‘Stick him in the trunk,’ the female voice shouted out again from the storage room.
‘See how our women are! That’s why us men are so miserable in this country!’
But Vova possessed a natural level of happiness that was rare. Every miserable fact he told about life in the village with its lack of work or women was bookended by a twinkling in his eye and a laugh that revealed two rows of yellow teeth.
We had driven just a hundred metres up the main street of Babichi when Vova suddenly asked me to pull over. On the opposite side of the road two men sat on a bench outside a wooden cottage clumsily arm wrestling each other. At their feet lay an empty bottle of vodka. Vova wound the window down.
‘Get in Stas, I’ve got a lift home.’
One of the men, a tall broad-shouldered man in sandals that revealed dirty feet stumbled over to the car unsteadily, removed his nylon cowboy hat and popped his shaved head in the open window.
‘What the fuck are you doing in a car?’ he asked Vova incredulously, no doubt surprised to see his friend in the unfamiliar surroundings of stitched leather and air conditioning.
We followed the twisting road out of the village avoiding a black snake that slithered unhurriedly into the undergrowth before crossing a low concrete bridge beneath which flowed the muddy River Pokats. A hunchbacked old woman carrying an empty shopping bag shuffled her bent body slowly across the bridge in the direction of Babichi’s village shop.
‘Hey Stas have you got that five roubles?’ Vova said, turning to his friend.
‘I’ll sort you out next week, I’ve got a couple days work in the cow sheds lined up.’
Vova laughed, revealing his yellow teeth again. He’d no doubt heard that one before.
We dropped Stas off at his dilapidated cottage on October Street outside of which lay more empty bottles of vodka and discarded cigarette packets before driving on into the village, passing a collection of empty wooden houses.
‘There used to be three hundred families in the village, now there are just seven.’
‘What happened to all the people?’
‘The war and then Chernobyl mostly. All the villages are dying, young people can’t wait to move away. What’s there to do here?’
We parked up on the grassy edge of Soviet Street that ran through the centre of the deserted village and together walked down through a glade of bright flowers being attacked constantly by insects before crossing a small wooden bridge that spanned a marshy stream of water that barely moved. In the trampled grass near a picnic table lay an assortment of empty bottles of vodka that I suspected Vova had had something to do with. We continued through a small copse of trees before emerging once again into the bright sunlight where a collection of wooden houses stood in varying states of collapse. Vova led me to his, the most ramshackle of them all.
‘I’m practically a tramp,’ he said, suddenly embarrassed, not having expected to be showing a stranger the conditions he lived in, ‘But a happy one.’
He pushed open the front door and led me into a filthy rubbish strewn room that served as his living room. A discarded assortment of newspapers, empty bottles, machine parts and empty cigarette packets covered every available surface. It was a dump.
‘You want tea?’ he asked, searching the rubbish strewn floor of his kitchen for a kettle, but I’d become squeamish in the squalid surroundings.
Instead, I asked him to show me his garden, and relieved to get me out of his home he led me to a plot of land at the back where he levered opened the creaking door to a large wooden barn. Inside, as my eyes adjusted to the darkness, the shape of a fine horse appeared.
‘Malish get out here you fucker,’ Vova said, entering the barn and pulling on the chain around the horse’s neck.
Malish stubbornly refused to budge until Vova whipped its rump with the loose end of the chain sending the horse charging out into the yard, knocking me out of its way and dragging a laughing Vova behind him like a manic waterskier. Once in the back garden a cloud of horse flies immediately descended onto the animal’s head, smothering its eyes and mouth. Malish immediately turned and cantered back into the cool darkness of the barn despite Vova’s attempts to stop him.
An elderly neighbour popped his head over the garden fence.
‘Got your pension Artur?’ Vova shouted out.
The neighbour nodded with a smile and Vova rubbed his hands.
‘I’d invite you to spend the night in my place but you’ve seen what condition it’s in,’ he said apologetically as we walked back to the car, no doubt also reluctant to split the vodka he’d soon be drinking with his neighbour.
‘250 roubles a month the local farm pays and that’s for an eighteen-hour day by the time I travel to the fields and back. I’m not going to slave away for Batska or anyone else for that kind of money, and so I live like this.’
The corner of his eyes wrinkled and the familiar chuckle rose from his stomach but this time it sounded forced.
FIFTEEN ( PART 2 )
The road continued north through the idyllic valley, skirting the Russian border and passing through wooden villages containing more empty houses and war memorials. It was impossible not to be struck by the craftsmanship of these heroic sculptures. In remote villages of no more than a hundred houses the Soviets had commissioned works of art that could easily have graced large city squares. In one village I stopped to inspect a bronze bust depicting the faces of two army commanders killed in the region which had been sculpted by an artist of considerable talent and yet it was placed in a remote corner of the country where few people would ever see it.
At Krasnapole, a small hilly town made up of pretty turn of the century buildings and a large statue of Lenin I turned east, following little used back roads into the eastern bulge of the country that punched its way deep into western Russia. The road was completely devoid of traffic that afternoon, the only vehicles I passed being a convoy of combine harvesters that were returning to the collective farms after a day in the fields. A flock of storks hunted in the freshly cut fields.
Collectivisation had been an agricultural policy forced on the Belarusian people by the Soviet authorities. As the USSR was industrialised in the early days and people moved from the countryside to the cities in search of work at the newly built factories, more and more grain and meat was needed to feed them. The order was sent down to confiscate the plots of land that the serfs had not long before won for themselves and to amalgamate them into farms that would be controlled by the state in the name of efficiency. However like many Soviet farming ideas it soon ended up becoming a disaster. The farmers and land owners who refused to hand over their hard won land and animals to the collective were liquidated or sent to the camps, and the state in its zealousness to acquire more and more food for the urban areas confiscated everything they could, leaving the people in the provinces to starve so the cities could eat. Hundreds of thousands of Belarusians were to starve to death in a region wide famine that killed millions.
Lukashenko has kept the state’s monopoly on the nation’s farmland and the old system of state farms continues. The profits from farming that he argues would be sent to foreign bank accounts were land to be sold to foreign investors, are instead being re-distributed in the vast array of social initiatives that the government of Belarus has rolled out throughout the country. Amongst them is the state guarantee of work for all Belarusian citizens, generous maternity benefits that put other nations to shame, pensions that are in some cases paid from the age of fifty-eight and free health care and education for all. The list goes on but the nation’s economy is small and hence so are the handouts.
As the sun began to set over the fields and forests on the lonely stretch of the eastern highway a monstrous steel factory appeared on the horizon belching black fumes into the azure air where it hung like an oil slick above a distant hilly town. A little while later I arrived under the black fumes in the attractive settlement of Kastyukovichi.
Driving along the
narrow streets of the prosperous little town I passed young couples who pushed prams and ate ice creams in the warmth of the summer evening. A beer tent set up in a pretty park was packed with locals enjoying themselves and it seemed a pleasant place to spend a Saturday night in the provinces.
A young woman out walking her dog along the tree lined central avenue pointed me to the town’s hotel but when I pulled up outside I knew I would not be staying. The building had recently been renovated with plastic double-glazed windows and a neon sign that stood blinking on the roof. Outside was parked an expensive BMW with Russian plates. I had a policy in Belarus of never spending more than ten dollars a night for a hotel and so knowing that modernisation meant modern prices in the country I didn’t bother to stop but instead continued past the hotel on the road out of town, re-joining the deserted highway.
The road continued heading east through the flat borderlands, watched over by storks that sat perched in huge nests on top of telegraph poles and road signs pointed me towards the last town at the end of the road: Hotimsk.
At a lonely bus stop located on the edge of the forest a lanky elderly man holding a bucket of dark coloured mushrooms flagged me down. Was he not afraid to eat food from the forest I asked as we drove past more signs alerting us to the high levels of Caesium in the woods he had spent the day foraging in.
He spread his bony hands, ‘What else am I going to eat?’
I dropped him off at a muddy track that ended at a cluster of dilapidated wooden houses on the horizon.
‘I don’t have anything to pay you with,’ he said apologetically, before adding as an after thought, ‘unless you’d like some mushrooms?’
Eventually at sundown I passed a concrete sign that marked the entrance to the town of Hotimsk which situated as it was in the most easterly corner of the country, felt as though it was the edge of the known world. I drove over a bridge that spanned a grassy river bank along which teenagers sat listening to pop music in the dusk, before passing the imposing government buildings on Lenin street and eventually coming to a stop outside the town’s Hotel Besid which was housed in a two-storied brick building painted with lime green stripes. It looked cheap and rundown which suited me perfectly.
‘English! Are you here to meet a woman?’ the middle-aged receptionist asked as she tried to decipher the Latin script in my passport.
‘We have never had a foreigner stay in the hotel before, I’ll have to report your arrival to the police so you may receive a visit from them,’ she informed me airily, as though random police visits were just a fact of life in Hotimsk. Behind her on the cluttered reception wall among calendars and icons hung a government information poster: ‘Stop Rape’ it said in large unmissable letters alongside a picture of a man holding his head in his hands as though remembering some heinous drunken sex crime he’d committed in his hotel room the night before.
There was the usual pile of forms to fill in as always happened when I checked into hotels but the receptionist’s inability to understand the Latin letters in my passport meant she was perplexed by the task.
‘Is this your visa?’ she asked, pointing at the photo page of my passport.
‘And what does this say?’ she asked with a confused look on her face whilst examining a Japanese entry stamp that she held upside down.
Leaving her to figure it out herself I headed upstairs to my room, passing more rape posters in the corridor before dumping my bag and heading out onto the streets as the sun dipped behind the corrugated roofs of the town’s apartment buildings.
In a small park in the centre of Hotimsk over which towered a large Ferris wheel that no longer turned I asked a couple of teenagers if there was a place to eat.
Liza and Olya were on their usual evening walk around town which they took every night of the week, every day of the year.
‘There’s literally nothing else to do here except walk the streets,’ Liza said, laughing at the absurd monotony of provincial life.
The place they took me to turned out to be nothing more than a small metal kiosk with a steel-grilled window through which a woman served microwaved pancakes filled with cheese and mushrooms.
‘They’re delicious don’t worry,’ Olya assured me, sensing my disappointment at another evening without a decent meal inside me.
After weeks of surviving on cheap packets of dried noodles that kindly receptionists had prepared for me I was desperate for something more substantial.
‘The woman working behind the window is our physics teacher, but she runs this place on the weekends.’
We waited in line with a handful of young locals who occasionally looked around to study me more closely, not quite sure what to make of a stranger in their town, whilst the girls bombarded me with the questions I’d answered a hundred times in the country: Why was I here and not somewhere else? Did I like Belarusian girls? Was I not afraid, travelling alone?
Eventually our turn came and the physics teacher handed me a steaming pancake through the grill. They were right, it was delicious.
The girls invited me to join them on their usual evening walk around Hotimsk and show me the few sights the town possessed, and with nothing else to do I accepted.
We headed off, walking back along Komsomol Street, past the Soviet Ferris wheel that didn’t turn and then left the centre of the town along dark streets before heading onto 50 Years of the USSR Street, the three of us squeezed onto the narrow pavement.
‘Don’t walk on the road, you’ll get a fine by the police,’ one of the girls said in the darkness as I stepped onto the bitumen.
As we walked they continued to ask me questions about my trip, intrigued to know what I thought of Belarusians. I told them the truth which was that I found the people too reserved and how at first Belarusians were overly wary of me but seemed to relax once they realised I spoke Russian.
‘Yes we can’t imagine why a foreigner would come to Belarus so if we see one I suppose we would automatically think uh oh what’s he up to? However, you’re not the first foreigner to visit our town. Two years ago we had a man here from China who married a local girl. She met him on the internet and now they live in his country.’
No matter where you go in the world there’s always some asshole who has been there before you.
We carried on over a bridge before turning right along the riverbank with its war memorial shaded by willow trees, before passing the town’s imposing government hospital which seemed absurdly large for such a small provincial town.
‘There must be a lot of ill people in Hotimsk,’ I said.
‘Yes, many,’ Liza replied, obviously not catching the irony in my voice.
We hurriedly passed the town’s police station where a couple of officers stood smoking on the porch and then crossed another bridge back over the river before eventually arriving back in the centre of town where we had begun our walk just twenty minutes earlier. And that ladies and gentlemen was Hotimsk.
The three of us sat on Lenin’s plinth in the darkness of the town’s central square.
‘Can you say something in English for us, we have never heard a native speak it,’ one of the girls said.
I introduced myself, and they both burst into fits of laughter. They had not understood anything I had said.
‘You don’t even understand the word hello?’ I asked surprised. ‘What English words do you know?’
They contemplated the question for a few seconds before Olya replied, ‘Motherfucker,’ and they burst into laughter again.
‘How do you cope with the boredom here?’ I asked. Liza, the more thoughtful of the two answered.
‘We walk around town and take photos of each other for our social media pages, hang out with friends. What else can we do? What we really want is a social club of some sort, ours closed down years ago. If there was a club here I might never leave. I love my town despite the boredom, and I don’t believe we should feel ashamed that we live in a place with no McDonalds or shopping centres. We only have 7000 peop
le here so of course there is not much to do, but we keep up with Moscow fashions and slang through television and internet. At least our town is safe, not like the towns over the border. Anyway I will go to Gomel after the summer to study, it will be more interesting there. I’ll tell you something about Belarusian people though, we are very patriotic and feel very connected to the places where we grew up. I can’t imagine leaving my country like the girl who married the Chinaman did. Despite the problems, I want to stay.’
Alarms went off simultaneously on their phones, their screens illuminating us in the darkness of the park. It was exactly a quarter to eleven, meaning they had to go home.
‘If we are out on the streets after eleven our parents will get fined by the police since we are under eighteen. It makes no sense since we are only going to go home and sit on the computer for hours. It would be better to be out here with friends.’
We walked back along Cosmonaut Street caught in a stream of teenagers all rushing home before the curfew, before eventually arriving at the green striped Hotel Besid. Low-wattage light bulbs lit rooms on lower floors whilst on the upper floor a broken window slammed in the wind that indicated another storm was going to blow through the region. The girls offered to show me the local history museum and the town’s church the following day if I stayed on in the town but I couldn’t take another day in Hotimsk.
On entering the lobby, full of pot plants and government information posters the receptionist handed me my passport.
‘The police called, said you should go report to the station at 9am. You’re not in trouble don’t worry.’
I went up to my room and climbed under the coarse blankets of my bed, hoping I’d not become another rape statistic of the Hotel Besid.
The Burning Edge Page 8