But the wonder of wonders is the bus station in Chernivtsi, the Czernowitz of the Yiddish world, the world capital of klezmer music. Around the bulldozed lot, buzzing with the whirling fan belts of hundreds of buses, is an endless series of kiosks whose pots are simmering with zurek, the local soup, bubbling over with mountains of green peppers, onions, and poultry from the valley of the Prut, the river that runs southeast to form the border between Romania and Moldova.
Amid the fragmentation of its borders, it appears that the bus is the only means of transport able to hold together the pieces of what used to be the Soviet Union.
At the head of the line, my bus empties out in the blazing heat of midday: the passengers come from distant places, but they know exactly where to go, what to buy, and from whom.
Chernivtsi is an interchange of cultures, food, and music populated by mild-mannered people at peace with the world. Among the merchants and the chickens, a pope walks arm in arm with his wife. He is satisfied in his yellow-gray tunic, ponytail, black beard, and vest. She’s happy in her chaste long skirt and coquettish longsleeved blouse. All around are Cossack butchers with cascading mustaches, buxom Moldovian farm women, vociferous Romanians selling strings of braided onions, bony-faced Carpathian natives with baskets of mountain herbs and greens. The only missing player in this chaotic scene is the Hasidic Jew with his wide-brimmed black hat, black long coat, and curls down to his shoulders. He’s no longer present. But something of his presence has remained in the air, permeating the market with a special kind of meekness.
In Chernivtsi, we’re supposed to get the train for Moldova in an attempt to cross it and head to Odessa. But the schedules are impossible, and we run the risk of missing the ferry for Istanbul. After the fall of the USSR, the train lines have been shortened, and the waiting times between trains would discourage even the most stubborn of slow travelers. So we look for a bus that will take us to Kamianets-Podilskyi, a jewel of a city we have heard great things about in Warsaw and where we could connect with the train line for the Black Sea.
We have two hours before departure, and because—as always—it’s during stopovers that things happen, we end up being part of an unforgettable scene.
There is a restaurant on the edge of the market, with tables outside under the plane trees. We’re the only customers. The waitress passes the time sitting at another table with a muscle-bound guy with a shaved head in a white T-shirt.
While we’re waiting for our food, two cars drive up and stop right in front of the door, next to a bus stop. A stocky forty-year-old with the face of a boxer gets out of the first car. The guy sitting next to the waitress gets up and goes over to join him on the other side of the street. They sit down on a bench in the shade of a tree and launch into an animated discussion in low voices.
Suddenly, fists are flying and the two fall to the ground under a billboard advertising the modular kitchens by Burzhua—bourgeois—the word condemned by communism. The older man is stronger; he must be an ex-boxer. He gets ahold of the kid, puts him back down on the bench in an almost fatherly manner, and tries to get him to listen to reason, holding him still with his knee as a sign of domination. Things seems to have calmed down, but appearances are deceiving. The guy with the boxer’s face is not a father. He’s a boss. And he suddenly lets fly a punch out of nowhere, a professional blow, landing just above the left eye of the other guy, whose face becomes a mask of blood.
Just then, his partner gets out of the second car to check things out, but the partner who’s busy settling accounts orders him to get back in the car. He’s not worried at all about being seen; he’s the boss of the territory. People go by and act as though everything’s normal. Even the waitress, blanched with fear, doesn’t do a thing for her boyfriend. So I get up and move closer to them to see if they’ll stop. I sit on a bench ten feet away, but they just keep at it as if I don’t exist.
They talk and I can distinguish every word. If I knew Ukrainian I would understand everything. The scene continues as though it were a film. After a while the bloodied young man calms down, and with a half grimace, he shakes the hand of the older man, who gets back in his car and leaves, followed by the second car. Only then does the beaten man get up, take off his white T-shirt, use it as a bandage to stop the bleeding, and then go off to a side street to lick his wounds.
I go back to the table and ask the waitress if she saw what I saw. She says yes. I ask her why she didn’t call the police, and she shrugs her shoulders, her eyes open wide, then she serves me a bowl of soup and a salad. At that point, the young man with the cut over his eye comes back, picks up his car keys that he’d left on the table, and walks over to a taxi, his, and leaves. Two minutes go by, and an enormous car pulls up, a four-wheel-drive Japanese SUV, black, naturally, with, naturally, dark tinted windows. The door opens and a shaved-headed guy with a scowl on his face gets out, takes a long look at what’s written in my notebook, enters the restaurant, and comes out again in a few minutes after pocketing the protection money. End of story.
I had observed something emblematic—not so much for the violence itself as for its flagrance. The whole thing happened right before my eyes; even worse, it was purposely thrown in my face. The message was: we’re in command here, not the police, not the state, and certainly not the new independent Ukraine.
I start to understand why millions of people have decided to emigrate from this meek country. I have not seen such an open exhibition of criminal hegemony anywhere else outside of the small towns around Naples. One time in Acerra, for example, a guy walked right up to the front of a long line at the post office window and a naive customer protested. The bully flattened him with a punch to the nose and then went back to the window to complete his transaction, in the most surreal silence.
Once we’re on the bus, Monika recounts the incident to the peasant woman who is sitting next to her. She’s not surprised and tells us, “Dear friends, twenty years ago it was worse; the gangs had shootouts in the streets. And in the 1960s it was even worse. Then there was the Topor Gang…. They were animals. They played cards, not for money but for their lives. And if one day they got the idea to kill everyone dressed in blue, they did it. Then it was the turn of people dressed in red. Today things are better. The criminals are all involved in finance.”
Sergei, on his way to Kamianets-Podilskyi, also evokes the horror of the “bad old days,” when his parents were arrested for “anti-Soviet resistance” six years after the end of the conflict in which the incident was supposed to have taken place. They were sent to Siberia from 1952 to 1975, and that’s where they met.
We still have ten minutes before departure, and a Gypsy comes aboard, the sweetest and best-mannered Gypsy I’ve ever seen. She offers blessings for the journey and asks for something in exchange, but without even a trace of importunity. I’m amazed; people offer her the equivalent of one or two euros, which is a lot of money here, a sign that the woman’s work is considered important and reliable. Some people instead give a tomato, a sweet, a piece of cheese, and the Gypsy—who knows this—holds out two hats, one for money and the other for food. After each donation, she closes her eyes to make contact with God. This is her recognized occupation. Concentrating deeply, she mumbles something incomprehensible. When she’s finished, she gets off, and the old bus, comforted by the Gypsy-style exorcism, is ready to leave, bouncing along toward the granary of Europe.