1. URMAS

A bit of bureaucracy never hurt anybody

Urmas is a travel agent in Estonia. He is perhaps fifty years old and has a sense of fended-off decay about him: oily brown hair, slicked smartly across his head, matched with a trimmed moustache, beneath a nose that's just beginning to bloom with the first faint purple veins. Thin-framed spectacles. Grave voice. His eyes seem heavy. Sometimes, a nervous smile flickers only slightly in the thick lines of his face. I know this, because I have spent a lot of time looking at the face of Urmas.

For a tidy sum, he is helping Mari and me through the hideously attritional process of obtaining three-month Russian business visas. His help has been going on for weeks, perhaps months. Our campaign for entry is beginning to feel like the siege of Stalingrad, and morale in the camp is sinking. I'm no longer convinced that Urmas or anybody else can help us.

The authors of our travel books, the bastards, skipped blithely through this process in a sentence or two: a tourist visa lasts only a month, they said, so you may want to get a business visa instead. As if we were choosing a bigger box of breakfast cereal, perhaps, or a multi-pack of chocolate biscuits. You'll need to apply through an embassy in your country of residence, and an agency can help you. Simple. Yet at every turn, the defenders of the Russian motherland are waiting to piss on our cornflakes.

First I had to become an official resident of Estonia. In fairness, that was easy. Register at the town the hall with the sunny, rotund woman on the counter, take the papers on a long trek to the immigration office, a morning's wait, two photographs, one signature and I am officially part of the Singing Nation. Didn't even have to learn the words to the national anthem. 

Then came the Visa process itself: the big brother. At the Russian Embassy a woman who may have been Breshnev's bastard lovechild turned us away with a gravelly "Niet", a curt shuffle of paperwork and a seemingly terminal drawing down of the blind over her window. The man who answered the phone at the British Embassy was lovely and told me in beautifully diplomatic tones that he couldn't give me any advice at all. I kept expecting him to say something like "Good luck, Old Bean - give the Ruskies one from me and I'll see you back in Blighty!" Even the internet, for once, had little to say. Then we found Urmas. His agency was first in the local Yellow Pages. He told us he could help.

Winter has since turned to Spring and we have become almost daily visitors to Urmas's office. There is never anyone else there - usually not even Urmas. Not even during his published business hours, when we have called shortly beforehand to announce that we are coming. After we've called him again and waited a couple of hours in one of the bars, he will text us to say that he's back. Once in the office, Urmas monotonously reels of the latest list of demands from the Russians. My grasp of the Estonian language is shamefully weak considering my residency status, and I understand only tiny parts of the conversation: Anglicised words, visa, Venemaa, and occasional numbers. The numbers mentioned tend to be rather high ones and are often followed by the flicker of Urmas's smile.

To pass the time I spend long minutes gazing over the antiquarian map of Scandinavia and the Baltics that is high on the wall. I run my eyes longingly around the contours of Norway until I reach the peak of the continent and swoop over the icy wastelands of the North, steer a carefully-drawn sailship into the fairy-tale port of Tallinn, hike through the meadows and woods of the Baltic lands, then take once again to the rough sea, conjuring in my mind the medieval beasts that sailors of the day believed they saw lurking in the dark, muscular waters below. To my left, meanwhile, the conversation goes on. Mari translates: We will need an agency based in Russia to arrange invitations before we can apply for visas; we will need to provide the name and address of our employer, although we are both unemployed; because I am from Great Britain or the United States there will be additional forms to complete; we will need to provide a full itinerary for our visit; we will need to make hotel arrangements in advance, although we do not know when we will be allowed in; we will need to provide details of travel insurance policies covering everything we intend to do during our stay, although we do not yet possess such policies; our applications have not yet left the offices of Urmas's associates in Tallinn; today is a popular holiday in Russia which is likely to delay the progress of our applications for up to a week; we will need... the more circular and impossibly bureaucratic the process becomes, the more valuable Urmas's commissioned help seems. Without him, it is impossible to make these arrangements. I actually come to look forward to the little flashes of the smile.

It wasn't supposed to be like this. Since my schooldays I've dreamt of the great adventure, imagined myself flitting like Raskalnikov's ghost through the backstreets of St Petersburg, finding Gogol's nose hidden under a bench on the Nevsky Prospect, drinking and dining with Professor Woland's ill-behaved cat in the finest Moscow restaurants, feeling the shudder of history marching across Red Square, then boarding the great train East. The train - that will take me away from the old cities of the west, beneath the grand Soviet monoliths, back through time and the little wooden villages, through the forest so thick and deep it lasts for days and nights, and out - into the brilliant blue dawn of the oldest lake in the world, out into the uncountable distances of the steppeland where Genghis once roamed, out into the East, into the air, into the temples, the mountains, into the endless skies of Mongolia, the vastnesss of the Gobi, the ancient mysteries of China, and further, to Another Place. Always onwards, the train rattles and cradles me, to the Somewhere Else of my dreams, where I can escape even myself.

But I'm still here. And I'm still in Urmas's office. I try to rally my spirits by viewing this whole experience as the first step on that epic dream journey. That's why I have made Urmas the subject of what I hope will be the first of many sketches of exotic locations, eccentric characters, rich experiences, epic journeys, boundless thoughts, and shimmering morning visions of the hugeness of the Earth around me as as it dangles, suspended, tiny as a pale blue teardop in the silent black universe. But really, there is nothing very interesting to say about Urmas.

His mother is unwell. He confides this as one of the reasons for his being away from the office when we arrive. In the lengthy periods of waiting I've speculated wildly on other, darker causes for these absences , but Mari, who's far less disposed than I am to think ill of people, is sure there's a perfectly reasonable explanation.

The absences might in turn explain why Urmas never has any other customers, although it's difficult to tell what is a consequence and what is a cause. Perhaps he wanders off because he knows that nobody else will come, or perhaps nobody comes because they know he'll have wandered off. Or maybe he's genuinely busy. He always makes a point of being busy on the phone when we eventually do get into the office, and normally takes a call or two during our meetings. But Mari, who understands these things, says the calls are from his wife.

I met her once (his wife, not Mari). She was holding fort in the office during one of Urmas's absences. She was doing a manful job of standing in for him as well, locking the door from the inside during business hours and calling out "Come in" while I knocked in growing frustration, unable to enter. When I eventually got in she told me to come back after 2.30.

That was an ill-fated visit. Urmas and I had difficulty understanding one another and even though all I needed to do was drop off some paperwork I left feeling low-spirited and without belief that the process would ever end. That was the day that he told me - man to man, perhaps, as Mari had chosen to stay at home - that his mother was unwell and so he'd be away from the office that afternoon.

I wish passionately that the old woman will make a speedy recovery. I feel my fate is somehow tied into hers, and Urmas has said that once we get the Russian visas he can help us with the Chinese ones too...