And so, just as I’m thinking that the people of the North have more sky than we do, I see two men at the bottom of one of the Estonian roller-coaster slopes, slender and dressed in black, or no, a man and a woman, standing on the side of the road waiting for a ride. As I approach, I keep changing my mind about them. Protestant black like the Pilgrim fathers; Jewish black, a couple of Hasidim on a pilgrimage to Israel; no, maybe it’s the Orthodox black of a pope and his wife.
Then I see that she has a black handkerchief covering her face and chin like a hijab, and for a second I think the Northern sky is home not only to flying Jewish violinists but also to Islamic imams, driven here from other latitudes. The man, black beard and slightly wild eyes, looks like a fanatical turbo-Islamist from the Wahhabi sect. But as soon as he opens his mouth to say he’s Russian and that his name is Vadim, voilà, the mystery is solved. I am looking at ultraorthodox Russian pilgrims, headed for some unknown monastery in a foreign land. She is frail, timid, submissive. She curls up in a corner of the backseat and lets her husband do the talking. He promptly explains that the veil she, Valentina, is wearing, is the result of a free choice of subjection to God, and obviously to her man.
A surreal dialogue has begun.
“You are Catholic. Convert. There is no salvation outside of Orthodoxy.”
I respond with silence. I think, You cal it Orthodoxy, but it seems like Islam. Not even in Pakistan had I heard such explicit demands to convert.
“Ecumenism is heresy; there is only one faith. The apostles’ eighty-five rules have already been fixed in the Book. Your pope is an Antichrist.” Vadim explains that it all began centuries ago, with the Catholics’ decision to put the Son on the same level with the Father. “A single Latin word divides us: filioque.”
I ask him if he was born a believer.
“I converted in 1992. Before, under Communism, I was controlled by unclean forces. My grandfather was an atheist, faithful to the party, and my father had to baptize me in secret. It was he who taught me that anyone can get to God, and if you get to Him passing through evil, so much the better.”
I think back to the Old Believers of Lake Peipsi who welcomed me without proclaiming certainties and without attempting to convert me.
“We go from monastery to monastery, working a little here, a little there. We have just come from the Pechora River and from Sviritsa on Lake Ladoga. Everywhere the struggle is extremely hard. Even there, the forces of Satan are at work. The Satanists are always trying to get their hands on the holy relics.”
“What relics, Vadim?”
“The relics of the saints. Orthodoxy is made of relics, of holy water, of incense, of candle wax that drips onto your hands. These are all blessed things that the Satanists want to destroy. Recently, some Communists and some Polish Catholics tried to get their hands on the remains of the saint who is buried in the monastery in Pechora, but they had been destroyed by fire. In Pechora even the birds praise God.”
I decide to keep quiet. There is no sense in responding, and Vadim has no intention of stopping. He keeps on talking as though he’s possessed.
“In the 1960s, Khrushchev’s atheists decided to analyze one of these relics, and they determined that it was composed of molecules from another world, not explainable with reference to the periodic table of the elements. So Khrushchev ordered that they not be touched.”
We’re coming into the lake region. The sandy beaches are full of little gulls, bickering like mothers-in-law. Middle Europe is immersed in a fantastic lilac-hued light. When the two riders get out to make their way to a farm in the countryside, I thank them for their company in Russian, “Spasibo, Vadim.”
But Vadim seizes on the opportunity to hold forth with another harangue.
“Spasibo? That word doesn’t exist! It is a perfidious manipulation of the Masonic Satanist Communists. Once, people used to say ‘ Spasi Bog,’ which means ‘Save me, God.’ And they also said ‘ Spasi Gospod,’ which is ‘Save me, Lord,’ but the forces of evil have extirpated the word God from the salutation.”
We say good-bye to them from the car window as they embark on a path through the birch trees.
“Reform! You still have time. Rediscover the meaning of the word… the true faith… Orthodoxy.”
Then his voice is lost in the wind.
The next day we take advantage of the car—the first exception to the public-transport rule adopted on this vertical journey—to take a look at the frontier at Võru, the southernmost and most difficult crossing in Estonia, on the most direct route between Warsaw and Saint Petersburg. We run into a line of trucks a mile and a half long, which in itself is nothing special. What’s strange is that the trucks have been stopped here for three days, parked on the shoulder of the road. A lot of them are empty, pervaded by a haunting immobility. Their drivers have gone home or to a bar and left their keys with a colleague. We are faced with an immense linear bivouac, as though the Iron Curtain still existed and had only been moved six hundred miles farther east.
Monika spies an enormous Ukrainian truck driver, with brush-cut hair and keys hanging from his belt, who is shaving in front of a mirror that he’s set up on the running board of the cab. She asks him how long he’s been waiting and starts to take some pictures.
The guy doesn’t shy away from the questions or from the camera. He can’t believe he’s getting the chance to talk. “Write it! Write that this crossing is a pile of shit. At Tehova, in Latvia, they go through thirty-five miles of trucks in two days.”
“Whose fault is it?”
“The Russian customs officers stopped working six months ago. While you’re sitting here waiting, they’re watching TV, picking their noses, scratching their balls. Then they stamp your passport. They’ve received orders to behave this way. It all goes back to that damn monument in Tallinn.”
Each question breaks down an already open door. I ask, “How do you pass the time?”
“This place is a shithole, an inglorious shithole. You got to do it in the woods, and the mosquitoes eat you alive. Swarms of mosquitoes on your ass. Look at all this crap on the side of the road, mountains of jars and cans and the smell of piss.”
I point out to him that there are no signs with the name of the crossing.
“But no, look, it’s called Miiisssooookuuulllaaaaa. I swear. That’s the way the Estonians pronounce it. But woe to you if you make fun of them. They look at you with hate in their eyes. Come on, you try it now. Say it loud: Miiisssooookuuulllaaaaa.”
He just can’t stand them with that absurd language of theirs, and he keeps on bellowing at the woods like an elk, finishing his shave. I tell him that I need a razor, too, that I am on a long and difficult journey, like his, and that with all the abuse it’s getting, my face looks as though it belongs to a beggar.
“Come on,” he says, “what do you need a barber for? You don’t look so bad. Besides, nobody can replace your real hair, not even the salon krasoty, the beauty salon.”
I get back at him for the crack about my baldness. “That long blond braid of your [Yulia] Tymoshenko, is it real or not?”