‘It happened quite suddenly,’ the woman had told me. ‘I watched them for a long time, but they made no more attempts to get away. I left the jar outside for days in the rain and sun, but the ants just stayed in a circle and twitched their whiskers.’
In the shadowed courtyard, sitting in silence beside Sami, a deep sadness overcame me. All my life I’ve been free to travel as I’ve pleased. I’ve made plans, boarded aircraft and trains, reached back and forth across oceans and continents. I’ve been drawn towards the horizon, to the place just out of sight, driven forward by curiosity, by questions, by the need to understand the lives of others. I’ve inhabited a world of open doors, never imagining that those doors would close. And now new borders were rising again between people, keeping apart the haves and the have-nots, protecting the rich and damning the poor, mocking my naive notions of a family of man.
I looked at Sami and wondered what would make him give up his journey. How many times would he be shaken and pushed down? He told me that he was sleeping rough, that without a visa he’d soon be arrested. His only option was to carry on, he said. ‘I keep on my path.’
I reached for my wallet and gave him $250. I didn’t know what else to do, other than to wish him well.
‘Good luck on your trip too, my friend,’ he said to me.
9
Tentacles
At dusk the Black Sea swells into dark bays and hidden coves. Its currents twist around Stygian submarines, butt against rocking frigates, wash my ferry towards the wide stone landing-steps of Russia’s great naval port.
I stepped ashore through Sevastopol’s colonnaded gateway, stirring a wave of night birds to swirl above the shadowy villas. Ahead, sailors on shore leave and murmuring couples sauntered along the sea’s inky edge, beneath rustling pines, towards Primorsky Boulevard. I followed in their wake, drawn forward by ripples of music.
In a waterside park, two dozen dancers whirled around the wheeled amplifier of a street entertainer. He crooned into a handheld microphone, chiding young and old onto their feet. In a medley of 1980s Russian pop songs – ‘A Million Scarlet Roses’, ‘Lavanda’, ‘Broken Heart Tango’ – he sang of love, loss and happiness ever after. Passers-by twirled for a happy moment or two, gripping partners or shopping bags. Holidaymakers clutched at the lyrics and each other. Swaying housewives waved their mobiles to the beat, calling home to explain that dinner would be late. A crew-cut mariner grasped the hand of a white-haired woman in a bright red dress. Two drunks staggered into the throng, steeped in delight, joining in the high-volume dance.
I stood at its periphery, reaching for my own mobile to record the event, until my hand too was seized and I was sucked into the whirlpool.
‘You are a terrible dancer,’ the twenty-something shouted into my ear after a moment. ‘Kakoi zhe ty slon neuklyuzhiy.’ You move like an elephant.
She was small and well muscled with wide blue eyes and cropped copper-red hair. She spoke a mixture of Russian, Ukrainian and English. In her heeled motorcycle boots she stood no higher than my chin, but – as I discovered when she tried to spin herself around me – her spark made up for her short stature.
‘Elephant,’ she teased again, pushing me away. Yet come the next day I was sitting behind her on a Kawasaki.
Crimea lends itself to stories. Its history is a story based on fact, but not all the facts, woven together with creativity of one sort or another. In ancient times pirates and giant seafaring cannibals dropped anchor here, according to Homer. Greeks from a city named after (mythical) Hercules then settled on the (real) peninsula. In its murky inlets, Vladimir the Great is said to have chosen to be baptised, founding in ad 988 the Russian Orthodox Church (according to the legend he rejected Islam only because of its taboo against alcohol). Along the coast Lord Cardigan’s Light Brigade charged into (poetic) infamy and the tsar’s last loyalists escaped from prosaic reality aboard lines of steamships.
Tales true and half-true continued to be told up to the present day of course. Outside the capital’s ‘parliament’ stands a new bronze statue of a bulked-up soldier receiving a flower from a young girl. It is dedicated to the ‘polite people’ who had liberated Crimea.
At a press conference after the 2014 invasion, Putin denied that the men who’d seized Crimea had been Russian soldiers. When a journalist pointed out that they had been heavily armed, carrying new Russian Army 7.62 mm PKP machine guns and driving military GAZ-2975 Humvee-type all-terrain vehicles, the president had speculated – with characteristic sardonic humour – that these ‘polite people’ were ‘merely spontaneous self-defence groups who may have acquired their weapons and uniforms from local Voentorg military surplus shops’.
Across the millennia Crimea has never failed to fire imaginations, and now its stirring sea air – and the ongoing waxing and waning effect of the truffle – also sped me on a merry dance.
‘Gorbachev was a war criminal who destroyed the Soviet Union and reunited our enemy Germany,’ Katja shouted over her shoulder as we accelerated out of the city. ‘He should have been locked up.’
I’d come to Crimea to visit the spot where Gorbachev had been imprisoned for three days in 1991. For me, it was the moment when Russia’s tentative steps towards democracy had suffered their first body blow. I didn’t yet know that I would come to within spitting distance of the man who’d then delivered the final knock-out punch.
We motored south across a bone-dry prairie. The arrow-straight road cut between bleached salt pans and scorched limestone escarpments, bending only when it met the mountains. Katja shifted into low gear and leaned into the turns, canyon-carving uphill with terrifying speed.
She was a local guide and interpreter whose ad for motorbike tours had been tacked on the tourist office noticeboard. She was also a rebel, of sorts. Born in Sevastopol after the collapse of the Soviet Union, she described herself as ‘Ukrainian by blood, Russian in my heart’. After Crimea’s annexation, or ‘the coming back’ as she called it, she’d carved out a living by taking visitors on ‘a sightseeing tour of the century’: Civil War battlefields, coastal batteries and Facility 825 – a once-secret Cold War nuclear submarine base. Behind its nine-metre-thick blast doors, along a curved half-mile tunnel within a rocky isthmus, up to seven subs could be hidden nose-to-tail, repaired and prepared for Armageddon.
Katja’s tour price? A hundred dollars a day. Cash.
The scream of the Kawasaki killed all further conversation, as did the spectacular view that unfolded when we breached the mountain pass. The Black Sea sparkled like mica in the heat haze, its gleam mottled by the shadows of clouds swept inland by the breeze. To left and right, magnificent cliffs rose steeply from the deep. Overhead, alpine swifts turned in the wind while linnets and yellowhammers fussed in the gorse around us.
‘Stunning,’ I said when she killed the engine.
‘Russian,’ replied Katja.
At our feet a thin strip of asphalt snaked down from the Baydar Gate, through bushy pinewoods, around narrow defiles and a tiny gold-domed church perched on a crag, to a narrow ledge of lush shoreline.
For generations Russian royals had built their summer palaces in this place of stark beauty, as had first secretaries of the Communist Party and their henchmen. Stalin had spent his summer days flitting between its finest villas, carving up Europe with Roosevelt and Churchill while at the Livadia Palace. Khrushchev had favoured Dacha No. 1, also known as Wisteria, where Brezhnev later entertained US President Richard Nixon. When he became first secretary, Gorbachev had taken over Dacha No. 2 on the hillside below the last tsar’s summer bolthole. But his wife, Raisa, hadn’t fancied it and so Dacha No. 3 was built for them among the acacias and magnolias in Foros.