The Cyclist Who Went Out in the Cold Read online

  Behind my door many redolent sensations awaited rediscovery: sheets that would part with a ripping crackle of static, a towel which kissed the flesh like a bearded welder and above all a great wave of wilting, fetid heat. In Russia you are never, ever cold indoors. You are nearly always hungry, though. In the murky basement restaurant I spent an increasingly light-headed half-hour procuring a menu, around twenty-nine minutes more than it should have taken with two waitresses and just one other occupied table. As the staff scratched their ears and gazed through my invisible form, Raija’s warnings tolled fuzzily through me: Russians just don’t want to get involved, even when it’s their job to.

  The ordering process forged a template for the bulk of my subsequent meals in Russia. The menu I opened that night and every other was entirely in Cyrillic: an alphabet that meant little to me, spelling a language that meant nothing. After a pained examination of several pages of inverted mathematical symbols, I decoded words that looked a bit like ‘cutlet’ and ‘salad’, another that at least shared some letters with the Italian for tomato, and pivo, which any Londoner who has had his house redecorated in the last decade will know means beer across most of Eastern Europe. I attracted the waitress with a nautical flare then jabbed at appropriate areas of the menu; in a spirit of adventurous whimsy I also let my finger alight on an entirely mysterious ‘lucky dip’ selection. In due course, and displaying all the bonhomie of a dead Finn, she came back with a tomato salad, three extruded kebab things, half a litre of lager and a separate plate with two hardboiled eggs rolling about on it. One was bright pink, one was lime green, both were stone cold. In an act of curious reflex, the moment she turned her back I whisked these psychedelic appetite suppressants straight into my anorak pocket.

  I’m not sure if it’s widely acknowledged, but Russians like a drink. During our 1990 trip we learned the hard way that the carafe placed unbidden on every restaurant table the minute you sat down at it was brimming with a fluid that merely looked like water. That hard way unfolded at a hotel in Vitebsk, now in Belarus, where we consequently made quick and very dear friends with two young Aeroflot pilots on the next table. If I’d been writing our journal, that would have been the full account of a three-carafe evening. As it was, my wife was somehow able to recall and transcribe many of the night’s wonderfully bipartisan toasts:

  ‘Propaganda of all nations!’

  ‘Victory in sport!’

  ‘Struggle for peace!’

  ‘Women of the world!’

  (I regret to confess that her final observation in this entry reads: ‘T did Lambada with Hondurans’.)

  The next morning, cursed with hangovers so vast and oppressive it felt like having a couple of carsick bouncers in the Saab with us, we were compelled by our state-ordained itinerary to drive several hundred kilometres to Minsk; the Aeroflot pilots left at dawn to fly many more real passengers much further.

  This episode came back to me as I watched my fellow restaurant guests, a table of four well-dressed middle-aged men, work their way through an entirely liquid Sunday dinner. It seemed almost a grim duty, bottle after bottle of vodka despatched in near silence. In fairness, drinking yourself to death isn’t much fun, which might be why Martini don’t major on it in their adverts. Here are the related thoughts of Sir Richard Peto, Professor of Medical Statistics and Epidemiology at the University of Oxford: ‘Russians clearly drink a lot, but it’s this pattern of getting really smashed on vodka and then continuing to drink that is dangerous. They drink in a destructive way.’ Indeed they do. When Russia last published a detailed analysis of its national disease, it counted forty million officially recognised alcoholics in a population of 270 million. A quarter of Russian men die before reaching fifty-five, compared with 7 per cent of those in the UK. At sixty-four years, a Russian male’s life expectancy is lower than his Indian counterpart. Whether through violence, accident, suicide or the roster of related medical hazards, two out of three Russian men die drunk. I’d like to say this is why I called it a night after one beer, but in reality I couldn’t face ordering another.

  A few days before leaving, I’d shown my neighbour Chris where I was off to this time, assisted by the European Cycling Federation’s pocket-sized map of its entire continental network. He inspected this modest document with interest, then asked a question that betrayed many years’ familiarity with my standards of preparation and professionalism: ‘Are you, um, taking any other maps?’ Oh, Chris! I’d laughed then, but it seemed rather less hilarious now. The Garmin’s navigation screen had gone blank the minute I left Finland, and my EV13 route guide – a three-volume, ring-bound anthology patchily translated from the German original – assumed that a sensibly fun-focused cyclist would hop on a ferry from Helsinki to Estonia, skipping out Russia entirely. In consequence I wasn’t just off the beaten track, but effectively off the map. For the next few days I would pedal uneasily away from every crossroads praying I’d chosen right. More than once, now that it was routinely visible, I took my bearings from the sun.

  Passing a rural bus depot I learned two hard lessons: Russian guard dogs are not chained, and they cannot be outrun on a MIFA 900. I failed to make my escape to a chorus of harsh laughter from the lunchtime drivers milling about outside the gates, but lost no more than a glove in the process. I would miss it, though. Nipping through the trees for a peek at the mist-smeared Baltic, I found its desolate foreshore heaped with fractured slabs of washed-up pack ice, like polystyrene crazy paving.

  I had failed to coax roubles from every cashpoint in Sovetskiy, and kept failing as I inched towards St Petersburg. No doubt all those fathomless Cyrillic on-screen pronouncements were informing me how much I had just transferred to the personal account of a Mr V. V. Putin. The least appealing consequence was a bus-shelter feast of those pink and green Chaika eggs, their slate-grey innards crushed into a pillaged breakfast roll. Everyone had urged me not to drink tap water – the St Petersburg region has a long-standing reputation for hot and cold running dysentery – but with no cash I had no choice.

  Looking back I must already have been infected with a very Russian malaise: fatalistic nonchalance. Why fret about a runny tummy when every passing vehicle might give me a flatty heady? The driving was stubbornly rash and heedless, with overtakers overtaking each other three abreast, and blind undertaking that desecrated my hallowed strip of crumbly verge. Russians have an innate ability to look right through you – irksome in a restaurant, murderous on a bike. My hi-vis tabard might have been a no-vis stealth suit fashioned from potholed tarmac. Lorries as ever were the worst; many of them requisitioned military leviathans whose thunderous approach always sounded like the last noise I would ever hear. There’s a fine line between the stoic acceptance of mortality and a full-on death-wish – a line that Russian road workers seem to have painted right over my skull and back.

  Sitting wide-eyed through all those YouTube Russian dashboard-camera compilations over the years had previously seemed a colossal and unsavoury waste of my time. What a sensible, indeed life-saving investment those hours were now proving. As well as equipping me to second-guess every manoeuvring insanity, my empirical research was also a potent discouragement from ever taking issue with the power-sliding, elbow-clipping maniacs: the video evidence showed that such confrontations generally ended in an appalling display of one-sided violence, sometimes involving firearms.

  I willed Russia to smile on me; instead, it sneered. Half of it at least. The head-scarfed babushkas and pram-pushing young mums merely gazed listlessly as I creaked and juddered out of the mangy pines and into their forlorn collation of corrugated hovels, but there was always a gauntlet of derisive male moochers to run. This was my introduction to the default appearance and bearing of twenty-first-century Russian man: stocky, close-cropped, pincered fag twixt thumb and forefinger, patrolling his patch with an extravagantly cocksure rolling gait. Every hamlet and town was thick with these under-employed swaggerers, each one a ludicrous parody of hard-man gangster entitleme
nt. I hastily convinced myself that their posturing posed no immediate personal danger, but was rather the poignant, even pathetic embodiment of a nation’s nostalgic desperation to be taken seriously as a macho superpower. This, I thought, was why Putin does all that topless hunting, and why Russians vote for him as a result, rather than cringing themselves to death.

  Occasionally I would trundle by some neglected celebration of the Soviet heyday, a scabrous concrete space rocket soaring forth from the roadside weeds, or a washed-out mural depicting square-jawed comrades of all stripes bearing test tubes and pickaxes into the heroic future down the side of a derelict warehouse. You couldn’t pass this stuff and not feel at least a faint urge to tilt your chin up and gaze flintily at the horizon, the ghostly strains of that rousing anthem playing through your head.

  Universal healthcare, housing and education; equal rights for women; full employment and billion-degree central heating for all: these were the front-line Soviet achievements, and rightly heralded. Albeit brutally, they pushed through an agrarian and industrial revolution that dragged a country largely composed of illiterate serfs five centuries forward in a single generation. They did more than anyone – much more – to save the world from Nazism. Yes, the USSR can’t have been much fun when you needed a bag of sugar, or fancied seeing the world, or developed a fondness for democracy, but at the height of its powers it must have stirred half a billion souls.

  What a glorious collective past; what a miserably divided present. For I had by now been exposed to the shocking polarisation of modern Russia, the horn-blaring, out-of-my-way Audis and factory-fresh BMWs, the shiny fat pipelines laid dismissively across humble farmsteads, the new-build, tin-pot-oligarch executive compounds that bookended even the most decrepit villages, their Tesco Extra turrets poking up above wire-topped perimeter walls. On my second night I somehow wound up in a country-club resort with complimentary bath robes and paunchy, punchable guests who smoked cigars in the sauna. How had it all gone so wrong?

  I began to forgive Russia at the pewter feet of a colossal hammer-handed labourer, standing vigil over a lonely lay-by. A hero worker, I guessed, some disciple of the stupendously industrious Alexei Stakhanov, a coal miner who lent his fabled name to a national drive for quota-battering productivity. All the sour-faced hostility, I now mused, was perhaps just a hangover from that intoxicating age when Russia was the Soviet heartland, torchbearer of the common man’s ideological struggle against those Western fat-cats and their running-dogs. How miraculous, how bold and brave, to beat the imperialists into space, to match them warhead for warhead and medal for medal.

  And as this epiphany unfolded, I looked up at the big metal Communist beside me and felt a spark fizz across to the smaller one between my legs. Oooh! I turned the MIFA back to the potholes and mayhem, but from now on it would be a little different. The Soviet anthem blared waywardly within and my propaganda newsreel alter ego was born: please to welcome Comrade Timoteya, Stakhanovite hero cyclist, on glorious mission to celebrate majesty and large scale of Soviet Union, to admire mighty border defences against rapacity of capitalism and lackey who snivel, to live proud dream of friendship and cooperation in socialist brotherhood. Struggle for peace! Victory in sport! Small bicycle of world unite!

  It wasn’t always easy to strike a convincing pioneer pose astride a shopping bike, but I did my best, and the internal commentaries proved durably invigorating. Comrade Timoteya make toast to 112 kilometre in single day: new record of shopping-class velociped! Comrade Timoteya kick unchain running-dog in face! Comrade Timoteya defy ‘hour of rush’ in number-two Soviet metropolis!

  St Petersburg was as unnerving as I feared it would be, an insane Grand National of jockeying, twelve-laned boulevards. Things got so out of hand when these funnelled into the centre that a traffic cop nipped out of his little hut and waved a sympathetic stick at me: Don’t be daft, son, just get yourself on the pavement. I obeyed for a while but the going was just too slow. More than that, after a thousand miles of snowbound silence it was seriously unnerving to find myself enmeshed in such a jostling cacophony: St Petersburg is Europe’s third largest city, delivering more faces every minute than I’d seen since leaving home. I remembered Raija’s account of a visit to Tokyo, and her horror-struck ordeal at a subway station that processed the equivalent of half the Finnish population every day.

  With no map I followed the coast as best I could, weaving between trams full of listless faces, up and down soul-clenching flyovers, past factory chimneys cheek by smutty jowl with gilded Orthodox domes. I didn’t catch even a glimpse of the Hermitage or all the showpiece sights I’d seen when it was Leningrad, and my wife and I jumped museum queues with dollar bills and ballpoint pens. Comrade Timoteya didn’t need to know about that. In any case, he was preoccupied with the afternoon’s Five Hour Plan, which required an inland diversion away from the extensive restricted zone around the Sosnovy Bor civil and military nuclear area, then delivered him through freezing sleet, mad traffic and the odd flooded culvert to an unreconstructed Commie hellhole.

  I arrived at Gostilitsy hollowed and frigid, one-gloved, filthy, my nerves shot by the ever-closer attentions of buses and lorries on a road that grew busier as it narrowed. After a van grazed my off-side pannier I had in desperation heaved the MIFA down an overgrown embankment to what looked like a parallel footpath. The adventure in establishing it was not left bike and man encrusted with vegetation, slush and the grimly malodorous contents of an under-road drainage channel.

  My little rechargeable lights had been on most of the day, and were diminished to a sickly glow as I creaked into the first town I’d passed in hours and my last chance of a bed. How hopeless that seemed as I stumbled through Gostilitsy’s burned-out cars and skeletal tenements, then into a ghostly central plaza furtively patrolled by head-down youths in hoodies and those more senior barrel-chested swaggerers. At its dingiest periphery stood a plinth-mounted bust of Lenin, the first I’d seen of Vlad the Elder since entering Russia. ‘Comrade Timoteya pay homage to father of revolution,’ I bleated internally. Perhaps if I rubbed that bald brass head he’d grant me a wish, and against his better judgement an Ibis Budget would shoot up through the weed-fractured paving. Every actor and prop from Raija’s tales of woe seemed to be lurking around this stage: people who wouldn’t help, doors that wouldn’t open. Then I pushed my MIFA round a corner past a battered old grocery, and encountered quite the opposite.

  ‘Oat-yell?’

  A tall man in overalls was leaning against one of those wire-topped sheet-metal gates that screened off every executive compound. Before I could answer his hailing cry he yanked it ajar with an unlubricated shriek, exposing a brand-new barn of a building. Its ochre façade was decorated with words I would presently be reading on a beautifully handwritten A4 sheet.

  ‘Hello, my name is Tatiana, many welcome to Mini Motel Gostilitsy.’

  I read; I beamed and nodded; I followed the receptionist’s finger to the next item on the calligraphic list in her hand.

  ‘I hope you can enjoy your stay.’

  Further beams and nods accompanied the finger on its downwards progress.

  ‘Will you like dinner?

  ‘The breakfast is from 07.00 serviced.’

  ‘With our pleasure your Fichtel & Sachs Duomatic hub will be dismantle and renovate.’

  Maintaining her amiable silence, Tatiana cheerily held out a room key and put the list in a drawer. What a touching document this was, even without that fictitious last entry. And what a miraculous discovery, this oasis of comfort and gentility. Tatiana was a new kind of Russian: the biddable, welcoming opposite of staff who had conducted all my previous interactions with pantomime ill-will, as if fulfilling a deeply resented community-service order. Was this just the face of can-do capitalism? If so I wanted to lick that face for ever. It didn’t yet trouble me that I was now one of the bastard haves, in here with the water coolers and the tropical fish tanks, fenced off from the grubby have-nots in an ugly desecrat
ion of Comrade Timoteya’s mission. Of more immediate concern was my graceless, unkempt appearance: clothing studded with furzes, burrs and frosted St Petersburg swamp mud; trainers – now the only shoes I possessed of any sort – expelling a squelch of accumulated brown water with every horrid step beneath the foyer’s gold chandeliers. Having repeatedly been thus manhandled, the MIFA aptly looked to have been dragged backwards through a hedge, and was now tied up out of sight in a stairwell.

  Tatiana was still smiling, but whoever drew up that charming list must surely have had a very different sort of Anglophone guest in mind. I couldn’t help wondering if I was the first foreigner they’d ever welcomed, new as this place clearly was and so distantly off the beaten track. As I walked into my palatially proportioned suite, with its heavy-soil laundry facility/spa tub and sweeping over-wire views of impoverished dereliction, I imagined someone slipping a handwritten addendum under the door: Please, why you are such disappointing mess?

  Dinner was eaten alone in an extremely gold room decorated with fabric bouquets, wooden elephants and airbrushed couples in evening dress locked in erotic embrace. The ordering process was memorably conducted by Tatiana, who dictated the Russian menu into a translation app on her phone. With the halting, toneless authority of a digitised train announcer, this device then offered me suggestions it was very difficult to listen to politely.