“You can’t see the border. There’s a cordon here.”
“What cordon?”
“The frontier cordon. The security strip.”
I ask him how wide it is.
“Eighteen miles.”
We try to buy some time in a tavern frequented by Gypsies, smugglers, and the forgotten. The store is interred, has no windows, and no ventilation. Outside, a groaning of engines, wind, dust. Inside, beer, cheese, bread, cigarettes, and turbo–folk music that sounds Dalmatian and gives me once again the false sensation of being around the corner from home. Instead, I’m very far away, trapped in the damned Carpathian elbow, which inscrutable powers have decided to turn into a dead track. Monika asks the customers how it was under the USSR.
“Nothing has changed. The barbed wire fences are still the same ones.” An old man is even more pessimistic: “Today, it’s even worse, the cordon is much wider.” I notice that even civilians are wearing camouflage. Since 1914, history hasn’t unloaded anything here except armies and uniforms.
At Uzhok, among bales of fresh hay, we encounter a freight train pulled by four gigantic engines, and as we wait for the next passenger train, we chat with the signalman, in a black uniform, red beret, and a wig. There is always a guardian angel, even in the most out-of-the-way place, and the signalman, having heard about our plan to skirt the Romanian border all the way to Odessa, gets upset and warns us that the train lines along the Tibiscus are called “desire.” And, anyway, if our destination is Odessa, “you have to go back to Lviv.” But he underestimates our stubbornness, and he watches us desolated as we head for the pass. We climb some more, where there is a monument to the fallen Russians and Austro-Germans of the Great War. Another frontier or, better, another front. The one where my grandfather, wearing an Austrian uniform, fought against the Russians of the czar.
The diesel engine bites into the slope, a barefoot grandma in a meadow waves her handkerchief, mountaineers run down from the villages to catch it. The Elektrichna has cars with wooden benches and it carries children, customs officers, lovers, and peasants. It whistles, shakes, creaks, whines, winds around itself, flirts with Poland, and shows you outside the window the Schengen Area guard huts and barbed wire, as solid as the Soviet ones. At Minjova, the station is a small building ten feet away from the barbed wire, but behind it is a Lilliputian world of little houses, chimneys, people, cows, and tunnels like the plastic villages of model trains. Everywhere you look, people intent on mowing the hay.
On the sliding door at the end of the car, a poster: under a pair of lenses with, reflected inside, two little boys in tears, the words DON’T PUT ON THE ROSE-COLORED GLASSES OF WORK ABROAD. It’s the first sign of a country dramatically depopulated by emigration. I ask the ticket taker how many miles it is to Uzhgorod. She answers, “Sixty-one.” I ask how long it will take. “Four hours.” Why so long? “But it’s sixty-one miles!” she replies, her gaze darkening. And we’re already descending toward Uzhgorod, toward Hungary, in a rain forest heavy with vapors, swarming with microscopic, implacable mosquitoes.
Pannonia[7] is very close; the Balkans, too. Like a stork, I can feel growing inside me the migratory instinct to fly directly south, following the meridian, toward Belgrade and Greece. But it is right here that the vertical border of fortress Europe makes a brusque turn to the east to outline Romania all the way to the Black Sea.
The faces on board have changed again; they’re pointier. This is the world of the Ruthenians, another minority that has been shaking its fists after the fall of Soviet homogenization. Here’s Nykola, eighty-three, a former orchestra director, from Lviv, thick white hair and deep eyes of someone who has seen it all. He spent his adolescence in Siberia, then in Kazakhstan, manufacturing bullets for the Red Army at the front. But in the meantime, he had already formed a chorus.
“The Russians,” he grumbles, “didn’t bring us anything good.” I say that up to now in Russia, we have only met good people. “Well, sure,” he says. “On their home turf they’re fine.” And how is life in Lviv? “Worse. It’s in a state of total anarchy. And the oligarchs have got their hands into everything.” I explain our journey to him, and his eyes pop out. “You could have gone by plane.” I reply that if I hadn’t taken a train, I wouldn’t have met him. He smiles. Then he sings an aria from Der Rosenkavalier.
Ferns, fog, mineral-water springs, paleosocialist factories in the rain. An old man climbs aboard with a pail full of porcini mushrooms to sell. He’s wearing short pants and rain boots. Outside it’s hot; inside it’s a sauna. The train keeps getting more crowded. Nykola: “If you knew how much I love traditional Italian songs… and then, ah, Verdi!” He intones “Catarì,” then “Il soldato innamorato,” and then “O sole mio.” He explains that the Slavs—“we Slavs,” he underlines, including the Russians now, too—adore this kind of music. He writes down meticulously on a sheet of paper his address in Lviv and offers it to us. “Come. It’s really not so far from Italy.”
The station in Uzhgorod is a little jewel with a mausoleum inside in commemoration of a famous assassination victim: Georgyi Kirpa, a former Ukrainian minister, done in, they say, by pro-Russian militants. In the middle of the waiting room, there is a case with his clothes and some tablets with the story of his martyrdom. The hostility toward Moscow is palpable. At ticket window number five, a shrew refuses to respond in the language that I’ve been using now for a month without any problems, even in the Baltic republics. Her nationalism immediately sends blood rushing to my head, because it demonizes the people rather than the criminals who govern them. I send her to hell in Italian and change to window number three, where my vendetta is promptly served up. Two Slovaks, despite knowing how to speak Ukrainian, speak English with the woman behind the glass just to highlight their membership in the club of the rich. She doesn’t understand, but they keep it up, refusing to make themselves understood even though they understand perfectly.
I look for a good hotel. I’m sick of scalding-hot rooms with saunas and discotheques on the floor below, and I find right away that in Uzhgorod everything works. The roads of five nations converge here; there is no lack of business and money. The English language shows up again at the hotel, lobster and Caesar salad on the menu, as well as, naturally, air-conditioning. But superimposed on the slipshod Soviet construction is the costly and marbled nullity of capitalism. And while all of a sudden everything works, just as suddenly there are no stories to tell. The West is the place where the yawn reigns supreme. The equation constructed by my friend Jacek in Warsaw is confirmed: “Difficulty equals story.”
Luckily, there are the Pannonian mosquitoes. The meanest, sliest, most ferocious, and hardest to snag of my entire life. Lying in wait behind the minifridge, hidden in the folds of the drapes, dug in like Vietcong in the darkest corners of the bathroom, they emerge one by one in the middle of the night to prevent us from sleeping and provide us at last with something to recount. I’m too tired for big-game hunting, and I take cover under the sheet. In the darkness, I’m reminded that one day on a comfy and punctual Swiss train, a woman said to me—I swear—that she loved Italian trains because they didn’t work and therefore, “there was at least something to talk about.” Obviously she was a snob and regarded these little inconveniences as the only surprises capable of interrupting her incommensurate boredom.
The next day. New train, to Chop, on the border with Slovakia and Hungary. The idea is to go up the Tibiscus to its source back in the Carpathians, not far from the stomping grounds of Count Dracula. My map indicates a line that goes up the entire valley and then runs down toward the Dniester near the city of Chernivtsi, from where I’ll leave to go down to Odessa. We are traveling full of hope through the desolate flatlands of Pannonia. And Chop isn’t a city; it’s a gigantic terminal full of fog, high-tension electric towers, gas pipelines, networks of tracks, immobile freight trains shiny with rain; and further still, ramps, warehouses, luggage trolleys in the scrub under a forest of electric wires. Long fields, typically Hungarian, on triennial rotation. The banks of the Tibiscus are no more than two or three hundred yards away, covered with tall yellow flowers. On board, the dark faces of Gypsies.
7
Pannonia is the name of a province of the Roman Empire bounded on the north and east by the Danube and occupying the territory of present-day western Hungary, eastern Austria, northern Croatia, northwestern Serbia, Slovenia, western Slovakia, and northern Bosnia and Herzegovina.