Navigating more by intuition and luck I followed the cobbled boulevard and found the garage on Arkadiankatu. The supervisor looked at the bulbs and fuses bought in London and said none were of the type to solve the problem, but he had the necessary parts and would have the job done in a couple of hours.
The Otava Publishing Company was a mere half mile away. I was shown into the opulent office of the managing director, Mr Erkii Reenpaa, a tall slim man in his forties, formally dressed (unlike myself) as a person of status, his somewhat draculous aspect belied by a glittery-eyed sense of humour.
Talking about my onward travels he said, as we smoked our cigars, that his firm was about to produce a complete guide to the Intourist motor routes currently open in the Soviet Union. The problem was that no detailed maps of the country were available.
From my briefcase I showed the elaborate tracings made of the road from Leningrad to Moscow and Kiev, on the scale of eight miles to an inch, based on British War Office maps and printed by the Royal Engineers. I had inked in villages, spot heights and water features, as well as additions from a few Russian maps. Also marked was the latest AA and Intourist information, indicating petrol pumps, hotels and service stations (few and far between) along the way. I had also altered those placenames which once had ‘Stalin’ in them. Spread out as well were the larger scale Austrian survey maps of southwest Russia between Kiev and Rumania which, though out of date, would still be useful. Other navigation equipment, I told him, included a prismatic compass readable to one degree, binoculars, and my shortwave radio receiver.
He was too much of a Finn — and a gentleman — to raise his hands in shock at my irresponsible naïvety, yet real concern came into his voice. I ought not, he said, to let the Soviet customs officers see such detailed maps. If found they would certainly be confiscated, and even supposing they still let you in you would be under surveillance for the whole of your stay. And if you do manage to smuggle them through don’t flaunt them too readily by the roadside. As for the radio you must have it marked in your passport at the frontier, otherwise there’ll be a fuss when you try to take it out.
I had spent many enjoyable and therapeutic hours making those maps, so they would certainly be used, to get the most out of my trip. I didn’t after all want to lose my way. An enticing stretch of scenery or piece of architecture would have to be marked so that I would remember exactly where it had been. In any case, I told him, I never travelled without the best maps, and as for spying over the fair land of secretive Mother Russia, weren’t United States satellites already photographing every building and footpath, and from them constructing maps that would make mine look as accurate as a seaman’s chart in the fifteenth century?
He smiled indulgently at my supposed recklessness, then invited me to his house for dinner, adding that I could spend the night as well. When I told him that my last stop in Finland would be at Virolahti, just before the Russian frontier, he picked up the telephone and spoke to a friend who was a bookseller in that village. It was arranged that I would lodge overnight at the man’s summerhouse on the shore of the Gulf. ‘And if you’d like a sauna’ — he smiled on my saying I would — ‘you’ll get a good one there.’
Back at the garage I was told by the fair and buxom receptionist that all the car lights had been checked and were now in working order. ‘Are you going to the Arctic Circle?’ she asked.
‘No. I’m going to Russia.’
‘In that case you must buy a spare set of windscreen wipers, because those you have at the moment are sure to disappear if you leave your car unguarded even for five minutes in that country. It happens to everyone.’
I already knew there were plenty of thieves in Moscow, having lost an expensive fountain pen from a pickpocket on a previous visit. I’d always assumed stealing to have some legitimacy if in need of bread to eat — well, maybe as long as it wasn’t from me. Pilfering was a fact of life that had to be guarded against, such as never walking around with a wallet showing from your back pocket. You can’t relax for a moment, and though Karl Marx had said that ‘property was theft’ I supposed he would have squealed like a stuck pig if he’d gone into a shop and found his money missing when he came to pay at the till.
Since I seemed liable to lose my windscreen wipers in Russia I took the woman’s advice and bought an extra set. With vigilance they might not be stolen, so the spare ones would no doubt go to rust in the back of the car. In general I trusted my neighbour while at the same time regarding everyone as potentially light fingered. Even so, on hearing that ‘all men are brothers’ my instinct is to take to the hills with a quantity of tobacco and a rifle.
I browsed in Stockman’s department store, from one treasure hall to the next, but wasn’t tempted to buy anything among the crowds of silent jostlers. Finding it too hot to stay indoors I headed twenty miles out of the city, forking on to a track from the main road and going through fields and patches of forest. I got out of the car at an isolated place, to lie down and let the sky be my blanket. No sounds except from birds in pine and birch trees, I couldn’t nevertheless do justice to the advantage and fall asleep. I smoked, wrote notes and letters, making myself as much at home as possible. I read more of a novel by Väinö Linna called The Unknown Soldier, one of the best war novels I’d so far come across, describing the fight of the Finnish army against the overwhelming Russians during the Winter War of 1939–40. I sacrificed sleep to go on with it, yet wondered what I would do when it was finished. I could of course start the Everyman two volumes of The Kalevala, which would certainly keep me going.
On the way back to Helsinki the sideblinkers packed up again. Driving on the motorway and even unable to use hand signals was a nightmare, for I was now on the unfamiliar right side of the road as well. I had to cut my speed and take extra care, while cursing those at the garage as potential murderers.
Saturday, 17 June
My first stop was at the Peugeot establishment, where I gave a few black looks and asked them to fix the bloody blinkers, this time for keeps. For all their silence they had been in some way incompetent, and I stood over the mechanic during the half hour’s work and final testing, till he assured me I would have no further trouble.
With most of the fine day to drive only 200 kilometres I pulled up for a couple of young men by the roadside who gave the autostop sign. They knew some English, and in chatting told me they were amateur long distance runners. Realising I was English they expressed great admiration for the champion Gordon Pirie.
Two years previously, in the same month almost to the day, with Ruth and David in the car, I was voyaging northeast towards Karelia in very different weather. Veils of rain slicked from low cloud, our plucky Austin A40 Countryman ploughing through with little trouble. At a café between road and lake for coffee and cakes, and milk for three-year-old David, I pushed a few coins into a juke box to amuse him with the latest Finnish top of the pops. A man took a liking to him — as who would not? — and carried him out to the water’s edge, where he broke up a couple of sweet buns for what looked like four thousand fishes which, to David’s delight, poked their snouts above the water to snap them up.