The Lost Forest
Page 53
Chapter 52
BACK IN RUSSIA
The dawn sky was grey and rain slanted down the windows of his compartment in the Krasnaya Strellya. As the train advanced towards St Petersburg, at a stately seventy or eighty kilometres an hour, Ennis made out the form of badly managed forests, un-worked fields, and factories abandoned or in a state of advanced decay.
Heavy with sleep he urinated into an empty beer bottle in the swaying train. He had already decided that in he did not want to venture into the corridor in the depth of night on the Krasnaya Strellya. For two reasons, the first he new the toilet would be awash in foul smelling water, probably piss mingled with the odour of stale vodka and garlic, and secondly because he did not want to meet the kind of unsavoury character that he knew existed from his past experience, or those of a more dangerous kind that were rumoured to rode at night on Russian trains, which supplied the expatriate population in Russia with their daily dose of horrors. He placed the beer bottle carefully on the floor and rolled back onto his couchette and dropped off into his pleasant sleep in the warm first class compartment.
He had boarded the train in Moscow at 10.45 in the evening after a long wait in the cavernous but fine railway station. The outside temperature had been minus 18°C and he was glad to be in the warmth of the train. He had been hungry and cold after the long wait in the station, and as a sign that things had improved recently, a smartly uniformed presented herself at the door of his compartment holding a wicker train covered with a red serviette on which was presented miniatures and small open sandwiches of salmon eggs.
What caught his attention were the miniatures in the form of small shiny aluminium flasks of Absolut Vodka. He took two Vodkas and two sandwiches paying an exorbitant price without flinching; in Russia if you wanted foreign quality you paid the price and that was that. A few moments later another vendor appeared, he handed Ennis a meal pack, it was free, he then pointed to the beer in a crate. Ennis took two and paid. He then had all that was necessary and locked his compartment door, attaching to the lock the security device which the wagon babushka had given him. The train started exactly on time slowly and smoothly. A few minutes later it reached the speed it would maintain through the night to Saint Petersburg excepting for the occasional halt. It swayed gently and the clackety-clack of the wheels over the uneven rails signalled Ennis to start his dinner.
The train arrived in Saint Petersburg at seven thirty the next morning. He had been awakened by the slamming of the door of the next compartment. There would be a queue before the toilet, large men and women with tousled hair, clutch small towels in their hands; there was no point to hurry. He carefully pulled open the cheap plastic curtain, carefully to avoid dislocating the rail from its fixing; it had already fallen on him twice the previous evening, outside the thin daylight showed the sad and dreary landscape of the outlying suburbs of Moscow.
Another twenty minutes and he would arrive at the Leningradski Station. He hoped the driver was waiting for him; Alexis had arrived the previous day on other business and had instructed his secretary in Moscow to lay on a car to meet Ennis at the station. Ennis hoped Ina, had looked after the arrangements as instructed, she was long on her legs but short in organisation. He had noted that she wasn’t exactly stupid but rather scatty. As Alexis commented whenever she bent over in her extra short mini-skirt she made up for all her shortcomings.
The Zoological Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences was situated on the Spit of Vasilievsky Island, in the building on the corner of the Birzhevaya Square and Universitetskaya Embankment of the Neva River.
Everybody in St Petersburg knows the building, the home to the Zoological Museum. It was part of the Zoological Institute, one of the oldest scientific institutions in the city, one hundred and seventy years old, though its history began much earlier, at time of Peter the Great.
The first museum catalogue in 1742 listed almost four-thousand mammals, birds, amphibians, fishes, insects and invertebrates, deposited in scientific collections of the Kunstkammer.
The driver was waiting and he dropped Ennis off at the Nevsky Palace Hotel on Nevsky Prospect a five minute ride from the station. He checked in showered and took breakfast in the hotel restaurant. Alexis had left a message that he would pick him up at ten.
Valentina Petrova was head of Physical anthropology. She was a handsome, dark haired woman of about forty. She had worked in at prehistoric sites in Central Asia at the time of the Soviet Union
‘One of our ex-camarades,’ Alexis said, ‘had discovered a Neanderthal type jawbone in 1968.’
‘It has since been dated to around 350,000 to 400,000 years old,’ said Valentina Petrova, ‘we think it was a female of about eighteen years old.’
‘This jawbone was found in the Azikh Caves in Azerbaijan. At the time your palaeontologist, Professor Lundy, said that the Azikh jawbone was the fourth oldest human relic ever to be found in history, an important event for the glory of the soviet system, n’est-ce pas!’
‘At that time we had little contact with the scientific world outside of the Soviet Union, travel was almost impossible though strangely enough we had good contacts with Lundy who was then a young man, before my time,’ laughed Valentina.
‘Today we believed these caves were inhabited as early as one million years ago. There’s an accumulation of fourteen meters of deposits. One of our discoveries was a kind of pebble culture, comparable that in the Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania. Huseinov which makes us think that the site is between 1.5 million years to 730,000 years ago.’
‘Can we visit the site?’
‘I’m sorry to say that today it’s impossible to visit the site, I’ve spoken with the Department of Archaeology at Baku State University. But the problem is the Azikh cave is located not far from the Iranian border occupied since 1993 by the Armenians.’
‘Is there anything else interesting we could visit?’
‘Maybe. As you know there is Dmanisi in Georgia and we have maintained good relations with the Georgian Academy of Sciences.’
Valentina described the site at Dmanisi, eighty odd kilometres to the southwest of the Georgian capital of Tbilisi in the Mashavera River Valley. In medieval times Dmanisi was an important city where the caravan routes to Byzantium from Armenia and Persia converged.
Alexis looked at his watch it was almost one, he invited Valentina to lunch at the Europa which was a couple of blocks away across the Nevsky Prospect which he had told Ennis had a special buffet.
‘So let us help ourselves to the caviar at the buffet, to say it’s not really good is an understatement but what can we expect for fifty dollars,’ he said laughing. ‘It’s an historical experience!’
‘You may be interested to know a little history of this magnificent hotel.’
‘Sure,’ Ennis said looking at the beautiful stained glass.
‘Originally it was three buildings constructed around 1825. They were later joined together with a common façade and transformed into the Grand Hotel Europa in 1875.’
‘So it wasn’t built as a hotel from the start?’
‘No.’
‘What happened with the revolution?’
‘After the Bolshevik revolution it was transformed into an orphanage before becoming a hotel once again and in WWII it was a hospital.’
‘Strange how things change.’
‘Yes indeed, under the Soviets it was rebuilt as a hotel, that was after the war but soon became very dilapidated. Fortunately for us it was bought by the Swedes and renovated.’
‘Was it used by the revolutionaries?’
‘Lenin used the Astoria, to my mind a dreary hotel especially its restaurant, what can you expect from the British!’ he laughed loudly.
The Sunday brunch was the culminating point of the week in the gastronomic pleasures offered by the hotel and its Austrian chef. The splendid restaurant was filled with well heeled tourists, doctors from provincial France, businessmen from Paris and prosperous small business
people from Spain and Italy. The pleasure on their self satisfied round rosy faces, which could have well figured in a Brugel, they tucked in like gluttons, attacking the caviar, the smoke sturgeon and marinated salmon accompanied by vodka and champagnski to their hearts content.
‘So tell me a little more about the history of Dmanisi,’ said Ennis.
‘Well it started back in 1936 when excavations first started, that of course stopped during the Patriotic War. Then in the sixties we started again.’
‘Nothing to do with anthropology, it was medieval archaeological work,’ said Alexis.
‘In the early eighties they found animal bones that were identified as the teeth of an extinct species of rhinoceros that was typical of early Early Pleistocene fauna. Then a little later the first stone tools were discovered.’
‘Then Georgia became independent,’ said Alexis throwing up his arms to show the Russians bad luck.
‘Yes in the last year of the Soviet Union’s existence the first bones were found. A human mandible and other bones were discovered dated to 1.7 million years ago, then in 1999 two human skulls.’
‘Extraordinary,’ said Ennis.
‘Yes this meant the presence of early men to the West of the Eurasian continent,’ said Valentina, ‘and their size and morphology indicated that they were close to archaic Homo erectus and Homo erectus ergaster until now never been found outside of East Africa.’
‘The stone tools found with the two skulls are early pebble-culture type found in Africa dating back to 2.4 million years ago meaning that migration out of Africa was earlier than supposed.’
‘Could it be possible that erectus developed in some other region such as East Asia and then migrated back to Africa?’
‘Who knows!’
Deep underground in the Saint Petersburg metro, no more than a few dozen metres from the luxurious restaurant, the citizens of Saint Petersburg went about their business in a struggle to live that Brezhnev could never have imagined, amongst gangs of pickpockets and in other small time criminal activities, trying as they could to reduce their handicap in the unfamiliar capitalist world that had descended upon them. The citizens of Saint Petersburg knew something of sudden change and struggled to adapt to the new environment to become new Russians.
Another wintry landscape flashed past as the Volvo headed towards the Finno-Russian border. Thick wet snow was falling and the road surface was wet. The needle stuck a constant 100 km/hr Kalevi was a Finn and was conditioned to respect the speed limit even though they were nearly one hour late.
Aris had met Ennis in St Petersburg, turning up unexpectedly when he had learnt that Ennis was there. He had arrived from Finland where a firm of consultants was studying one of his new projects in Borneo and persuaded then to drive him to Russia to visit the Hermitage.
He spent an hour in the Hermitage returning to the hotel, ‘Too cold,’ was his only remark. However, the nearby casino was warm enough and he spent most of the night at the tables and talking to the girls at the bar.
He turned up for breakfast at their scheduled departure time and proceeded to fill three plates with marinated herring, ham, grilled sausages, a boiled egg, a croissant, smoked salmon and fruit. He then took from his small plastic bag a bottle of soja sauce which he spread liberally on selected items. He ordered a pot of tea and settled down to munch his way through his own assorted buffet.
Kalevi left to put their affairs in the car and Ennis decided it was the moment to take a crap, a long crap.
Forty five minutes later Aris arrived, his thick coat still bearing the Burberry’s label on the left hand sleeve, his scarf in a ball under his chin and his chequered peaked cap pulled well down on his thick grey hair.
Ennis had prised from one of the roulette tables whilst he was still ahead collecting the chips into a large heap to the annoyance of the croupier and the other girls who surrounded him.
From Helsinki they took the ferry to Stockholm where Aris had another meeting, which Ennis only half believed as the Finns had told Aris of the Silja Symphony from Helsinki to Stockholm was another of those floating hotels, in reality nothing less than a floating bar and casino complete with duty free booze, discotheques and a complete shopping mall with restaurants of all choices from Tex Mex to Le Bon Vivant and everything in between.
They had Commodore class sea side cabins equivalent to good rooms in a first class hotel. The weather though minus five and snowing was calm and they barely felt the movement as the ship left its berth for the fifteen hour journey across the Baltic. After Russia, Aris had got a sudden taste for caviar and his only thoughts were first food and then the casino. They started with Vodka and caviar covered blinis a true delight before ploughing through the rest of the menu. Aris glanced at his watch and made a sign to Ennis it was time to go to the office, the casino.
It was the long way round to Paris, but that was what Aris wanted