Even Monika, who is at home here, is in a state of crisis after three successive lines at the Belarus Embassy to request a visa. Maybe the unfriendly priest is right: in the countries of the EU, time is consumed in senseless acts. Beyond the frontier, there may be Europe’s last Communist dictatorship and its toughest police, but that doesn’t matter to us. We want to return to the East. Our biorhythms have changed.
But then old Warsaw redeems itself. The bookstores are better stocked and more crowded than in my illiterate Italy, where they’ve been ruined by television and mobile phones. At a book sale in the Rynek, the market square, there is a line thirty yards long outside the door, as at a film premier. The theater marquees are more interesting than those in Rome. And my spirits are also raised by the map store in John Paul II Street, where the best show of all, as Ryszard Kapuścińsky told me one day when we went in there to get out of the snow, is seeing “the people hungry for the world,” browsing the shelves. The great Polish journalist was to die two years later, and I had the sensation then that he was like a nomad shut into a space that was too small for him.
His life, too, I must confess, was consumed in repetitive acts, which clipped his traveler’s wings. He was restless, seemed to be chasing after something in a blizzard. “Time,” he would say, “I need more time, and time is a luxury for me.
They besiege me: honorary degrees, lectures, letters, prefaces. Ah, how happy I was when nobody knew me!” The memory of that phrase has never left me, and now it surfaces again, clear as a bell, in the heart of this journey where the return to the West signals a speedup like the ones in silent movies. Kapuścińsky said, “How wonderful it was way back when. All I had to do was get on a train, listen, and take notes. I enjoyed anonymity, which is the basic requirement for a reporter. Today that’s all over. If I could at least write about Poland, but by now they know me too well. As soon as I enter a town, out pops the mayor, then the bishop invites me to lunch, and I’ve already stopped working.”
His notebooks had filled up with stories of the pueblos of Central America, of aurorae boreales and monsoon rains, but after all that traveling, his pen couldn’t manage to stop anything anymore. I now had the same impression: Warsaw was already a different place compared to two years ago, and what I had written then was already archaeology. Kapuścińsky said: “If I return to Latin America or India, I can’t recognize places I’ve only just been to. It’s devastating. Every second gets consumed as though it were the last, and then news inflation hits and we’re totally disoriented.” He was starved for slowness and simplicity, for old hotels, for shoes to dirty. He didn’t use taxis but streetcars, shuffled along in the slush toward food stands to buy beets and cabbages, noted like a foxhound every detail of store windows, grumbled about multinational hotel chains that were “too expensive.” I once saw him help an old woman who had slipped in the slush, until an impetuous snowplow passing through a puddle soaked us both to the bone in Grzybowska Street.
In the evening, we go to the house of Jacek Kopciński, a friend of Monika’s, to pick up my old car with the intention of going as far as Odessa on four wheels. We had discussed it for what seemed like an eternity, and in the end we decided that traveling by car in Belarus and Ukraine was the only way to get deep into the lives of those two countries. After all those trains, stations, waits in the wind, I discover myself dreaming of my old compact, and the idea of unloading my backpack after three weeks as a globe-trotter seems like an incredible luxury.
We’ve got everything we need: insurance, international driver’s license, visa. Even a small supply of Italian food to use in what we fear will be the Lenten fast of Belarus. Thus outfitted, for a moment it seems that the journey to the Black Sea is going to be a breeze.
But the unpredictable happens. When Monika’s friend takes us to the car parked in his yard, the journey by car suddenly appears to us to be perfectly insane. The trunk and the backseat are crammed with stuff that three weeks ago I had judged indispensable and today seems the fruit of some delirium, aside from being utterly superfluous: books I would never have the time to read, an Italian espresso maker that I would never use, clothes that I would never want to wash or even wear. Even two pillows, in case we ended up sleeping in the car. Away, away with it all; traveling light has changed us. Kapuścińsky is right. We can’t turn back the clock; we have to win back our time. And so, in front of a bowl of beet soup, we formalize our change of plan by giving the car keys back to our stupefied friend.
Jacek is beside himself. “The journey takes care of itself,” we have told him, to justify our change of plan, and now he wants to enter into our philosophy. He asks, “What is it that moves you to go? Empathy? Compassion? Images that have attracted your attention?” He forces himself to rationalize an instinct, dooming himself to be wrong from the outset. “I don’t even know myself what makes me go,” I tell him. “All I know is that when the season changes, I have to go. I clean my flight feathers like a bird preparing for the big move. It’s a thing that ornithologists know welclass="underline" it’s called migratory restlessness.” We put down in black and white a few basic equations of travel. For example, less weight equals more encounters. Pace equals metrics equals story. And above alclass="underline" the greater the difficulty, the more stories to tell. And who cares if we end up trying to hitch a ride in the middle of the Carpathians? We’ll have more things to remember.
But we still haven’t solved the problem of the Belarus visas. We can ask for a tourist visa, but everyone rushes to warn us not to be too clever, because the Minsk police are implacable. On the other hand, we’re not going to Belarus to conduct an investigation but simply to travel, and what’s more, by the most “transparent” means of all, the train. So we decide to declare ourselves journalist and photographer but also to write the word tourism in the box asking the purpose of our visit. Last precaution: for fear—which will prove to have been exaggerated—that my notes might be seized, I photocopy them page by page and send them to my address in Italy. Then I hand over my car to a young woman named Ola who is planning to come to Italy in a month with a friend.
Meanwhile, with a little wheedling and a lot of patience, Monika succeeds in getting the visas. The road is clear.
The next day we’re back at the Warsawa Centralna station waiting for the train to Belarus. We’re feeling euphoric again. After giving up on the car, our journey seems to have acquired greater awareness. Right there on the threshold of the last dictatorship in Europe, we realize that we are free and that slowness allows us to ransom our occupations—photography and journalism—which have become embroiled in the race for profits and the allure of the virtual. We are also replacing investigation with the simple sampling of the territory, casual encounters instead of appointments. Warsawa Centralna is comfortable. The TV screens do not show a succession of commercials, as they do in Italian stations, but news, and it’s news from the border. Arrests for smuggling in Zamość, drug traffic in Lublin, cross-border tourism between Poland and Lithuania.
In the waiting room, I see people who are starved for space like us. Young people with backpacks, families with children who are reading in anxious anticipation. Children reading—there’s another thing that’s disappeared where I live. I’m in the midst of a people of travelers. Being constantly on the move was an obsession for Pope John Paul II, and nomadism is a Polish national illness. It’s not only the desire for freedom after the fall of Communism. It’s also the reflection of an ancient claustrophobia, born of the sensation of being crushed between two cumbersome neighbors, Russia and Germany. So cheers for Warsaw, cheers for Kapuścińsky’s shoes. Into my fifteen-pound backpack, I have slipped an old edition of Journey to Poland by Alfred Döblin, the only luxury extracted from my car. The adventure begins again.