The black car was a 1991 Volga; that was the year the car became the choice of cab-drivers, rather than of members of the
Nomenklatura. The car emblem was a red-and-black stag. The driver looked unhappy and tired; this was understandable, considering he had just driven up from Petersburg, about 200 miles away. It was a warm day for Russia, and his shirt showed the results. His name was Boris, and the name certainly suited him
: he was husky with a gruff, gravely voice, had reddish hair that was thinning and graying, needed to shave at least twice a day, and spoke a minimum of heavily-accented English. I was sure he could definitely handle that Volga, and just about anything else Russian life could throw at him. Our luggage was at the concierge desk of the
Belinsky; Boris followed us up the gangway and took the luggage back down quickly, tossed them (literally) into the trunk, and motioned for us to get in the Volga. As soon as we said our good-byes and
dasvodanyas to our friends, we got into the car, Phoebe in front, myself in the back, Boris immediately started moving, and was talking to the dispatcher on his ever-present cell phone (no good Russian is ever without one.) The front windows of the car were rolled down, and the air-conditioner was blasting at the same time. The gravel road soon turned into what-I-had-thought was just a dirt path through the resort. Then we reached a gated guard-post, the back egress to Mandrogi. Boris showed the man his duly stamped manifest, and we were off. On a rugged dusty logging-road. Huge flat-bed trucks, loaded with giant logs, lumbered toward us. Boris held up both hands, one had 2 fingers up, the other made a zero with thumb and forefinger. "
Dvatsat," he announced. Twenty. 20 kilometers of this so-called road.
How happy were we?!
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We hadn't gone very far, bouncing up and down, when he suddenly stopped the car, and began rummaging around on the floor of the car. Now
what?! I thought. Phoebe looked ready to jump out of the car and disappear into the thick woods on either side of us. "What's going on?" I asked. He held his hand to his ear, thumb and pinkie extended, the universal sign for phone, and then shrugged. Ah, he's lost his cell phone. The windows were still open, and with all this bouncing, it could've gone out the window. He got out on the driver's side, and opened the back door. There it was on the floor of my seat. Relieved, he picked it up and we started off again. I was beginning to think that his phone had some special qualities, like it could actually run the car's engine. From the rear-view mirror, hung by a fine silver chain, hung a tiny blue crystal hummingbird. It was a rather beautiful object (probably given to Boris by his daughters); as we drove, it never stopped swinging to and fro. Sometimes it seemed as if his object was to have the bird's needle-like beak penetrate the windshield. I don't believe I'll
ever forget that moving glass hummingbird... At least we were able to convince him to roll-up the front windows. The air-conditioner roared like a wounded elephant, and pushed tepid air in our faces. No doubt an after-market improvement. But at least the dust was gone. The road was so rutted in places that he had to stop and maneuver over it one wheel at a time. Logging road? Probably originally created by a German Panzer Division on its way to the Siege of Leningrad. Any moment I expected to see an enormous black tank rumble into our path.
After 20 kilometers, or was it 20
miles, the dust and rocks gave way to bumpy pavement, and we turned right onto a more-or-less paved 2-lane road. The P37 Highway, heading southwest, mostly through dense forest. What a relief to watch the speedometer climb and the trees rush by. Traffic was very light. We might actually make it to Petersburg before the midnight sunset. We made one more turn, onto a fairly-wide 4-lane; this was the M18, the Murmansk Highway. The traffic was a lot more steady and faster on this road. But It was still heavily-wooded and desolate out here...
Occasionally we would drive through a clearing in the woods, through some settlement, with a grim factory somewhere off the road, and maybe a faded yellow-brick apartment block behind the trees; tired- looking older men and women straggled along the roadside near a concrete shelter, waiting for buses that we never saw. We were passing through one of these towns when Phoebe pointed to the dashbaord guages.
"Looks like you're almost out of fuel," she said. Boris looked down.
"Achh.
Plekha!"
Fortunately, there was a small blue-and-red filling station on the left. As near as I could figure, their gas prices looked to be about the same as the ones in the US. Across the street was a rusty metal shed beside some equally rusted train tracks. Behind the station was a kind of do-it-yourself "mall" -- a semi-circle of open-faced wooden stalls with peeling white paint; lined-up inside of them were old bathtubs filled with live fish and other river creatures, and old sinks filled with large vegtables from garden plots. Hand-made signs announced the prices, which looked very inexpensive, indeed. In the middle of the graveled space stood a kiosk that sold drinks. I got a plastic glass full of coffee with cream for Phoebe that only cost 7 rubles (about 28 cents); in Saint Petersburg hotels, we'd paid 150 rubles. (Obviously this was
not Saint Petersburg. ) But soon we were nearing the city. We were now in the Leningrad Oblast (they never bothered to rename the region, just the city itself). When we crossed one of the outer loops of the Neva River, over the long Ladozhsky Bridge, we entered the outskirts of Petersburg. (Below the bridge is a porto-potty that was much appreciated)...
It was almost 8:30 in the evening -- late afternoon by Petersburg standards -- as we cruised through the east-side of the city and heading downtown. Traffic was not too bad. We turned on Lermontovsky Prospekt and there was our destination for the night: the Azimut Hotel...
What the picture doesn't show is the huge L-shaped annex at the rear of the hotel. Obviously one of the largest hotels in Petersburg. Boris, already paid, took our luggage into the lobby, which was crowded with some German young people here for the Expo. I was talking to the concierge about our reservation, when one of them barged in and, before I knew it, the concierge was no where to be found. At this point, Boris was heading out the door, but Phoebe was there to intercept him; for someone who doesn't speak a word of Russian, she certainly knew how to communicate. In a blink, Boris was at the front desk, pounding on it like Krushchev at the UN. Needless to say, the concierge quickly reappeared and waited on us, And we received our room assignment, and a small map.
Spasibo, Boris!
The map was obviously
not to scale. The elevator took us to the end of the upside-down L', from there it was quite a walk, pulling our luggage (fortunately they had wheels), to the right-turn that became the long-leg of the 'L'. Our room, marked with an 'X', was at the end of that. We were confronted with the longest, dimmest corridor I have ever encountered. There were recessed-10 watt bulbs in the ceiling every hundred yards or so. Facetiously I thought that we perhaps we were simply going to walk to the airport tonight. "This is ridiculous!" Phoebe remarked, always a master of under-statement. The room was indeed the last one; the card actually worked, and here was the smallest hotel room possible: a king-size bed with about 2-feet of space on wither side, a shallow closet and knee-threatening bathroom, each with a pocket door. But the view was very nice, indeed. As was the location of this wing of the hotel. Next to our room was a narrow unmarked elevator. I went out to get a late snack, and decided to try the elecator, which I figured was probably for staff and wouldn't work without a key. It worked fine and took me down to the ground floor, where the door opened, reavling a small empty lobby and double glass doors.
No one in sight. The doors were not locked from inside. But they were from the outside, I discovered, too late. Undeterred, i strolled along the embankment of the Moika. it was after 10; the sky was an eerie, milky white, and the only sound was the muffled roar of the boulevards. No one walking. No cars. Fyodor's famous 'White Nights'. I bought some chips and large Coke at a Kiosk near a iton-railed bridgr. Then headed back to the wing. My card actually opened the double doors, and the strange elevator returned me to our tiny room. It was after 11 when we lay down to sleep. Phoebe took one last picture of the view from our room, a farewell glimpse of Peter's fabulous city in the fading June light...
Thus endeth our last full-day on Russian soil.
