it might have been if I’d had any hope of victory. Then my route peeled away towards the quieter north-east coast, and as the blossom-flecked trees pushed shadows far across the gilded hillsides I settled into the brainless, pinprick-pupilled accumulation of distance.

  ‘I am sorry for my English, is ah—’

  I had hit Władysławowo’s Blackpool-ish b. & b. belt deep into twilight, a desperate, pallid man astride a bike clagged with sun-baked mud and creaking in exhausted sympathy. Simon, as the chubby young man at the desk of the first guest house had introduced himself, spoke a language whose long, wondering pauses made it poorly suited for my predicament. I had asked him if there was a restaurant in town and now interrupted to ask him again.

  ‘Ah … restauracja … yes, but I think is, ah … close at nine.’

  I checked my watch; it was 8.40, the latest I would ever finish.

  ‘So, ah, tomorrow breakfast here from eight o’clock, down the stairs in… how is room called? Room where people must eat, like in, ah … office or ah … ah … I apologise again for my English, I learn in school bu—’

  I cut in with the measured urgency of a man who has just ridden 133km on a shopping bike, the last half of them on Pro Plus and carbonated taurine.

  ‘Simon,’ I said, clamping my white hand to his shoulder, ‘you must tell me where this restaurant is, and you must tell me now.’

  With a nervous smile he obliged, and I tore raggedly down the off-season streets like a drunk ghost. A young woman was polishing glasses behind an empty counter when I staggered in and executed an unusually theatrical rendition of my eating mime.

  ‘I’m sorry, I can see that you’re hungry but I’m afraid our kitchen is closed. Maybe you could try the kebab café in the centre?’ As I ricocheted out of the door I looked back and saw her re-enacting my performance to the loud amusement of unseen men.

  I often wonder what would happen if I ever fail to source calories in these situations; this one, for instance, could have ended very badly for Simon’s succulent jowls. But somehow, perhaps because of the many great deeds and acts of kindness I have carried out in this life and its predecessors, it always works out. I successfully located the kebab shop, and there laid waste to an open roadkill sandwich and several Specjal beers, watching a succession of progressively more dishevelled locals weave in from the night, drunk moths drawn to that flaming bollard of flesh. I went to bed feeling oily, replete and very at home.

  For three blowy, blue-skied days I tracked Poland’s Baltic coast, trying to forget that every westward pedal stroke was taking me further away from my Black Sea goal to the distant south-east. After countless false dawns, spring had sprung: Poles were getting noisy with lawnmowers and strimmers, spraying crap and nitrates over fields and riding bicycles en masse for the purposes of leisure. How pleasing to have learned that the Polish for bike was rowery, in unique tribute to the Rover Safety Bicycle, a nineteenth-century British creation that conquered the world and set a design template that still endures. And how regrettable, after the thick end of 4,000km, to be indirectly introduced to the MIFA’s final shortcoming: big wheels were not just faster, but hugely more comfortable. The couples and families that wheeled smoothly along the sun-splashed forest paths offered a serene counterpoint to the hectic, deafening progress of my all-action judderfest. And though these wandering trails of cinders and gravel made an aesthetically agreeable environment for a pootle down the Baltic coast, in terms of speed and navigational directness they did few favours for anyone attempting to ride the entire length of continental Europe before dying of boredom or old age.

  It was a long holiday weekend. Back in Moscow, Putin was getting ready to cast his sinister, beady gaze across the biggest military parade in Russian history, and the Baltic resorts were at last coming to life. Every couple of hours the pines parted and I found myself winding through a clutch of refreshment stands and seaside-crap shacks, most topped with national flags slapping themselves silly in the wind. Much more rarely I would catch a glimpse of soft sand and rough water. Seaside holidays might have been invented on this coast, but those frigid gusts mean the Baltic’s resorts generally shelter behind dunes and windbreak pine glades. Out on the beaches, everyone was hunkered down in stripy-canopied, two-seat enclosures arrestingly positioned with their backs to the sea and its incoming blasts of chilled air. What an odd spectacle they made, less like holidaymakers than telephone engineers working over a thousand open manholes.

  These were days of radish-heavy breakfasts, of shades-on sun and good-natured public drunkenness, of distance-blitzing Magic Man afternoons and herring suppers. The wind was stiff and capricious, obliging me on occasion to underlay my gardening gloves with disposable produce-handling mitts nicked from a supermarket. I regularly lost my way, lugging the MIFA for miles through raw sand and brambly brush with my retreat-from-Moscow face on. At length, with blood spotting my socks and shoes full of grit, I would generally emerge at some forgotten entrance to a derelict Soviet army base. So many were strung along the coast, reduced now to weed-pierced asphalt, mossy piles of rubble and the odd
rusted sentry barrier with ‘CTOΠ!’ on it in brine-blistered red letters. The service roads between these places were invariably laid with miles of liver-loosening cobbles, a punishing ordeal for the smaller-wheeled gentleman tourist. I had to take my watch off when the reverberating crown wheel threatened to gouge through my wrist flesh. More than once I stopped to allow a bout of nausea to pass.

  Poland’s holiday drinkers got to work early. I saw one young couple taking bottle-toting selfies at 9.15 a.m., but there were none of the rheumy, grazed-knuckled trouble-seekers who had patrolled small-town Poland back in 1990. Indeed, the mood was almost overbearingly convivial. The coastal paths were full of primary-school outings, and every single member of every single one reflexively hailed me with a wave, a smile or a squeaky ‘Dzień dobry!’ In the evenings, the streets and sands were dense with hand-holders: grandparents, young lovers, even teenage boys and their mothers. It was all very heart-warming, and entirely unexpected. The bloke who retiled our bathroom last year hardly ever held my hand.

  The resorts were an intriguing blend of crumbly stucco, smart new boutique hotels and the odd Soviet leisure monstrosity, sometimes unconvincingly made-over with coppered glass and a portico, sometimes left to rot where it stood. The pavements offered an introduction to East Europe’s remarkable tolerance of infant recklessness and its handmaiden, sozzled parental negligence: all thronged with whooping toddlers on battery-powered trikes, zipping waywardly through the crowds at lethal speed. From here on, almost every former Communist settlement I passed through would have its main public spaces terrorised after dark by children of similar age at the wheels of rented electric racing cars.