As we were going down the corridor to the restaurant car the Soviet officer pointed out to us a hill where he and his men had fought a fierce battle with the Japs, wiping out a couple of battalions.
At lunchtime we could see that Galina had been crying. ‘The chef discovered the handkerchiefs you gave the girls and denounced them to the Train Supervisor, and he took them away,’ Co reported.
The chef, with an eye to a deal, told us that food was extremely scarce in Vladivostok and offered to trade our Intourist coupons for cigarettes and vodka. Finally, he included some cheese, a sausage, a piece of cake and a bar of chocolate. During the afternoon we concentrated on packing. As the journey progressed I had made fifty-odd pages of notes, closely written on leaves torn from a small notebook. These I had kept tucked into a money belt round my waist. If the recent denunciation for spying was a sign of trouble to come, then we must be prepared for a body search.
A handbag is among the first things to be examined and is a dangerous hiding place, so after taking a careful look at our luggage we decided to unpick an inch or two of stitching in the watered silk lining of a small leather holdall. Being light and easy to carry but awkward in shape, this was always put on top of the baggage and therefore kept in sight.
As soon as the notes were safely concealed I began a steady process of auto-brainwashing. ‘Your treasures,’ I told myself, ‘are all in the yellow suitcase. The things you really care about. Be sure that the yellow suitcase is not lost. Keep an eye on it.’ In this way I hoped to disguise my real concern and leave in the atmosphere no extra-sensory leads to the holdall.
A milky streak appeared on our left. The Pacific Ocean. Slowly it spread and glistened. The line was now running along the shore, which was clothed in a thin soupy weed, and tiny waves catching the last of the sunset glow.
It was dark when we reached Vladivostok, but the station clock, faithful to Moscow time, showed twelve noon. We were reluctant to leave the train and apprehensive that the trap might, at the last moment, close on us. But nothing happened. Porters, working in pairs, collected our luggage and wandered off, closely followed by us, to find a conveyance to the hotel. A couple of broken-down taxis finally appeared and we bumped off over streets riddled with potholes and deep in dust. Passing through a small square we saw that instead of flowers in the once ornamental garden there were soldiers rolled up in their greatcoats sleeping on the bare earth.
‘The lower the standard of living for the troops the easier for the General Staff,’ said Kenneth.
‘And think what a help in war-time if the civilian population is accustomed to living rough,’ I agreed.
The hotel was as dismal as Our Friend’s brother had predicted. Once more there was the long wait before we were shown to our rooms, only this time the floor of the foyer was covered in cracked linoleum and the ceiling bulb was so flyblown as to be almost opaque. The manager, a beetle-browed Georgian, made it plain that we were extremely unwelcome guests.
At last he took us to our room. The two iron beds were covered with grimed army blankets. Another torn blanket was nailed over the window. The walls bore the telltale blood splashes resulting from a prolonged campaign against bed bugs. Worst of all, a drunk sat crouched with his head in the wash basin. At this, the manager was actually disconcerted. Giving the man an expert bum’s rush, he threw our luggage down and tried to shut the door on us.
‘We won’t sleep here,’ I said. ‘It’s dirty and disgusting. There are bugs.’ But the manager simply walked away. Tired and disheartened, we puffed the last of our insect powder onto the beds and lay down fully clothed.
We woke at five next morning, tortured by flies. The previous night the maid had promised a bath at nine o’clock, but at 8.45 the stove in the only bathroom was cold.
‘There will be no bath,’ said the maid when we finally found her. Grudgingly she brought a jug of boiling water, but it smelt unwholesome.
Down in the dining room we were joined by the rest of the party. The light was grey and raindrops carved runnels down the dusty window panes. An ancient waiter, patient and timid, brought omelettes like bricks, and soggy grey bread.
‘Can we have some butter?’ we asked. The manager, scenting a fight, surged in.
‘Butter is first-class food. You can’t have first-class food for third -class price.’
‘Then we will pay.’
‘You can’t pay. You have no money.’
The sight of some ten-rouble notes mollified him and two saucers of jam were brought. We said that one was enough, but the manager insisted on two, and charged us accordingly. Butter, he said, would have cost three roubles eighty a portion the size of a penny piece. This, at the official rate, would have been nearly four shillings.
In one corner of the dining room a man was lovingly polishing an aspidistra. Its shining leaves were the only things that looked cared-for in the hotel. In the world of the Victorians where interiors were heavy with dust-catching draperies or, as in Vladivostok, grimed from years of neglect, the lush gleaming leaves had an extraordinary appeal.
The rain was still streaming down the windows. To pass the time, but without much hope of success, we pursued the manager up and down the stairs saying, ‘We must have a better room.’
‘You have only paid for third class.’
‘Then we will pay the difference.’
‘You can’t.’
The manager knew quite well that, having roubles, we could pay the supplement, but he seemed determined to make us scapegoats for the whole party as the other rooms, though drab, were acceptable. An American engineer who travelled across Siberia at the turn of the century, commented on the extreme unpleasantness ofthe manager of the Metropole at Irkutsk. The further east one goes, he wrote, the more disagreeable the managers become. We were at the end of the line and presumably faced with one of the most awkward specimens.
The upstairs loo was out of order and of the two downstairs, one had no lock and the other no seat. ‘This is uncivilized,’ we complained.
‘It is not,’ said the manager.
‘Then you can’t know what civilization is.’
‘I do. I’ve been to New York.’
Dorothy joined in the argument, producing a bug which she had caught in our room and trapped in a matchbox. I thought for a moment that the manager was going to hit us.
‘We’d better go for a walk and let him cool off,’ said Nick.
So we went out into the rain, determined to find something of interest in Vladivostok. Lying on the lovely Bay of the Golden Horn, it could have been a pleasant place, but it was built in haste when the Russians annexed the territory in 1861—a mixture of garrison and gold rush town. As far as we could see, there was not a single building of distinction.
The dust of the night before had turned to mud which slurped into the potholes left unrepaired since the fighting of the early twenties. The buildings were unpainted and shabby, and even the street names almost illegible, their enamel chipped and scratched.
Dilapidated trams screeched up and down the hills, people hanging from them like bunches of grapes, and jumping on before stops to fight their way inside. Across their prows Communist Party slogans were pasted, their tattered messages fluttering in the wind. Passenger mortality was evidently high, as the authorities had thought it worth while to warn the captive audiences which queued at every stop. Posters depicted people being crushed between trams, or stepping out from the kerb to be flattened. Some warnings even showed a man jumping off a tram and under a car, though this, in view of the scarcity of passenger vehicles, seemed a lesser hazard.
The shop windows in Vladivostok were still pierced by the bullet holes of twenty years ago. Great cracks in the plate glass were riveted together with rounds of metal cut from the bottom of tins. Except for piles of tinned crab, arranged in pyramids and spirals, none of the stock was post-Revolution. In one window bottles of patchouli and violet perfume, rice powder and ivory-handled t
oothbrushes were thick with dust. The most exciting window display showed a cardboard family, the mother wearing a feather boa and flowery hat, the children in muslin dresses and sailor suits, all playing croquet with real hoops and mallets. A small crowd stood admiring the window—which afforded one of the few diversions of the town. It was all immensely dispiriting.
At lunch, a thin soup was followed by a particularly odious reminder of the gluey tapioca of our childhood days, but this was bright pink and had a fishy taint.
‘Caviar,’ said the manager challengingly.
‘It isn’t,’ we replied.
‘It is,’ he maintained. This was repartee on a nursery level.
‘The roe from a Pacific fish,’ whispered the waiter.
As we struggled to eat the horrible stuff the manager circled the table muttering, ‘First-class food. First-class food, and you have only paid for third-class.’ We shuddered to think what third-class food must be like.
Despite our determined efforts we had completely failed to find anything of interest in Vladivostok. But what about our sightseeing vouchers? One gold dollar each for the last fourteen days and all we had so far been offered was the man with the megaphone in the Moscow bus. Here was a new bone of contention to keep the adrenalin flowing.
‘We have paid for a sightseeing tour every day. When will it begin?’ we asked the manager.
‘Seychas,’ he replied mechanically. This remark we felt was to be taken even less seriously than usual.
‘We want to go out in a boat.’ (This might afford a vital glimpse of the naval harbour.)
‘You can’t.’
This automatic refusal was no more discouraging than the usual ‘Seychas’. It just varied the dialogue a little.
During all our conflicts with the management Untourist had failed to show up, wisely deciding to keep his head down. Sooner or later, though, he would have to make himself useful.
The only other guests in the hotel, a family of Jewish refugees on their way to Canada, whose luggage tags showed that they were ‘Mr, Mrs, Miss and Master April’, told us that the boat to Japan would leave in three days’ time. If this were true, and we were to maintain our modest standard of living, we should need more roubles.
‘There must be a State pawnshop in Vladivostok,’ suggested Barbara. ‘Let’s collect up everything we can spare and take it along.’ So we discarded every possible oddment and even some things we found useful, trusting that we could replace them in Japan. The expedition did not appeal to Nick and Dorothy, so with Co and Barbara we crammed picnic things, a watch which had broken on the journey, dispensable clothing, empty biscuit tins, half-used lipsticks and powder compacts into a bag and set out, directed by an old man we met on the first corner.
The pawnbroker would obviously have liked to slam the door in our faces, but he coveted our treasures, particularly the broken watch. After some sharp bargaining we finished with three hundred roubles for the use of our group. Like us, the pawnbroker had time on his hands and decided to treat us to some Communist propaganda.
In answer to every question he declared, ‘U nas luche,’ (Everything’s better here.)
‘How can you say that?’ asked Co. ‘The shops are empty. Food is scarce ...’
‘Are your shops in England full?’
‘Of course.’ (We were unaware of wartime shortages.) ‘You can buy anything you like.’
‘That proves it then,’ said the man triumphantly. ‘If your workers were properly paid they would buy up everything and the shops would be empty like ours.’
After supper we went out to send a telegram home. The door of the telegraph office creaked as if it had never been opened. The operator sat by a wooden table, fast asleep, his head on his arms. In spite of Co’s assurances, he remained deeply suspicious of the foreign text and we felt convinced that he would tear up our telegram as soon as we had left.
As we opened the hotel door the manager scuttled into his office. ‘We want to go out tomorrow—in a boat, and fish,’ we told him.
‘Then you must give me your passports.’
‘But you have them.’
‘Not I, the police.’
If he expected instant collapse, he was disappointed. ‘Then our Intourist courier must get them back,’ we said calmly.
Our misery and very genuine grievances had made us reckless, but we were beginning to realize that we had chosen the right line with the manager. The more aggressive we were, the more amenable he became.
‘You can have room No.3,’ he said to us grudgingly. This was a wonderful relief, as we had dreaded a return to the bug-infested bedroom. Our new room, with its pea green dado and pink muslin curtains, was a blissful contrast. What was more, it smelt of paint.
Next morning the sun shone brilliantly. Today we would begin the great boating contest, and carry on with the sightseeing campaign. Already we were beginning to feel tentatively at home, like children who have survived the first week at a particularly unpleasant boarding school.
At breakfast, the old waiter shuffled in with the daily egg-mix brick. Jam appeared and the usual toll was levied. At the going rate, it was costing us something like thirty-five shillings a pound.
Towards twelve o’clock, just as we were preparing to acknowledge defeat and go out into the dismal streets, Untourist came beaming to say that he was taking us down to the harbour.
‘You can’t have one. boat,’ he said. ‘You must have two.’
It was easy to understand the logic of insisting on two saucers of jam, since twice as much could be charged for them, but in this case we had already paid for the coupons which were to cover the outing, so nothing was to be gained from insisting on an extra boat. Perhaps this was merely a face-saving device to show that we had not, in the end, got exactly what we had asked for.
The narrow beach was flanked by a row of wooden huts on stilts. As the old man started to push the first boat into the water, two tall men in police uniform strode into the nearest hut. They emerged two minutes later dressed in identical dark blue bathing trunks and each wore his police cap. The old man stared at them apprehensively.
Our boats were sun-bleached and a little unsteady. In the bows of each was a huge life belt. The old man handed us fishing lines—a thick cord tied onto a stripped branch, with a large piece of cork for a float and some rather smelly herring as bait—one set for each boat.
‘Bathing is forbidden,’ he said. We pushed our boat out into the waters of the Golden Horn, which stretches for four miles to the narrows leading to the open sea.
In the carefree days before the Russo-Japanese War the supposed impregnability of Vladivostok Harbour had done a great deal to bolster the confidence of the Russian General Staff. Batteries placed on either side of the narrows were reckoned to be able to destroy even the largest naval vessel afloat, but this belief was never put to the test as the Vladivostok Squadron, imprudently venturing out, was destroyed by the Japanese.’
We rowed around in the sunshine, followed at an unvarying distance of twenty yards by the NKVD men. Tiring of this, we halted and lowered the lines. Suddenly, ours snagged. We rowed in a circle, tugging gently in an attempt to set it free. The hook gave, and came up dragging a bunch of black hair.
‘We must have hooked a corpse,’ said Kenneth.
This suggested to Co the macabre happening at the Black Sea port of Novorossisk, where a group of Tsarist officers were shot and then, weighted down by a heavy chain round their ankles, dropped into the sea. Owing to the preservative effect of the chemicals released by a nearby factory, the bodies did not decay, but could be seen upright and swaying gently with the movement of the water. We decided to give up fishing. As we tried to edge our boats in the direction of the naval harbour, our guardians called that time was up.
Untourist, feeling that he had fulfilled his obligations, joined us at lunch which, this time, consisted of more ‘caviar’ and half a tin of crab each. During the meal he asked us
to introduce him to Miss April who, unlike her raven-haired parents, was a blonde. This was our opportunity.
‘We’ll get her to ask for the sightseeing tour,’ suggested Kenneth, ‘and she can insist that we come too.’
After lunch we went into the town once more. Under the warm sun the mud of the day before had once more turned to dust. Soon we became thirsty, but where to get a drink? A grubby little kiosk offered dubious-looking glasses of pink water. We decided to try the station buffet, but a woman barred the entrance snapping, ‘No buffet.’
Not far from the station was the Military Officers’ Club. This was described in the Great Siberian Guide as the most exclusive in town. Now, it was at least neater and cleaner than its surroundings, confirming the impression we had formed right through our journey that the armed forces, together with Party leaders, approved writers, artists and scientists formed the new Russian elite. Paying a rouble each at the door we went in.
The walks were lined with large amateurish portraits of Lenin, Stalin, Voroshilov and so on, rather like the work of an English pavement artist. Benches surviving from Tsarist times had been patched up with new slats and given a coat of paint. By the band stand, a trampled earthen floor was flanked by a placard which read ‘MASS DANCING’. Further on we came to a rifle range, and here the notice warned, ‘Bring your own gun’. A large rocking horse and some wooden cocks, arranged to be pushed along a set of rails, provided amusement for children. Behind a small cinema advertising an old propaganda film was a magnificent wooden loo with seating for twelve along a single wooden bench. Fortunately, there were no officers in it.
The club grounds were completely empty. It was in fact still exclusive, as the entrance fee of one rouble probably kept the inhabitants out except on special occasions, though the cartons trodden into the ground round the ice cream kiosk showed that there had been visitors at some time.
As we walked home, we noticed a hill which would afford us an excellent view of the harbour.
Baltic Countdown: A Nation Vanishes Page 21