Leopold Baranowski, ex-submarine officer in charge of the torpedoes, takes me to visit the B-413 submarine parked at the dock. He traveled underwater for more than twenty years, from 1960 to 1982, in all the seas of the world. “I’ve seen your hometown, too, through the periscope,” he says to me about Trieste.
“Your defenses were excellent,” he continues, but complains that Western films about Russian submarines are all nonsense. “Even the Russian films are all lies. The only realistic one that I’ve seen is German, entitled Das Boot.” I ask him how long he used to go without seeing the sunlight. “Up to six months.” How did you do it? “Today, I ask myself that same question.” While we’re in the wardroom, two steps away from the periscope, we hear a ticking sound like a pounding rain that takes possession of the hull. “It’s nothing,” Leopold smiles, “it’s just another ship passing nearby.” Kaliningrad by itself is worth a journey.
In the square with the monument to the fallen of 1941–45, there’s Andrei, twenty-two, just named midshipman, in a white uniform and dress sword, who waves a bunch of fuchsia-colored flowers in our faces to invite us to drink shampanskoye with his friends. He has just disembarked in Murmansk from the missile launcher Peter the Great, where he put his studies of ballistics to use, and he is celebrating his promotion with a group of young aspiring officers. I tell him that I have a son by the same name. Then I add that my father was also an officer. Right away he asks me if my father fought on Hitler’s side, a question that is as naive as you like, but unavoidable. “Da,” I reply. Yes. “Sometimes,” I explain, “it happens that you fight on the wrong side. But he was an officer and a gentleman. And in any case, he was a good father.”
Sorry to have embarrassed me, the young man in uniform whispers sweetly, “I understand.” Then he raises his glass again and proclaims to his friends, to us, to the city: “I love you. I love you, and I carry you in my heart.” I’m not sure any Western soldier would say something like that, especially in the presence of strangers. Meanwhile, at the base at Baltiysk, eighteen miles from the city, on this side of the big sand dune that closes the Baltic, Putin’s nuclear submarines, lined up like glistening mackerel on a fish stand, put the West on notice that the Bear never sleeps.
I’ve already talked about the marvel of Russian trains, the small strawberry- or pistachio-colored stations where they stop in the middle of the forest, their steaming samovars, the original geometry of their bunks, and the endless, orderly picnics that are consumed on board long-distance runs under the watchful eyes of a maternal hostess who takes everyone and everything under her wing.
What I haven’t mentioned yet is the magnificence of their tickets, decorated like banknotes, solemnly titled Travel Document, sheathed in a multicolored sleeve, perfect souvenirs with your revered name in Cyrillic, departure and arrival times, your passport number, and a plethora of data that make them irreplaceable documents of your life. Nothing can compare to them except perhaps the stamps applied to your visa. They are so baroquely beautiful that I have gathered them all in a case, which I keep in the stationery compartment of my pack. The ticket purchased for the ride from Petrozavodsk to Saint Petersburg–Ladozkaya, along the border strip with Finland, is a light primrose pink, with a pompous script RELEASE near the top in perfectly matched brown Cyrillic, and on the lower right, the signature of the ticket vendor, rich with Victorian swirls. The route from Olenegorsk to Kyem, the embarcadero for the Solovetsky Islands, is represented by a prune-colored card with flaming red decorations, and on the left a golden yellow icon, like a coin, bearing an image of the locomotive of the new Russia, racing toward the future. The sleeve of the tickets issued at the central station in Kaliningrad features a map of Russia with a radiant sun in the center, and it changes color progressively from one side to the other with all the shades of the rainbow. It’s as though all the pride of the nation were concentrated in these pieces of paper.
But the tickets are nothing compared to the ticket booths of the former Soviet empire. In Russia, a ticket vendor—more often than not a woman—is a ranking public official to whom you must address yourself with respect. The people’s deferential attitude in front of a ticket window is one of the most interesting things to be seen around these parts. Already in Murmansk, Olenegorsk, and Saint Petersburg, the lines had taught me a different—much slower—dimension of time, with flexible working hours interrupted by microintervals for union breaks (one every forty-five minutes). But it wasn’t until Kaliningrad that I understood their complex operations.
We go to the station to buy two tickets to Warsaw, and we get into one of the five lines in front of five open ticket windows. Right away, the woman in front of us politely explains that she is in line for six other persons and so we should evaluate our waiting time accordingly. Then, without any preliminaries, she offers to wait on line for me too and explains that if I, by getting into another line, were to save a place for her and the others, she would be infinitely grateful.
Monika, who understands the language, immediately agrees to take part in the game, and invites me to do the same. Instantly, the mechanism is revealed. In front of the ticket windows, a strategy of “one for all, all for one” has developed in response to the uncertainty of the pee-pee breaks of the ticket vendor.
A rugby scrum could not play out any better. The five lines are processed in perfect order as though they were only one. Nobody tries to sneak in front of anybody else. I don’t know what generates this solidarity. Maybe a compassion born of a great shared pain, the suffering of a people that has experienced a century of horrors, which have left their mark on the soul. The fact remains that even the ticket vendor, faced with a stammering foreigner, me, is moved and does everything she can to help me. “Departure is at 6:30 p.m., but that is Moscow time, so you have to be here by 5:30.” And then, with a maternal gaze, “Be sure to have your passports ready, the train is on platform six.”
When I see it, I can’t believe it. The train for Poland sitting on platform six—the Kaliningrad–Gdynia–Berlin with a change in Malbork for Warsaw—is not the usual interminable procession of cars with which I crossed the tundra and the boreal taiga to get to the Baltic. It’s a sort of commuter train, small and half empty, that quickly heads toward the coastal dunes emanating terrifying noises—barks, snarls, howls, and trombone toots, a kind of concert of ghosts, a wailing of the dead that drifts across immense fields of grain, whizzes by freight yards, mountains of coal, barbed-wire fences, towers, searchlights, control bridges, and finally the windswept dunes of the Baltic, and it seems to be taking us to the ends of the Earth.
I don’t realize right away that this is a train for small-time smugglers. But when we come into the station at Braniewo—classic Prussian red brick—and the Polish customs police erupt into the car with electric screwdrivers to dismantle the bulkheads above the baggage racks and the passenger seats, I understand that this is hardball. It’s not just a customs check; it’s a face-to-face stare-down between cultures. The Russian rail personnel and the Polish police each know the language of the other, know it perfectly, but there’s no way they’ll speak it. At this checkpoint along the “wall” of united Europe, maybe they both know that they’re going through the motions to nab chicken stealers while leaving untouched the most dangerous mafia in the world.
Meanwhile, as cartons of cigarettes are popping out, even from under my seat, there begins a sequester of food. Because all food products not labeled EU are considered “impure,” sandwiches, hams, sweets, and salamis—all homemade—have to be eaten right there or thrown into a dump outside the train. Obviously, the passengers all eat as much as they can, and the car is transformed into a frantic picnic, to which the Russians invite me, too, so as not to throw away their God-given bounty. The smell of onion and cheese and the sounds of unfolding paper and munching jaws fill the train. The Polish soldiers perform this odious part of their duty with ascetic professionalism. No insults, at least, unlike when Albanians arrive in Italy and are treated like pack animals.