In Europe

the famous steps running down to the harbour, the steps that played such a central role in Eisenstein's
Potemkin
. The sea. Right below my window is the boulevard with its benches, lanterns and rustling chestnut trees. Beside and behind me, the city, its houses light green and ochre, its streets of a nineteenth-century allure, with only a few cars, old cobblestones, the house fronts a tableau of faded glory.
    Everything a lover of Russian literature could dream of can be found in Odessa: the palace where Alexander Pushkin courted Yelizaveta Vorontsova, the wife of Governor Mikhail Vorontsov; the editorial offices of the naval gazette
Moryak
where Paustovsky carried out his own revolution in 1920; the courtyards ruled over by Isaac Babel's king rat, Benya Krik.
    Along the boulevard one hears the cooing of the doves, the sound of music. Boys and girls walk back and forth here all day, because they have no money to sit in a café. There are ponies for the children. You can have your picture taken with a monkey. The swallows bob and weave between the rooftops. It is like a Sunday from long ago.
    ‘Odessa has experienced prosperity and is now going downhill – a poetic, rather carefree and extremely helpless downhill,’ Babel wrote in 1916. An old woman with grey, mussed hair is moving down the steps towards the harbour. She staggers. She shouts: ‘The communists are gone! God is gone! God doesn't exist! The state doesn't exist. The only ones left are poor people, robbers and bandits. God help us! Robbers! Bandits!’ And she keeps shouting that, all the way to the waterfront.
    Here you can watch an empire collapse before your eyes. Ten years ago, from Riga to Volgograd, from St Petersburg to Odessa, you could pay with roubles. Now my pockets are full of the widest spectrum ofbanknotes, printed in meaningless denominations with the portraits of obscure gentlemen. The gigantic trading network of old Russia and the former Soviet Union has been tossed for a loop, the new nationalism has thrown up thousands of new obstacles, and the consequences are being felt everywhere: in the Lithuanian border town that lives off exports to Russia, in the vacant tourist hotels of Moscow and Kiev, in the port of Odessa where shipping revenues have gone down by two thirds since the dissolution of the Soviet Union, in the dozens of bankrupt ships lying here off the coast, waiting.
    I wander into the Literature Museum. Beside Babel's lone spectacles – in a panic, he left them lying on his nightstand when he was arrested on 15 May, 1939 – I actually find a few old copies of
Moryak
. They date from 1921, they are printed on the back of packaging material used to ship tea, and they include Paustovsky's first stories. In the great hall – the museum is actually a palace – a sixtieth wedding anniversary party is underway. A women's chorus of veterans and pensioners, dressed in beautiful Ukrainian costumes, sings one rousing song after another. The bridal couple, old and fragile, stand up to receive the congratulations. The stars and ribbons of the late Soviet Union hang on their chests.
    Isaac Babel wrote: ‘In Odessa you have caressing and refreshing spring evenings, the penetrating aroma of acacias, and above the dark sea a moon that incessantly sheds its irresistible light.’ Nothing of that has changed. I was in love with this city for a long time, before I ever set foot in it. I had first come here a few years back, travelling passenger class aboard a freighter from Istanbul that shuttled back and forth across the Black Sea, along the nether reaches of Europe. That ship, the
Briz
, was like an old man, its hull overgrown with crusts and tumours, and it had been carrying traders back and forth between Odessa and Istanbul for as long as anyone could remember. But the lifeboats and life jackets all said Odessa, Odessa, Odessa.
    Halfway across, a cable became tangled in the propeller and we were adrift for hours. Almost none of the passengers seemed to notice. Most of them only came on deck to inspect their goods anyway. Had the fridges stayed dry? Were the Italian lawn chairs lashed down well? Were the deck-hands stealing too many tomatoes from the hundred of crates piled upthere? Then they would retreat to their cabins or the ship's minuscule bar.
    That was how it went, all the way to the much talked-of outer limits of Europe: an old rust bucket, a group of surly men in jogging suits, vodka, a few ship's whores, and a dozen dolphins