Even the name of the train is propitious: Niemen, variant of Neman, one of Middle Europe’s great rivers, maybe the most legendary. In Poland, every child knows its name from a historical novel about the country’s peasant origins. Napoléon crossed it with his Grand Armée at the start of his Russian campaign. It happens that the spirit of places seeks refuge in minor rivers. In the Drina and the Tibiscus (Timiş), for example, rather than in the Danube, which they flow into.
The Drina marks a still visible cultural frontier between the empire of the East and the empire of the West; in Serbia you can read about it in elementary-school books. For Hungarians, on the other hand, their Timiş signals the beginning of the great open spaces to the east, the endless horizons beyond the elbow of the Carpathians.
My mind grinds together sleepiness and thoughts, and in the meantime the train crosses the Bug, wide and brown in the midst of an absolute flatness covered with woods. The map says Treblinka is just a few miles away. As we’re nearing Czyżew, the flash of an image: a shack in the middle of the forest with a thirty-foot white limousine out front. Next to us, on the window side, a couple of peasants in their seventies, sturdy as trees. They’ve both taken their shoes off, and she has put her feet between his legs on the seat. They don’t smile. They don’t read. They speak only rarely, in the low voice of the confessional, and when they do, it’s all a shishing of Polish s’s. Monika’s language sweetens everything, even death (ś mierć compared to the sour smrt of the Serbs), but it has the defect of revealing itself immediately with its excess of softened consonants that sound like a pair of shuffling slippers in an empty house. With a language like that, you can’t gossip, conspire, or even prompt, because it’s a dead giveaway.
10. NEMAN
AT BIALYSTOK, near the frontier, we change for White Russia. Waiting for us is a little brown local. The flatness of the landscape and the consequent absence of curves account for the small gap between the cars, which is less than two feet. Instead of the accordion connector of normal trains, passage between cars is by way of a simple open gangway as on the trains of the Old West. Because there are no doors, looking back from the first car behind the engine, I can see all the way to the last one, at the end of a straight line of Euclidean perfection. One police officer can keep watch over the whole train without moving, and I can see a crowd of women spilling out from the compartments—small-time smugglers—loaded with all kinds of packages and bags. I haven’t seen anything like it since the 1970s, when Yugoslavs returned home from Trieste wearing four pairs of jeans. Bedlam.
“Tanya, give me a hand here,” and there goes a pack of DVDs, vanished inside her bra. “Natasha, help me out,” and a roll of Scotch tape does a circumnavigation of a thigh, attaching a pair of iPods as an electronic garter. If the Kaliningrad–Berlin was transformed into a picnic area in response to customs checks, the Bialystok–Grodno turns into a dressing room, for the same reason.
The acoustics are dominated by the zips with which four, even five dresses are shimmied into place over female flanks, by the ripping of adhesive tape, the unwrapping of packages, and the scrunching of cellophane. Hundreds of CDs vanish into old books, shiny new gym shoes are filled by delicate feminine feet.
Robust women are in the minority; contraband is dominated by the slender, who have more useful room under their skirts and jackets.
The train leaves the station at a snail’s pace toward the Belarus barbed wire. It never bends, despite the ups and downs of some occasional hills. The fields grow wilder, trees appear that are older and stouter than the trees in Poland. On board, the frenzy grows instead of diminishing, and the re-dressing and concealment manages to emanate, despite the rushing, its own sort of professional nobility.
When the women, having noticed my notebook, fall into a fearful silence, I decide to delegate the scene to memory and put my notebook back in my pack. I make a conciliatory gesture with my hand. In response come smiles of complicity, sighs of relief, the final adjustments of skirts and jackets. Then out come the spray deodorants, to hide the cellophane smell of newly purchased goods. The final touch of clandestine professionalism.
A half-hour stop in the middle of fields. I offer a sampling of Polish cherries.
The pretty smugglers accept and begin eating ostentatiously as the police are checking passports. This too is a masking operation. Eating is a sign of a clear conscience. Two police officers have come on board, with a wolf-dog, an official, and the train conductor—an attractive brunette in fishnet stockings. They are satisfied just to stamp passports and don’t show much interest in the goods. The train pulls out again into the underbrush, and fifteen minutes later, it slows down, rumbling into the station in Grodno. The luggage check, it’s clear by now, will be done on the ground.
I barely have time to get up when the doors open and the women, overloaded with shopping bags, hampered by pants stuffed with new purchases and three-ply overlaid outfits, are off their marks like sprinters, covering in just a few seconds, under the amused eyes of the customs agents, the distance between the platform and the customs office inside the station. Nobody shows any amazement, but I’ve never seen people fly like that except in Chagall paintings. Why the rush? I don’t know. Maybe to be the first to get to the local market with the goods. Maybe to be able to take the next train back to Poland, or to avoid the most annoying checks, which are often saved for those at the end. Or maybe to make it to the black market faster. It all goes by in a flash, and there’s no one left of whom I can ask the question.
We are the last to pass through the checkpoint with our tourist visas. Monika explains that, yes, we are a photographer and a journalist, but we travel with the people. The agent understands immediately: a man on a train with a backpack cannot be a troublemaker.
The dark green current of the Neman meanders on its way in the night, emanating a great sense of calm among the wooded slopes of Grodno, city of churches and synagogues near the Polish border. Neman, a name like a lullaby, the portal of a labyrinth of streams leading to other legendary rivers of Middle Europe: the Bug, the Dniester, the Pripet, the Western Berezina. They spring from no mountain, ice over in the winter, wander through a no-man’s-land of rolling hills, and it seems that it would take only the slightest change in slope to push them to empty themselves into the Baltic instead of the Black Sea.
This frontier is perhaps the most arcane and the least legible of those we’ve encountered so far. The first impact with the only Communist country in Europe is even reassuring: an absolute green that dominates everything, an agrarian landscape dotted with excellently preserved wooden houses, geese running free around the villages. And then this Grodno, Polish until 1939, a shopwindow city of Austrian tidiness, now a beehive of gentrifying restoration, baroque like Vilnius and old Bialystok, full of young people, swallows, and stunning women.
But very quickly it starts to not add up. The old and the new clash without mediation. The Belarus Hotel, where I find a room, is a monument to Brezhnevian grayness, but its rooms are full of horny Sinhalese—in town for a fair—who will be trafficking all night in the hallways trying to find some women for hire. At the bar I see Russian shampanskoye next to five-star Greek Metaxa. A doctor makes €150 a month, but in the restaurants, the prices are higher than in Poland. And then the inflation: at the change office in the station, they give me, in exchange for €100, a wad of bills as thick as my fist. So many and so equally gray that I have to divide them between two pockets. The under-fifty bills in the lower right and the fifty-and-over bills in the upper left. I haven’t seen paper money with that many zeroes since the time of the war in Yugoslavia.