Back Out, the USSR - an Extract from Rock & Hard Places by Andrew Mueller
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Every so often, I'll get off a train, bus, plane, boat, camel, donkey-drawn cart or elephant in a town I've never been to and might even know very little about, and feel like I've come home. It's an instinct I've never been able to quantify, but it's never been wrong yet. I just know that everything's going to be okay as long as I'm there. Wherever the sensation has struck, it has remained for the duration of my stay, and returned on repeat visits. There isn't, so far as I can tell, any rhyme or reason to it - I can't come up with a plausible universal theory that ropes in places as diverse as New York City, Dublin, Budapest, Moscow, Hong Kong, Istanbul, Aleppo, Tel Aviv, Siena, Reykjavik, Peshawar, Sarajevo, Barcelona, Split and Glasgow. But I felt it when I got off the bus in Lithuania's elegant and raffish capital, Vilnius, back in 1993, and… now?
In 1993, any reasonable facsimile of civilization would have had me committing indecencies with the bus station tarmac. I had come to Vilnius from the Lithuanian seaside town of Klaipeda, where I had stayed in The Worst Hotel In The World. The Baltija was the fifth-best of Klaipeda's two hotels, and was all I could afford. The building was painted the colour of a smoker's teeth. Half the windows were missing, as was a decent portion of the roof.
Still, I'd thought, maybe it won't be too bad, in much the same way you think, still, maybe it won't be too bad, when the dentist starts polishing his pliers and cackling. My optimism evaporated in the time it took to open the door and walk into the lobby. The walls were grey. The carpet was grey, though relieved in places by grey rugs. Behind the reception desk was a young woman whose hair and skin were the same colour as the carpets and the walls. She looked like she hadn't seen the sun for some years, and I wondered, frantically, if she was bolted to her post.
"Do you," she croaked, "have reservation?".
I didn't know where to start answering that one. I hadn't had so many reservations since Helsinki, when two Finnish heavy metal fans I'd met in a bar had invited me back to their flat to try their home-brewed vodka ("Isss very goooood stuff, ya? Vill alssso run lawnmower.") No, I said. The woman sighed the sort of defeated, anguished sigh usually only heard from frequent air travellers discovering that the in-flight movie is "Legends Of The Fall", and produced a list of prices from under the counter. I pointed at the single room with bath and television for about ten dollars. The young woman croaked something into her bakelite phone, and a creature emerged from behind a door, holding a key in one hand and pointing up with the other. Christ, I thought, I've died and gone to a Roald Dahl short story.
Said creature proved, on further inspection, to be one of those fearful crones that ex-Soviet hotels install on every floor to make sure nobody pinches anything from the rooms. Given what I found when I picked my way up the stairs (a few were missing), along the dark, concrete corridor (which had potholes), and opened my door, I suspected that my superannuated security guard was probably kept about as busy as Myra Hindley's social secretary. The most determined kleptomaniac would have been strapped for inspiration. The only thing even possibly worth stealing was the television, and that only worked if you sat it on its side, and even then the only programming you could get was "Neighbours" dubbed into Russian and some stoned youth based in Minsk presenting rock videos he'd taped off MTV.
The bathroom contained a toilet I didn't even want to think about and a shower that, after much encouragement, spat a few globs of cold, rust-coloured water that smelt of fish. The bed was a wooden bench, adorned with pillows the shape and consistency of solidified lava, sheets that could well have enjoyed previous work as potato sacking, and a mattress, made of the same material, that felt like it still had the potatoes in it. However, it was only me that found it uninviting. Visible colonies of bedbugs scampered through the dank Hessian folds, licking their microscopic lips at the thought of the feast about to be delivered to them - there was no question of sleeping on the linoleum floor, as it was smeared with a similar unctuous goo to that found on the floors of the sort of cinemas you wouldn't suggest on a first date.
I sprayed everything in the room, myself included, with insect repellent. I wedged a chair under the doorknob to keep out the old woman with the key, the young woman from reception, and the vodka-sodden Poles throwing a party in the next room along, who knocked on my door every ten minutes asking to use my bathroom - there was, they kept explaining, a rat in theirs they didn't much like the look of. Fully clothed to deter bedbugs, I lay on my side to watch "Neighbours" and awaited sleep. It didn't come.
Today, as soon as I've paid the cab driver and settled in the hotel bar, I know I still feel about Vilnius like I feel about a select coterie of pop groups that I've loved to distraction but who never sold any records to anybody but me. Vilnius should be firmly established as the new Prague. The streets and alleys of its outrageously beautiful old city should be teeming with shuffling posses of half-man half-camcorder tourists, marvelling at architecture bequeathed by local imperial dukes, Polish kings, Russian tsars and -desultory credit where it's due - Soviet invaders. You shouldn't be able to get into Vilnius's vibrant bars and cafes for herds of young American idiots with big shirts and bigger trust funds exercising their Hemingwayish delusions and reading each other reams of risible poetry. In a sane world, you wouldn't be able to get a room in Vilnius this side of Judgement Day.
This glorious city is Europe's most deeply and bafflingly buried treasure. The 17th century church of St Peter and St Paul, a short walk from the centre of town along the Neris river, is the most beautiful church in Europe. It may even be the most beautiful thing in Europe. More than 2,000 white stuccoed cherubs and angels cling to the white walls and hang from the white ceiling, yielding infinite subtle shades and shadows as the sun shifts across the windows in the central dome. If it were in Florence, the end of the queue to get in would be just outside Warsaw. My only company today is the only company I had five years ago - an old woman with a mop and a bucket, tutting irritably as she sloshes soapy water over the bits of the floor I've walked on.
Vilnius is also the most fun of any of the Baltic capitals. There's a bar called NATO's, decorated with the uniforms and hardware of the western alliance, with a menu that features Remains Of Partisan (boiled and smoked pigs' ears) and Rest Of Partisan (pigs' feet) as well as the inevitable Molotov Cocktails. Another bar, Naktinas Vilkas, is decorated with discarded Soviet kitsch, lit by television screens playing footage of Politburo conferences and has toilets that play snatches of Brezhnev's speeches when you flush them. In a car park on the edge of the old city, there's a four-metre-high bronze memorial to Frank Zappa, the late American rock singer much beloved of students who have smoked too much. Zappa wasn't Lithuanian (his family were Sicilian Greeks). To the best of my knowledge, he never went to Lithuania. He may not even have heard of it. I'd imagine, though, that anyone who called their children Dweezil and Moon Unit would have appreciated the incongruity of this tribute.
It says much for Vilnusians' sense of municipal history that they haven't removed the socialist realist statues of model Soviet youth that stand at each corner of the Green Bridge. Actually, given the sense of humour demonstrated by the NATO's and Naktinas Vilkas bars, it's more surprising that they haven't been painted pink and given party hats. The faintly Dadaist sense of humour that percolates through Vilnius might be the city's way of having the last laugh on a century that has scarred it so brutally. Pitifully few traces remain of what was once a centre of Jewish culture, and those that do are museums, and monuments to something that has long gone - 94% of Lithuania's Jews were murdered during World War II. A short walk from the church of St Peter and St Paul, Antakalnis cemetery cradles the graves of the dozen protestors crushed by Soviet tanks on January 13, 1991, when Mikhail Gorbachev tried to suppress Lithuania's burgeoning independence movement (in 1993, outside the parliament building, I'd seen a mural depicting a sun labelled "Freedom" being swallowed by a crocodile called "Moscow").
Coming to terms with the Soviet legacy is still taking some doing. In 1994, what had been a popular picnic spot at Tuskulenai Park was discovered to be atop the mass grave of 800 Lithuanian partisans shot by the KGB five decades earlier. On Vilnius's main street, Gediminas Prospect, the basement prison in the former KGB building has been opened as the Museum of the Genocide of the Lithuanian People. It's an unspeakably depressing place, a corridor of mean, dark little holding cells, with a couple of rooms that exemplify humanity at its most wretched. The Wet Room has a sunken concrete floor and a small platform in the middle, maybe 30 centimetres square - the floor would be filled
with water, which would turn to ice during the bitter Baltic winters, leaving the prisoner with the choice of balancing on the little metal perch or freezing to death. There's also a cell lined with sound-proofing pads, on which fading bloodstains are visible. Dissidents were being tortured in here as recently as 1990.
The museum is staffed by former inmates. What it costs them to come to this place every day can only be wondered at. They're old, and speak no English, and so one of them just wanders silently along next to me, gesturing into these all too self-explanatory rooms, looking bereft, robbed and terribly, terribly sad.
On the way to the airport, I can at least see the happy ending for myself. I ask the cab to stop outside a warehouse on the Dariaus ir Gireno trunk road. I walk through the front door, nod at staff who've got used to tourists blundering through here, despite the lack of formal signposting, stroll up a corridor and out the back into a yard overgrown with weeds. Here, lying flat on their backs, are the statues of Lenin, Stalin and other communist worthies that were chopped down as Lithuanian independence became a reality. The figures stare blankly up into space, as if they've all just been knocked down by a truck and are still trying to figure out what hit them. They once presided regally over the squares and boulevards of one of Europe's great cities. They have ended up, literally, on the scrap heap, and it couldn't have happened to a nicer bunch.