From Russia with Lunch

by David Smiedt

  Twining beside the boulevard is the Raze River, which has been landscaped into more of a murmuring stream. Fringed by reeds, bluebells and grassy banks, its bullion waters are traversed by imperious midnight-blue ducks that can spot a bread roll from 50 metres and badger unwary children into dumping their crusty booty whole. Eventually, the river veers sharp right to disgorge itself into the Baltic Sea. It was this juncture that the Classical Café called home. Having taken its theme from an MGM English garden party, the establishment featured a central kiosk of too much glass and unnecessarily severe angles. Its acre of spongy grass, however, was dotted with white metal garden settings each arranged in a two-seat/one-table configuration. Spaced evenly around the periphery of the café were tannoys on poles, from which wafted a selection of Mantovani, Puccini and Brahms.

  Although my head recognised this as an exercise in effete sophistication that British sitcoms like Keeping Up Appearances routinely mine for laughs at the expense of the pompous, my heart stood its ground. For the next hour, I sipped Orange Pekoe amid washes of light orchestral music while swans eyed my petits fours. Pretentious? Moi?

  Resuming my stroll, I discovered that Basanaviciaus is curtailed by sand dunes, beyond which lie the beach and 100-metre long pier that draw 100,000 visitors a year to Palanga. Colder than a stepmother’s kiss and as welcoming as a biker bar, the Baltic is a forbidding sea with its own stark beauty. Which was catered to by Palanga’s authorities with a series of surfside benches arranged in neat rows – four along and three deep. Brooding while the ocean did likewise was apparently a favourite pastime in Palanga. While the coastline is known for turning on sunsets that make Boney M’s wardrobe designer appear to be a dedicated monochromist, all it could muster for my visit was a diluted lavender which ran to eye-bag charcoal.

  I loved every fading moment of the mordant miasma. It was like stepping into a Bergman film. Not least for the fact that after about ten minutes of watching the waves unfold themselves onto the shore with a muffled whump, a piano accordionist shuffled into place several rows behind me. He or she then cajoled from the instrument a perfectly lachrymose version of ‘La Mer’. As limpid as you’d like and in a minor key, it was the kind of moment that might have triggered a cinematic flashback but instead made the present all the more so.

  A succession of equally mawkish tunes – ‘Stormy Weather’, ‘These Foolish Things’ and, for something different, ‘Tie A Yellow Ribbon’ – were also on the playlist. This unexpected soundtrack presented a series of dilemmas. The first was that I felt compelled to financially compensate the musician concerned for this concert. The second was that I didn’t want to know what he or she looked like. On the latter score, my fervent hope was that the tunes were being cajoled out of a wheezing instrument by a world-weary Jacques Brel type with doleful eyes but the last traces of a whimsical smile sagging across his craggy cheeks. The reality turned out to be so much better. Behind the squeezebox was a girl of no more than sixteen with hastily pinned dark hair, alabaster skin and bulky black-rimmed budget glasses of the ‘when you turn eighteen you can swap them for contacts’ variety. When key changes or transitions to a bridge presented themselves, her forehead would crinkle in concentration before smoothing itself out once more come chorus time.

  Extracting 50 litas from my wallet, I waited until she was between numbers before standing an appropriate three benches away and thanking her for the music. I then proffered the note and in so doing tarnished what could well have been a perfect dusk. She wasn’t busking but playing for the practice and joy of it. And here I was sullying art with commerce. Aside from which I had inadvertently entered into the ugly spectacle of a solitary man a long way from home offering a relatively extravagant amount of money to a girl two decades his junior. Suffused with awkward embarrassment she blushed fuchsia while casting a furtive glance over her shoulder to ensure she was not alone with this currency-wielding weirdo. With extrication from our respective embarrassments now as distant as the horizon, I exited gracelessly in search of dinner.

  Dining options were myriad, as were welcoming lantern-lit courtyards scented by grilling fish, cooling pastry and beach goddesses from whose coquettish lips fell the enticement, ‘Free margarita with every meal.’ Forgoing the Armenian, Chinese, Russian and Cuban options, I decided to be swayed by my guide book which crooned the praises of the Baltoji Zuvedra Hotel with the grace of a lovestruck balladeer. The restaurant was described in a flourish of teen-speak as ‘so one of the most romantic spots in town to have a bite and watch the sunset from a glass-enclosed dining room that will even make loners feel loved’. Truth be told, it was the tail end of the spiel that won me over. For all the multitudinous pleasures that come with being a lone traveller – no schedules, no routines, no one to tell you that trying to maintain a Dutch accent all day is childish – this was one of those evenings when I was missing home and Jennie. Only I didn’t know it yet.

  I have done enough solo travelling to no longer have a problem reading a novel by tealights, but this establishment was such a candelabra-festooned courtship conduit that I almost channelled my inner country and western singer to belt out that whiskyed favourite ‘Working My Way Back To You One Barstool At A Time’. Loneliness brings out the cynic in me and as I took my table for one amid the freshly infatuated and trying-to-recapture-the-good-old-days couples, I passed the time by attempting to decipher which pairings were yet to sleep together by the amount of earnest nodding the man was doing.

  By the time I realised Céline Dion was on a loop, I couldn’t take it anymore. This loner was feeling anything but loved and it seemed all bar myself were on the verge of either launching or lynching a relationship. What’s more, the professional staff wouldn’t even share eye-rolls with me at some of the more noxious face-stroking advances. They were, however, more inclined to display such behaviour when I requested my bill after having consumed two vodkas and several complimentary bread rolls. I decamped to an eatery whose honesty of title – Fish Restaurant – and queue of locals spoke to my mood and guts. Especially since their logo featured a female chef smiling through the weight of a platter on which was curled a whole fish the size of a Shetland pony. There wasn’t even enough room for a slice of lemon.

  If you ever happen to be in Palanga, make a beeline for this place as it was far and away the best meal I had in Lithuania. Well, at least until midnight of that evening. Aside from the fact that the fish I gorged on had still been in school that morning, it opened a portal to my past in the form of traditional recipes I had not tasted since my grandmother’s table. Snack-size portions of fresh and salty herring fillets swam in sour cream and overripe tomatoes. The same fish again, this time tart with pickled cucumbers.

  When it came to the entrées, however, the chef let both his imagination and Lithuanian/English internet translator run riot. ‘Black Caviar on the Snow’ turned out to merely be served on ice. Fearlessly braving the gulf between ocean and earth, he plied me with interlaced slivers of salmon and beef carpaccio before rounding off the meal with seared butterfish accompanied by radishes and black grapes. Instead of regarding me with the combination of outright suspicion and veiled pity often reserved for the compan-ionless, the staff at Fish Restaurant took pity on me in the form of Krupnikas, a honey liqueur that’s 40 per cent proof and traditionally drunk at 50 degrees Celsius.

  It turned out that the maitre d’ had been shown some kindness by a Melburnian in London some years before and I was the opportunity to realign his hospitality karma. Feeling both sated and just a little fascinating, I stumbled onto the Yellow Brick Road in search of diversion. Illuminated Roman-candle style, the Honolulu entertainment complex is a rather beautiful glass and concrete cylinder built in the 1960s. The closer I got, however, the less intriguing it became, not least for the plastic party people posing under equally plastic palms. Instead, I found myself in a chess bar known as Sachmatine, which translates as ‘Checkmate’. All faint uric light and burnished wood panelling, the club was gently
pulsating to chilled house from a DJ whose podium peered over the sunken lounge in which around a dozen games of chess were being played. Better still, the barman quickly surmised my Krupnikas demeanour and furnished me with a sweet and sobering coffee.

  Sinking into a velour sofa that I wouldn’t have wanted to see by daylight, I was then presented with a predatory pastiche the likes of which I had never seen before. Under the guise of Fool’s Mates, Double Attacks and En Passants, this was an ill-disguised pick-up joint where hands as practised as they were sleazy preyed on the naive. My guess is that the tanned young women who tried out the Sachmatine were tired of the tanned young men on whose résumé the words ‘bench press’ featured. What they encountered instead were gusset merchants who had perfected what I termed the ‘one-knight stand’. From the very first moment when he casually asks if she would like a game then puts a white and black piece behind his back, forcing the girl to break the physical barrier by touching an arm to select her colour, his technique was built on a combination of experience and the pruning of probability.

  Ignoring the three-move checkmate when it presented itself, he prolonged the game like a tantric master, nodding appreciatively at her most ill-advised moves, all the while pressing her for information in muted tones. Drinks are suggested but withdrawn on the grounds that alcohol might dull her game, but she insists. He smiles knowingly, ticking off a mental box. She dares to think this one might be different. And so it goes, until he suggestively lays her king on the horizontal with a half-arsed smile of apology and an enquiry as to how she feels about receiving similar treatment. In more cases than I might have expected, the woman in question left the premises with one of these boardgame Lotharios. This was clearly a well-thought-out ruse and although I mostly felt for the girls about to find out that sleaze can come in a cardigan and horn-rims, a tiny part of me also admired the bishop-shuffling bravado of these men.

  My journey back to the hotel was taken up with the following thought: it is a truth universally acknowledged that a young chap on the make needs a game plan. No sooner had I – mercifully – entered my room, than I was struck by another universally acknowledged truth: what the hell was I doing eating the butterfish? While the colour of its flesh undoubtedly played some part in its name, this creature of the deep should be known as Neptune’s Revenge. Suffice to say that should you check into a particular room at the Info Hotel in Palanga, you will find a complete set of my fingerprints gouged over a period of several gurning and explosive hours into the underside of the toilet seat.

  With both myself and the Palanga coastline cleansed of turbulence by morning, I wandered the low-slung grid of shade-brindled residential streets that ran off Basanavi-ciaus. Often painted sea green with white guttering and matching fences, Palanga’s double-storey wooden homes had an air of understated old money about them. Lawns were tidy but not quite manicured, the garden furniture was on the chicer side of shabby and any notions of art-directed perfection were disbanded by the array of sun-bleached beach towels tossed over patio railings to dry.

  In terms of both atmosphere and aesthetic, this corner of Palanga had a similar feel to the whitewashed, preppy and nautical American east coast villages so beloved by that nation’s political dynasties. Yet while I had no problems envisioning Ted Kennedy’s car being pulled out of the duck pond beside Basanaviciaus, Palanga differed from the likes of Cape Cod in that it was ironically more democratic. There are no walled-off compounds here, no ‘private property’ admonishments. Rather, it seems that boundaries are not only marked with fetching wooden fences that add to the town’s allure rather than the opposite, but that these also make a sufficient statement of boundary.

  If there was one town in Lithuania I was determined to return to it was Palanga. Problem is, although I can qualify for a Lithuanian passport, I’m not the only one smitten by the idea of a holiday home here. Since Lithuania became part of the EU, its best and brightest have been lured to lucrative jobs in Germany and the United Kingdom, from whence they return home with bankrolls thicker than your average reality TV show contestant. This they spend on property, causing house prices to skyrocket, inflation to follow suit and their nation to once again fall short of the quotas required to go from lita to euro. The result? Pricey in the backblocks, forget about it with an ocean view. And what sealed Palanga’s enticing deal lay at the periphery of the beachside suburb.

  But first a word on salt. Most seawater contains around 3.5 per cent of the stuff. This has several effects, two of which being: it helps you float and results in only the hardiest of salinity-resistant plants flourishing within cooee of the shore. The Baltic’s salt content, however, hovers between 0.1 and 0.8 per cent, which is hardly enough to flavour a cashew. Consequently, it means that swimmers hit bottom quick smart and that the surrounding coastline has a floral fecundity not encountered in many other seaside regions.

  Nowhere is this more spectacularly apparent than in Pal-anga’s 100-hectare Botanic Park. Formerly the estate of the aristocratic Tyszkiewicz family who ruled the Palanga region from 1824 to 1940, the park was laid out in the last years of the nineteenth century. Over the course of three summers, French landscape designer Edouard André – whose CV also included the Tuileries Gardens in Paris – created this masterpiece in the English naturalist style, which is slippery to define but easily envisioned with the words ‘Beatrix Potter backdrop’. Over five hundred varieties of trees loom over the grassland, which features myriad sculptures. Pick of the bunch is the lubricious bronze Queen of the Serpents, who has a body that would make Gisele Bundchen seem permanently bloated. There is also a capacious rose garden where the mere act of breathing is a Turkish-Delight-scented joy and blood-red petals dilute into prom-dress pink then confirmation white. The park is the botanic equivalent of a degustation feast with 60 hectares of trees, 24.5 hectares of fields, half a hectare of flowers, over a hectare of flowing water, 1.5 kilometres of beach and dunes and 18 kilometres of tracks to explore it all.

  Better still, the place is not regarded as a pristine arboreal art gallery. Pick-up soccer matches take place on the lawns, couples canoodle behind tree trunks, camera nerds crouch millimetres from pansies to test their macro lenses and kids race leaves down streams. The garden’s showpiece is the Neo-Renaissance Tyszkiewicz Palace, which now houses an amber museum. Built in 1897 by German architect Franz Schwecthen – whose friends no doubt carried umbrellas in case their mate had to introduce himself to someone – it is fronted by a ballustraded stone terrace approached via a pair of curlicued stairways. From this vantage point, beds of tiger-yellow gazanias flank an elongated pond with a fountain at its centre. Beyond which stands the beautifully simple Christ Blessing sculpture by Danish neoclassicist Berthel Thorwaldsen.

  Perched on the stone steps, a twinge of regret took a seat beside me. The time had come to leave Palanga, which was everything a seaside town should be. Except contrived.

  11

  A question of spirit

  A rabbi had to spend some time recovering from an operation in a Catholic hospital and became good friends with a nurse there. One day she came into his room and noticed the crucifix on the wall was missing.

  ‘Rabbi,’ she asked him, ‘what have you done with the crucifix?’

  He replied, ‘One suffering Jew in this room was enough.’

  Travel writers all have personal milestones on their journeys. For some, it’s the first time they become lost on a strange road. For others, such as AA Gill, it’s when he notices himself falling into a routine – as in this is the place I go for breakfast, here’s where I write up my notes in the afternoon – that serves as a stimulus for motion. For me, it’s the turnaround, the point at which I will be furthest from where I started, that delivers a sense of progress. So it was that I headed east from Palanga through the wonderfully named Plunge and on to Siauliai. I wasn’t expecting much from Lithuania’s fourth largest city, half of whose buildings were destroyed in World War I. Come the sequel, the Germans and Russians
exceeded their previous benchmark by obliterating 80 per cent of the town’s structures.

  Inhabited since the first century and Christianised by the Teutonic knights in the fifteenth century, the place came into its own in the second half of the nineteenth with the advent of new road and rail links. An economic hub of the Russian empire, Siauliai was home to flax processors, tile manufacturers, tobacco factories and confectionary plants. It’s best known establishment was the Frenkel Leather Factory. Employing eight hundred workers, it was one of the largest firms in the Russian empire and so fine were its wares that it took gold medals at the 1905 Paris exhibition. The entrepreneurial zeal of the locals was corralled by the Soviet regime, which made Siauliai a high-tech hub for the production of electronics, radio engineering and televisions. By 1990, 30,000 of the town’s 135,000 population were employed in local industries but with the collapse of the old captive markets, that number fell to 12,000 in just three years.

  Siauliai could have gone the way of many other Lithuanian towns which found themselves in a similar position. However, instead of capitulating to the unemployment and seemingly inevitable exodus of young people to bigger cities with greater work opportunities, the Siauliai brains trust decided to play to their strengths. They not only offered electronics and computer manufacturers a relatively cheap workforce but a skilled one which had been assembling such components for decades. The Lithuanian government came to the party in the form of exempting from sales tax and customs duty materials brought into the country for manufacture. Then applied the same breaks when the completed products where shipped out again. It’s a strategy that is paying dividends and nowhere is this more apparent than at the old Soviet military airport of Zokniai on the edge of town, the first such facility in the Baltics capable of handling all types of aircraft and operating 24/7 irrespective of weather conditions. Better still, the tab for this centrepiece of what is a new free economic zone was picked up entirely by the Phillips corporation.