Small-scale activities had been carried out along the Finnish border, tying Bibles to balloons for the wind to carry them into the USSR. There was always the chance of arrest and imprisonment. The illegal transportation of Bibles to the Eastern Bloc had been going on for years. “Do you think you could smuggle Bibles into the USSR for us? The faithful are aching for the word of God, and smuggling the Bibles in piecemeal isn’t getting the job done.” Small-scale activities had been carried out along the Finnish border, tying Bibles to balloons To this day, I have no idea how he found me, but there were only a few people in the Netherlands in the 1980s who spoke Russian. He asked me about my background in Russian and I invited him in. Siderius appeared at my family’s door one day, dressed in a tan mac, with a comb-over. Then I was saved by a man dispatched like an angel from heaven. I’d reconciled myself to the idea that I’d spend the rest of my life in an office, with a broken dream of being a writer. I decided to take Maxim Gorky’s advice to Isaac Babel: “First go and live!” After a year and a half as a recreation leader on Tenerife – close to where Isherwood wrote his Berlin stories – I returned to the Netherlands. I graduated five years later, but my wish was now less modest: I wanted to become a writer. In 1980, when I started my Russian studies at the University of Amsterdam, I had only one wish: to be able to read Turgenev, Chekhov and Tolstoy in the original. I was drawn in by the language and the 19th-century Russian world that the writer evoked. From the start, the words struck me like a hammer-blow. The thinnest was First Love, by Ivan Turgenev. After I’d filled out the membership card, a woman said: “And now you can choose three books!” I snatched three off the shelf. One day, when I was 14, I went to our village library. Each morning, when my classmates’ fathers drove their expensive cars to solicitors’ offices, banks or ministries, my father would don his cook’s uniform. I was embarrassed about my non-intellectual origins. Books passed me by so it was an anomaly that, at the age of 12, I found myself attending a grammar school in Haarlem that churned out politicians, artists and writers. We slaved all year round – my father at the kitchen stove, my mother serving, cleaning the hotel rooms, and caring for three children. The scenes of my boyhood were of German seaside tourists, drunken men and women at the bar, wedding receptions, and bingo nights in the function room. I grew up in a modest, family hotel on the Dutch coast.