Don’t Go There: From Chernobyl to North Korea—one man’s quest to lose himself and find everyone else in the world’s strangest places

by Adam Fletcher

  “Who orders a quadruple rum and coke? That’s not a thing.”

  “In Transnistria it is thing.”

  He gestured to the empty bar. “If you stopped trying to rip your customers off you might have a few more of them.”

  Her eyes narrowed further. “How dare you talk to me this way.”

  The woman sent her meek male colleague—who had pinned himself against the wall in an unsuccessful attempt to make himself invisible—outside to wake up the bouncer. The bouncer was sleeping in a chair, his head leaning against the wall. It was a slow night, after all. Possibly it was always a slow night.

  The bouncer came inside rubbing sleep from heavy eyes. The barwoman talked to him in Russian. He blinked, slowly, seemingly unaware what any of this had to do with him. He let out a loud yawn. The woman removed one hand from her hip and began waving it in Chris’s direction. The bouncer scratched at patches of his bald head.

  “Since I know you like them big, I gave you bigger one.”

  Chris tutted. “You can’t charge me for things I don’t order. It doesn’t work like that.”

  I was pretty sure it did work like that, just as long as the sheriff said so. Eventually she backed down but only after Sergei stepped in and worked some of his calm, rational, diplomatic magic. Chris’s money was returned to him. She spent the rest of the evening scowling at him, and anyone else foolish enough to enter her eyeline.

  At 3am, lights were switched off. We were still the only customers. “I fucking love y’s all,” said Jack, propping himself uneasily against the bar. I’d wanted to go home hours ago but had toughed it out so as not to look like a stick in the mud. We began putting on coats and thinking of sleep. Two of the group had wandered outside together, thinking of something else. There was a lot of hugging, singing, some wobbling.

  Mrs Quadruple pushed a piece of paper across the bar to Jack. It was a bill. We were not expecting a bill. The drinks had been paid for as we’d ordered them, sometimes for more than we’d ordered, even. An extraordinary amount of swearing then occurred, most of it from Jack. I’ll censor it now, for those of a sensitive nature.

  “I don’t love you, you f****** charlatans,” said Jack, after scrutinising the bill. “They’re trying to fleece us f****** two dollars per f****** song. They’re taking the p*** is what they are, c***s.”

  Jack’s outrage was understandable. Two dollars went far in this country. The average wage was just two hundred dollars a month. Our karaoke bill was $110. “Two dollars per f****** song? Are ye having a laugh? I could buy the song for less, and sing it as much as I want,” added Chris, standing next to Jack, shoving the bill back across the bar. “Where does it say it costs that much?” He looked around the bar for a price list or menu. Nothing in the woman’s face moved. Her hands were stuck firm to her hips.

  “You never asked,” she said. “I vould have told.”

  The life-averse male barman had discovered some very important dusting and bottle rearrangement work to be done in the far corner. He was summoned back and told to rouse the slumbering security guard once more. The guard took even longer to gift us with his dopey presence, which he announced with a loud yawn and some lead-footed shuffling. He looked as if he were being asked to referee a game he’d not read the rules of. The woman squared up to Chris, across the bar, her finger within swatting distance of his nose. “Who are you to give me advice on running business?” she said.

  “I’m the punter. F*** this s***hole. Let’s go, I’m not paying it.”

  She threw her arms up in the air. “I don’t set the prices. It’s nothing to do with me.”

  “Yeah, well, you don’t communicate them either, do you, love?” an irate Jack fired back at her. I thought midnight-blue Ladas were going to be called. Sergei stepped tactfully back in and convinced the three people who had held the microphone hostage all night to pitch in and pay. It was strongly recommended, he said, without saying why. Group tours can be nice, but they depend heavily on the group. In this one, I was a fifth wheel on a party Lada. I already wanted out.

  The next day was a beauty. I found the main street approaching a light bustle (by Transnistrian standards). Almost all the people in the broad streets were advanced in age, huddled against the strong wind as they walked over whitewashed pavement. Decrepit Soviet trolleybuses rattled by; commuters pushed up against dirty windows covered in propaganda art showcasing a time of prosperity long gone.

  After breakfast, Sergei led a tour of the city. It held my original positive impression of it—calm, unabashedly Soviet, favouring brutalist architecture, not unfriendly or hostile to outsiders, just confused by their existence. Sergei explained that the country’s current president had got elected on an anti-sheriff ticket. The city had only one supermarket, imaginatively called Sheriff Supermarket, but this man, Yevgeny Vasylyevich Shevchuk, had promised that if he was elected, he’d open a second one. As political promises went it was certainly less ambitious than “no taxation without representation,” “better dead than red,” or “make Transnistria great once,” but it had worked nonetheless. His new supermarket had just opened. “Take a look inside,” Sergei said. It looked like any other supermarket, anywhere in the world.

  “So is it cheaper than the sheriff’s?” Mads asked.

  “No, I think it’s pretty much the same. Probably it’s really the sheriff who owns it anyway,” Sergei added, with his usual portion of nonchalance. “Or a friend of his.”

  A taxi passed us. Inside, riding next to the driver, was a person of colour. Given the immigration officer’s comments, I found this as unexpected as passing a wolf in downtown Detroit.

  “You have black people here?” I asked.

  “Of course,” he said, running a hand slowly through his cropped hair. “We have two.”

  My head jerked backwards. “What do you mean two? Like two in the whole country?”

  “Yeah. They play for the basketball team.”

  “Wait, there’s a basketball team?”

  “Yeah.” He nodded. “It’s called Sheriff.”

  Of course it was. On the way to a flea market we passed several Lenin statues, including one outside of the government offices. Lenin statues were being removed from the Ukraine now, as it began airbrushing its history. Transnistria was fighting progress. Sergei showed me an election poster of the sheriff’s son. “Do you think things will change if the sheriff’s son gets elected? Will Transnistria become a real country?”

  “No.” He laughed. “They say every day in the paper that they’re working on becoming recognised. It’s bullshit. Nothing ever happens. They don’t want anything that would threaten their monopoly.”

  After lunch we drove out towards an abandoned brick factory. I told Sergei about Chernobyl. He furrowed his brow. “Why would anyone want to go there? Transnistria is full of abandoned buildings! When I travel abroad, I like to visit things like Starbucks, McDonald’s, or shopping malls. Things we don’t have here.”

  On the way, we stopped at a supermarket in a town outside of Tiraspol. It may or may not have been owned by the sheriff. Sergei returned from it clutching a plastic bag containing a bottle of vodka, an onion, a loaf of bread, and some cheese. At the abandoned factory’s gates he told us to stay put, and disappeared inside with his loot. He returned empty-handed. “You can go in now,” he said. “I’ve bribed the guard.”

  We passed the guard’s house. He lived in the derelict building nearest to the complex’s rusty iron gates. Outside his hovel was a bathtub full of junk and scrap metal. He came out to take a cursory look at us. “Hello there, captain. How you been keeping?” said Jack. The man didn’t reply. He was wearing a beanie hat, and had a thick, unkempt black beard. He didn’t smell of roses. He did smell of regret. Sergei said he’d probably been in prison and with nowhere else to go after his release, the government had posted him here to guard what was left of the facility. After we’d been exploring for ten or fifteen minutes, an expensive off-road truck pulled up. A fat man got out
and whistled to Sergei. They had an intense conversation. It sounded like war was imminent. But it looked, from Sergei’s face, as if they were old friends inquiring about the health of each other’s mothers. Everything was a negotiation here, everyone wanted to be bribed, yet Sergei never seemed fazed or flustered by the chaos and uncertainty within which he was forced to live. I found him extremely impressive. He was perfectly adapted to his surroundings, like a chameleon, but a chameleon who understood that his surroundings were nonsense and he really shouldn’t keep being asked to blend into them. He wore his stoicism like a shield. The stranger got back into his truck and drove away leaving a cloud of dust.

  “Who was that?” we asked.

  “Some guy,” said Sergei, flatly. “He says we have to leave, and that the other guy I bribed is not in charge and so I should have bribed him instead.”

  Just then the security guard with the wild beard appeared from a different entrance to the hangar we were exploring. He and Sergei had a similarly threatening-sounding conversation.

  “It’s okay, we can stay,” Sergei said, afterwards. “The boss man talked to that normal security guard guy and he gave him my number and now everything is okay.”

  “So you have to bribe them both in future?” I asked.

  “Yeah. Or, I told Mr Truck I would, anyway. I’ll just call the normal guy I bribed today and ask him if the other guy is around. If he’s not then I’ll come.”

  “You’re very calm about all this,” I said, sitting on some metal piping.

  He shrugged. “Why wouldn’t I be?”

  “I don’t know. You don’t get tired of everyone trying to exploit each other?”

  “Sure I get tired of it,” he said, like a tortoise about its shell. “But what am I going to do?” I might have tried getting really angry, or having a little cry, or moving to Moscow.

  I sat next to Sergei on the ride back to town. “Do you think there’s any ideology here?” I asked. “Do you think people want to go back to Communism?”

  He scratched his chin. “No. That’s just what the government says. This is a cowboy country. It doesn’t stand for anything, except money.”

  “What do you think is going to happen? Do the people want to have another revolution?”

  He laughed. “I’m not sure they wanted the last one. No, I think the people just want to be left alone, mostly.”

  I frowned.

  “Why did you want to come here, Adam?”

  “I don’t know. I thought there was something different happening here.”

  “Do you think that now?”

  “No.” I sighed.

  “Do you regret coming then?”

  “Not really. For some reason I’d still rather be here than in Berlin.”

  His eyes widened. “Why? I’d rather be in Berlin.”

  “I don’t know. Everything just sort of functions there, you know? It’s boring.”

  We passed a Soviet tank that was now a memorial of their war of independence. Sergei’s dad had fought in it. “Boredom is a luxury good,” he said.

  I gasped. Boredom is a luxury good. This simple statement dug its claws into me and didn’t let go. Of course. I’d lost sight of the extraordinary privilege inherent within boredom. Most people in the world don’t get to decide whether or not to engage in politics. Don’t feel so safe and secure and bored that they actively go out looking for danger, just to feel more alive.

  Having a life like that didn’t make me normal—it made me special. I was the unusual one. The weirdo. The outlier. Boredom was not the enemy. My ingratitude of it was. I’d been looking at it wrong. Writing it off as a commodity, when for most of the world it would be impossibly luxurious. “I’d happily swap your boring normal life for mine.” Sergei smirked.

  I cleared my throat. “Yeah, perhaps not right now.”

  13

  Chişinău, Moldova: “I AM THE DEVIL INCARNATE!”

  A billion lions, windsocks, bountiful harvests

  Our group’s next destination, Moldova, was one of the ten least-visited countries in the world, and so largely unused to tourists. The short train ride from Tiraspol, Transnistria, to Chişinău, Moldova, was passing smoothly for my group of intrepid, roving alcoholics, lubricated as they were by the liquid charms of Transnistrian cognac. I was staying on with them through Moldova to Bucharest.

  “So, like,” shouted David, over the music coming from his portable speaker, “who do you think would win in a fight between a billion lions and the sun?” He was an English history student openly hostile to silence.

  I groaned. “A billion lions?” said Mike.

  The carriage’s attendant appeared at the door. Each carriage of the train had its own personal attendant. Perhaps a throwback to socialism’s drive for full employment. It was unclear what exactly our attendant was supposed to be doing, beyond tightly filling out an official-looking uniform. The group was endeavouring to keep him as busy as possible by spilling things, breaking things, and shouting things.

  “SSHHHH. Too loud.” The man pointed at the speaker. David turned it down. The man left. David turned it up again. Mike fell back in his seat. “It’s actually quite hard to imagine a billion lions.”

  “I know, right,” said David. “Now imagine the sun, and have them fight.”

  Chins were scratched. Brows furrowed. “How would that, like, work?” asked Chris.

  David shrugged. “I don’t know. But it’s a lot of lions, right? They could, like, bite the sun?”

  Mike took another swig of cognac from the bottle being passed round. “Yeah, my money’s on the lions.”

  The song “Sweet Home Alabama” played. We were a long way from both. The group sang along, collapsing over each other affectionately like a litter of idiot puppies. At the start of the journey our carriage had been full. A woman with dyed blonde hair and knee-high leather boots was the last to break. She lasted twenty minutes. I found this impressive. She snarled something under her breath as she stomped past us. I apologised with my eyes. I don’t think it worked.

  “Lovely to see ya,” Jack shouted at her. “Thanks for stopping by. Have fun in the next carriage, you tool.”

  I felt her pain but couldn’t find the courage to abandon my tour-mates altogether. Were they so totally beyond redemption? Possibly. Probably. Yes. As a compromise quasi-rebellion, I moved a few seats away from them, where I kept myself busy quietly seething.

  I was relieved when we reached Chişinău’s central station, for it meant I was closer to being away from the group. I’d leave them in a few days, in Bucharest. Waiting on the platform, we found a confused-looking man staring vacantly at his shoes—a thin, lanky individual who appeared stretched against his will. His head was shaved around the sides, leaving just one central hair clump: a Mohawk, but brushed forward and prone to flapping, giving him both the appearance and function of a windsock. He was our local guide, Marius.

  In keeping with the tour company’s philosophy of frugality, Marius was not a real tour guide, just a local student impersonating one. Unfortunately, he possessed neither Sergei’s knowledge nor charm. “This is a pretty station. When was it built?” asked Paul, an IT consultant. He tripped as he walked, no longer in a state to consult on anything except poor life choices.

  Marius’s eyes darted upwards. “Erm,” he said. “Yes, it’s quite old.” With outstretched arms he turned and tried to get the group into a flock that could be led towards our accommodation. At present, they were a mishmash of competing geographies scattered over the station’s entrance hall, some singing, some dancing. David and Anne-Sophie were embracing in a dark corner.

  “Everyone,” he shouted. No one responded. He found two people on the periphery, inspecting a phone box, and tried to nudge them back towards the group’s centre, near some ATMs. “Hello. Hello!” he shouted. “Everyone. Attention, please.”

  It didn’t work. The second he loosened his grip on the arm of one straggler, to try to corral another, the first would become distr
acted by something shiny or alcoholic, and wander off. It was an entertaining scene, for everyone but Marius. It was going to be a long three days for him, I think he now realised. He tried whistling. No one responded. He grimaced, and massaged the duster on the centre of his head. Ten minutes in and he already looked exasperated.

  “Who wants to go to a club?” he yelled.

  The group snapped to attention. People emerged from the shadows, alert and responsive. A loose huddle formed around him. Had someone mentioned a club? Yes, the group wanted to go to a club. Why had the possibility not been mentioned sooner? Where was this club and why were we not already in it?

  He didn’t take us to a club, the liar. Instead, we walked for ten minutes to the entrance of an enormous high-rise hotel. The sort of hotel that markets itself primarily on its size using clever marketing slogans such as “Size does matter” and “Chişinău’s biggest party.”

  After the AIST hotel of Tiraspol, this one seemed impossibly luxurious. Nothing fell off the wall, even. You sank into the bed, rather than being repelled by it. We had bedside lamps.

  Lamps. Plural.

  It was almost too much.

  After a warm shower I was back down in the lobby waiting for the rest of the group. Weary from having spent another day with twelve people who thought restraint was ordering a beer without a chaser, and that intercultural awareness was knowing how to swear in six languages. Something had happened in Transnistria, although I guess it had been building slowly since Chernobyl. It was a new, poorly defined feeling manifesting in the centre of my chest. I was investigating it cautiously. So far I’d concluded it was homesickness iced with guilt, lightly dusted with regret, and then wrapped in a growing realisation that what I needed next was there, not here. It was a complex emotion. I liked that I was capable of them now. That I was decreasingly apathetic about the human experience.

  At the lobby bar, attempting to locate The Mood and get into it, I ordered my first beer of the day. I was excited to learn more about Moldova. It wouldn’t be hard, since I knew nothing, other than that it had once had a war with Transnistria, which it was in denial about having lost.