The Burning Edge

by Chichester, Arthur

  When I returned up the path an hour later feeling invigorated by my swim the village had stirred into life. A horse stood tethered to a garden fence post impatiently stomping its hooves, waiting to be led to the fields and the sound of well handles and slamming outhouse doors filled the morning air. Babushka Valya came out and ushered me into the warmth of the kitchen, seating me at the table besides the simpleton who was noisily eating a bowl of porridge.

  ‘Yura is not my son but I treat him like he is,’ she said, talking about him as though he wasn’t there.

  ‘His parents abandoned him here when they moved to Russia, they didn’t want the burden anymore. He’s not the only one like him in the villages, they say it’s because of Chernobyl but I don’t know about those things. I have lived here all my life and I’m healthy. He’s gentle, but he likes to drink and people take advantage of him. He has the mind of a child.’

  Yura smiled inanely and slurped down another spoonful of steaming porridge.

  An hour later I waited on a wooden bench in the centre of the village for the bus that would take me north to Gomel, the nation’s second largest city. Yura suddenly appeared at speed over the brow of the main street peddling frantically on his bicycle and coming to a skidding stop before me in the dried mud of the road. I presumed I’d forgotten something at his adopted mother’s home and he’d come to return it.

  ‘Give me something for a drink please friend…just a little money,’ he said, pleadingly.

  The sound of his voice surprised me. I had taken him for a mute having never heard him say a word to babushka Valya since I’d arrived. A large woman waiting for the bus beside me told him to clear off, raising her walking stick in his direction as a threat. No doubt long used to being shooed away by all and sundry as he begged for coins he did not protest. Instead, he smiled his simple smile and wished me a safe journey before re-mounting his bicycle and proceeding to ride off down a dirt track towards the swiftly flowing river.

  I recognised some of the waiting pensioners from the faces that had peered over the fence the night before. They nodded in my direction smiling their wrinkled faces and continued talking among themselves until after some time a bus from the state transport company pulled up in the centre of the village and we all boarded, squeezing our bodies and bags into cramped hard seats that would offer little protection to our backsides from the bumps in the rutted roads of the region.

  The driver of our bus, a dapper looking man who smoked cheap Belarusian cigarettes throughout the journey, took our money and handed out change before climbing over the gear stick into his seat and guiding us along a road that passed through small villages surrounded by forest and river, stopping occasionally to pick up elderly passengers who stood clutching plastic buckets of fruit and vegetables by the side of the road.

  On we drove through the forests and fields until coming to a stop at a barrier that blocked the road on the outskirts of an old village. Through the driver’s windscreen I could see a young soldier manning the red and white pole with a machine gun strapped across his chest. A sign besides the barrier announced: ‘You are leaving the restricted border zone - Be prepared to show your pass’. Seemingly I had inadvertently entered a restricted area through the back door when I’d crossed the river the previous day. It was certainly not marked on my map as being out of bounds but I doubted that anyone would accept that excuse.

  The young soldier stepped onto the bus and slowly scanned our faces. Trying to avert his gaze and not stand out in any way from the other passengers I pretended I’d suddenly found something fascinating in the flat distant fields to look at, like a supermarket cashier when you enter your pin number. In the reflection of the window I saw the soldier say something to the driver I couldn’t hear who simply shrugged and took another drag on his cheap cigarette impatient to continue the journey. Seemingly satisfied, the soldier stepped back off the bus and raised the barrier, allowing us to set off again towards the city.

  I breathed out in relief. It wasn’t that there was anything to fear, I was obviously not a spy or of much interest to the authorities but I could not be bothered spending hours explaining how I had come to enter a restricted border zone accidentally and then filling out the inevitable forms promising not to do it again.

  We continued along the small back road that hugged the bank of the river Sozh before crossing a four-lane highway and following a winding road that snaked through thick pine forests that made the air outside my open window smell sweet. Set back from the road among the pines, large sanatorium complexes began appearing outside of which people milled around or were busy taking part in outdoor exercise classes, stretching their bodies to the commands of their instructors.

  Sanatoriums were set up in the time of the Soviet Union to offer domestic holidays to the workers, foreign travel in those days being the reserved privilege of the nomenclature. They were usually situated in areas of beauty, on lake shores or seaside beaches, and evidently, the outskirts of cities like Gomel where they continue to entice people seeking a cheap holiday at home. Families walked along the road in colourful swimsuits carrying butterfly nets over their shoulders and rubber dinghies for the river beach under their arms in preparation for a day in the sun. Outside one sanatorium stood a small concrete statue of Lenin who stood smiling with his hands in his pockets, no doubt taking in the holiday atmosphere of the resort. I was to see Vladimir Ilyich standing on pedestals all over the country: outside universities, kindergartens, hospitals and food factories, erected as constant reminders to Soviet citizens as to who they had to thank for their daily bread.

  The driver, still puffing away on his cigarettes, led us out of the sweet smelling pine forests and towards the outskirts of Gomel, passing along a wide boulevard in the shadow of huge apartment buildings that towered over small wooden cottages that had somehow managed to survive the wars and the Soviet reconstruction of the city. On both sides of the road patriotic billboards welcomed us displaying huge photos that glorified amongst other things, the beauty of the nation’s countryside, the Border Guard division and muscular Olympic heroes who grinned from up high whilst clutching golden medals.

  We crossed a high bridge below which flowed the wide river Sozh where parents walked the boardwalks with their children before eventually, after passing along a street of wooden homes and buildings baring brass busts of famous Soviet citizens who had once resided in them we came to a stop on a large square outside the city’s railway station.

  An elderly passenger disembarked the bus laden with heavy bags full of apples and pears which she had brought to the city to sell. I offered to help her and together we slowly walked past the fountain on Station Square, up the seemingly never ending Lenin Street with its empty cafes and book shops, and then turned down silent back roads overlooked by fine pre-revolutionary buildings before eventually, sweating in the midday heat and beginning to regret my offer of help, we arrived at an outdoor market where old women of the villages wearing bright headscarves sat at tables selling produce from plastic buckets.

  The old woman nodded at a group of gypsy women loitering at the entrance to the market when I placed her heavy bags on the counter from where she would attempt to sell them to the few locals who were shopping in the heat.

  ‘Do you have them in your country?’ she asked.

  ‘They wait for me at the end of the day and demand money. When I refuse they spit and put their curses on me. I suppose in your country they don’t dare behave like that. Batska should sort them out.’

  She gave me three of her apples and I left her to face the gauntlet of spittle and gypsy curses alone at the end of the day.

  Instead, I headed to the city centre in search of a place to stay, eventually finding a hotel situated behind the flying-saucer shaped circus building halfway up Communism Street. Looking up at the hotel from the outside it was hard to believe the building could have been built for the purpose of welcoming guests. Built of six stories of blocky featureless design that someone had dec
ided to encase in rough concrete the colour of shit, it was the ugliest building I had seen on my journey. However, at just $10 for a room it was cheap. The friendly receptionist who sat in a wooden cubicle surrounded by Bakelite telephones handed me a guest card whilst bored looking muscular people lazed on the lobby sofas.

  ‘Circus performers,’ she said, nodding in their direction.

  ‘Sitting out the summer break until the season starts again.’

  After exchanging my guest card for a key with the dezhurnaya in the lobby, a ridiculous remnant from Soviet days when meaningless jobs were created in order to give people something to do, I climbed the stairs, passing the children of lion tamers and knife throwers who made the carpeted landings their play areas whilst their mums kept an eye on them from large hallway sofas where they sat gossiping among themselves.

  My room was exactly the same as all hotel rooms would be on my trip. Spotlessly clean and consisting of a hard single bed pushed against one wall and a desk and television set pushed against the other. In front of the windows hung transparent nylon curtains that in no way stopped the sunshine from passing through them meaning that in all my hotel stays in the country I would always wake at dawn when my room would be flooded with bright summer sunlight.

  I can’t say I had high expectations for Gomel having heard reports from friends in Minsk who had been only too happy to leave the slow paced provincial city behind but it impressed me nonetheless.

  It was an attractive and welcoming place populated by friendly locals who spent their evenings hanging out in the city’s parks and strolling along the sidewalks on the banks of the Sozh, enjoying beers in the outdoor cafes that were dotted throughout the centre. Founded a thousand years before on a bluff overlooking a bend in the river, Gomel became an important trading fort from where early Slavic tribes traded pelts with the wealthy town of Kiev downriver. The fort built by those early settlers is now long gone, the city that replaced it, an eclectic mix of architectural styles. Beyond the pre-revolutionary wooden cottages and early Soviet buildings with their imposing columns in the centre of the city, the late Soviet-built parts of Gomel were a showcase of Socialist city planning. Communism street, the city’s main thoroughfare, ran for miles from one end of the city to the other, boasting large hotels, department stores, cinemas, parks, theatres, sports centres and everything else a Soviet citizen could have desired. And towering above it all were long rows of apartment buildings to house them. I spent my first afternoon riding on trolleybuses that whizzed along wide thoroughfares delivering me into the outer regions of the city where a huge web of housing estates named after heroes of the Soviet Empire stood out against the ever present backdrop of the forest.

  Unlike in many former Soviet republics where the old system was reviled, there had been no rush or desire to eradicate history in Belarus. I sat in a park watching pensioners play chess on Soviet Street before having a beer in a pub on 40 Years Of The Belarusian Soviet Socialist Republic Street. Then there were the smaller arteries of the city named after lesser known figures: Frunze, Kalinin, Okhlopkov. In fact the Soviet past was not only preserved in Belarus, it was celebrated.

  Products in the city’s supermarkets were sold in nostalgic mock-Soviet packaging. Ice cream wrappers were emblazoned with hammers and sickles, vodka brands were named after Gagarin and Stalin, everyday essentials were advertised as being of ‘Soviet Quality’. In the evening I dined in a Soviet-kitsch restaurant where waitresses delivered plates of food dressed in the uniforms of the Komsomol and where dishes were named after leaders and events: Brezhnev’s fish soup, Salad of the Twelfth Party Congress.

  Television was no different. Whenever I switched on a television set in a hotel room there would be a programme set in Soviet times. It is only in the West where the Soviet Union has been demonised, and we therefore expect the people who lived under the system to have the same revulsion towards it that we have been indoctrinated to. To those who spent the majority of their lives under that system however, the Soviet period, or to be more precise, the post-Stalin Soviet period when the terrors and abuses ended, was one of stability and relative prosperity where work was plentiful and products were cheap. Practically every taxi driver I talk to in the former USSR reminisces about growing up in those days, of holidays spent hiking in the mountains of Central Asia or summers spent sailing along the Volga and partying in the river boat discos. Old women regularly tut at grim newspaper headlines and say ‘It wasn’t like that under Brezhnev’. That does not mean however that people have a desire to return to Soviet rule or a USSR 2.0, people are rightly proud of the nation’s independence, it’s just that what was achieved in the arts, the sciences and engineering and the simpler lives people led back then is a source of nostalgia and pride for many, especially the elderly who find the new world of dog-eat-dog difficult to come to terms with.

  After some searching I found the city’s Jewish cemetery. Gomel, like many towns and villages on the edge of the Russian Empire, once had a large population of Jews. Expelled from larger cities such as Moscow and Saint Petersburg hundreds of years before under the Pale of Settlement, they were forced to move to provincial towns along the distant edge where they rebuilt their lives and kept their traditions. Modern gravestones of black granite bore stern-faced etchings of the deceased contained beneath wearing their Sunday best. The more elaborate of the gravestones depicted elements of the deceased’s life: a delivery truck, the factory gates, an air force jet.

  Among the graves I met Larisa. An elderly woman with a bent back but full of youthful energy she sweeps the graves clean of leaves and places empty vodka bottles in the bin for the equivalent of $40 a month. It’s why the country is so impeccably tidy, in fact there can be no country in the world as clean and tidy as Belarus. From the capital to the smallest provincial village, parks and roads are swept and tidied every morning by an orange vested army of elderly sweepers topping up their pensions with the broom.

  ‘Have you visited Lesha?’ she asked me, using the diminutive form of the name as though she had built a personal relationship with the deceased men and women whose graves she swept every day.

  She led me to a large polished gravestone depicting a young man in the military uniform of the Soviet Army. Over his left shoulder an attack helicopter I recognised from a Rambo film fired a missile towards a barren Asian mountain.

  ‘Killed in Afghanistan,’ she said sadly, ‘And over there Sasha, him too. We don’t want any more war. Of course, we don’t have much money here but I always tell my grandchildren that peace is the most important thing. Belarus has suffered enough already. The Fascists killed so many of us, that’s why we don’t want to suffer again.’

  She led me by the arm to a monument that commemorated Gomel’s Jews that had been executed by the Germans during the war. I studied the fading inscription which told of the night Jews were rounded up and executed soon after the invaders had arrived in the city. As I did so I heard the sound of Larisa crying behind me.

  The next day, whilst riding a bus in the suburbs of the city I met Irina Edvardovnaya. Like all Belarusians you only have to ask a polite question and they immediately pour out their life story.

  ‘My grandfather was from Madrid and came to Russia after the Spanish civil war. He believed in Communism, believed until the day he was shot. I grew up in Siberia but fell in love with a Belarusian man and moved here in my twenties. We had a couple of children together but my daughter is dead and my son has left for Poland.’

  I told her I intended to write a book about my journey.

  ‘Well you can write that the government killed my daughter,’ she said, her voice suddenly becoming louder with emotion which garnered looks from the other passengers.

  ‘She was protesting in the capital and a policeman stuck his gun in her chest, right here,’ she jabbed a finger just beneath her sternum.

  ‘She collapsed and died in hospital a day later. My son didn’t have faith in the government after that and claimed political
asylum in Poland. He recently graduated there,’ she said with a mother’s pride.

  ‘And what about you, do you have a future in Belarus?’ I asked.

  ‘No, there is nothing left for me here. I recently met a man from Syria on a dating site who lives in Prague. I hope we will marry and I can move there.’

  She offered to introduce me to a friend of hers. Formerly a professor at Gomel University but now a member of the opposition, he had taken part in the protests against the government alongside her daughter. I gave her my number to pass on out of politeness but knew I would not take his call when it came.

  I had spent time with opposition members at informal gatherings and rallies in Minsk but had soon learnt to avoid them where possible. Funded by and spending much of their time abroad in the European Union, I had little time for their willingness to run their country down to anybody who would listen. Instead I preferred to hear the opinions of the people who knew the country best, namely those who stayed in their homeland and struggled to find their way within it.

  When later that evening I received a call from an unfamiliar number I ignored it and went for a burger in my favourite fast food joint instead.

  EIGHT

  I first saw him whilst riding one of the city’s green trolleybuses. Middle aged and wearing the same clothes I had seen being sold in the region’s shops, there was nothing that marked him out as being any different from the people I passed on the streets of the provinces every day. When our eyes met across the tops of the seats he stared back confrontationally, challenging me to look away. I didn’t know why exactly but something told me there was a certain desperation about him. Perhaps it was the sweat running down his forehead despite it being a chilly morning in the city or perhaps it was the length of rope he clutched tightly in his hand. He disembarked at a stop that stood on the edge of the forest, somewhere deep in the suburbs of the city where concrete and nature collided abruptly and for some reason I felt compelled to follow him.