Just a few hours left before our departure for Istanbul. A lump in my throat. Leaving behind the Slavic world hurts.
I see it and say, “That can’t be it.”
The ferry that’s going to take us to Istanbul can’t even remotely resemble the rust bucket that appears at the bottom of the Potemkin Stairs, on the left side of the Odessa Marine Station. It’s so short that it looks like a Venetian water bus, so low that only the smokestack is higher than the upper terrace of the terminal, so anti-aerodynamic that it seems to belong to another era. The inside can hold no more than five or six trucks and thirty or so automobiles. I say to myself, The farthest this thing can go is to Crimea, around the corner from here.
But no, this is our ship all right. The letters UKR FERRY on the side erase all doubts. The line for passenger tickets and the one on the ramp for the vehicle deck are both following the sign for Istanbul. Only the name—Caledonia—seems to belong to other seas and other latitudes. Who in the world travels from Odessa to the Bosporus? I asked myself that question many times when I was trying to reserve two places for that out-of-the-way crossing. Now I see them, the passengers with whom I’ll be bringing to a close my vertical European trip. They come from another world.
Agatha Christie characters: an Ethiopian on foot with an American passport and full of rings and trinkets. A sort of New-Age shaman with a contemptuous look and turbid eyes, a backpack, and a colorful floor-length gown. Two jolly jelly bellies from Kiev aboard a metallic gray Jeep with a space-age trailer of the same color. An Armenian truck driver in clogs and a muscle shirt, dark and sharp-featured the way only an Armenian can be. Three young Muscovite centaurs on their way to Greece with expensive leather biker outfits and American motorcycles. Two Moldovian models who pose for photographs as they whimper and moan, sitting on their suitcases. A little girl in an orange dress, whose long skirt billows in the wind like a hot air balloon. The Black Sea grabs us in its tentacles like a jellyfish, and at the first sign of rain, it turns really black, black as coal. Up to a minute ago, it had been windy and greenish blue. Now it is still, oily, and dark, and I finally understand where it got its name. In an instant Odessa disappears behind the mist, and only the colonnade of Vorontsov Palace, above the port, keeps shining for a few minutes, the Nordic propylaea illuminated by a solitary ray of sunlight. The sharpness of the image is absolute. It even seems to me that I can make out the two women whom we met the night before. After that, it’s all a soporific pitch and roll. Nothing worth staying on deck for.
Vroom-vroom toward the Bosporus. Four hundred miles nonstop, without a view of the Danube Delta nor even of the coastal hills of Dobruja. Almost a flight, like that of Jason from Colchis. Now it’s pouring rain, my travel companion has taken to her cabin to correct the proofs of her book Boży ludzie, God’s People, depicting the religious of the Other Europe. The dining rooms are empty; everyone is already asleep in the cabins, even the three Russian bikers and the Ethiopian shaman with the U.S. passport. I stay on at the aft disco bar to play cards with a Bulgarian, and he immediately places on the table a small icon of Saint Nicholas, which opens like a book, so that the bearded protector of sailors stands up and I can keep an eye on him, a good-luck charm against storms.
The first boat on this journey—the fishing boat specialized in giant crabs from Kamchatka encountered on the Russian-Norwegian frontier—had an icon on deck of good ol’ Saint Nick. I have the impression that he’s been with me the whole time on this Slavic journey accompanied by bodies of water, even on dry land, between one lake and another, one river and the next, like the Viking ships that made it to Kiev from the Baltic or like the boat of Väinämöinen, the shipwright bard of Finnic legend, carried on his back amid the birch trees of Karelia.
The next day, in the few hours that we’re on board, a lot of things happen. Everyone knows that a ship is an extraterritorial space, where the rules that apply on land are no longer valid. The Bulgarian challenges a Russian to a chess match, and after a well-mannered confrontation that goes on for hours, the two almost get into a fistfight. In the disco bar, on the other hand, a stormy love story is born between a pallid Caucasian (Circassian) woman and a blue-eyed Turk, and the whole ship seems to have been sucked into that clandestine tryst, which the protagonists do nothing to hide. A Ukrainian from Podolia recounts the Gulag epic of his parents. I feel I’m a hundred thousand versts from Odessa. Lost in space.
I take inventory of my personal belongings and discover that the contents of my backpack have changed. There is a new equilibrium between things given and things received. I no longer have my knife, some drawing books, the mosquito net, colored pens, or a book on the White Sea purchased in Murmansk. Instead I have the book on Nordic sagas I received as a present from the wolf-man on the shores of Lake Onega. A necklace from Shungut. The crest of the Russian Boy Scouts, attached to my buttonhole by a soldier in the house of a pope. A box of old coins received from a Lithuanian hitchhiker who works as a joiner.
But a lot of things I have received as presents are not here. They have been consumed along the way. I’m missing the smoked fish of Captain Nikolai with which I crossed over into Russia. I’m missing the reindeer meat I got from the Laplanders, the pancakes cooked by Alya, the sweet queen of the blini in Petrozavodsk. And then the goat’s milk from Osipa in the Carpathians, and the awesome distillate of barley (served with fish, butter, and brown bread) offered by Rita and Volodya, the two Russian Lithuanians in their house that was once a synagogue. Not to mention the countless piping-hot cups of chai (tea) poured as a sign of friendship by the world’s most hospitable people. The time has come for drawing up the balance sheets.
I received much more than I gave. I encountered a few brigands, but the great majority of those I met along the way were good people. Many of them, especially the poorest, were ready to offer the foreigner a roof to sleep under or to accompany him for a part of the journey. But of all these things, of perhaps the most precious things I received, nothing remains. Except for shreds of notes dispersed throughout seven notebooks. I wonder if I’ll really be able to render the human density of this journey.
It’s raining, night returns, the Caledonia sails into a curtain of clouds hovering at the water’s surface. Alone on the bulwarks, I squeeze all the negritude I can from the Black Sea. Coal, oil, cast iron, ink, squid juice. Thousands of years ago, the Black Sea was a lake, and the Bosporus, a mountain gorge between Anatolia and the Balkans. Then, more than seven thousand years ago, a tumultuous spillover occurred. At the end of the Ice Age, the levels of the seas grew higher, and the Mediterranean overflowed the thin barrier of the Bosporus. The gorge became a huge cascade of fifty million cubic meters of water every day, and the new sea swelled by a meter every week, forcing the shoreline populations to escape toward the Danube, the Caucasus, and the Middle East. First it was thought that the Biblical Flood was an exceptional spate of the Tigris and Euphrates, but today the overflow of the Mediterranean seems to be the winning hypothesis. Surveys of the bottom of the Black Sea confirm it. Underneath, regular strata of lacustrine fossils; above—with a clear gap datable to about 5000 BCE—disordered strata of seashells, stirred by an enormous ladle.
As the Caledonia sails along on the biblical waters of the flood, one of the two Moldovian models is cuddled up on the stern, wrapped in a colorful shawl. The captain walks out onto the bulwarks to smoke. A young Muscovite biker tells me the story of General Alexander Samsonov, defeated by General Erich Ludendorff at the Battle of Tannenberg, in Poland, during the First World War. Before surrendering, he tore the epaulets off his uniform in anger, and now those very same epaulets have been found by chance in a bush, ninety years later, by a farmer.