The kids invited me to play football with them on the overgrown village pitch. We headed over to the patch of grass and began kicking the ball around until after a few minutes a purple Lada raced down the grassy track before coming to a sudden halt in a dust cloud behind one of the tree log goalposts. The driver, a rough looking man in a sleeveless vest and military shoulder tattoo shouted out the window.
‘Vova, Masha, get in the car now!’
‘Dad, we’re playing football!’ the young boy shouted back timidly.
‘Vova get in the fucking car now I said.’
Vova and Masha said goodbye and with heads bowed trudged off through the long grass to their father’s car.
‘We are just having a game of football comrade,’ I shouted over to their father, ‘Come and join in.’
He ignored me and instead sped off along the grassy track whilst the kids waved sadly out of the back window.
I sent Lena home and returned to the house of Anna Alexandrovna.
‘I was thinking you would stay the night,’ she said when I entered, ‘I can prepare a place on the sofa for you. No point paying money for a hotel and besides, I’d like the company.’
Later in the evening we sat together on the sofa in her lounge-bedroom watching a Russian tv serial set during the war. Soviet soldiers were running at an enemy gun nest in the rubble of Berlin, being cut to ribbons heroically.
‘I was in Germany too,’ Anna said matter of factly over the sound of exploding grenades.
‘Visiting relatives?’ I replied, not realising that the events on the screen had collided with a memory.
‘No, I was sent to the concentration camps to work during the war,’ she replied, not taking her eyes off the screen.
‘Oh…how was it there?’ I replied clumsily.
My Russian, whilst having been greatly improved during my time in Minsk, still lacked the kind of subtlety or finesse needed to approach such topics with any kind of sensitivity.
‘Well they didn’t treat me so bad, others had it much worse. Our soldiers suffered terribly and the Jews worst of all.’
The shrill sound of the Bakelite phone rang out from the other side of the room. Anna Alexandrovna leveraged herself off the couch to take the call, picking up the receiver with her bent fingers.
I grabbed a beer from the fridge and went out into the garden for some fresh air. The night was perfectly still, the only sound to be heard that of Anna Alexandrovna’s distant voice coming from somewhere inside the living room.
The tranquillity of provincial life could be beguiling and for a brief moment I considered the possibility of starting a new life in the village. I could build a cottage, take a local wife and spend my days tending to my vegetable patch. But I had spent enough time in the region not to be so quickly deceived by the romanticism of the provinces. The short summer months when the land was a colourful palette of greens and yellows and butterflies fluttered through the air was merely a pleasant interlude before the snow and sleet would return turning villages into quagmires of muddy slush for months on end.
When I eventually returned to the living room Anna Alexandrovna had made a bed for me on the sofa. I lay down on the cotton sheet and fell asleep to the sound of her snoring from the other side of the room.
FOURTEEN
I spent the following days riding antiquated buses and hitchhiking through the gently undulating countryside that was bathed in a yellow light, visiting orderly towns and farming communities that merged into one in my mind’s eye, little distinguishing them from one another: Mazyr, Salihorsk, Slutsk, Dovsk…all with their Soviet built hotels and nylon curtains, all with their well-kept parks and Lenin statues, all with their Communism and Cosmonaut streets. And all with their sad history.
It was through this region that German Army Group Centre swept after the launch of Operation Barbarossa, and following in their wake the feared Einsatzgruppen, rounding up and slaughtering Jews by the thousand. Children, elderly, disabled, all treated with the same cruelty. Shot, hung and burned to death. By the end of the war more than 800,000 Jews had been murdered on the territory of modern day Belarus. The non-Jewish population fared little better.
From the farming community of Glusk, another town where the Germans had ruthlessly slaughtered the Jewish population, I caught a bus to Bobruisk, arriving at the city bus station on a grey and miserable evening just as it began to rain. Kitsch plastic signs hanging from the station ceiling pointed travellers in various directions: to an empty hair salon where a bored hairdresser sat idly watching her reflection in the mirror, to a dusty bar where a friendly barmaid served warm bottles of beer and sweet pastries to village men who drank in silence. Opposite the bus station on a main road stood a large billboard showing a photo of a young child out of whose mouth came a speech bubble filled with the sad plea: ‘Please come home sober tonight dad’.
Bobruisk had once been known as the Jewish capital of Belarus, Jews having emigrated to the city in large numbers from less tolerant parts of Russian Empire in the nineteenth century, finding work in the lumber business from which the city had grown wealthy. They chopped and sawed trees from the surrounding forest before shipping the planks north to the Baltic Sea ports where they were hammered and nailed into the shape of hulls for the Russian Imperial Navy. On June 28, 1941that all changed when the German Army rolled into town, and before the end of July more than four thousand of the city’s Jews had been publicly shot in the main square. By the time the Soviets liberated Bobruisk three years later over thirty-thousand Jews had been murdered reducing the Jewish population of Bobruisk to practically zero.
I set off along the attractive boulevards of the city in search of a place to stay taking temporary shelter in doorways and bus stops when the rain intensified from drizzle to torrential. I had arrived in Belarus with clothes suited for a warm continental summer however this year the weather was proving to be somewhat unpredictable. On some days the thermometer had barely reached 15c. Eventually, wet and cold, I made it to the far end of Lenin Street where I found the Hotel Kujbysheva hidden behind shabby apartment buildings in a poor suburb of the city.
The receptionist sat at a desk in the lobby behind which stood shelves stocked with numerous varieties of beer and chocolate.
‘We have a room but I’m not sure you’ll like it, you’re no doubt used to more comfortable settings. Are you sure you wouldn’t prefer to stay in the centre?’ she said, misjudging the level of comfort I was used to or willing to pay for.
Through a door to the left of the reception hall was the hotel’s restaurant in which a band were busy tuning their instruments in preparation for the beginning of a wedding party. Immaculately made-up young women sat on the lobby sofas besides their men in their grey polyester suits. The contrast between young women and their partners in the provinces never ceased to amaze me. Men who in the West would struggle to get a date with anyone ended up marrying models in Belarus where men were a rarer commodity and thus held more power in the sexual market place.
In the hotel’s vestibule, sheltering from the rain and waiting for the bride and groom to arrive stood their parents holding an ornate tray on which sat a loaf of black bread and a cup of salt, the traditional welcome in Belarus. I walked back into town in search of a meal and company, neither of which were easy to find in the torrential rainstorm that had by now flooded the town. The residents of Bobruisk had had the good sense to stay home, leaving just myself and a few sodden policemen in plastic trench coats to reluctantly walk the streets wishing we were elsewhere.
The restaurant I had been recommended by the hotel receptionist turned out to have closed down a couple of weeks earlier. I stopped a passerby who was running to escape the storm, but he had no idea where another restaurant was to be found in the centre of the city. Defeated I began the long walk back to the hotel, eventually becoming so soaked that there was no point in taking shelter to avoid the rain. It seemed however that my arrival at the Kujbysheva had caused something of a stir
amongst the wedding guests who by now were in high spirits having had a couple hours of drinking inside of them. The groom’s father approached me in the lobby asking if I was the Englishman who was staying in the hotel before ushering me into the dining hall to join the party, seating me at a table covered in half empty plates and bottles.
A man seated beside me asked why I was in the city and soon like a game of Chinese whispers my reply had spread along the table from intoxicated ear to ear until by the time it reached the far end my mistaken identity as a respected journalist visiting the country on an important assignment was complete. With my newfound status I was ushered from my seat and moved further along the table past empty bottles and spilled soup bowls and squeezed into a chair next to Lyudmila, a school headmistress from a nearby town who spoke impeccable English with the kind of sultry Slavic accent you only hear in spy movies. She had a hairstyle that made her look like a Belarusian Margaret Thatcher which visibly pleased her when I told her.
‘An English journalist here in Bobruisk, how intriguing,’ she purred through purple lips moistened by alcohol, before commandeering a bottle of Gagarin Vodka from a waiter with the confidence of someone who was used to being obeyed and proceeding to fill my glass.
‘The Times?’ she asked.
‘Occasionally, but mostly freelance,’ I lied, not wanting to ruin my reputation at the table too quickly.
An overweight man sat opposite, perspiring heavily beneath the restaurant’s lights as he watched us through glassy eyes. Beside him sat a young brunette in a pink low cut dress who seemed to be doing her best to resist his pawing advances. He raised his vodka glass in a silent toast in our direction before sinking the cup of clear liquid. Lyudmila leaned close to me, the smell of alcohol left her purple lips and floated up into my nostrils.
‘My husband,’ she said, apparently unconcerned that he was groping the pretty brunette besides him.
‘Look at the men here, not at all creative types like you,’ she said, completely misjudging my talents. I liked Bobruisk, people seemed to have an inflated opinion of me.
She filled her glass with more of the Gagarin and downed it in a large gulp that revealed a mouth peppered with golden teeth.
A handful of male guests left the dining room in conspiratorial chatter before returning a few minutes later having slipped into ballet dresses in the lobby that exposed hairy legs. The band on the stage struck up a tune and the guests cheered as an impromptu rendition of Swan Lake was performed by the male ballerinas. The groom, a handsome man in his twenties wearing a military uniform, was manhandled from his chair and led into the middle of the group where he pirouetted unsteadily on the shiny parquet floor, his medals jangling on his jacket. Hotel staff poked their heads in the doorway to watch the spectacle, clapping along with the guests as the male ballerinas swirled around bumping clumsily into tables and chairs. I felt Lyudmila’s claw like hand rest on my knee under the table and begin to slowly massage my thigh. She purred something in my ear that fortunately I could not make out over the loud thud of the music. I smiled at her and nodded, hoping that would be enough to stop her repeating whatever it was she had said.
At the end of the performance the band struck up a popular tune and people headed to the dance floor in pairs. A large man staggered towards our table with his shirt unbuttoned revealing chest hair as thick as the forests of the country and proceeded to lift Lyudmila out of her chair and pull her to the dance floor, manhandling her protestations with ease. I grabbed some sandwiches and took my chance to retire to my room.
Sometime later I was woken by gentle tapping on my door. At first, I thought I was dreaming, but then I recognised the sultry slurred voice on the other side.
‘Arthur it’s Lyudmila, open the door please… Arthur!..Arthur?’
I pulled the blanket over my head and fell back to sleep.
FIFTEEN
The following morning I headed into town to pick up a hire car. The manager of the office had been surprised to receive my call, his usual clients being locals and the occasional émigré who was visiting relatives or searching for lost family lines. A true outsider was still a rarity in Bobruisk.
Bus travel had been frustrating. I’d speed through villages I would have liked to have stopped in and pass inviting turn-offs I wanted to explore for no better reason than to know what lay at the end of the road. With a hire car I would be the captain of my own ship.
The manager led me around the vehicle inspecting it for bumps and scratches, explaining the rules of hire which amounted to one thing.
‘Drive only on main highways please,’ he said, handing me the keys.
‘Sure,’ I lied.
I headed out of the centre of Bobruisk passing Lenin statues and war memorials before immediately getting lost in the maze of grey concrete high rises and industrial buildings on the edge of town until eventually finding my way across the Berezina river on which fisherman floated in inflatable green dinghies.
Heading south-east towards the town of Vetka, I drove on smooth roads seeing little traffic except for farm vehicles and minibuses that sped between the farming communities of the region, depositing passengers at decaying provincial bus-station buildings which had not been modernised since the fall of the empire.
The towns and forests of the region to which I was heading were, with the exception of the official exclusion zone, the most radiated in the country. For some reason the clouds of deadly radioactive particles that had drifted north from Chernobyl on those April days had drifted over the forests of Vetka and deposited their contamination throughout the region. In fact so contaminated did this region of the country become that the few locals who remained behind referred to it simply as ‘The Zone’.
A radiation map I had seen online showed the entire region sitting inside a blob of dark maroon, the colour that indicated the deadliest levels. It was a region with abnormally high rates of cancers and birth defects. Before Chernobyl the cancer rate in this eastern region of Belarus stood at 82 in every 100,000 people. After the explosion however that number had risen to 6000 in every 100,000. A devastating increase.
As I approached Vetka after a few hours of following straight roads through fenceless farmland, large radiation signs began appearing on the edges of the road. Different from the small hand painted signs I had seen further south, these indicated not only a warning skull but also the Caesium levels contained within the dark tangle of trees that enclosed the road, forming a tunnel of deadly greens and bronzes. More signs warned of fines for anyone foolish enough to leave the bitumen and be tempted to enter the soft bed of irradiated pine needles. And yet despite that, as I drove by, occasionally peering deeper into the woods I’d see the bright cardigans and the bent backs of mushroom pickers foraging in the deadly undergrowth.
I lunched in a small worker’s canteen in Vetka, a town which in the past had had a thriving ship building industry. Steamships had been built in the riverside boat yards, shaped from timber sourced from the forest that it was now forbidden to enter. Due to the Chernobyl evacuations in which over 40,000 of the town’s population were hastily relocated to safer areas of the country, the town was now nothing but a half-empty backwater town where nothing much happened, the boat yards having long since stopped producing vessels of any kind.
It felt like driving through a movie set. The buildings in the centre were in good order, but they seemed uninhabited and the streets were devoid of life or activity. A city bus passed by with no passengers on board, stopping at a bus stop where nobody waited to board. I found an empty cafe where a waitress barked at me when I ordered a coffee as though the unexpected arrival of a customer in the establishment was more than she was prepared to take and I left town soon after, crossing the river along which the steamships had once plied their trade before entering the radiated forests once again. Butterflies bounced off the car’s windscreen, a hare crossed the empty road in the distance and disappeared into a thicket of wild flowers and if it were not for the
radiation signs that lined the road at regular intervals, I’d have been forgiven for thinking all was well in the forests of Vetka.
The bitumen of the highway ran north for an hour through the dense woods. I drove along it until bored by the monotony of the pencil straight highway, I decided to turn onto a back road that left the forest and ran through the pretty valley of the River Pokats, passing small wooden villages that lined the banks of the slow moving waterway.
In the sleepy farming village of Babichi which was just a small collection of brightly painted wooden cottages built around a large war memorial, I pulled up outside the village shop in search of a cold drink. The rain and cold of previous days had now been replaced with the heat of a Central European summer pushing temperatures on the road into the mid thirties. The shop worker, an overweight woman wearing a blue apron like all shop workers in the country, peered her head over the shelves of alcohol and chocolates to see what I was searching for.
Lyudmila Borisova had worked in the government food shop since leaving school and knew every face in the surrounding villages who all made their way to her shop for supplies on pension day or whenever they’d managed to scrounge a few roubles from a neighbour. A local villager with bloodshot eyes was leaning on her counter and telling her his difficulties in finding a wife.
‘What happened with that girl from Krichev you were living with last year?’ she asked him.
‘Dasha!? She just drank my booze whilst I broke my back in the fields.’
‘You haven’t done a day’s work on the farm in years Vova!’ a female voice shouted out from a storage room in the back.
Vova lived five miles away in a small village which had no shop meaning a long walk every time he needed to buy something. I offered him a lift home.
The Burning Edge Page 7