“Welcome to the country of millionaires,” cracks a passerby, watching me fumble with all that paper. On the train to Bialystok, I read that Belarus is broke and that next winter it won’t be able to pay for its Russian gas. But then where does all the money come from for all these restaurants? Who was able to finance this gigantic real estate development operation? I pose this question to two old women sitting in front of the door of a redbrick house. They respond without hesitation: “The gosudarstvo,” the government. Those people let the old houses fall into ruin, make the inhabitants move out, and then they speculate on the land. And if I ask how they found all that money to build new things, the answer is: “Simple, they don’t pay people who work. Here, life is good only for people who don’t work.” In the station, Alexei, a retired army officer, told me, in no uncertain terms, “They steal. It’s disgusting. And one day they’ll find the red star up their ass.”
In Poland, they told me to be careful, because Belarus is full of police in plainclothes. They may be right, but here nobody is afraid to talk. In an hour, all I hear are merciless critiques of the regime. A former army officer who makes a living driving a taxi tells how he denounced corruption and he was thrown out of the army because of it. “They made me blow up the balloon to demonstrate that I was drunk. But the balloon didn’t change color. So they put me in a mental institution, but General Grizikin had me released for meritorious service. So they discharged me without a pension.” Thin and hyperkinetic, the former Soviet officer shows me the restaurants with violins for the rich and the houses of the poor with old women wrapped in miserable dressing gowns. “A revolution is going to break out,” he sniggers, and he takes me to see three paddy wagons of the militia ready to intervene, hidden in an alley behind the Catholic curia and the church of the Poles.
In a meadow overlooking the river, some young people are sitting on the grass at sunset passing a hookah as the Neman Valley is submersed in the warm colors of the stories of Bruno Schulz. Tanya, red hair enkindled by the sunlight and a star-of-David earring, says that “Grodno isn’t Minsk; it’s a real city, old, with its own history,” and that’s why she loves it. Her friends are also proud of their “city of Europe,” and they say that the West begins here. They point to a nearby synagogue, lit up by the sunset, and on the other side of the river, the Church of Saints Boris and Gleb, almost a thousand years old, all alone, a belvedere amid centuries-old maple trees. Then they show me the Gradnicanka, the palisade of the lovers that slopes down in terraces to a tributary of the Neman. They offer us their hookah, point out to us the lights of the city. “We like Grodno; the Poles call it ‘little Switzerland.’”
Another extraordinary thing: at seven in the evening, the elderly and adult population dissolves into nothingness. On the street, on the benches, in the squares, or along the river walk by the Neman, only young people with potato chips and cans of beer. I don’t know whom to talk to; there’s no one who gives me the impression of being able to talk about the history of the place. In an hour of exploration in the city center, I observe that I am the only adult human in circulation. It’s as though in Grodno, and perhaps in all of Belarus, there had been an extermination of sixty-year-olds, as though yellow fever or the Spanish flu had eliminated the elderly. Alcoholism, rampant in these parts, is not enough to explain this demographic earthquake. There has to be something else. I feel that I am in a country that’s teetering on the edge, vulnerable, divided among orthodox Communism, crude capitalism, and an ingenuous age-old agrarian civilization in danger of extinction. There is supposed to be a bronze statue of Lenin in the heart of Belarus, but here all you can feel is a single superhuman presence: the market.
The next day is Saturday, and we go to the synagogue to see the service. There are only ten survivors of the once numerous community. I feel again the void that I sensed in Latvia and northern Poland, and the Jews are only the most conspicuous absence. Not only have they disappeared, but also the Poles, the Lithuanians, the Germans, the Ukrainians, and the Armenians. A century of pogroms, deportations, and exterminations has created an ethnically simplified Central Europe by destroying its transnational fabric. “Adonai,” “Elohim,” the old people chant in the otherwise empty synagogue, and everything seems to be hanging on the thread of these ancient words, which ensure the continuity of the world. But that is what is really scary. When they are not heard by anyone anymore, then Europe will have definitively lost itself. You realize that already, when the silence returns to the choral space, heavy with nostalgia for a chant that is no longer.
“The French Jewish banks are eating up everything we have.” Those were the words I’d heard the night before from an old woman waiting to be evicted from her home. But here in Grodno, there were seventeen places of Jewish worship, and now there is only one. The name written on the outside, GRAND CHORAL SYNAGOGUE, is the sign of a building designed especially for song. It was designed and built in 1853 in pure Persian style by an architect brought in especially from Italy. Mariya, the old custodian, is a former Russian Orthodox converted to Judaism, but her faith is a hybrid of the two religions. She says, with feverish eyes, “Everyone is waiting for the coming of the Messiah. He will come when everyone takes up arms against Israel. Then the heavens will open up and He will go to her aid. It will be the second coming of Christ. The time will come soon; so it is written in the Torah. Then the Jews will believe in Him. Jesus will bless them, and Israel will be the first among peoples.”
They tell us that there is an old Jewish cemetery on the other side of the river.
A taxi driver drops us off in front of a wall of overgrown brush and says, “You can pass through there.” There is a path between the thorns and, at the end of it, an infinity of tombstones made crooked by the roots of the birch trees. We also have to climb over a crumbling wall covered with thistle. On the other side, the stone of Polyakov Abram Lazarevich. Then comes Rosenzweig David Bulfovich.
The tombs with the star of David rise up out of the vegetation like menhirs, covered with gray and mustard-yellow lichens. Some of them have a red star.
Over everything shines the fiery light of sunset. Thousands of dead among the blueberry bushes, and they are the minority. The others were burned in the ovens.
Amid the thorns and brush, a woman in a poppy-red dress is sweeping off a grave. She looks like a vision, a mirage. With her is a little boy who is helping her. Not far off, a man is cutting the underbrush with a sickle. The name of the woman in red is Lilja, and she tells an extraordinary story. “My husband and I are Orthodox, but we have adopted this place. Since we retired, we clean one grave every day. I live in that house back there, next to the perimeter wall, and for years, I’ve been struggling to keep this place from decaying. I know all of the people who inhabit it.” She says “inhabit,” because she speaks about her tenants as though they were still alive.
The man: “In 1969 confessional cemeteries were abolished and no one could be buried here anymore. Today, it is allowed again, but there are almost no Jews left.” He tells us about his losing battle against the underbrush and the tree roots. “The law prohibits cutting down trees, so I spend my life pruning. But by now the tombstones are one on top of the other and you can’t make heads or tails of them.” I ask him why it is that there are no Jews helping him. “I knew a lot of these dead people, and they fought together with me so this place wouldn’t decay.” He tells us there was also another cemetery, but they built a stadium on top of it. “A terrible thing.”