Black Sea or Bust - Day 3 Munderkingen to Gunzburg (84.5 Km)

An early start on a grey morning, early enough that when I get to the market place in Ehingen the shops are just opening, there is a bustle of shutters rattling and morning  shoppers. The rain starts and I am in for a wet run and more flat Norfolk scenery. The Danube Path is erratic. Sometimes it will take you right through the centre of a town and at the next take you on a zig-zag path through the outskirts past tennis courts and across industrial estates. On this particular section there is an alternative scenic route through the Blautal (the Blue Valley) but it is 10km longer and with the rain now setting in I decide to give it a miss. There is no one else on the Danube Path that morning apart from a lot of large black slugs inching their way across the tarmac. What was it that impelled them to set out from a vast area of presumably edible vegetation, a positive mollusc Serengeti, and undertake a hazardous journey, exposed to predators and inattentive cyclists all the way, only to arrive at another identical mollusc Serengeti? You might theorise that slugs are just plain stupid and once they set off in any particular direction they just keep going until they bump into something that they like to eat. Or are these particular slugs the Columbus's of their species, happy to set off across an ocean of tarmac on the off chance of an Eldorado on the other side? Will they return to where they started from to report back to their less adventurous fellows. No. Surely the answer must be sex. It must be the case that they can smell an alluring female on the other side? How does your slug smell? I don't know, he's got no nose.

I arrive in Ulm at 2.00pm, go straight to the Hauptbahnhof, dump my bags in a locker, chain Doris to some railings and head for the city centre. Ulm has some 'previous' in Irwin family history. In the mid nineteen sixties the family were on a camping holiday driving to Venice I think. My father was always one for 'pushing on' as far as possible every day. He wouldn't stop driving until my mother lost her temper. On this particular occasion she lost her temper in Ulm and we stopped at a hotel bang in the city centre, a Protestant throw from the Cathedral. We checked in, taking our bags up to the room and then my father, following directions from the desk clerk, went to park the car In the hotel car park. As he exited the car park he took a wrong turn and promptly got lost and worse he had not made a note of the hotel's name. He returned more than an hour later accompanied by a jolly leather coated German policeman and dog having visited most of the hotels in central Ulm. I remember the Cathedral well, it has the highest spire in Europe and you can climb the 750 odd steps to the top if you wish to. Having just cycled 30 kilometres in driving rain I decided against this and went in search of lunch and Wi-Fi. I had a delicious fish and some excellent Wi-Fi in a trendy bar. Later I walked round the outside of the cathedral and wished that my children were with me, partly because I missed them and partly so that I could explain what flying buttresses are and point out the excellent animal gargoyles.

My reading has revealed many facts, both interesting and uninteresting, about Ulm. I am interested in military history and a bit of a Napoleon fan and it was at Ulm in 1805 that he so totally outmanoeuvred the 'unlucky' General Mack, commander of the Austrian army, that the latter was compelled to surrender with barely a shot fired. It was also at Ulm that the World War Two Field Marshal Rommel was given a state funeral in 1944. He was implicated in the failed Von Stauffenberg plot to kill Hitler and because he was such a heroic public figure the Nazi regime gave him the option of taking poison, which he did, rather than risk public a trial and public exposure of his treachery. He got a state funeral having 'died of wounds received in the service of the Reich'. Claudio Magris in his book Danube takes Rommel to task for believing that it was more important to avoid the disastrous effect on the morale of the German military that a trial would have caused. But surely Magris is being naive, the Nazis would have happily watched him die on a meat hook and still say that he died of 'wounds received....'. At the other end of the Nazi social scale Magris tells us of the fate of a young brother and sister, Hans and Sophie Scholl, who printed and distributed anti-Nazi manifestos and who were executed in 1943. One other wartime fact about Ulm is that of the city's 12,795 buildings only 2,633 survived Allied bombing intact.

When you cross the river at Ulm you leave Baden-Wurttemberg and enter Bavaria. At that point the signposting of the Danube Path goes to Hell in a handcart. Whoever is in charge of the Bavarian signage is not fit to wash the car of the guy from Baden-Wurtemberg. The signs become tiny, hard to spot, badly placed, ambiguous. I will have to be more alert from now on.

Doris and I had a pleasant and uneventful run to Gunzburg, a very pretty town whose attractions were only marred that night when I read that it was the birthplace of Joseph Mengele, the bestial Doctor of Auschwitz. For what it's worth I ate Wiener Schnitzel and chips that night, the chips were excellent.

Black Sea or Bust - Day 2 - Beuron to Munderkingen (86 Km)

A grim start to the day. After breakfast in the Museum of Modern Kitsch I push Doris through steady rain a mile or so to the nearest railway station. the only upside (and there always is one) is that my wet weather gear appears to work well. I heave a fully laden Doris onto the train which takes us 9 km up the valley, then another mile's walk to the bike workshop. I ring the bell and a cheery head pops out of an upstairs window. I gesture toward Doris's broken bits, he winces. He comes down and winces more as he inspects Doris more closely. Not only is the gear system wrecked so are very specific mounting plates and the bits that they bolt to on Doris are bent. He speaks good English which is a mercy as my 'get through the day' German doesn't run to gear ratios and wheel centring. I start to babble about leaving Doris and renting another bike for the length of time it takes to fix her. I am prepared if necessary to buy a new bike. I am desperate, I am as locked into my schedule as the German armies were locked into their train timetables as they invaded France and Belgium in World War One. Heinz, I looked up his name on the internet later, is looking round his workshop muttering "Maybe, maybe". He strips off the broken bits then holding one of the vital mounting plates he offers it up in turn to the other cycles in his shed until he finds one that almost matches. Slowly he cobbles together something that will work and he has a Shimano gear system in stock that is better than my original. Forty five minutes later Doris and I are back on the road. Heinz is a great and good man and should your bicycle break down in Hausen look no further.

The Danube gorge continued for about 25 km, the limestone cliff tops dotted with schlossen, shrines and follies. The rain that had been unrelenting all morning petered out as I arrived in Sigmaringen. I spotted a Bratwurst stall on the outskirts and screeched to a halt. I love bratwurst, when I was working in Cologne for six weeks on We Will Rock You there was scarcely a day when I didn't pop across the road to Mr Wurst in the Hauptbanhof food court. This Sigmaringen sausage was particularly welcome after a tough morning.

The Danube valley opens out at this point, though the river itself looks no more impressive than the River Wey at Godalming, the hills recede into the distance and suddenly there is a lot of sky. I could be on a cycling tour of Norfolk with vast open fields stretching into the distance though I have not seen any signs of inbreeding among the locals. Apparently you have to go up into the mountains or to Switzerland to see that sort of thing. It's still a grey day with nothing to see, nothing to distract one from the sheer tedium of cycling, not a gear change in an hour. I don't listen to music on headphones partly because I like to hear what is going on around me and partly because I left my headphones on the kitchen table at home so I sing a bit. The Eton Boating Song is good for cycling and my background in musical theatre has given me a lot of material to murder. Sadly I am not very good at remembering the lyrics so I end up la-la-la-ing. Oklahoma is a favourite, followed perhaps by a bit of West Side Story and I am sure that Dr May and MrTaylor would enjoy my version of Under Pressure.

Finally I make it to the pretty market town of Munderkingen where I am booked in for the night. The lady at the hotel tells me that I am booked into their 'Chocolate' room. The walls are chocolate brown and white, the pillows are chocolate brown, there are photographs of chocolate on the walls and on the ceiling there is giant plastic chocolate bar partially unwrapped from its silver foil. How quaint I think as I stagger into the shower. I have done 86 km, admittedly nine of them by train but I seem to suffering no ill effects other than exhaustion.
I go out to eat and have a delicious pizza served to me by a cheerful lady called Gertrude. Gertrude has worked in this restaurant for 24 years. She tells me that she has a garden on an island in the middle of the Danube and that Wednesday is her day off and that she spends every Wednesday in her garden. She shows me her album with photographs that she has taken of her garden, the produce that she grows in it and the creatures that she shares it with. They are very beautiful photos. Gertrude is a happy and contented woman.

Black Sea or Bust: Day 1 - Donaueschingen to Beuron (62.5 km)

Any great river, worthy of the name, has a disputed source and the Danube is no exception. There is an ornamental pool in the town which is fed by a spring which, according to one of the books that I have read, only yields one cubic inch of water per minute. There are two streams, the Breg and the Brigach which unite with the cubic inch just to the east of Donaueschingen to form the Danube. Both these streams originate in sodden meadows further up the valley and both have a better claim to be the source than this effete pool. However some local dignitary has formalised the position and so it was to the ornamental pool that I went to start my journey. Easier said than done. The pool was in the middle of a building site and as I cycled onto the site all the workers there starting shouting "Verboten! Verboten!" Etc etc. I pleaded for two minutes and managed a couple of hasty photos before I was ejected. All of which was a bit of a disappointment. A send off from the local burgermeister was probably too much to hope for but perhaps there might have been some German OAPs starting a similar journey with whom I could have enjoyed some friendly banter. Something along the lines of "Oy Fritz what kind of a bike is that you've got there? Is it a Fokker." You know the sort of thing.

So there it is, an inauspicious start both for the Danube and me. I exited Donaueschingen through a pretty park and then rode for some miles through broad water meadows.
The route is mostly tarmac and is immaculately signposted. The man who organised the signposting even caters for those nagging doubts that crop up after you have been going for a while without seeing a signpost even though there have been no possible turnings.  At the very instant that these doubts start to surface in one's consciousness a reassuring sign will appear. It's almost magical. The Danube path is largely traffic free. Occasionally one has to join a road for a kilometre or two and often (deliberately) the route takes you through the middle of the small towns and villages that dot the banks of the river.
There is a railway line that runs along the valley and both it and the path cross and recross the Danube regularly as the topography of the valley demands. The path is almost deserted. There are a few elderly couples, one couple is English, who one overtakes and then is overtaken by if one stops for coffee or to take a photo. We wave cheerily at each other but don't stop to chat.

After lunch the valley closes up and limestone cliffs rear up on either side of the river but after a few kilometres the Danube literally vanishes. All that remain are muddy pools where the main watercourse should be. The river has seeped down into the porous limestone and for twelve kilometres it travels underground. Apparently the water spends 60 hours finding its way through the underground system before gushing out once more at a rate of 10,000 litres a second.
Then the sun comes out and it is a glorious afternoon, pedalling up and down a path that hugs the side of the spectacular cliffs, occasionally rising to take a shortcut over the top to cut off a loop of the river. I was hurtling down a gravel path with forest on one side and river on the other thinking that life doesn't get much better than this when Ptang! Doris pulled up suddenly, we skidded along sideways for a few yards before coming to an undignified halt. Something had caught in the rear wheel, a branch on the track perhaps but in any case Doris was mortally wounded. Her gear assembly had become entangled with the spokes of the rear wheel and was sheared in half. The gear mounting itself was also broken. I pushed a fully laden Doris the fives miles to Beuron where we were booked into a hotel. The hotel owner was sympathetic. He rang a bicycle repairman in the next village who said he could look at it in the morning. I had little faith that in a tiny village in rural Westphalia this man would have the parts to do the job. I went up to my room depressed and desperately trying to come up with Plan B. There is always a Plan B. I could rent a bike for as long as it took to fix Doris but that would mean trekking back to this village from somewhere hundreds of kilometres further on or I could just dump Doris (think the unthinkable) and buy a slut of a German bike. The one consolation of the day was the view from my third floor balcony across the valley to the onion domed abbey in the centre of the village. Later in the evening I watched through my binoculars while the
local volunteer fire brigade practiced their hose technique.

 I managed to avoid the worst excesses of the hotel menu by ordering Tortellini and salad but had to endure a CD which must have been titled The Worst Muzak Ever. Unspeakable, as was the decor in the dining room. In southern Germany every bar has its regulation issue clutter. Hunting trophies, alpine prints, kitsch religious carvings and so on, not unlike rural pubs in England with their horse brasses etc. But there was nothing old in this dining room everything was modern, almost new and had been carefully selected by someone (I blame the owner's wife, a ghastly woman) and every single item was hideous.
It was a relief to go to bed and have troubled dreams of Doris in the rough insensitive hands of some tattooed Westphalian cycle mechanic.

Black Sea or Bust - Getting to the Beginning

To get Doris on the same 7.01 Eurostar as me I had to check her in with Goods Despatch the night before but I was assured that she would be on the same train. I love travelling by Eurostar. It normally means that you are going somewhere interesting to do something interesting. At the very least wherever you go and for whatever reason at some point you will have a decent dinner.

At The Gare du Nord there was a drama. The attendant had told me that Doris would be in the compartment between coaches 9 and 10. When I went to retrieve her but the cupboard was bare. There were two Eurostar ladies with me and I could tell by the glances that they exchanged that a) this was not an unusual occurrence and that b) the outcome was unlikely to be good. Was Doris still in London or worse was she speeding towards Brussels? The ladies directed me to an office in a far flung corner of the station yard and then they fled. But all was well, in a shed by the office there was Doris. She had been put on a train the night before.

My next connection was with a TGV to Strasbourg from the Gare de l'Est just a few hundred metres from the Gare du Nord and I had two hours to kill so set off more or less at random until I came across the Canal de l'Ourcq and I cycled north along the tow path for a few miles, a canal ride is always a pleasant jaunt.

The one thing that must strike any Englishman travelling by train in France is just how empty it is. So it was on the TGV to Strasbourg, there were endless vistas of rolling agricultural land without a single house, farm or other sign of human habitation in sight. It's hard to think of any location in England where this would be the case. At Strasbourg's smartly facaded station I had only ten minutes to wait for the next connection. Doris and I sidled across the German border on a two car commuter
train. Then there was a sinuous train ride up the valley into the Black Forest finally arriving at Donaueschingen at 650m above sea level, the source of the Danube.

My hotel was exactly what you would expect it to be and holding fast to the first rule of travel I left to find somewhere else to eat. I decided to go traditional and go for a German protein rush dinner, pork, mushrooms, spatzli and vegetables, all inundated in cream sauces. Of its kind it was good but if    I were to eat this every night I would be at risk of death from constipation before I leave Germany's soil. The waitress, who may have been called Mitzi, was charming and at the table next to me three elderly couples were playing cards. One couple had neglected to bring along enough pairs of reading
glasses with them so as each hand was dealt the glasses were passed back and forth so that they could check their cards.

Black Sea or Bust - Preparation

What does it take to cycle 900 miles across Central Europe? Well a bicycle for a start. I was brought up in semi-rural Surrey and bicycles were as much a part of boyhood as Airfix  kits and Biggles, as fish paste sandwiches and Tizer. Then at some point riding across Chobham Common pretending to be the Cisco Kid lost its appeal and sex, drugs and rock and roll took over. So from the age of 15 until just a couple of years ago, I am now 63, I haven't owned a bicycle. On a holiday in Poland, a couple of years ago, I went for a ride with my brother-in-law and enjoyed it enough to buy a bicycle on my return. It was sturdy, cheap and cheerful, a hybrid, a cross between a trail bike and a road bike. I clattered along local canal tow paths and the country lanes around Basingstoke and thought "this is good". But when it came to this journey I thought it's time for an upgrade. I consulted cycling enthusiast friends who made suggestions and I ended up in a glossy modern shop called 'Specialized' in Newbury  where I met several good looking young men who insisted on being on first name terms from the moment I walked in. For a second or two I considered saying "It's Mr Irwin to you, you little shits" but I was distracted by the wonderland of bicycles around me. I explained to the good looking young men that I was planning to cycle the length of the Danube and when I had explained that the Danube was a long river in Europe they were impressed and helpful. I quickly parted with £400 and walked out with a shiny new Sirrus. This seemed to me to be a lot of money but most of the bikes in the shop were priced in the thousands. Was it worth it? Was the Sirrus that much better than my old bike? Yes it was. It's just like buying a new car. Your old car, with an ashtray, stuffed full of soggy Pay & Display tickets and an apple core, with rear seats stained with something from a best forgotten holiday and with a handbrake that you have little confidence in, may seem comfortable and homely but when you get a new car you realise just how good life can be. It all works, there are no knobs missing, the seats adjust and the radio can receive more than just BBC Berkshire. Well that's how my Sirrus seemed to me, lighter, smarter and better engineered than my old bike. Do I love my Sirrus? Yes I do and that's just as well as she(?) is all I have for company on this trip. What to call her?
Indefatigable Irish cycling traveller and writer Dervla Murphy calls her bike Gerald. I broached the subject to the children at supper, Maria suggested 'Doris' but seeing the look of contempt on Jack's face she quickly retracted saying that giving a bicycle a name was stupid. 'Doris' will do for me, if for no better reason than it is quicker to type "I chained Doris to the railings" than it is to type "I chained my bike to the railings".

So with Doris in place the next thing to do was a bit of training. In a book of Hampshire Cycle rides there is a circuit round the outlying villages around Basingstoke which, with the ride out to the start point, totals 43 miles and I have worked myself up to a point where I can complete this in around 5 hours without feeling too many ill effects other than a sore arse, a phrase that I suspect will come up frequently in the future. Again I consulted more experienced cyclists. "Ted you need to get yourself some padded lycra shorts". Lycra shorts. Old blokes don't look good in shorts let alone lycra shorts but they were right and I thank them for it. What to wear under the shorts? I am a boxer shorts person but they are hopeless, lots of seams and they ruck up and chafe. Ordinary briefs are better but after consultation with my wife I tried a pair of her knickers. Excellent, the way forward. Yes folks I am cycling down the Danube in ladies' underwear.

What to take with me? As little as possible obviously. I bought two smart pannier bags and I already had a small saddle bag. Apart from clothes, a few tools, a small first aid kit, a phone, a torch, a Hi-Viz jacket, an I-Pad, something to read on Danubian evenings, all I needed was a guide book. Stanfords have the very thing. Four volumes that cover the entire route, they have immaculate maps, a miraculous level of detail and fit into a map holder that velcros onto your handlebars. From these books I have booked accommodation all along the route based on my daily average of 50 miles. So there we are. All ready. What can possibly go wrong.

Black Sea or Bust - Cycling Down the Danube

'Late-onset cycling mania' is a common complaint in the twenty-first century. It strikes down men (mostly) who are either too old or too fainthearted to buy a motorcycle and take on a nineteen year old mistress.  I am a sufferer and suffer to such an extent that I am currently planning to cycle the length of the Danube, some 1700 miles in total. At an average of fifty miles a day that is 34 days on the road, with days off for blisters and tourism that makes six weeks away. My wife can't do without me for that long so I have decided to make the journey in two hits, the source (at Donaueschingen) to Budapest  in the spring and from Budapest to the Black Sea in the autumn. I have never in my life cycled fifty miles in a day and to plan to do so for a number of consecutive days might seem foolhardy but I am in training and the well established Danube cycle path is mercifully flat unlike the countryside that surrounds Basingstoke where we live near the top of a hill and any bike ride must end in a cardiac inducing climb. When I say well established I am perhaps understating the status of the Danube Cycle Path which is probably the most popular in Europe and is undertaken by many thousands of portly Germans every year. It takes in Ulm, Passau, Linz, Vienna, Bratislava, Budapest, Belgrade  and the mosquito infested Danube delta. It passes through Germany, Austria, Hungary, Slovakia, Serbia and forms the border between Roumania and Bulgaria.

Why the Danube? Like so many things in my life it is all because of a book that I read.Unimaginatively called Danube, it was written by an Italian, Claudio Magris, and published in 1990. I picked it up at random,I was reading a lot of travel books at that time and was walking the canals of England, perhaps this would be a cultured towpath guide. Absolutely not. In many ways it is an irritating book, it purports to be an account of a trip like mine from source to delta, though the details, the mechanics of the journey, remain obscure. Sometimes he has companions, Amedeo, Maddalena, Maria, sometimes not. How does he travel? Train? Car? Does he actually travel at all? Did he write the whole thing in a library somewhere occasionally popping out to the payphone to call a Danubian station master or hotelier to check on local details or the weather? However it was created, Mr Magris certainly managed to pack in a great deal of intriguing information about those who fought, died, wrote, composed, tortured, loved or philosophised along the banks of the Danube and while bemoaning the lack of mystery and adventure in modern travel he includes the following sentence on page one "To be on the move, however, is better than nothing: one stares out of the window of the train as it hurtles into the countryside, one raises one face to the breeze and something passes, flows through the body." Maybe he did it by train.

For a while a 1700 mile walk appealed to me, influenced by Patrick Leigh Fermor's A Time of Gifts and Between the Woods and the Water in which he describes a nineteen-thirties walk from the Channel to Constantinople. Instead I got married, had a family and forgot about such foolishness but Danube still had its place on the shelf in the downstairs loo and about eighteen months ago while browsing in Stanfords I came across a packet of maps, The Danube Cycle Path from Budapest to the Black Sea. Unputdownable. So then I started to search the secondhand book site Abe and bought almost anything with 'Danube' in the title. First I read Down the Danube  by Guy Arnold, published in 1989, written before the fall of Communism. He travelled by bus, train and barge and it's a dull rather sour read. He takes most pleasure in making cheap jokes about Germans which as we all know is as easy as shooting ducks in a bucket. Next I had a go at The Danube by Emil Lengyel. This is much more interesting, published in 1939 in the months between the occupation of Czechoslovakia in March and the fall of Poland in September, the maps that are the endpapers of the book show Czechoslovakia already absorbed into the Third Reich but Poland uninvaded. Lengyel, a Hungarian American historian, didn't write a travel book but did start his account of Danubian folklore and history at the source and work his way downstream with the emphasis being on the area out of reach of the Nazis, east of Vienna. Then there was Dawdling Down the Danube by Edward Enfield (Harry's Dad) who rode a bicycle from the source to Passau on the German border with Austria when he was deep into his seventies. A charming book and for me, ten years younger than he was, rather encouraging. I also bought a couple of duds. On the Banks of the Danube turned out to be a slim volume of verse in Hungarian by Attila Jozsef. The blurb on the back states that this collection ".....offers a faithful record of a courageous poetic voice defying despair and projecting far beyond the shadows cast by the harrowing circumstances of a tragic life". Straight to the charity shop I think. Finally I had a go at The Glance of the Countess Hahn-Hahn (Down the Danube) by Peter Esterhazy  is described as "not quite a novel, not quite a travel book" and which is probably avant-garde and to me at least incomprehensible.

That's enough bibliography. The mechanics of my trip are pretty straightforward. I travel with my bike to the source by train. Eurostar to Paris, TGV to Strasbourg, a local train across the German border to Offenburg and then another to Donaueschingen. I have booked hotels, gasthofs and pensions on the way. I am travelling alone and while it would be nice to be able to say that I am giving up my precious time and putting myself to a gruelling endurance test in a selfless attempt to raise funds for charity nothing could be further from the truth. I am doing this because I want to, for sheer pleasure. To be on the move is better than nothing. I love to travel and the fund raising, I am ashamed to admit, was an afterthought but a worthy one nevertheless. Here is the link to my 'Just Giving' page where you can donate to the Alzheimers Society should you wish to.http://www.justgiving.com/Ted-Irwin . I start from the source on May 15th and should arrive in Budapest on June 3rd.

 

Dancing on the Table

A few years ago I had the dubious pleasure of putting on a musical in Moscow, in fact I have already written a rather jaunty account of what turned out to be something of a debacle. There was one particular experience that, at the time, I left out of that account for no other reason that it was slightly out of kilter with the day to day absurdities of that production.

The musical in question was being promoted locally by a rather desperate character and things were fairly chaotic but we were fortunate in having most of our dealings with an experienced Muscovite production manager, Yuri, who spoke good English. However these qualities were not enough to protect us from the appalling workmanship of the local scenery contractors, the taciturn idleness of the local crew and the open hostility of the venue management. In the best Brit tradition we plodded stoically on and I did my best not to lose my temper, as day after day, scenery would fail to be delivered and even when it did arrive was of questionable quality.

One particular set, consisting of a pair of large gates flanked on either side by a length of crumbling wall, the whole stretching across the full width of the stage, gave me particular pause. In pure construction terms what had been delivered bore some resemblance to the drawings that we had supplied but the paint finish, a sunny ochre stucco, ideal for a ‘Figaro’ or ‘Barber of Seville’, was not remotely appropriate for the 21st century post-modern parable that we were engaged on. Grey concrete mottled with lichen and spattered with pigeon shit was what we were after, so I called over Yuri and explained what had to done and needless to say he shrugged and said that there was no time for a repaint. I suggested an overnighter and he turned to the painters who were standing nearby. There were three of them, the boss, Sergei, was tall and gloomy, there was a spotty youth whose name I never learnt and there was Irina. Irina was extremely fat, extremely old and mostly drunk but I had noticed in passing that while her work rate was nothing special she, of the three, was the only one with any real skill as a scenic artist. Yuri asked if they fancied the overtime call and was refused, then he demanded that they take the call and finally he pleaded with them to do it. The men walked away but Irina gave me a sarcastic smile and said “How I know what to do?” Yes, Irina spoke a certain amount of English.
“I’ll be here” I said “I’ll tell you what to do”
“All night?” she asked.
“Yes”
“OK I do it.” She said and gave me a drunken leer. At this point I started to have doubts about the wisdom of the enterprise because when I say that Irina was mostly drunk in fact she was always drunk. She was forever shuffling off into the wings and taking a swig from a bottle in her vast handbag. She wore a thick paint splashed skirt, layers of ragged pullovers and heavy work boots. If you stood close to her the smell of unwashed woman pickled in vodka was not unlike that of standing next to a bucket of paint stripper. In short I had just decided to spend all night working on stage with a bag-lady.

Before the normal evening shift finished I made sure that the set we needed to paint was pushed onto the centre of the stage, that the electricians left us sufficient light to work in and that we had the theatre’s one rickety step ladder handy. Irina and I had already worked out a division of labour, I was to knock the whole set in dark grey and she would follow on behind me splattering and glazing to give the appropriately weathered look. As the rest of the crew left to do whatever Muscovite stage crews do after hours we made a start. I began to slosh grey paint around with great abandon and Irina huffed and puffed around mixing colour washes and glazes. We started to talk, Irina’s English was not great but we managed to get by with the occasional use of the tiny Russian Dictionary in my briefcase. In the cause of clarity I have tidied up her English in order to make this account of our night together readable.

I was curious to know her age but was too gallant to ask. She could have been a raddled fifty year old ravaged by years of hard drinking or a surprising seventy year old, surviving despite years of hard drinking but as she told me a little about her life it appeared that even my high estimate was probably on the low side. She had painted backcloths for the legendary designer Fedorovsky at the Bolshoi in the sixties and had worked at Lyubimov’s Taganka Theatre in the eighties. In fact as she stumped around the stage she mentioned a couple of dozen other theatres or companies unknown to me and I started to suspect that in a country where jobs are often for life her speckled career path might have something to do with the amount that she drank. At about 2.00am she stopped talking about herself and asked.
“Hey. You want me to tell you something about this theatre?”
All I knew so far was that the theatre, the Estrada, had been built in the 1930s as part of an apartment complex that was designed to accommodate Party bigwigs from the Kremlin a mere Kalashnikov shot away.
“Stalin built this and all the apartments for his buddies” she waved a brush around her head liberally spattering the floor with yellow ochre. “They were the most luxurious apartments in Moscow at that time but I tell you something about these apartments. During the Terror not one of them escaped a visit from the NKVD or KGB.. They would come in the night. Sometimes, if they were lucky, the residents would end up in the Gulag, or they might just be killed in the corridors, their bodies left as a warning to others. The unlucky ones were taken to be tortured, to watch their family being tortured, to see their children hanging on meat hooks. I tell you Englishman you have no idea what went on here”. She had dropped her earlier bantering tone and was suddenly speaking with great intensity.
“I tell you something else about this theatre Englishman. The night they arrested the murderer Beria, you know who I mean, Beria, the monster who thought he would take over from Stalin?”
“Yes I know who Beria was.” I replied. He was almost beyond evil even by the high standards set by Stalin’s Russia.
“The night that Krushchev had Beria arrested he sent his men down here, they knew that a gang of Beria’s guys were in watching the show. They locked all the doors and dragged them out one by one and shot them in the Foyer, they say the blood was ankle deep”.
“Christ I didn’t know!” I said thinking of the chilly impersonal marble foyer that existed just beyond the doors at the back of the auditorium.
There was silence for a while then she said “I danced here then.”
“What here? On this stage?”
“Yes I was a dancer then. I was sixteen”
“Wow!”
“I was sixteen. My father played the fiddle. He sat over there and played, I danced. We were what you call a special. Is special the right word?”
“Maybe you mean novelty. You were a novelty act” I said
“Yeah maybe a novelty act.” She sniffed and then wiped her nose on the sleeve of her jumper. After a moment she went upstage behind the set that we were painting. I carried on with the grey, making the most of her absence to grab the stepladder and get to some top bits of the wall. I saw her come back out of the corner of my eye. She walked straight downstage to where the light was brightest. I turned to look and nearly fell off the ladder. Apart from her boots and socks she was completely naked and it wasn’t the sagging flesh, the puckered thighs or the vast breasts that she wanted to show me, it was every inch of her body from neck to ankle that was special because every inch was tattooed and what tattoos! These days tattoos are fashionable, the stuff of coffee table books and Sunday supplement articles and I would guess not many between the ages of twenty and thirty don’t have one, but not tattoos like these. Whoever had worked on Irina was a true artist, there were Tartar princes, scimitar wielding warriors, unicorns, wolves, waterfalls, icy mountains, forests, sailing ships, giants and dwarves.
I stood on the step ladder with a brush in one hand and a can of paint in the other with my mouth open, not sure what to say. “My what nice tattoos you have.” didn’t seem right for the situation. Instead I said “Turn round.”
She did and a medieval army was marshalled at the base of her spine, an eagle clutching a bleeding serpent in its talons on one shoulder, a crescent moon rising over a silvery lake on the other, a princess was entwined with a dragon on her right thigh. The level of detail was extraordinary and the composition spectacular.
“It’s amazing. It’s beautiful. You’re beautiful.” I said
“Yeah yeah OK” she dropped back into her normal ironic manner and she went back upstage, returning fully clothed a few minutes later.
“Who did the tattoos?” I asked.
“My uncle. He was the finest tattooist in the Caucasus, maybe in all Russia. We were a circus family from Georgia, my mother was a trapeze artist, her sister had an act with horses and my father was a musician. I was a disappointment to them, I didn’t have the knack for the trapeze and I hated horses so the family decided that I should become a tattooed lady.”
“Did you mind?”
“How could I mind? In my family everybody had to earn their keep, I had to do something, so, no, I didn’t mind”.
She reclaimed the ladder from me and starting glazing the wall.
“In those days there was a sort of unofficial cabaret circuit in Russia. Most city or district Party committees ran some sort of late night event. Maybe once a month. My father and I travelled all over Russia, we did OK, we were looked after. One day we got a message to come to Moscow, to this theatre. This was a big step up for us. We normally played tractor factory canteens and so on, so we were very nervous. The act was simple, my father played a jolly country tune on his accordion, I took my clothes off and then posed for a bit to show off the tattoos. That was all, the tattoos did it. Oh and I was a very pretty girl then.” She laughed and the stepladder rattled and squeaked as she did.
“After our third night two men came into our dressing room. They didn’t knock, they just walked in and said “Come with us”. I was only wearing a dressing gown and my father protested but they just grabbed us and took us down the stairs, out of the stage door and into a car. We passed people on the corridor as we went and they looked away, they knew that we were going to be killed. In the car they put hoods over our heads and told us to be quiet, even so I could hear my father muttering prayers and I had never heard a single religious word come out of his mouth until then. I just thought this is not fair, we’ve done nothing and I started to cry. One of the men told me to shut up but then said “Don’t worry everything’s OK” and I thought maybe they’re not going to kill us after all. We drove for a long time, maybe two hours, Eventually we stopped and there were conversations that we couldn’t quite make out but we could hear gates opening and then we could hear that we were on gravel . When the car finally stopped they whipped the hoods off and we could see that we were outside the front doors of a big house and that there were lights on in the hall. A tall man in a black suit came down the steps and poked his head in the window and he said ‘Good you’re here, better late than never. Come with me”. We got out of the car and followed him into the house and I noticed that one of the men that had brought us had taken my father’s fiddle out of the trunk of the car, then I knew that we weren’t going to be killed we were going to perform.

In the hall the tall man, who was a butler or something, looked at me and then turned to the man carrying the violin and said “You didn’t bring her clothes?” and when the man shook his head the butler raised his eyes to heaven and took me by the hand, through a door and down some stairs into the kitchens. He told the two women working there to bring a hair brush, a mirror and some make-up. “You have ten minutes so do the best you can” he said to me and patted my shoulder. When I was ready we went back upstairs and my father and I were ushered into a small sitting room, .in the corner was an old man with a blanket over his knees. The butler indicated a chair to my father and then using another chair he helped me get up on to a table in the middle of the room. I thought ‘Who is this old man and why are we performing here’ then I recognised him and I nearly fainted. You have already guessed I’m sure, but it was Stalin himself, his skin was yellow, his hair white and his moustache, that famous moustache, was wispy and thin”
“So you danced for Stalin?” I said. I was staggered.
“Yes.I was shocked because of course we were fed propaganda images of the Great Leader from ten years earlier, we were never shown this old man on our weekly newsreels. Anyway, I looked at my father, who was petrified, he obviously knew who we were playing for, and I gave him the signal to start. I did the best I could with just my dressing gown and was down to just the tattoos pretty quickly but it was OK,I could see the old man start to smile and tap his foot in time to the music, he was a Georgian too you know. At the end of the routine he beckoned me to come to him and examined my tattoos very closely, he made the butler bring one of the table lamps closer so that he could see better. He was amazed, he shook his head in wonderment, he didn’t touch me, but he traced some of the images with his finger just a millimetre or two from my skin. Then he waved us away and slumped back in the chair and it was all over. The butler helped me into my dressing gown and in a moment my father and I were back in the hall where everyone was happy, they were relieved that we had done well because, perhaps, their lives depended on it. The guys who had driven us from Moscow slapped us on the back as they led us back to the car and they were really apologetic when they put the hoods back on. We were about to drive away when we heard the butler come back and talk for a couple of minutes to our escorts. We couldn’t make out what he said but the mood suddenly became more serious.
They took us back to the apartment where we were staying and once the hoods were off the one who wasn’t driving turned to us and said that he had been instructed to tell us that under no circumstances were we to continue performing our routine or to exhibit my tattoos in any way. We would receive instructions on what we were to do in the next few days.
This was a catastrophe for us and we couldn’t believe it after our success with the Great Leader but then two days later my father got a letter informing him that he was to take a senior musical position with a Georgian folk dance troupe in Tblisi. On the same day I also received a letter instructing me to report to the scene painting department of the Bolshoi Theatre here in Moscow where I was to be an apprentice, a much sought after position, though I didn’t know that the time”.
“So the reason that you are here with me tonight is because Stalin arranged it” I said
“Yes, because I danced naked on a table for Josef Stalin. I could have been dancing for my life you know, in a way that’s what everyone in Russia did in those days, they danced for their lives naked on Stalin’s table. I was lucky and here I am with you Englishman, you and this fucking wall”.