Europe
From Estonia to Atlantis
Jan 12th 2007
From Economist.com
Travels with our central Europe correspondent
LONDON (or at least the bit of it that is interested in eastern European politics) was abuzz with unkind gossip after the Polish president, Lech Kaczynski, came visiting in November. Of several awkward moments, the most talked-about was when he looked around the cabinet room at 10 Downing Street, and muttered something which his interpreter rendered as “Not very impressive”.
There are three baffling aspects to this. One is why Poland, the weightiest country in eastern Europe, managed to choose as head of state a man whose personal merits (honesty and kindness) are disguised by an ignorant, clumsy and nervous manner.
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Not very impressive |
Another is why his staff are so utterly incompetent that they don’t provide him with some bland talking points.
The third is why the Polish government seems consistently to hire such lousy interpreters. Mr Kaczynski actually wanted to make a pleasant observation that it was a surprisingly small room for somewhere so important.
Poles who understand the damage done by such mistakes are gloomy. The government is not too bad—indeed it is probably one of the least bad that the country has ever had. But it is abominably bad at foreign policy.
To console them, your correspondent tells some horror stories from other countries. President Mikheil Saakashvili of Georgia turned up nearly an hour late at Downing Street—a place where the prime minister’s day is timed to the minute.
But it is odd that Poland gets so much mockery. There is a kind of snobbish disdain for Europe’s east rooted very deeply in the British psyche. Before writing this diary, your correspondent was trying to do his expenses—a task that represents a weekly high-water mark for a journalist’s numeracy (and, it is rumoured, creativity).
The Economist’s internal expenses form allows claims in Zambian Kwacha—but not Estonian kroons, or lats (Latvia) or litas (Lithuania). These countries may be members of the EU and NATO, but for all that they are just not important enough. To say nothing of pipsqueak countries such as Ukraine.
There is some pressing business to end the week with. Literature from small countries, especially those that were wiped from the map for a few decades, tends to fare badly on the international publishing circuit.
Despite that, Estonia’s writers have a lot of clout for a country of 1.3m people. Jaan Kross (as in “The Czar’s Madman”) is internationally known. Tõnu Õnnepalu is a rising star. But the national classic, “Truth and Justice” by Anton Tammsaare, has never been published in English. That is a huge gap: rather as if Thomas Mann, Cervantes or Stendhal were not available in English.
“Truth and Justice” is a terrific tale, in five volumes, spanning rural farm life in Czarist-era Estonia, the Russian revolution and the creation of an independent Estonia.
The world it portrays seems as distant from ours as Atlantis. But the Estonians, taciturn, thoughtful, and dependable, are instantly recognisable.
There are translations in both German and Finnish. Rumour has it that there was once a translation into English, but it perished during a wartime shipwreck.
Now two Estonian-Americans, Inna Feldbach and Alan Trei, have translated the first volume and have sent some sample chapters of what they call the “sprawling, rambunctious” epic. A literary journal is publishing one of them, and the others are now with Random House in New York, and Arcadia Press in London.
It is addictive stuff, and a valuable Friday afternoon that should have been spent fixing interviews for next week’s paper slips by in a happy, melancholic haze. With luck the hard-nosed publishers will feel the same way. It would be a worthy addition to the Great Books list so animatedly discussed in Bratislava.
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HOME again to London―the financial, cultural and diplomatic capital of eastern Europe. The city is a magnet for the ambitious, the desperate and the nervous, and for those just itching to have fun. By some counts it acommodates 500,000 expatriates from what your correspondent still likes to call the “former captive nations”. There could well be more.
It’s a new wave, but not the first. When your correspondent was first learning Polish in the mid-1980s, he frequented a café in South Kensington called Daquise, where he laboriously construed the label on a shabby collecting tin that sat next to the cash till. It was a quote from one of Poland’s great wartime leaders, General Wladyslaw Anders: “Legitymacja skarbu narodowego jest paszportem wolnego Polaku” (”The National Treasury ID card is the passport of a free Pole”).
Holders of those particular ID cards faced a death sentence if they returned to communist Poland, which regarded the government-in-exile that issued them as treasonous.
Now the members of that government, for which the tin raised a tiny, voluntary tax, have wound up triumphant. They, not their communist usurpers, are honoured by Poland's current rulers, as the legitimate government of that day.
It was a time when east European languages were deeply exotic, and finding people to practise them with was quite hard. The smart way to get a cheap conversation lesson was by buying drinks for the mustachioed gents who used to hang around Daquise, or the Polish Hearth Club up the road.
Now, by contrast, east European languages are so common on the London street that they barely register. But few of their speakers imagine that any local (and in his tweed jacket, corduroys, brogues and Barbour jacket, your correspondent could hardly look more English) will understand what they are saying.
At a bus stop, a Russian chats animatedly into a mobile phone about a scam involving over-invoicing. On the bus, two Polish girls are comparing notes on their sex life with laudable frankness.
A bit later, on the tube, three Lithuanians are discussing a complicated and dodgy-sounding business to do with a container, some forged documents, and a British “colleague”. They create the dismal impression that they have corrupted a customs officer.
After a bit the eavesdropping gets rather conspicuous, and they look at the unwanted observer with undisguised dislike. They switch to Russian, which this eavesdropper understands rather better. Sadly, they get off at the next stop.
Merely speaking Russian doesn’t mean that you understand Russians. For that, start with one of the best books ever written about the Communist mindset, “Negotiating with the Soviets”, by Raymond Smith, first published in 1989.
The author, a retired American diplomat who spent his working life in dull, intricate, pointless talks with Soviet bureaucrats, explains beautifully the difference between two kinds of Russian truth―istina which is what is factually true, and pravda, which is the “right truth”.
He explains the use of vranyo—an untranslatable word meaning, roughly, “useful bullshit”. And, perhaps most usefully, he outlines the three ways of dealing with strangers: befriend, bully or grovel.
The normal Western conversational register, of friendly, respectful professional interaction is much rarer, particularly among Soviet-born people of a certain age.
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Mourning Mr Litvinenko |
An example: your correspondent leaves a message with a famous Soviet-era defector, now living in the UK, asking whether he and other cold war fence-jumpers are nervous in the wake of the poisoning of Alexander Litvinenko.
“What do you want to talk about?” he asks brusquely. He interrupts the explanation. “I don’t talk to the KGB”, he erupts. “Your paper is full of communist propaganda. Your correspondents are KGB officers. Sack them.”
This line of attack is rather disconcerting, given that our general line on Russia is quite hawkish, and your correspondent's, if anything, more so. But still he thinks the paper’s coverage of Mr Litvinenko’s death was insufficiently reverential.
He rants on. One option is to counter-attack, berating him for his foolish and ignorant views. But that is risky. He is a lot older, and considers himself a lot grander. Another is to whine and apologise, let him enjoy some trampling, and then appeal for mercy. The third is try to befriend him.
But a fourth option looks more attractive still. As he reaches a fulminating crescendo of insults, explaining for the third time why he will not talk to Moscow’s flunkeys, it is time to apologise crisply for bothering him and then, as he pauses, slightly startled, add a swift goodbye and hang up. It wasn’t that interesting a story anyway.
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TO BUDAPEST, and the Gellert hotel. A favourite of your correspondent. Note the eccentric plumbing, the peeling paint and the worn carpets. The service ranges from sombre to sullen. Here you can see all the tide-marks left in the course of Hungary’s transition from goulash communism to debt-laden crony capitalism.
But the history, architecture and atmosphere outweigh such cavils. The visitor is not quite standing on the shoulders of giants, but at least standing in rooms they frequented. The Gellert is where Oskar Schindler stayed when saving thousands of Jews from the Nazis.
The hotel manages, just, to feel like an oddly-run bit of a market economy. But a trip down the corridors to the Gellert's thermal baths, still municipally owned, brings with it an unmistakable whiff of the bossy, dour regime that collapsed in 1989.
In, say, Estonia, this gorgeous Art Deco swimming pool would have been privatised long ago, renovated, and turned into a world-class health resort for the super-rich.
In a city with a more dynamic municipal government, it might at least be run by friendly English-speaking staff.
But it isn’t. And for the foreign visitor, one of the great experiences of Budapest can seem a bit daunting. So here’s what to do.
Pack a bathing costume and flipflops (or buy overpriced ones in the hotel business centre). Change in your hotel room, donning the thin and scratchy white bathrobe provided. Bring soap, some small-denomination Hungarian banknotes, reading material, and a towel.
Pad down the corridor and summon the antique lift, all ironwork and glass. The female attendant will give you a faded plastic swipe card to get you through the turnstiles thronged by glum-looking Budapesters intent on sweating away their troubles.
Here you will catch a tempting glimpse of the swimming pool to your right, though you get there via a roundabout tunnel worthy of a car park.
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The way of Buda |
Swimming is strictly anti-clockwise. Backstroke is recommended so that you can see the ceiling. Grecian urns and lions’ heads spouting water evoke a more elegant age―which is more than you can say for the podgier of the clientele.
Now for the real treats. Head right (men) or left (women) and you reach a warren of cubicles and passages. Collect a “modesty cloth” from the freshly laundered pile on the table, and find a vacant cabin to change. An attendant (monoglot and cross) will lock away your possessions for safe keeping and give you a tiny metal tag to wear round your ankle.
Proceed to the dry sauna with its three circles of hell. The hottest is 80ºC. Hungarians sit stolidly reading newspapers, or conversing in their (to outsiders) impenetrable tongue. Some are in their underwear, others in modesty cloths. The etiquette is to switch this round when you sit, so that your bare bottom does not rest directly on a wooden chair.
After a bit of that, head for the two plunge pools, heated to 36ºC and 38ºC, or go for a bracing wallow in the cold pool. Disappointingly for aficionados of the Russian banya, which follows a long bake with a serious freeze, the cold pool here is cooled to a mere 8ºC.
Once your extremities are losing all feeling, warm up again in the “wet” (steam) sauna next door. Nobody reads or talks here. Breathing is painful, and you can’t see across the room.
The tantalising “mud treatment”, whatever the hotel may say, is not available at weekends. To get it at all you need a doctor’s letter certifying to your general good health, and to your particular need of spa treatments for fatigue and digestive problems.
But there are beauty treatments requiring nothing more than cash—around €50 for an hour of facial patting and prodding with anti-wrinkle potions, an extraction of blackheads (by hand) and other pleasurable if scientifically unproven remedies. Your correspondent's wife, who believes her husband to spend most of his time overseas in a muddy wasteland where starving dogs gnaw at frozen corpses, was delighted, pronouncing it “blissful”. Wait until we get to a Moscow banya.
The baths will shoo you out in good time for dinner. Take the hint. Hungarian cuisine is the best anywhere in the ex-communist world, with sophisticated combinations of duck, goose, sour cherries and chestnuts, instead of the cabbage, sausage and potato of most other countries.
But some local delicacies are better than others. Lung casserole is rather like eating rubber bands. Catfish, especially when stewed, taste like the lake-bottom on which they live.
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THE conference on post-communist Europe is a rare gem, with short papers, lively discussions, and lots of time for socialising. The wildly varying levels of informality are striking. Some people have been friends for 20 years: they use “ty”, and diminutive forms of address―“Honza” for Jan, “Edicko” for Edward.
Others are meeting for the first time, and want to be friendly without rushing it. Luckily, it is much easier to be informal in English, where speedy use of a Christian name doesn’t signify forced intimacy.
A Serbian diplomat will have none of this. Steely in manner, appearance and views, she insists on addressing her interlocutors at every point as “Esteemed” followed by their job title. The crosser she gets with our more cavalier approach, the more formal she becomes.
A spare hour presents a chance to call an actress, Ingrid T. She comes highly recommended by a journalist colleague, now in New York, who spent many years in post-communist Czechslovakia. He is something of a Casanova, but gives no hint of any romantic entanglement.
The conversation goes like this. “Hello, this is X from The Economist. I am in Bratislava and wanted to discuss the interaction between Slovak cultural identity and global influences. I got your number from Peter in New York”. At this point the call is interrupted by a peal of derisive, incredulous laughter, followed by a click. It is tempting to phone New York for an explanation. But perhaps better not to.
Over dinner, four of us, all from outside the region, discuss what first sparked our lifelong interest in the now ex-communist world, back when it seemed as inaccessible as Pyongyang seems today. The common answer: books.
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The captivating Milosz |
This prompts an attempt to construct a reading list, on the lines of an American-style Great Books course.
You have to start with Kundera, says one colleague. “Grossly overrated,” says