“Come!” they invite us joyously, but we can’t. We have to get the train at dawn in Baranovichi. Time, here too, time is short. I’d like to stay, like Primo Levi in Stariya Darohi. I should have planned a shorter journey. In Turzhets I get lost amid dirt roads and skeins of geese waddling back home to their barnyards.
Horses ride into the violet sky, reflected in small lakes of the same color. They all have a name; here as in Poland they are seen as friends of man, and butchering them is viewed as a barbarous act. I think intensely of Mario Rigoni Stern, who died only recently. He loved this world, which welcomed him fraternally in 1943–44, even though he was a soldier on the opposite side in the war.
In Mir, next to a seventeenth-century castle restored to look like an ice cream cake, a rock concert is about to begin. Patrols of girls are arriving from every direction, but where are the males? Ah, there they are; there’s only a handful of them, and they look lost. At dusk, the old men vanish, too. As in Grodno, there’s a curfew for adults. At the hotel Gorizont (horizon) in Baranovichi, where the taxi driver, fed up with our aimless wandering, drops us off with a gruff good-bye, I notice that I’m the only man in the dining room. On one side, a table of lovely forty-year-olds, maybe a graduation anniversary. On the other, a group of newly licensed hairdressers, celebrating the end of their training course. Phenoms with towering high heels, miniskirts, hot pants, sky-blue tulle wedding veils, leopard-skin leotards. They come in all together, in a line, with long, catwalk strides. They plunk down bottles of vodka on the table already laid out with sausages, cucumbers, and tomatoes, and then they start to dance. I’m in a feminine universe; even with my eyes closed, I would realize it from the smell.
The orchestra strikes up a samba and the hairdressers go wild. They’re into it, they’re sweating, they’re happy to be there in the company of women. They don’t need men. The local fauna is depressing. Every so often, two or three men stop in front of a side door to have a look. Glassy-eyed, big-bellied boozers, half drunk, vanilla or mouse-gray shoes and white socks. Stalinist ruins. They don’t dare come in to the bacchanal; they walk off with their tails between their legs.
Incredible the ferment in the Communist provinces. We leave after a half hour of ear-splitting uproar.
The square is full of young people. Twelve-year-old girls go by in high heels, tanga panties in plain view, and heavy makeup. Everybody looks us over: we’re aliens, idiots who come looking in the East instead of staying comfortable in the West. There’s an Internet café. I go in. A smart aleck with a face that’s asking to be slapped slips me a keyboard with illegible letters. I’ve got Net time until 10:00, but at 9:52 my connection goes down when I’m writing to my son. I ask Slap-My-Face if he’s the one who unplugged me. He says yes. I respond that it’s not 10:00 yet. He says it is. I respond that even if it is, you don’t cut someone off without notice. He looks at me as though I’m a microbe; other young people give me the microbe look, too. I’m a sixty-year-old who has defied the curfew. Maybe even a dirty old man who wants to steal their women.
I leave, without even looking for the police. In a country that has a police officer for every twenty inhabitants, the police are unnecessary if you already have alcohol and the void promoted by unbridled consumption. A thunderstorm hits, and Baranovichi sinks into catacombal darkness. The streetlights go off at 11:00 to save energy. Poor country, I worry that it will sell itself for under market value, end up in the hands of unscrupulous merchants, with all of its sweet, endless countryside, its rivers, its fishing swallows. So we make our escape in a taxi in the middle of the night, through suburbs full of water and darkness, toward the central station, which awaits us amid thunder and lightning with the train from Saint Petersburg to Lviv already in position at the rain-soaked platform, impregnated by the smell of patient humanity in transit.
The train for Lviv, heading for the Ukraine border. Night, rain, and swamps. For three hours, the glowing caterpillar penetrates like a submarine in a world of water. Everything is so monotonous that it would be easy to miss your station.
That’s what happens to a woman and her child. As soon as she realizes that she hasn’t gotten off at the right stop, she screams desperately, “Disaster, disaster!” but the whole car laughs heartily at the scene, only to then shower her with advice. Day is dawning, the sky opens up over the bridge on the Pripet River, much wider than the Po. We are in the heart of Polesye, another of the mythical shadow regions on this journey. Kapuścińsky was born here, the unforgettable maestro of my journeying.
“As a kid,” he writes about that place, “I had sandals made of tree bark, that’s how poor we were.” Ah, shoes, the pleasure of putting on a good pair, of traveling with them for thousands of miles. The desire to travel was born in him then, in this most loved homeland. He spoke to me about it with nostalgia in his eyes and accompanied me with his story in the fluvial labyrinth of his eastern Poland, which became Belarus after the war. He wanted to write about it, but he ran out of time. His Tartar eyes burned bright, blue under bushy gray eyebrows. “Vast forests, villages reachable only by water, dirt-poor peasants. We were the poorest of Europe’s poor. We lived on fish, mushrooms, and berries. There were Lithuanians, Jews, Poles, Belarusians, Germans, Tartars. That’s where I learned to understand the Other and the world of the least among us.”
Years ago, I flew over this piece of Europe, on a flight from Kiev to Warsaw, on a cloudless day. There were no cities or even mountains. No reference points. The land was covered by a tangled labyrinth of waterways. I was over the least perceptible watershed in Europe, a place where all it takes is a gust of wind to make a stream flow toward the Baltic instead of the Black Sea. Now I’m seeing it close-up. The water doesn’t fall, it overflows. From Polesye, the maestro used to say, you can reach the whole world by boat. Now I realize that the key to this journey is not land but water. That’s why Väinämöinen has followed me everywhere.
The West has not only run out of time, which keeps slipping through its fingers; it has also lost the reassuring company of water. It no longer burbles, roars, or lulls. The turbocracy has won across the board. But here, the song of the first element follows me and invites me. The Bug, the Vistula, the Berezina, the Dniester. I think back to the frozen black lakes of Lapland, the silver torrents among the mines of Kola, the Narva loomed over by lead-gray rival castles, and yet again to the shores of the Onega with the chaika staring into the wind, and to the Latvian lake next to the lost synagogue, where I threw my coins of remembrance. Water, without a doubt, has been my great companion. A formation of wild geese flies overhead. Meanwhile, the sky’s cloudy apparel has changed. The inky black bubbles of the Baltic have disappeared; now it is the vaporous whites that dominate. The sun comes out; swamps and lakes shine like zinc. To the southwest, a glimpse of periwinkle blue. The frontier.
11. CARPATHIANS
THE UKRAINIAN POLICE OFFICER, white shirt and lavender perfume, opens the door for us to the world where a visa is no longer necessary. Then here comes a gigantic woman selling dolls and teddy bears, overflowing with goods and flesh. “Ah, our Gypsy has arrived.” The conductor laughs, and meanwhile the train fills up with what sounds like Serbian music. I hear phrases like “my Ukraine,” “my sweetness,” and “heart of mine.” I’m plunging into the South. The language becomes more modular; the chitchat rises in volume, and the convivial Slavic warmth—momentarily gone into hibernation in Belarus—reexplodes. I recognize pieces of the journey that we’ve already done: a mother from Murmansk with two children, traveling for seventy-two hours. When she left, it was still winter, and here it’s already insufferably hot.