by Tim Moore
I ate on the garden terrace of what was clearly Kirklareli’s premium eaterie, served by expressionless young women in dark waistcoats who glided up bearing small bowls decorously filled with salads, meats and vegetable paste. The night air hung warm and lazy, infused with pine resin, sticky tarmac and grilled meat. Crickets and cicadas trilled and squeaked. A tall glass of beer, appealingly beaded with condensation, stood on the glossy black table before me, and for once the stars were out. I took it all in, every sloth-inducing holiday sensation, then thought: Please, not now. Not just yet.
The mournful, off-key tremolo of native wind instruments struck abruptly forth from a function at the garden’s distant fundament, presently accompanied by tortured calls to prayer crackling out of a PA speaker atop the mosque down the road. Could somebody, anybody, please explain how I had come from the silent, barren tundra to this sultry realm of wailing imams? Sensible answers only, none of that rubbish about riding here on a two-geared children’s bicycle.
I spooned toothsome pepper pulp into my mouth and trawled through a murky ocean of memories. Was that really me, watching a little white bike slide down a big white hill with one eye frozen shut? Eating smoked trout in a bank and pink eggs at a Russian bus stop, reading Pravda in a KGB ghost town, falling asleep in my shorts by a fishmonger’s stove? It seemed fanciful. I could only convincingly picture myself from about Serbia onwards, placed in an environment of heat and kebabs that bore tangible relation to my current surroundings. Everything before that, the postipanki and schnitzels, the wanking gnomes, the bagging-up and garden gloves, the Bon Jovi and mulleted miners … It was all too far back, too different, just simply too much. And so I wandered back to the hotel through loud traffic and roach-scuttle, lay down on my last bed, cleared my mind and waited for an enlightened perspective to settle over this sprawling endeavour. Then I closed my eyes and at once fell into a dreamless coma.
Nine hours later I took my place behind the suits in the buffet queue, just another man with a job of work to do, a job that would require three plate-piling visits to those silver troughs. I raised the last with a sigh of pleasure and regret. Chips for breakfast! The all-day cyclist’s Holy Grail, right at the death. Back at the table I automatically ran through my routines, checking the weather, slyly pocketing rolls, and parting the ring-bound route guide on the relevant page. What a strange thing to see the little red line I had been following over these maps for most of my adult life wiggle briefly north into Bulgaria, then across to the Black Sea and stop dead.
The MIFA had slept with two real bikes in a storage room full of wedding decorations. When the receptionist opened the door for me, there it was, safe and sound amongst the white satinette and plastic flowers. An endgame phobia evaporated. In these latter stages I had been haunted by the sorry anticlimax that cut short Colin Martin’s trailblazing small-wheeled adventure: in 1970, having nearly circumnavigated the globe on a Moulton Marathon, Martin walked out of a guest house in Kalgoorlie, Western Australia, and found that his little bike had been pinched in the night. (He abandoned the trip and settled there, finally completing the last leg of his ride thirty-eight years later.)
‘The small one? It’s really yours?’
I turned to the receptionist and saw the look I had come to know so well. Yes, it really was mine. But, and I could say it now: what a bike. My MIFA 900 had taken me through snowdrifts and sand dunes and a million bone-cracking craters, slow and steady up 60 vertical kilometres, fast and loose back down them. Its destiny as a museum exhibit – though unfulfilled at the time of writing – seemed much less foolish now. This so-small Commie campsite wobbler, this jerry-built underbike, had somehow conquered a continent.
As I portentously clipped on the panniers, outside in the sharp sun, the automatic doors hissed ajar and the receptionist trotted through them with a half-litre bottle of mineral water.
‘Please,’ he said, placing it down in the MIFA’s shade. ‘Good luck to you my friend.’
I thanked him, and when he was gone bunged it into the front bag, alongside the two I had smuggled out of the breakfast hall.
The roads were eerily quiet for a Monday morning: with Ramadan about to commence, I guessed everyone was gearing up for its associated upheavals to the working routine. Through the outskirts of Kirklareli it was just me, the odd cheery shopkeeper sweeping his threshold (‘Hello, welcome!’) and those amplified ululations that poured maddeningly from every minaret. Then, as my local cyclo-chum had warned me, the broad, vacant asphalt began to tilt and weave, winding itself up for the big stuff. EV13 wasn’t going down without a fight.
Tim Moore
@mrtimmoore
Hot ride in the general direction of Bulgaria. Melting tarmac popped under my tyres like space dust.
I clicked the Duomatic back into low, eased myself up in the saddle and got to work. It was wiltingly hot, hotter than it had ever been at this hour, and in its more exposed sections the road surface began to soften and liquefy. The under-wheel slurps and slithers seemed distantly familiar; at length I remembered hearing these exact sounds just prior to every slo-mo spill in the traction-free slush of middle Finland. And look, here they came again: the spindly pine battalions, marching back to the roadside to see me off. Cut me and I’d bleed resin.
My hotel water bottles were empty by 500m; after that it was tepid, soapy suckles from the CamelBak. Strange new pains began to pulse from obscure zones, desperate to make a name for themselves before it was too late. Both elbows began to creak and the crimson tips of my ears, laid bare to the sun by that moonshine barber, throbbed like silent klaxons. My scrotum had clearly been waiting for its time to shine: having gone quietly about its business for ninety days, it now agonisingly inveigled itself between the saddle and the top of my right thigh every time I sat down.
But the propulsive essentials, my legs and lungs, kept quiet and applied themselves uncomplainingly to this latest challenge. Back in the Serbian dog days, I had spent half an airless afternoon calculating the pedal revolutions required to propel a Duomatic-powered MIFA 900 from Kirkenes to Tsarevo: those hairy, copper knees had now risen and fallen 1.7 million times. I looked down at them and wondered what on earth I would do with all this flabbergasting physical resilience. Please, I urged myself, please carry the torch forward. Take home the good habits, and leave the bad behind. Yes to regular aerobic exercise, goal-oriented achievement and focused discipline. No to 3,000-calorie breakfasts, public urination and bellowing offensive adaptations of popular hits for hours on end.
‘Eight five hundred up.’
I had counted out every centenary kilometre aloud, but this one, delivered to the brown hills and the pliable tarmac, would be the last. In the hours ahead I filled my camera’s memory card with commemorative on-the-move video; the wobbly footage makes poor viewing, but the soundtrack is remarkable. Below my respirational huffing runs a fusion of mechanical dismay: a stick-along-the-railings thrum, competing clonks and creaks, the pea-in-a-can rattle of agitated aerosol paint. The net effect suggests a rusty tombola filled with bottle tops. It is truly awful to hear, yet at the time I filtered it all out. And presumably had done so for weeks, for these sounds carried the weariness of a well-worn orchestra. My poor little MIFA was begging for mercy, but all I heard was the hot, mountain silence.
Above, through the pine trees, stood the concrete gantry of a border watchtower. Euro Velo 13’s final frontier; I was about to cross the Iron Curtain for the last time. I thought back to the first, cycling into Russia with dread knotting my innards. It was twenty-five years since the Cold War fizzled out, but veterans on both sides still bore the scars. Those childhood nights hunched up by a short-wave radio, twiddling through crackly, haunting Soviet jingles, had clearly left their mark on me. The Finns were distant and drank to forget. So did the wary, bitter Russians. Germany was still two nations, as were the Baltic states, each of them pumped half-full of Russians by Stalin. A thread of glum detachment lingered stubbornly on in so many border zones
, an expression of the late Václav Havel’s assertion that ‘two new generations will have to grow up to wash away the footprints of Communism’. Was it coincidence that the only consistently cheerful people I had met – the Serbs and Turks – had played no more than bit-part Cold War roles?
The Iron Curtain’s fall was inarguably a good thing for all concerned. And yet part of me missed it. I missed the simplicity of a clear-cut, them-and-us divide, and the heady, high-stakes history it fostered. You just don’t know where you are today with all these shape-shifting terrorist splinter cells and tangled geo-political alliances. Yes, the Cold War was a colossal waste of everybody’s time and money, and left three global generations with an ingrained terror of nuclear annihilation. But, you know, it drove us all forward, gave both sides a goal, something to prove, someone to better. It was why we put men in space and invented the microchip. Look at the giant strides the world took from 1945 to 1989, and its apologetic shuffles since then. Take mobile phones and the internet out of the picture, and in technological terms we have barely evolved. And I sometimes wonder if the balancing influence of an alternative economic system, one based at least nominally on fairness and equality, helped put a brake on the polarising excesses of capitalism. During the Cold War years, the share of all income earned by the richest 1 per cent of Britons fell steadily; since the curtain went down, it has trebled. ‘Money didn’t matter in the GDR,’ an old East German artist told a BBC reporter recently. ‘Now everything depends on it. Yes, we now have the freedom to travel, but what good is that if you’re on the dole and can’t afford it?’
‘Where you go?’
The Bulgar in the epaulettes thumbed idly through my passport; there would be no incredulous snorting this time.
‘Tsarevo,’ I said, jabbing a thumb over my shoulder in the general direction of the proximate Black Sea coast. ‘Then, um, home.’
He flicked back to the photo page, compared it briefly with my frankly unrecognisable face, then handed the passport back through the window of his hot little booth. ‘Have nice day, Mister Timoteya.’
Back in 1990, our Saab spluttered up to the Bulgarian Black Sea coast at Varna, a resort town ruled by seagulls so vast and fearless we watched one fly off from a restaurant terrace with a whole roast chicken in its beak. After three months, we’d run out of cash and exhausted our wanderlust; it was the end of the line. How strange that this journey, the longest I had ever been on since, should be wending towards the same terminus.
The finale would not be the serene and pensive victory parade of my imagination: between the imminent familial rendezvous at Malko Tarnovo and the Black Sea sand lay 56 savage, vibe-harshing kilometres. The lonely road would rise and fall and crumble into Russian disrepair. I would be chased a very long way by a very big dog, battering desperately through the potholes. I would run out of fuel, succumb to the cold sweats and go a little bit mad, in fact so mad that I attempted to deliver an elegiac voice recording into my CamelBak mouthpiece. I would be welcomed into Tsarevo’s half-built holiday apartments by forked-lightning fireworks and a ticker-tape parade of rain. And at bruised and woozy length, with 8,558.4 kilometres on the clock and a face creased in bemusement, I would stumble through damp, shingled sand and unattended sunloungers and part the Black Sea with my little MIFA’s filthy front wheel, the tepid, gently lapping brine as grey as the Arctic Ocean I had squinted at through bullets of iced sleet in some previous life.
But all that lay ahead. For the moment, I sat on a bench outside a grocer’s shack in one last semi-derelict borderland hill-town, a can of Strong Hell warming in my hand, and waited for a car full of half-forgotten faces.
Tim Moore
@mrtimmoore
The final curtain.
Tim Moore
@mrtimmoore
Last entry in the Progressometer.
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Yellow Jersey Press, an imprint of Vintage
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Copyright © Tim Moore 2016
Illustrations copyright © Michael A Hill
Tim Moore has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this Work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
First published in Yellow Jersey Press in 2016
penguin.co.uk/vintage
The extract from The Winter War by William R. Trotter (Aurum press, 2003) here is reproduced with permission of Aurum Press
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library