by Jan Morris
26 Esoterica
When I was a child, and spent much of my time tracking the ships that came up the Bristol Channel, the most esoteric of the vessels I saw through my telescope were the small freighters, with high deck-cargoes of timber, that flew the flags of Latvia and Lithuania. I was vague about the localities of those countries, and entirely ignorant about their histories; and when long afterwards I set foot in them I was not much the wiser. Together with Estonia they were the only States of my Europe that were actually absorbed into the Soviet Union as constituent republics, after having been occupied by the Nazis in the Second World War; and although I reached them only after the collapse of Communism, when they had regained their interwar independence (more or less, because as in Tallinn Russians of one sort or another were still influential in their affairs), they remained for me the least familiar of all the countries of the continent. The process of de-Sovietization was more difficult there than anywhere. By 1996 the two capitals of Riga and Vilnius had gone a long way down the free-market road, and were becoming recognizably normal European cities; but looking for somewhere that would more truly illustrate the halfway condition of the republics, still emerging from Stalinism, I came to the Lithuanian industrial town of Šiauliai (Schaulen to the Germans) – particularly suitable to my purposes because in Soviet times it had been forbidden to all foreigners as the site of a strategically important base of the Red Air Force. I had never heard of it before.
I checked in at the main hotel, a dowdy high-rise that was built in Soviet times, might well be still Soviet-owned (nobody seemed to know), and had doggedly stuck to those old ways that I had begun to find nostalgic back on page 78: which is to say, streaked concrete, no heat, derelict telephone booths, dismal food, receptionists muffled in greatcoats, a Moscow chat show on the television, and a notice on the wall quoting different rates for Lithuanian citizens, citizens of the former USSR, and the rest of us. ‘Just what I wanted,’ said I to myself as the terrifyingly jerky lift carried me in spasms to my room. It was almost as though Lithuania had never achieved its independence at all, and when I went out for a morning walk I thought I might well be in some relatively prosperous township of the USSR ten years before, except that there were no statues of Stalin or Lenin.
Everything else was there. There were the monumental square office blocks of State, overlooking spacious squares with parks in them. There was the statutorily ornamental pedestrian highway, Vilniaus Street, running through the city centre, with various cultural institutions on it, and many benches for the well-earned refreshment of happy workers, and babushkas selling bananas. The crowning church of St Peter and St Paul, with its tall polygonal steeple, had been handsomely rebuilt – as a museum of atheism, perhaps? – and there were many manifestations of the whimsical humour that was meant to give a human face to Soviet Communism, like funny statues of rabbits, a stone shoe on a pillar, and a cat museum. Most of the factories, on the outskirts of town, were disused, deprived of their Soviet markets and left to languish. The former airbase was being turned into a free economic zone, but it gave me a shudder nevertheless, as I wandered among its shabby half-dereliction, its hangars and abandoned guardhouses, to imagine what kind of reception I would have had if I had strayed through its barricades in Stalin’s time.
But gradually, very gradually, the little Baltic States were finding an identity again, and so was Šiauliai. Here and there along Vilniaus Street very different institutions were arising. Cappuccino was available. Rock music blared from boutiques. Foreign businessmen ate expense-account lunches at smart new restaurants. Credit cards were accepted. Ravishing girls in miniskirts would never grow up to be babushkas. There was a bowling alley in the basement of Vilniaus 88, and you could eat quite a decent hamburger at 146. The Universaline department store still looked a bit Stalinist, but as the Business Advisory Centre’s Šiauliai At Your Fingertips indulgently suggested, it was ‘a good place to visit for nostalgic reasons’. Up at St Peter and St Paul five masses were celebrated every day.
At the end of the street, nevertheless, irreconcilably loomed my hotel. No cappuccino there, no country-and-western music. It was, in Šiauliai At Your Fingertips’s snide classification, ‘where most people stay if the other hotels are full’. At breakfast a long table covered with a brown velveteen cloth was occupied by twenty young Russian males, like visiting technicians from the old days, while at the end of the dim-lit room there sat alone in silence at her victuals a woman who might be typecast as a lady commissar: severe, spectacled, muscular, her hair in a bun, and her skirts long and heavy. A solitary waiter in shirtsleeves served us – thick black coffee (they were out of milk), fried eggs with peas, black bread and very good cheese. Halfway through the meal we were each given a bottle of Coca-Cola. Most of the men drank theirs there and then, in tandem with the coffee: but I noticed that when the lady commissar left the room, wiping her mouth fastidiously with her paper napkin, and studiously not looking anyone in the eye, she took hers with her.
27 At the pleasure gardens
My acquaintance with Denmark has been slight, and unsatisfactory. It is another of the small States that were once great Powers, and long ago I walked the streets of Danish imperialism in Tranquebar, on the Coromandel coast of India. There in the seventeenth century the Danes had founded a fort and trading colony, and although the plaster was peeled and the pilasters were crumbling, I could still discern the remains of Danesborg and Prins Christian Gade dreaming the centuries away. My introduction to the Danish motherland was scarcely less curious. In 1952 I attended a North Atlantic Treaty exercise designed to demonstrate how instantly the West could come to the support of the Scandinavian countries if ever the Soviet Union attacked them. Its climax was a landing by marines on a beach at Skagen, at the very tip of Jutland between the Kattegat and the Skagerrak, between the North Sea and the Baltic. This was my entry to Denmark, and I remember it largely because the battalion of the Danish Home Guard assigned to receive the landing went to the wrong place and appeared far too late, merrily huffing and puffing in its long greatcoats along the strand.
It is unfair, I know, but I suspect that this ridiculous episode was always subconsciously to colour my view of Denmark. It was a pleasant country, that was undeniable. Its landscape was genial, its architecture handsome, its people were generally honest and friendly. The things it made were beautiful. Its butters and bacons were tasty. Its National Museum was one of the best in Europe. Lego was a blessing to harassed parents around the world, and so were the tales of Hans Christian Andersen. Denmark’s behaviour during the Second World War had been exemplary (though there was no truth to the well-known legend that good King Christian X had appeared in public, during the Nazi occupation, wearing a Star of David on his sleeve – Danish Jews were not obliged to wear them anyway). Yet somehow it always seemed to me a. foolish place, and if this feeling was first inspired in me (I was young and somewhat militant in those days) by the spectacle of those part-time soldiers jokingly shambling along the beach, too late for the action, it was particularly reinforced over the years by the central position that the Tivoli Pleasure Gardens in Copenhagen appeared to occupy in the national psyche. Mention Copenhagen to almost anyone, Danish or foreign, and they would mention the Tivoli Pleasure Gardens in return. The gardens themselves were certainly agreeable, with their Chinese lanterns and flowered terraces, their swings and slot-machines and rifle-ranges and jolly orchestras playing far into the night. I have paid happy enough visits to the Tivoli Pleasure Gardens. But I have always found it childishly demeaning that they should stand at the very centre of Denmark’s life and reputation – Denmark, home of the Vikings, the country of Gorm the Old and Harald Bluetooth, which once sent its colonists to India and Africa, and its conquerors all across the icy northlands! That it should all come down to this, I used to think: tinkly music, clowns and fairy lights in the Tivoli Pleasure Gardens!
Besides, the public style of Denmark has never allured me. Nothing could be much more footling
, in my view, than the daily changing of the royal guard at the Amalienborg in Copenhagen, after the Tivoli the central Danish tourist spectacle. Most military displays appear pretty childish to me nowadays, but the Amalienborg ceremony seems deliberately designed to be absurd. The unfortunate men of the guard look as though they are officially trained to impersonate toy soldiers, with their white cross-belting, striped blue trousers, heaps of buttons and preposterously exaggerated bearskin hats. The bandmasters stamp about like parodies of sergeant-majors. When some of the more diminutive officers, dwarfed by their bearskins, march in an embarrassed way around the ranks, or fiercely draw their swords in salute, I find it hard not to think of them as comics in a farce.
Something sugary, something whimsical about this culture turns me off. Jazz, which seems silly in the hands of most Europeans, seems silliest of all in the hands of middle-ageing Danes. The chain of Copenhagen pedestrian streets called Strøget, the most famous shopping precinct in Denmark, is dominated by a tawdry-glitz sort of capitalism and frequented by the trendiest kind of street performer – the sort that plays Peruvian pipes or performs incomprehensible mimes. The very titles of Denmark’s favourite fairy tales say it all for me – ‘The Little Matchgirl’ – ‘Little Claus and Big Claus’ – ‘The Steadfast Tin Soldier’ – ‘The Rose-Elf’. I sympathize with the vandal who climbed out one day to the statue of The Little Mermaid, sitting prettily on a rock in the harbour, and sawed her head off. But there we are: perhaps I am not made for Hans Christian Andersen. Perhaps I am the Brothers Grimm type! Danish humour has never much amused me. I do not respond to the national taste for japes and winsomeness, or its reliance on charm and pixie-lore. I have repeatedly tried to make myself enjoy Denmark, but have failed so far: such is the power of unfair prejudice – and the unfairer, perhaps, the more powerful.
28 No owls in Iceland
I feel very differently about another of Denmark’s former possessions, Iceland. I have felt happily at home in Iceland. I certainly do not mean at home in its landscapes, which are almost hallucinatorily alien, scarred with terrible glaciers, spouting all over the place into hot springs and volcanoes – an eighth of Iceland is one immense snowfield, and down the years I have myself watched the island of Surtsey, off the south-east coast, maturing from a plume of fiery smoke in the sea to a sizeable piece of new Icelandic territory. I mean I have felt at ease with the national outlook. Iceland is not in the least insular, in any pejorative sense. Nor does it seem, when you get there, particularly remote. Reykjavik feels just up the road from Edinburgh, where many citizens go for their Christmas shopping. I arrived once on the same aircraft as a well-known Swedish tenor, who had come to perform in an oratorio and would be popping back to Stockholm again next morning. The harpist of the Iceland Philharmonic is traditionally recruited in Wales, and on my very first visit to the republic, when I dined with the British Ambassador, he told me that the night before he had thrown a whisky bottle at the Icelandic Foreign Minister – as though they had been enjoying a rather too rowdy evening at the Students’ Union.
The Icelanders are something like the rest of us, but not much. Descended about equally from Celts and Vikings, sometimes they look gently poetical, sometimes so loutish that they ought to be wearing horned helmets. Beauty and the Beast is a true Icelandic allegory. I have repeatedly been stopped short in Iceland by some totally unexpected dead end of behaviour or comment. Years ago I bought in Reykjavik a copy of Horrebow’s Natural History of Iceland, published in an English translation in 1758. For the most part it is an archetypal work of the Age of Reason, arranged in chapters uniformly named and rationally argued –‘Concerning Earthworks in Iceland’, ‘Concerning Forests in Iceland’, ‘Concerning Horses’, ‘Concerning Butter and Cheese’ – but Chapter 17 is a more characteristically Icelandic entry. ‘Concerning Owls in Iceland’ is its heading, and it consists in its entirety of the following minimalist analysis: ‘There are no owls of any kind in the whole island.’
29 Which was the illusion?
I loved this odd streak in the Icelanders from the start. Many peoples suppose themselves extraordinary, and boast of being ‘quite, quite mad’, but the only ones who really seemed to me nationally, generically eccentric were the people of Iceland. Perhaps the long northern winters were the cause, or the cage of the winds above. Gargantuan toasts, awful hangovers, free love, sexy high spirits, gallons of coffee, throwing bottles at one another, sleeping round the clock – all these things I came to associate with the Icelanders. Their ancient language, the core of their nationality, was surrounded by a mystic exaltation, not without comedy. Bards abounded, people launched themselves without warning into poetic declamation, and strangers spoke of characters in the sagas, Grimur Goatbeard or Leif the Lucky, as though they were neighbours up the road.
One evening in Akureyri, on the northern coast, I heard the sound of solemn singing emerging from a restaurant, and peering through the door I saw that a large party was in progress. There the Icelanders sat in ordered ranks, their arms linked around the long tables, and as they sang what sounded like some sort of sacramental anthem they swayed heavily from side to side in a rhythmic motion. It gave me a queer impression of private solidarity – Iceland all over. Everybody knew the words of the song, and the whole assembly seemed to be in arcane collusion. I noticed that if ever I caught an eye, as the celebrants sang and swayed there at the tables, after a moment’s puzzled focusing it abruptly switched away from me, as if to dismiss an illusion.
30 Labyrinths
I suppose the Romanians are almost as odd as the Icelanders. I did not get to Romania until 1994, but I felt I knew them well already. They were Frenchified Latins, peculiarly implanted among the Slavs of the East, and they were famously raffish, intriguing, high-flown, unpredictable and unreliable. At first it seemed to me that most of their conversations concerned tunnels. Tunnels apparently played a large part in Romanian history, as they figured largely still in their affairs – tunnels of love, tunnels of escape, rumoured conspiratorial tunnels. Tunnel-talk was everywhere. The whole Romanian mind-cast, it seemed to me, was tunnelly. The appalling dictator Nicolae Ceauşescu and his no less frightful wife had been dead for five years, but many of their associates were still in the Government, and every manner of twist and mayhem still complicated the corridors of power, making them feel subterranean too.
Ignorant as I was, I was dazed by the complexity of Romanian allusions. Which was Moldova and which Moldavia? What was the difference between Iron Guardists and Legionnaires? Was the Trans-Dniester issue the same as the Trans-Istria question? What was the Romanian Orthodox attitude to the matter of Bessarabia, and how did Catholics feel about the return of King Mihal? Was King Mihal the same as King Michael? Who were the Szekels? Louche but devout, often elegant in a feline way – with women tram-drivers smoking on the job, and headscarved babushkas sweeping leaves – with vulpine sellers of medicinal roots and peasants in high fur hats – with cinematic rogues, coats over their shoulders, trying to cheat you with financial transactions – with slyly evasive bureaucrats and delightfully cynical historians – with conversations bafflingly opaque, and memories almost fictionally improbable – the Romanians struck me as a cavalcade of everything I thought of as most unchangeably Balkan. While I was in the country the head of the national intelligence bureau declared Romania to be under threat from Legionnaires, Iron Guardists, international terrorism, organized crime, extreme leftists, Hungarian autonomists and the secret services of Russia, Ukraine, Hungary and Moldova. The fate of all Europe, he said, depended upon the solution of the Trans-Dniester issue.
31 Six reasons
One day I was given six different reasons why I might not enter Peleş Castle, the former palace of the Romanian kings and queens at Sinaia:
(1) It was being rebuilt.
(2) There had been a robbery in it.
(3) An inventory was being conducted.
(4) It was about to be visited by President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt.
(5) It had lately been visited by President Saparmurad Niyazov of Turkmenistan.
(6) It was closed.
32 Nico o problema
Nevertheless the Romanians, who are lived among by large communities of Hungarians, and are all wound about by Gypsies like a plant enmeshed in the tendrils of a parasite, despite their neuroses are charmingly welcoming to the stranger. Walking one day past the gloriously baroque Central House of the Army in Bucharest, a marvel of elaboration in the very heart of the Paris of the Balkans, I noticed that its ground floor appeared to be a restaurant. I breezed in through the revolving doors and asked if I could bring some guests to dinner. ‘Nico o problema,’ they said at once with the well-matured smile Romanians specialize in, and sure enough that night, with a jolly crew of acquaintances, I found myself sitting there, to the deafeningly amplified thump of a band, eating pike-perch from the Danube and drinking a happy Riesling from Moldavia (as against Moldova, I think). And when I once blundered into the headquarters of the Romanian Writers’ Union, for decades a tribunal of Communist orthodoxy, I was allowed to wander as I wished, bemused and unhindered, through the accumulated cigar-smoke of a thousand ideological debates, amiably nodded at now and then by marvellously literary-looking confrères.
