The Burning Edge

by Chichester, Arthur

  I’d been too open with my experiences. The fact was that for a thirty-something single mother living in Rechitsa, escaping the provinces was something of a pipe dream. Her hopes she told me, lay in finding a foreign husband on the internet, hope he would visit and fall in love and take her and Dimitri back to his country. America, Germany, Mozambique…It didn’t matter where, just so long as it was away from the cramped apartment she shared with her grandmother and the boredom of life in provincial Rechitsa. Tractors and women; the country’s two biggest exports.

  ELEVEN

  The following morning I took a stroll along the banks of the Dnieper which flowed swiftly past the northern edge of the town set against a backdrop of suburban factories and listing apartment buildings. One of the mightiest of European rivers, it was along the Dnieper that the Viking Rus tribe had sailed from the north bringing with them a culture from Scandinavia that would eventually become the founding state of Russia: Kievan Rus.

  I bought a plastic beaker of kvas from a seller on the river’s embankment. A refreshing mildly fermented drink, kvas is sold from bowsers on street corners and city parks in the hot summer months all across the country. Taking my cup of the dark liquid I joined an attractive babushka on a bench who was keeping an eye on a young blonde boy playing on a rusty swing.

  Marina Nikolayevna was a retired medic who had left her southern village and moved north to Rechitsa with her young family soon after the Chernobyl disaster. She pointed to an old rusting hydrofoil that lay on its side like a beached whale on the opposite bank of the Dnieper.

  ‘I used to ride the Rocket down to Kiev on weekends in the past. Such a beautiful city. We would walk along the Kreschatik and sit in cafes taking in the atmosphere. Kiev was a different world from the village, it was as close as we could get to feeling like we were abroad in Soviet times.’

  - Lesha be careful on the slide, it might have sharp edges! - she called out to her grandson who took no notice.

  ‘I graduated from medical college, married an engineer and began working at a clinic in a small village near Gomel, that was in the Brezhnev era, such happy memories. On weekends my husband who was in the Party, would commandeer a truck from the chicken factory around which the village was built, and we’d take the children to Gomel for the day. Once a journalist came and interviewed me about my work, asked me all these questions about my life as a medic in the village, journalists loved such stories back in those days, the heroic worker fulfilling their quota, serving the people. Anyway, he took my photo and I thought nothing more of it but then one day my cousin phoned from the city and said “Marina have you seen the newspaper?” I went to the kiosk in the village and there on the front page of Belarus Pravda was a large photo of me. My story had been printed and suddenly I was famous in our republic.’

  - Lesha don’t go too high on the swing, you’ll fall off - she shouted out.

  ‘Not long after that the letters started to arrive. They came from all over, men telling me how they had fallen in love with me. Letters from Minsk, Kiev, Odessa…I had so many proposals! It was the prisoners who wrote the most romantic letters of all. Of course, they did not say they were in prison but you could tell from the frank on the envelope. Well my husband didn’t like all the attention I was getting, so I had to hide the letters, but they kept coming. One man wrote that his wife had died, and he was lonely and wanted to find love again. I had a colleague at the time who was looking for a man, so I gave her his address and they began to correspond. He invited her to Kiev, and she took the Rocket down the Dnieper. Well he turned out to be a crank, didn’t take her to dinner but tried getting her straight back to his bedroom instead.’

  - Lesha put that down, it’s dirty!

  In the evening I waited for Katya by a bus stop called ‘World Peace’ opposite the war memorial. She had offered to show me around the city park and arrived half an hour late, stepping off the trolleybus wearing a short dress and high heels and saying nothing in the way of an apology. Anything less than an hour is not considered late by women in the former Soviet Union.

  We headed to a well-kept park in the centre of town and walked along the paths with other young couples from the city who strolled around together talking in hushed tones. In one corner someone had set up a bouncy castle and trampoline, but they stood unused by the passing families. The owner sat on a broken plastic chair looking bored.

  ‘Who has two roubles to spend on such things?’ Katya said sadly.

  We found a beer tent set up on a patch of brown grass near the House of Culture, its plastic roof flapped in the evening breeze indicating that a summer storm was approaching. I ordered a couple of beers, and we headed to a table in a torn corner of the tent.

  ‘I grew up in a village in the south, and we were evacuated after Chernobyl,’ she said, half-way through her beaker of beer. ‘I suffered with my health after the disaster like most children in the village and so when I was twelve I was chosen to be part of a programme that sent children who had been affected to Italy for the summer months. I ended up living with a family in Ancona who had a son a year older than me, and we soon fell in love. I returned the following year and spent another summer with the family. Such fond memories, days by the sea, trips to the mountains, Rome, Venice… Myself and Antonio, that was his name, would spend our evenings on the roof of his house. We would look at the stars and hold hands, it was all so innocent. We talked of being together in the future, living in Italy, he would become a successful architect and that I would become a teacher. Well of course life did not work out like that. The programme ended and I never returned to Italy again. We wrote letters promising to wait for each other of course, I remember going downstairs in the mornings to the post box in the vestibule to see if a letter had arrived from abroad. Well eventually the letters arrived less often and then stopped arriving altogether, and I suppose I stopped writing too. I met a man after university and got married, but I never forgot Antonio. A year ago after my divorce I decided to search for him on Facebook. I knew it would hurt me to see him, his life, his achievements, but I was curious. Maybe I still had a naive hope we would correspond and fall in love again. Well he had become an architect as he said he would, had married and had a child, a beautiful little girl with long dark hair and brown eyes. I didn’t write to him, what would I say and would he even remember me?’

  Seated at the table next to us were two middle-aged men who were silently sharing a bottle of vodka and a plate of gherkins. No doubt hearing my heavily accented Russian, and eavesdropping in on our conversation, they would occasionally turn around to look at us. I knew what was coming and eventually one of them spoke.

  ‘Why are you hanging out with a foreigner?’ he said to Katya, ignoring my presence. ‘Come and join us instead or are you too good for Belarusian men?’

  ‘You have a problem with that comrade?’ I responded, angry at his rudeness.

  He was going to say something but his drinking companion topped up his glass and said, ‘Leave it Andrusha.’

  The man gave Katya a look of contempt and turned back to his vodka.

  It wasn’t the first time Belarusian men had made comments to a girl I’d been with, shaming them for wanting to spend time in the company of a non-native.

  ‘I have to leave this place, what hope is there here?’ Katya said despondently.

  We walked along city streets in the darkness as trees swayed in the winds that were swirling through the town, making our way slowly through a dark maze of apartment building courtyards containing rusty swings and cigarette butt sandpits before eventually arriving at the five storied Kruschevka building where Katya lived crammed into two small rooms with her son and grandmother. Outside under a lamp that bathed us in fluorescent light I said goodnight. Katya put her hands on my waist and leaned in to kiss me. A silence filled the closed space between us.

  ‘Katya listen, I have…’

  ‘I understand,’ she said testily, cutting me off before I could finish and no doubt em
barrassed that she had misread the signals. I would not be her ticket out of the provinces.

  ‘Will I see you again before you leave town?’ she asked, no doubt already knowing the answer.

  ‘Maybe,’ I lied.

  She turned and pressed the magnetic-key into the slot before disappearing into the darkness of the vestibule where she once collected her letters from Italy, the clunky steel door slowly closing with a final metallic thud behind her. I turned and walked back to the hotel along cracked pavements as the rain began.

  TWELVE

  The next morning I found myself sitting inside the city’s shed-like bus station. On the wall above the ticket window was a sketch-map of the region showing the towns and villages that local services ran to. I chose a name at random and headed to the waiting room that contained a contrasting mix of people: young stylish women who were returning to city universities after the holidays and the elderly people who inhabited the region’s villages. There was a distinct discrepancy in the number of elderly women versus elderly men in the country, the nation having lost a generation of men to the war and Stalin and after that to the bottle. The babushkas in the waiting room wore cardigans and brightly coloured headscarves tied in knots under their whiskered chins, their stout legs pushed into rubber shoes that looked as though they could withstand any season or terrain. Shoes that defeated the Nazis. The few men in the room wore smart shiny shirts tucked into black trousers. No matter how poor a person was in the country they were always well turned out, carrying themselves with a certain threadbare dignity.

  A bus heading to Minsk arrived and the young women in the waiting hall clip-clopped out in their high heels to board, leaving me alone with the babushkas and dedushkas. The people of the hinterland. A man of about fifty wearing a loose bandage around his neck sat down in the vacated formica seat next to me. He pressed his finger into the bandage and plugged a hole in his throat that enabled his words to be heard. In a quiet voice accompanied by a constant wheeze of air he told me he was travelling to a provincial town to spend three months in hospital. He pointed at his bandage and raised his eyebrows as if to stay ‘this fucking throat will be the death of me one day.’ I could make out the contours of his bony limbs beneath his clothes. Taking pity on him I handed over a five rouble note I had loose in my pocket and told him to use it for his medicines which he had informed me were prohibitively expensive for a man on an invalidity pension. He plugged his throat with his finger and wheezed a thanks. I went to use the toilet behind the bus station which was just a porcelain hole in the floor and when I returned I saw him buying bottles of beer from the station kiosk with the note I had given him. He looked at me sheepishly when our eyes met.

  Eventually the bus arrived and the man with the bandage and the babushkas with kindly smiles hastily gathered their plastic bags and bundles and made for the door, gently elbowing each other out of the way to get a good seat on the bus. I boarded last and took my place alone at the back, spreading myself out comfortably on the row of dusty seats.

  The bus left the city, passing the familiar rusting garage sheds and industrial buildings and headed north-west, towards the Berezina river in which Napoleon’s Grande Armée had drowned on the retreat from Moscow.

  THIRTEEN

  The bus followed the road for mile after repetitive mile through the forest, occasionally overtaking overloaded logging trucks that belched black diesel fumes as they struggled to climb the gentle gradients. I lay down and nodded off into a fitful sleep only to be woken by our bus suddenly braking which threw me into the back of the seat in front. There had been an accident up ahead. After fifty metres we slowly passed two cars that had crashed head on at speed. Besides the mangled bonnets lay a large elk which had no doubt been the cause of the accident. A limp pair of feet missing a shoe stuck out from beneath a fireman’s silver sheet by the side of the road. A man, bloodied and cut, crouched besides the body with a dazed look on his face and the elderly passengers on the bus simultaneously crossed themselves and muttered prayers.

  I disembarked at a bus stop decorated with brightly painted Soviet cartoon characters somewhere to the south of the town of Svetlogorsk. On the opposite side of the road stood a large concrete star which marked the entrance to a collective farm. Someone with an artistic side had carved large toadstools from tree trunks and placed them, along with a collection of garden gnomes, besides the track that led to a distant housing estate. The effect was surreal. In a shop situated at the turn-off I asked where I could find a meal in the village. A babushka queuing for bread overheard and offered to feed me in exchange for some help with her garden.

  We set off along the dusty track together, passing the brightly painted toadstools and gnomes before coming to the old wooden houses of the original settlement, and then a little further on to the entrance of her housing estate built of identical white bricked houses. Those of the exiles. From a distance the houses had looked well-built and solid but as we entered her garden and walked up the path I could see up close the shoddy workmanship of houses built in haste. Cracks ran down an outer wall and window frames didn’t fit tightly, the gaps between wood and brick having been stuffed with old newspapers to keep out the winds and snows that would soon blow across the flat landscape once again.

  ‘Go on inside,’ she said, ushering me into her home with a friendly push in the back, ‘I don’t want the neighbours thinking I’ve taken in a young lover.’

  Anna Alexandrovna led me to her vegetable patch at the back of the house that was hemmed in by a listing wall that looked as though it would topple over and crush her at any moment, instructing me as to which vegetables I should pull from the dark soil and which tomato plants should be lifted and tied to the wooden frames she had constructed in her garden.

  ‘I’m seventy-nine and have arthritis in my fingers,’ she said raising a hand of swollen knuckles and bent fingers that reminded me of knotted rope.

  It was hard to imagine how someone her age managed to keep a vegetable plot at all.

  Afterwards when I had earned my keep she cooked a simple pasta meal in her bright kitchen whilst I went to the bathroom to wash the soil and berry juice from my hands. Inside there was just a cold tap above the sink. Water would have to be boiled on the stove and then poured over oneself in order to shower in the colder months. She was fortunate however. In the wooden houses of the old village we had passed there was no indoor plumbing at all meaning the elderly residents had to use the garden well and wooden outhouses at the end of their gardens even in winter when temperatures would drop far below zero. It was that toughness and ability to endure the unendurable, passed down through generations that has allowed the Belarusian people to survive despite the attempts of greater forces to wipe them out.

  Afterwards we sat at the kitchen table eating a meal off crockery stamped with the USSR kite mark and I asked her how she had ended up living in the exile’s village.

  ‘We were evacuated the summer after the catastrophe. My husband and I arrived on the back of a truck loaded with our furniture along with other families from our village. More than twenty big Kamaz trucks. I cried the whole way. It was hard at first, the residents of the village didn’t want us here and us Belarusians are not shy to say what they truly think. They thought they would be contaminated by us, parents refused to send their children to the village school because they didn’t want them sitting in the same classroom as evacuees. In the shop people would ask us why we didn’t go elsewhere, why did we have to come to their village. And at the same time there was a lot of jealousy. Why have the evacuees been given brand-new houses with indoor bathrooms they would ask. They talked as though we were living in palaces, but does this place look like a palace to you? The government eventually had to send a bigwig from Minsk who gave a speech explaining that there was no danger, that we were not bringing radiation to their village and eventually over time people stopped worrying about us and returned to their own struggles, and we slowly re-built our lives again, but we never f
orgot what we’d left behind. In some ways I think many of us felt guilty, as though we had betrayed our homes and villages by deserting them. Some people left notes addressed to their houses when they left, “Don’t be sad little house, we’ll be back one day,” some wrote, but of course none of us went back.’

  After dinner, I went for a stroll around the estate. At the far end of the grassy track that served as the main road through the settlement stood a row of prefabricated cuboid homes which had been abandoned long ago, the doors and windows now boarded up with wooden planks. Three young children ran over, excited to know what the stranger was doing on their patch.

  ‘Can you show us your phone ?’ the eldest of the children, a girl of about twelve immediately asked.

  I handed it over, and she stared at it with a sense of wonder.

  ‘Take our photo, take our photo!’ her younger friend said.

  The three of them lined up in front of the abandoned houses and grinned for the photo. Just then a woman stomped along the track towards us with her arms crossed front of her.

  ‘What are you doing here?’ she demanded to know.

  ‘Just passing through and having a look around the village,’ I said, surprised by her bluntness. ‘Is that a problem?’

  ‘Alright,’ she said as though giving me permission to stay, but she was obviously suspicious as to why a stranger would suddenly appear in the village.

  ‘Lena, thirty minutes and I want you home,’ she said sternly to the youngest child before stomping off.