Europe @ 2.4 km/h Read Free Page A

visit begins, I in turn am visited by a great stroke of luck.
    While I wait for the stair lift to be lowered, and explore my wallet for the admittance fee of 350 roubles (about A$17.50), an attendant approaches, face beaming, and says, ‘Did you know that entrance is free on the first Thursday of every month?’ I do a single take, thinking: Gosh, today’s Thursday, and then a double: Hey, today’s the third of May!
    This is not an art book, but I must mention a few reasons why the Hermitage always leaves its visitors in awe. First, there is the grandeur of the green, white and gold palace itself. On the ceiling above the grand Jordan Staircase is a restored classical painting that shows the gods on Mt Olympus.
    Unfamiliarity springs an early surprise in the form of a larger-than-life gilt diorama of a peacock atop a tree stump, flanked by an owl and a rooster that work this bizarre chronometer by hooting the minutes and crowing the seconds. Attributed to English horologist James Cox in the 1790s, the Peacock Clock was commissioned by minister Potemkin, more renowned for erecting village facades with nothing behind them to impress his lover, Tsarina Catherine, on her progress through rural Russia.
    In Room 208 I make an early discovery in my European exploration, an anonymous work by a 15th-century Florentine painter that shows the baby Jesus with the whole world in his hands, an orb with Asia, Africa and — this is not a misspelling — Europia. I am intrigued by the suggestion of Utopia here, the notion that Europe — whatever else it may be — is an ideal called Europia to which the real-world entity only occasionally corresponds.
    22 km
    Inescapable on the way back to my hostel, lo and behold, Ivan, at his post in front of the Nevsky Palace. ‘The quality of mercy is not strained,’ he begins to recite, leaving me tongue-tied and strangely moved, as Portia’s speech from The Merchant of Venice is one that my 87-year-old father knows by heart. Clearly, Ivan is beefing up his emigration pitch. I smile appreciation and make a mental note: if ever Australia is desperately short of peasant-minded doormen who can quote Shakespeare, he will go to the head of the queue.
    40 km
    Five days, 8 km a day (it would have been less but this city’s underground railway, with no lifts down from street level, is off limits to wheelchair users). Tomorrow morning I head north to the boondocks.
    It’s 10 pm now, and I hope to slink back to my hostel for a few hours’ sleep. Easy does it, if I can just avoid the drunks who swig from the bottle as they sway down the pavements on autopilot. Uh-oh, there’s Ivan under the Nevsky’s awning, beckoning. No escape.
    Patiently I listen as he tells me of his son, now nineteen, who was left deformed by an injury sustained during his birth. He says he just wanted to tell me one thing. ‘I admire you. You do not’ — and here he declaims in a manner worthy of Hamlet — ‘surrender’ — his arm is outstretched, statue-like — ‘to despair’. How humbling. If only he knew …
    I could have told him quite a lot about succumbing to Despair but compliments come along rarely enough in life that no good purpose is served by showing those kind enough to offer them how undeserved they are. Those days were a different time, and too different a place in my life, to make it any part of Ivan’s, and these days I hardly ever think of the time before and immediately after that fundamental divide in my life.
    Still, the night you try to kill yourself is not one you’re likely to forget. Nor is the state of mind that drove you to the brink of self-annihilation.
    But how could I hope to convey the devastating damage to the certainties of everyday life wrought by Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait on those working in ‘the next emirate down’, Bahrain, in the incandescent summer of 1990? How could I expect Ivan to comprehend the fear of that fight, and the pointlessness of flight when faced with a looming