The train jolts up and down with a clanging of hardware on the boards of the bridge over the eastern branch of the Vistula, and stops in the dark in front of the magnificent station in Malbork, intact in its Prussian red brick, the ghost of a lost Europe. The train will continue to Berlin, but this is where we get off to catch our connecting train to Warsaw and also where we see, given that we’re here, the famous castle of the Teutonic Knights, the border monument that many Poles look upon as an advance guard of the Nazi invasion of 1939. At the Panorama Restaurant, on the main road, girls in low necklines are generously showing themselves off at the billiard table while a group of young lads, ignoring the women in action, are watching a soccer match shown on three plasma TV screens, and a DJ is blasting a deafening sample of techno music. At midnight, thanks to an accommodating taxi driver, we find a place to sleep at an inn next to the castle, in which the West is present in the form of one of its immaculate icons: the bidet, the first of our journey.
The night sky is quiet, full of stars. The Vistula is murmuring a hundred yards from the balcony, and the castle’s big windows, like those in the kremlin on the Solovetsky Islands, look like eye sockets. I am lighthearted, with little pangs in my heart from the sense I have of the distance we’ve traveled. I’ve just read a map from 1695, signed by Gerardus Mercator, which reconstructs the Tabulae geographicae orbis terrarum (Geographical Tables of the Circle of Lands Known to the Ancients) by Ptolemy, and I found our journey there. Sarmaticus Oceanus, the Baltic; Chrones, the Neman River; Montes Pencini, the Carpathians. The Gulf of Finland, Karelia, and the Kola Peninsula are still terra incognita, like the land beyond the Tanais and the Montes Hyperborei, that is, the Don and the Urals.
What I find unsettling is the sense of the mobile frontiers of this Poland, which in 1945 shifted 120 miles west, just like that, because of a distracted mark made by the Great Powers on the map of Europe. Danzig, Stettin, Masuria. Swedish, Mongol, Russian, and German armies. Peter the Great, Hindenburg’s mustache.
There is absolutely nothing that indicates the boundaries of this flat country, nor the boundary of the West.
The next day treats us to brilliant sunlight. Already at dawn, the sky billowed out like a spinnaker over the dunes of the Baltic. Nonetheless, Malbork still manages to fill us with anguish. It’s immobile as a watchdog, an inanimate golem on the edge of the river. This city was the departure point for a campaign of Christianization by the blade of a sword, and centuries later came the apocalypse.
The church, deprived of its roof by the Russian bombardment and re-covered with a cement ceiling, still has at the end of the apse the pulpit and throne of the grand master. The statues of the evangelists, at the base of what remains of the vault, are decapitated or missing their jawbones. Wooden statues crushed by the bombs, trapdoors, secret passages. The signs of the Wehrmacht, with its headquarters in communication with Hitler’s Wolf’s Lair to the southeast. The echo of German boots in the corridors and on the stairs of the bell tower. The white mantels with their black crosses, the gray pewters, the red bricks, the deep green of the linden trees. The blue-gray of the Vistula and the train pulling out toward the belly of Poland.
After the thrust onto the shores of the Baltic to see Kaliningrad, we’re heading east again, finally without obstacles, smugglers, or police. In Warsaw, we’ll try to get our visas for Belarus and maybe get back the car that we left there before leaving for the North. We’ve been told that from there to Odessa, the border-skirting journey we’d planned to make with public transportation is a desperate enterprise, especially for someone with a limp, like me, so we have left ourselves this way out. Meanwhile the train cuts like a knife through a buttery landscape, reemerges, and dives back in again without a tunnel. It seems like a submarine piercing the long waves of the ocean. Wheat, barley, poppies. Tannenberg, the Masuri Lakes, stories of the Great War. At Narew, at the sandy confluence of the Bug and the Vistula, swimmers lying in the sun. Then the arrival, painfully slow, creaking, at the station in Praga, the part of Warsaw on the left bank of the river. Where in 1944 the Red Army waited for five months while the Nazis finished slaughtering the Polish patriots, who were seen as troublesome by Stalin.
Unyielding with chicken stealers, the border of the EU suddenly turns warmly welcoming for the brigands, bandits, and scoundrels of the globe-trotting elite.
That’s what I find in Warsaw, after the surreal adventure on the train from Kaliningrad, fleeced of its salamis and cigarettes by Polish customs. The city is crawling with tourists, and to find a room I’m forced to turn—against my principles—to a hotel for the rich on Grzybowska Street. I get off to a bad start.
Because of my backpack and long beard, they frisk me at the entrance, and only the sudden appearance of my credit card manages to force a smile from the mug of the bouncer who is patting my jacket and then saccharine welcomes in English from the people working the reception desk.
Then, taking the elevator up to my room, I happen to find myself next to two enormous Russian gorillas with shaved heads, impeccable gray suits, and spiral-wire earphones sticking out next to their jugular veins, blood-swollen like a turkey’s. Both are obviously packing heat, their jackets bulging with holstered guns. I can’t contain myself. I go back down to the reception desk without unpacking my bag and tell them I don’t want to stay in a hotel where they frisk ordinary customers but don’t frisk gangsters. I provide the embarrassed management with information on where they can find the two head-shaven monsters, but since nothing happens, I return my key and leave, not without declaiming, in a loud voice in the lobby, my sacrosanct reasons for doing so.
But Western Europe immediately bids me welcome with still other unpleasant episodes. The pack on my aging back becomes the object of thinly veiled commiseration, and interpersonal communication on public transport diminishes sensibly, while the incidence of indifference and boredom soars. But above all, time. It is consumed with the anguishing velocity of a candle. I have a vaguely fixed appointment with a Greek Catholic priest outside of Warsaw, who is very familiar with the Kaliningrad border, a priest who organizes folk festivals and trains combat dogs. But when I phone him to say I’m on my way, the reverend responds icily that I was supposed to confirm the appointment earlier and he won’t be able to see me. “I’m sorry,” he tells me, “but I haven’t got time.” And he adds, with a touch of venom, “Since we’ve joined the European Union, there’s no time anymore.”
The city I have loved and visited many times suddenly seems to have been sucked into the void. Bermuda shorts, ice cream cones, rude tourists, a square invaded by multicolored papier-mâché bears on their hind legs with their forelegs raised in the air like fools. The analgesic illusionism of the West appears to me in all of its dementia. After just one day, I’m exhausted. Where is it written that traveling is wearisome? Three hours in an overheated Internet café tire me out more than the five Russian trains I had to ride to circumnavigate Lake Ladoga.