At platform ten of the Vilnius station, the problem is not boarding but getting off, because this is the corridor that connects the two Russias. It feels as though we were at Tempelhof Airport during the Cold War, when it was the only transport facility that kept Berlin in contact with the West. This border crossing for Kaliningrad is exactly the kind of frontier I’ve been looking for, a tough frontier, one of those old-fashioned borders that, since the Schengen Accords, we are no longer used to crossing. There are only two stations, both highly guarded, between the Lithuanian capital and the Russian territory on the Baltic, but just the same, some clever daredevils occasionally manage to get by the police. All that has to happen is for the train to slow down to around thirty miles an hour, and some shadowy figures start slipping out through the windows. That is why, I’m told, the tracks are constantly checked and repaired: to leave no alibis for unscheduled stops or slowdowns.
I can see my shadow projected as though by a magic lantern from the still-illuminated window out toward the thick of the woods. The train is painted green and flaming red, like those pretty czarist uniforms in the film War and Peace.
With their immaculate sheets and mothering female conductors, Russian trains coddle and reassure, even here on the road to Königsberg, the city of Kant, now a place for submarines, contraband, and secret services. I have arrived here without touching either Tallinn or Riga, too far from my border-skirting itinerary.
But now, for the journey to be complete, I have to make a long detour and go to K Town. I couldn’t miss Kaliningrad, the island of the recluses, surrounded by fortress Europe. In order to get there, I had to procure for myself, not without some difficulty, a double entry visa stamped on my passport.
I ask the conductress for a tea, and I buy a packet of Bolshevik cookies, in a red and yellow wrapper. Everybody on board is snoring. The corridor is empty except for one woman, on her feet, watching the sun come up between the Baltic clouds, nibbling on a chocolate bar. She says to Monika, “The others are sleeping, but I can’t. Lithuania makes me anxious. There is a strange relationship between the two police forces. They help each other out, and they always know where to look.” She tells us that at the border station between Belarus and Vilnius, the police went directly to wake up a young guy, who was sleeping like a rock. Only him. Then they threw him off the train. Some days ago, they caught a man with fifty pounds of amber, and his was the only bag they opened in the whole compartment.
In Nesterov, lost in the mountains ninety miles east of Kaliningrad, the customs officers search under the train with a mirror. Then at the border, there’s a general mobilization. Railroad security, tax police, army. The Lithuanians come aboard with a wolf-dog, then with a strange team of men who go looking for something with a magnifying glass. Then it’s the Russians’ turn. A policewoman with a long blond braid scrutinizes our documents with another magnifying glass and then again with a sensor. Finally she spells our surnames into her walkie-talkie.
Twenty seconds later, from the other end, crystal clear, maybe even from Moscow itself, there arrives a blunt nyet. There is nothing negative in our records, and I can feel that K Town is already capturing us like an insect inside a drop of amber. Then once again, we’re off, in the rain, toward the Baltic and the former East Prussia.
“Kaliningrad, Kaliningrad Station, prepare to detrain,” the conductress notifies us, as she comes by to collect the last sheets and pillowcases. Just outside the station, decorated with marble and fountains, K Town announces itself with fantastic visions. Submarines in the rain, sandhills, Prussian spires, a sky brewing like a kettle of ink. An elegantly refined old couple—he, bow tie; she, a silver pagoda hairdo; both in cream-colored suits, shoes included—who disappear inside an enormous black Volga. Young pallid women striding long and briskly into the wind. My bloodred hands, from the overripe strawberries purchased from a peasant woman, and the station with a huge clock displaying the hour of the lord and master, Moscow. We could be in 1950s Monte Carlo if it weren’t for a certain odor of herring and this Jewish sky out of Fiddler on the Roof.
What a surprise. The recluse island is not at all a desperate relic of the Khrushchev era. Detached from Mother Russia, surrounded on all sides by the star-spangled banner of the EU, it shows no traces of claustrophobia, despite the vexations of the Lithuanians, who have imposed a transit visa even on those Russians who, to reach it by land, must cross the territory of the EU without getting off the train. We’ve never seen as many stretch limousines as here, as many shopping centers, ATMs. This western outpost of the former empire, Putin’s favorite city, is living the easy life. The chief of the new Russia found his wife here, invests his rubles here, and here he has decided to play out his hand by dropping his strongest card: a military base in the middle of the West, like the eye in the huge head of a whale.
Let’s decline it then, the consonant of destiny. K as in Königsberg, to start with. Its old Baltic name, perfumed with sailing ships and merchandise. K as in Kaliningrad, today’s Soviet name, stuck on in 1945 to immortalize Comrade Mikhail Kalinin, who never visited it and became president of the USSR by vaunting his merit in having let his wife die in a Gulag. K as in Królewiec, the name given by the Poles to the most closed city in Europe, capital of the only piece of Russia detached from the Great Mother. An armor-plated planet sealed off from the world, half the size of Belgium, which the enlargement of the European Union has isolated even more than in the times of Leonid Brezhnev.
But K is also for Krieg, the war, the Second World War, which exterminated the Baltic Jews, forced the Prussians to escape, and reduced the cities to rubble. K is Kommunismus, the big freeze, which completed the job begun by the Allied bombers, deported the region’s inhabitants, militarized the territory, swept away its memory. Yet again, K as in Koka-Kola, symbol of the capital that today governs an enclave where everything is bought and sold: women, oil, nuclear warheads. Finally, K as in Kant. Immanuel Kant, founding father of modern thought and quintessence of German rigor. The philosopher is back in vogue in this advance outpost of the ex-USSR. He can be resuscitated partly because his memory has never truly been banned. Lenin did not fail to appreciate the German philosopher, and Stalin—having conquered the city—saved his tomb from demolition. Today, his shadow is reemerging, becoming a symbol of the West, perhaps the only one possible in a city deprived of its history. He is becoming a symbol partly because of the children of the population that was forced to immigrate here after the eviction of the natives. New-generation kids, like Lyudmila Putin, born here to a family of “alien” immigrants.
Today the newlyweds of Kaliningrad place flowers on the red granite stone that covers the remains of the great sage, behind an old redbrick Protestant church. Kant didn’t spend much time in churches. He contemplated the starry skies above him, and this caused him problems with the bigoted king of Prussia. Today there are those who come here to touch his death mask as though it were a good luck charm, not knowing that it is only a copy of the original, conserved in the University of Tartu, in Estonia. But that doesn’t much matter. Few people here have read a line of The Critique of Pure Reason, but that’s not important, either. Kant is an immanent thought, a shade who oversees the fascinating and terrible destiny of his city.
But K is also for Kristina, a twenty-year-old woman who invites us to stay at her house and picks us up at the station with a friend. She studies international relations (her friend, design), has an apartment with a bay window in the “good” part of the city, dreams of the great wide world, and flies to Berlin for weekends.