The Burning Edge

by Chichester, Arthur

  He soon left the cracked pavement and headed down a small muddy slope into the woods, following a track that meandered into the depths, away from the glances of passing pedestrians and bus passengers. I stayed a good few metres behind, always keeping his back in view, intrigued to know what he planned to do but also a little disgusted with my own excitement and voyeurism at what was about to take place. Would I try to stop him or not?

  At one point he left the track and penetrated the tangled undergrowth of the woods, his neck bent backwards, his eyes no doubt scanning the trees for something suitable. I followed him into the undergrowth, snapping branches underfoot and cursing my muddied shoes and jeans as I went. It was by now obvious that I was following him, and yet he did not stop to ask me what my intentions were or tell me to fuck off. Perhaps he was glad of the unexpected company.

  His movements started to become more erratic, taken more in haste as he darted this way and that across paths before plunging back into the undergrowth like an animal, searching, scanning, but there was a problem he had seemingly not considered; this forest of birch trees with their branchless trunks was no place to loop a rope.

  Eventually, defeated by nature or perhaps just his own fear of the final moment when as the rope would slowly tighten and suffocate, he would thrash his body, or perhaps remembering the people he would leave behind, he gave up his search, instead taking a seat on a fallen tree trunk, still clutching his rope. Once again our eyes met but now the hard confrontational stare from the trolleybus was gone, replaced instead by one robbed of any strength and fight. I stepped forward from the trees to say something, to offer some words of comfort I had not yet formulated, but he shook his head, not wanting me to cross the muddy divide between us. Instead he stood up and walked back through the undergrowth to the path that led back to the trolleybus stop. I followed him there and watched him board the number seven, returning to whatever it was he had sought to escape.

  NINE

  On an overcast morning I sat on a platform bench at Gomel’s central bus station surrounded by an assortment of locals all waiting to board buses heading to the villages and towns of the region. I was travelling to Rechitsa, an old trading station situated upriver on the banks of the Dnieper. An elderly man with scarred hands approached me wheeling a shopping trolley full of chunks of broken glass and mirror.

  ‘Look at this young man,’ he said, pulling out a small home-made cutting device before proceeding to slice a shard of mirror in half with the ease of a hot knife through butter.

  ‘Only eight roubles for you, they cost thirteen in the shop.’

  He looked at me, his eyes longing for me to reach into my pocket and take out some coins. He was shabbily dressed in worn-out shoes and threadbare trousers that once might have been the lower part of a decent suit that he no longer had use for. Before I could speak a babushka reading the newspaper on the bench behind me leaned over and asked him how much his implements were.

  ‘How much! Eight roubles, that’s eighty-thousand in old money! You can buy them in the shop for six. Don’t buy it,’ she said, turning to me and obviously indignant at his mark-up.

  ‘Hey keep your nose out of it,’ he said raising his voice and sensing the possibility of a rare sale slipping through his scarred hands.

  ‘I’m not going to keep my nose out if you’re going to cheat people,’ she said whilst other waiting passengers craned their necks in our direction, eager to listen in on the developing argument taking place on the platform.

  ‘Six roubles to you,’ he whispered to me when the old woman had turned back to her newspaper.

  I shook my head, as impressed as I was I had no need of such an item I told him.

  ‘Five roubles then,’ he finally offered in one last desperate appeal before accepting I wasn’t going to reach into my pocket. Cursing under his breath at the babushka who he no doubt blamed for his failed sales pitch he wheeled his trolley of broken glass and mirror away to perform his magic trick to others.

  After some time the Rechitsa bus pulled into a berth beneath the platform roof from where pigeons sat shitting onto the heads and bags of the waiting travellers. The driver revved the diesel engine to announce both his arrival and his impatience to depart, sending black fumes into the crowd of queuing passengers, making them cough like tuberculosis patients. Once we’d boarded and settled into our seats the driver turned and asked if everyone on board had purchased a ticket already. We all nodded and satisfied by our replies he wrestled the gear stick into first and drove out of the station.

  In all my bus journeys in the country rarely was my ticket checked. I could have travelled the length and breadth of Belarus for free had I wanted. It reminded me of what Edvard had told me in Hoiniki about the honesty of the Belarusian people. Often I would leave my laptop unguarded on bar room tables whilst I went to order a drink, or leave my phone on train bunks whilst using the bathroom knowing that when I returned it would still be there. I rarely locked the door to my hotel room, often leaving my wallet on the bedside table knowing the cleaning lady would be entering and never felt for a moment that something would disappear. And it never did. And the lack of crime goes beyond petty theft. Fears that we have in the West are almost completely unknown to Belarusians. Parents send their young children to school on public transport by themselves without worry and women walk alone late at night through dark housing estates knowing that they are perfectly safe. On the rare occasion that I did read about a grizzly crime in the press it was almost always committed by a Russian or an immigrant, almost never by a local.

  The bus puttered along the broad avenue of Prospect Rechitsa passing the October Cinema and the city’s Festival park where even at this early hour people strolled with ice creams and beakers of kvas in hand before we headed into the endless suburban maze of pre-fabricated apartment buildings where fashionable Gomolovians waited at trolleybus stops heading to the offices and factories of the city. And then all of a sudden a gape opened up in the expansive wall of concrete before us, and we slipped through it, immediately passing out of the grey to be suddenly surrounded instead by the thick green forests that enclosed the city from all sides.

  We crossed the outer ring road, passing a roadside prostitute who stood alone in a lay-by waiting for early morning customers, before following a perfectly straight ribbon of black bitumen deeper and deeper into the depths of the woods. Cottages stood hidden amongst the same trees from which they were constructed long ago before eventually our bus emerged out of the shadows and into a bright flat landscape of yellow fields that gently undulated towards the horizon in all directions. The passengers on the bus dozed fitfully, occasionally being jolted awake as we hit bumps in the road on our journey through the rural landscape. After crossing the slow flowing Dnieper on a rutted concrete bridge we passed housing estates set back from the highway that were built for the displaced. Grandchildren of the evacuees played football in overgrown fields on the edge of their village and rode along dusty tracks on bicycles too large for them, before eventually on the horizon appeared the stubby industrial chimneys that stood guard over the listing suburban factories of our destination. Rechitsa.

  I checked into a hotel in the centre of town and was handed a heavy key to a room which was no doubt unchanged since the day the hotel had first opened its doors decades before. Such hotels were rapidly disappearing across the former Soviet Union. Huge Intourist monoliths considered too brutal on the outside and too dated on the inside for the tastes of modern tourists and travelling salesman were being bought up by international chains and having their dark innards ripped out to be filled instead with shiny plastic and leather in an attempt to create the illusion that you were not really deep inside the former Soviet Union at all. It was only when you looked out of your hotel room window onto a landscape of rusting garage-sheds, cracked apartment blocks and staggering drunks on the streets below that the carefully constructed illusion was broken. However, for now at least, international hotel chains have not penetr
ated the provinces of Belarus and so these old boxy hulks of steel and cement constructed under Brezhnev and Gorbachev, with their cracked masonry that occasionally thuds in chunks onto pavements and passing pedestrians below, were still clinging to life and resisting change, a metaphor for Belarus.

  After a greasy dinner of potatoes ‘village style’ and chicken cutlets in the hotel’s restaurant I walked the streets of the city aimlessly, not knowing where I was going, stumbling as I went on cracked pavements that ran unevenly between apartment buildings. Built into basements were shops that bore functional names advertising exactly what they sold: ‘Shoes’, ‘Products’, ‘Flowers’.

  Crossing a barren square in the shadow of a derelict office building, a woman pushing a pram containing a small sickly looking child approached me.

  ‘I bet it’s nicer where you live, look at our pavements, it’s impossible to push the pram,’ she said, stubbing the toe of her sandal on a raised paving stone to illustrate her point.

  ‘How did you know I was not a local?’ I asked.

  I wore clothes little different from the people who passed us on the street.

  ‘You look happy,’ she replied.

  Katya, a tall elegant woman with features that hinted at an aristocratic bloodline, was taking her young son for his daily stroll through town past empty shops and unnoticed Lenin statues. She would be heading to a swimming pool with her son the next day and suggested I go along if I had no other plans.

  With grey skies above I continued wandering the streets until I stumbled, almost literally, upon a subterranean bar built into the bowels of a featureless government building. The bar was empty except for a gruff barman and an overly attentive waitress who hovered around my table waiting to pounce on any used napkins as soon as I placed them in the ashtray. As on the streets above, the cult of cleanliness in the country continued below ground. I tried using the bar’s Wi-Fi signal but as usually happened in Belarus things were not so simple. First you had to register your number and wait for a text message with a code that you would then have to enter to get online. I couldn’t be bothered and gave up which was no doubt the whole idea of the convoluted process, and instead headed back to the hotel.

  Two middle-aged prostitutes with hard features only slightly softened by thick make-up sat at a table in the hotel’s lobby cafe. They attempted to make seductive eye contact as I waited to be served at the counter, but I wasn’t that lonely yet. I headed up to my room with a couple of beers and removed the bedside phone from the hook. I’d had my sleep disturbed too many times by late night propositions in Soviet hotel rooms over the years.

  On the table lay a tourist brochure printed some fifteen years ago that had been translated into English, German, and somewhat intriguingly, Dutch, the faded cover of which bore a photo of smiling women dancing in a field of wheat wearing bright national costumes. The inside was filled with random facts and statistics from the region’s oil industry that the editor had deemed would be of some interest to the town’s occasional foreign visitor. It was no wonder Belarus had an image problem abroad when even the local tourist board was so out of touch with what foreigners were interested in. I drank my beers and went to sleep.

  TEN

  The following morning I ate breakfast in a worker’s canteen on the edge of town that was attached to a small red bricked factory. Large rusting pipes covered in torn insulation fabric rose from metal supports that crossed the road and snaked in and out of the building at various heights. But apart from the occasional sound of banging emanating from somewhere deep within the distant inner sanctum, the factory was silent. The stubby chimney had long stopped emitting smoke of any kind, instead a family of storks nested up there from where they perched, surveying the surrounding fields.

  It was still early and the canteen wasn’t yet open when I entered the heavy wooden doors, but the cook, a burly woman who told me she had worked there since being laid off from her job as a teacher, took pity on me when she realised I was from out of town, hastily setting a place at a table in the large empty hall which was overlooked by a mural of factory workers in greasy overalls. The men and women held shovels and spanners aloft with muscular arms whilst wearing purposeful expressions on their faces indicating, I suspected, that they were not merely building things, but were in fact building the future.

  The cook fussed over me bringing glasses of fruit juice, fried eggs and sausage.

  ‘What are you going to eat in our town?’ she asked, as though there was nowhere else to dine.

  ‘I’m ashamed that I have nothing more to feed you with!’

  I assured her I would survive, but she wasn’t convinced as she watched me from behind her counter, her chins resting on her fleshy forearms, occasionally shaking her head and sighing at my presumed plight. Afterwards I thanked her and paid before passing along the dark corridors and back onto the street. A minute later I heard someone call out and turned to see her waddling out onto the canteen’s steps breathing heavily from the effort before handing over a salami sandwich wrapped in kitchen film. The image that many people hold of Slavs as being a gruff and unfriendly race is completely erroneous.

  A few hours later I found Katya sheltering from the rain in a shop doorway with her young son near the bus station. Together we bought tickets and along with a handful of grandmothers boarded and took our seats at the back of a bus that was heading to a sanatorium situated somewhere out of town in the forest. The bus departed and rode through a suburban landscape of rusting steel garages and unfinished construction projects begun in the 1980s when the government had both the money and inclination for such things, but now after the collapse these concrete eyesores covered in protruding spikes of rusting rebar, stood uncompleted all over the country. Spiked sentinels of the past that must have pierced the soul of every pensioner who passed them, reminding them of what was, of what could have been, and what never would be again.

  Eventually we joined a road that headed through a tunnel of green forest for mile after mile before eventually turning down a winding lane, passing pretty country dachas where well built middle-aged women in bathing suits and rubber boots worked on their vegetable plots. Katya wore a sleeveless denim shirt that revealed heavily bruised arms. I gazed out of the window whilst she fed her son some porridge she had prepared and imagined a story as to how she may have gotten such marks; A brutal lover called Igor who would come home from the factory at night, down a bottle of Stalin vodka and take out his frustrations at a failed life on Katya with his fists. Afterwards, filled with regret he’d rest his head on her bruised body and cry tears of regret and shame. Katya would stroke his head and whisper through bloodied lips, ‘I forgive you Igor’. A sudden pot hole jerked me out of my daydream.

  The sanatorium when we reached it, was located at the end of a long stony driveway covered in spongy pine needles that weaved through the woods from the brightly painted bus stop where we had been deposited. We walked the path along with the stout babushkas who carried string sacks stuffed with towels and bright swimming caps until coming to the entrance of the complex where a dwarf sized statue of Lenin painted from head to toe in silver paint stood guard. Someone had stubbed a cigarette out on the top of his bald head.

  At first glance the sanatorium, a collection of two storied red bricked buildings, looked as though it might be abandoned. Paint peeled from cracked window frames and glass panes in some of the rooms were missing. It was only the children's clothing hanging from string washing lines on upper floor balconies that indicated otherwise. Built into the brickwork along one of the walls with white tiles was the year of construction: 1964, the year Leonid Brezhnev was elected leader of the Soviet Union which had heralded the beginning of the superstate’s most prosperous period when world oil prices were high and the Soviet coffers were full. The sanatorium had been built and run by one of the town’s paper factories as a place for its workers to be rewarded with cheap retreats. That was all back then however. Now in the modern post-Soviet world, the
sanatorium which no doubt lacked the financial backing of the factory survived by offering cheap retreats to Belarusians from small towns who could not afford holidays on the Red Sea.

  The three of us walked along the gravel paths passing well-behaved children who walked hand in hand with their grandparents. Dimitri, Katya’s sullen young son, ran on ahead.

  ‘I can’t afford to buy him many things since his father left but the government pays for two swimming pool visits a month so I bring him. There is nothing else to do in the city.’

  The indoor pool was housed in a large wooden building that had been constructed recently. The Belarusian government was investing heavily in sporting facilities across the country meaning even the smallest towns now possessed a sport’s hall or ice rink. The three of us spent an hour swimming around in the warm waters being shouted at by the lifeguard whenever it appeared we might be enjoying ourselves a little too much before eventually retiring to an adjoining cafe for ice cream.

  ‘Your life is like a dream to me,’ Katya said after I’d told her about the travels I had undertaken the previous year.

  ‘I’ll never get the chance to see the places you talk about. Just to see Moscow or Saint Petersburg now would be something wonderful. I’ve not been to Minsk in five years.’