From Russia with Lunch (19 page)

Outside it, however, things perked up. My room tariff included access to a sauna and heated pool, which I used, as well as a weights room, solarium and rollerblade rink, which I did not. Helping myself to a communal pushbike, I pedalled to the beach to watch a somehow lugubrious mauve sunset then returned to the near deserted hotel. After an artery-cloggingly delicious dinner of pork steak and creamed potatoes, I downed a pair of cherry brandies and prepared to head up to my room. It was at this point that I heard a sound which signalled either the presence of a billiard table or a chiropractor at work. Fortunately, it was the former. The table in question was a carved beauty of deep mahogany with emerald baize and an overhanging light fringed with red silk. Banging balls around was a skinny ten-year-old boy in glasses and Manchester United pyjamas.

Like many men, I play immaculate stick under an extremely narrow set of circumstances – which includes being slightly drunk, a long way from home and having no audience to impress. With a grin on his scrubbed face and a spare cue in his hand, Minnesota Thins soon made it clear that a challenge was being offered. For reasons I am yet to fully comprehend, I have several blistering memories of adults wiping the floor with me at games of skill as a child and I was determined to take it easy on the little fella. Which is tantamount to asking for a bitch-slap. Of course, he pocketed more balls than a kleptomaniac at a marbles convention and with each snide sinking of the black beamed, ‘Again?' I swear he was on the verge of upping the ante with a wager when his harried mother appeared from the kitchen and marched him upstairs with what I assumed was a Lithuanian tirade along the lines of ‘What have I told you about rolling the customers?'

On the pretext of organising my notes, I spent a further day in Nida, but in truth I simply wallowed in its downplayed nautical folksiness and sodium chloride perfume. Meandering – oh yes, I meander – by the docks, I was confronted by even more proof that the Lithuanians can't help themselves when it comes to turning objects of pedestrian functionality into crafty statements. In 1844, the local authorities decided that those plying the Curonian coast needed to install weathervanes on their vessels so that they could be identified and their fishing activities monitored.

Curonian fisherfolk were somewhat underwhelmed by the aesthetic impact that these weathervanes – initially made of tin and issued by the government – had on their lovingly tended craft. Long before MTV saw the merit of this approach, the residents decided to pimp their rides. Or at least their vanes. The rudimentary government designs were emblazoned with woodcarvings that spanned the religious to the profane. From one glance at a pattern an observer could tell how many other boats the fisherman owned and the number of offspring back at home. The more rustic versions were made of sunbleached wood painted blue and white with strategic blocks of the greyed-out timber for contrast. Others were tin, featuring rectangular segments of red, white and black. The majority, however, took the form of flat-bottomed boats with a slightly shorter top deck and a glinting prow shaped to resemble a seagull in flight. The decks of these ships were an evolving tale reflecting intricate carvings of faraway destinations, the names of loved ones left behind and, in one case, a touching tribute to what I assumed was once a beloved ship's cat.

Twenty-four hours later I was back at the Curonian's northern edge waiting for a ferry to take me back to the mainland. It was a most instructive delay. First up was a nearby noticeboard which detailed the region's rich birdlife. Which in turn led to a puerile spits and swallows joke that I felt compelled to jot down but now feels faintly too dirty to type. There was also a stone on which was carved a succession of names. These were the winners of the nautical mile footrace around the precinct which took place on the second Saturday of October every year. In a bout of specificity above and beyond the call of who cares, the stonemason felt it necessary to add ‘at 1pm'.

Finally, with the ferry workers seemingly on a break for lunch, I wandered off in the direction of a sign marked ‘cemetery' in search of one of those local traditions you feel could be a gullibility test played on visitors. The Baltic Sand People who once inhabited the spit believed that the dead were fond of an evening amble and consequently placed vertical boards at the feet of the deceased so that he or she could use it as a ramp from six feet under. Rising to above 100 centimetres from the earth, the designs and fabrications of these
krikstas
(a word which now means ‘baptism'), were predicated along gender lines. Metabolically challenged chaps got oak or birch boards on which their names were written and horses' heads were carved. Flatlining ladies, however, were commemorated with planks of linden, aspen and fir. Hearts, flowers, birds and the like were the motifs of choice.

My next destination lay 25 kilometres to the north and marketed itself as everything that the spit was not. Palanga is a party town that draws revellers – as opposed to holidaymakers – from Germany, Sweden and Denmark. It was also the one town in Lithuania where I could pull up stumps and live in tomorrow.

10

A Balt from the blue

One day Shlomo and Moshe are talking about holidays. Shlomo says, ‘I think I am just about ready to book my winter holidays again, but I'm going to do it differently this time. In the past, I have always taken your advice about where to go. Three years ago you said to go to Eilat. I went to Eilat and my wife Ruth got pregnant. Then two years ago, you told me to go to Bermuda and Ruth got pregnant again. Last year you suggested the Canary Isles and, as you know, Ruth got pregnant yet again.'

Moshe asks, ‘So what are you going to do different this year, Shlomo?'

‘This year,' replies Shlomo, ‘I'm taking Ruth with me.'

Palanga's main attraction is the Basanaviciaus pedestrian mall, otherwise known as the Yellow Brick Road thanks to the city forefathers' choice in jaundiced paving. Expecting a tawdry strip filled with titty bars and engineering students from Moscow asleep in their own sick, I instead encountered a wide, mile-long boulevard flanked by iridescent yellow street lamps. Both sides of which were bedecked with bars and restaurants recessed from the street and fronted by either a shaded patio of plump couches or an inviting garden of burbling fountains and daisy clumps. In tealit pubs, punters who still had beach sand on their toes put away sundowners to Coltrane. Meanwhile, a faded carousel rendered pallid by its 240-watt track marks groaned into action. Picking up speed to ‘Greensleeves', the handful of children atop the pine equines joyfully tested the limits of their upper registers.

Twining beside the boulevard is the Raze River, which has been landscaped into more of a murmuring stream. Fringed by reeds, bluebells and grassy banks, its bullion waters are traversed by imperious midnight-blue ducks that can spot a bread roll from 50 metres and badger unwary children into dumping their crusty booty whole. Eventually, the river veers sharp right to disgorge itself into the Baltic Sea. It was this juncture that the Classical Café called home. Having taken its theme from an MGM English garden party, the establishment featured a central kiosk of too much glass and unnecessarily severe angles. Its acre of spongy grass, however, was dotted with white metal garden settings each arranged in a two-seat/one-table configuration. Spaced evenly around the periphery of the café were tannoys on poles, from which wafted a selection of Mantovani, Puccini and Brahms.

Although my head recognised this as an exercise in effete sophistication that British sitcoms like
Keeping Up Appearances
routinely mine for laughs at the expense of the pompous, my heart stood its ground. For the next hour, I sipped Orange Pekoe amid washes of light orchestral music while swans eyed my petits fours. Pretentious? Moi?

Resuming my stroll, I discovered that Basanaviciaus is curtailed by sand dunes, beyond which lie the beach and 100-metre long pier that draw 100,000 visitors a year to Palanga. Colder than a stepmother's kiss and as welcoming as a biker bar, the Baltic is a forbidding sea with its own stark beauty. Which was catered to by Palanga's authorities with a series of surfside benches arranged in neat rows – four along and three deep. Brooding while the ocean did likewise was apparently a favourite pastime in Palanga. While the coastline is known for turning on sunsets that make Boney M's wardrobe designer appear to be a dedicated monochromist, all it could muster for my visit was a diluted lavender which ran to eye-bag charcoal.

I loved every fading moment of the mordant miasma. It was like stepping into a Bergman film. Not least for the fact that after about ten minutes of watching the waves unfold themselves onto the shore with a muffled whump, a piano accordionist shuffled into place several rows behind me. He or she then cajoled from the instrument a perfectly lachrymose version of ‘La Mer'. As limpid as you'd like and in a minor key, it was the kind of moment that might have triggered a cinematic flashback but instead made the present all the more so.

A succession of equally mawkish tunes – ‘Stormy Weather', ‘These Foolish Things' and, for something different, ‘Tie A Yellow Ribbon' – were also on the playlist. This unexpected soundtrack presented a series of dilemmas. The first was that I felt compelled to financially compensate the musician concerned for this concert. The second was that I didn't want to know what he or she looked like. On the latter score, my fervent hope was that the tunes were being cajoled out of a wheezing instrument by a world-weary Jacques Brel type with doleful eyes but the last traces of a whimsical smile sagging across his craggy cheeks. The reality turned out to be so much better. Behind the squeezebox was a girl of no more than sixteen with hastily pinned dark hair, alabaster skin and bulky black-rimmed budget glasses of the ‘when you turn eighteen you can swap them for contacts' variety. When key changes or transitions to a bridge presented themselves, her forehead would crinkle in concentration before smoothing itself out once more come chorus time.

Extracting 50 litas from my wallet, I waited until she was between numbers before standing an appropriate three benches away and thanking her for the music. I then proffered the note and in so doing tarnished what could well have been a perfect dusk. She wasn't busking but playing for the practice and joy of it. And here I was sullying art with commerce. Aside from which I had inadvertently entered into the ugly spectacle of a solitary man a long way from home offering a relatively extravagant amount of money to a girl two decades his junior. Suffused with awkward embarrassment she blushed fuchsia while casting a furtive glance over her shoulder to ensure she was not alone with this currency-wielding weirdo. With extrication from our respective embarrassments now as distant as the horizon, I exited gracelessly in search of dinner.

Dining options were myriad, as were welcoming lantern-lit courtyards scented by grilling fish, cooling pastry and beach goddesses from whose coquettish lips fell the enticement, ‘Free margarita with every meal.' Forgoing the Armenian, Chinese, Russian and Cuban options, I decided to be swayed by my guide book which crooned the praises of the Baltoji Zuvedra Hotel with the grace of a lovestruck balladeer. The restaurant was described in a flourish of teen-speak as ‘so one of the most romantic spots in town to have a bite and watch the sunset from a glass-enclosed dining room that will even make loners feel loved'. Truth be told, it was the tail end of the spiel that won me over. For all the multitudinous pleasures that come with being a lone traveller – no schedules, no routines, no one to tell you that trying to maintain a Dutch accent all day is childish – this was one of those evenings when I was missing home and Jennie. Only I didn't know it yet.

I have done enough solo travelling to no longer have a problem reading a novel by tealights, but this establishment was such a candelabra-festooned courtship conduit that I almost channelled my inner country and western singer to belt out that whiskyed favourite ‘Working My Way Back To You One Barstool At A Time'. Loneliness brings out the cynic in me and as I took my table for one amid the freshly infatuated and trying-to-recapture-the-good-old-days couples, I passed the time by attempting to decipher which pairings were yet to sleep together by the amount of earnest nodding the man was doing.

By the time I realised Céline Dion was on a loop, I couldn't take it anymore. This loner was feeling anything but loved and it seemed all bar myself were on the verge of either launching or lynching a relationship. What's more, the professional staff wouldn't even share eye-rolls with me at some of the more noxious face-stroking advances. They were, however, more inclined to display such behaviour when I requested my bill after having consumed two vodkas and several complimentary bread rolls. I decamped to an eatery whose honesty of title – Fish Restaurant – and queue of locals spoke to my mood and guts. Especially since their logo featured a female chef smiling through the weight of a platter on which was curled a whole fish the size of a Shetland pony. There wasn't even enough room for a slice of lemon.

If you ever happen to be in Palanga, make a beeline for this place as it was far and away the best meal I had in Lithuania. Well, at least until midnight of that evening. Aside from the fact that the fish I gorged on had still been in school that morning, it opened a portal to my past in the form of traditional recipes I had not tasted since my grandmother's table. Snack-size portions of fresh and salty herring fillets swam in sour cream and overripe tomatoes. The same fish again, this time tart with pickled cucumbers.

When it came to the entrées, however, the chef let both his imagination and Lithuanian/English internet translator run riot. ‘Black Caviar on the Snow' turned out to merely be served on ice. Fearlessly braving the gulf between ocean and earth, he plied me with interlaced slivers of salmon and beef carpaccio before rounding off the meal with seared butterfish accompanied by radishes and black grapes. Instead of regarding me with the combination of outright suspicion and veiled pity often reserved for the compan-ionless, the staff at Fish Restaurant took pity on me in the form of Krupnikas, a honey liqueur that's 40 per cent proof and traditionally drunk at 50 degrees Celsius.

It turned out that the maitre d' had been shown some kindness by a Melburnian in London some years before and I was the opportunity to realign his hospitality karma. Feeling both sated and just a little fascinating, I stumbled onto the Yellow Brick Road in search of diversion. Illuminated Roman-candle style, the Honolulu entertainment complex is a rather beautiful glass and concrete cylinder built in the 1960s. The closer I got, however, the less intriguing it became, not least for the plastic party people posing under equally plastic palms. Instead, I found myself in a chess bar known as Sachmatine, which translates as ‘Checkmate'. All faint uric light and burnished wood panelling, the club was gently pulsating to chilled house from a DJ whose podium peered over the sunken lounge in which around a dozen games of chess were being played. Better still, the barman quickly surmised my Krupnikas demeanour and furnished me with a sweet and sobering coffee.

Sinking into a velour sofa that I wouldn't have wanted to see by daylight, I was then presented with a predatory pastiche the likes of which I had never seen before. Under the guise of Fool's Mates, Double Attacks and En Passants, this was an ill-disguised pick-up joint where hands as practised as they were sleazy preyed on the naive. My guess is that the tanned young women who tried out the Sachmatine were tired of the tanned young men on whose résumé the words ‘bench press' featured. What they encountered instead were gusset merchants who had perfected what I termed the ‘one-knight stand'. From the very first moment when he casually asks if she would like a game then puts a white and black piece behind his back, forcing the girl to break the physical barrier by touching an arm to select her colour, his technique was built on a combination of experience and the pruning of probability.

Ignoring the three-move checkmate when it presented itself, he prolonged the game like a tantric master, nodding appreciatively at her most ill-advised moves, all the while pressing her for information in muted tones. Drinks are suggested but withdrawn on the grounds that alcohol might dull her game, but she insists. He smiles knowingly, ticking off a mental box. She dares to think this one might be different. And so it goes, until he suggestively lays her king on the horizontal with a half-arsed smile of apology and an enquiry as to how she feels about receiving similar treatment. In more cases than I might have expected, the woman in question left the premises with one of these boardgame Lotharios. This was clearly a well-thought-out ruse and although I mostly felt for the girls about to find out that sleaze can come in a cardigan and horn-rims, a tiny part of me also admired the bishop-shuffling bravado of these men.

My journey back to the hotel was taken up with the following thought: it is a truth universally acknowledged that a young chap on the make needs a game plan. No sooner had I – mercifully – entered my room, than I was struck by another universally acknowledged truth: what the hell was I doing eating the butterfish? While the colour of its flesh undoubtedly played some part in its name, this creature of the deep should be known as Neptune's Revenge. Suffice to say that should you check into a particular room at the Info Hotel in Palanga, you will find a complete set of my fingerprints gouged over a period of several gurning and explosive hours into the underside of the toilet seat.

With both myself and the Palanga coastline cleansed of turbulence by morning, I wandered the low-slung grid of shade-brindled residential streets that ran off Basanavi-ciaus. Often painted sea green with white guttering and matching fences, Palanga's double-storey wooden homes had an air of understated old money about them. Lawns were tidy but not quite manicured, the garden furniture was on the chicer side of shabby and any notions of art-directed perfection were disbanded by the array of sun-bleached beach towels tossed over patio railings to dry.

In terms of both atmosphere and aesthetic, this corner of Palanga had a similar feel to the whitewashed, preppy and nautical American east coast villages so beloved by that nation's political dynasties. Yet while I had no problems envisioning Ted Kennedy's car being pulled out of the duck pond beside Basanaviciaus, Palanga differed from the likes of Cape Cod in that it was ironically more democratic. There are no walled-off compounds here, no ‘private property' admonishments. Rather, it seems that boundaries are not only marked with fetching wooden fences that add to the town's allure rather than the opposite, but that these also make a sufficient statement of boundary.

If there was one town in Lithuania I was determined to return to it was Palanga. Problem is, although I can qualify for a Lithuanian passport, I'm not the only one smitten by the idea of a holiday home here. Since Lithuania became part of the EU, its best and brightest have been lured to lucrative jobs in Germany and the United Kingdom, from whence they return home with bankrolls thicker than your average reality TV show contestant. This they spend on property, causing house prices to skyrocket, inflation to follow suit and their nation to once again fall short of the quotas required to go from lita to euro. The result? Pricey in the backblocks, forget about it with an ocean view. And what sealed Palanga's enticing deal lay at the periphery of the beachside suburb.