The Burning Edge

by Chichester, Arthur

  SIXTEEN

  The grey half-light of a provincial dawn filtered through the nylon curtains waking me early from a night of strange dreams. Outside the window rain fell in vicious droplets the size of kopeks onto Lenin Street from dark clouds that blanketed the eastern sky. In a bathroom of cracked tiles I showered and then left the hotel, passing the sleeping receptionist in the office.

  Not having any desire to waste time at the police station I exited the town, instead joining a road heading north-west and passing through farming communities and villages seemingly as old as the land itself.

  Rainwater streamed off apartment building roofs, gushing from overflowing drainpipes in mini tsunamis that turned village roads to muddy streams of gravel and debris. Early-risers walked to village shops housed in buildings encased in yellow bathroom tiling with heads bowed against the rains that pounded them from angry skies above.

  I stopped to buy food at a petrol station situated somewhere on the gloomy outskirts of Klimovichi where a pretty young cashier lay sleeping on a camp bed behind the counter. I quietly placed the coins for some chocolate bars beside the till and left without waking her, driving on for hours ensconced in the warmth of the car whilst outside in the morning twilight a bleak landscape of sleepy grey towns and sodden villages passed by the windscreen like a sepia movie reel. It was hard to imagine someone spending a lifetime in such places, surrounded as they were by nothing but fields and forest.

  Slowly however as morning came the towns began to stir into life. In this, the most Sovietized region of the country, buildings had slogans built into their brickwork: Glory to the Worker’s Party, Celebrating 40 years of the Belarusian Soviet Republic, World Peace! The entrances to villages and collective farms were often marked by hammers and sickles built of concrete or steel. Sometimes they had been hidden behind plywood boards on which now were printed advertisements for farm products, but they were still there, hidden beacons of the past. Outside some of the larger towns stood the elevated remains of the towers from where once upon a time officers of the state traffic police had kept a vigilant eye on people across the empire. Cars bearing distant number plates entering a town would have been stopped, papers checked and questions asked: Where were you going? Who were you meeting? But now they stood empty, the window panes long broken, people no longer needing to explain their movements, unless you were a tourist in Hotimsk.

  I had the road to myself that Sunday morning, awake but at the same time feeling as though I was in a dream, as though what passed by the window, the ancient wooden villages, the provincial people in their old-fashioned clothing and rubber boots, the brooding landscapes, were not quite real, and that if I opened the window and let the fresh morning air hit my face I would somehow snap out of it and the mirage I was witnessing would melt from view. But I did not want it to, instead I wanted it to continue, to drink it all in, notice every detail, the sounds and smells, knowing that I was unlikely to ever return and see it again.

  On and on I drove for hours, intoxicated by the beauty of the land, ignoring the instructions of the car hire manager, avoiding main roads as much as possible and instead taking rough turn-offs that headed through dark forests and yellow farmland, following gravelled tracks through small villages composed of nothing but clusters of dimly lit houses surrounded by picket fences that looked forlorn beneath the grey skies. Old village club houses built in the decades that bookended the war stood derelict. Sometimes I would leave the car and explore them, forging a path through the wet grass and stinging nettles that had formed a barrier around the disused buildings, guarding them from all but the most inquisitive. Pinned to the walls inside some were the peeling remains of lists of upcoming social events from decades past, debates, political speeches and movie nights. I’d try to imagine the weekend get-togethers that were held there when villagers would gather from the surrounding farming communities to dance, fight and flirt, all the while taking part in a huge social experiment behind closed doors, away from the prying judgemental eyes of the West.

  I criss-crossed small rivers on rarely used bridges that creaked under the unexpected weight of something heavier than a horse and cart, following roads through gentle rolling hills just a mile from the Russian border that loomed out there beyond the horizon, visible momentarily between smeared swipes of the windscreen wiper. Often a road came to a dead end where once a village had stood but where now there was nothing, the only clue to lives having been lived being a lonely graveyard containing rows of Belarusian-blue steel crosses. I passed through towns built before other continents were discovered: Slavgorod, Cherikov, Krichev, towns that Vikings founded, Mongols sacked, Poles conquered and Russia consumed, situated on bluffs that overlooked meandering rivers bearing Sumerian and Scythian names untaught in western classrooms. Families travelled to Sunday markets by horse and cart, sheltered from the incessant rains under plastic sheets or squeezed together into the dry cabins of their tractor, blocking the driver’s view of the road. Occasionally I passed destroyed churches which had been smashed by the Party in an attempt to crush the old ways, the broken bell towers now inhabited by storks which returned in pairs from southern Africa every year to raise their young before departing again as the cold winds returned. In one village situated in a remote river valley stood a red bricked psychiatric hospital outside of which patients in striped hospital pyjamas wandered along the empty village road watched over by orderlies who called them back when they stumbled too far from the hospital gates.

  On I went, deliberately losing myself, heading further and further off the map and penetrating the dark woods, only stopping occasionally to enter small wooden shops in remote settlements. I would ask shopkeepers which village I was in, and they would stare back at me as though I was from another world. I was.

  I had bought a road atlas in Bobruisk but it was of little use. Belarusian cartographers had a habit of marking things in the wrong place, deliberately or through incompetency I could not tell. Roads that were supposed to lead in one direction instead headed in a completely different one, rivers I expected to cross seemed to not exist at all. But on I went, occasionally stopping to strike up a conversation with a villager who would invite me into his wooden home to share a bottle. It would be easy for outsiders to judge Belarusian men for their drinking, but living here in the bleak landscape of decaying villages and with futures that consisted of nothing more than a hard life working on the farm, every man had a right to seek his own solace wherever he chose. I would have made the same choice.

  And then at midday the town of Gorky appeared on the horizon. A pretty conurbation of winding streets along which people walked wearing clothes adorned in the colours of the national flag which was popular attire throughout the country. In a cafe I struck up a conversation with a young guy who told me he was waiting for summer to end so the female students would return to the town, and he’d at last have something to do in the evenings. And there, finally satisfied that I had seen something of the provinces and had witnessed, however briefly, a part of Europe rarely seen by outsiders, I turned the car south, leaving the town on country roads that led back towards the irradiated forests of Vetka.

  SEVENTEEN

  Near the town of Slavgorod, which stood on a green bluff overlooking the forested banks of the Sozh, the grey clouds finally parted, revealing the sun and bathing the land in bright golden light which began drying out the villages and towns of the region. A huge wind turbine visible from miles around appeared on the hilly horizon, towering over the valley, the modernity of its sleek steel design jarring to the eye in the landscape of wooden houses built centuries ago. An old woman sweeping a war memorial in a village stopped and stared as I passed by.

  The cult of the war was still as strong as ever. People placed bumper stickers on their cars with the slogan ‘Thanks Grandad for our freedom,’ and every time I switched on the television half the channels were showing war films or serials set in the time of the German occupation. In every town two things took cent
re stage, Lenin and the war memorial, and it is easy to understand why. Whilst Britain lost less than one percent of its population to the war, in Belarus a quarter of its people perished, the highest percentage of any country, leaving no family untouched by tragedy. In one small border village I stopped to read the inscription on a memorial which read: ‘From this village 379 people left for the front. 349 did not return.’ It was the same in every settlement I passed through. Used as slave workers or simply murdered, the Belarusian population suffered so much under the occupation that when the war ended the small Soviet republic was given its own seat in the United Nations. An acknowledgement for its disproportionate suffering.

  After eight hours at the wheel I joined national Highway 38 that once again took me south along the fenceless Russian border. Along a lonely stretch of the road far from any town or village, I passed a turning that led off from the deserted highway before quickly disappearing into the wild undergrowth that had enveloped the road. Intrigued, I ignored a radiation sign that forbade entry and followed the stretch of cracked asphalt passing through the tangle of bushes that grew across the entrance, driving over weeds and saplings that made a whipping sound against the windscreen as I drove through them.

  After a few hundred metres, rising out of the grasses at the side of the road appeared a concrete war memorial, its faded red and white hammer and sickle standing out against the green landscape in which it stood. I pulled up and left the car, walking through the deadly vegetation of wild flowers to read the names inscribed upon it. Over one hundred victims remembered but one family name written over and over: Gromyko.

  I returned to the car and continued on along the cracked road for a couple of miles through a wild landscape dotted with abandoned farm buildings, determined to stop only when I doubted the car’s ability to return to the safety of the highway. Suddenly out of the long grasses appeared two half starved dogs excitedly wagging their tails and bounding alongside the car as I continued slowly forging a path through the nettles and prickly plants to whatever it was the road had once led to. On I drove beside my two companions until suddenly the torn concrete beneath the wheels abruptly ended and I drove into a grassy square in the far corner of which, on the edge of the forest, stood a solitary wooden cottage.

  The emaciated dogs jumped up at me licking my hands for the scent of food as I left the car and entered the garden of the cottage, peering through a back window to see if someone was home. Despite the squalor inside it seemed someone was indeed still living there, empty milk bottles and dirty crockery lay on a kitchen table. I tapped on the glass and shouted out a greeting that pierced the silence of the deserted radiated land but no answer came back and having nothing with which to feed the dogs I returned to the car and drove back towards the highway watching the dogs to disappear back into the tall grasses in my wake.

  As night fell I reached the sleepy town of Chechersk that lay at the end of the highway. A policeman pointed me to the town’s hotel, an ugly Soviet construction situated on the corner of Gagarin street.

  ‘Check out the October bar,’ he said when I asked him where people went on Sunday evenings in the town, ‘but be careful, people like to drink here.’

  EIGHTEEN

  My hotel room contained three single beds and a fridge that buzzed like a swarm of bees. To escape the noise I headed out in search of the October Bar, a distant thud of music leading me there without the need to ask directions. As I entered through the glass doors and crossed the empty dance floor, illuminated by a colourful spectrum of disco lights, the patrons in the bar stopped their conversations and turned to stare in unison at the strange apparition of a foreigner in their club, nudging each other to make sure their friends got a good look and confirm that they were not imagining it. I found an empty table in the corner.

  A heavy hand tapped me on my shoulder.

  ‘Where are you from friend?’

  I turned to see a powerfully built man sitting with his arm around a pretty blonde woman.

  ‘London,’ I lied. I'd given up on explaining to people where my provincial home town was.

  The man motioned for me to join him and the girl at their table, he was already well on the way to being drunk and the girl looked annoyed by the fact that my presence would extend the Sunday night drinking session even longer. We ordered a carafe of vodka and the blonde rolled her eyes.

  Sasha worked in a factory by day and trained at the local powerlifting club by night. We could go there and see it now he offered but I wasn’t sure if he meant the factory or the weights room and neither option sounded appealing at ten at night. Instead, he suggested taking me to the city’s war memorial which sounded only mildly more interesting. The three of us left the October Bar, stopping to buy beers at my hotel’s reception along the way despite the blonde asking him not to.

  ‘It’s brewed in the region,’ Sasha said, ignoring his companion and passing me the bottle, asking me what I thought of it.

  I took a swig.

  ‘It’s shit,’ I replied honestly.

  ‘Yes,’ he agreed, ‘nobody here drinks it.’

  The war memorial was located in a small park in the centre of the town. In the dark as mosquitoes attacked us, we stood and toasted fallen soldiers with the local beer. Sasha was beginning to slur his words and the pretty blonde kept nagging him to stop drinking and take her home until eventually he had had enough.

  ‘Shut your mouth or go home, I’ll drink as much as I want,’ he said firmly, giving her a look that said ‘don't embarrass me, not in front of someone who isn’t one of ours.’

  She crossed her arms and sighed loudly to show her annoyance but didn’t reply. Sasha then began a monologue about the war and I zoned out.

  I had been mentally working on a movie script during my trip to pass time on monotonous bus journeys. It was a spy thriller set somewhere deep in Belarus and was almost complete but the part I was struggling with was where to set the final climactic sex scene between the two main protagonists, an American professor who was on the run from the KGB for uncovering a dark national secret and a local raven haired beauty who was risking her freedom to help him escape. And as the pretty blonde rolled her eyes and dramatically sighed each time another bottle of beer was opened and Sasha rambled on and on about the war to nobody in particular, I realised that the eternal flame of a war memorial would in fact be the obvious choice. Naked intertwined bodies writhing in the throes of passion, illuminated in the dark by the flickering of the flame, and all taking place beneath the defiant gaze of a bronzed muscular soldier charging to a certain and heroic death. Maybe a light snow falling for that final atmospheric touch. Coming soon to cinemas near you.

  ‘Can you explain something to me,’ Sasha said, the sudden lucidity of his voice bringing me back.

  ‘Why do you guys in the West hate us so much? What did Russia ever do to America or Britain? All we ever did was die in Europe’s wars and yet now we are treated worse than Arabs who you let into your countries without even having passports. I tried getting a visa to visit my sister in Germany last year and was refused but an Afghan gets given a free apartment in Munich. Why is it like that?’

  I had no answer.

  NINETEEN

  It was dawn when I was woken by bright sunlight flooding into the room and the sound of a tractor engine revving in the yard behind the hotel. Sasha’s girlfriend had eventually given up on persuading him to go home with her and with one final dramatic sigh and roll of her eyes as another beer bottle was opened had walked off into the darkness of the night leaving us both at the memorial to continue drinking.

  We had returned to the October bar where we found some friends of his from the powerlifting club who were entertaining a table of girls from a local college. After that my memories of the night faded, appearing again only fleetingly as hazy snapshots through the fog of a hangover. I remembered being on the dance floor with a tall red-headed student, and then vaguely of being in a basement gym surrounded by barbells before fin
ally, in the early hours of morning, I had somehow ended up next to the war memorial again but this time with the red-headed student from the October bar. I washed my face in the cold water of the bathroom and hoped that the final inevitable memory of the night would not return.

  Wanting to escape the incessant sound of the tractor engine I checked out of the hotel and headed to the town’s supermarket joining a queue of early morning customers queueing for groceries where I bought two large packets of sausage meat and a bottle of vodka before heading north out of town, re-tracing my route along the road I’d driven the day before, passing half derelict towns that in the darkness of the previous evening I had not fully taken in except in dark silhouette but which now stood out depressingly clear in the bright sunshine of the summer’s morning.

  The wooden houses of the semi-inhabited villages I passed by were well cared for, their timbers painted Belarusian-blue and gardens well tended, but the brick-built government buildings were long closed and boarded up, seemingly never to be put to any kind of use again. Subsidies that the Soviet government had once upon a time provided in the provinces had long since disappeared with the new harsh economic realities of post-independence Belarus. Kindergartens, medical clinics, cinemas and village club houses, were all now long closed and derelict, left standing in a sea of weeds and nettles in villages and towns that straddled the southern end of the highway. People now had to travel to larger towns for such necessities. ‘For rent’ signs were painted onto industrial buildings as I had seen in every town throughout the region but there would be no takers despite the fact that there was an educated and hardworking populace waiting to do something constructive, sick of working on the state farms for subsistence level wages.