He laughed and we went inside. I paid for twenty liters, then trotted briskly back to the car: in Russian gas stations, you pay the attendant for the gas, then she (usually) dials it up on a sort of telephone gadget, which turns the hose on — the sudden jolt of pressure frequently spraying your purchase all over the place. But in this case my run was purely for form; Intourist had given me a full tank, so most of what I'd bought was spilled anyway.
When I was finished, I put the hose back and pulled over to one side of the lot. I was still in the light here, but at the very edge of its arc, and as cars and trucks moved in and out of the service area they hid me from anyone inside the booth.
I went around and opened the hood. The oily warmth of the engine swelled up at my face and the snow hissed on the block. I checked the dipstick; it was fine. I wiggled the battery connections; terrific. But then, apparently discovering something wrong, I returned to the car and came out with the tool kit. Taking out a screwdriver and a pair of pliers, I fussed for a couple of minutes, adjusting the idle until it was absolutely the same as I'd found it. Then, leaving the hood up, I got back in the car, sitting in the front seat but leaving the door open and keeping both feet outside, on the ground.
I lit a cigarette.
Five minutes passed.
Traffic, mainly trucks, kept pulling into the station. As they came up to the pumps, their powerful headlamps shone right at my little car, stretching a long wedge of shadow behind it. "hen I ground out my cigarette, and stepped into this darkled patch, I must have been almost invisible. I worked around to the service area. The snow had been cleared here, but the bays were dark and locked. Beyond them, extending out from the back of the building, was a metal fence; I probably could have got over this easily, but I didn't have to. There was a gate, and the padlock was broken; I just pushed hard to shift the snow behind it and stepped quickly through.
I looked around. I was on a small asphalt lot, where they kept the cars that were waiting to go in for repairs. Parked in two rows, they were now being buried under a blanket of snow. Behind them, bringing back a faint echo of that day in Detroit, was a junkyard: piles of tires (but chained together); a lot of twisted scrap, one old door jutting up like a broken wing; and a tangled heap of exhaust pipes sticking up through the snow like old bones. If there was a guard, I couldn't see him. I made my way to the cars. The one I wanted was in the back row. A Zhiguli. It was dark green, but at night it would be hard to tell from the one I was driving. Its owner must have tried to drive it through a brick wall. The front end was a twisted mess, the grille ripped right away, and a piece of cardboard was taped over the windshield. But, bending down, I saw that the front license plate was intact and hanging by only a single bolt. Rather than try to unscrew it, I just levered hard with the screwdriver — one ugly screech — until it popped free. I went around to the back. Here the damage wasn't so bad, though the trunk lid was off its hinges and jammed inside. I set to work with the screwdriver. One of the bolts was a little rusted, but in ninety seconds I had it off, and with both plates shoved under my coat I headed back to the gate. No one had seen me; in twenty minutes, the snow would have covered my tracks. And it might be days before anyone noticed the missing plates; even then, the assumption would be that someone had taken them off and put them away for safekeeping.
I returned to my car.
Sitting there, with its hood up and the door still open, it seemed part of the landscape; already the windshield was covered with snow. I slipped inside, shoving the plates under the seat. Then I lit a cigarette and started the engine… though my door remained open and the pantomime still wasn't over. I let the engine warm. Finished my cigarette. Turned on the wipers, waited as they carved two perfect arcs in the night. At last, getting out, I slapped the hood back into place; and this time, getting back in, I pulled the door shut behind me. But both my coming and going had been so slow and gradual that I felt sure neither would have been noticed.
I edged into the road.
A mile away, turning into a side street, I pulled up at the curb, and ten minutes later, despite the cold and my clumsy fingers, one Zhiguli had vanished and another had taken its place.
I had disappeared. The car had disappeared. For one night at least, I could enjoy the greatest freedom — or horror — conceivable in a totalitarian country: I had no official identity.
But I knew this freedom would be very brief; I had to make quick use of it. I sped south through the city. Tn an odd way now, my plans depended on my being seen at least a couple of times by the police, so I kept to main roads: back to the Nevsky, past Alexander's Palace onto Oborony Prospekt, then on toward Route 22. Here, at the junction, was a GAI post, the yellow light of its interior floating high over the road; I dutifully slowed. The GAI are a Soviet equivalent to the highway patrol; they cruise around in yellow cars and man observation posts along the highways. Some of these are small, but others, like the one I passed now, are high towers. Inside, they would take down my license, and conceivably transmit it to the next post in line. And I wanted them to: tomorrow, when my car was posted missing, these records would be checked, and as long as its license — or the entry unidentified Zhiguli—didn't appear, everyone would assume I was still somewhere in Leningrad.
As I accelerated away from the post, the road opened up. On either side was the blackness of the subarctic night, but in front of me, trapped in the headlights, was a blizzard of gold. The wind rocked the little car, and after half an hour my arms ached from the task of holding it steady. But the road was level and reasonably straight. I kept the speedometer at ninety kilometers per hour, and the miles unwound. There was little to see in the blackness, just the snow heaped up on empty fields or around the rim of the forest, but I knew I was traveling along the southern edge of Lake Ladoga, the largest lake in all Europe, and occasionally the void beyond the car took on a limitless sheen. There were one or two towns — Novya Ladoga, Perevoz, Lodeynoye Pole — but at Olonets the road swung north and east, across country. Five A.M. … Now I was into Karelia, a stubby finger of rock and bush that sticks up between the Finnish border and the arctic seas. It's a desolate land of rocks, trees, lakes, tumbling rivers and waterfalls whose towns are depots for pitheads and lumber camps. A lot of it was once part of Finland, and though almost half a million Finns left when the Russians invaded, East Finnish is still spoken here and I saw it printed on the occasional sign. I was tired by now; my shoulders ached and my eyes burned a little. But then, at Pryazha, where a smaller road joined the one I was on, I fell in behind a couple of lumber trucks and gave them the task of finding the way. There were three of them, empty, traveling in convoy. Huge black chains, used to strap the logs on, jostled and jounced on their long, flat beds, and I followed their thumping music through the wind, the night, and the snow into Petrozavodsk.
Sitting on the edge of Lake Onega — the second-largest lake in all of Europe — this is the capital of the Karelian Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic (K.A.S.S.R.); about 200,000 people live there. In Imperial times, it was called "the near Siberia" because people from Petersburg convicted of minor offenses were often exiled here, but now it's an administrative center, has the regulation tractor factory, and boasts something of a tourist industry based on a hydrofoil service that runs to Kizhi Island, with its ancient wooden church, out in the lake. But there'd be no boat trips today. As a gray, bleary dawn streaked the horizon, I could see that the low, snow-covered shore merged with the ice on the lake in an unbroken white plain, and only far, far out was there a dark sparkle from open water.