Another laugh with the reply that those are just Polish fables. “But you two,” they ask, “what are you doing here?”
I tell them about my vertical Europe, about Murmansk still covered in snow and about the EU frontier. They’re left with their mouths agape. “Then you really are crazy!”
But the conclusion is fated: “You did well to come here. In the Carpathians we have open minds.” Meanwhile, the second round of vodka arrives, and the dinner companions open up. The most talkative is the mayor of Turka, Yevstaky Ivanovich. The second is Ivan, a rascal police officer. The third is Bogdan, a friend of the group who offers to take us to a motel and, the next morning, on a tour of the nearby villages.
“You can trust Bogdan,” says the mayor, “the important thing is that you don’t trust the police officer. The police always lie.” More laughter. One of the women at the table explains that the mayor won the election with good humor. Like this, telling jokes.
“Is that right, Yevstaky Ivanovich?” I ask him.
“I’m a Boyko, and you can say whatever you like.” The Boykos are one of the ethnic minorities of the Carpathians. Monika knows them well.
I ask if there are Jews in Turka.
“There were lots of them. Today there is only one left. But he… is careful not to tell anyone.” More laughter, this time with mouths closed. Yevstaky urges me on like a Cossack: “Drink up, have one for your horse, too!” They had warned me: careful of the Carpathians; they’ll drown you with vodka and hospitality.
Confirmation arrives promptly.
We head for the longed-for hotel in an indescribable sunset, apple green and apricot, outlined by the serrated profile of the pine groves, amid meadows covered with pale blue fog. In the distance, a lighted train makes a wide, slow curve in ascent. It brilliantly overcomes the steep slope with endless turns and switchbacks. “That’s the Elektrichna,” Bogdan explains, “the Austrians built the line in 1905.” The whistle train that goes up and down the valley and connects with the Trans-Carpathian, toward Hungary, along the watershed that was one of the bloodiest fronts of the Great War. That’s how we’re going to continue our journey.
In the motel, crowded with hyperexcited excursionists, the only available place is over the sauna, and in the room—all in flammable wood—it is at least 100°. But that’s no problem, I’m carried off by a leaden sleep. But at two in the morning, the temperature goes up to 120°, and from underneath me comes a concert of thumps, barbaric grunts, and female whoops. Pandemonium, with the flame from the sauna crackling distinctly just inches under my bed. The room is full of smoke even though the windows are wide open. I go outside to breathe some fresh air, and I realize that this incendiary earthquake is the only hotbed of noise in the boundless silence of the Carpathians.
The next day, they take us to a wooden church near the source of the Dniester. The nave breathes, creaks, hisses, resonates like the bottom of a boat. The pope sings the Lord’s Prayer with just two notes, repeats ad infinitum the word Gospod, Lord, and the women respond in chorus. Candles around the icons, children serious as soldiers, in white shirts. It’s a mixture of Baroque Austria and Orthodox Russia, Rome and Byzantium, all smelling of resin and decorated with lighted candles like Christmas. Monika has been traveling in Central Europe for twenty years, away from the centers of power and the delirium of ideologies. In places like the Carpathians, you understand clearly that in church what is celebrated is the community, and the sense of limits that looms over it.
Out on the street, a grandmother, with a red handkerchief, and a little girl, her granddaughter, dressed as a bride. She is dressed like that for her mother’s birthday, but her mother has nine children and can’t afford to keep her at home.
So she lives with her old Osipa, Josephine. “They gave me my name because I was born on Christmas,” she explains, and recounts that she was once a telephone operator and then the letter carrier for the town. “I went around on a bicycle, even in the snow. A hard job but nice, because you get to talk with everyone.”
Osipa has a serene face and lots of tragedies behind her. Here the whole peasant world seems to be suffering unspeakably, even in these towns with genteel names like Strawberry or Apple. Just a while ago, in another church, we heard the pope cry out that “the devil has entered our community” and something had to be done. People were arguing heatedly, the parish was being attacked, and the enemy could have but one name, Satan. Josephine tells us atrocious things: a son of hers was burned alive—she repeats “burned alive”—by a madman. The other son was taken from her at age twenty-five by cancer. And her daughter isn’t able to bring up all those children by herself, so she has to give her a hand with the produce from her vegetable garden. She makes us a present of a liter and a half of fresh goat’s milk that we would drink later, sitting between a sheaf of wheat and a stream.
That evening, the proprietor of the hotel, after moving me out of the infernal room and giving me another, tells me that the hotel was a kolkhoz, of which only the walls were left because everything else had been robbed after the fall of the Soviet Union. “I bought the stones and spent ten thousand dollars to make a hotel out of them. But I have to fight with those damn plants that you see outside there.” He takes us outside and shows us gigantic flowers, ten feet high, that besiege the grounds. “They were planted by the kolkhoz, to feed them to the cows so they would make more milk. They come from Siberia, and they are so happy to be here that they’ve become monsters. Now there are no more cows, but they are still here; they’ve invaded the mountains. You can’t get rid of them even with a flamethrower, and they’re poisonous for people.”
Who knows, maybe the devil that’s tormenting the Carpathians has taken cover in this killer plant. Already, on the Arctic Ocean, I’ve met a giant killer crab from the depths, brought there from Asia in the name of progress. Maybe the demon is globalism, which has made its nest here, too. It’s hard to sleep in these mountains. The Austrian train goes by in the middle of the night.
In the mountain range where the vampires live, local trains come and go, to and from various heads of the line, with nonexistent connections. Especially in Ukraine. But that’s the nice thing about it. It happens that you get off in a place called Yablunka (Apple Tree), in a countryside resounding with cackling hens, and you have three hours to wait for the next train, which might take you only twelve miles farther. But the stop-off offers you the opportunity to meet the signalman, drink a tea together, and see a group of young people on horseback, bareback like Andalusians, riding alongside the tracks. You can’t understand the Carpathians without the syncopated rhythm of the train known as Elektrichna.
At Turka, I stop in for a beer at the blue shack that hosts the Klub for Afghanistan vets. In Syanki, a Ukrainian soldier stops us. We are the only passengers to get off the train with bags, and those bags indicate that we are engaged in a long journey on a train that is used only by local passengers. The man in uniform wants to understand.
“Where are you going?”
We reply, “To Uzhgorod.”
“The next train is the right one.”
“We know that,” I respond, “but we want to see the border. That’s what we’re here for.”
“There is nothing to see here. And above all there is nothing to photograph.”
I explain that I’m interested in this place because my grandfather fought here in 1914, against the Russians.
“Passport, please.”
We give him our documents, and the soldier gets even more upset. The importance of our visas, together with the poverty of our clothing, confounds him. He can’t figure us out.