“Do you like Donetsk?” the girl asked timidly. People are sensitive on such matters, feel hurt if one says something critical. I began to search feverishly and diligently for something positive to say about the city, but my voice apparently lacked sincerity, for when I fell silent she responded with determination, even proudly: “But in the summer roses bloom in our city. A million roses. Can you imagine? A million roses!”
I SPEND HALF the night at the Donetsk station, waiting for the train. In the evening, everything is already closed here: the only bar, in which they sell tea with sugar, the newsstand, the ticket booths. In the large, poorly lit hall, people are asleep on the wooden benches, sitting tightly side by side or lying down. Tired from traveling and waiting, they assume in sleep the most unusual, catatonic poses. Wrapped in shawls and kerchiefs, hidden inside coats and hats with earmuffs, they look from a distance like motionless, bulgy bundles, packs, packages, arranged in rows.
Silence, stuffiness, and darkness.
Then, suddenly, in one corner of the hall, from inside the invisible depths of one of these bundles, a cry arises. A woman springs up, circles round the hall, thrashes about helplessly. “Vory! Vory!” she shouts with despair. (“Thieves! Thieves!”) She probably awoke and sensed she no longer had her purse. For a time she runs between the benches, wonders out loud why, why her purse. She calls on God for help. But no one stirs, so she roams around a bit more, disheveled, sleepy, then finally returns to her place, sits down, rolls herself back up into a bundle, and falls silent.
A moment later, however, again — in some other place, another voice, equally fearful, terrified: “Vory! Vory!” And another woman runs among us, showing us that her hands are empty. But no one sees this; everyone is curled up, hidden, huddled over.
Only the granny sitting next to me opens her eye for a moment, and says, perhaps to me, perhaps to herself, “Zyt’ strashno” (“life is terrible”), clutches her oilcloth bag even more tightly, and sinks again into her shallow, vigilant sleep.
A WOMAN IN our compartment was traveling to Odessa for her son’s wedding. She lived somewhere in Siberia, on the Lena River. Usually, two, four, or six people travel in a single compartment. Men and women together. The customs are rigid. First, women make up their beds and change, then men. Once, pajamas were the popular evening-nighttime outfit; now, more and more frequently, it is sweat suits. One passes time in a railroad compartment pleasantly. Everyone offers everyone else something; they share whatever they have — pierogi, baked chicken, bread with cheese. I once found myself traveling with a lady who had soup as well as bowls and spoons with her — just so she could offer some to others. You will almost always find a bottle of vodka or cognac in a compartment — invariably someone will have thought to bring it along for the road. Sometimes I had nothing to eat, and right away others gave me whatever they had. At one time, people were afraid of one another and there was silence in the compartment, but now there is glasnost and everyone is talking at once. When the dams finally burst and whatever remaining mutual distrust disappears, the storytelling begins in earnest, the confessions, the exchange of opinions.
Siberia is called the largest prison on earth. The czar deported hundreds of thousands of his subjects here; here the Bolsheviks imprisoned millions of innocent people. But our Siberian, Claudia Mironova, considers Siberia a place of sanctuary, an island of liberty. The immeasurable distances, the enormous taiga, and the lack of roads facilitated isolation, provided refuge, enabled one to vanish from view. Entire communities of dissenters, says Claudia Mironova, were able to survive here. They survived the czar and the Bolsheviks — no one knew where they were. A man in a boat reached them once, she recounts. He carried with him paper and paints, pencils and crayons. He sailed down the Lena, stopping at villages and farms, and from small school or passport photographs he painted for women likenesses of their sons who had died in the war. That was how he made his living, not dependent on anyone. And she herself, Claudia Mironova? When they were herding everyone into the kolkhoz, one night she and her husband, taking with them a cow and two pigs, fled deep into the taiga. They settled there, built a shed, and later even a little house with an enclosure. During the entire Stalinist era, she says with pride, they did not see a single stranger. She posits as the key to their survival her knack for canning lard. Lard — therein lies the secret of life. The secret of life and the prerequisite for liberty. If you do not have lard — meaning, if you do not possess this basic, elementary wealth — you will not be free. That is what Claudia Mironova says, sharing with us the most important lesson of her life. Later, she explains how one should scald the cans and jars so as to preserve the lard well. What herbs, which can be gathered on the taiga, should be used. She gives the proportions and the recipe for the decoction. She explains how to disembowel the pig and how to cut it up.
Through the window I see abandoned artillery pieces — guns of medium caliber — half-buried in what passes for a road, running parallel to the tracks. A dozen or so new-looking barrels and shields stick up out of the mud; the rest have already sunk into the bog and the water. Then several minutes later, perhaps twenty armored cars — also half-buried. Not a living soul anywhere, just emptiness and more emptiness, the flat Ukrainian plain.
All the way to Odessa we eat the lard that Claudia Mironova cuts with a sharp jackknife from a large slab, placing its nutritious, fragrant slices on pieces of bread for us.
THE SUBURBAN TRAIN that runs from Odessa to Kishinev is a dilapidated piece of junk, hammered together with nails and sheets of tin, patched over with wooden planks and plywood riddled with holes. Traces of destruction everywhere. How many times already has each car been demolished, smashed, broken, and ripped? Inside, a typically suburban gang: chums, hooligans, tarts, bad boys. This train is theirs, this platform, this world. They shove, roar with laughter, but not cheerfully; this is an aggressive, cautionary roar that is meant to provoke you. There is no doubt in my mind, because we are standing closely pressed together, that it is only a matter of time before I will feel the prick of a knife under my ribs or glimpse a razor blade near my eye. It is like this until Tiraspol. The gang gets out, and only Romanian peasants are left on the train, meek, silent, staring fixedly into the twilight gathering outside the windows.
We spent the entire morning taking in all the sights of Kishinev. In everything there was the strangest mixture and assortment; the names on street signs are in French, Polish, Russian, German, Armenian. The prevailing language, the language of the street, is Moldavian, i.e., Romanian, and it is in this language that the peddlers advertise their merchandise, rolls (franzoli), pears, watermelons and other fruit (all sold by weight). At the inn where we were staying, one of the signs was in Polish; there was a broker, a Jew, as is usually the case in our country, and the hired coachman turned out to be born in Vilnius. The owner had an Italian name. There was a similar mixture in everything. It is no wonder that Kishinev exemplifies the characteristic feature of the population of Bessarabia: a gathering of people of the most diverse provenance. Next to survivors from the East, an elegant personage slinks by in a dress coat imported from Vienna and yellow kid gloves, while next to an Armenian barber’s shop a hand organ plays the arias of Donizetti and Bellini, the waltzes of Straus.… (Józef Ignacy Kraszewski, Memoirs of Odessa, Jassy, and Budzak, 1843)
WHAT IS LEFT of that Kishinev? Today it is two cities. One built in the most recent decades — neighborhoods of tall apartment towers covered in pale limestone slabs. This city of anthills arranged in rows is rapidly displacing and destroying old Kishinev — the enchanting, southeastern little town spread out over green hills, of which a few sleepy nooks still remain, a few small streets crossing one another on the perpendicular. One could walk endlessly on these streets. While the sun is shining, they are shaded by old, spreading elm, ash, and chestnut trees. Both sides of every street are thick with lilacs and jasmine, barberry and forsythia. Strolling here, one can glimpse, in the depths of a courtyard, gardens, bowers, and verandas, flowering, warm, inviting.