To the outside observer, this country can feel like a chaotic and unruly place. But that sense is not exclusive to those looking from elsewhere. Russians too are deeply aware of it. Perhaps, as Mikhail suggested, the country’s size is partly to blame. It feels too vast and too disparate to be managed. But what’s notable, regardless of the reason, is the extent to which, despite the upheavals the country went through at the beginning and end of the twentieth century, the nature of politics and power in Russia has remained the same, concentrated to a very great extent in the hands of one person. This is a country in which democracy is viewed by many as too unstable a system, the constant flip-flopping of power inconsistent with the desire and demand for order. It is a country that seems, constantly, to be battling with itself.
Nowhere else is this conflict between order and chaos so apparent as here in St Petersburg (of which both Putin and his right hand man Dmitry Medvedev are natives). This city was, from its very beginning, an imposition of order upon the chaotic land, a manifestation of human will and imperial power. Peter the Great imposed straight lines upon the islands and swamps of the Neva delta. He imagined canals where streams had run, he drew streets through the mud. The magnificence of this city was a direct response to the difficulty of its location. It was an act of defiance, not just against Russia’s neighbours but against the country’s own terrain. St Petersburg was conceived as an ideal city, but for a long time it remained a battleground, where flood and fire threatened to destroy what humans had created. And frequently, as Pushkin’s poem describes, it was people who were on the losing side. Today, that battle feels less like one of man against nature than of man’s desire for order against the chaos he creates: the chaos of poverty and corruption, of squalor and discontent, versus the order of authoritarianism and political power, of clean streets and brightly painted buildings.
On a drizzly afternoon I visited a museum dedicated to the short life of Alexander Pushkin, housed in the last building in which the poet lived, close to Palace Square. There were paintings, letters and furniture, as well as glass-fronted displays that recreated and retold episodes from his childhood in Moscow to the duel he fought in St Petersburg in 1837, in which he was shot and fatally wounded, dying two days later. The museum was cold and dusty, and when a stray column of light pierced the windows, I could see the motes glitter like a shoal of tiny raindrops, suspended. The place was virtually empty, apart from its staff – an army of elderly women, dressed in greys, browns and beige. By each doorway in the many rooms was a stool, and on each stool sat one of these women. As I walked through the museum, I felt their eyes follow me, observing everything. I noticed too that in every room, as I replaced the laminated information sheets provided in English, one of these attendants would swoop in to check the paper and to straighten it. I sensed a tut of disapproval following me as I walked, and I began to feel that, by being there, by lifting those sheets and then returning them, I was creating havoc.
I took to straightening the pages myself on the display cases, leaving them just as I had found them. I took care to ensure that each page was perfectly aligned, so that no fault could be found. Lingering close to the doorways I noted that the staff were still unable to resist their impulses. As I moved on, an attendant would invariably appear, approach the paper, only to find it just as it ought to be. Silently she would return to her seat, looking even more dissatisfied. Watching this strange ritual, I realised that the care I was taking was not what they had been hoping for at all. Their desire was not for straightness, it was for straightening. They did not wish to find order, but to impose it. I left them to it, then, and headed back out into the rain.
I decided to take a train to the north. I wanted to cross the parallel, which lies towards the edge of the city, but also to escape the noise and commotion for a few hours. I chose as my destination the village of Repino, almost, but not quite, at random. A resort on the Gulf of Finland, about twenty miles from the centre of St Petersburg, it seemed, I suppose, as good as anywhere. It had a museum dedicated to the artist Ilya Repin, after whom the village is named, and it would also have a view over the sea, which seemed like a good antidote to my urban weariness.
I found my way to Finland Station, the place where Lenin had returned to Russia in 1917 after his years in European exile, and where his statue still stands, draped in garlands of pigeon shit. After a discussion with the ticket vendor that was longer and more arduous than either of us would have liked, I found myself a space in a busy carriage. Squeezed in together on yellow plastic benches, my fellow travellers were babushkas doing crossword puzzles and young families shouting at each other, most seemingly on their way to weekend cottages in the country.
As the train pulled out from the station, an odd procession of people began to enter the carriage, all with goods to sell. First there was a selection of ice creams, then magazines and puzzle books, fake amber bracelets, torches, waterproof overalls, Russian and pirate flags, and jumping plastic spiders. As each seller arrived, they would stand at one end of the carriage and shout a sales pitch, like an air steward doing a safety demonstration. Then they would walk down the aisle in search of customers, though few appeared to sell anything at all. Some were good at their job, managing to be both loud and charming, but others seemed nervous – too quiet, or jittery, even. Perhaps they were new at the job, or perhaps it was just the latest in a line of failed careers. The worst of these vendors seemed pathetic and humiliated, as though worn down by the effort of the task.
Rumbling north, the train passed a succession of bleak industrial estates, some of which looked long abandoned. Crumbling factories, warehouses and chimneys; acres of rust and decay. Three inspectors arrived in the carriage then, with the smart uniform and menace of soldiers. Everyone hurried at once to find their tickets.
I showed mine and then closed my eyes for a moment to rest. When I opened them again we were among pines and grey-skinned birches. Here and there amid the forest a few houses could be seen, and sometimes a gathering of dachas. Some of these looked ramshackle and close to collapse, many years since their last encounter with paint. But others were smart and well-tended, with roses blooming all about. These dachas have long been a part of Russian life. In the eighteenth century they were gifts bestowed by the tsar upon loyal allies, country houses and estates to which ordinary people could never aspire. But after the revolution, when properties were nationalised, the Soviet authorities began to distribute them to community organisations. Restrictions were imposed on the size of dachas and their gardens in order to maintain the appearance of equality, and by the 1990s, when they were privatised once again, a great many families had one, usually on the outskirts of the city in which they lived. These dachas were used not just as retreats, where people could escape from the city at weekends and during holidays, but equally importantly, their gardens allowed people to provide themselves with vegetables and fruit, commodities that were often hard to come by during the food shortages that afflicted the country.
From the station at Repino I crossed the tracks to where a car park and a large modern building – half restaurant, half supermarket – stood. I looked around, in search of a direction. I was intending, somewhat vaguely, to find Penaty, the former home and studio of Ilya Repin. This is where he lived from the late nineteenth century until his death in 1930. When the area was ceded to Russia in the 1940s (it had previously been part of the Duchy of Finland, in the Russian Empire) it was named after its former resident.
Repin had been the most important and influential of the Wanderers, a group of artists dedicated to portraying the social problems and realities of their country. His most famous painting, Barge Haulers on the Volga, hangs now in the Russian Museum in St Petersburg. It portrays a group of peasants dragging a boat up the river, ropes tied over their shoulders. The faces of the men tell the story: of oppression, suffering and deprivation. The image is both beautiful and horrifying at once, a vision of social injustice that is, also, an explicit demand for cha
nge.
Repino seemed like a small place, but I had no map and there were no obvious signs that might point me in the right direction. Having walked back and forth around the building for a few moments, I returned to the car park, where elderly women were selling fruit and vegetables from pots and buckets on the street. In one corner of the car park was a noticeboard, and I scoured it for something helpful. Among a plethora of signs, I found one that was in English. It said, simply, ‘This Way’, with an arrow that pointed towards a lane in the forest. Other than these two words there was nothing I could understand. Nor was there anything to indicate what might be found in that direction. But since I had plenty of time and nowhere in particular to go, I followed it, enjoying the absence of logic in my choice. ‘This Way’ could lead anywhere at all, but anywhere was better than nowhere, and so I continued. I followed the path down the hill between the trees, noting the myriad little trails that branched off into the forest, to places unseen and unknown. A light rain shivered among the pines and dribbled down my neck and shoulders.
When I reached the end of the path another road lay in front of me. Beyond, I could see the sun glittering on the Gulf of Finland. I turned right and walked along the shore path. A wide golden beach stretches along this part of the coast, and offers somewhere to stroll for the spa visitors and rich dacha or apartment owners. Above the beach, expensive restaurants and hotels mingled with brand new apartments, some unfinished and advertising for owners. There was plenty of money in this town, it seemed. From the beach I looked out over the water, then turned to see the outline of the city to the south east, with the glittering dome of St Isaac’s Cathedral clearly visible at its centre.
When the spas and restaurants thinned out I stopped and turned round, then tried the other direction. My feet and legs were getting wet and coated with sand from the path, and I was beginning to feel disheartened. Once or twice I walked down from the road to the beach to see if I could locate the museum from the sea side, but I couldn’t, and so I just continued walking. Again, when the buildings thinned out I returned to where I’d first emerged from the forest. Without much thought I took another road that led away from the water, but again, in the end, I turned back without success. Twice I stopped to ask fellow walkers where I might find the museum, but each time I was met with a shake of the head and a ‘Nyet!’ It was impossible to know whether they’d failed to understand or whether they didn’t know the answer. Or whether, even, they just didn’t want to tell me.
By then I’d been walking for more than two hours and I still had no idea where I was going. I was searching for a building that I’d never seen before, in a place I didn’t know, without a map, without directions, without a single clue. I realised then that I wasn’t going to get there. I wasn’t going to find what I was looking for.
Deflated, I walked back through the trees to the place where I had begun, at the restaurant and supermarket. My feet were damp and muddy and sandy. I felt hungry and irritated. I looked again at the noticeboard and its little arrow saying ‘This way’, and I made a mental note: the only sign you are able to read is not necessarily the right one.
Crossing the road back to the station, I stood on the platform waiting for the next train. Beside me, an elderly couple talked quietly to each other. In his hands, the man held a wicker basket, brimming with fat, golden mushrooms, plucked from the forest. Together we made our way back towards the city.
On a Sunday afternoon, in dappled sunshine, I stopped for a coffee on Yelagin Island, to the north of the city centre. The island is a popular weekend destination, a wooded park, with young people rollerblading and families out walking. Half-tame squirrels roamed the pathways, pursued by screeching children. The deciduous trees were turning bronze and yellow, smouldering among the evergreens, and a chilly wind brought leaves and acorns tumbling to the ground.
I sat in the café courtyard looking out at a large metal cage, just across the path. The cage held three ravens, for the amusement of customers, most of whom ignored them. The birds stood apart from one another, each staring out in a different direction. They watched as people passed by, and sometimes they cawed pathetically out towards the trees. But there was nothing that could respond. There were no other ravens around. Everywhere I had travelled on the sixtieth parallel I had seen ravens. They are the great circumpolar bird, the avian natives of the north. At times they had felt rather like companions on this journey, and until that moment I had always found pleasure in the sight of them. Playful and intelligent, graceful and violent, they are creatures of both dreams and nightmares; they are scavengers and acrobats, murderers and artists, tricksters and prophets. I could not help but feel depressed by the sight of those three individuals, calling out to their imagined kindred. For them, home would always be in clear sight, but forever unreachable.
Like many people, I find myself both attracted and repelled by cities. I am drawn in by the choices they offer and by the freedom they promise, but I am left sometimes feeling lonely, particularly on short visits such as this one. In cities I can be struck, without warning, by a sense of alienation and by a feeling that, while there, I am separated from something important, or essential, even. When I finished university I moved, almost by accident, to Prague. I went for a month to train as a teacher of English as a foreign language, but at the end of my course I was offered a job and decided to stay. And so with little more than a shrug of my shoulders I found myself a resident of one of the most beautiful cities in Europe. It is a city that, over the year that followed, I came to know and to think of with intense fondness.
That year was one of the happiest of my life, but it was also one of the most surprising. Surprising because, in the midst of that happiness, caught up in the novelty of being where I was, something began to niggle at me. It was at first only a minor distraction, an encroachment on my least occupied moments, when my thoughts would turn north without warning. But it grew. Steadily, certainly, those thoughts grew. Until, in the end, I was almost obsessed. And this was not some vague, undirected nostalgia. This was not the ache I had known since I was ten years old. This was homesickness. It was a longing for one specific place: Shetland.
Though I had called the islands home for a long time by then, I don’t think I had ever really imagined them as such. For years Shetland was just the place in which my family lived, and in which I stayed not really by choice but by necessity. It was not until I was in Prague that I really began to think about home, about what that word meant and why. ‘Where are you from?’ people would ask. ‘I am from Shetland,’ I said. But what did I mean by that? What did that ‘from’ imply, beyond the bare fact of my former residence in an archipelago of that name?
In Prague it occurred to me, I think for the first time, that it really did mean something. Previously my nostalgia had always been for things I couldn’t bring back: for a childhood that was gone, in a place that would never be home again, with a father who was dead. But suddenly I understood that there was more to it: a bond I had not recognised before, or had refused to see. It was a thread or a leash, even, with me at one end and the islands at the other. Mad as it may seem, the thought that my homesickness could be pinned to a real place – to the place, indeed, that had been home for most of my life – was revelatory. I felt much as those ravens might feel if, after years of calling out hopelessly into the forest, they found that their cage door had been open all along. And so, after my year in Prague was up, I went home. And that, I suppose, was all I had ever wanted to do.
FINLAND and ÅLAND
neither one thing nor the other
Through a narrow crack in the curtains, I could see the morning coming to life. It was after eight but the sky was still dim, and paled by a haze of snow. From outside I could hear the squeal of metal on tarmac as ploughs roamed the streets, carving smooth trails through the night’s fall. I drew the covers close around me and lay there in bed, listening, until I felt ready for the day.
I rose and showered, then reached into my
bag for clothes. I pulled on two T-shirts, two pairs of socks, a pair of thermal long-johns, jeans and a thick, woollen jumper, then my jacket, scarf, hat and gloves. It was a ritual I undertook with anticipatory pleasure, because I like the cold. Not the blustery, biting chill of Shetland, but the calm, still degrees just below zero; the cold that fully fills the air, and necessitates the wearing of ‘sensible clothes’. There is a cleanness to it, and a satisfaction that comes with the knowledge that it can be held at bay. The slap of frozen air against the face; the sharp gasp, deep in the lungs; the sting of pleasure that puckers the skin. It is as sensual and reviving as the thickest of tropical heats, and though I felt well-padded and well-prepared, I was looking forward to that first gulp of frost.
The town of Ekenäs lies at the very tip of Finland, southwest of Helsinki, where the body of the country peters out in a splutter of islets and skerries. In summer it is a tourist resort, offering access to the national park that sprawls across 5,000 hectares of the region’s archipelago. Campers, kayakers, walkers and anglers can all find their fun around these shores. But in winter things are different. In winter it feels like a town waiting for something to happen. At half past nine, as I left the hotel, the light was still tentative, and though the flurries of early morning had ceased, an iron sky was glowering above. After the frantic rush of St Petersburg, Ekenäs was a haven of quiet. The snow muffled and dampened all noise. It gathered and enclosed, covered and concealed. It swaddled the town like the scarves and jackets that swaddled its red-faced pedestrians. Such weather insists on movement, on the necessity of keeping warm by activity, but thick clothing and icy pavements insist otherwise, and make moving difficult. So with heads bowed, the town’s walkers hurried, slowly, in their various directions, breath billowing in the morning air.
Sixty Degrees North Page 15