JUNE 2008, SIX A.M. The last bus in Europe is heading north through Finland toward Lake Inari, chugging its way through an immense landscape of water, stone, snow, and forests. Its ultimate destination is Kirkenes, the last piece of Norway before the Russian border, where my long descent south will begin. It’s cold, in defiance of the season, and there is an air of funereal melancholy on board. Finns don’t talk much, and they smile even less. The people of the woodlands live in terror that someone will smile at them, because in that ill-fated case, their code of good manners obliges them to come out of their cocoon and respond to the signal.
A ceiling of heavy clouds. No longer the cauliflower and bulging dragons of my latitudes, but banks of bloated herring, gashes in their flesh, ulcerating wounds, ash-colored tumefactions still warm and pulsing with flashes of orange light. No mountains: the landscape looks as though it has been planed by some planetary carpenter. The sunlight in Helsinki? It’s already a dream, as is the Mediterranean. The Baltic? The tropics by comparison.
Why have I come here? I ask myself that every time I go away, as though it had been the supreme order of some czar and not my own free will that pushed me to leave home. Half asleep, I think back to the winter night when it all began, six months ago, next to a brook, in a solitary valley illuminated only by the moonlight.
It was December 20, 2007, my sixtieth birthday. The date coincided with the elimination of the Schengen Area border around Trieste,4 and this geopolitical occasion set the tone for the party. We celebrated the fall of the border at a woodland inn fifty feet away from a pedestrian border crossing, with a couple dozen friends and a Balkan quintet. After the revelry, we turned our attention to the historic iron bar painted white, red, and blue, and with the help of a bunch of Slovenes, who at the stroke of midnight had popped out of the forest with searchlights strapped on their heads, we cut it into slices. Somebody poured champagne on the overheated saw blade, kisses were exchanged at random without regard for our countries of origin, and it was there, amid the smell of wine and slivovitz, as the iron bar was cut into souvenirs to the sound of an accordion, that my Jewish friend Salamone Ovadia cried out to the moon his strident prophecy: “And now, you old barn owl, you’re going to miss this fucking border.”
Moni laughed derisively when the last piece of bar fell to the ground accompanied by cheers. What the devil? I thought. There was no reason at all to regret the opening of the border. When it first went up, all it brought was misfortune, then with détente it had become a joke. Nobody took it seriously anymore, especially after the suicide of the ex-Yugoslavia, so it was only right that it should disappear. It was the poison fruit of a war brought on by the Fascists, and for decades it had separated Trieste from its natural hinterland, the hinterland that had made it rich when it was part of the Austrian Empire at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Why would I ever miss that damn iron bar? Now I could cross the border wherever I wanted. Separate microcosms were now reunited and I was free, free as the wind, to set out on foot, by car or bicycle, to recompose the severed topography of my world. Yet … I really started to feel as though I were missing something. Something … but what? What was it that my friend meant to tell me with that derisive howl of some nocturnal predator?
It wasn’t long before I understood. What I missed was the dream, the shadow line to cross over, the sense of the prohibited. Wasn’t it the very presence of that border that first pushed me to travel? Didn’t my wanderlust come from the claustrophobic sense of confinement in which Trieste had been closed on the exact date of my birthday, December 20, 1947? “What’s on the other side?” I wondered as a kid, listening on an old static-filled radio to the voice of the Communist world carried on the airwaves from Budapest, Prague, and Belgrade. From then on, I had begun to navigate in that direction, toward the land of the storks between the Vistula and the Danube. First with my imagination, then—as an adult—on old trains, bicycles, buses, even river barges.
My home is a land of seashore, rocks, and wind. A place I inhabit more as a base camp than a city. Trieste is a place of refuge clinging to the north coast of the Mediterranean, a place that every now and again God enjoys turning upside down with his ladle, in a tempest of air and water called the bora. Trieste, with its furious continental wind, is my hiding place. Between one journey and the next, I’m on the lookout for nooks and crannies where I can’t be seen. Taverns, penumbrae, ghosts, old bookstores, blind alleys, no stylish nightspots, and not even piazzas. I would like to sweep away all the obstacles that separate me from the sea. Go, go, a sailboat and I’m gone. A city to be used only as a boarding area, a place to leave from. A lookout, a balustrade from which to gaze at new horizons.
The Finnish bus snores up and down the slightly sloping road, past elongated shields of moss-covered rock, and right here, in these vast spaces, I realize that my little homeland is not a territory but a line, a frontier in itself. Since birth I’ve been poised precariously on that fault of mine like a tightrope walker on his rope. I’m a man of the frontier, situated between languages and cultures, between the sea and the mountains. In Trieste, there is nothing between the Alps and the Mediterranean, and even the local news and gossip reflect this extraordinary contiguity. On a street two minutes’ walk from the center of town, an old lady adopted a sweet little puppy looking in the garbage for food, and not until several months later did she realize it was a wolf. A young goat, having come too far down off the mountain, had no other escape route than to throw himself into the sea, right there in the heart of the city, and several times the papers have run stories about Slovenian bears that have come to the edge of town to snack in local chicken coops. In Trieste, the industrial area backs up to a wilderness canyon called Rosandra, with sixth-degree cliffs, and that gorge takes you to the border in a half hour’s walk. That’s where the no-man’s-land is marked by my inn with the iron bar; a place typical of the Cold War, still intact, where thirty years ago soldiers from the now defunct Yugoslavia used to stop in for some rounds of unauthorized drinking with the Italian tax police.
Once, during the Jewish feast of Purim, in which getting drunk is a licit activity, a Jerusalemite rabbi whose family was originally from my area gave me the best definition of my Heimat (home). “When a Triestian sits at the head of a dock and looks out at the sunset with a good bottle of wine in hand, well, that is prayer, great and blessed prayer.” And if you pay close attention in those moments, he added, “the sea bristles with pleasure, the grass on the Karst turns to velvet, and women look at you with bursting desire. And the master of the universe, caressing his beard, says to you with satisfaction, and just a pinch of envy, ‘My lads, you’ve got the better of me yet again.’ ” In other words, the magnificence of the place resides in its unique contiguity with antithetical situations. Seeing is believing. The distance between a mooring berth and the opera house is fifty yards, between your boat and a tavern less than thirty.
I am proudly attached to this shoreline of mine, where I have dreamed up all of my departures. There are nights, especially autumn nights, when the breeze kicks up, the air turns to glass, and the ferries to Istanbul weigh their anchors to pass in front of the freshly snowcapped Alps, when I really do have the sensation that God envies us mixed-blood bastards perched between worlds on this fabulous precipice. Standing at the head of a pier, without moving an inch, we can see Europe and Turkey; imagine the islands of Ulysses and the beer halls of Prague, where Bohumil Hrabal looked for his passengers; make out, among the ribbing of the surrounding hills, the front of the Great War, which intertwines with the Iron Curtain; sniff the warehouses of Serene Venice, packed full of goods from the East, and at the same time the wild smells of the steppes beyond the Danube. In the mid-1980s, when a Bavarian chancellor landed with his helicopter on one of these piers, he said, “Unglaublich” (incredible), because such was the synthesis of the different worlds.
So when the borders began to open and the rhetoric of globalization started dismantling the sense of the Elsewhere, slowly, in the spirit of contradiction, there began to grow inside of me, without my knowing it, a sense of nostalgia for a true border. I longed for one of those borders from days of old, with barbed-wire fences, glowering looks, searched luggage, and tense silence in front of a man in uniform scrutinizing your passport. Yes, what I needed was a long journey along a limes, a boundary path. That was my unexpressed desire that my friend Moni—transborder poet—had simply rendered explicit and no longer postponable.
So I had to leave, then. But for where? The Iron Curtain was gone; the fences had been replaced by landscaped parklets, museums, and cycling paths. In order to find some still untamed places, you had to go beyond that, to the eastern frontier of the European Union. Maybe that was where “another world” began. And so there was nothing more to do than imagine a borderline itinerary from the glacial Arctic Ocean to the Mediterranean, all the way to Turkey, or maybe even Cyprus. There would be no lack of surprises. Between Russia and Finland, the barrier separating the two worlds still ran alongside the fences of the big chill; the bunkers from 1940 had not been dismantled. Two steps from the North Pole was Murmansk, with the most mysterious submarine base in the world, the one from which the submarine Kursk set sail on its final tragic mission. There was Belarus, the last Communist dictatorship in Europe, and then Kaliningrad, a city of spies come in from the cold, surrounded on all sides by the European Union. Followed by Ukraine, with its elbow of the Carpathians crisscrossed by smugglers and the powerful remnants of its lost Jewish presence. And then, the Black Sea, with its frightful, unending silence. That was where I had to go.
Now I’m on a vertical climb, toward Boreas, the land of the last light. After Napapijri—the Arctic Circle—the Finnish railroad stops, and the only way to get to land’s end is this soporific motor coach. The driver is a sort of harpooner, with a walrus mustache. He’s been driving without a bump since six in the morning. The map says I’m heading north between two historic regions, Karelia and Bothnia. Two different worlds, it would seem, but I see the same lakes and snowfields left and right. The colors are all muted, except for a fuzzy down of tiny yellow flowers on the tundra.
Gray, on the other hand, is giving it all it’s got, displaying an amazing array of shades and hues: the coal gray of the sunless lakes, the asbestos gray of the rocks, the rifle-barrel gray of the compact bank of clouds above the snowfields, the granulated gray—shiny as mica—of the still-frozen higher lakes, the coppered or reddish silver gray of the birches, and the nickel or opal gray of the sea when it bristles in the fjords, depending on whether or not the sun comes out. The streaks of windblown snow are the only thing capable of marking the humps in the terrain in a world without shadows. I can understand why the Finns and the Scandinavians love the flag: more than anything else, it is a salute to color, and therefore to life, in this mineral misery. Even the houses display the national colors of the North—red, blue, yellow, and white—like matchboxes scattered on the detritus of a mine.
For a while now, a fine snow has been falling. The shiny Scandinavian shield is all covered in flour. In the seat pocket I find a brochure with some maps of the area. There is also a more general map of the Northern Hemisphere as seen from the Pole. I’ve never seen anything like it. Eurasia, with its Siberian spine, is like an enormous cow with its hind legs kicking. India and Indochina are its hooves, and Kamchatka the tail. North America is upside down except for a bend down low, on the left, around the Gulf of Mexico. On the margins of the map, the equatorial lands are dilated as though they were under a magnifying glass, while the empires of the North—Russia and America—lose their arrogant magnitude. It’s the vertical dimension of the world that is now beginning.
Before this I had seen only horizontal maps, and their highest level of grandeur had been revealed to me on another snowy day similar to this one, on Hungary’s border with Ukraine, not long after the fall of the Wall. It was in the control room of the immense railway station in Záhony, where, with deafening creaks and squeals, the eastbound trains were lifted off the track to have their wheel trucks replaced to ride on the imperial-gauge Russian tracks. It was a cylindrical projection map of the ex–Soviet Union, which covered an entire wall, sixteen feet by ten, above the electric control panel for track switches. On the far right, beyond the Bering Strait, the western edge of America. On the far left, I managed to make out TRST, for Trieste.
I felt like an ant in the immensity of steppes and marshes where the rivers snaked along in leisurely meanderings before reaching the sea. My Europe was a miserable periphery. And the North, without the convergence of the meridians, was monstrously enlarged. Halfway down from top to bottom, on the fabled Trans-Siberian line, were the names of every single station, and there were so many of them that in order to fit them all in, they’d had to use a minuscule font. For lack of space and because the empire extended horizontally, the names of the places along the railroad lines were written vertically, forming a kind of long millipede. Never again have I seen such a representation of immensity.
I turn my general map of the journey in my hands and make a few discoveries. First, the European Union is six hundred miles wider than it is long. Second, as you move closer to the Pole, the spaces between the meridians get narrower, like the tips of orange wedges, and they narrow so rapidly that at the top all you have to do to change your longitude is take a step left or right. I am much farther east than it seems; my meridian cuts Turkey in two and goes on down to Alexandria. Third, the local maps here, rather than square, are isosceles trapezoids. On a notice board in Utsjoki, on the Finnish border with Norway, I see a map like this for the first time in my life. Fourth, in this contiguity of longitudes, time is deceptive. If it’s eight o’clock in Norway, it’s nine o’clock in Finland and ten o’clock in Russia, but because in the far north a piece of Norway inserts itself like an ingrown toenail between Russia and Finland, someone traveling east on a six-mile journey has to turn his clock back one hour and then ahead two hours, despite never changing direction.
The sea finally makes its appearance at Varangerbotn. The coach lets off almost all of its passengers as a snowstorm begins. A young man is standing motionless at the bus stop. He stares into the void, looking frozen; then he gives a sign of life, stretching out his hand as though to lean against the wall, only the wall isn’t there and he falls to the ground in slow motion. So inert that he does almost nothing to break his fall, he hits his head and lies there on the ground quaking with what seem like epileptic contractions. I pick him up and sit him down on a bench. He’s stiff and up to his hair in alcohol. I sense that I’ve arrived in a tasteless, colorless world of desperation. One of the other passengers explains to me that an ambulance will certainly arrive soon. Here everything is delegated to the state, even compassion. I have to get back on the coach. I’ve got a painful foot from a recent fracture, and sitting for such a long time has made it swell up like a ten-pound salami. As we pull away, I see the drunk leaning like a dead herring against a billboard with an enormous frost-covered crab, just pulled out of the water. Under it are the words GIANT CRAB SAFARI, and in the middle of all that wind and snow, the African word seems offensive, to be banned in these latitudes, a monument to the damnation of mass tourism.
We start climbing again toward the mountains and the Neiden River, sacred to the Sami reindeer herders, who, here at the place where they used to come to catch fish with their hands, built an Orthodox church dedicated to Saint George. The place that the Sami chose for their cemetery has been a sacred place for ages. It’s perfectly situated on the border between sea and mountain, where the reindeer herders go down to the sea to meet the salmon fishers, who, vice versa, move upriver toward the mountain spring in pursuit of their prey. The place is contested by Russians, Norwegians, and Finns, without regard for the only real owners, the nomads of the tundra who do not recognize nations and frontiers. Result: the newly restored church has been closed, and it seems that nobody can go inside, not even the king of Norway. Its only rightful attendees are the ghosts of a people swallowed up by the snow, whose language, around these parts, nobody speaks anymore.
There are three of us left on board. The coach goes down a long road, and at the base of a fjord that looks to be a lake lies Kirkenes, three thousand inhabitants, colored wooden houses, my end of the line and my frontier. I get off into a stiff wind impregnated with the melancholy of a Welsh coal mine, holding on to my cane, wearing all of my few clothes layered like an onion. My God, where have I come to? There’s not a living soul here. On the streets no one but fat, menacing seagulls, almost as big as eagles. The hotel is closed. I ring the bell; no answer. Rather than a hotel, it seems more like a precarious frontier barracks, a wooden building with no foundation, attached to the granite with pilings as to a muddy lake bottom. Am I in the right place? A portly taxi driver in his Russian mafia–style tinted-glass black Mercedes comes to my aid. He spits out monosyllables without vowels, opens his door, jumps out, strides up the steps of the ghost hotel, and without a moment’s hesitation, pulls out the keys from a box next to the front door. He opens it, shows me in, and grumbling, drives off.
I am totally alone, inside and outside the hotel. At eight o’clock in the evening, the social life of the town is over. Public offices and stores are open until three; all that’s left is an exasperating wait for a night that never comes. In the lobby, the reception desk is bolted shut, as though the owners had emigrated years ago. The only sign of welcome is a slip of paper with my name and room number written on it. I realize that I’ve been left, on trust, to look after myself, and I go to install myself in a monastic cell at the end of the hallway. The door is open and the curtainless window looks out on the birch trees. At my latitude, the light would be that of five in the afternoon, but here it’s dinnertime. To the north, at the far end of the fjord, a cold sun moves horizontally behind a veil of humidity.
I’m hungry; I go to look for something to eat. I limp my way to the only tavern still open, and there too I’m perfectly alone. It’s a place right out of the English suburbs, but with something even more desperate about it, and when the young man behind the counter greets me with a brusque “What do you want?” as if to say, Why the fuck have you come all the way here, to the end of the world? I’m overcome with a desire to douse my empty stomach with a shot of vodka. Sitting there at my solitary table, I gulp down meat, potatoes, and beer, then I walk out to look at the water and discover with a throb in my heart that the last light of day is sucking me into a far-off void through a slit of pale yellow between the clouds and the tundra. The North. At two o’clock, I don’t fall asleep—sleep is not the right word. I slide my wool cap over my nose and collapse into a tempest of dreams that tosses me about until morning.
The next day, the sensation that I’ve come unstuck in time gets stronger instead of weaker. What time is it? Ten o’clock? Six? Three in the morning? My watch says it’s eight o’clock, but in the hotel there’s nary a sound to be heard. Maybe I’m the only guest. I don’t hear any noises of plates and silverware coming from the breakfast room right next to mine. But when I walk out into the hall, I see a dozen Norwegians sipping coffee in a cloisterlike silence, as though they were in the refectory of some monastery just before vespers. It takes all of my attention for my ears to intuit the hushed exchanges worthy of a confessional. So at that moment, just to break that soul-chilling ice and throw them into dismay, I call out a lusty buongiorno to everybody, and I enjoy the sight of those startled eyes lifting themselves with difficulty from their plates of fish, eggs, and onion, to respond to the new arrival with a nod. Only then do I find the strength to confront my black bread, herring, and coffee.
I have a whole day in front of me, and I pass in review the contents of my bag. I’m about to go into the belly of the Soviet bear with the lightest bag of my entire life. Fifteen pounds. There’s an ultralight sleeping bag, four pounds of clothing, a dozen or so notebooks, stationery, medicine, a bedside book (Isaac Babel’s Odessa Tales), ten maps, a pillowcase, some nuts, and an emergency canteen. The reduced baggage brings with it nightly laundry, synthetic fabrics that dry in two hours, layers of light clothing in cold weather, even miniaturized handwriting—something fairly close to stenography—in order to save paper, and a categorical refusal of souvenirs or purchases of less than vital necessity. Passport, visa, money, telephone—all are tucked away in a multipocket vest whose only defect is that it makes me look like a journalist. I learned long ago that traveling light instills calm, frees you from the superfluous, and allows for short-notice departures.
Back in November 2001, on the Khyber Pass, near the border between Pakistan and Afghanistan, if I hadn’t given up my suitcase for a small bag purchased at the bazaar in Peshawar, I wouldn’t have been able to jump onto the truck full of mujahideen heading for Jalalabad on the road to Kabul. There were about thirty of those trucks, and I had seen them coming a long way off, in a dust-raising convoy down the switchback turns, with their cargo beds full of men armed with whatever weapons they could find. In their thick beards and colored turbans, they were as euphoric as kids on a school trip at the idea of beating up on the Taliban. I had to decide on the spot, and when the line of trucks slowed down a few hundred yards from the border, I asked the Pashtun militiamen to let me get aboard. They laughed and said yes, so I jumped up into the back of the truck without giving any weight to a thousand utterly reasonable forebodings of an ambush. In five minutes, I was over the border with no checking of my documents.
The year 2001 was also the beginning of a great experience: the first of the journeys, which, ever since then, I’ve had the good fortune to make every summer on behalf of the newspaper La Repubblica. In that memorable summer, just two months before the eleventh of September that would change so many things, I went from Italy to Turkey through the Balkans by bicycle. In those lands, only recently escaped from the storm of ethnic conflict, I began my progressive renunciation of the superfluous. The first step came in the green campgrounds of Vojvodina, north of Belgrade. My two traveling companions, more expert cyclists than I, having noticed that I was wearing briefs under my elastic deerskin cycling shorts, made fun of me until I couldn’t take it anymore—so much so that in a cornfield between the Danube and the Tibiscus, I took off my briefs and threw them into the Serbian sky as if they were a white dove carrying good news. The picture of that liberating gesture was to remain for me a symbol of my entrance into a new way of living: more nomadic, more free-spirited, lighter.
And now here I am, beyond the Arctic Circle, checking yet again to make sure that there’s nothing necessary missing from my bag and nothing unnecessary in it. At the foot of my bed is my only pair of shoes, the survivor of a severe selection process. A week before my departure, I had selected six pairs, all thoroughly checked, and I had tried each pair for an entire day so as to avoid surprises. With a broken foot on the mend, I couldn’t allow myself the luxury of a mistake, and in the end I opted for a low-cut shoe, light as a slipper, in which I inserted a pair of interchangeable made-to-measure orthotic insoles. “Geld, Karten, und Papiere,” an old Triestian named Fritz once told me, to remind me that three things are indispensable for a good departure: money, maps, and documents. I can now add Schuhe, shoes. A man with a good pair of shoes can respond to any kind of emergency. He acquires a better stride, becomes less clumsy, inspires more confidence. His erect position helps him think better, gives him a more rounded calligraphy, a more pleasing metric cadence. A good pair of shoes counts more than a pile of good books. And I must confess, I write with my feet.
There is something of the sublime in these technical trials on the brink of the big leap. You throw out a useless T-shirt, you buy a pocket knife, and maybe two new pencils (the only luxury I refuse to give up is stationery); you spit-shine some old shoes, and you chuck an unsustainable arsenal of certainties without struggling too hard to imagine what the future will bring. It’s useless to try to prepare for everything; even if you do, the journey will do its best to upset all your plans. It all seems like a metaphor for life, a rehearsal for the final journey. Sometimes I think that people who have crossed a lot of frontiers are also better prepared to die. They don’t fear the unknown as much as homebodies do.
In the Kirkenes Library, I find the northernmost Internet point in Europe; it’s nice and warm, and I ensconce myself inside to catch up on correspondence. Among my other contacts, I try to find a Russian geographer by the priceless name of Kolossov, who, it seems, can give me some information about my “borderline,” one of the most militarized places in the world. The keyboard of my workstation has no accents or apostrophes, Mediterranean embellishments that, I gather, are useless in a language in which everything is as clear cut as a hatchet blow. That far I can adapt, but the ø’s and å’s are too much, and on top of that, the instructions are not available in any foreign language other than Russian.
I look around for some help, and it comes in the form of an octogenarian, skinny as a herring, who has just arrived. He deposits his enormous backpack and springs into action on the keyboard as though that were all he’d been waiting for. That monitor seems to be his only contact with the outside world. He explains that he lives far away out on the tundra, all by himself, and comes down into town once a week to do the shopping. His name is Mette. Meanwhile, the workstations are occupied by an incredible sampling of humanity. A little Lapp girl with dazzling black eyes pops in from the reading room, followed by a refrigerator-size Russian and then by a Chinese man—a member of the only people more close-lipped than the Norwegians—who hammers away at the keyboard, letting out a series of little grunts; it’s not clear whether of disappointment or satisfaction.
But the best is a mother who parks her baby carriage and baby outside (the thermometer is fixed on forty degrees), comes in, and after placing her baby monitor on the tabletop, starts typing. She doesn’t bring the baby inside so as not to disturb the others. Can you believe it? This is Norway, the land of silence.
Down at the shoreline, the sun has come out, and Kirkenes is suddenly beautiful with its brightly colored houses and birch trees. In front of every house is a snowmobile, which is probably the only sure means of transport. Winter up here in this extreme region must be an extraordinary season. You can even walk or drive across the lakes, the rivers freeze over, and all you need is the stars to show you the way.
I hear the horn blast of the Hurtigruten cruise ship that is arriving at the end of the line after weeks of sailing along the serrated Norwegian coast. It sounds like all the pipes of a cathedral organ playing at the same time, and that thunderous boom, resounding through the mountains and echoing down the valleys, reveals the acoustic dimension of the fjord. The fjords are cathedral naves, fabulous sound boxes that send even the most minimal acoustic signal down every coastal ravine and gorge. I go to see the docking operation of the cruise ship. An army of timid trolls, bundled up and happy, comes streaming down a gangway, welcomed by a rubicund woman dressed in the national colors and waving the gold-crossed flag to announce that their voyage has ended. The ship’s second officer is a magnificent young woman with short-cropped hair, smiling and full of life. Among the regional fauna of depressed males, the Northern woman takes command.
All around us are the sea, the mountains, the wind, and the little wooden houses—white, red, blue, or mustard yellow, in the style of Ice Station Zebra, and the inhabitants don’t try to impose themselves by wealth or arrogance. On a street in the center of town, I knock on the door of the secretariat of the Euroarctic region of Barents, a border zone that includes parts of Norway, Russia, and Finland, and Mr. Rune Rafaelsen tells me about the demilitarization of what used to be one of the most heavily armed borders in the world. To me it appears to be just the opposite. On the ex-Soviet side, Putin is still flexing his muscles, and actually the area under surveillance is now several miles wider. Even a Russian who wants to enter it has to request authorization on his passport. For Westerners, the procedure for obtaining a visa is now longer and more costly than it was in Brezhnev’s time. Back then, all you needed was a photocopy of your passport. Today you have to send in your passport itself, weeks in advance. Who knows why? Maybe back then everything was so programmed that the place itself, Russia, left no room for the do-it-yourself traveler. Now that moving around has become easier, the police are always on your back, and here at the border, it’s even worse. For a thirty-mile-wide swath, from the border to a place called Staraya Titovka, everything is prohibited: taking pictures, asking for information, getting out of your car.
Now it’s snowing hard. I’m all bundled up, walking against the wind on a frontier that if it were any more of a frontier, you’d die. Kirkenes doesn’t have one border; it has three: not only with Russia and Finland, but also with the ice pack of the Arctic Ocean, which in the winter comes all the way down to the entrance to the fjord. Old German bunkers cling to the cliff sides like motionless green lizards. Some of them have since been blown up and imploded, caving in on themselves after a quaking spasm. This is where Hitler launched his attack on Murmansk, the only northern Russian port that didn’t freeze over, allowing the Allies to supply military aid to Stalin. That’s why Kirkenes was bombed three hundred times and reduced to ruins like Dresden. And later, also like Dresden, it suffered the worst of the Cold War. Today the city is a shadow of its former self. In this cemetery-like silence, nobody would believe that, up until 1940, thanks to the nearby iron mines, this was a Klondike full of adventurers, restaurants with caviar, banking windows, beautiful women, and Eastern palaces with onion domes.
In the realm of silence, it happens that cemeteries speak, and the cemetery in Kirkenes is a special place. The gravestones ask, Who are you who have come here to visit us? Berglioth Hansine Kristensen, 1916–1938, mutters it; the query is repeated by Harry Jensen Fodt, 1918–1941, and along with him, Berte Marie Eliseussen, 1866–1939. I catch myself thinking out loud. I wonder if Amanda Thorbjornsen, 1892–1978, was as passionate as her name seems to whisper to me? What changed in the life of Gunnar Oistein Fjeld, 1918–1979, after 1945? Why does Ole Ulvang, 1878–1947, confide to me that he had a happy love story? And was Helga Eleonora Konstase Eriksen, 1887–1968, worthy of the matriarchal epitaph that remembers her? And who knows why, right in front of the grave of Andreas Lind Hanssen, 1876–1931, a hot-tempered seagull takes aim at me from his perch, spreads his wings, screams, and then attacks, grazing the top of my head? The dead are laid to rest just under the surface because the permafrost makes digging graves impossible, and the great beyond seems closer here than it does elsewhere. I walk around by myself in the dim light, and it feels as though, around every turn, behind every hump in the terrain, I might run into a ghost.
From the solitary lighthouse of Bokfjord, mythical finis terrae just a few miles from Russia, I’m looking north-northeast onto an ivory-colored window of open sea. A surface so flat I can make out a walrus fin three miles away. I wonder where she is at this time of year—the White Lady, the fata morgana, the ice pack. How is it formed, how close does it come to the shore in the winter months?
About nine hundred miles out from the lighthouse, beyond the far end of the Novaya Zemlya archipelago, lies another archipelago known as Franz Josef Land. The men who discovered those remote islands came from my home, from the east coast of the “Sea of Venice” (the Adriatic). Their names were Marola, Zaninovich, Scarpa, Lusina, or Catarinch—frontier names, “bastard names” like mine—and they amazed the world by all coming back alive from the white inferno that had swallowed them up for nine hundred days. A crew of fourteen sailors from Dalmatia, Fiume (Rijeka), and Trieste, who—after abandoning ship—returned home by a horrible journey on foot across the glaciers over a span of two winters at sixty degrees below zero. It was 1874, and those sailors and officers pushed themselves north to the highest latitude ever reached—82° 51′ in the lonely archipelago that they baptized Franz Josef Land in honor of their emperor. Upon their return, in Norway, then Germany, and finally in Vienna, they were given a heroes’ welcome, but still today the name of their commander, Carlo Weyprecht, from Trieste, is unknown in Italy.
In the Kirkenes Library, I found a number of books with references to his story. Even the Norwegians admit it: the first great scientific expedition to the North Pole was not made by their hero Nansen or by the American Perry, but by an indomitable Germanborn Triestian and his Adriatic crew. The English and the Austrians recognize his record; his name appears on the NASA website as one of the fathers of international scientific research. Vienna has commemorated him with posthumous awards, and the Austrian Academy of Sciences has published his letters. But Italy ignores him, and even Trieste, his adopted city, has not so much as a street named after him.
Bear with me for telling you all this. It helps me to explain to you where I come from. Those were the years when geographic fever was sweeping across the world and globes featured vast, still-unexplored white spaces. The North Pole was the biggest one of all, and Weyprecht, a lieutenant in his early thirties, full of scientific fervor, infected sponsors and institutions with his enthusiasm, raising all the money he needed. He had a steamship built capable of sailing in icy waters, sheathed it with iron, selected a twenty-three-man crew, and on June 13, 1872, set sail for the Pole with the added objective of finding the northwest passage to the Pacific. He happened upon an extraordinarily cold summer and was immediately trapped in the ice pack without any help from the Gulf Stream, which in normal conditions would have been able to open up a route for him through the icebergs for at least six hundred miles or so.
As a kid, I read a book about him, illustrated with old black-and-white drawings—dawn breaking on the ice pack and interminable nights illuminated by oil lamps. I remember a date, October 28. That was the day the sun disappeared to remain for months below the horizon line, and the pressure of the ice on the keel became so powerful that the ship was lifted out of the water to the sound of terrifying creaking and thumping. The darkness was so thick that, to overcome the men’s depression, the commander invented all kinds of menial tasks for them to carry out and held classes for the crew as though they were on a training ship. At midnight on New Year’s Eve, they all went out on deck with torches and sucked on pieces of frozen champagne, while a few polar bears tried to climb aboard.
The next summer they sighted new land, but the ice pack closed in on them again and the night of the second winter arrived. They had to wait another six months before they could explore the Ultima Thule, where they baptized a promontory with the name Cape Trieste, after the commander’s adopted Heimat. In Trieste, Weyprecht had become familiar with the Venetian dialect used by the sailors, had strengthened his scientific training, and had learned to appreciate the sons of those windswept cliffs overlooking the sea. They say that when he informed his fellow Germans that he wanted to take on the Arctic with a Mediterranean crew, they smiled at him with contempt. But he didn’t let that discourage him and reminded himself that during Napoléon’s retreat from Russia, the units that suffered the lowest losses were those from the Illyrian provinces: Trieste, Istria, Dalmatia, and Montenegro. On the ships of the Austrian Navy, the sailors least subject to illness were again the sons of the Dalmatian coast, tempered by torrid summers and hard winters, descended from the men who had defended Vienna and Venice from the Ottoman Turks.
In Bremerhaven, the German port on the North Sea, it’s still possible to see today an obelisk in honor of the sailors from Trieste, Istria, and Dalmatia who defeated the Italian Navy off the coast of Lissa in 1866, under the command of the Austrian admiral Wilhelm von Tegetthoff, for whom, after his death in 1871, Weyprecht’s polar steamship would be named. In Pola, now in Croatia but formerly part of Italy, I’ve seen a plaque, which, with not totally unfounded vainglory, exalts the “men of iron on ships of wood” who defeated the “men of wood on ships of iron.” The iron men were the Austro-Hungarian enemies of Italy, but when sailing their ships, they spoke Venetian, and every time their cannons hit the target, they yelled, “Viva San Marco,” in honor of Venice. “Demoghe drento!” (Full speed ahead!) is what Tegetthoff is said to have shouted to his helmsman just before ramming the Italian flagship, crammed with sailors from Liguria, Tuscany, and Naples—the Adriatic against the Tyrrhenian.
At the Battle of Lissa, Weyprecht also sank an Italian ship, and it is understandable why he ended up in the vast archipelago of our national amnesia. Italians don’t know or prefer not to remember that the port of Trieste experienced its greatest flowering under Hapsburg rule. They don’t know that my city invented the propeller and the first battleship with rotating cannons or that the enterprise of building the Suez Canal did not begin in Paris but with a pool of bankers and insurers in Trieste. It’s unimaginable that they might remember reading somewhere that the first combat planes in history were designed in Gorizia, near Venice, and that the first torpedoes and the first experimental hovercraft were perfected in Pola. Under the dynasty of Savoy and the Fascist regime, Italy was Tyrrhenocentric, and because Austria was the heir of Venice, even the legend of the Serene Republic has been relegated to the lower echelons of our national consciousness—and with it, the story of the captains courageous of the North Pole.
Sleet. The weather is getting worse. The pilot of the motorboat that has brought me to Bokfjord gestures that we had better head back into port at Kirkenes. I ask him how the winters are in these parts. He replies that sometimes it snows nonstop for a month, and that’s when they start having problems with the polar bears, which don’t go into hibernation. But the worst time is the transitional season, when the weather changes constantly and crossing the frozen lake is no longer safe. The boat heads toward Kirkenes while a splinter of sunlight reveals a little church on the coast. The chapel of King Oscar II, it is in the village of Grense Jakobselv, the easternmost point of Western Europe, the Europe that you don’t need a visa to visit. Set apart from the village, just a few yards from the shoreline, the church stands almost exactly on the thirty-first meridian. Around it, tundra and birch trees of all colors: brown, copper, tea, reddish brown, straw yellow, dirty silver, pure white. There’s no monotony in their presence. Their leaves still haven’t sprouted; the season is late this year, but little flowers all around indicate that nature is just waiting for the smallest signal to explode.
On an afternoon of alternating sun and sleet, I go to the airport to meet Monika, my companion. She’ll be my escort all the way to the end of the journey. She’s a photographer and a writer. Born in Warsaw, she speaks Russian, and on the frontiers of the East, the terrain of my journey, she knows her way around perfectly. She has an innate talent for making herself be accepted. She’s been accepted by the Berbers of the High Atlas Mountains in Morocco, by Belarusians, Bulgarians, Sudanese, Iranians, Afghans, and Bengalese. For years she has gone in search of the lost peoples between the Baltic and the Black seas—Lemkos, Hutzuls, Boykos, Gypsies of every origin, the Gagauzi of Moldavia, the Tartars of Belarus, Caucasian Albanians and Udins—and peoples of borderline religious faiths like the Dönmeh in Turkey, practitioners of a hybrid of Judaism and Islam; or the Rifa’i Sufi; or again the Old Believers, a collection of Russian Orthodox splinter groups who have refused any modernization of the original liturgy. Her dense and varied biography bespeaks a woman who has lived for eighty years rather than her forty-two. When I see her coming down the stairs from the plane, I realize her backpack has even less space for clothes than mine, because of the bulky telescopic lens and dozens of rolls of film she has to carry.
The color of the sky is changing constantly. We leave right away to go looking for images, and the town, which up until yesterday was deserted, suddenly seems crowded. But with Russians. Herring fishermen, traffickers, miners, ex–political refugees. We can see they are Russians from a mile away because of their more aggressive walk, their Slavic gestures, the musicality of their language. To go from Norwegian to Russian is to enter a whole new world. With the Russians, the vowels take their revenge against the guttural consonants of the North; the i’s triumph, frequent and variegated as the birch trees. Around town, the signs are often bilingual; I read in Cyrillic: Gostinitza (Hotel) and Klub Moryakov (Mariners’ Club). On the hill, next to an antiaircraft shelter from the Second World War, there’s a monument to the unknown Soviet soldier, which nobody dreams of taking down, even if only to avoid irritating Putin.
In the harbor, a dozen deep-sea fishing boats from Murmansk are napping at the dock, waiting to be careened. Mythological tramp steamers, flags flapping in the wind, arranged in rows of three. An extinct species where I come from. The Russian sailors greet us and, unlike the Norwegians, they’re anxious to talk. So we’re invited to go aboard the Kolmykova, a huge beast with a crew of thirty, specialists in autumn giant-crab fishing. To get to it, we have to cross over two more iron-laden tramps and three gangplanks. The captain—a mild-mannered man from Murmansk by the name of Nikolai—welcomes us in his slippers. He takes me up to the bridge and tells me that those monster crabs with claws up to six feet long are native to the peninsula of Kamchatka and were brought here about thirty years ago by Russian scientists. They thrived so well that they multiplied well beyond their normal rate and ate up everything, even the algae on the sea bottom. A disaster. Today hunting them down is a public service, even more so because they are exquisite, and restaurants pay through the teeth for them. “A nice problem,” I say to the captain.
“I’d call it a succulent problem,” Nikolai Alexandreyevich laughs, licking his mustache. Our conversation has gotten off to a good start.
He takes me into the cabin of the radio telegrapher and shows me on the computer some apocalyptic images of the fishing boat covered with ice in a storm-tossed sea. On the cabin walls, an icon of Saint Nicholas cohabits happily with the tits of a blond worthy of a truckers’ calendar. The computer prints out a collection of frightening images of the armored monster of the depths.
The bearded telegrapher asks me where I’m from.
I say, “Trieste.”
He responds, “I see, I see. We’re on the southern coast of the northern sea and you’re on the northern coast of the southern sea.”
A geographic treatise in one sentence. These people are solid, modest, and happy-hearted. I say this to the captain.
“You know what we call the Norwegians, we Russians? Zamorozhenniye, the frozen ones.”
I ask him how long their fishing trips last.
“Five to six months, nonstop.”
“And the sea,” I ask again, “how rough can it get?”
“Force nine.”
“Ah, I thought the maximum was force seven.”
Nikolai asks me to go up to the fabrika, the assembly line, which, out on the high seas, swallows up giant crabs from Kamchatka, cooks them, and freezes them for the restaurants of Norway. I follow him through a labyrinth of stairways and gangways and end up in the slaughterhouse, the first stage of the production line, bristling with sharp corners and hidden dangers, where the crabs are stripped of their claws and submerged in boiling water.
“Imagine working in here during a storm at sea. We wear gloves to pull the claws off; it’s a job that can be done only by hand. Then we stick them in the cages and boil them. It’s not easy, some of them weigh as much as forty-five pounds.”
“How much do you earn?”
“A percentage, about fifty cents a pound to divide among thirty men.”
“And how much do the restaurants pay?”
“Fifteen dollars a pound.”
“That’s a tough job, captain.”
“Yeah, but you got to eat somehow.”
During the summer, only six of the crew remain aboard. They are painting what in the summer becomes their second home, and I have to be careful not to get my pants smudged with orange paint. We go down to the stern, to the point where they launch the nets with their immense tackle. Some decapitated fish are hanging from one of the bulkheads, where they’ve been put out to dry.
Alexandreyevich pulls one off the line—the biggest, more than five pounds—wraps it in some paper, and gives it to me to wish me a good trip. In the North, a fish is an important gift, a traditional gesture of Christian charity, which in the Russian world cannot be refused. And because it will take me days to finish it, I decide to hang it from my backpack and carry it across the border with me; why not?—just to see the faces of the customs officers. I’m delighted; I’ll ride my silvery codfish all the way to Red Square in Moscow, just like Mathias Rust and his airplane. My pockets are jingling with cute little Norwegian coins with a hole in the middle. We’re off to the East. Between us and the United States, there is nothing but Russia.