Gadfly in Russia
A Story of Travel, History, People, and Places
by
Alan Sillitoe
Part One
Motoring There
1967
The only essay I remember writing at school was about the German advance into Russia during the Second World War. After mentioning the Napoleonic Campaign of 1812 I said that the aim of the current offensive in the Ukraine was to acquire the oil wells in the Caucasus, to fuel the Nazi economy. I was thirteen, but had probably taken most of it from a newspaper.
The first topographical map I owned was sent from Stanford’s to me in Nottingham, a sheet covering the Stalingrad region, on which to follow the fighting. It cost two shillings and three pence, and came rolled in a cardboard tube. I still have it.
Fascination with Russia remained, even after the final victories. In 1963 I stayed a month in the country, and wrote a book called Road to Volgograd. In the summer of 1967, impelled to get away from my writing for a while, I sent a letter to Oksana Krugerskaya in Moscow, whom I’d met on the prior trip:
Having finished a novel, and with time to spare, I would like to visit Russia again. I’ll drive there in my own car through Finland, and as for the itinerary, let’s say a couple of days in Leningrad, and the same for Moscow. Then I’ll go to Kiev and Chernovtsy, and out into Rumania. This will mean about two weeks in the USSR, so would it be possible to collect enough royalties from the translation of Key to the Door to pay my hotel bills? Please cable me if this can be done, then I’ll make bookings.
In accepting the plan Oksana said I would be met in Leningrad by a graduate of English from Moscow University called George Andjaparidze, who would stay with me all the way to the Rumanian frontier. I didn’t like the idea, preferring to motor on my own. Perhaps it would be possible to avoid his company soon after my arrival.
As it turned out I was to know him for most of my life. His adventures with me, and misadventures with others, will be related in their place.
Monday, 12 June 1967
It wasn’t the biggest of cars, being fifteen feet from snout to stern, but would more than do. Everything necessary for the journey was stowed on board. My son, five-year-old David, unhappy at seeing me go, watched from the top of the steps, old enough to imagine that some catastrophe might stop me coming back. He was right to wonder, since there were five thousand miles to cover, all plotted and mapped.
Why was I going? He couldn’t or wouldn’t articulate. It wasn’t his fault, but he might have thought so in the confusing tunnels of his mind, as he brought another box by way of help. A child senses a betrayal of custody when you leave home for no obvious reason. Voluntary absence was an insoluble puzzle to him, even though I promised a cargo of presents from the retail outlets of Soviet Muscovy. Doubling a month’s spending money into his warm palm, I broke free, and left him standing by the door. A last goodbye to my wife Ruth, and I was off.
All paperwork was done, a litany that set the heart racing: visas, international driving licence, passport, car insurance, currencies and travellers’ cheques, were in my wallet. The car had been fully serviced, even the brakes relined. At the garage the manager had sold me a box of spares, including, he said, all possible bulbs and fuses. He guided me out on to the street calling: ‘You should have no trouble at all,’ something I’d heard too many times to feel complacent.
The boxy dark blue Peugeot Estate made a northeasterly vector of escape. Too long where I no longer wanted to be had been no good for the heart. A Tree on Fire had taken much of the mind, as is the way with a novel, and was now with the publisher, but I still felt that my present venture was self-indulgence.
The gypsy in me surfaced on sounding the klaxon and showing a smile at green traffic lights, waving at other drivers and getting daggers back at my supposed high spirits. At times the sense of freedom faded, leaving only loneliness and deprivation. I had the urge to turn back, but pressed on across the Thames.
Wanting to get more quickly out of the country I cruised the outer lane at seventy, until a huge black wagon blocked the way ahead, and for no apparent reason braked. My heart fluttered like a sparrow’s at the notion of a tangled wreck, but the Peugeot fitted into a leftward gap between another car and the municipal dustwagon. Life saved, the blue sky blessed me on towards Harwich.
I’d always wanted to get away from England, took every opportunity. Loving the place, I didn’t often like it. Such an errant traveller was untrustworthy, liable at any moment to desert family or friends, but however much the tight-lipped stay-at-homes preferred it here, I paid no mindless homage to the cosy fixed customs of a particular piece of earth, and revelled in the fevered acts of departure, seeming only alive at the wheel of a car. Perhaps the zest for travel was a desire to find a spot that would provide tranquillity until death. No such place. The quest would be hopeless. If I thought that way I wouldn’t drive a mile, never mind five thousand.
I telephoned from the quayside, and when David came on he sounded more grown up at my departure, asking me to bring back ‘painted things’, such as Palekh and Fidoskino gew-gaw boxes with hand-coloured scenes from Russian fairy tales on their lids.
The car was stowed, and a cabin allotted. Farewells suggest one might never return and, superstitious as travellers inevitably are, I refused to consider the possibility. One could, after all, be killed in an accident a mile from where one lived. Lunatic Hamlets shipped between Denmark and England must make up a good share of the two-way traffic.
Instead of giving a sardonic wave to the nondescript marshes of Essex I sat for dinner in the Danish ship that was called England. The food was as good as London fare was vile. At my table a paunchy grey-haired businessman of about fifty said he was on his way to Copenhagen and then Cologne in a Humber Imperial. He wasn’t put out by my questions, and we went on to talk about the campaign of Israel against Syria, Egypt and Jordan, both of us sufficiently informed after reading the Sunday Times account. Judging by his interesting reappraisal of the conflict he must at one time have been a soldier.
In the cabin I listened on shortwave to an adaptation of Mr Norris Changes Trains. Then the news was read which, as the saying goes, went in one ear and out the other. On deck at half past ten waves beat along the ship’s white flanks, the western horizon a deep pink above a wide band of green and blue. Venus, the first star of the evening, kept company with a sickle of moon.
Travelling alone was a form of deracination. Nothing seemed real, drifting through nowhere in my lit-up coffin of a cabin, one of the almost dead only to come fully alive on driving into Denmark. A vibrating of engines and the rush of water suggested that an unfathomably devious will had brought me to where I was.
Lights off, the ship made headway. From the radio again a voice said that one should not be afraid to die. I wasn’t, thank you very much. Why should I be? If the earth had fallen on my foot, and left me lame — metaphorically speaking — I was nevertheless still able to walk. Snug in spirit, I switched off the light, wondering why I didn’t much care about anyone or anything, because being en route for Russia filled me with optimism, and I fell asleep.
Tuesday, 13 June
A young marine engineer with a reddish beard was riding to New Zealand on a powered bicycle, and expected to reach Singapore in six months. Slender and of middle height, he wore a checked shirt and jeans, and I wished him good luck as he gazed towards land after breakfast. Travelling so light, he seemed set for privation, though I didn’t doubt he would get to the Antipodes, sooner or later. On docking at Esbjerg his bike wouldn’t start, so he pushed it ashore to find a mechanic.