What a metamorphosis! The men who come aboard are less suspicious and the women more robust, suntanned like farmhands. The frequency of pale, slender Baltic beauty tapers off. The train is heading southwest, toward Lviv, in a world that’s more vigorous, sunny, Gypsyesque. Towns are not as well kept, apparently poorer, but the fields are fertile, with grazing horses and geese, as in a Soviet documentary from the 1950s. The cemeteries, joyously colorful with fresh flowers, are not enclosed; they grow up spontaneously by gemmation. The deep green of Belarus has been tinged with yellow, maybe it’s a prelude to the steppe.
Saddled horses, dust, riding boots. There’s an air of Middle Eastern caravan, and yet—how strange—I’m getting closer to home. The map says that the elbow of the Carpathians and Hungary are right next door.
My map of wonders indicates that this is the area of the Russian gas pipelines that supply Europe. The stability of the world depends on their spigots. That would be a great journey! Follow the pipe from your very own kitchen stove all the way to Siberia. An epic. I note down words like Klondike, Putinian power.
Monika fires me up, talking about the legend of the Rachmani, a subterranean people of fire carriers. The train continues southwest, but now my imagination is galloping northeast, across the Don with the Italian troops at the front in 1942, over the steppes of Oryol and Kursk, where the last open-field battle of history was fought in 1943, to the headquarters of Gazprom in Moscow, the Kremlin. Then the great mother Volga; Kazan, the city of towers on the rivers; the end of Europe and the hyperborean mountains, the Urals.
What a grandiose terrain, unexplored and current. An investigation and at the same time an exploration. Beyond the Urals, toward the oil fields trapped under the permafrost—there you have it, the world’s biggest swamp, an endless horizon of mosquitoes and migratory birds. I see the Ob, monosyllabic river, the Po of the great North, which the icebreakers just barely break open at the end of April, to the tune of dynamite blasts. Siberian stories, the tundra, the Gulags, the Arctic railways built by convicts, mammoths under the frozen ground. Novy Urengoy, the city of Utopia, reachable only by plane; the land where fire is born. Yamal, the last peninsula, the reindeer, the Arctic people threatened with extinction. The frozen Arctic Ocean, and again the madness of the midnight sun. The spaces whence we have come.
The train shoots into long valleys, imperceptible, the first change in the lay of the land since lacustrine Polesye. Until 1918, this is where Austrian Galicia began.
Outside there are signs of a different aesthetic, of a different order. A new limes, a new sign of the mobile frontiers that have determined the fate of millions of people. The ethnicities mix. At Brody a blond with a Greek profile comes aboard. She looks as though she just got off a horse, a mythic Amazon. In the back of the car, Monika has found a Gypsy of savage beauty whose eyes invite her on the road to the Carpathians.
The bus for the South is dancing wildly like a crazed tarantist, but the driver is a jelly-bellied jolly guy who sings and accelerates through the potholes because that’s the only way to get by them. The bus is jam-packed, a crowd of farmers who engage in animated conversation, eat, and sing with the windows thrown open, in an amazing vortex of spinning air. The road to Murmansk was a different music. The same potholes, but a leaden silence behind the wheel. Tinted windows hermetically sealed and a bleak gloom among the passengers. Like a paddy wagon full of detainees.
It’s amid this chaotic earthquake that the Vision appears. Beyond the clamor of the confabulating passengers, the fields of grain, the villages with their onion-domed bell towers, beyond the yellow and blue Ukrainian flags fluttering in the wind and the bus’s orange curtains, rumpled and torn by the current, there appears a black line, as wide as the entire horizon, regular as a breaker that rises up following the reflux of the surf. Mountains! The black line of the mountains!
It’s not a serrated crest like the Alps, but a barrier with a soft silhouette like a tidal wave. Barrier is the right word because the Carpathians are standing there like a dam, after thousands of miles at zero altitude, amid minimal hills, sand dunes, forests, and vast clearings.
Having a terrestrial limit to hold on to is a blessed thing, and I’m immediately overcome by a rush of good cheer that breaks the dam of reserve between me and my fellow passengers. I offer my neighbors some Uzbek apricots and Bulgarian almonds purchased in Kaliningrad. They thank me and return the favor with pumpkin seeds (another sign of the South!), laugh with a full display of teeth in their bony, caravanesque faces. Who are they? Alans? Sarmatians? Dacians? The legendary Scythians, who ensnared and defeated the Persians on the endless plains? They’re also asking who we are, with our long thin faces and blue-green eyes staring out at the long wave of the last horizon.
Let me try to recapitulate how I ended up in the middle of these people. It all happened in a flash. Outside the train station in Lviv we hopped on the first bus directed toward the Carpathians, to throw ourselves into that frontier “entanglement” where Poland, Slovakia, Hungary, and Ukraine all touch each other. “Run, run, and you might make it,” they told me at the ticket booth, pointing at a bus with its motor running in the middle of a hundred or so motor coaches haphazardly parked in front of the station. If I had stopped in Lviv, I would have lost myself in the city. Too much fascination in that city-bazaar, Gothic, Slav, and Jewish, so Northern for those who come there from the South and so Southern for those who arrive from the North. For the Italian soldiers on their way to the Don, Lviv was the place of their disillusionment. They saw emaciated Jews on the train tracks, pushed and shoved by German soldiers with whips, and they realized what a heinous cause they were going to fight for.
The bus starts to climb and enters the first tunnel on its route, crosses the newborn Dniester, and everything changes again. The Ukrainian neglectfulness ends together with the plain and is replaced by valleys of Alpine tidiness, sprinkled with pagoda-roofed wooden churches. Another frontier between cultures. What to do? The place is worthy of a stopover, but should I get off here? Are there hotels? Inns? Try looking in Turka, they tell me, maybe you’ll find something there. We get off in Turka, but there’s not even the shadow of a bed, and night is about to fall. Poland is right next door, and the border is a tough one. They told me in Warsaw that the Chechen mafia makes money from smuggling across that mountainous border.
The Dnieper Inn emanates an excellent aroma of soup and welcomes us like shipwreck survivors. We order dinner and ask for information, but the waitress knows nothing; she’s not from here. Just as in Italy, the young people have lost a consciousness of place. So I try my luck with a merry table of customers at the bar, three women and four men.
“Why don’t you have a car?” they ask us immediately, looking at our backpacks.
I shoot back, “Because we’re crazy.”
They burst out laughing, followed by a round of vodka.
I ask if there are really Chechens in these mountains.