We trundled past forbidding blocks of apartments, with TV aerials hung from every window and sometimes enormous, outdated satellite dishes.
There were no yards or play areas, just two or three cars up on concrete blocks. Even the snow was gray.
The scenery didn't change much as the stops became more frequent, except that every spare inch of ground along the track was covered with little vegetable patches. Even the spaces under electricity towers were turned into makeshift greenhouses using a patchwork of plastic sheeting. Just when I thought it couldn't get any more depressing, the train shunted past three cars parked at the side of the road, nose to tail. They were riddled with bullet holes and burned out. There was no snow or ice on them and shattered glass lay all over the place. It looked as if they'd only just been hosed down and flash lighted For all I knew there might still be bodies inside. A couple of kids walked past and didn't give them a second look.
The train stopped with a rumble and a loud squeal of brakes. We seemed to be in a rail yard. Fuel tankers and freight cars appeared on either side, all covered with Russian script and caked in oil and ice. I was back in a scene from a Harry Palmer film again, only Michael Caine would have had a suit and trench coat on instead of piss- stained jeans.
The train just seemed to have driven into the yard and stopped, and that was it. Going by the number of doors opening, it was time to get off. Welcome to Narva.
I looked out of the window and saw people jumping down onto the tracks with their shopping bags. The only other remaining passenger in my car was leaving. I did the same, traipsing through the snow across a massive shunting yard, following the others toward an old stone house.
I guessed that it hadn't been built until after 1944, because I'd read that when the Russians 'liberated' Estonia from the Germans they flattened the whole town, then rebuilt it from scratch.
I went through gray-painted, metal double doors into the ticket office.
The room was only about twenty by thirty feet, with a few old plastic, classroom-style chairs around the sides. The walls were covered with the same thick shiny gray paint as the doors, onto which graffiti had been scratched. I thought the floor was plain pitted concrete until I noticed the two remaining tiles refusing to leave home.
The ticket office was closed. A large wooden board was fixed to the wall near the sales window, with plastic sliders upon which, in Cyrillic, were the names of various destinations. I looked for anything that resembled the word Tallinn. It seemed that the first train back was at 8:22 each morning, but even if they'd spoken English, there was no one around to confirm it.
I stepped round the obligatory puddle of vomit and came out of the main entrance. Over to my left was what I took to be a bus station. The buses were of 1960s or 1970s vintage, all battered and some even hand painted. People were fighting to get aboard, exactly as they'd done in the capital; the driver was shouting at them and they shouted at each other. Even the snow was exactly the same as in Tallinn: dirty, downtrodden, and viciously icy.
Digging my hands deep into my pockets I cut directly across the potholed road, following the map in my head along Puskini, which seemed to be the main street. It wouldn't be far to Konstantin's address.
Puskini was lined on either side by high buildings. On the left, what looked like a power station loomed behind them and, bizarrely, electricity towers were set into the street and pavements, so pedestrians had to pick their way round them. Russians seemed to have sited all their industrial units as near as possible to the stations that powered them; then, if they had any space left, they'd squeezed in accommodation for the workers, and fuck the people who had to live there. I'd seen enough to tell me this was a miserable, run-down place. The newest buildings looked as if they dated from the 1970s, and even they were falling apart.
I headed up the street, keeping to the right. It was quiet apart from the occasional tractor and one or two Russian-plated articulated lorries surging past. The roads and sidewalks were jet black with grease and grime, with a good coating of slush from passing vehicles.
Christmas hadn't arrived in Narva yet. I wondered if it ever would.
There were no street decorations, lights, or anything remotely festive, even in the windows. I walked past drab storefronts which advertised everything from second-hand washing machines to Arnold Schwarzenegger videos.
Further along, I came to a small food store. It was an old building, but had the brightest lighting I'd yet seen spilling out onto the iced pavement. I couldn't resist it, especially as I hadn't had anything to eat since my chocolate and meat combo, from which I'd long since parted company.
An old man was lying on top of a cardboard box to one side of the main entrance, sheltered by the shop's canopy. His head was wrapped in rags, his hands covered with strips of canvas. The skin on his face was dark with ingrained dirt and he could have grown vegetables in his beard. Beside him was a wooden tomato crate turned upside down, displaying a rusty old screwdriver and a pair of pliers that were clearly up for sale. He didn't bother looking up at me as I passed. I must have looked as though I was all right for rusty tools.
The store was laid out to exactly the same template as a small town corner store in the U.K. It even had some of the same brands Colgate toothpaste, Kellogg's Cornflakes, and Gillette shaving cream but not much else apart from crates of beer and a large cooler that had nothing in it except rows of different sausages, including the risky red ones I hadn't eaten on the ferry, strung out in lines to make the display look more generous.
I picked up a family-sized bag of chips, two packs of sliced, processed cheese, and four cake-type rolls. I didn't bother with a drink as I hoped I'd soon be getting a hot one at Konstantin's. Besides, there wasn't much choice apart from beer and half-bottles of vodka. I couldn't be hassled to get toiler tries or a toothbrush to replace the stuff that had been stolen. All that sort of thing I'd grab if I needed it, but I didn't plan to be in the country that long; and in any case, no one I'd seen so far seemed to give much of a shit about personal hygiene.
As I paid for my goods I helped myself to two shopping bags, putting one pack of cheese and a couple of rolls into one, the rest into the other. Passing the old guy on the way out, I put the smaller bag down beside him. I hadn't bought him any chips because I didn't think his gums could tackle them. I knew what it felt like to spend hours outside in the cold.
With hands back in my jacket pockets, the bag dangling from my right wrist and banging rhythmically against my thigh, I moved on. I skirted an electric pole that was half in the street and half over the wall of a small factory, and more rows of miserable apartments came into view, identical to the ones I'd seen from the train. There were no names on the blocks, just stenciled numbers. At last I'd found one thing that my childhood project had over this place: at least every building there had been named after locations in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. The rest of it, though, was much the same rotting wooden window frames and cracks in the panes taped over with packing tape. I remembered why I'd promised myself at the age of nine that I'd get out of shit holes like this as soon as I could.
It was only about one thirty in the afternoon, but already the town could have done with some streetlights on. Unfortunately, there just weren't that many around to help out.
Things started to liven up after another hundred yards or so. I came to a giant parking lot, full of buses and cars. People who seemed to be carrying everything from shopping bags to suitcases were shouting at each other, trying to be heard over the noise of air brakes and engines. It looked like news footage of refugees moving through a checkpoint. The closer I got, the more it started to look like somewhere Han Solo might go to get a spare part for his spacecraft.
There were some strange looking people around.
I realized I was at the border crossing point, the road bridge into, or out of, Russia. Harry Palmer would have been a regular here.
The parking lot was clogged with new Audis, old BMWs, and Ladas of all sorts, shapes, and ages. It was the Ford Sierras that looked strangely out of place. There were fleets of the things. I now knew where all the second- hand ones went when they weren't snapped up by cab drivers.
Money changers plied their trade along the edges of the parking lot, and kiosks sold all other types of kit as fast as Chad could manufacture it. I walked over to a green-painted garden shed with a small sliding window, dodging the arctic trucks that thundered past as they cleared border control. If you didn't get out of the way, tough.
Camel, Marlboro, and a million different Russian brands were taped to the glass, together with as many different styles of lighters. An old guy who looked like a gypsy, dark-skinned with thick gray curly hair, showed me
