I know. Since Murmansk, I’ve been zigzagging down a long krajina inhabited by frustrated ethnic minorities ready to let themselves be set on fire. And ever since the Barents Sea, I can feel the growing tension of the East-West confrontation, as though a new Iron Curtain were forming a few hundred miles to the east from the old one: Poles and the Baltic peoples against Moscow, Russian military deployments on the border with Finland, endless complications in getting our visas, the enlargement to eighteen miles of the frontier strip under control of Moscow’s police and army, barbed-wire fences between Poland and Ukraine.
What if this visionary is right? For too long, since the fall of the Berlin Wall, we’ve been living in the atmosphere of a feeble-minded thaw, as if Russia had not become the master of Europe’s energy supply, as if it were a flabby giant incapable of reacting. I’ve been traveling for more than a month along a seismic fault that’s only apparently dormant. I’ve passed through customs, barbed wire, barriers guarded by towers and spotlights. I’ve experienced seizures of goods, interminable delays, arrests, relentless scrutiny of visas. Crossing the border of the European Union over and over, I’ve felt chills down my spine more than once, but I’ve never thought of the Cold War. Now, in the middle of the train platforms inflamed by the sunset, I feel like a cat that has crept by under the bear’s nose without waking him up. Maybe Maxim is right; the frontier is moving back into the cold.
I recall Viktor Ivanovich, the pilgrim on the banks of the White Sea who prophesied a war starting at the Beijing Olympics. I can see him now: a meek, robust man with big hands and a Mormon’s beard without a mustache, wearing a thick overcoat and carrying a haversack. I had totally forgotten about him. I open my backpack and look through my notebooks. In the second one, on page thirty-one, my summary of that strange encounter. Written in a hurried scribble is: “1 July. Viktor Ivanovich, 1940, born in Sumy, Ukraine.” Then, “Prophecy, monasteries, war with Olympic games.” And then, “2008 a bad year, 2012 too. Still a month left.” Then I noted the names of the monasteries: Svensky Monastery near Bryansk, Torodalmatov, in the Urals. Solovetsky. Everyone in the monasteries knew that a war was about to break out. I asked him where, and Viktor answered, “In the mountains.” He said he had given up his Ukrainian passport for a Russian one, and he spoke with irritation about the Chechen mafia, which in his words had taken possession of the port of Sumsky Posad where the Suma River empties into the White Sea. He was one strange pilgrim who knew too many things. I didn’t pay him much attention then, but now, here with Maxim, that warning starts to get to me. It gets to me even more a week later when, on August 7, 2008, the war in Georgia begins.
In front of the station, under the statue of the hetman Bogdan Khmelnytsky, the student goes on. He says that everything is changing, that Russia is becoming a threat again and the West has no idea how to deal with it. “You can’t claim independence for Kosovo and then not agree to autonomy from Georgia for Ossetia.” Then he tells us about Crimea, which until yesterday was full of vacationing Russians at the seaside but now has no more tourism because Ukrainians don’t want to go to a place that has hosted so many Muscovite occupiers. “If you like extreme journeys,” he laughs, “go to Crimea. The mountains have again become a wild pastoral land, like they used to be.”
It is July 31. The train pulls out of the station, rattling its way across the plain, and I lie down on my bunk to ruminate. Forgotten details from the journey come back to mind: faces and words that initially seemed to be pure, insignificant choreography but now become meaningful. Vadim, for example, the turbo-Orthodox encountered in Estonia. He prophesied unprecedented conflicts between civilizations. Not between Christians and Muslims, but between Catholics and Orthodox. I think back to the drums of war that inflamed Belgrade in 1989, the gatherings of warmongers on the Kosovo Polje, the Blackbird’s Field, blessed by Orthodox popes and archimandrites. I recall the tension constructed around the monasteries of southern Serbia. Now again in Ukraine I can smell the odor of incense. Why is it that the Russians who frequent the monasteries know so much in advance?
13. BLACK SEA
WE GET INTO ODESSA in the early morning and go to see the Uspensky (Assumption) Cathedral, near our hotel. We go down to the crypt, where a miraculous Madonna is on display. Men and women, old and young, genuflect—some with their forehead touching the floor, as though they were Muslim—then they get in line to kiss the holy icon. Outside, at a newsstand, a newspaper has a headline about the American Sixth Fleet having entered the Black Sea. Not far away, at the corner of Uspenskaya and Osipova streets, Jews in prayer dress are walking toward the Malbish Arumim (Clothing for the Naked) Synagogue for Shabbat. We follow them. They let us come in without even checking our backpacks. They hand us a brochure in English that talks about the “Jewish reawakening” after the season of Communist atheism and the great escape to Israel. It all feels strangely like Trieste.
The city is spotless. In front of every front door, there is someone sweeping and washing the sidewalk. At every intersection, there is a sign that says THIS IS OUR CITY. A healthy dose of local patriotism. In Sobor (Cathedral) Square, outdoor tables and chess games. Hundreds of simultaneous challenges. Monika tells me that chess is an Orthodox art form. The Poles don’t play. On the iron grating of the Iskusstv Bridge (Bridge of the Arts), above the commercial port (overlooking tugboats, ferries, and mountains of coal), dozens of shining closed padlocks with the names of lovers written on them: Masa and Vadiki; Dunya and Lepa; Valzer and Nasta. Igor and Oksana have hung a whole chain of them and thrown the keys in the water. It’s hard to resist the temptation to let this be the end of the journey rather than Istanbul.
On the propylaea of the Vorontsov Palace, not far from the stairway made famous by the film Battleship Potemkin, two women friends are looking out at the sea and talking. One looks to be seventy-five, the other twenty years younger.
Monika strikes up a conversation about the beauty of the city.
The older woman responds: “Beautiful but full of thieves. They steal the old houses to build new ones.”
Did they steal your house, too?
“They won’t be able to until they’ve finished down below… in the catacombs. …From my house I can see the water. I’ve got a terrace with a grapevine. I’ll never give it up. I used to watch my husband going out to sea from up there. He was a sailor.”
On the Black Sea?
“Yes, on the Black Sea. I didn’t used to believe it, but it really is black. I realized it when I went on a voyage with him. But if the wind comes down from Siberia, the black turns green, with whitecaps.”
The colonnade is inflamed by the sunset, a rugby-ball-shaped moon is rising, and, carried on the air from some unseen location, we hear the notes of “Blue Moon.” The younger of the two women talks about her friends who have emigrated to the West.
“Those who have left here are full of regrets. Even our friend Valentina. We all lived together, helped each other, cooked blini together. Ah, how we love blini; when I cook them, I don’t need to buy anything else.”
The older woman: “For tonight I’ve cooked potatoes under the embers. I’ll put a little oil on them. Then I’ll go out for a walk. Sometimes I walk until two or three o’clock in the morning. Odessa lives by night. You meet people who have come from Russia, Moldova, Belarus. They’re not rich. Ordinary people, factory workers even.”