Lyuba: “A hundred and fifty thousand Jews passed over that bridge up there, holding hands, surrounded by Germans. I even saw Byela, sweet Byela, who sold candy to children. We shouted to them: ‘Rise up! There are a lot of you! You can kill them!’ But they answered, ‘God will help us.’”
Viktor: “They killed them in a village not far from here, called Mikraion. The ground was red with blood.”
I ask if anyone was left alive after the German retreat in 1944. They tell me yes, but the last ones left twelve years later, in 1956, after Stalin died. At the time of the revolt in Hungary.
Viktor searches in his memory: “I remember Arkhip… Lyuba, Harik, who drove a taxi… Lonka, who had a mobile cinema and showed me the world when I was a kid.”
“There was also a Jewish market, here on the right side of the bridge,” Lyuba adds, “they sold some excellent cured meats.”
Monika listens, asks, translates, and takes pictures, all at the same time, without interruption. I don’t know how she does it. She’s captivated by this world, by what she calls “the people of God,” the creeds and the simple souls of the Other Europe to whom she has dedicated twenty years of her life. She passes her enchantment on to me.
“There’s goodness in your eyes,” the little lady with the goats tells her. She offers her some berries. “Eat them, they’re good for your heart. And drink from this spring here, the water is exquisite. Drink with your hands; don’t be afraid. Water is life.” It’s an invitation to both baptism and the Eucharist; an ancient ritual is carried out through her.
Karavasari, sunken in the shade, seems to be in touch with the profound. I feel as though I can hear the ancient voice of the earth. A drum, a slow pulsing. Lyuba herself is the earth, the black earth of the granary of Europe.
“The young don’t appreciate the countryside. They don’t make it fruitful, don’t make it live. That’s why Ukraine is poor. Look at the fields all around us. They could feed half the world… and instead they’re full of weeds. Who knows, maybe one day things will get better, but I won’t be around to see it.”
And Chernobyl?
“It changed everything. More and more people are dying of cancer. It didn’t used to be that way. Do lots of people die from cancer in Italy, too?”
“Yes, a lot of people die from cancer there, too.” We ask her how things were before, during Communism.
“With the USSR, there was more order. Sure, we were poor, but it was paradise here. Now it’s a mess. Everybody drinks too much, even the women. Morality has gone way down, and opportunities for work, too. Everyone thinks only about themselves. I like living on Earth with the others… the Earth belongs to everyone… What do you think? Am I wrong?”
No, Lyuba, you’ve got it right.
“I don’t know the world, but I know enough to understand that God gave us a wonderful Earth. Here there is so much land. All you have to do is take it and use it. It’s an immense gift, especially in times like these, when young people can’t find work. But land is hard work, and today nobody wants to work hard.”
Land and water—zemlya and voda—Lyuba repeats the two key words like a litany. They are the origin of everything, the genesis and the regeneration.
Monika asks Lyuba if she lives alone.
“Yes, I live alone. My daughter comes every now and again to bring me bread and semolina. Everything else I get from the garden. And my goats.”
What did you do for work?
“I was a schoolteacher for thirty years, then a custodian. But at school they didn’t know where to put the children—there were so many of them. Now the schools are closing because there aren’t enough. We’ve got eight million emigrants, the villages are full of empty houses.”
Viktor accompanies us to see the wooden church of Karavasari, directly under the castle.
“Take a good look at it. It doesn’t have even a single nail. Iron was not to be used, as on the old boats. Iron had pierced the flesh of Our Lord. It was built with joints. There’s no cement, either, but look how solid it is. Today, they’ve buried us in tons of cement, and look at how everything is falling apart.”
Under the castle walls, there is a small fountain of pure water. The underground vein is the same one that allowed defenders of the city to hold out without having to draw water from the river. The Turks were the ones who opened it laterally so the inhabitants of Karavasari could draw from it freely.
Viktor recounts that, during the retreat of 1944, one of the German soldiers hid inside the niche of the fountain. The Russians killed him, and some bullets are still stuck inside the rocks. He shows them to us.
“What a winter that was. The river thawed without warning and dragged away dozens of people who tried to hang on to chunks of ice. It was March 16. A German tank tried to get through and hit a mine that killed a lot of people.”
Today there is only silence, a cool breeze, and the burbling of the water in the twilight.
The first stars come out. Viktor has gone to close his dovecote. Lyuba invites us to come back tomorrow morning to drink some fresh goat’s milk. We climb slowly back up to the castle on a labyrinth of stairs. From the top, we look back down on the lights of Karavasari with all the characters of the story—the Turks, the Jews, the Poles, the merchants, the boatmen, and the horses drinking at the river. There’s also Lyuba, going back inside the house with her goats, and nearby a group of young people pitching their tent for the night on an emerald-green meadow next to the river. Still farther, a horse grazing. They’re all moving inside the same story, written long ago.
“Ah, come on, you don’t see the Cold War coming back?” an amazed Maxim asks me at the station in Khmelnytsky, where we’re waiting for the train to Odessa in a placid golden-wheat evening. Maxim Apostol is a Ukrainian medical student, cheery and well nourished, with long black hair like Gogol’s, and he looks at us with his mouth agape and eyes wide open to mime the fear that’s on the horizon. He’s an accomplished ham. He hunches his back, contracts his neck, embraces his elbows, and pretends his teeth are chattering, as though a sudden gust of cold wind from the north had turned the season inside-out, sweeping the countryside free of ripe wheat, reapers, and farmers.
“Where do you live, you Westerners? Everybody knows that the Caucasus is about to explode. Putin wants to keep it under control, and the Americans want to build military bases there. Plus there’s the oil under the Caspian Sea…. See what you think…. To me it seems like enough and then some.” Then he adds, “We can feel the tension really well. The frontier between East and West passes right through here.” He asks me if I know what Ukraine means, and I reply that I know, and how: it means “frontier.” In Croatia, too, there was a krajina—a strip of frontier with a Serb majority—that in 1991, instigated by Belgrade, inflamed all of Yugoslavia. “Exactly,” he responds, “I see that you’ve understood perfectly. If Ukraine stops being what it has been for centuries, that is, a buffer, to enter into an alliance with the West, all hell will break loose. The country, which is pro-Russian in the east, will split into two, and then Moscow will intervene. Let’s not even talk about the Caucasus. Stalin filled it with enclaves, ethnic mines to foment conflict and facilitate control by Moscow, and Putin can set them on fire whenever he wants.”