The Cyclist Who Went Out in the Cold Read online

  At length I rose with a birthday skinful and a spring in my step, a combo that would in due course make heavy work of the many decorous staircases that separated me from my bed. I strode over to the card players, rapped an overbearing farewell on their table and breezed expansively out into the night. On previous evenings I had always been too exhausted – and frankly too scared – to plan beyond the next overnight stop, at the most the one after. But this had been a short day and in various ways an inspiring one: with a plinth in Paddy von Fanbelt’s museum of two-wheeled heroes on offer for completing this ride, I had breathed deep, drunk deeper, and made a big, crumply audit of the remaining distance.

  Many moons before (in fact only four of them, but still), Ed Lancaster had warned me that EV13 was thought to run 10,400km from the Barents Sea to the Black. By rights I was barely more than halfway, but the navigational aids bundled messily under my arm had given me the most wonderful present a drunken long-distance shopping cyclist could ask for: somehow, I appeared to be almost a thousand miles closer to the end than I should have been.

  Two hours after I shelled out fourteen euros on sun cream, I discovered why the German for weather is wetter. For many days thence I frothed inside my anorak, toiling up heavy slabs of hillside in a dank world of grey: concrete watchtowers, whole villages faced from top to toe in local slate, pewter windfarms, the leaden, leaking skies. Two months of hard labour had deformed my legs into hourglasses of muscle pinched in at the knee, but they still only had one big climb a day in them. Every incline after that was a rain-faced Calvary of gurns and steaming death-rasps: one close-up bus-shelter selfie taken at 800m appears to show Bono concluding an especially overwrought chorus in a rubbish sauna. Even my arms suffered, painfully aglow with the strain of yanking up on the bars, like that was going to help. Standing in the saddle of a shopping bike felt pretty stupid, but at least it was an option: had I been half an inch taller my right kneecap would have sliced against the handlebar bell-bracket with every single revolution, rather than every third or fourth.

  The descents were a reckless mess, my MIFA’s runaway clatter bringing worried old faces to every other window in the valley-side villages. Near the foot of one especially knuckle-blanching plummet, I hazarded a glance at my juddering Garmin screen. I’m pretty sure that 64.7kmh is the fastest I have ever travelled on a bicycle, and entirely certain that this was not the bicycle to do it on. In two days, my almost pristine brake blocks were reduced to smoking nubbins.

  I was now into the final run of the inner German border, a region where the nation’s richest province, Bavaria, butted up to Thuringia, one of its poorest. Back in the years of division this disparity drew crowds of West German holidaymakers, who climbed up a very particular breed of observation tower to gaze down at their benighted cross-border brethren with a blend of compassion and schadenfreude. My sole fellow guests at the Haus des Volkes had been a retired West German couple I met at breakfast, who told me they’d climbed the 150ft Bayernturm – largest of these gloat-decks – thirty years previously. They were near the end of their own walk down what the wife called ‘the line of death’, and I was fascinated by the pair’s enduring fixation with people they clearly thought of as an alien and inferior race.

  ‘It’s perhaps their history,’ said the husband, ‘but the Ossis we still find a little rude, a little bad in education.’

  It transpired that we’d eaten in the same pub the night before; they’d seen me but I’d failed to notice them, presumably because they hadn’t rapped a hello on my table.

  ‘Did you not find it terrible? Everyone with cigarettes and cards, eating bad food with dirty hands.’

  His wife shuddered at the memory of what had been one of my favourite German evenings. ‘We really felt we were back in the East, with Honecker in control.’

  I thought of them, and my strangely self-censored interviews at the MIFA plant, when I pushed the bike over a stretch of sodden pasture and up to a slatted wooden bridge. A cluster of mossy signs and fingerposts indicated that this was the lonely meeting point of three countries, two of them Germanys, and one of those no more. This was it: my farewell to the erstwhile German Democratic Republic, and its enduringly awkward legacy. I huffed an accumulation of rain off my upper lip, then bucked muddily away through phantom minefields and into the Czech Republic.

  12. THE CZECH REPUBLIC, GERMANY AND AUSTRIA

  In 1990, Czechoslovakia welcomed us with open arms and hungry wallets, a nation in thrall to the new freedom and its commercial spin-offs. The GDR had petered out into grime and gloom; on our last night we’d slept on a bare mattress in an unheated campsite shed, welcomed in the very loosest sense by a Stasi wannabe who handed us a bent key and seven squares of waxed toilet paper. Then we crossed the border and at once found ourselves on gaily lit streets suffused with an almost palpable spirit of good cheer.

  The old state-controlled hotel agencies in every Czech town were anarchically thronged with homeowners hawking their spare rooms at prices even my wife found hard to resist, and we hadn’t once regretted taking them up. Never had I encountered such glowingly house-proud hosts, people who sometimes seemed more interested in showing off their well-ordered arsenals of West European cleaning products than in taking our money. Every menu was a zingy wake-up call to palates withered by days of boiled pallor, and the bustling cafés seemed to have picked up where they left off in the gilded, chocolatey belle époque. I must also pay special tribute to The Miracle of Wenceslaus Square, wherein Prague’s most fabled public space was lined with tankers full of Pilsner Urquell, dispensed by white-coated brewery technicians into half-litre glasses for which they asked the equivalent of 3p. The afternoon that unfolded here spawned one of our journal’s most worrisome entries: ‘Got tanked up and bullied a cab driver.’

  Czechoslovakia is long gone, of course, cleaved in two shortly after our return by mutual consent. Since then I’d been back to Prague twice, but had never revisited the Czech provinces and was keen to see if they retained that infectious joie de vivre. After a lengthy approach through the still unpeopled exclusion zone, I found my two-letter answer in a two-letter town.

  ‘Besahlen! BE-SAH-LEN!’

  The Hotel Goethe in Aš had attracted me with its shabby-chic art nouveau façade, one of the town’s many noble but haggard survivors from Bohemia’s turn-of-the-century golden age. Now, through dense veils of tobacco smoke at the panelled entrance lobby’s dingy fundament, I was being ordered – in loud and terrible German – to pay up front, by a blubbery, ageing skinhead who didn’t seem likely to show me his prized collection of anti-bacterial surface cleaners any time soon.

  Upstairs I sat on my bed, which sagged gently down to the hair-balled carpet amid a chorus of geriatric groans. How very far I had come in an hour and a bit. The disorderly streets of Aš had presented an abrupt departure from well-entrenched civic norms, sparingly dotted with people who were younger, gaunter and conspicuously more laidback – more aimless – than the typical townsperson I had pedalled past for the previous thousand miles. The bike paths were gone and so was half the tarmac; the muddy front yards were strewn with battered children’s toys in a manner unthinkable, indeed probably unlawful, back over the border. Everything – clothes, apartment blocks, cars – looked cheap and worn-out. Half the shop names had missing letters, their dusty windows thinly scattered with sun-bleached merchandise. I couldn’t even make a puerile joke at this sorry dump’s expense, because it’s actually pronounced ‘ash’. Not for the first time – or the last – I wondered how on earth our pocket continent preserves such startling cheek-by-jowl diversity in this age of globalised convergence.

  The compact hotel restaurant was heaving with noisy diners in matching tracksuits who appeared to be members of some sort of competitive smoking club, and staffed by a harassed duo in stained red waistcoats. As I made my way towards the only empty table, the younger female half of this pair barged waywardly out through the kitchen doors with one hand over her face, then d
ucked down behind the bar. For a while I could hear her heaving sobs above the tracksuit gang’s racket, but I never saw her again. Her superior, a paunchy middle-aged man with a yellowing moustache and a medieval rash poking out above his grimy shirt collar, glanced briefly behind the bar with an expression far removed from sympathy, then returned to his business. This principally involved the dead-eyed, desultory transport of full and empty bottles of beer to and from the tracksuit tables. After ten minutes he flicked a menu into my lap on his way past; after another ten he sparingly thinned out the forest of empties I was sharing my table with. My expectant cough and lofted finger went ignored on this and umpteen subsequent occasions. I was about to stick out a foot and floor him when he stopped before me with an open notepad and a very Russian expression.

  ‘OK, so, um, could I maybe start with salat?’

  The menu was entirely in Czech, and though after 131 steep, wet kilometres I hardly cared what I ate as long as there was a lot of it, it seemed prudent to kick-off with a familiarity. I pressed a finger to the relevant menu entry, then watched as the bill of fare was removed from my grasp with great speed and no little violence. This mysterious and arresting turn of events was accompanied by a shrill burst of z-centric words, delivered into my face at close quarters along with a generous splash of spittle.

  ‘Sounds good,’ I said to the waiter’s rapidly retreating back. ‘I’ll have it medium-rare with chips.’

  Then, my ears still ringing and my face aflame, I picked my way through the suddenly silent tracksuits and went up the road to a Thai-run sushi steakhouse, where I had a pizza and wondered what on earth had gone wrong with this country.

  If nothing else, EV13 was commendably well signposted in the Czech Republic. The next morning I blankly followed it through wet towns full of lorries, and over wet hillsides full of mud. I’d been kept awake half the night by death-watch plumbing creaks and a host of rival noises off, further reminders of how spoiled I’d been by weeks of subservient motorists and well-balanced service staff, of hotel guests who didn’t spend the small hours washing dogs in their baths or holding corridor football tournaments.

  Come back, Germany, I thought, head down at the brimming potholes, all is forgiven. I pedalled on and ever upwards, watching my sodden red trainers rise and fall, rise and fall, and thinking that thought didn’t sound quite right. OK, most is forgiven. Then I looked up and saw a sign informing me that I had reached the Mittelpunkt Europa, and understood that my wish had been granted.

  This was the start of a long round of the EV13 hokey-cokey: for a fortnight I would weave across borders with dizzying frequency, left leg in, right leg out, never spending consecutive nights in the same country. There would generally be some token indication of the frontier, an old border hut or a metal sign with the facing nations on either side of it, but sometimes there was nothing. In twenty-five short years we’ve gone from an iron curtain to a blown-down garden fence.

  My first reacquaintance with Germany, welcome as it most surely was, came at a price. The rain intensified and the hills swelled so loftily that some came topped with a ski station. In a single week I had doubled my entire trip’s Garmin-archived accumulation of vertical distance. And my word it was cold, so cold that smoke once more coiled forth from every cottage chimney and hung thickly in the wet air. Helmut Schmidt would have loved it at least: blended with powerful wafts of new-growth pine, every inhalation was a drag of high-tar menthol.

  In 1990 we stopped at Auschwitz-Birkenau, back then a sparsely attended site and as such perhaps more haunted and harrowing than it is today, with one and a half million annual visitors. No matter how much you think you know about such places, confronting the horror first hand is always a draining ordeal. For good measure I was going down with my inaugural kidney stone, which added a top note of physical pain to the emotional anguish. Auschwitz must surely be the most terrible place on earth, but the Nazis provided plenty of competition. Between 1933 and 1945, they operated more than 20,000 concentration camps – a scarcely fathomable total, and one that made an encounter along my route inevitable.

  On a shiversome, bedraggled afternoon, the remains of Konzentrationslager Flossenbürg exuded a grimly appropriate air of misery. And a jolt of shock – the site lay at the heart of a trim little town, and I later noted with quiet horror that several parades of post-war homes had been built directly on to the foundations of the old prison huts. Flossenbürg was a labour camp rather than an extermination facility like Birkenau, but what with it being run by the SS, over 30,000 inmates – most of them political prisoners – still perished here: worked to death in a neighbouring quarry, starved to death in those long, low huts, hung at dawn for trying to escape or not being Nazis.

  What remained of the site has been sombrely conserved, with the old kitchen block now home to a museum. I was dourly processing its dreadful revelations – the encyclopaedic registers whose last column neatly displayed every prisoner’s ‘date of release’, the on-site SS casino, the post-war repurposing of the camp’s largest hut as a toy factory – when a female voice called out from the entrance. There were a dozen of us inside, but when I looked up I saw a woman with a laminated badge round her neck beckoning me directly.

  ‘I must ask you please to remove your bicycle,’ she said coldly. I’d left the MIFA propped on its stand behind the kitchen block, which I now learned represented a transgression of the site’s code of respect: a sign she led me to bracketed bicycles with picnics, unleashed dogs and racist insignia on the roll-call of the banished. ‘You see, we have rules here.’ This seemed an unfortunate statement in the circumstances, but I resisted a regrettable riposte and slunk away through a teenage school group, who parted before me in silent opprobrium.

  I spent the balance of an extremely challenging afternoon clearing rain from the Garmin screen with a weary swipe of gardening glove, watching the altitude rise and the temperature fall. In these conditions, I had finally learned, the key was to keep going, indeed to speed up when your aching, refrigerated body begged you to pack it in. By five o’clock I was blotted, numb and spent, barely able to uncurl my clawed fingers from the handlebars. Yet with the wet air now chilled to 4 degrees, I knew that any drop in pace would multiply every woe, and that if my engine cooled down I might not get it started again. This was a tough enough ask on tilted tarmac, and a frankly ludicrous one when an ill-fated dalliance with Google Maps led me down a dark and dwindling forest trail. Waist-high brambles and toppled trunks obliged me to gather the MIFA up in my arms and lug it blindly through the world’s stupidest assault course for almost an hour; I staggered out on to the road looking like a rubbish fireman wondering why he’d just rescued a shopping bike from a mudslide. As a rule I quite enjoyed getting massively lost: the relief at eventually rediscovering the true path was always more profound than the initial dismay of mislaying it, so I garnered a net morale boost from the experience. This episode was an exception to that rule.

  Eslarn, where I’d planned to stay, was liberally dotted with pensions and guest houses, but their doors were all locked and my ever more ragged knocking and letter-box bellows didn’t open any of them. Shuddering like a coal-fired Trabant I toiled on to Schönsee, the next cluster of roofs and bulbous church spires, where at tearful length I was eventually ushered in through a pension threshold. When someone rescues you from cold, wet hunger, it’s extremely difficult not to smother them in grateful kisses, even if you’re paying for the privilege and they’re a big, bald Dutchman.

  The borderland hills wouldn’t lie down, pumping themselves up into thousand-metre monsters that tapped into rich new seams of pain. My back began to squirt out wincing pulses of bruised agony, as if instead of spending his evening offering tips on route planning and historical research, that lovely Dutchman had bent me over his knee and whacked me all night with a clog. My forearms burned, my splayed knees shrieked, my right ankle yammered out its duller woes like a nutter on the bus, and below them all the MIFA’s hopeless little pram
wheels revolved with ever more wobbly reluctance. More than once I was bullied off the bike and into the Push of Shame, gazing with wet, wan eyes at the retreating ranks of conifers below and all around, wreathed in smoky mist as if the latest downpour had just extinguished a hundred forest fires.

  The German mountain villages were the usual studies in sober discipline, counterbalanced with radioactive bad taste. Every lawn was a fanatically marshalled putting surface, with a garden hose coiled tight and true as a big green slinky in one corner, and in the other some garish monstrosity, a cluster of giant, polychromic baubles or a plastic snail the size of an Alsatian. The gnomes were large and many, and generally engaged en masse in something unexpected, like ganging up on a purple stork or masturbating.

  In vivid contrast, the Czech settlements were sparse and ghostly, sometimes nothing but five roofless cottages and a stray dog. My Dutchman had offered the explanation: as I should have remembered from History O level, this was the Czech Sudetenland, a region of ethnic Germans fatefully annexed by Hitler in 1938. When the Soviets set up shop in Czechoslovakia after the war, they inevitably took a dim view of the Sudetenland’s inhabitants, and set about making their lives a misery. Ethnic Germans were forced to wear white armbands, and prevented from sitting on park benches or even walking on pavements. Almost 6,000 of them committed suicide in 1946 alone, and millions more were deported with merciless efficiency. By 1950, just 150,000 Germans remained of the three million who had called the Sudetenland home before the war. One village I went through started the 1940s with 2,500 residents, and ended them with fifty-two. Even by the standards of the age this was ethnic cleansing on a shocking scale: today, just 40,000 Czech citizens claim German heritage. Aš, I was chastened to learn, had lived most of its life as Asch, the Sudetenland’s most completely German town. In October 1945, the entire population was herded into twenty-seven trains and taken away, and seventy years on the poor place had barely begun to recover.