‘I am glad you agreed to speak with us’, Arkady began, almost respectfully.
‘Not at all, I always try to make myself available. How can I be of assistance?’ The two Russians gave each other knowing looks as the girl returned with two white pots and cups to match. They waited a few moments, making small talk about the weather.
‘You see’, Arkady started to say, ‘we do not generally have a high regard for your country. Maybe you will be different, I can hope so?’
Tom raised an eyebrow. ‘Gentlemen, you intrigue me…’
‘We think you are better’, Bogdan chipped in incoherently.
‘Better than what?’
‘Grigori’s Belarussian friends like Alexey Dzermant and Dmitry Dyomushin’s Soyuz lunatics!’
‘In what way, better?’ Tom began to sound defensive. Bogdan’s mouth was spitting tea.
‘Well, our people don’t want anybody like the National Democratic Party to succeed. We don’t agree with Rossiya, Rossiya, Rossiya, messiya gryadushchevko dnya.’ Tom’s eyes widened. Arkady translated, ‘O Russia, the messiah of the coming day’. Then, adding, ‘In fact we hold opposing views and would prefer if the conference was boycotted!’
‘What are you suggesting?’
‘That you become indisposed.’
‘You don’t want me to speak?’
‘It is not personal, we are approaching all people scheduled to talk!’
‘Well, that’s alright, then’, Tom laughed.
‘Can I report that you will be unavailable?’ The academic touched his fore-head with an index finger.
‘I have never been in better health!’
‘Let’s hope it stays that way!’ Arkady said, levering himself out of the booth. ‘The hospitals here have poor survival rates!’
• Production of Mebendazola is increased ten-fold to offset the growing prevalence of Central Asian diseases like ascariasis and entrebiasis;
• Outbreaks of Urban Cutaneous leishmaniasis, ethinococcis, and toxocarciasis are reported to have crossed from the Stans into Rostov Oblast;
• Zoonotic parasitic infections and vector-borne protozoan infections become common in Svetlograd, Novopavlovsk, and Ipatovo;
• Multiple deaths from Middle East respiratory syndrome occur in Kalmykia.
He met Ekaterina standing on the quayside in front of the Winter Palace. Her hair hung wet, gusting in the wind, flecks of corn blowing against a gun-metal sky. The high pitched cries of piebald gulls pierced the cloud line. She took him by the hand, and he used the opportunity to kiss her cheek respectfully before walking down a clanking iron footbridge onto a small motor-launch. Ekaterina haggled with the captain before Tom handed over a 500 rouble note, and they stepped onto the oil-stained decking.
The Neva travelled as far as the eye could see. To the west was the Gulf of Finland. To the east, Archangel and the Barents Sea. The sky welded the iron span of bridges, structures straining to make each shoreline. Steel and stone shoulders broke under the oppressive weight of infinite grey. Passengers gathered below a cream awning, watching the propeller twist into action, arcing white water edging the vessel out into the brown river. Ekaterina pointed to a flight of wildfowl drifting over the shoreline on the Petrograd side as the pounding of a canon’s mechanical recoil echoed from the fortress.
She explained how the Neva’s origins lay in the far north and how Lake Ladoga’s frozen surface cracked in May, sending ice floes down the full length of the river, finally dissipating into open sea. Salty marsh islands crystallised at its mouth, and lowland swamps formed which would often be submerged beneath the swelling water. Here, millennia before, the Izhora people had settled, and legend had it that Prince Rurik built a stronghold at Novgorod and Prince Oleg struck out for Kiev to found a new state. Hence, the great Varangian trade route from the Viking Baltic to the Black Sea was born and the Neva was its life source.
To the west, Kastelholm stood like a proud master over the Alands. The castle’s walls marked the borderlands between Finland and Tsarist Russia. From Kattegat to St Petersburg, the southern shore was mined for amber, the legacy of the resins deposited by the ancient Lake Ancylus, which drained away to form the gravel beds that were later to mould rivers like the Vistula and the Bug. These treacherous lagoons and fenlands proved death traps for the Teutonic Knights as they waged their northern crusades around Riga. Even today, the dark sentinels of the Karnan and Kronborg strongholds still stood out sharply against the dark cliff faces that dropped suddenly into the sea.
‘Kronborg was built to defend Helsingor on the Danish side’, Ekaterina was saying as if this may interest her guest. When he shook his head dumbly, she laughed. ‘English called it Elsinore. You must know Shakespeare’s Hamlet?’ Now it was his turn to laugh.
‘I have forgotten my classes.’
Moving on up the river was like travelling back in time. He imagined an empty stream, a great silence, an impenetrable larch and pine forest. Round-topped wooden huts sat on the indented shore and salted fish hung from poles. His mind was full of tribal people like the Sami, Setus, and Karelians fighting over the best hunting grounds and farmland. The warlike Aesti gave ground to the Viking surge which followed the collapse of Rome’s western empire. Their dragon prows drew east to the Black and Caspian seas.
Salt air tingled nostrils. There was no joy in the winter sunshine, just the chorus of sea birds to mark their passage. You could still smell the sweat of the serf labourers digging the foundations of the Peterhof, toiling through the mud and soil, backs breaking under the overseer’s whip. In the distance, long stretches of waterway ran on ahead like a stained-glass highway. They were staring into the reflected images of domes and spires, lost in rippling tides. On silver-grey sandbanks, dead rats and effluent lay side by side. The water flowed through and past them, washing away memories, thought of time, and any sense of space. Long ago, the Swedes under Jarl Magnusson, Catholic Germans, and the Hanse merchants had navigated these stretches. All were seduced by the power of the river. Women were beguiled and men bewitched by its meandering rhythms.
In midstream, the captain nodded to the crew from the small cabin, and they began serving platters of zakuski. This consisted of smoked sturgeon, garlic sausage, potatoes, and mushrooms in sour cream. Tom and Ekaterina were offered chilled shots of vodka. He toasted their meeting.
‘To our voyage of discovery.’ The cabbage pies were unlike anything he had ever encountered. Ekaterina was eating enthusiastically. ‘This is domashni piroshki, you say homemade.’ They were looking intently into each other’s eyes. ‘The water always gives me an appetite’, she smiled, ‘You like?’
‘It’s all the fresh air and the smell of the wind.’ She offered a salted herring on the end of a fork. He declined with a shrug of the shoulders. ‘I’ve got enough, thanks.’
They watched as a lone woman walked down to the shoreline on the Petrograd embankment. Ekaterina waved, and the distant figure returned the compliment with a lazy, slow jerk of the arm. It seemed to Tom that it was almost an involuntary reflex response. St Petersburgers, unlike Muscovites, were naturally more communal. Regardless of their state of mind or how busy they were, their inclination was always to be more civil than those from the capital. Perhaps it was because the inhabitants had faced such barbarism, either from their own rulers, or invaders who targeted the city and singled out its people for special attention.