What the Traveller Saw Read Online Free PDF Page A

open and I was led into the office of the manager, a Mr Scholkonogov, an assertive monoglot Russian in a bright blue suit, for whom one of his aides, a crop-haired gentleman, all smiles, interpreted.
    I told Mr Scholkonogov that I wanted to fly to Venice.
    ‘Why?’ he asked.
    It seemed a strange question for the manager of an airline to ask a potential passenger, but at this time I was unused to Russians.
    ‘Because my wife and children are in Venice,’ I said. It was no good complicating matters by telling him that they were, in fact, in a village between Trieste and Monfalcone.
    ‘Better you fly to Tirana,’ he said, with the air of someone who had already made up his mind that that was where I was going whether I wanted to or not.
    ‘But Tirana’s in Albania, it’s miles from Venice,’ I said. With a man like this unless I watched my step I would probably end up in Siberia. Happily this was not his intention. He wasa nice man, trying to look after my interests. ‘Better you go to Tirana because Tirana is much cheaper fare; but if Tirana no good, go to Vienna. Vienna for you still very cheap.’
    ‘How cheap?’
    ‘Very cheap. You buy Afghanis [the Afghan currency] on the black market with English pounds at 150 Afghanis to the pound. Then you buy a ticket from me in roubles at a very good rate of exchange’ – I forget what it was – ‘and the entire journey Kabul – Vienna by Moscow will cost you …’ – at this point there was a halt in the conversation during which he got out an abacus and went to work on it, eventually coming up with a figure – ‘8650 Afghanis, £51. Good for 6000 kilometres. Why not go to England?’ – more work on the abacus – ‘That will cost you only 10,000 Afghanis, £8 more, and we will both come with you. We have always wished to see England.’
    ‘I can’t do that, I’ve got a wife and children waiting for me in Venice.’
    ‘Mr Scholkonogov asks me to tell you that wives and children are nothing but trouble,’ the interpreter said as I prepared to set off for the Bazaar right away, apprehensive that the black market in sterling might suddenly collapse. ‘He will telephone our Embassy and tell Mr Oleynik there that it is all right as far as we are concerned for a visa to be issued for you. You should have no difficulty, but go there at once before what Mr Scholkonogov says to Mr Oleynik is forgotten.’
    The plane was an Ilyushin 12, a Russian version of a Dakota. The windows were fitted with lace curtains and the headrests with antimacassars, the only concessions to luxury in this otherwise austere machine. The effect was curious. All that was lacking was an aspidistra. It remained less than half full all the way to Moscow, in spite of people getting on and off, which would scarcely be the case today.
    The stewardesses were monolithic. They gave us sweets with the air of schoolmistresses providing the most disagreeableof their pupils with some undreamed-of treat, but no sooner had we put them in our mouths and begun sucking them than we were told to put on our oxygen masks – there was no such thing as one of those mindless, preliminary demonstrations which all too often send the recipients of this vital information to sleep – so we had either to swallow them or spit them out.
    Now we were off, on the crossing of the Hindu Kush. Sadly I looked down on snow-covered summits that I now knew, in my heart of hearts, I would never conquer. And then we had to put on our masks in earnest.
    With the mountains behind us we were over the Oxus, seeing dense jungle, momentarily, and coming in to land at Termez, on its right bank, in Russian Uzbekistan, where we were out of sight of the river, which I longed to see, a magic one to all explorers.
    From Termez we flew northwards to Tashkent, over the Zeravshan and Turkestan Ranges, and over Samarkand, all of which I identified using the Oxford University Economic Atlas of the USSR, which I had bought in the Bazaar at