LITMIR.BIZ

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climate it was a simple matter to believe that things were going well. Every other year the first families of the East, leaving their overcoats and their worries at home, gathered at a resort near Yalta just along the coast – the Brezhnevs, the Honeckers, the Zhivkovs, the Ceausescus, and the Tsendbals – to compare growth rates and grandchildren.

      Though virtually unknown outside his own country, Tsendbal’s survival eclipsed them all. For forty-four years, as general secretary and then president, this obscure figure ruled the People’s Republic of Mongolia, the world’s second Communist state and the oldest of Russia’s allies. To keep tabs on him, the KGB had managed to marry him off to one of their agents, the boorish Filatova, a Russian from Soviet Central Asia. The Crimea was one of her passions and the Tsendbals came to the Black Sea at least twice a year. If any folk memories of the Mongol Hordes lurked in the Crimean subconscious, Tsendbal must have confused them. The heir to Genghis Khan was a small mousy man, the epitome of the faceless bureaucrat, obsequious to his domineering wife and his masters in the Kremlin.

      In the afternoon I wandered through the park where Crimean War monuments were deployed between the flower beds. Todleben, who organized the defence of Sevastopol in 1855, towered serenely over strolling naval cadets in hats so ridiculous they might have been dressed for a children’s party. At the far end of the park a fat man reading a newspaper sold me a ticket for an empty Ferris wheel.

      Ten years ago Sevastopol was the most closed of the Soviet Union’s closed cities, and spies in every Western nation would have considered a ride on this Ferris wheel as the pinnacle of their careers. Now the operator hardly cared enough about the presence of the former enemy to look up from the sports pages. With a series of creaking shudders I rose above the city. Beneath me, in the long protected harbour, lay the great Black Sea Fleet. It looked like a vast naval scrap yard full of rusting hulks. Economic collapse appeared to have done for the fleet what the naval strategies of Nato failed to do – keep much of it in harbour. Russia and the Ukraine had argued over the disposition of the ships when the latter declared its independence, though neither of them can afford to maintain its share of the naval loot.

      Back at my hotel the lobby was dominated by a flashing sign that read El Dorado. Beneath it a cabal of young venture capitalists in baseball caps worked the slot machines. Upstairs in my room the television offered two Russian channels. On the first, old Russia survived. Rectangular men in grey suits were making interminable speeches. On the other channel, new Russia was in full cry. Encouraged by a deranged game-show host, housewives were performing a striptease. The applause levels of the audience determined which one would win the kind of washing machine I remember my mother throwing out in the 1960s. It was not difficult to guess which channel was winning the ratings war.

      The finest part of Sevastopol is the esplanade along the seafront which stages the evening passeggiata. A series of neo-classical buildings – naval academies, customs houses, municipal offices – lines the long promenade where the inhabitants stroll arm in arm taking the sea air as swallows dive between the rooftops. Like the promenaders most of the buildings appeared to have lost the security of state employment and now struggle to make ends meet. Corner rooms in the old academies have been rented out as bars and restaurants. As the soft southern night fell, noisy discos mushroomed between the Corinthian columns where visiting leaders, including the Tsendbals of Outer Mongolia, once reviewed the naval fleet that was the pride of the Soviet Union.

      At this season the Crimea was full of poppies. In the winding defile that climbed towards the interior, the kind of treacherous geography that betrayed the Light Brigade, poppies wreathed the outcrops of pink rock. Above on the plateau, ramparts of poppies enclosed fields where armies of stout women were cutting hay with scythes. Then the bus passed into a country of orchards where poppies trickled down the aisles between the trees to gather in pools among apple-green shadows.

      I felt relieved to be on the move, to be consuming landscapes. The boat and its complex relationships had engendered a sense of confinement, some cloying and unsuitable feeling of responsibility. Now I was performing the traveller’s trick, the trick of departure, the vanishing act that marks the stages of a journey. For the traveller every encounter is conditioned by departure, by the impending schedule of trains, by the tickets already folded in his pocket, by the promise of new pastures. Departure is the constraint and the liberation of journeys.

      On this bright morning fresh landscapes opened in front of me. Gazing out the window of the bus I delighted in the flash of fields and houses, the blur of poppies. I watched whole towns sweep past, adrift among wheat fields, then fall rapidly astern. At Simferopol I would get the train and tomorrow evening I would be on the Volga, seven hundred miles to the east. I felt the elation of movement. On this bus fleeing eastward, I felt I was staging my own disappearance, vanishing into Asia, leaving only a handwritten sign on the window of my former life: ‘Gone to Outer Mongolia, please cancel the papers’.

      Since the time of the Scythians, the pastures of the Crimean interior had lured successive waves of Asian nomads onto the peninsula from the southern Russian steppes. When the Mongols arrived here in the thirteenth century it became an important component of the western province of the Mongolian Empire known as the Golden Horde whose capital lay at Sarai on the Volga. The Russians mistakenly called these eastern invaders Tatars, one of the many tribes that had been subdued by Genghis Khan in the early years of conquest, and the name stuck. In the west this became Tartar when Louis IX, William’s benefactor, transformed it by way of a Latin pun on ex tartarus, meaning ‘from the regions of hell’ recorded in classical legend.

      Friar William landed at Sudak on the southern shore of the Crimea on 21 May, 1253. His plan was to visit a Mongol prince, Sartaq, rumoured to be a Christian, whose camp lay three days’ ride beyond the River Don. On the advice of the Greek merchants in Sudak he opted to travel by cart, filling one with ‘fruits, muscatel wine and dry biscuits’ as gifts for the Mongol officials that they would encounter along the way. He set off with four companions: his colleague, Friar Bartholomew, a man whose age and bulk made him even less suited to this epic journey than William himself; Gosset, ‘a bearer’; Homo Dei, a Syrian interpreter whose knowledge of any useful language was fairly shaky; and Nicholas, a slave boy that William had rescued in Constantinople.

      But William’s journey was to take him a good deal further than he had planned. He was embarking on an odyssey that would lead him eventually to the distant Mongol capital of Qaraqorum, at the other end of Asia, well over four thousand miles away. If he had hoped to be back with his fellow monks in time for Christmas, he was to be disappointed.

      At Simferopol I found the train to Volgograd guarded by an army of formidable carriage attendants, big-breasted women who stood by the doors like bouncers. They had beehive hairdos, thick necks and the kind of shoulders born of a career spent wrestling baggage and the heavy windows of Russian trains. Even their make-up was intimidating – scarlet lipstick, blue eyelids, raspberry-rouged cheeks, and malevolent bits of mascara gathered at the corners of their eyes. But once the train started, they underwent a transformation, from security guards to matrons. They abandoned their jackboots for carpet slippers, and began to fuss with the curtains. Taking pity on a hapless foreigner, my carriage attendant brought me a mug of tea from her samovar and I spread out a picnic of bananas, smoked cheese, a sausage, and Ukrainian pastries.

      I shared my compartment with a burly Russian with mechanic’s hands and a simian haircut growing low on his forehead. He lay down on the bunk opposite and was asleep before we cleared the industrial suburbs of Simferopol. He slept with one eye slightly ajar. From beneath its lowered lid it followed me round the compartment. As he fell deeper into his slumbers his limbs began to convulse, like a dog dreaming of chasing rabbits.

      On the edges of the Azov Sea we crossed out of Crimea on a littoral of islands. For a time the world was poised uneasily between land, water and sky. Causeways linked narrow tongues of marsh where lone houses stood silhouetted against uncertain horizons. A fisherman passed in a boat no bigger than a bathtub, his head bowed over nets, like a man at prayer. Watery planes tapered beneath landscapes of cloud until the sea and the sky began to merge, the same placid grey, the same boundless horizontals.

      Beyond Melitopol we sailed over prairies tilting beneath towering skies. This was nomad country, the Don steppe, traversed

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