The Cyclist Who Went Out in the Cold

by Tim Moore

  Inland, most non-holiday towns were ingrained with the stubborn patina of Communism, all grimy concrete, battered streets and parade-ready public spaces suffused with the smell of damp plaster and stuff being burned that shouldn’t be. The dominant commercial outlet throughout was the sklep, a Russian-pattern grocery shed run almost round the clock by a little old lady who stood guard before a couple of well-stocked shelves and a chiller cabinet. It was a very homely set-up, and one that helped me develop some seriously advanced pointing skills. Almost every old dear, in sklep and on street, had a grandchild or two under her skirts; Polish women still work as hard as they did in the socialistic era, but these days they don’t get any state childcare. Almost every old man was down by some unpromising industrial waterway with a rod and a bottle of beer. This would become one of my ride’s stock spectacles. Sometimes they weren’t even fishing: an awful lot of retirements in these countries are seen out sitting on the dock of the bay.

  Only gradually did I take stock of all the church towers, features so conspicuously absent from most small-town skylines in Russia and the Baltics. Catholicism has always been entrenched in Polish life; for days I followed a trail of those seashell pilgrimage signs that had pointed my way when I dragged a donkey to Santiago de Compostela. The Soviets were always slightly scared of their stroppiest satellite, and after an initial Stalin-era crackdown they allowed the Polish Catholic Church an unusually free hand.

  Elsewhere across their empire, spires were toppled and pastors taken away to break rocks or build dams. A troublesome Hungarian cardinal was tortured until he confessed to an impressive range of crimes, amongst them plotting to steal the crown jewels. When an East German priest went through the records after 1990, he found that he’d been spied on by forty different Stasi officers, and that of the seven people who regularly attended his masses, six were informers. The Stasi’s campaign against him was impressively broad: ‘The meanest thing they did was throw stink bombs into a full church.’

  But in Poland the churches were left largely in peace, and when in 1979 Pope John Paul II expressed a wish to visit his homeland, the Soviet authorities felt obliged to grant permission. They probably shouldn’t have, though, as a third of the Polish population came out to see their Pope, establishing an unhelpful tradition of mass gatherings that became even more unhelpful after John Paul hit it off with Lech Wałe˛sa. It’s now generally agreed that the Pope’s Polish tour catalysed the creation of Solidarity, and (less generally) that John Paul II thus brought down Communism singlehanded.

  Everything grew steadily more German as I rode on: trim lawns and hanging baskets, regimental ranks of static caravans, shiny plastic pantiles and intriguingly hideous gnome-heavy garden tableaux. Every wrinkled hand now clutched a tippy-tappy hiking pole, an apparently compulsory accessory for the over sixties across most of northern Europe west of the old curtain. Soon every other number plate was German, and every other voice.

  I was waiting at a set of lights in Kołobrzeg, a novel seaside-resort/cargo-terminal hybrid just east of the border, when a crop-haired young man on a rubbish mountain bike pulled up alongside. Shamefully I had yet to hose off the MIFA, and its incongruous topcoat of Russian road porridge and Somme-grade Pomeranian mud clumps had attracted regular attention in such scenarios all week. But the skinhead beside me was surveying the bike, and then its rider, with a new sort of expression. No confusion or pity, no smirking contempt. As the lights changed he nodded, lofted a thumb, and offered me a small smile of approval. Without words, he said: ‘That is a really daft thing to be doing, but fair play for doing it.’ After six weeks I had finally encountered someone who got it, someone who understood; I smiled back and we rode together hand in hand towards the sunset, or definitely should have.

  10. THE GERMAN BALTIC

  After its memorable and heroic three-month absence, my MIFA came home without ceremony. One minute I was rattling down a boulevard flanked with stalls flogging cheap fags and fake football shirts to cross-border Germans; then came a blink-and-miss-it roadside round-up of national speed limits, and I was in. At once the full parade of stereotypes – the lazy, the patronising, the offensive – marched out around me. Spotless cars drove down velvet roads with a careful obedience that was hard to attune to: I approached one of those digital watch-your-speed displays in a 40 zone and saw it clocked at 38, 39, 39, 38, 38, 11 (me). The hedges were clipped and the pavements almost shone. The farms looked like parks and everyone was wearing lederhosen made out of sausages. After weeks of potholed shonkiness it seemed unreal, like a model village.

  And this was, or until recently had been, East Germany – just a Commie knock-off of the real thing. I had to look hard for evidence. The five-floor tenement blocks were a giveaway, but even these bore little resemblance to those perpetrated by Soviet Russia elsewhere across its empire. Each had a homely pitched roof and pastel-painted walls that didn’t seem to have been fashioned from cardboard pulp and asbestos. But then the GDR was the Soviet poster girl, its flagship western outpost, the one place where their brand of Communism almost made it. No one here ever queued for food or went hungry. Welfare provisions were a class above any East European neighbours, indeed the envy of many in the West: education standards ranked amongst the highest in the world, and eighteen million citizens were generally over-qualified for the blue-collar jobs that most ended up in. In 1984, the World Bank rated the GDR as the world’s twelfth strongest economy, and the CIA told Reagan it was poised to overtake West Germany. A nation that wasn’t even recognised by the International Olympic Committee until 1968 established immediate sporting dominance: from 1972 onwards they finished every Olympic Games, summer and winter, in the top three on the medals table.

  It was another crisp, bright afternoon, and I bowled down a series of sun-stippled clifftop paths threaded with pensioners on electric bikes, kicking some serious old arse along the way. Strange as it felt to think of all these German retirees as former Communists – much stranger than it had amongst elderly Russians, Balts or Poles – now that I thought about it, the clichéd Teutonic mentality seemed uniquely well suited to the Soviet ethos. Hard work and healthy play, reliable efficiency, wholesale compliance and the readiness to denounce those who betrayed it … Even that hearty, no-funny-business approach to naturism was a good fit.

  The path was punctuated with GDR-vintage campsites, most still up and running and mercifully fully clothed. I was interested to note the number of static caravans flying the German flag: displays of national pride were understandably a bit iffy in the post-war decades, and flags weren’t waved en masse in Germany until the country hosted the 2006 World Cup. Thus inspired I coasted to a halt at the edge of a campsite and rummaged portentously through my right-hand pannier. When my wife went home with most of my winter wardrobe she handed over my summer one – an outfit dominated by the jersey I now pulled down over my concave, pasty torso for the first time. Pale blue, ringed with the red, yellow and black national stripes, and there, emblazoned across the front – was this really OK? – the strident emblem of the German Democratic Republic, a corn-ringed hammer and compasses.

  I decided that on balance it looked a bit much, and was putting my anorak on over it when I gazed along the row of trees that marked the campsite boundary, and spotted a small lime-green bicycle propped distantly against one. Even at that range I somehow knew what it was; I pedalled breathlessly through the sandy tussocks and found I was right. A MIFA, and not just a MIFA but a twin-racked, caliper-braked 904! A single exclamation mark does scant justice to this historic and emotion-charged reunion. And to think it was happening here, at a campsite that was every MIFA’s natural habitat. Blinking out tears I tore off my anorak and struck a Comrade Timoteya pose, beefed up with a glare of Germanic purpose. Had I known that this would be the only time my MIFA met one of his three million stunted brethren I would have taken even more bike-on-bike photographs, and some even weirder ones.

  Tim Moore

  @mrtimmoore

&
nbsp; OH EM GEE - another MIFA!!! In its natural state, unloved & unlocked at a campsite. A powerful moment for all 3 of us.

  The life expectancy of a bicycle is apparently around 9,000km, the distance typically accumulated in five years of regular commuter riding. And that’s a proper bike, with durable components made to exacting modern standards. Pedalling away from my MIFA’s long-lost brother – a bike that flaunted its modest territorial expectations, with a plastic bag wrapped over the saddle and two wire-frame shopping baskets lashed to the carriers – I pondered an ongoing miracle: this twenty-five-year-old campsite potterer, built by bored Communists out of melted-down coat hangers, was on course to better that lifetime total in no more than a few brutal months. How little had gone wrong with it, and how little that was thanks to me. I hadn’t even attempted to diagnose the grating creaks that had accompanied me since Russia. This tiny old dear had been left to look after itself, coping with the worst weather and roads our continent has to offer, confounding cynics – especially deaf cynics – for fun.

  *

  My first night in Germany cast an enduring template: dark wood, bolster pillows, a gold-rimmed weissbier glass with an integral drip-doily round the stem, and a plate buried under a Sky-dish schnitzel and a hill of potatoes. This genteel gluttony, and its starchy, subdued environment, would end most of my days in the MIFA’s homeland, give or take the odd in-room Aldi pasta-salad rite if I missed the restaurant – they generally closed before eight – or felt the need to restore my financial morale (I’m looking at you, Herr ‘eighty euro vissout breakfast’ Gasthaus-Swindler). Nobody foreign came up here; half the service operatives couldn’t speak a word of English, and there was no menu option beyond Hearty German Fayre. But what a rare joy, in this easyJet age, to find myself on a bona fide voyage of discovery right here on my continental doorstep, exploring a huge swathe of Europe I would never otherwise have dreamed of going near. Good old bicycle.

  I tracked the Baltic north-west then south, up and down through holiday homes, commercial ports and windswept coastal plains. A million geese honked it up across the flatlands and – here we go – a billion midges met their maker in my face-holes. From a distance the seaside was an alluring Mediterranean combo of twinkly azure and soft white sand, but when the path took me closer I saw children chasing after cartwheeling buckets and other windborne leisure accessories, watched through slitted eyes by parents blanketed up in those stripy weather-proof bench-shelters. So many vistas recalled the old MIFA brochure shots I’d found online, young couples in nylon clothing gathered around a shiny 900 by a wooden jetty or a beach hut, with expressions that suggested a grey-faced man in a dark raincoat was standing behind the camera holding up a sign that said: SMILE CLASSIFICATION: COLLECTIVE ENJOYMENT B2.

  Western Pomerania was a great flat blanket, woven in bright green and garish yellow: oilseed rape in vibrant full bloom and a plague of dandelions bursting gloriously through the meadows. Huge-eared hares cavorted wildly across the fields, doing their mad March thing a month or two late; lone fishermen stood transfixed by marshy bulrush glades. My nostrils twitched to a complex perfume of brine, blossom and fresh-mown grass. How very distant the sterile Arctic wastes now seemed. If you’d tried to explain to me what a butterfly was back in the middle of Finland, I’d have grunted sceptically. Then torn your throat open and supped deep on your warm, life-giving blood.

  I rode through settlements ticking boxes in my Observer’s Book of Commie Relics, a Karl-Marx-strasse or a Friedrich-Engels-allee, a concrete-slab path of period military origin (per-dum-ba-dank-per-tonk-buh-tink – what a literal pain in the arse they always were), a town hall that suggested a ventilation shaft for some giant underground car park. Very rarely I’d spot a bricked-up ruin: a column-fronted Kulturhaus with the T hanging down at an angle, or one of those Cyanide with Rosie agricultural mega-structures that looked like tractor prisons, or interrogation centres for subversive cattle. But in general, the Germans had erased the evidence with customary rigour. The country we drove through in 1990 was tired and grubby, mired in a cancerous fug of brown-coal smoke and two-stroke exhaust fumes. Now everything seemed clean, fresh and stridently sustainable, with a windfarm on every other bright green hillside and a rank of shiny black photovoltaic tiles on every other roof. In four days I saw a single Trabant, though it did have its bonnet up with three male heads wedged in the hole, one per moving part. The allotments were neater and better tended than most nation’s front gardens, and everyone’s exterior woodwork gleamed.

  Of the many lost freedoms reclaimed after the Wall came down, the inalienable right to civic slobbery was not one of them. As much as I appreciated all this smartness and order, I didn’t feel qualified to envy it – in the words of that great sage Harry Callahan, a man’s gotta know his limitations, and I simply lack the house-proud discipline required to cut my lawn in the designated hours between twelve and two on Saturday, or to repaint my shutters every three years by mayoral decree. What would you do if you saw a van with a blue light on the roof and the word Ordnungsamt on the side? Not much, perhaps, until someone explained that Ordnungsamt meant ‘office of order’, and that this vehicle was on hand to speed to any emergency contravention of the civil code, which – to take some genuine examples – might include a neighbour’s failure to weed the pavement in front of his house, or to stop his pond-frogs croaking on a Sunday. Then you might sneak up behind this van and draw a nob on it.

  After all those weeks of nothing and Russia, public decorum was a challenge. For the first time on this trip I felt self-conscious about flobbing into hedgerows, and indeed whipping down my shorts to anoint a roadside tree. Previously there had never been anyone around, and even when there had been they couldn’t have cared less. Now my route was fairly well lined with the world’s most responsible and censorious citizens. Miraculously, I only got hooted at twice in Germany: once after I overtook a car at 22kmh in a 20 zone, and once when I knocked over and killed two elderly pedestrians on the wrong Tuesday.

  Out by the full-fat, blustery Baltic, then back through the dunes to the calm and slightly fetid lagoons behind. Every lunch was a path-side homage to the straight-bat national cuisine, cramming bread rolls with smoked and processed incitements to bowel cancer. The cockerels had been silenced by law and not once was I menaced by a dog. If a German lets his dog loose on the public highway, the diktats of Ordnungsamt permit you to electrocute his youngest child.

  Prerow, Zingst, Wieck: trim and forgivably twee resorts well-stocked with pensioners and their immaculate cottages, all thatched with roofs that appeared to have been washed and combed that morning. Every mailbox had a lighthouse or a salty old sea dog painted on it. Elderly couples were out on matching bikes in matching tracksuits, often in comradely pelotons of a dozen or more, exuding an air of perpetual, bracingly active retirement and gentle, communal pleasure. These places had doubtless been their recreational stamping grounds since the GDR days, and were probably much the same now, just with better cars and shops. With a start I realised that half these retired Communists looked barely older than I did: a tribute to all those invigorating formative decades spent breathing sulphur and spying on each other. And to all those ongoing current decades of smoking their tits off.

  When former West German chancellor Helmut Schmidt died, a few months after my return, the BBC’s 10 O’clock News obituary concluded that his people would remember him ‘wreathed in a cloud of his beloved cigarette smoke’. I thought that seemed a little off as the farewell to a grand statesman, but Schmidt – who extraordinarily lived to ninety-six after smoking fifty a day for the thick end of eighty years – really was the poster boy for a vigorously wholesome and salubrious nation with a curious weakness for little white death-sticks. They cheered when Helmut lit up on chat shows – he once got through thirteen fags in a single TV interview – and booed when a Hamburg prosecutor tried to charge him for smoking in a city theatre. In 2013, after the EU announced a ban on flavoured cigarettes, Schmidt immediately
stockpiled 38,000 of his favourite Reyno Menthols. He was ninety-four at the time. Coincidentally or not, and assuming adherence to his lifelong rate of consumption, he coughed it in the very month this hoard would have been exhausted.

  When did you last see someone smoking on a bike? I saw three puffing wobblers on my first day in Germany, all well-presented men of middle years. The cheerily fag-faced hiker is another staple on the nation’s cycle paths and forest trails; my top spot was a rambling nicotine enthusiast in a rauchfrei.de stop-smoking T-shirt. In such a healthful country it was most jarring. There were cigarette vending machines on every other street corner, and the Germans haven’t just failed to ban tobacco advertising – they seem to cherish it. Entire towns were dominated by gigantic people waving fags around at glamorous parties, in the sort of themed billboard profusion you only usually encounter in the run-up to a general election. More than one in three German men smoke, almost 50 per cent higher than the British rate.

  The reason for this remarkable idiosyncrasy? Hitler. That’s right. The Nazis, you see, were pioneering anti-smokers: their public-health inspectorate made the connection between tobacco consumption and lung cancer some fifteen years before anyone else did. (For the record, they were also trail-blazingly down on asbestos, white bread and food additives.) The Führer personally set up an Institute for the Struggle Against Tobacco, which banned smoking in cinemas and discouraged it in the workplace. Advertising was heavily restricted. They even invented nicotine gum to help people give up. Hitler loved pointing out that he, Mussolini and Franco were all non-smokers, in contrast to the wheezing Allied triumvirate of Stalin (pipe), Churchill (cigar) and Roosevelt (bong).