Better Than Fiction 2 (22 page)

O
ur paths would never have crossed, but for an official in the Kaunas city office telling me a few days earlier, ‘Well, course, you will have to go to Smolensk.’

A desk divided us, and the official and I leaned back in our chairs. For a pleasant half hour he shared the problem surrounding the bones of Napoleon’s Grande Armée turning up in the ploughs of farmers each spring.

The difficulties, he said, were of a diplomatic nature. The French don’t want the bones repatriated, and the local farmers don’t know what to do with them.

The ‘bones impasse’ had come up in conversation after I’d told him of my plan to retrace the route taken by Napoleon on his disastrous invasion of Russia in 1814.

So many of the invaders caught by a barbarous early winter never made it back across the Neiman River. The retreating army
froze to death or died spectacularly – catching light as they tried to warm themselves, or were eaten by bears, or run down by pursuing Cossacks, or drowned in the snow and blizzards, slowly capsizing into a sleep from which there was no return.

Some of the survivors never made it back to their country of origin (for this was one of the first ‘great coalitions of the willing’) and stayed on in Russia, absorbed, or adopted, into local communities.

The city official told me the murals in one of the local churches had been painted by one such straggler.

I can’t recall the church or its whereabouts, or a single detail of the paintings I took in later that day, but I do retain a vivid memory of the woman whose knees were swaddled in bandages as she crawled and dragged herself across the flagstones in the direction of the altar.

I thought at first she was crippled, and I watched appalled by the spectacle of this poor woman’s attempt to drag herself up the aisle to get closer to, presumably, God or his emissary.

I went and bought an ice cream (vanilla) from a huge woman in a white apron scooping it out of a wooden vat on wheels next to a chocolate-coloured phone box.

I don’t recall much of the road to Vilnius bifurcating the historic oak tree where, the official said, Napoleon had taken a nap.

I do remember my eagerness to see it, and my edge-of-the-seat concern that the driver might have already passed it.

I am not even sure of where I caught the train to Smolensk. I suspect it was Vilnius. Probably it was. Of the train trip, nothing passing in the window has stuck as well as the magnificent pastel-coloured station with its cathedral atmosphere that I strode out of that spring morning in 1995.

A road climbed to the old walled town of Smolensk. A section of its stone wall was still intact, and nearby I spied a Ferris wheel. There was no line. I have an idea I was the first customer. And I think it was my idea for the operator to stop the wheel at the top of its arc.

Of the view I don’t recall much, apart from the unnerving height at which my bucket seat came to a rest, and my sudden awareness of the disheartening amount of rust and corrosion in the framework around me.

I probably made notes; that’s what I usually do. But where are those notes now? I have no idea…

I am in Smolensk that day for no other reason than to search out my own event while in pursuit of another.

My train is scheduled to leave Smolensk for Moscow that evening, so there is the rest of the afternoon to kill. I am, I suppose, just another mysterious and clueless visitor pretending they are not lost.
That
shop and
that
corner lead me to another, and another, and then I am crossing a busy road to a park. Here I may relax, because the obligation of anyone in a park is to forget where they are; a wander in a park is the nearest thing to dreamily treading water in the sea.

The day has turned unexpectedly warm, and wintry faces grimace in the mad wind that is suddenly sweeping the park. Across the road the doors of the Lenin Institute are banging loudly.

The woman approaching me on the path has been caught out, apparently like everyone else, by the soaring warmth. The man at her side also wears a coat, although his is dark and suavely hangs off the points of his sloping shoulders.

He is tall, and thin. He seems agitated. More so now, as I think back to this moment. The way he stops, and starts. He
stops when she doesn’t want to. He moves off again before she is ready to, or is convinced – her face is one you see at checkpoints; it wants to be persuaded of something which he is withholding. That is how it seems to me now. But that is after many replays. At the time their progress simply appeared to be marked by some minor disagreement.

They are still making their slow way along the path when they stop again, this time for the man to shake a cigarette loose from a packet. His coat falls off his shoulders. He reaches for the woman. Alarmed, she takes half a step back. He still manages to catch her and place each hand on her shoulder, then his knees bend and he proceeds to slide down her front, melting away from her, to sit, and to roll on to his side, dead.

The woman calls out in distress. She kneels down and gently shakes his shoulder. She strokes the man’s cheek, talking to him, hoping no doubt that he will suddenly spring awake until she looks up for help, and her eyes alight on me and she begins speaking hurriedly and urgently in Russian which I don’t understand, have at best only a few words for asking directions and in the politest possible way saying, ‘No, thank you’ and ‘Yes, please.’

She has one hand beneath the man’s shoulder, so that part of him is slightly raised while his head droops back.

I say something in English (probably ‘Can I help?’), and then, for a moment that feels unbearably long, certainly long enough for the absurdity of the situation to take its full measure, we stare at each other – the woman with a look of incomprehension.

Another arrives, a knowledgeable and useful person, and he crouches down to check the fallen man. He and the woman quickly converse, and reach agreement. The woman gets to her feet and scrambles off, presumably to find help.

Now, years later, I have just remembered she is carrying a large handbag. And this ridiculous accessory swings uselessly from her arm as she hurries away. She wants to run but has long forgotten how. And we watch her topple into the lanes of traffic and make a beeline for the crashing doors of the Lenin Institute.

The other fellow seems quite unbothered by the dead man. As though it is a regular occurrence. Especially on Sunday afternoons, and at this time of the year.

He lights himself a cigarette, then he crouches down to get his hand under the dead man’s shoulder, and together we hoist the poor fellow on to the park bench. We are able to arrange him so that the bench supports him as far as his waist; however, we leave his legs drooping down to the ground, and his shaggy head turned away from the public.

We squeeze in to the little remaining space, and we sit, and we wait, the Russian man with his elbows on his knees, blowing smoke at the ground, and myself, colossally inadequate to the requirements of the moment, totally extraneous to the scene, but implicated by the chance of my being there, as history was made.

Who were they? Man and wife? Lovers? Is the woman still alive?

I imagine I have featured many times in her account of the day ‘Ivan’ died, so unexpectedly, so heartbreakingly, and the first person on the scene was someone from the other side of the world and without a drop of Russian.

I imagine she has furnished me with details that I can’t recall of myself – what I wore, my expressions, my responses, and the strangeness of an encounter which the invaded will recall with clarity for generations after.

W
hen I was nineteen, a backpacker, and in Paris, many years ago, I looked out a train window and saw the Eiffel Tower. I’d forgotten about the tower’s existence so it was as if I had not only personally discovered it, but was the first to understand its stark, industrial beauty. This is one of the particular pleasures of travelling while young. Everything is new; everything is waiting to be discovered. You don’t know how many millions have done
that
elephant ride,
that
trek, or that wherever you are staying used to be
so
much better before it was discovered (ten years, twenty years, fifty years ago). You can find your way into experience that feels like your own.

When I saw the Grand Canyon for the first time, back in the early ’90s, I felt a similar sense of overwhelming surprise and pleasure, despite the fact that in this case I’d sought it out. I’ll never forget that moment of getting out of the car in a relatively
prosaic car park and walking towards the North Rim. Despite the canyon’s enormity – it is close to 2000 square miles – it comes upon you suddenly as you walk towards its edge and look down into it: this extraordinary ravine that plunges deep into the earth. It was late afternoon and the canyon walls were a series of striated purples. The rocks and the light – it was hard to distinguish one from the other – shifted from grey to lilac, from dark purple to black. I was awestruck. The visit was so brief that when I left the next day it was as if I’d dreamt the landscape, one so beautiful it’s hard to believe it actually existed.

But you can’t pursue the purity of the unexpected moment, and ignorance isn’t an answer. It certainly pays to know what you’re doing when you visit the Grand Canyon. Despite the fact that it’s one of the most popular national parks in the world, with around five million visitors a year, only 1 percent of these visitors ever make it below the rim – one of the best ways to appreciate the grandeur of the place – and of those who do, around 250 need to be rescued each year. Worse still, a not inconsiderable number of them die. Over the 96 years of the park’s existence, an average of twelve people have died a year.

It’s easy to see how this happens. If you’re not an experienced walker, it’s hard to imagine how demanding the descent to the Colorado River far below, and the return from it, will be. You can’t imagine how much water you might need when the sun beats on you from above, or what it’s like to bake in temperatures as high as 120° Fahrenheit. This is why signs everywhere warn you not to be casual when you estimate your endurance, and discourage you from hiking from rim to river and back again in a single day.

When I arrived at the entrance to the South Rim of Grand Canyon National Park late last year, I had no desire to walk to
the Colorado River and back in a single day, but nor was I aware of the dangers of doing so. All the first sign at the gate warned us of was the fact that there would be no refund if weather conditions meant there wasn’t a good view. My partner and I looked at each other. Do people really do that? Demand refunds if the canyon doesn’t display its extraordinary dimensions, its subtle light shows? Apparently so. We pulled into the car park further down the road and I tried to repeat the moment when I’d first spied the canyon some twenty years before. Alas, it’s hard to recycle profundity.

That night the decision was made to walk some of the Bright Angel Trail, the path that descends from the rim to the river. I knew about it because my 21-year-old godson had told me it was a good walk, though ‘kinda challenging’. I certainly hadn’t read the report of Spanish explorers in 1540 who, after several hours and having covered only a third of the distance to the river, had returned to the rim, reporting that ‘what seemed easy from above was not so’. Now I can report that they were correct and that in this, as all things, perspective is everything. The descent (and ascent) along the trail is so sheer that you can’t see what’s in store for you when you look at it from above. Two days later,
after
we’d walked down Bright Angel Trail to Plateau Point and back, about 11 miles roundtrip, we cycled far enough along the rim to get a better view – and it was then that we understood what it was we’d undertaken.

However, the morning when we headed off on our impromptu hike, our band of four adults and two kids under thirteen was as deluded as most of the Grand Canyon’s other visitors. It was a cool day, so we didn’t struggle with high temperatures. The first part of the walk, down to Indian Gardens, was easy enough and the zigzag of the paths, the sheer walls of the canyon, and
the persistent plodding of the mule trains were hypnotic. The gardens, when we got to them, were an oasis, sitting at what we first thought was the bottom of the canyon, though in fact they were a good quarter of a mile above it as the crow plummets. Cottonwood trees lined the creek, and leaves glittered gold, brown, and pale yellow in the autumn light. The grass was green and the harshness of the canyon’s sheer walls faded away. Havasupai Indians lived and farmed these gardens until 1928, when the National Park Service drove them out, and I tried to imagine what it was like to live down here in such a private, remote, and dramatic place. The contrast between the gardens and the one-and-a-half-mile trail to Plateau Point added to the drama. The flatlands around the trail were populated with thousands of purple cacti, and within ten minutes of walking through them, we felt as if we’d been walking an hour, not because it was strenuous but because it was so otherworldly.

But the point of this story is not the walk, it’s that walking on and down into a landscape bonds you to a place, even if that walk includes a five-mile hike back up the canyon during which you ascend close to half a mile straight up: an incline that at first leaves you cursing, but soon reduces you to speechlessness. Over the eight hours it took to walk what was only eleven miles, we became sensitive to the moods and light of the canyon, which shifted from shaded to gentle morning sunlight, to harsh midday sun, then back towards those purplish hues I remembered from my first trip.

We fell in love with the canyon even more the following day when we cycled the rim and spied a condor, some mule deer, and a stand of conifer carved by the wind into a dreamscape of bonsai.

By the time we left, four nights after we arrived, we’d been at the canyon long enough to get down into it, travel around it, and
see it in every kind of light. We were sated. We certainly had no expectations of our final morning. As we packed the car, half-asleep in the almost dark of dawn, my partner gestured to the canyon: ‘Look at that’.

So I looked. What I saw was a great ocean of dense white cloud that pulsed, and shimmied from side to side, as well up towards, then down from, the canyon rim. The entire gorge was filled with thick clouds and mist. It throbbed as the rising sun played across it. Day broke in a series of pale greys and blues, then pink with golden flashes. The tips of the peaks scattered through the canyon floated like tiny islands. Later I was told that what we had seen was called a cloud inversion. It was rare.

We stood at the rim for some time, just outside the Bright Angel Lodge. People slowly realised what was happening and stood silently, with the exception of the woman who muttered that the clouds were ruining the view. We wondered if she was going to ask for her money back. Native Americans working on the heritage building sites along the rim all laid down their tools and joined the crowds. It was as if we were all of us, a group of strangers, worshipping nature.

There is a word to describe this sense of giving over to some greater force: numinous. Some use the word to mean religious ecstasy, but for me it was a reminder of why we seek nature out, what we are losing as the wilderness is driven into increasingly remote pockets of the earth. I felt honoured. It was a reminder of the privilege that travel can afford. A reminder that travel will never stop surprising us, even when we’re standing in the midst of one of the most densely touristed places on the planet.