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Stockholm
When I arrive in Stockholm, Gay Pride is in full swing. Roads have been cordoned off, the taxi can’t take me as far as the hotel, and I have to scramble under ropes and across blocked-off streets, map in one hand, suitcase in the other, arriving mildly frazzled at last on Strandvägen.
The Hotel Diplomat is the epitome of Gracious Tourism, with Art Nouveau architecture, geraniums at the window, and a stunning view across boats and water and a couple of islands. But there are drawbacks. To operate the very grand lift, you have to insert your key card, and it rarely works. The wifi password has to be re-entered several times a day. Still, there are free M&Ms.
Kathy arrives in the early evening, and we walk over to Gamla Stan, on the next island across. Stockholm was founded in 1252 and flourished as a Hansa town for centuries. At dusk the Old Town is charming. We eat Swedish meatballs in a restaurant on Stortorget, the main square, where a Danish bloodbath took place in 1520. A balloon sails over the city in the deep blue twilight.
Sweden has a warlike past, and the ship that was built in 1628 to dominate the Baltic is on view at the Vasamuseet. Intended to be the most powerful warship of its day, it keeled over and sank within minutes of its launch. The centre of gravity was placed too high, and it carried twice as many cannon as normal ships. The cannons were recovered around 1660, but the Vasa itself was only raised from the seabed in 1961. The Baltic is too cold for wreck-eating shipworms, and the ship is remarkably well preserved.
Next door to the Vasa Museum is Skansen, an open-air museum that aims to re-create Swedish village life with period buildings staffed by people in traditional costume. The structures are akin to those of Central Europe: barns, church, windmill, belfry. A man sits in a typical 1930s parlour, an ironmonger stands behind the counter of an old-fashioned shop. But it starts to rain, so we take the tram back into town. One-trip tickets have to be bought in the Seven Eleven, used within 75 minutes of purchase, and checked by a controller. Is this really efficient?
Over to trendy Södermalm on a literary pilgrimage (I’ve been re-reading The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.) Unlike Strandvägen (too grand) and Östermalm (too chic), it’s an area that feels lived in. We track down Mikael Blomkvist’s house on Bellmansgatan, admire the views over Gamla Stan, and then dive into a pub called The Bishop’s Arms just in time to avoid the next downpour. It’s Sunday night, the specials have run out, but the pub has a vast selection of Scotch whiskies that I cannot resist. Prices are high and doses are small, but when Kathy (a non-whisky drinker) sees how cheered I am by a shot of Caol Ila, she joins me in a second round. A trendy couple with sea-green Mohawks stalk past on the cobbled street.
By daylight, the charm of Gamla Stan is severely diminished. The cobbled streets and souvenir shops bulge with wall-to-wall tourists. It feels like the Mont St. Michel. After a tour of the quieter streets, and a quick lunch of shrimp sandwiches, we head back to the Grand Hotel for a pre-booked boat trip. Halfway there, we are shocked (shocked!) to realize that, in the confusion resulting from slow table service and the Byzantine procedures involving the key to the ladies’ room, neither of us has paid for lunch. But pragmatism wins the day! there’s no time to go back. For the rest of our stay we steer clear of Gamla Stan.
The boat trip takes us round the islands, under the bridges, and through the locks. It’s a wonderful blue day. The sun shimmers on the water. Stockholmers on holiday mess about in boats. At Slussen, passing through the lock that separates Lake Mälaren from the Baltic Sea, we’re enchanted to discover that the word “Slussen” must mean sluice gates, in other words locks. We’ve been trying to decipher the language, with mixed results. The lady sitting next to us is taking her elderly mother on a day out. She recommends a restaurant called the Bla Dörren (we eventually work out that this must mean Blue Doors), but she doesn’t know the address. Take the tunnelbana to Slussen, she says, and anyone will direct you. We find it in the end, though it does not have blue doors. The food is average, but they serve great homemade schnapps. Mine is made with raspberries, and Kathy’s with ginger.
The evening ends high over Slussen in a tower that we originally took for a crane (Slussen is an unsightly amalgam of rail lines, flyovers, and construction works in the city centre). It turns out to be a restaurant called the Gondolen. The gilded youth of Stockholm hang out in the bar, and their elders have dinner one floor below. It’s a good place to watch the sun set over Gamla Stan.
Vilnius
Stockholm was supposed to be the three-day prelude to a guided tour of the Baltic States, but the package was cancelled due to lack of participants, leaving us to fend for ourselves. This is the reason we are cramming five countries into a twelve-day period. It’s not the best way to see things, but what can you do? On Tuesday morning, there’s time for a quick but rewarding visit to the Architecture Museum before we fly to Vilnius. The temperature rises. Stockholm was breezy, but in Vilnius it’s over 30C.
The capital of Lithuania has a manicured town centre with lots of fresh paint and green parkland. The main pedestrian street, which is called Pilies, meaning castle, is lined with open air restaurants and souvenir shops selling local linen and Baltic amber. We are staying at the Hotel Narutis, halfway down the street. Perfect location, perfect wifi, a lift that works, and chocolates at bedtime. Collapsing on canework sofas in the bar across the road, we sip our wine and watch the tourists go by. Some of the women are very done up, in a Baltic kind of way, and it looks as though most of the visitors are from Eastern Europe. After Stockholm, prices are ridiculously cheap, and the Chardonnay is not bad at all.
Lithuania was the first of the Soviet republics to declare independence from Moscow, in March 1990, and in the past twenty-five years it has done its best to rid itself of Russian influence. The population is 85% Lithuanian, which makes things easier. Street signs are in Lithuanian and English. Marks and Spencer has a shiny new store on Gediminas Avenue. In the centre of the city, the Palace of the Grand Dukes of Lithuania, demolished by the Russians in 1801, has been pointedly rebuilt, and used to receive heads of state during Lithuania’s presidency of the European Union. (The three Baltic states joined Europe in 2004.) The Castle which gave our street its name is on the hill behind the Palace, but it’s too hot today to walk up there.
The building that once served as the headquarters for the Gestapo and the NKVD has been transformed into a KGB Museum, unforgivingly curated with the Nazis on one floor, the Soviets on another, and the KGB prison in the basement. Memorial stones on the outside of the building commemorate young partisans who died in 1945 and 1946. The Lithuanians have done an excellent job. Auschwitz is the worst place I’ve ever been, but this comes in a close second. The execution chambers are particularly harrowing. “This is how it was,” says a red placard near the end of the exhibit. “We are showing all this so as not to allow it to sink into oblivion.” It’s a relief to emerge into the hot sun outside the museum and listen to a group of French tourists discuss their luggage and their lunch (“j’ai une petite faim”).
Nous aussi. After a sustaining lunch of grilled steak and sweetcorn in the park by the Cathedral, we continue our research. The exhibition in the Palace provides an exhaustive account of Lithuanian history from its pagan beginnings. In the Middle Ages, the Lithuanian-Polish alliance was a force to be reckoned with, and the Palace was at one point the nerve centre of an empire that stretched from the Baltic to the Black Sea. Sadly, the avalanche of details about obscure Grand Dukes, victories over Teutonic Knights, and incursions of Swedes and Russians is too much for us (even Kathy, who is half Polish), and we give up halfway through. The guards stare reproachfully as we leave the museum and head over to Pilies for a drink.
Lithuania was the last country in Europe to convert to Christianity, in 1385, and paganism seems to be a valued component of the national soul. According to Viktoria, the guide who escorts us on a half-day excursion to the castle of Trakai, the summer solstice is more deeply felt and more energetically celebrated than anywhere else. We don’t argue. The word Trakai means “glades,” and the castle stands on an island in a lake. Built as a fortress in the fourteenth century, restored (oddly enough) under Soviet rule, it’s a romantic sight. Tour groups flow over it in multilingual waves. Viktoria shows us a stash of coins minted during the brief period when Lithuania had its own Mint. A neat Korean lady trips past, wearing dainty pale pink gloves despite the heat.
Returning mid-afternoon to the blazing streets of Vilnius, we set out past the candy-coloured facades to the Gates of Dawn at the top end of the Old Town. It must be 35C. We’re drooping, having missed lunch, so we stop in a shady café for a sugar fix: Coke and cake. The Grand Dukes used to make their ceremonial entrance into the city through the Gates and proceed down Pilies to the Palace. These days Pilies is thronged with tourists, buskers, drunks and beggars. Eating dinner the previous evening at a Lithuanian pizza joint, we were besieged with panhandlers speaking in tongues – especially after Kathy gave one of them five euros and word got around. Tonight we avoid the pedestrian street and opt for the more elegant Saint Germain restaurant, down at the end of Literatu past the tattoo parlour, where the food is more inventive and the beggars stay away.
Riga
So that was Vilnius. If this is Friday, it must be Riga. Air Baltic operates a rather small propeller plane with miniature baggage compartments between the two Baltic capitals, and makes us pay forty euros each to check our luggage. Kathy talks to a young Ukrainian musician who is en route to Oslo, and has plans to travel round the world. Otherwise, he says, he could be drafted to fight Russian separatists in East Ukraine.
The road from Riga airport goes through dishevelled industrial suburbs and mega-shopping malls. The hotel is an upgraded Soviet establishment with weird chandeliers and a discouraging bar. It’s all slightly schizophrenic. In front of the hotel is a four-lane highway and a Stalinist wedding-cake building, but the back door leads you straight out into the Old Town. Riga was founded by the Teutonic Knights in 1201. The city became an important trading centre in the Hanseatic League, and the usual invasions of Swedes and Poles and Russians followed. Like the other Baltic countries, Latvia was briefly independent between the wars. The country still has a large Russian presence, and over one-third of its citizens speak Russian at home.
By now we’re on our third Old Town in less than a week. After a lunch of Latvian cheese and Chardonnay, we grit our teeth and set out to See the Sights. But Riga defeats us. Clearly the city is opening up to tourism, there are plenty of bars and Steak Grills and Irish Pubs, but the town is still as dilapidated and Soviet as it must have been twenty-five years ago. Unlike Vilnius, the architecture is not homogeneous. Pre-war, post-war and Hanseatic are all mixed up together. Tourists seem fewer. More Russian is spoken. After the gleaming paintwork and national drive of Lithuania, we are perplexed. It’s not as hot as Vilnius, but it’s dusty and stuffy. I am anxious to see the Baltic, two of Kathy’s Facebook friends have recommended nearby Jurmala, so we retreat to the beach.
Jurmala is a resort set amid woodland on the Baltic Sea. It has a gorgeous sweep of white sand and warm shallow water. Failing to find the ferry from Riga Castle, we fall eagerly into the car of a Russian taxi driver who offers to take us out there for twenty-five euros. It’s a relief to be able to communicate. We managed to decipher a little Swedish (Germanic roots) and a little Lithuanian (Slavic roots), but Latvian is impenetrable. We spend the afternoon on the beach, paddle in the Baltic, admire the seaside villas, and drink ice cream cocktails in a café before heading back into town on the elektrichka.
In the morning there’s time for another brief and unsatisfactory stroll round the Old Town before heading back to the airport. We spot the Museum of the Occupation of Latvia 1940-1991, a concrete block at the bottom of Town Hall Square which doesn’t mess with dates, but there’s no time to go in. The taxi driver who takes us to the airport is a Russian-speaking Latvian who asks what we think of the European immigrant problem, and says there was a demonstration against immigration quotas in Riga a few weeks earlier. We don’t need Muslims in Latvia, he says, they bring too many problems. He’s a fan of Marine Le Pen, and claims that the elections due to be held in Latvia in two years’ time will see a victory of the nationalist parties. What does he think of Greece and its problems? “Lazy bastards!” he says in English. He has travelled to several European countries, including Italy, Scandinavia and the UK, but he can’t get a visa for the US because in his youth he was a “khuligan.” If his deeds were bad enough to come to the attention of the visa authorities they must have been serious, but he doesn’t expand, and we can’t really inquire.
Tallinn
Tallinn looks how you expect a Hansa port to look. Conquered by the Danes in 1219 (Taani Linnus means “Danish stronghold”), it was recovered by the Germans in 1346, and became a major trading centre in late mediaeval Europe. We are staying in the Three Sisters Hotel, which consists of three tastefully renovated merchants’ houses built in 1362. Sightseers snap the facades as we go down to breakfast.
Crouched behind its ramparts and turrets, the Old Town is an enchanting maze of grey and blue and yellow and ochre buildings. Quiet cobbled streets bearing mysterious monosyllabic names – Lai and Pikk and Uus and Vene – lead down from the port to Town Hall Square and the Upper Town. Tallinn is a sort of seafaring Prague. The Maritime Museum in Fat Margaret Tower gives the flavour of the place. Outside the museum is a plaque to four British admirals who helped the Estonians fight for independence in 1918-1920.
Tallinn made its fortune from salt – the white gold of the Middle Ages – which was shipped from France and Portugal into Russia. These days it seems to rely on Finnish and European investment. Ferries to Helsinki run several times a day. The business district boasts a cluster of glitzy skyscrapers. The Estonian language is close to Finnish, and listening to Finnish radio in Soviet days influenced the national mindset. Where Vilnius felt faintly Polish, and Riga still very Soviet, Tallinn feels closer to the West than the other Baltic capitals.
Tourism is plainly a major money-spinner. Town Hall Square and the adjoining streets are full of souvenir shops, bars, and restaurants that use plastic pictures of the food to break down language barriers. The tall spire of St. Olaf’s Church dominates the skyline. There are more Western tourists than in the other capitals, and a lot of groups. Germans come to explore their Hanseatic ancestry, Russians and Finns come to drink. Prices are higher than Lithuania and Latvia, but lower than in the West. Overcome by the need to shop, we buy ourselves some linen knick-knacks and invest in amber earrings.
On our first night we have dinner in the hotel restaurant, which is called Bordoo (pronounce Bordeaux), which occupies a great gloomy room with monstrous chairs and a sub-mediaeval decor, and whose cuisine is not quite as exclusive as it thinks it is. The second night we end up at one of the plastic-picture places, and the third night we go for Russian: borshch, blinis and Russky Standart. The Russians took over Estonia in 1710 and have never really left. They still account for one quarter of the population. The Russian consulate and Russian cultural centre are housed in elegant premises on a street called Vene, which means “Russian” in the Estonian language, and the skyline of the Upper Town is dominated by the imposing Orthodox Cathedral of St. Alexander Nevsky.
The Hop On Hop Off bus takes us out to the Estonian Open-Air Museum. Like Skansen, it’s made up of historical rural buildings, but it’s quieter, cheaper, and more atmospheric. We see a wooden farmhouse with a well, a barnyard, and a kitchen garden. There’s a tidy schoolroom. We sit for a while in an eighteenth-century wooden church where a haunting ecclesiastical chant is playing. An elderly lady in a checked shawl unhooks ropes and arranges flowers. We are the only people there. The place has the mystical feel of a Bergman film.
Back in the twentieth century, the Museum of Occupations at the foot of Toompea Hill is the local equivalent of the Vilnius KGB Museum. The focus is less on Occupation than on Deportation. Concrete suitcases stand in the forecourt. The German Occupation of Estonia seems to have been less harsh than elsewhere – Alfred Rosenberg, the Third Reich ideologist who became governor of the Baltic States, was born in Tallinn – but the Soviets made up for it when the country was re-occupied. Thousands of Estonians were deported to Siberia from 1944 onwards. (A recent Estonian film called Crosswinds provides a vivid account of the deportations.) In the basement of the museum is a collection of stone heads of former great men (Vladimir Ilich and friends) who have clearly been dismantled and shoved out of the way.
The reward for Good Tourists is a chocolate shop called Chez Pierre, with a geranium-filled courtyard and a cosy interior, where we have a delicious “Aztec” nightcap of hot chocolate made with sea salt.
Back on the bus, we make for the Soviet-era TV tower, which must have been a miracle of engineering in its day, but now feels past its prime. A row of white vans with Russian plates stands in front of the tower, cabs empty, engines running. Who’s invading this time? Just Toyota. During the 1991 putsch, the Soviet Army tried to take the tower, but was foiled by four Estonians who held out on the 22nd floor. The view from up there is impressive. Arrows on the carpet tell you how far it is to Minsk or Washington. Odd-shaped multimedia screens are scattered around and glass holes in the floor show how far it is down to the ground.
Lunch is “boletus” soup in the cafeteria, followed a little later by prosecco in the courtyard of the Three Sisters. After dinner, we take a stroll through the garden festival outside the city ramparts, which has small-size houses and large-size armchairs, cut-out figures and fan-shaped scarecrows, otherworldly chess games, walkways lined with mirrors, and gigantic ants. We’ve fallen down the rabbit-hole with Alice in the soft Baltic twilight.
Helsinki
Time to go back to the real world. We leave Estonia on the ferry to Helsinki next morning, and are relieved to find ourselves in a place that does not have an Old Town, and whose streets are not lined with souvenir shops. We take a taxi to the GLO Art Hotel which is dark and minimalist, eat lunch in a buffet restaurant (€10 for all you can eat), and catch the ferry to Suomenlinna, the island fortress built by Sweden in 1748, captured by the Russians in 1808, and relinquished to the Finns in 1918.
The sun is shining, and the ferry is packed with locals clutching plastic bags of strawberries and sweet green peas from the quayside market. They will spend the afternoon sunbathing on the grassy mounds of the fortress, and swimming off the rocks that line the island. The man sitting opposite, who is a dead ringer for Brody in Homeland, asks me if I’ve been to Helsinki before (I have), and comments rather acidly that we’re lucky to have such good weather. Apparently it’s been a bad summer in Scandinavia. Returning to the city in the early evening, we do a little upmarket glassware shopping in iittala, and splurge on a farewell dinner at Aino on the Esplanade. Cauliflower soup, smoked salmon, and chocolate nut cake.
Over the Viognier we work on the Baltic Trilogy, which came into being earlier in the afternoon as we were lounging on a bench in Suomenlinna. Kathy came up with the first title, Tallinn Never Tells, followed swiftly by Riga Never Repents, and Vilnius Never Forgives. Catchy, huh? The basic plan is that a body would wash up somewhere (say the rocks below us), and an investigation would ensue. Scandinavian thrillers like to draw on the misdeeds of the past, so we can throw in SS and KGB as required. Unfortunately, there is authorial disagreement concerning our protagonist. Kathy wants a lesbian with short black hair and piercings, which strikes me as too Lisbeth Salander. Me I favour the crotchety Brody lookalike. To Be Continued.
August 2015
)
A London publisher who had read The Glass Palace Chronicle wanted to meet me, for reasons that were never very clear. She had already made up her mind.
“In fact,” she said disdainfully, “what you’ve written is a South-East Asian road novel?”
“I suppose it is,” I admitted. Wrong answer.
“There’s no market for that,” she said, “in the current climate.”
After a detour via the Internet, The Glass Palace Chronicle was picked up by another print publisher a year or two later, and twenty years later, back in digital form, it continues to sell. Amazon reviews are still positive, readers still send me e-mails.
The actual road trip took place in 1993. My husband and I had been to Burma before, in July 1988, slipping in and out between two political upheavals, more by good luck than good planning. We toured the country at breakneck speed on a one-week visa. Our trip was blighted by monsoon, curfew, and Tourist Burma. We spent most of our time organizing onward travel, and the rest selling off our possessions for local currency (the exchange rate was ruinous). It didn’t leave much time for sightseeing. We were hungry for more.
Trading on his travel agent credentials, and scraping an acquaintance with someone who knew the French Ambassador to Burma, my husband managed to return in 1991. At that point, no tourist visas were being delivered. It was another two years before we went back together.
RANGOON
January 1993. Arriving in Rangoon in the early afternoon, we take a taxi into town. The monsoon is over, and the air is warm and damp. The taxi is a blue pick-up truck with wooden bench seats. The driver stops twice to put water in the radiator and re-tie his longgyi. Everyone wears longgyis in Burma (it’s a kind of sarong). Ladies have little tops to go with them; gents wear Western shirts. Chic young men favour baseball caps to complete their look. Chic older ones wear short collarless jackets (very elegant). Everyone ties and re-ties all day long.
Burma is currently governed by a military junta called SLORC (State Law and Order Restoration Council), which has changed the country’s name to Myanmar, refused to hand over power to the democratic winners of free elections, and placed the Opposition leader, Aung San Suu Kyi, under house arrest. A civil war is under way against ethnic minorities who want more independence from the dominant Burmans.
Riding into Rangoon we see no overt signs of repression apart from a large sign by the side of the road, white lettering on a dark red background, that says TATMADAW SHALL NEVER BETRAY THE NATIONAL CAUSE. Tatmadaw is the army; the national cause is unity, and what this means is that the insurgents are not going to get the federation they are demanding.
The taxi takes us to the Hotel Kandawgi, which was once the premises of the Orient Boat Club. Enormous philodendrons curve down into the water, and it has a creaking colonial charm. The receptionist claims the hotel is full, but my husband met the French Ambassador on his previous trip, and has kept in contact with Christine, the Ambassador’s secretary. Christine plays the diplomatic card to get us a bungalow with a verandah overlooking the lake. Inside, the paint is peeling and there are large damp patches on the walls.
The Kandawgi is a favoured venue for official meetings and social receptions. In the lobby, we encounter Aude, a doctor who has been sent by the French Foreign Ministry to liaise on AIDS. In the lakeside restaurant, we watch as Western businessmen in shirtsleeves negotiate with Burmese officials in longgyis. One morning, we catch a glimpse of a society wedding: bride in pink with a train, groom in Western suit, ladies in shimmering longgyis of a quality you don’t see at street markets, teenage girls wearing longgyis at an interesting mid-calf length. Most of the men wear trousers. Money leaks from every pore, and there are a lot of photographers present. Footwear consists mostly of flip-flops.
Rangoon has broad colonial avenues with stately buildings and it must once have been impressive. Despite the potholes and rats and open drains, it doesn’t look too bad in the dark. The street signs are still in English, and the Post Office still has red postboxes for Inland and Foreign Mail. The Strand Hotel, once the best hotel in Asia, is swathed in scaffolding. It’s under renovation by an Australian firm. We spent a night in the Strand in 1988, snapping up the last free room available just before curfew. We enjoyed the faded splendour, but not the cockroaches.
We eat dinner squatting on stools at a pavement tea house near the Sule Pagoda. Fine dining is at a premium in central Rangoon. The tea house is dirty, and we can’t make ourselves understood. Five years ago everyone spoke tourist English, but not any more. Since 1988 the number of foreign visitors has plummeted. Eventually someone proposes “Dinner?” and we are given fried eggs, bread and Burmese tea. Passers-by stare at us, and smile, and say hello. Aude, who has come along for the ride, looks perturbed but does not protest.
Christine lives in a square white house next to the Yugoslav Embassy with two large dogs and one small cat. Her house is furnished with things she picked up on her travels: Vietnamese lacquer chests, Moroccan brass trays. Christine has spent her life in the diplomatic service. We swim in her pool and then, in the late afternoon, we make for the Shwedagon, the pagoda whose great golden dome dominates the city. Leaving our shoes at the door, we climb the steps to the terrace. There’s a cheerful family atmosphere; people come and go. Last time we were here, it was monsoon, the terrace was swept by rain, and there was no one around. Today it’s completely different. Children hide under a bell, people eat meals in tucked-away corners. A monk asks us “What nationality?” and taps on his bell when we answer. I cannot remember ever being in a place where there was such a sense of peace.
PAGAN
Peace is in short supply at the airport next morning. It’s five a.m. and the terminal is in chaos. Passengers heave sacks around, officials fill in forms. Waiting for the flight to Pagan on hard wooden benches in the departure lounge, we buy cake off a roaming vendor, eat what we can, and offer the rest to the orange-robed monk sitting opposite. Someone dumps a pile of plastic bags on the seat next to me. They have a picture of a bird on them, and they’re still warm. On the plane they give us breakfast: two samosas, a cup of sweet milky tea, a face flannel and two boiled sweets. The flannels come in handy for cleaning hotel rooms.
Pagan is magic. Once it was the capital of Burma, and over two thousand temples were built here. LOVE YOUR MOTHERLAND, OBEY THE LAW, says the sign at the entrance to the village. Everywhere you look there is a temple, and they stretch for miles across the plain. We rent bicycles and ride along the Irrawaddy River to the next village, Nyaung U. It’s livelier than Pagan, with bicycles, bullock carts, and shops with dark interiors selling God knows what. Children in green school longgyis shout hello. An older lady with a basket on her head invites us into her home for tea, tells us how hard times are, and asks for a present. At lunch in the Nation Restaurant in Pagan, the waitress says that she is studying physics at Mandalay University, but that when she graduates she will return to Pagan to work with the tourists because it’s the best way to earn a living. Lunch consists of Burmese Dish, a kind of all-purpose curried stew.
There’s a festival in progress at the Ananda temple. Attractions include a soccer match, a bullock competition, and a beer tent. After a courtesy visit, we steer clear. We spend the next three days idling along dusty roads from one silent, abandoned temple to the next. Occasionally an ox-cart trundles past. No one has set foot in some of the smaller temples for years. The trace of a snake can sometimes be seen in the dust.
My husband has developed an interest in lacquerware, and we stop to drink tea with shopkeepers and negotiate a price. They’ve been making lacquer in Pagan since the eleventh century. The best lacquer has twelve coats, and can take up to a year to make. We’re becoming experts at telling the good stuff from the poorer quality, which contains clay, weighs more, and has only three coats of lacquer.
One of the best-known temples is the Dhammayangyi, a square red-brick pyramid rising above the plain. Visiting the temple five years earlier, we were shown round by a bright and beautiful eleven-year-old girl speaking excellent English. We took a photo of her with her little sister, and gave her an emery board as a token of our appreciation (it was the end of the trip and stocks were running low). We’re startled to find the same girl in the same temple, still showing tourists around. She’s sixteen now. Her older brother is married and his fifteen-year-old wife has just had a baby, but she says she would rather earn money to buy a school uniform for her sister. We give her badges and key-rings that she can trade, and she gives us two small lacquer bowls.
Returning to Nyaung U to buy bus tickets for Lake Inle, we stop a man by the side of the road to ask our way, and he takes us to a pagoda on the edge of the river. Bells are tinkling, and the monks give us Chinese tea. When we give our guide ten kyats, he isn’t pleased. “It’s too less for me,” he says. So we add on a baseball cap, which goes down much better. “I very thank you,” he says.
LAKE INLE
The bus to Lake Inle leaves at four, with a breakfast stop at five thirty. The bus is open to the elements. Until the sun comes up it’s freezing. We drape ourselves in sweaters and towels to keep out the wind. Most of the passengers are Burmese, except for four English students. When it gets warm enough to talk, I swap travel experiences with the girl sitting next to me, and she passes on a couple of slogans for my collection.
Arriving at Shwenyaung around half-past three, we leave the bus and complete our journey to Lake Inle by horse-drawn cab. The road goes through a marshy landscape, past bamboo houses perched on stilts. Lake Inle is populated by a tribe called the Inthas, who live in houses built over the lake, and cultivate vegetable fields that float on the water. They get round in long narrow boats that they row with their legs.
In Yaunghwe, the town on the edge of the lake, there is only one hotel for foreigners. We’re given a room with bamboo walls in the courtyard. Each bed has one skimpy blanket, and it’s very cold. The next night we’re upgraded to a room in the main building, but there’s a draught down the chimney and the window has no glass. For the rest of our stay at the lake, we sleep with all our clothes on.
After a breakfast of fried eggs, we take the bus back to Shwenyaung en route to Heho market. Passing a pagoda, the bus slows so that passengers can make contributions. One-kyat notes are flung out into the road. At Shwenyaung, we change into an open truck, which is already full. My husband gets on to the running board and holds on to the rail. I prepare to do the same, then realize I’ll fall off at the first bump. The truck is about to start moving. I fling myself forward and land on a group of Burmese who move up to make room for me on the floor.
The shoppers at Heho Market belong to the hill tribes. They have darker skins than the people in central Burma; they wear brightly coloured headdresses and black knee-length tunics. CRUSH ALL DESTRUCTIVE ELEMENTS says the red and white sign. The market sells blankets, bales of material, and longgyis. Ladies with sewing machines make your clothes up as you wait. We wander past knives, salt, flowers, vegetables, chilis, chives, dried fish, and a strange white root vegetable that they chew in the bus on the way home. There is no meat or poultry in sight. My husband is disappointed to find no lacquerware.
We have lunch in the local café: a large square gloomy dirty room. The walls are unpainted, the floor is bare earth, the tables and chairs are made of solid teak. All the cafés in Burma look the same. All of them play what one of our rickshaw drivers describes as “Burmese modern music.” This consists of Western pop music with Burmanized lyrics. Particularly popular are the Bee Gees, ABBA and Rod Stewart. I am sailing, I am sailing. In the classier places, they wipe the table between clients. You can drink tea made with tinned milk, coffee ditto, Pepsi-Cola, or bright yellow soda. Free Chinese tea comes automatically in handle-less cups. Toilet paper, Lux soap and tinned fish are on offer in glass-fronted display cases.
Back at the hotel there’s a Shan evening for the tourists. We sit cross-legged on the polished teak floor to eat a typical Shan dinner and watch a puppet show. The food is a lot better than Burmese Dish, but there’s something very ferocious about Shan puppets. The other guests are Germans, Americans, Canadians, Australians. Tourist conversations run along well-oiled tracks: where have you come from, how did you get here, where are you going next, how will you get there?
We all meet up again the following day when the hotel organizes an excursion to the Floating Market. This takes place twice a week on the lake between a couple of shops on stilts and a ruined pagoda. Boats slide alongside each other, moving forward, apparently without direction. No money changes hands, it’s all done by barter. The locals exchange firewood for vegetables. The tourists exchange watches for lacquerwork and calculators for antiques. When it becomes known that my husband is interested in small lacquer boxes, small lacquer boxes start to pour in from all directions, passed across the boats from hand to hand. A large sign in the pagoda says Ladies Prohibited.
MANDALAY
No more buses for us: we take the plane to Mandalay. The inside of the terminal is like a cattle shed. Vendors sell crisps and oranges, and giggling girls cheerfully spit the pips out. LOVE AND CHERISH YOUR MOTHERLAND says the sign by the door.
What I remember best from our previous trip is driving past the walls of Mandalay Fort at dusk in a horse-drawn carriage. The light was fading, the walls were endless. There was no one around. The only sound was the clip-clop of the horse’s hooves. It felt as though we had fallen out of time.
Since then Mandalay has changed. The walls of the Fort have been repainted in an un-poetic shade of blood red. The horse-drawn carriages have been replaced by motorized pick-ups. Bicycle rickshaws have been banished to the side streets, and the centre hums with reconditioned Japanese cars. The twentieth century is on its way. The town bustles with shops and stalls. Mandalay is famous for its craftsmanship, and there’s a whole street of chair-makers where youths squat in the dust plaiting wickerwork backs and seats for wooden chairs.
After a night in the Mandalay Hotel, Tourist Burma’s Chinese-built flagship overlooking the Fort, we repair to a hotel recommended by Christine, which opened in 1990, does not figure in tourist guides, and has mainly Burmese clients. We are lodged in a wooden bungalow that houses four separate guest rooms. A verandah with table and chairs overlooks a dusty lawn. A young man in jeans and Converse saunters past. We are back in the heart of affluent, official, Westernized Burma. These are the people who get married in the Kandawgi. The car park is full of chauffeurs washing cars. Our neighbours are golden youths with a ghetto blaster. Can you hear the drums, Fernando? They turn off the music about nine in the evening, but it goes back on at six a.m. They sing along to the music, and take all the hot water.
Mandalay is a centre of Buddhist learning, the town is full of monasteries, and SLORC is doing its best to drum up sympathy among the monks. BE KIND TO ANIMALS BY NOT EATING THEM says the dark red street sign.
Mandalay Hill, the town’s main monument, has been a sacred place for thousands of years. The covered stairway leading to the top of the Hill is lined with astrologers, photographers, souvenir peddlers, and stalls selling flowers, cold drinks, and brightly-coloured sweets. It looks like Lourdes-on-the-Irrawaddy — but the view is amazing. As we climb the 1729 steps, Mandalay spreads out beneath us. First the golden dome of the Kuthudaw Pagoda, then the white dome next to it, then the military compound that now occupies the Fort, then the golf course, and then at last the wide grey flow of the Irrawaddy. “What country?” hisses a monk walking past us down the steps.
Christine has given us an introduction to an artist and tapestry-maker named U Sein Myint. We visit his house in one of the quiet residential streets near the Fort. Tapestry looms are set out in the garden, and his employees are hard at work. Burmese tapestries have a distinctive black background, lots of sequins and spangles, and figures stuffed with rags to make them stand out. Sein Myint has made tapestries for French diplomats, and designed a card for UNICEF. He talks a lot about himself. He shows us his museum of Burmese antiquities and his private shrine and his water colours. He tells us that he once worked as a smuggler, and says he used to have two shops in Zegyo Market (the main market in Mandalay), but that he ceded them to his siblings to devote himself to his Art. No two of his tapestries are the same, he claims, because he has to follow his Creative Impulses. My husband mentions that I am a writer and a fellow Creator: he looks at me in perplexity, and informs us that he has written five newspaper articles. We order a couple of tapestries, to be delivered via Christine at the Embassy. He takes us to a tea room, and then drives us home. The golden youths are listening to the Bee Gees, the lights are going down in Massachusetts, and there is no hot water.
Sitting on my bed, writing up my notes, thinking about Sein Myint and his tapestries, the idea for The Glass Palace Chronicle takes shape, and the events of our journey start to acquire the malleability of fiction.
Sagaing is a mystical town of pagodas and monasteries where no one speaks English. It’s quieter and more devout than Mandalay. In the Kaunghmudaw Pagoda, a monk shows round a couple who might be his parents. We eat our picnic in a vast white empty courtyard. In the field outside, two men are grooming a cow. The Irrawaddy gleams faintly in the distance.
Back at the Innwa Inn, we find the dining room occupied by a large group of plumpish men who have obviously been drinking all afternoon. The tables are covered with empty soda bottles. Despite the lack of alcohol, they look very pleased with themselves, and they all have the used-car salesman air peculiar to dignitaries in authoritarian states. The waiter offers us a choice of European dinner or Chinese dinner. No Burmese Dish here.
Returning to Rangoon by train, we find the station seething with hysteria. The platform is sealed off with wire netting, and only travellers are allowed to pass. A family of emigré Burmese in fussy Western clothes wail tearful goodbyes to their Mandalay relatives as the train pulls out.
We are travelling in style in Upper Class, which has reclining seats equipped with footrests and cupholders. Vendors patrol the car, selling fruit, sweets, nuts, and cigarettes. When it starts to get dark, the serious food appears: small roast chicken pieces and rice with nuts. It’s one of the best meals we’ve had in Burma. Then the vendors disappear, and people settle down for the night. We get out the striped blankets we bought in Zegyo Market that morning.
The train gets into Rangoon at six a.m. Arriving at the Kandawgi is like coming home. The night clerk gives us a “suite” with a fridge freezer and four fake leather armchairs grouped round a coffee table. A lizard runs down the wall.
Our fellow dinner guests at Christine’s that evening are archeologists working on the ruins at Pagan. By now everyone I meet has become grist to the mill of The Glass Palace Chronicle, and they will all end up in travestied form in the South-East Asian road novel.
)
March 2011
Syria is the graveyard of ancient civilizations, and a mosaic of tribes, nations, religions, schisms, ideologies and invaders. Greeks, Romans, Alawites, Hittites, Aramaeans, Druzes, Crusaders…. It’s hard to know what to make of it, either past or present. And it’s still in flux.
Five days before we leave France in March 2011, troubles break out in the southern town of Dara’a. The travel agent assures us that there is no cause for concern. The Syrian guide ignores the unrest as long as he can, and then dismisses it. The situation doesn’t seem dangerous, but it’s uncomfortable. Nevertheless, at the end of a week, we are relieved to cross into Jordan.
I’m travelling with a group of French people, aged from sixty to eighty. It’s my first foray into group travel since my husband died. Some of the group formerly worked for the Paris suburban water board and call themselves the Anciens des Eaux. Some of the rest have travelled together before. I’m the only one who knows no one. There are nineteen of us in all.
On our arrival in Damascus, the advantages of group travel are immediately apparent: no visas to queue up for, no money to change, no taxis to haggle with. The guide takes charge of our passports, changes our money, assigns us hotel rooms. His name is Afif, and he’s a plump, rather oily gent, in a spiffy pin-striped suit. We are staying at the Ebla Palace, a faux luxury hotel in the middle of nowhere, with an ostentatious lobby and paint-stripper toiletries. The restaurant has a three-piece band, an empty dance floor and a singer crooning antiquated hits to assorted multi-national tour groups.
Next morning we set out to see Damascus. We start off in the Architectural Museum, which has some fine pieces but is cramped and badly laid out. The displays jump anarchically from one period to another. It’s hard to follow when you haven’t seen the sites. But then it’s on to the Old City which has extensive souks, an imposing mosque, the head of John the Baptist, and the tomb of Saladin. Ladies are issued with unflattering robes to visit the mosque and Saladin’s mausoleum: we are allowed to provide our own headscarves. The gentlemen make sympathetic comments and take our photo. The Great Mosque of Damascus and the Azem Palace (the Ottoman governor’s residence) are fine examples of Islamic architecture, one dating from the eighth century, and the second from the eighteenth.
When we’ve finished with the serious stuff, Afif escorts us on a walk through the souk, pointing out places of interest, which include a lot of Christian churches (he himself is a Christian, we discover). It’s quite relaxing not to have to grope your way forward with one eye on the guidebook and the other on the city plan. Marianne, who is seventy-eight and a very nice lady, walks behind me and saves me from being run over by motor scooters a few times. Purchases are authorized, in emporia selected by Afif. We are not allowed to straggle. At the end of the day, we drive up to the top of a hill overlooking the city to admire Damascus by night. On the way we pass the Presidential Palace, which is dark and unlit, and possibly swarming with military in the shadows. Afif fobs off questions about the current unrest with some chat about how visitors are traditionally welcomed into a guest palace at the bottom of the hill before being conducted to the Presence at the top. He says the arrangement is modeled on Ebla, one of the ancient sites we will visit in the course of our stay. That evening, the BBC reports fifteen dead in Dara’a.
On to Palmyra. Travelling through the suburbs of Damascus on the way east, I’m struck by the amount of unadorned concrete dwellings: half-finished houses with metal struts sticking up in the air and heaps of rubble and used tyres in front of the door. (Later we hear that the reason for the unfinished look is that people like to think that they can build on an extra storey for relatives if the spirit moves them.) Afif boasts that everyone in Syria is entitled to free medical care and that there is no unemployment because, unlike France, people are not paid unemployment benefit, and so everyone “figures something out.” Well, that’s nice. Everyone is busy phoning their relatives in France to reassure them that we are nowhere near Dara’a. Afif pretends not to hear. Our road takes us across the steppe, which is flat and not very interesting, with a few miserable-looking Bedouin tents hunkered down here and there. Afif says that Bedouins are free to camp where they want with no need for government permits. We make a pit stop at a place called the Bagdad Café, and take lunch in a Bedouin-run restaurant featuring steam-cooked lamb, a local delicacy, which is truly disgusting.
The first sight of Palmyra is amazing. Coming round the last bend on the featureless steppe road, we’re suddenly confronted with the ruins of the ancient city, floating like a mirage in the desert air. The clouds have lifted and the sun has come out. High points of the visit are the Archeological Museum, which is more focused and better laid out than the one in Damascus; Queen Zenobia’s baths; and the temple of Baal, which was built in the Roman style, only bigger and better, to make sure everyone seeing it was properly humbled. The gods of the Middle East seem to have been a remarkably ferocious and repressive lot. One sees exactly where Yahweh comes from. The local tribes needed to be kept in line and terrorized into good behaviour. The oasis can be traced back to the nineteenth century BC, and gets several mentions in the Old Testament. When the Romans moved in, they straightened out the unruly nomads, and the city became an important trading centre on the caravan routes. Zenobia became queen in 267 AD and set out to challenge Roman power in Egypt and Asia Minor. Obliged in the end to surrender, she may have been killed – or else she may have ended her days in Rome as a senator’s wife. You can choose what you want to believe. Palmyra fell gradually into obscurity until the first Western travellers started arriving in the seventeenth century, and the archeologists some time thereafter.
The Hotel Zenobia Cham is not up to the late queen’s standards. It has dark little rooms hung with dark little carpets, and some rather alarming plumbing. Afif has inveigled us into attending an evening of Bedouin dancing. We file into a tent, sit in a row, and listen to four or five guys playing screechy music on unidentifiable instruments. A man in black robes claps his hands and get us all to clap too. A few men dance, but respectable Bedouin ladies are not allowed to dance in front of strangers, so instead Sophie and Claire from our group are borne off to the back of the tent, kitted out in embroidered robes, and encouraged to do the dancing. They do not get a share of the €10 we all forked out.
Next day it’s off to Aleppo, via Hama, Apamee and Ebla, and the many layers of Syria’s past start to pile up in confusion. Hama has been settled since five thousand years before Christ. In the second millenium it was ravaged (possibly) by someone called the Hyksos, then it became the capital of an Aramaean kingdom which paid tribute to King David, then the Assyrians ravaged it and then the Romans moved in. At last, someone I’ve heard of! Hama is reputed to be the most traditionalist town in Syria today, and was the site of a bloody attack by Hafez al Assad in 1982, that Afif assures us was regrettable but necessary. It’s Friday today, the Day of Prayer, and the town is quiet when we visit mid-morning, but our visit is confined to the nurias, the gigantic water-wheels that were used until recently to bring water into the city from the River Orontes, followed by cream cheese delicacies in a nearby coffee shop. Afif tucks in, and gets them to make up a parcel for him to take home. Claire, who at sixty-seven still has something of the little girl about her, tells me about her husband who worked for Air France and didn’t like to travel. And wouldn’t let her travel either. So she’s making up for lost time. Next stop is Apamea for a pleasant walk in the sunshine along the Cardo, two kilometres long, edged by colonnades, set amid greenery with sheep grazing nearby. Apamea was a garrison town under the Greeks and the Romans, and the Cardo is the main drag where the shops used to be. Some of the flagstones underfoot have been there for two thousand years. Lunch takes place at a truckdrivers’ halt, and consists of a tasty lamb dish.
The last stop of the day is Ebla, which is where the vertigo really kicks in. Not much is left of the site, but they found archives. We’re looking at a major city from the third millenium BC, which controlled a good part of north-western Syria, owned vast herds of cattle and sheep, and traded with Mesopotamia. It was destroyed first by the Assyrians around 2300 BC, then by the Hittites in 1200 BC. A Bedouin guide escorts us round, throwing pebbles at the uncovered foundations in an alarming fashion to attract our attention to anything he deems noteworthy. The locals are out and about, picknicking, taking walks with their children, enjoying their day of leisure in the sunshine. Girls in long coats and headscarves titter and stare, boys shoot past on scooters, people say hello and ask us where we’re from.
On to Aleppo, and back to the twenty-first century. Photos of Baal’s successor, Bashar al-Assad, are plastered up on buildings and on cars. Bashar has a furtive smile and an uneasy gaze. He was trained as an opthalmologist before dynastic imperatives obliged him to take over as heir apparent when his elder brother was killed in a car accident. Youths in pick-up trucks sporting pennants of Bashar are driving up and down the main thoroughfares hooting and yelling. They look as though they’re having a good time. It’s an exciting way to round off the Day of Prayer. The BBC talks of demonstrations, shootings, and unconfirmed numbers of dead. It’s not clear what’s happening where. There are no foreign journalists in Syria, and eyewitness reports cannot be authentified. France 5 claims one hundred dead (a nice round number), and the BBC suggests forty-five, unconfirmed. Afif has talked us into another evening of entertainment in a nearby hotel. The original plan was to go there on foot, but the lads in the pick-up trucks have changed his mind, and we take the bus instead. The whirling dervishes are worth seeing: one is fortyish, experienced, and very convincing; the other is a boy of twelve at most, learning the trade, and it’s touching to see him teeter round. How on earth do they stay on their feet? But the belly dancer is a disaster. Her belly doesn’t move, her hips barely sway, she has no sense of rhythm. She moves flabbily round from table to table and fidgets unbecomingly in front of each. To judge by her set smile and constant fiddling with her hair, she is as embarrassed by the proceedings as we are. Afif gets up to dance with her and tucks a note into her over-padded bra. Part of the €14 we paid for the evening?
The next day was supposed to be spent in Aleppo, but because of the disturbances we spend the morning out of town visiting a ruined Byzantine cathedral in a place called Saint Simeon, named after an ascetic monk who spent most of his life perching on top of a stone platform, for reasons that are not entirely clear. The church was partially destroyed by an earthquake, but the ruins attest to a harmoniously laid out building, and the site is spectacular. A Spanish group accompanied by a priest says mass and sings, and a group of well-dressed Syrian schoolgirls wearing make-up and headscarves produce mobile phones and ask to have their photos taken with us. We assume they live in the fancy apartment blocks that are going up on the outskirts of Aleppo. There is presumably a correlation between Westernized clothes and better housing, just as there must be links between the rundown buildings in the town centre and the dark covering coats of the women on the streets there. Afif is hard to pin down on socio-economic questions (no one dares ask political questions). Some of what he says is confusing, and some is plainly evasive.
Back in Aleppo, we have lunch in a former palace where surly waiters grimly process yet another batch of tourists. Their put-upon expressions remind me of the musicians who played for us last night, who couldn’t get out of the door fast enough at the end of the show. People are tired and cross today, and quite a few have upset stomachs. “No stamina,” says Simone disdainfully. Simone is turning out to be the Wicked Witch of the East. She is seventy-five. In her previous existence she must have terrorized the typing pool. Her conversation is of earth-shattering banality, and she likes to be the centre of attention. Next stop is the Citadel, but enough is enough. I sit at a café terrace with a few other dropouts, and we watch the world go by. The Citadel is the place to go for an afternoon out. Ladies wearing sober coats and headscarves with lipstick teeter past. Young men stride in leather jackets, old men shuffle along in long robes. We see lots of families with children. Behind us in the café, two young girls smoke a narguileh. We take a stroll through the souks, visit the factory where they make Aleppo soap, and move on to the shops where Afif is sure of his commission. We are staying in the Riga Palace, which is thankfully less Soviet than its name implies. It has decent toiletries, a bathroom big enough to dry one’s laundry, and an excellent view of the city from the seventh-floor restaurant. According to the BBC, there has been one death in Lattakia, where we are due to stay tomorrow night, and the city has been closed off. In Amman, where we will be in three days’ time, one hundred people have been hurt in a fight between supporters and opponents of the government. Great timing.
From Aleppo we drive north through the mountains to Saladin’s Castle, with an unscheduled stop in a village for Claire, who is feeling poorly, to throw up by the roadside. An interested crowd of teenagers, some clutching portraits of Bashar, immediately surrounds us. Nothing this exciting has happened in the village for years. Saladin’s Castle is a spectacular ruin on a hill dominating the countryside. It was built by the Crusaders and fell to Saladin in 1188. A spectacular pillar of rock juts up at the entrance, left over from when they dug out the moat. Once the pillar supported the drawbridge, several metres above the ground. After lunch, we drive through a wooded Mediterranean landscape towards Lattakia. A lot of high-end construction work is going up: holiday apartments, apparently, financed by rich Saudis, who need somewhere cooler to spend the summer. Since there seems to be nothing to do, and it’s not close to the beach, the choice of location seems odd, but apparently they party all night and sleep all day.
Police are checking cars at the entrance to Lattakia, but they let us through, and we drive through the town by a circuitous route avoiding the centre. Traffic is light, the streets are virtually deserted, and the shops are almost all shuttered. There are army patrols and police checkpoints at several crossroads. We take the turn off to Ugarit, the city of the Canaanites, who are also known as the Phoenicians. The origins of the site date back to 4000 BC, but the ruins currently visible belong only to 2000 BC or thereabouts. Did I mention that Syria is confusing? Ugarit’s main claim to fame is the invention, in about 1500 BC, of an alphabet whose signs corresponded to sounds, not syllables. That alphabet, engraved on a cylinder of dried clay, is in the Damascus Archeological Museum, and we saw it on our first day, but of course out of context. It’s a pity they didn’t keep it on the site: it would have been more meaningful to see it here. We repair to the café across the road for fresh orange juice, but break camp when a couple of young men on scooters with rifles ride by.
Our new hotel is on the beach, and we are quartered in vast holiday studios with kitchenettes big enough for a family of four. Unfortunately we arrive late and there’s hardly time to look outside before the sun goes down. CNN airs an interview with an old friend of Bashar now living abroad who says that Bashar used to be a nice guy but he isn’t any more. Rather than sit alone in my large, cold room until dinner, I repair to the bar, order arak and write up my journal. This does not seem to be the done thing, but it puts me in a better frame of mind for dinner, which consists of the usual buffet, made up of the usual mezze, the usual lamb stew, the usual steamed vegetables, the usual rice, all accompanied by the usual platitudes from Simone. The Anciens des Eaux have their drinking rituals with apéritifs and bottles of wine, but the rest of the group is sadly non-alcoholic. Simone has announced that she never drinks, and that seems to have set the tone. The small amount of whisky I brought with me ran out in Aleppo. Poor planning.
When we leave Lattakia the next day, the army is still guarding the entrance to the city. We drive past a huge pennant of Bashar hanging from a fourth floor apartment down to the street. Afif informs us that Bashar’s supporters are strongest in this region, because his tribe, the Alawites, are from around here. He assures us that everything will be resolved, that Bashar will adress the nation, that he will revoke the state of emergency that has been in force since 1963, and accede to the people’s demands. Does he really believe this, or is he just playing it safe by giving us the Party line? As a Christian, he presumably has a vested interest in the current socialist regime. Even if the Muslim Brotherhood aren’t as fanatical as they’re reputed to be, if they came to power it would no doubt upset all kinds of little tribal and religious balancing acts. Bashar is an Alawite, which is apparently a tribe, but it’s also the name of a schism from the Shiites. Does that mean they’re the same? I ask Afif if he could tell us something about the different tribes, since this is something Westerners overlook, but instead he tells us that snipers fired on to a crowd and killed thirty policeman. No one ventures to question this odd claim. He adds that the troubles are caused by Bashar’s uncle and cousins, and by the ex-deputy head of the opposition who fomented a coup and was sent into exile. Right.
Visits today include Tartus, which was a Frankish stronghold (after belonging to the Phoenicians and the Greeks and the Romans) and has a cathedral which was converted into a mosque, then a military depot, and finally a museum. Then on to Amrit just down the road, an important port around 1500 BC. The Arvadites and the Aradites and the Phoenicians were here, and one of other of them constructed some deep dark tombs surmounted by phallic-looking towers. I’m suffering from archeological burnout. In the distance, we can make out the guns at the nearby military camp aimed over Amrit at the sea. A few kilometres further on is the Krak des Chevaliers, the biggest and best of the Crusader castles remaining in Syria. It is huge, gloomy, draughty and oppressive. The sun that was shining when we left Lattakia this morning has vanished, and there’s a cold wind blowing in from the desert. Michel tells me how his wife collapsed and died in front of his eyes at dinner the previous year. Afif traipses us along long stone walkways pointing out where they put the horses, where they put the wine, and where they put the guards. The castle seems to have been a holding pen capable of accomodating huge numbers of soldiers ready to pour out and fight the Infidel as needed. Thinking of these Frankish warriors so far from home in this austere fortress in the bitter Syrian winters depresses me. I’m glad when the visit is over and it’s time for lunch.
After a final night in Damascus, we drive south to cross into Jordan. Sophie, who is seventy-eight but can pass for twenty years younger, tells me she was so lonely when her husband died six years ago that she went to a dating agency, but it didn’t work out. The usual frontier post is at Dara’a, which is still cordoned off, so we will cross a few kilometres further on. There’s a big pro-Bashar demonstration scheduled for today, and we see people grouping and preparations being made along our route. Don’t take photos, says Afif. We stop at Shaaba for the mosaics and Bosra for the theatre. Afif points out the town hall, the police station and the palace of justice in the towns we pass through, as he always does: as always they are glitzy modern buildings. The television in the restaurant where we stop for lunch shows massive street demonstrations, in Aleppo, apparently. We should tell everyone at home that things are under control in Syria, says Afif, and that everything is normal. He shepherds us through the Syrian border controls and leaves us on the edge of no man’s land. The Syrian bus is to drive us down to Amman, while he returns to Damascus in a taxi. His farewell is terse. He was less than pleased with the contents of the optional gratuity envelope that we passed round. I suspect he got his revenge by making us stumble through some of the danker, darker, more treacherous passages in Krak des Chevaliers.
The Jordanian guide, whose name is Mustafa, meets us at the Jordanian border, and takes care of the entrance formalities while we recover from the rigours of Syria with Turkish coffee and Cadbury’s chocolate at the border café. Mustafa is a large, nonchalant man in jeans and desert boots. Escorting tour groups round Jordan is his day job: his true vocation is teaching snorkelling in Aqaba. He is more at ease in French than Afif, and more willing to answer questions about the current situation. On the drive down to Amman, he explains the rationale behind last Friday’s demonstrations in Amman which left one hundred wounded, saying that the demonstrators want respect for the constitution, not the overthrow of the King. He claims that the economic situation in Jordan is better than Syria, and it’s true that Amman looks much more prosperous than anything we’ve seen in Syria. It could almost be an American suburb. The hotel is in a residential neighbourhood with nice houses and gardens, and some very fancy cars in the streets. Taking a walk on my own round the block (no one else wants to come), I’m impressed. Of course this is a city where people walk: the pavements are high and narrow and cluttered with garbage bins. Nor is there public transport to speak of: you have to take your car or find a cab. Staying briefly in Amman a year ago with my daughter, we got round in taxis, but had problems with drivers speaking Arabic only, and fell foul of a bizarre metering system that made us think a single journey was costing us thirty dinars (about €30), when in fact it was only three.
Sightseeing in Amman is limited to one site in the centre of the city that includes the Citadel, the Roman theatre, and a small though impressive Archeological Museum with exhibits going back to the seventh millenium BC. The theatre is closed for renovation. Apparently the whole of the city centre is about to be razed. The current mix of scraggy shops and rundown buildings will be revamped, and access to the archeological site will be improved. Who’s paying for this? Jordan has no resources and an unstable demographic mix, but Palestinian and Iraqi capital has been flowing in for the past two decades. Let’s hope it lasts.
One of Jordan’s problems is lack of water. Mustafa highlights this when we drive out to the desert castles east of Amman. “Castles” is not the best word to describe them: they’re more like fortified hammams. Most of them were built by the Omeyyads (the first dynasty of caliphs: 661 to 750 A.D.), for rest and relaxation at a suitable distance from the holy cities of Mecca and Medina. Qasr Amra is notable for the frescos in the audience room and hammam showing human faces and forms, which is rare in Islamic art. Qasr el Asraq was where T.E. Lawrence plotted tactics with Prince Faisal during the Arab revolt against the Ottomans in 1917. It was once an oasis, and Mustafa explains that there was still a lake there only twenty years ago, but that now the steppe is being pumped dry to meet the needs of Amman. Unlike Afif, Mustafa doesn’t march us round the castle pointing out the baths, the stables and the guardroom. He takes a more lateral approach, giving us a fascinating account of Lawrence’s psychological problems, and how this affected the political development of the Middle East. He points out the room where Lawrence conspired with Faisal, and then leaves us free to wander round and look at the rest on our own. Or else take pictures. The group includes a few camera junkies who are destined to spend more time watching film of the trip than they actually spent on the road.
Next morning, it’s back to the Christians (and the Jews). From Mount Nebo you can see over the River Jordan into Israel, and this is where Moses is thought to have glimpsed the Promised Land. From the church in Madaba, which has an intriguing sixth-century mosaic map of Palestine, we move on to the local handicrafts centre, where we all spend far too much money, and then drive down the spectacular King’s Highway to Kerak, another Crusader castle. Sparing us another guided tour of another fortress, Mustafa sits us down and talks about the reasons for the Crusades, such as the poor economic situation in Europe, and the role played by the Templars, and his own epiphany on hearing a guide say when he visited France that Vienna had been saved from the “Infidel.” He, of course, had been taught to think of Europe as the “Infidel,” and this made him sit up and think. He says he has read a lot since then, trying to see things from different angles, and it shows in what he’s saying. He gives us things to think about as well as things to look at. Afif, though archeologically sound, was incapable of presenting a factual overview in a coherent manner.
And so to Petra. Petra was the first place the spice caravans reached on their way north from Arabia. It was ideally placed for levying taxes, and this is what the Nabateans, its founders, did, in the sixth century BC. Petra was their warehouse and their fortress. From here they controlled the region, organizing and taxing from their city in the rock. The architecture is cut out of the rock face: the builders started at the top and worked down. The Treasury, the most famous site, is the height of a ten-storey building. Access to the city is through a long narrow natural gorge (the Siq) that winds for a kilometre and a half. When you catch the first glimpse of Al Khazneh, the Treasury, gleaming in the morning sun, through the last cleft in the Siq, it takes your breath away. The area is subject to storms and flash floods, and the Nabateans set up a highly sophisticated irrigation system which controlled the water pouring in by means of dams, cisterns and water conduits. This meant the city could store water for periods of drought (and sell it too). In its heyday, Petra was famous for its gardens, but alas they are long gone. Still, the site is remarkable. The visit involves a lot of walking, though there are carriages, horses, donkeys and camels on offer along the way, but most of it is flat. Petra is what stays in the mind after two weeks of intensive archeology. It’s completely unlike any of the other sites in the region. The facades sculpted in the rock have something other-worldly about them. When you walk out of the Siq, it’s as though you’ve landed on another planet. Despite the tourist hordes and the souvenir shops, it’s like going back in time. “A rose-red city, half as old as Time,” wrote John William Burgon. Not that the Nabateans would recognize their city now – for sand and water have done their work of erosion – but in the constantly changing colours of the rock, there is something archaic and resistant.
After the Treasury, the path widens out, there’s more walking, more tombs, a theatre, colonnades, and there’s also Fatima’s Place, a pleasant café in the shade. We stop there with the guide on the way out, and the group straggles back in twos and threes on the way back. Fatima is a sharp little Bedouin girl who serves the drinks and rakes in the cash. The whole site of Petra is run by Bedouins. They live in a town nearby and entire families work on the site, selling soft drinks, postcards, souvenirs, passing out toilet paper at restrooms, hiring out camels, providing whatever tourists want, or can be persuaded they need. Schooling is a problem, says the guide, because the little kids are sent out to pester tourists with postcards, and have no incentive to get an education or move on to other professions. Lunch is naturally in a Bedouin restaurant. It’s here that the Schism takes place. The Anciens des Eaux settle themselves at one end of a long table, Simone moves her three main acolytes sharply down to the other end, and the rest of us lurk uneasily in the middle. I haven’t seen anything like it since primary school. But thus is formed the “bande à Simone,” and for the rest of the trip the four of them are inseparable.
After a spin through the desert in the Wadi Rum, we head back north to the Dead Sea. The hotel is right on the shore of the sea, a vast tourist complex with spa, beach, and swimming pools catering to a multinational clientèle that includes a lot of Russians and Ukrainians. The décor is Soviet, but the food is pretty good. After breakfast, everyone rushes off to sit in the sea and then smother themselves with mud. Since I tried this last year already (and once is enough), I spend the morning peacefully by the pool. Next stop is Bethany, on the banks of the River Jordan, where John the Baptist allegedly plied his trade. Mustafa gives us an exposé based on Bible references and archeology showing that the allegations are probably true. The Jordan is narrow and mucky because it’s been travelling through sand. We are allowed to poke in our fingers and toes. On the way back to Amman, we stop in a shop selling beauty products made of Dead Sea mud that claim to be the elixir of eternal youth, and as usual spend too much money.
The Dead Sea was hot, but Amman is colder, and the next day it rains. It’s our last day in Jordan and I am sick of travelling, sick of archeological sites, sick of the group. We head north to Jerash, and then on to Umm Qeis, where, in a café overlooking Lake Tiberias, opposite the Golan Heights, Mustafa concludes our education with a little realpolitik: Balfour Declaration, State of Israel, Israeli pilfering of Jordanian water resources – all credible, though coming from a slightly different angle than one is used to. But then he spoils it by claiming that the current Israeli Foreign Minister is hoping to take advantage of the regional turmoil to impose something called the Great Transfer, which means that all Arabs living on Israeli soil would be shipped out to neighbouring Arab countries such as Jordan. This puts rather a dent in his credibility.
On the plane back to Paris, cut off from the group by the computer at check-in, I find myself sitting next to the Ghost of Jordan Past: a stringy little woman of indeterminate age, who has clearly never been on a plane before, and who has put on her best grey velvet dress for the occasion. Every time she moves, I get a blast of mothballs. All the way across Europe she fidgets, poking me with her sharp little velvet elbows, invading my space with her sharp little bare feet, twisting round in her seat to offer me the meat out of her sandwich. Not the usual suave behavior one expects from one’s neighbour on the plane, but I don’t really mind. At least I don’t have to make conversation and pretend to like her.
POSTSCRIPT: May 2015.
Palmyra has just fallen to the Islamic State, who are reported to be hacking their way through the museum. Visiting the ruins there four years ago, I bought a necklace I didn’t want off a pleasant young man who said I was his first customer that week. I imagine our group was one of the last to be admitted to Syria before the troubles started. The soap factory in Aleppo no longer exists, the souk there is in ruins, and I sometimes wonder what became of the teenage necklace vendor of Palmyra.
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First I decided I needed to steal a picture. Then I had to work out what to steal. Nothing too obscure. It ought to be an artist everyone had heard of. An Impressionist, maybe? Monet, perhaps? Eureka!
The idea for my novel Girl with Parasol came from a 2008 exhibition at the Jewish Museum in Paris called “A Qui Appartenaient Ces Tableaux?” (Looking for Owners). The exhibition showed pictures stolen by the Nazis whose owners had never been traced. There were paintings by Delacroix, Courbet, Vlaminck, Cézanne and Manet, among many others. It struck me at once that there was a book in there, but I was busy with another project and it was several years before I came back to it.
I returned to the museum bookshop in 2011, and I asked what to read. They started me off with a couple of books on Nazi looting. I read at random, trying to find a way into the theme. I needed characters, I needed a plot, I needed a painting. Weirdly, they all dropped into my head at breakfast one morning over the cornflakes, and the title of the book appeared later the same day. Girl with Parasol, of course. What else?
“Girl with Parasol” does not exist. Monet painted several pictures entitled “Femme à l’Ombrelle,” but there is no “Jeune Fille à l’Ombrelle.” Fusing the existing portraits and the lily pond and the Japanese bridge, I invented the painting. The model for the fictional portrait is the daughter of Monet’s art dealer (also fictional). She is is fifteen when Monet paints her, and her name is Tania. By the time the novel gets under way in 1940 she is dead. My main character is her daughter Corinne. Monet’s portrait of Tania has great sentimental value for Corinne. When the Germans invade France, she conceals the fact that she is part-Jewish, and she hides the portrait from the Nazi looters.
The second character, Rose, I did not make up. From 1940-44, Rose Valland was the sole French curator at the Musée du Jeu de Paume, which was used as a transit point for looted artworks. Everything pillaged from Jewish dealers and collectors was sent there to be evaluated and inventorized before being shipped off to the Reich. The museum was guarded, and its existence kept secret. Rose eavesdropped on conversations, noted what paintings came in, where they had come from, when they were going to be shipped. At the risk of her life, she passed the information to the Resistance. Rose was dowdy of dress, unobtrusive of manner, meticulous and determined. She was the perfect spy. When I came to write about her, I discovered that her autobiography had been out of print for years. (Rose was no writer, and her book is virtually unreadable, but that’s not the point.) Happily, Le Front de l’Art was re-published when the feature film The Monuments Men was released in 2014. In the movie, Rose is played by Cate Blanchett. I doubt she was as glamourous in the flesh, but at least she’s getting the recognition she deserves.
Rose seems to have had no sex life – she lived on art alone – but Corinne needed a love interest, and this turned out to be Thomas, an up-and-coming German diplomat. Thomas is not a Nazi, he’s an opportunist. He thinks he can use the Nazis to get on in life, but realizes too late that he’s been outmanoeuvered. His role was originally to make friends with Corinne, discover the portrait, betray her, and bow out. It rapidly became clear that he had other ideas. He betrays Corinne, but he falls in love with her too. His scenes with Corinne wrote themselves. This is not always an advantage, and I had a bad experience with a needy character in an early book. But this time it served a purpose, so I let him stay.
“Girl with Parasol” is confiscated by the Gestapo in 1942, and sent to Berlin at the request of the Foreign Minister, Joachim von Ribbentrop, who, unlike most of the Nazi hierarchy, had a fondness for the Impressionists. The portrait hangs in his office for about a year, until Allied bombing of Berlin impels Hanna, one of the Minister’s secretaries, to rescue the painting and take it home with her. Hanna keeps it safe till the end of the war, but then it is stolen again – this time by the Russians. The Russians were sole occupiers of Berlin for two months at the end of the war, and during that period they seized all the artworks they could get their hands on. They took far more pieces than the Nazis, in a far more disorganized manner, shipped them back to the USSR, and stashed them out of sight.
Like many authors, I like to see the places I write about for myself. I knew the Hermitage from previous trips, and doubted I would be able to get in to see either the Director’s office or the basement at first hand. I knew Berlin already too, but I made another trip there one summer to inspect the remains of the Foreign Ministry and scout out locations for Hanna’s apartment. Eventually I settled her in Charlottenburg. From there I thought about going to Dachau, where Corinne has a life-changing experience towards the end of the book, but in the end I chickened out. Having seen both Buchenwald, which was weird (the exhibition I saw was from the time of the DDR, and the East German curators were keener on glorifying anti-Fascist resistance than on discussing loss of life), and Auschwitz, which was terrible, I decided I knew enough to write one scene in the camp.
Other than that there wasn’t much travelling, since most of the book is set in France, where I live. In Paris, I revisited the Louvre and the Jeu de Paume. I tracked down Rose’s building on Rue de Navarre, near the Arènes de Lutèce, and located Thomas’ lodgings in the Hôtel d’Orsay, where a lot of German personnel were housed. I took a tour of the Hôtel de Beauharnais, which was the German Embassy during the war. I selected Corinne’s apartment on Rue du Bac and found her a suitable gallery to rent on Rue de Verneuil.
And then I went south. After her run-in with the Gestapo, Corinne flees over the Pyrenees into Spain, and goes to New York to join her family. I put out feelers in St. Jean de Luz to see if anyone remembered the wartime exfiltrations, but no one wanted to talk about it. Are the routes still in use? Are the memories too painful? In the end I had to rely on books, but the Basque passeurs I mention were all real people, and the escape route is one that was frequently used for “night work.”
“Girl with Parasol” reached Leningrad in October 1945. For the next fifty years the portrait was stored in the basement of the Hermitage, along with thousands of other looted artworks. No one knew they were there: the works were believed to have been destroyed. The museum did not reveal their existence until after the Soviet collapse, in 1994.
When the trove comes to light, Corinne is eighty-four and living in Connecticut. Her son Daniel travels to St. Petersburg, locates the painting, and buys it illicitly off a museum employee who needs money for her sick mother. He flies back to New York with the stolen Monet, and restores it to Corinne at the end of her life.
April 2015
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March 2015
From Iphigenia to Putin, Crimea has been reputed as a land of priestesses, wars and sanatoria. Khrushchev transferred the peninsula to the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic in 1954, and Putin grabbed it back from independent Ukraine in 2014. When we visited Yalta eight years before that, the Greeks were long gone, the Tatars still cast a shadow, and the Russians had never really gone away.
It was the Russians who interested me. I was working on a book called Compassion, whose characters are artists and writers, and I was treading in the footsteps of the poets Anna Akhmatova and Osip Mandelshtam, who both made numerous visits.
Like them, we arrive on the night train from Kiev. Yalta has neither station nor airport: everything stops in Simferopol eighty kilometres away, and you complete your journey across the mountains by road. At Simferopol, we are met with a pre-booked taxi by a young man called Slavik, who claims to have taught himself English by listening to pop music on foreign radio stations with his elder brother, back in the glory days when it was all forbidden. His British intonation is pitch perfect, and the BBC has a lot to be proud of. Slavik drives us to Yalta and drops us at the Hotel Bristol, near the sea front, which is not as English as it thinks it is, but considerably less Soviet than our hotel in Kiev.
Wandering inland, we find the market, and a stall selling excellent pelmeni. All the Central Asian specialities are on offer: laghman and plov and shashlyk. Since the nineteenth century Crimea has been Russia’s equivalent of the Côte d’Azur, but before that it belonged to the Tatars, a Turkic ethnic group which arrived with Genghis Khan. The Tatars ran a semi-independent khanate under the Sublime Porte, until the Russians kicked out the Ottomans in 1783. During World War II, the Tatars were deported to Siberia, but they’ve been drifting back again since 1989.
According to the guidebook, Yalta catered first to tsarist aristocrats with tuberculosis, then to Soviet citizens who had earned a rest in a sanatorium, and now it attracts the mafia. I have my doubts. From what we see, it’s still in Stage Two, and likely to remain so. Why would mafiosi want to spend their vacation in a place that has no Armani, no Hugo Boss, and almost no black Jeeps? The town has a gorgeous setting – mountains rear up just behind it, and lush vegetation pours right down to the sea – but it’s been ruined by too much concrete development. The main sea-front promenade offers beer and ice cream and plastic cafés, string quartets in track suits playing Brahms, an old guy in a sailor’s cap karaoke-ing to Kalinka, families taking the air, booths offering excursions to Livadia and Alupka and Bakhchisarai, and photo ops galore: cardboard fat ladies with a space to put your head; Harley Davidsons with appropriate leather rig; red velvet thrones with glitzy crinolines apparently conceived on the theme of Barbie meets the Tsar.
Amazingly, the promenade is still named the Lenin Embankment, and a statue of the great man still presides. He cuts a fine, if melancholy, figure on his pedestal in his best revolutionary greatcoat, with the mountains behind him, McDonalds next to him, and someone singing Oh Susanna, oh don’t you cry for me, I come from Alabama with a banjo on my knee. There are a few foreign tourists: Germans sampling the local beer, and Americans doing mini-bungee-jumping on the promenade. As resorts go, Yalta is pretty low end, but it’s trying hard to modernize, and every restaurant in town has multiple television screens playing an endless diet of inane clips and music videos. Seventy years of communism seem to have given Ukrainian citizens an appetite for beautiful people in unlikely clothes behaving in non-socialist ways in glossy settings. Sit there for an hour, and your brain drains away completely. Electronic opium for the masses?
On Wednesday, we set off in a marshrutka (collective taxi) for Livadia, the site of the February 1945 Yalta conference. Sadly, it is closed today for the May 9 holiday. Poor planning. We explore the site and the grounds, and decline a photo op with wax effigies of the Big Three sitting on a sofa. It’s a gorgeous day: bright and hot and spring-like. We take another marshrutka out to Alupka to see the Vorontsov Palace where Churchill stayed during the Conference, but it looks much too Scottish for Crimea, so we continue on along the road and take the cable car up Ai Petri. It’s a terrifying ride, right up the sheer face of the mountain. “Nothing guarantees that the cable car is revised periodically,” says Lonely Planet, “but it nevertheless seems in better shape than most public transport.” Oh yes? You can see right down through the floorboards to the slopes below. During the ride we encounter our first French-speaker of the trip, who was born in Belgium and lives in Sevastopol. He cracks jokes in Ukrainian and French the whole way up and makes everyone laugh, though the laughter is a shade nervous – especially when the cable car grinds to a halt halfway up the mountain. The summit, when we finally get there, offers nothing but a lot of scrubby Tatar tourist shops with Oriental-style divans selling sheepskins and chai.
On Thursday we take an ekskursia to Bakhchisarai, the palace of the Tatar khans of Crimea. We buy the trip from a kiosk on the promenade, and the kindly elderly man who sells us the tickets is so worried about our ability to locate the bus that he calls our hotel before breakfast to make sure we’re on track. Pushkin wrote a poem about the fountain of Bakhchisarai that evokes silver dust and distant lands and a pale star. It takes two hours to get there, down along the south-west coast to Sevastopol and back up north to Bakhchisarai. There’s a shorter road through the mountains, but apparently it’s too dangerous by bus. The trip includes a trek up to a sixth-century cave settlement in the mountains, lunch in an alleged caravanserai, and the visit to the palace, which is disappointing. It is not in good repair, and far less elaborate than the mosques and madrassahs we saw in Uzbekistan. The fountain that inspired Pushkin has run dry. Getting there and back has taken up a whole day, which could perhaps have been better spent. There’s a lot to see in Yalta.
On our last day, we take the bus to Chekhov’s house, which is where he wrote The Cherry Orchard. He designed the house and garden himself, and spent much of his last five years here. The house is still as it was when he left Yalta in 1904. An earnest lady shows us around and explains every last postcard. Her voluble Russian is too much for me, and my husband doesn’t understand a word, but she is so bent on sharing Chekhov with us that we smile and nod and attempt to live up to her cultural expectations. The house is delightful, and I purloin the garden for Nina, the heroine of Compassion, to remember her lost love Andrei, exiled in London, and ponder her future without him.
Finally, we head for the beach, which is not great. Gravel on the promenade side, pebbles on the Massandra side. There are a few brave bathers, but the water is cold. All around us everyone is painting and sanding and sawing and hammering to get all the cafes and restaurants and lounger stands ready for the summer season. We lie on the pebbles and soak up the sun.
Eight years later, Yalta is Russian again. I don’t know who goes there now.
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March 2015. My mind is a blank. For the first time in years, I have no ideas for a book. I can’t recall this ever happening before. As I was finishing Compassion in 2011, I came across a flyer for an exhibition I’d seen a couple of years earlier in the Musée du Judaisme about Nazi art thefts during World War II, and that gave me the inspiration for the next book. Girl with Parasol was finished in the middle of last year, and since then — nada!
In the beginning I was quite happy to have my head to myself. With mental space to spare, I read some proper books, but now I’m hankering to get back to my normal routine of research and writing, relieved by junk television series and trash fiction (mind you, trash that respects both intellect and syntax is hard to find.)
One reason I have no ideas is because the publishing future of Girl with Parasol is still undecided. My agent is still chasing print publishers, and she has also evoked the possibility of an in-house self publishing procedure (which means I can’t be the only homeless author on their books). I put an early version of the novel on Amazon some months ago, but she made me take it down again to avoid scaring the punters. Print publishers get a large proportion of their income from digital sales. Estimates vary, but it might be as high as 50%. At some point, I will presumably have to grit my teeth and format the book for online platforms. This is not as fast and easy as they claim (Smashwords has a 200-page style guide!), but with time, concentration and Xanax it can be done. But right now everything is in flux and I don’t know what I should be doing.
The other thing keeping the Muse at bay is, paradoxically, Art. I’m selling my husband’s collection of paintings, and I’m sad to see them go. They are American Impressionists and post-Impressionists that he acquired over a period of nearly twenty years up until his death in 2009. They have been stocked wherever there was room, in basements, hallways, corners, and corridors. There were some in the space down by the side of the piano, and more in his brother’s house in Normandy. The whole collection has never been together. There are close to 130 paintings. There has never been enough wall space to hang them all, and now that I’m planning to downsize, there never will be. I’ve spent the past two weeks trying to figure out what we have, what we used to have, and what we no longer have. Since one View of the Pont-Neuf looks much like another, it’s very confusing. Thank God the experts are coming soon to do a real inventory.
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2014 was a busy year. Updating this website, reformatting three titles I got back from an old publisher, attending a conference on digital publishing in Moscow, and discovering horseradish vodka.
Most useful was the vodka, but most interesting was the conference, which was organized by the Moscow Higher School of Economics. In Russia, the market for e-publishing is huge. The aim of the conference was to make sense of the emerging trends and help young publishers develop their business.
Russian media and literary figures discussed topics that included Dialogue with Pirates, Kind Robots and Eternal Books, and Tomorrow is Already Today, or How Did We Find Ourselves Here? (Good question.) There was a lot of talk about design and marketing strategy and the online environment and ‘krossplatformennost’. The title of my presentation was Author’s View on Self-Publishing: Innovation or Optimization. I’m not sure I talked about either, but no one complained.
The weather in Moscow was not great: clouds above one’s head and mud under one’s feet. I got as far as Red Square, where they had a Christmas market and a skating rink, and bought a matrioshka for my elder grandson aged three, and a rattle for his brother aged one. GUM was beautifully decorated for the holidays, a real Armani/Versace fairyland, but I didn’t see much cash changing hands. Times are tough.
The highlight of the trip was the night they took me to a Soviet-themed restaurant called Petrovich. Genuine 1970s oilcloths on the tables, manual typewriters of the kind that were used to type samizdat on, antiquated radio sets of the type that were used to listen to Western radio stations (in their dachas where reception was better). It was a weird experience. After all those years of collating audience data at Radio Liberty, I was sitting next to the sets our audience might actually have used. Rather like Alice through the Microphone.
The food that night was authentically Russian: herrings, mushrooms, borshch, and so on, because of course Western food is in short supply these days – no more parmesan, no more serrano – though apparently there’s a thriving trade in repackaging going on in Belarus. Also authentic was the drink. Let’s have horseradish vodka, they said, had I ever had it before? Winter vodka! I was reticent, but it was wonderful stuff! It cleared my cold, settled my stomach, and drove away the winter chills. The taste was a little odd, but you got used to it by the third glass.
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Digital publishing is the flavour of the month in Russia these days, while print publishing is in the doldrums. In an attempt to fathom what the future might hold, the Moscow Higher School of Economics organized a conference on “A Book vs. E-Book” from December 6-10, 2014. It attracted mainly young publishers from Moscow and the regions. Speakers included prominent Russian writers, television presenters and literary figures (Aleksandr Arkhangelskiy, Vladimir Kharitonov, Aleksandr Gavrilov) – and me.
As a writer with considerable first-hand knowledge of e-publishing in the UK, I was invited to take part in the conference and talk about my own experiences. My thanks go to Eric Johnson for dropping my name in the right place; to Tatiana Tikhomirova for issuing the invitation and ensuring I had a memorable stay; to Jane Vidyaykina for making sure everything functioned smoothly; and to Ksenia Khrustalyova for her word-perfect translation.
Here’s some of what I said:
I was born in England and I write in English even though I have a French name and live in Paris. I have eight books currently available either online or in paperback, including two novels, four thrillers, and two romantic comedies. I have written about Russia, Central Asia, Burma, and Germany.
None of this is mass-market fiction, and none of the books fit into a single category. Usually what I write is a mix of thriller, love story, and politics. Publishers don’t like this because they need to be able to position their product on the market, and booksellers don’t like it because they need to place it on the shelves. Because of this, I’ve always had trouble finding publishers.
In 1996, when I stumbled across online publishing, I’d been trying to find an editor for a novel called The Glass Palace Chronicle, which is about drug-smuggling in Burma. My literary agent in London had refused to handle it because she said nobody was interested in Burma. All the publishing houses I tried refused it. So when somebody told me about a new start-up called Online Originals, which was publishing books in digital format on the internet, I jumped at the idea. It meant that my work would be available, not just in one country, but to the English-speaking community worldwide. It was exciting to be involved in a new medium that was just opening up, and I felt privileged to be part of it.
I gave The Glass Palace Chronicle to Online Originals. There was no advance, but I got 50% of royalties. The following year, I gave them The Angels of Russia, the story of a dissident manipulated by the KGB in the perestroika period. Online Originals submitted it for the Booker Prize and, since it was the first e-book ever to be submitted, it generated a lot of publicity, a lot of idle discussion about paper and binding, and a rave review in the Times Literary Supplement.
I didn’t win the Booker, but I did get picked up by a London print publisher, Piatkus, who put out both The Angels of Russia and The Glass Palace Chronicle, and later Music at the Garden House, which is set in Germany and Russia after the fall of the Berlin Wall. This was the only stage in my career when I made any money. Online sales picked up after the publicity over the Booker Prize, but they were still only in the hundreds, not the thousands. The problem back then was that there were no dedicated e-readers and no tablets. Many people didn’t even have Internet at home.
Shortly after that my career petered out because of family problems, and I didn’t get back on track until 2009. By that time everything had changed. In 2007, Amazon had launched the Kindle e-reader, a light, portable, reader-friendly device, and people had begun to buy e-books as an alternative to print. Unfortunately Online Originals, after a strong start, had run out of steam, and weren’t doing much in the way of either publishing or promotion any more. Meanwhile, my print publisher had sold her company and retired.
So it was back to Square One.
I found a new agent, who has worked hard on my behalf, but she has failed to sell two recent books. The Judas Tree is about the Stasi files in East Germany, and Compassion is set in Stalinist Russia. A lot of the editorial rejection letters said that they personally enjoyed the books, but doubted they would sell. The publishing industry is in crisis, companies are being bought up, editors are nervous about losing their jobs, and there’s a lot of pressure to produce best-sellers. My agent has just sent out my latest book, Girl with Parasol, which is about Nazi art thefts in World War II, and warned me that it probably won’t find a home.
This means that I will have to publish it myself online, as I have done for several earlier books. I don’t work with a digital publisher at the moment, I do it myself. The obvious platform is Amazon, which is highly visible, has its own e-reader, and provides detailed guidelines for authors. Self-publishing means you have to edit the book, format it, provide a cover, upload the text, figure out the price. It’s a lot of work.
The major advantage of online publishing is that it extends a book’s lifetime indefinitely. Your work is never out of stock, nor out of print. The disadvantage is that you have to spend a lot of time promoting it via blogs, Facebook, Twitter etc. Since Internet culture is still oriented towards free circulation of information, I make some of my books available for free download on a site called obooko.com, and some of them have had over ten thousand downloads, including The Glass Palace Chronicle, which seems to be the most popular of my books.
Aside from the ideal of the Republic of Letters, free books are a useful marketing tool. You’re reaching people who might not have bothered to read the book if they had to pay for it. You’re not earning money, but you’re earning readers. Money, in any case, is pretty much beside the point. Best-sellers on Amazon are mass-market fiction, chick lit, and vampire romances.
E-books are eroding barriers between readers, writers, and publishers, and it’s hard to say how things might evolve in the future. Print publishers currently make at least thirty percent of their revenues from e-books, and quite likely the percentage will rise. Probably a lot will depend on who the next big player is. If someone like Apple decides to engage seriously with the e-book market, and reinvent the whole product with that magic Apple touch, then maybe the whole game will change.
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The Higher School of Economics in Moscow held a conference on digital publishing from December 6-10, 2014. I was invited to recount my experiences publishing online (see post Adventures in the E-Trade). The conference was intended mainly for young publishers aiming to make the transition from print to e-books. Speakers included well-known Russian media and literary figures, such as Aleksandr Arkhangelskiy, Vladimir Kharitonov and Aleksandr Gavrilov.
In Soviet times, Russians were reputed for their attachment to books, but the reading public has shrunk, and now 36% of the adult population never read a book. Why not? Because there are other things to do now: socializing, eating and drinking, social media… Traditional forms of entertainment such as books and theatre are losing ground to music and cinema, and books must adapt to the new digital landscape if they are to survive.
The book market in Russia is moving rapidly away from print editions to online publishing. Print sales now account for 25% of total book sales, and e-books for 75%. Why the shift? For one thing, there are few bookstores left in small towns with a population of under 100,000, whereas internet access is available practically everywhere. In a country the size of Russia, online publishing solves the problem of distribution. Amazon.ru is having limited success because the postal service cannot provide rapid delivery (and the drones aren’t yet in service). Prices of print books have risen 10% in the past six months, and e-books are considerably cheaper.
Digital books have a major role to play in the field of education – though they should be avoided in the early years, says literary guru Aleksandr Gavrilov. If you give only e-books to very young children, it will kill off print books forever – and besides they’ll just use their e-readers to hit each other over the head with.
E-books change the nature of the reading experience, notes Alyona Sosnina. Readers are no longer interacting with an object (the printed book), but experiencing reading as a flow on a screen, and they must be made sufficiently comfortable with the online environment to cross the divide from User to Reader.
Which is where Design comes in. It takes a well-designed site, says Roman Zolin, to grab the bird-brain attention span of the passing surfer. What’s more, you need a Brand. If your product has no Ideology it won’t survive. You must have a Marketing Strategy. (It’s the second time in three days that someone’s told me I need a marketing strategy – which is alarming. As soon as I find out what it is, I’m definitely going to get one.)
What makes the conference interesting is that it’s a bit of a grab bag. Something for everyone. Krossplatformennost’, as they say. Advice for publishers from Aleksandr Arkhangelskiy: Talk to your pirates, see if you can get them to hold off on their wicked ways until you’ve had the chance to make some money from your own edition. (Apparently this works for a while.) Make videos of authors reading from their books. Poll your readers on their opinions. Aim for maximum visibility: post blogs, go on Facebook, get yourself seen.
As for authors, anything goes. Dispense with the services of a publisher by posting and distributing your book through Amazon. Choose a technological platform like ridero.ru to download an application, format your book, choose the layout, and post your text in online bookstores (Amazon, Ozon.ru, Bookmate…) Use crowdfunding sites to present your book proposal and see if anyone wants to finance it. This option doesn’t seem to exist in Russia yet, but a site called unbound.co.uk is mentioned. Another British start-up, FicShelf, offers a different model: FicShelf aims to create a social platform for the reading community. (It is suggested to me that I might like to post chapters of my next novel on their site to get reactions from anyone who happens to be passing through. Feedback from strangers having caused one or two disasters in the past, I decline politely.)
Some of these approaches are familiar to me from personal experience, some are new, and some are slightly confusing. The opportunities of the Internet have gone to everyone’s head. English-language sites and jargon are spattered liberally across all the Power Point presentations, and there are a lot of international cross-references and cross-platformness. It reminds me of the heady dot.com days of the 1990s. It’s hard to say if the Russian e-book market is developing in the same way as the Western market, with maybe a few years’ time lag, or if it is going in a completely different direction. Vremya pokazhet. Time will tell. Whatever happens, it’s going to be huge.
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November 2014
Twenty-five years ago this month, the Berlin Wall fell. It was a surprise to all concerned. At a press briefing on November 9, the regime spokesman, Günter Schabowski, reading from a note he had just been given, announced that DDR citizens would henceforth be authorized to travel abroad.
“Starting when?” asked a journalist.
Schabowski checked his papers. “As far as I know, immediately.”
That was all it took to send East Berliners pouring towards the frontier. A few hours later, the Wall was open and they were streaming into the West. All through the summer of 1989, East Germans had been sneaking out of the country the back way, through Hungary and Austria. Would-be emigrants had taken West German embassies in Budapest, Warsaw and Prague by storm. Still, no one thought the regime that had gone to the trouble of building the Wall would give in without a struggle. The massacre of Tien An Men had taken place just a few months earlier. Everyone was prepared for violent repression.
But the political will to save the state was no longer there. Huge demonstrations had shown that the East German people would no longer tolerate the regime. Gorbachev had declined to send in reinforcements. The death knell of the DDR had sounded a whole month earlier, in Leipzig.
The Monday Peace Prayers in the Nikolaikirche had been going on for years, but that summer the congregation took to marching peacefully round the Leipzig Ring Road when they came out of the church. The marches got bigger and bigger. The authorities got more and more tense. The Church authorities were pressured to cancel the prayer meetings. The police blocked roads leading to the church, and started to arrest the demonstrators. Every week the turnout swelled. Every week people waited nervously for the police to shoot.
Things came to a head on Monday October 9. Two days earlier, there had been riots in Berlin, provokinga violent police riposte. Loudspeakers warned the population to stay at home. Seventy thousand people turned out on the Ring. They carried candles. You need two hands to hold a candle: one to hold it up, and one to protect the flame. You can’t carry sticks and stones too. The streets leading off the Ring were blocked with trucks, armed men in uniform, dogs and their handlers. Keine Gewalt! cried the demonstrators. No Violence! WIR sind das Volk! they chanted, as they passed the Stasi headquarters. WE are the people! Wir wollen raus! We want to leave! Gorby! Gorby!
“We had planned everything,” said a Party official later, “we were prepared for anything. Only not for candles and prayers.”
No wonder Schabowski scanning his notes showed such confusion. The regime had been in disarray for weeks. The DDR had already collapsed – one month earlier in Leipzig.
The East German state lasted four decades, and the Wall for nearly three. But it didn’t all just vanish overnight. What happened later is recounted in my thrillers Music at the Garden House and The Judas Tree. Music at the Garden House, set the summer after the wall came down, examines KGB reactions to the loss of “their” Germany. The Judas Tree shows what happened when the Stasi files were opened.
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