The Cyclist Who Went Out in the Cold Page 8

  I fully expected to ride alone the next day, so was surprised – and indeed rather proud – when my son’s approach to the breakfast table came accompanied by a tell-tale underfoot crumple: he was bagged up and ready for more. With clear roads and clear skies it would be a different story, at least until the last few chapters. We ate lunch by one of the many heaps of conifer trunks awaiting collection along the road; my son fell fast asleep with half a sandwich in his gloved hand. I roused him, then spent the balance of the afternoon watching my first born reprise every ugly phase of my ride’s early days, from damp-eyed distress to full-blown madness.

  When Raija said I would find the endless Finnish forests mentally invigorating, she probably didn’t imagine me shattering the wilderness with bellowed ‘Geordie Beyoncé’ numbers and animal noises. My son’s preferred lunatic mantra was spawned during a very Moore family discussion on the feasibility of living off the deposits from discarded beverage containers (ever the contrarians, Finns only chuck stuff out of the window if it’s worth something – there were never any crisp bags or fag packets crumpled into the roadside drifts, just a regular parade of cans and plastic bottles with a displayed refund value of between ten and forty cents). The pan-Scandinavian words for ‘deposit’ gleaned from the forensic phase of this study would tear forth from my son’s throat all through the lonely late afternoon, in reflexive riposte to inclines, headwinds, a proffered Snickers bar or my wheedling efforts to coax him back into the saddle when he dismounted and dropped his bike into the roadside slush. In Finland, no one can hear you scream ‘PANTTI-PANT!’

  We met my wife at a lakeside retirement hotel with a captured T-34 on the lawn. Some of our elderly fellow residents were playing bingo in the dining hall; others tottered gamely down to a shore-edge ice hole in their swimsuits. It seemed an awfully long time since I’d slept somewhere normal. As normal my son slept for an awfully long time: he went to bed at nine, reappeared eleven hours later and announced that his knees had gone and he’d had enough. I didn’t try to talk him round. A hundred miles in two days seemed the humane limit in these conditions.

  It was my support crew’s last full day and Russia loomed. After dismembering Raija’s bike and wedging it into their hire car I set about pedalling these twin woes clean out of my soul. The world is never a blur on a MIFA 900, but I did my best to smear it a little that day, speeding through my first cultivated landscapes and the ever-closer, ever-larger towns of southern Finland. On snowless roads my spiked tyres let forth the rising drone of a Tube train; elbows in and head down on a straight descent between green fields, I finally bested the speed that Raija averaged all day on her bike.

  Finland had welcomed me with a cold, hard slap, but was seeing me off with a warm wave. Chevrons of high-flying geese crossed a cloudless sky. Lakes had fully thawed to a deeply becoming midnight blue, most of them speckled with green islands, and most of those gaily bestrewn with clapboard holiday homes, each sprouting a flagpole trailing a streamer in the blue-and-white national colours. Butterflies wafted clumsily about the road; I shared my bus-shelter burgers with the first ants of spring.

  It was Saturday, and the towns were alive with the weekend trappings of civilisation in its slow-paced, clean-living Scandinavian essence. Unisex footballers on garish AstroTurf. A woman vacuuming her front drive. Tippy-tappy Nordic pole walkers patrolling the suburban pavements. I rode on my first cycle paths, broad and sleek, and on them encountered my first adult cyclists. Nearly all were standard-issue middle-aged men in Lycra, and not one returned my comradely half-waves and lifts of the chin. A glance in a shop window ensured I didn’t take it personally: what a painstakingly thorough twannet I looked in my bulging snood and flappy reflective tabard, the under-anorak CamelBak tenting out my profile like a participant in some Help4Hunchbacks charity ride. A hi-vis ogre bent over a tiny bicycle. ‘You know what I think every time I watch you ride away?’ my wife had asked me at breakfast. ‘That a kid reckons there’s something wrong with his bike, and has just asked his dad to take it for a test-ride round the block.’

  When at last a fellow cyclist did acknowledge me, side by side at a red light, it was to ask where my helmet was. I showed him: clipped to the top of the rear rack, ready for Russia. I’d never even tried squeezing it on over my four hats, and explained why: ‘Thing is, it’s really, really cold in Finland, but you only have about twelve cars. It’s a question of relative risk.’

  ‘A helmet here is the law,’ he said, a little stoutly, tugging his chin-strap tight as the lights changed. ‘Also, my brother has three cars.’

  Last and largest of the towns was Imatra, home to the first old buildings I’d seen in Finland, and the only handsome ones. I met my family at the art nouveau Castle Hotel for a farewell festival of starched linen, silver-lidded breakfast buffets, generous tipping and all the other stuff that wouldn’t be part of life once I was left to my grubby own devices.

  The next morning I changed my tyres on the hotel’s stately forecourt as the support crew packed up, bullying off the spiked set and pushing on the standard smoothies my wife had come out with. This had always been the plan, as it was to send her home with a holdall full of mittens, boots and skiwear; but after no more than two full days of clear tarmac and positive centigrade, both strategies now seemed a little hasty.

  As I waved the family off, lower lip slightly a-wobble, an Asiatic hotel guest came out and sparked up his first cigarette of the day.

  ‘Where they go?’ he asked, tilting his head at my departing support vehicle.

  ‘Home.’

  My condensed breath mixed with his exhaled billows in the clear, cold air.

  ‘Where you go?’

  ‘Hell.’

  6. RUSSIA

  ‘So you are two more come to see death of socialism.’

  Flicking through the excellent journal my wife kept during our distant odyssey through Scandinavia and Eastern Europe, I see we were thus welcomed by a border guard of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics on 18 August 1990. I say excellent, though from a personal perspective this document is more a tireless litany of shame, and Nostradamus-grade lifestyle prescience. After three weeks under canvas, our first night in a campsite chalet, eating prawns from a cardboard box in the dark, is pithily billed as ‘Nazi Tim’s special treat’.

  In Denmark, when our supply of cheap German tins is exhausted: ‘Food becoming bone of contention – T’s yoghurt and lentil surprise had me in open revolt.’

  In Sweden: ‘Mosquitoes unbelievable – T hysterical.’

  In Norway: ‘T came out of supermarket with bacon and mince stuffed down trousers. Had also refused to buy proper map. After furious row we got lost. Karma.’

  Finland was despatched in five days, and not many more words:

  ‘Drove for eleven hours straight, nothing to see but trees.’

  ‘Swedes warned us Finns all drunk and mad, but towns totally dead.’

  Our USSR visa was running down and after 2,253 miles in Scandinavia – as I say, it’s quite a journal – endless wood and water had begun to lose its appeal.

  We arrived at the Soviet border rather traumatised, having spent the previous two nights in the company of a very distant relative of hers, who even in death still reigns supreme as the rudest man I have ever shared a tiny Baltic island with. His catchphrase, delivered when turning over all my cards during a candlelit game of Hearts, or raising the lid of the waterless centrifugal toilet after my panicked emergence, or inspecting the remains of the glass timer that unaccountably fell off his sauna’s wall when I opened the door: ‘Why did you do this? I am baffled by your stupidity.’

  The border guards worked as a team. While the one with more stripes and a bigger hat spooled out a lugubrious inner monologue, his junior colleague carefully disembowelled our decomposing Saab, and laid its copious and unlovely contents on the sunny asphalt like the world’s worst car-boot sale. ‘Gorbachev no good, everything here bad. I have dream of London, Piccadilly, tower of Nelson.�
�� He only brightened when his subordinate discovered the cache of Western unobtainables we had brought along for the purposes of bribe and barter. ‘He took a blank VHS tape and let his mate grab two packets of Marlboro,’ records my wife. ‘Then they waved us through: “Welcome in Soviet Union and good journey.”’

  In the generous interim I had never once returned to Russia. How apposite to now find myself riding across the very same slice of crap-scattered no man’s land, towards the very same border post on the Helsinki-to-St Petersburg E18, with the very same blend of terror and exhilaration percolating in my guts. Then, as now, it felt like going behind enemy lines. After all these snow-blind, head-down weeks with nary a peek of my objective, I was at last crossing the Iron Curtain, or at least a residual slice of its pelmet.

  It was Sunday and the queues were short. At the first dim booth a stern woman with magenta hair and jarringly vivid make-up – in a bluer suit she could have been David Bowie performing ‘Life on Mars’ – snatched my passport and the weighty sheaf of visa documents. As she scanned them a look of incredulous outrage contorted her features, as if I’d tried to palm her off with a couple of used scratch-cards and a TV licence application filled out in the name of Vladimir Poo-Poo Poo-Tin. It was three months since I’d endured a ghastly afternoon before a variety of such expressions at the Russian Visa Office in London, faces that wordlessly demanded to know exactly who I thought I was, coming in here with this correct vast sum of cash and all these exhaustively completed forms explaining (this is absolutely true) why I had left my previous two jobs, and listing the names of every country I had visited during the past ten years, along with the exact dates of each visit. The cheek-clawing absurdity of it all is that while pulling those faces, they’re not actually paying your documents the slightest genuine attention: nobody at the visa office challenged the invented hotels I had put down as my overnight stops for each day in Russia, and nor did they here at the border.

  ‘Timoteya! Timoteya!’

  Sour Bowie had passed my papers to a colleague at the next window down, a very much jollier young man peering cheerfully out from under one of those rearing bin-lid peaks that accessorise Russian military caps to such entertaining effect.

  ‘So, Mister Timoteya – you come from Lon-don on velociped?’

  ‘Gind og,’ I said. I’d managed to pull the snood on over my helmet, but it was a tight fit. I unclicked the strap.

  ‘Kind of. I started in Norway.’

  ‘It is good, you are English gentleman!’ He beamed winningly, very pleased with himself and at least slightly impressed by me. Then he stamped my papers with a quick-fire flourish – pah-donkker-chunk-ba-thunk! – and raised the barrier.

  In August 1990, the Soviet Union was falling apart at the seams; the next year it would be completely unstitched. The Russia we drove into seemed unsettlingly rudderless: our border welcome had vacillated between the hidebound authoritarianism of old and that anarchic every-man-for-himself vibe which always seems to set in at the end of an empire. Nowhere would epitomise this unravelling of law and order more memorably than the E18 from the Finnish border to St Petersburg.

  We had heard a vague report of bandits lured to this road by the magic combo of a new influx of Western tourists and the sudden evaporation of police. Nonetheless, my wife implored me to stop when, barely a mile into Russia, we drove up to a man waving dementedly next to a Lada with the bonnet up. I’m a pretty bad Samaritan at the best of times, but had started to slow down when my wife looked up the road and saw another Lada with the bonnet up, with another man flapping his arms beside it. I floored it and in the next five minutes or so sped past a further half-dozen raised bonnets, and a rather more imaginative would-be mugger rolling theatrically about in the road clutching his knee. After swerving around him I looked in the mirror: he was on his feet and toting a huge spanner, a study in thwarted rage.

  Twenty-five years on, Bandit Alley was broad and freshly re-tarmacked. I suspected this might be a classic bit of borderland window dressing, and correctly so: within a couple of hours I was engaged in the pothole slalom that would characterise my under-wheel experience until I returned to the European Union. Otherwise the cross-border culture shock was astonishingly stark – one of our continent’s great frontier mood-shifts, right up there with Italy–Switzerland. That spick, span asphalt was densely bordered with the full spectrum of litter, winking CD shards and discarded sanitary-ware poking through the last grubby outcrops of winter. I traced a careful path between plastic bottles filled with what British street-cleaners have gamely euphemised as ‘driver Tizer’. After 1,700km of odourless, aseptic Finland my nostrils were befouled by a rolling miasma of unregulated neglect and decay: sulphur and solvents, fermenting rubbish, burning plastic, poo and wee.

  It stank like some crushingly over-populated third-world slumland, yet there was absolutely nothing around – just a hefty, pan-flat slice of reclaimed Finland razed to the ground and left vacant as a Cold War buffer zone. And though I wasn’t attacked by people pretending they had broken down, I endured several near-death encounters with people pretending they could drive. Average speeds were close to terminal velocity and every blind corner was the cue for urgent overtaking. I can’t speak from experience, but you’d imagine that peeing into a half-litre Coke bottle while on the move must present a potentially lethal conflict of focus for any lorry driver who values his trousers, particularly if, like most Russians, he’s simultaneously on the phone. At any rate most vehicles were piloted in a consistently wayward manner. In consequence of all this, the roadside litter festival was regularly interrupted by elaborate accident death-shrines, granite crosses inlaid with photographs of smiling young men, and decorated with plastic flowers and dented reliquaries, sometimes a glassless wing mirror or a singed hubcap, once the stoved-in door of a black Lada. Even at this very early stage I found myself dwelling unhappily on the extremely low value that so many Russians seem to place on their own lives and everyone else’s, the die-and-let-die fatalism that stained Finland’s snow red in the winter of 1939–40.

  Vyborg delivered my first encounter with urban Russia, and looking back the city showcased everything that lay in wait – fear, filth, incompetence and colourful family fun – all in one ramshackle package. On the way in, crossing a high bridge over some Baltic inlet – the first sea I’d set eyes on since day one – I peered down and beheld a sprawling yard of mothballed military vehicles – hundreds, perhaps thousands, of radar trucks, tankers and ambulances in dusted khaki ranks behind a watchtowered wall. I photographed it, then almost instantly rode up to a police checkpoint and wished I hadn’t. (I needn’t have worried: the sole occupant was happily engrossed in a roadside dog-end harvest.) The outskirts were a shocking mess of dumped cars and bleary winos, and the thirteenth-century Swedish castle that presided stoutly over old Vyborg looked down on cancerous stucco and gap-toothed cobbles. Old men in battered camping chairs dangled rods into a poisoned creek bordered by derelict factories and a forest of rusty cranes. I passed an ancient wall that must have recently collapsed, its rubble imaginatively recycled to fill the many van-sized craters in the road beneath.

  Then, without warning, I juddered down a hill to find myself in a square overlooked by immaculate Baroque structures and alive with happy noise and balloons: a well-attended children’s carnival was in full swing, performers in garish traditional costume belting out electro folk tunes to a jiggling crowd of candyfloss kids and piggyback dads. ‘This really is not Finland,’ I can just be heard saying above the amplified balalaikas on a short video souvenir recorded here. Until the war, of course, it was. The communal merriment seemed as bewilderingly unFinnish as the squalid hardship.

  Surgically stripped of the former, Sovetskiy was half as bewildering but twice as horrid. The day was almost done when I bumped and clattered into this eponymously old-school town, and found its populace diligently engaged in an experiment to define the precise point at which civic unfriendliness tipped into open hostility
. Stray dogs gazed sullenly from a roadside strewn with old furniture and carpets. Truculent men with extremely short hair shambled by, dragging lengths of scrap wood. Sovetskiy’s junior miserablists fixed me with Children of the Corn stares from their pushchairs and playgrounds. Even the ubiquitous ‘stack-a-prole’ five-floor prefab tenements didn’t seem to like what they saw, firing out scar-faced confrontational glowers like the weather-beaten tramps they were. Russians don’t like outsiders. They don’t like insiders much either. When Who Wants to Be a Millionaire was first broadcast here, the producers swiftly binned the ask-the-audience round: instead of being offered assistance, contestants were deliberately misled.

  My experience of the Russian service industry, distant as it was, stood me in good stead for my reception at the Hotel Chaika. The woman at the desk tracked my progress towards her with the thin-lipped, cold-eyed disdain of that nurse who has Jack Nicholson lobotomised in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. ‘Oh, marvellous,’ said her face. ‘A guest. With a bicycle. A really stupid bicycle.’ Her revenge came in the usual form, or the usual forms: three in all, of archaic design, balefully handed to me for laborious completion. Not a word was exchanged, until I attempted to chain the MIFA to a fire extinguisher across the lobby.

  I couldn’t begin to imagine how Sovetskiy had lured visitors in sufficient number to merit the existence of this low-rise hotel. In truth, it probably never had. The institutional strip-lit corridors had an air of long-term disuse, silent as Chernobyl and about as welcoming. I was borne haphazardly upwards in a big tin yo-yo masquerading as a lift. My landing remained home to a battered sentry-post armchair reserved for one of those gimlet-eyed female ‘floor commandants’ I remembered from my 1990 visit, though she was now long gone and no one had watered the pot plants since. Was the hotel built during or after what I would learn to call the ‘socialistic era’? It was very hard to tell in a country where everything, from concrete to people, seemed to age in treble time.