Littler Igor says to Monika, “Come with me, I’ll take you to see the tomb of a saint,” and climbs onto the base of a pyramid covered with Hebrew characters. “He was a rabbi. Lots of people come to visit his grave. They always ask him something.”
They have two wolf dogs. They are the guards of Lilja’s house. Once they smelled some strangers outside the gate. Lilja saw some boys trying to get in. She screamed, threatened them, and scared them off.
“Vandals! They ruined some tombs in the Orthodox cemetery too. They come here to drink; they smoke, make a mess, screw. A lot of times at night there are ill-intentioned thugs who come around, and we get scared. That’s why we have the dogs. But I say to myself, with all the drunken hoodlums that there are around here, why in the world doesn’t the city government send a custodian here to clean the place up?”
I ask why she has chosen to do this work.
“I love the Jews. They are extraordinary people. So many of them were killed, and so many have gone away. The big exodus was in the 1990s, and now we feel even more alone.”
But doesn’t the cemetery make you sad?
“I don’t live with the dead. I live with the living and for the living. For the ones who come back, and there are lots of them. This pastime gives my life meaning. And it keeps my husband in good shape.”
We go back to the city. The moon has risen over the Neman. The church of the Poles, the former lords of Grodno, is full of women and resounds with shrill vespertine chants, charged with national more than religious ardor. In front of the Orthodox church of the Mother of God, at the end of the service, women with handkerchiefs around their necks are exiting tumultuously and rapidly from the nave, which is full of lighted candles. Are they running away? No, they’re just making a run up to a final twirl to face the church and make the sign of the cross. Christian prayer in the Slavic world is highly corporal, much more forceful than the distracted gestures of Roman Catholics. The final twirl morphs into a bow and the bow into an elevation. Their entire bodies arch upward to allow the right hand to make a long vertical parabola and then the transverse movement, which together trace against the backdrop of the stars the sign of the cross and—why not?—the coordinates of my journey along the frontier.
Endless fields, snowlike frost backlit by the morning sun, and then land, land, grain tall enough to dive into, to swim across. Spaces that would go to the head of any farmer, or any general in the mood for conquest. Belarus, green heart of Europe. A four-lane highway, empty as a takeoff runway, cuts across it without a curve, with interminable ups and downs. Road signs indicate the beginning and end of towns that aren’t there. There’s nothing between one sign and the next; the inhabited area is far away, reachable by side roads between woods and birch stands. In the twenty-five days since the Kola Peninsula, we have gone from winter to midsummer. Forests and sky. Sky and forests. With nothing in between.
I look for the remains of the uncontaminated peasant world that Primo Levi, liberated from Auschwitz, discovered and loved during his railroad saga all the way to the Dnieper and on to Romania. A happy world whose epicenter was in Belarus, in a village known as Stariya Darohi, Ancient Roads. It is exactly those ancient roads that we have decided to travel, for just one day, renting a taxi to take us as far as Baranovichi, in the belly of the country, where our train for Ukraine leaves from. There are no train lines that run along the border; before we go south, we have to go east. Horizontal Europe blocks our route more frequently now, and we have to resign ourselves to proceed in a zigzag fashion, like a sailboat tacking into the wind. To get to Baranovichi there is no alternative to the automobile. The bus network is too complicated and too slow; the magnetism of Minsk is too strong. All the roads converge on the capital, and it’s hard to escape its web without independent means.
It’s six in the morning and the taxi driver is grumbling. He doesn’t want to get his Volga dirty, but we stubbornly seek out dirt roads, villages, geese, rivers. We are crazy about this blinding sunlight, sharp, already southern. The towns are Swiss tidy, the roads without a single pothole. If the Russian countryside is falling apart, here the entire country seems to be committed to and involved in a conservation and maintenance program. Wooden houses, blue and mustard yellow. In a wood, lovely girls in two-piece outfits walk barefoot with baskets of strawberries. Very few matryoshka figures; even in the countryside the female beauty is radiant. In Žaludok begins the chernozyom, the legendary black soil that goes all the way to the river Don. In Pieskavce, fields covered with dew, spiderwebs woven between birch limbs, crosses adorned with flowers at the intersections. Sailboats in dry dock. The Neman.
Two down-and-out types are fishing on the convex side of the bend in the river. They smoke overlooking little whirlpools like hieroglyphics and a patrol of barn swallows diving into the current. The fishermen drag on their cigarettes until they burn their lips. They’re suspicious as otters and respond rudely to our attempt to break the ice. No, this is decidedly not Russia. The people here avoid us; they’re afraid. If I then take out my notebook, they run away even if I don’t ask them any questions. I don’t ask questions because I respect the rules. I’m here on a tourist visa, not to work as a reporter. I look, say hello, listen, and note down. That’s it. But looking and listening are more than enough to understand. With 450,000 police officers for its 10,000,000 inhabitants, Belarus is one scared country.
Three pigs behind a wooden fence. Rooting through the kitchen leftovers, they don’t smell as bad as ours. Without multinational feed even pig shit is different.
“How’s it going?” I ask a woman in the vegetable garden. Response: “All right, but our men are dying like flies.” She doesn’t say that the cause is alcohol. She doesn’t say that it’s the reason why masses of women run off to the West. I’d like to stay here; Pieskavce is enchanting and I could spend a week here, just fishing and writing. Places like this are to be lived right now before the global gets here and settles in with transgenic grain and supermarkets. But instead, it’s onward again, in the midst of clearings that open up between fairy-tale forests, teeming with birdsong. In one field, I see some girls in bikinis hunting for wild berries.
Triumphant verdure, orderliness, brilliant sunlight, intense heat. It’s unimaginable that in the winter, temperatures go down to forty below zero.
In Dziatlava, over a Catholic altar, God is painted with a wizard’s hat. He looks like the bard Väinämöinen encountered in the legend of Kalevala, up there in Karelia. In the shadows of an Orthodox church in another town, I encounter the reassuring eyes of Saint Nicholas. In Italy, we don’t know that gaze and that beard, everyone’s ideal grandfather. To understand it, we have to pass the frontier that divides us from Eastern Christianity. In another church, dedicated to saints Boris and Gleb, there is a catafalque covered in green velvet with a big cross and a wooden skull. In that semidarkness you can breathe in all of the silent lethargy of expectation, the same expectation that explodes in Orthodox churches on Easter Saturday night, from Greece all the way to Saint Petersburg and Vladivostok, with the shout: “He is risen!”
In Novogrudok there is a market with all of God’s bounty: strawberries, birch juice, and elderly women with colored bows on their heads. The Slav woman, Monika explains, tries to be pleasing even on the edge of the grave. The countryside captures us. Chernobyl is only 120 miles from here, but it seems far, far away. In Karelichy, the farmers milk their cows in the open air, in the middle of the countryside. They invite us to stay over; the pig market is tomorrow.