In Europe

responsibility for roof and pillar, my father was on good terms with the security service at the Winter Palace, and one day we received permission to view the parade from the palace itself. I was even allowed to bring a friend.
    ‘So there we stood on 7 November, 1952, at that window, with a few other families and the ever-present plainclothes policeman. I was six, my friend was seven. Below they were carrying around huge portraits. I loved Comrade Stalin, and that was the extent of my knowledge of politics. But my friend wanted to show how smart he was, and suddenly he asked my father: “Alexander Alexandrovitch, if Stalin dies, who will be hissuccessor?” Well, the very idea that Stalin would ever die was taboo, and talking about his successor was nothing less than a deadly sin. My father turned white as a sheet. Later he told me that the plainclothesman had clearly heard the comment, and that a whole range of emotions had crossed the man's face. Starting with: Should I arrest this man? Then: But he's only a child. And finally: Why not act as though I didn't hear?
    ‘My father didn't sleep for a week. When he told me about it, years later, you could still see the tension in his face.’

Chapter FIFTEEN
Riga
    VARSHAVSKY STATION IN ST PETERSBURG CAN HARDLY BE CALLED A station at all. It is more like a vague, open lot through which one picks one's way with difficulty, a place criss-crossed with tracks and here and there a long platform. The engines roar behind their snowploughs and the carriages reek as the coal heaters are fired up for a new journey, but inside the compartments it is the very picture of conviviality. The professional busybody assigned to our carriage has settled down in the last compartment. Why would she want to be anywhere else? Her whole life is laid out in her home on wheels, with coloured cushions, flowers, her own curtains, an icon on the wall and a singing kettle on the stove. Always on the road.
    Our first-class compartment is also like a salon, with two velveteen pull-out beds, red draperies, white lace curtains and plastic flowers on the table. My only fellow passenger, Andrei Morozov, deals in ship's tackle. The train pulls away, outside there is nothing but white barrenness, here and there a chimney, from the speakers the soft sound of Russian songs, and quite soon the day begins to fade.
    Together we polish off two bottles of vodka. First we talk about Andrei's thirteen-year-old daughter and her favourite magazine,
Callgirl
. Then we speak of the lightness of Pushkin. Then he informs me in detail about the peculiarities of the whores who work the trains in Lithuania.
    In the next carriage everyone is sitting or lying on plank bunks: farmers with red faces, shy soldiers and wizened grandmothers. My bed shakes gently, the train couplings creak, from somewhere far down the corridor comes the sound of an accordion, outside the window the endless snow slides by, the lanterns of a sleeping village, above it the stars.
    I get off at Vilnius at 4.30 a.m. It is quiet as the grave. Close to thestation, standing half on the tracks, four greyish-looking men are staring at the lights and the train, their faces tense from the cold, fishing equipment in hand. They do not speak a word. Then I walk down the city's main street and suddenly I see German houses, American advertising, Italian cafés and Swedish hotels, as though the city centre is cut off from the winter by an invisible glass dome.
    My room is at the Hotel Neringa. I'm awakened by the groans of the man in the next room, and a few yelping cries from one of the working girls. It is quiet for a bit, and then together they sing a sweet melancholy song in an incomprehensible language. Meanwhile I lie there feeling a bit out of place in a Western bed, next to a shower that actually produces clean water. Just as my mattress springs easily back into shape, so has this entire city sprung back in a moment to European life, as though there had never been anything in between. Still, it was only ten years ago that people here first dared openly to celebrate Christmas. And ten years ago that they formed that human chain, right through three Baltic States, 650 kilometres long, with two million participants. And the bitter fighting with Soviet troops close to the television tower of Vilnius, that was only eight years ago. All the while, Lenin stood looking calmly out over Lukiškiû Square.
    But all that was centuries ago. On the main street of