After thirty miles I came to the turn off I recognised from the day before and once again ignored the no entry sign and passed the war memorial with its list of names before driving for a couple of miles through the young saplings and foxgloves until once again reaching the lonely cottage in the clearing where I whistled and waited, but this time the dogs did not appear. I took the sausage meat from the car and walked across the empty glade putting my head to the dirty glass of the kitchen window of the house, cupping my eyes and peering into the ramshackle room. Suddenly from the shadows of the room appeared half a face and I jumped back in surprise.
I waited on a garden bench until after some time an emaciated old man appeared in the doorway of the cottage dressed in a check shirt that was frayed to the point of falling apart revealing protruding ribs beneath. When he stepped out into the light I could see that half his face had been eaten away by some disease, his right eyeball and a large part of his nose were missing, rough scars from the surgeon’s knife having replaced them.
‘I’ve brought your dogs meat,’ I said, embarrassed to have to say such a thing to a man as malnourished as he was.
‘They’re out in the fields,’ he told me, leading me to the front of the cottage and clapping his bony hands to alert them. The noise of bone hitting bone travelled a few yards and dissipated into the silence of the Zone. We sat on a bench under an old oak tree, its exposed roots disappearing under his house. I took out the vodka bottle and poured a generous measure of the clear liquid into a glass that the old man had fetched from the tall grass behind a fence post.
‘A stranger out here is a rare thing so let’s drink to our meeting,’ he said knocking back the drink in a large gulp and motioning for me to fill the glass again.
‘Were there houses here before?’
‘You’re in the middle of the village, all around here were houses, some were two stories tall and built of concrete. Over there was the shop, and there was the club house,’ he said, pointing to a void on the edge of the grassy square.
‘It all got knocked down and buried after Chernobyl.’
‘Why did he not leave along with the others?’
‘They asked me to, offered me an apartment in town, but I was born here and didn’t want to leave. I remember the day the Fascists appeared from the forest over there.’
He jutted his chin at a dark line of trees on the horizon.
‘I was seven years old. The memorial you passed has the names of over fifty members of my family written on it.’
‘You’re a Gromyko,’ I said, remembering the name.
‘The last one.’
‘What do you remember from those times?’
‘I remember going to collect my brother’s body the day he was shot and I remember the day my mother received the letter telling us my father had been killed fighting in Poland. I was young and somehow survived when everyone was being killed all around me, uncles, cousins, friends, teachers, every family suffered, they didn’t discriminate. So I was never going to leave this village. You have to be one of ours to understand.’
He had not always lived alone. He told me of a wife and married life in the village in Soviet times when there was plenty of work and on weekends people would gather in the club house to watch the latest Soviet comedies on the projector screen. But that was another life altogether, before the evacuations began and the farm was closed after which just four families had stayed on along with an abandoned assortment of cats and dogs. His wife was eventually diagnosed with cancer in her spine and became paralysed over time. He nursed her for years in their wooden cottage until the end came, and then the other neighbours passed on and now it was just him and his dogs left. The last survivors of the village, all surviving on a basic rural-pension of less than $100. Once a month he would walk the seven kilometres through the forest to the highway where a government shop-truck would stop and sell him the few essentials he could afford.
‘Every year Batska says to the people “look I’m giving you five roubles more on your pension,” but then the prices in the shops just go up immediately.’
One of his dogs appeared, bounding out of the woods and running up to us wagging its tail excitedly, smelling the packets of sausage meat on the bench beside me. I opened a kilogram of the grey coloured meat and the dog snatched it from my hand before I could place it on the ground, devouring it in three huge choking gulps. The old man sat silently watching the dog greedily fill its belly. I handed him the remaining pack of meat.
I took out my phone to photograph his house, and he immediately turned his face away from me, ashamed perhaps by its grotesqueness. Maybe that was another reason why he continued to live alone at the end of the road with nothing but his starving dogs for company, far from the eyes of others.
As I prepared to leave he told me of a nearby church that had been built centuries ago, explaining how to find the track that led to it from the highway. It was Sunday and the few remaining residents from the surrounding villages and hamlets would be attending the service. We made a final toast to our unlikely meeting, knocked back another large shot of vodka and bit into a tomato he had grown in the same soil that contained so much of his family’s blood.
TWENTY
The road twisted north under an azure sky. I drove through pasturelands and forests for mile after unchanging mile until finding the stony turn-off that led towards the church which was situated a stone’s throw from the Russian border. Villagers riding on horse and carts and old-fashioned motorcycle sidecar combinations headed along the track in their Sunday best lost in clouds of road dust. After a mile a magnificent church announced itself on the horizon, it’s planked steeple towering over the flat eastern borderlands of the Zone. Built of wood and painted bright blue it dazzled brilliantly in the sunshine. I parked and joined the babushkas in their bright headscarves who stood outside the entrance of the building crossing themselves in the Orthodox fashion whilst their husbands removed their farm caps and bowed their heads before entering the church through the large wooden doors. I followed.
The service had already begun and people stood murmuring prayers whilst crossing themselves repeatedly below the smoke stained icons that covered every inch of the walls. I took a seat on a bench at the back alongside elderly women with whiskered chins to watch a spectacle that was no doubt little changed since the religion was brought to the region.
The congregation was mostly made up of people with the strong weathered faces of the farm, thick hands and stout arms used to manual labour. They stood in the nave under oil paintings depicting scenes from the Bible whilst in the transept stood a golden altar and beyond that the chancel from where behind the thick wooden doors deep male voices could be heard chanting. People waited patiently for the priest to emerge whilst up above the congregation on a wooden parapet accessible only by a steep wooden ladder, stood six babushkas in headscarves singing Slavonic hymns in their soft Belarusian accents.
Eventually two elderly men, bearded and wearing dirty golden robes, appeared from the chancel looking as though they had stepped out of one of the oil paintings that surrounded us. The babushkas up high in the parapet sang louder, their shrill voices filling the space above them, drifting up high to the eaves which were decorated with paintings of the apostles shrouded in the light of golden halos. Then as the suspense built, the priest solemnly appeared in the doorway wearing a fine tunic weaved with golden threads. The congregation bowed and crossed themselves and muttered prayers in quiet whispers as he stepped forward and began reading the liturgy before they shuffled towards him to taste the holy water which he poured into their mouths from a golden spoon. A young mother held a child in her arms whose body was the size of a toddler but who possessed a head no bigger than a newborn. Its tongue lolled uncontrollably out of its mouth upon which, when brought before the priest, he solemnly poured water from the golden spoon. Looking around to study the people waiting for the blessing more closely, I noticed that many were afflicted in some way: stumps,
limps, a dwarf. The Church and God no doubt where they placed their hope, hope that the afterlife would not be so cruel as the present.
When the last of the congregation had drunk from the golden spoon, the priest and his bearded escorts slow-walked back to the sanctum of the chancel, closing the doors behind them with a dramatic thud. The babushkas in the parapet lowered their voices and murmured prayers, and feeling like an intruder I slipped away through the creaking doors of the church and drove back through the irradiated forest towards Bobruisk.
TWENTY-ONE
A couple of days later I boarded the early morning Minsk-Kherson Express from Bobruisk. Outside the compartment window the world disappeared into the mists that floated through the woods and grassy clefts in the pastural land. The dimly lit dormitory wagon was full with families heading to resort towns along Ukraine’s Black Sea coast, an eighteen-hour journey to the south. Children used the bunk beds as climbing frames and chased new-found carriage companions up and down the corridors in excited games of tag.
A young married couple sat on the opposite bunk holding hands tightly. Vladimir, a pale skinned young man, had just been reunited with his wife after serving a three-month sentence for taking part in an anti-government protest. They were heading to Kiev from where they planned to apply for visas at the American embassy and begin a new life in Seattle where Vladimir had distant relatives. He poured some juice into a plastic cup and handed it to me.
‘I hope we can return one day, I don’t want to leave my country but with Batska in charge there’s no future for us here. Just look how beautiful Belarus is,’ he said, turning to the misty world that raced by outside the carriage window.
His young wife began to cry quietly.
‘There, there my little rabbit, don’t cry,’ he said to her tenderly, ‘It won’t be so bad, we’ll soon be swimming in the Pacific Ocean.’
With that she let out a sob that forced a large snot bubble out of her nostril.
‘I worked in a government office,’ he said, wiping his wife’s nose with a tissue, ‘and when election time came our boss gave a speech telling us all who we had to vote for. I made my thoughts known, perhaps a little too strongly, and it caused something of a scandal. Not long after I lost my job. With nothing to lose I joined the protests where I was arrested. Well you can see why I don’t see a future for my family here.’
The gentle swaying of the carriages rocked me off to sleep until I was shaken awake by the matronly carriage attendant a couple of hours later as the train emerged from the mists and passed over a wide river that flowed silken and swift beneath us. The train rattled its way through the rusting industrial outskirts of the city until coming to a stop in front of Gomel’s palatial railway station with its chandeliers and Lenin statue. I stepped onto the platform, fighting my way past families in beach wear eager to board and begin their holidays, and headed back along Lenin Street to the familiar shit coloured concrete of the Hotel Circus.
With my visa soon coming to an end I had time to make one final journey in the region. I spread my map out on the ketchup covered table in Mega Burger, a local fast food chain which had become my second home in the city. But despite my repeated visits and often being the only person spending money in the place, not once did the girls serving behind the counter acknowledge me in any way or offer a smile. It was something I had noticed throughout the wider region, the more you frequented a place the more the staff resented your presence. In fact if you frequented an establishment too often the staff would become openly hostile towards you.
If the map could be trusted then the town of Korma was situated somewhere upstream on the banks of the Sozh, standing on the western edge of the irradiated Vetka forests. From there, heading east out of the town, the map showed a small road that crossed the river penetrating deep into the woods before ending abruptly at a small cluster of villages far from anywhere. Beyond that the map showed nothing but forest for about twenty miles until the village of Marinopol on the other side. It was an ideal route for a lazy stroll through the woods.
The following morning after a final breakfast in Mega Burger which despite the staff’s open contempt for me I had to admit served the best burgers I had ever eaten, I headed to Gomel bus station in search of a ride to Korma. The sun was out and it seemed as though summer was finally going to begin. It had to. I had passed fields on the train journey from Bobruisk that were full of cut wheat which lay rotting under the endless rains. For a rural economy such as Belarus’ a wet summer could prove a financial disaster.
Buses to Korma were few and far between, situated as it was at the dead-end of a road that passed through nowhere significant and lying deep within the Zone. I passed time in the station cafe waiting for the afternoon service to depart with vagabonds who entered to buy cheap cups of coffee with coins begged on the station platform. Gypsy children with dirty faces entered and scrounged kopeks at tables before the exasperated manageress chased them out in a never ending game of catch-me-if-you-can. Eventually the bus pulled in and a handful of provincial travellers boarded for the journey north.
Along the way people disembarked at lonely bus shelters on the edge of wooden villages bearing Soviet names: Bolshevik, Kalinin, October, whilst all the while, out there to the east, looming on the horizon, the ever present shadow of the forest that had accompanied my journey through the country at every mile.
The passenger sitting beside me asked me where I was heading. A smartly dressed young man, he worked as a surgeon at Gomel hospital for which he was paid five hundred dollars a month. Many of his colleagues had emigrated abroad finding work in Europe and America where wages and living standards were far higher. Was he not tempted to leave too I asked.
‘I have a wife and young son and I don’t want him to grow up speaking German like my friend’s children,’ he replied, barely containing his disgust at the prospect of having Teutonic offspring.
‘Better to stay, my grandparents are here and despite the difficulties it’s my country. I shall not leave just because I can make money abroad.’
He disembarked at a bus stop topped by a white concrete dove far from anywhere and walked off along a muddied track towards a cluster of squat concrete buildings in the distance where his wife and child were waiting for him.
We continued north until the bus eventually pulled into the deserted bus station yard in the lonely outpost of Korma. By then I was the only passenger remaining on board, all the others having left long before. The sun of the morning had by now disappeared behind ominous black clouds that had appeared overhead and the sky crackled with the static of an impending storm. Walking past the town’s hotel I briefly considered stopping for the night and sitting the weather out but my determination to keep moving pushed the thought aside.
‘I’ll find a cottage in the forest in which to spend the night,’ I told myself, and with naive enthusiasm set off towards the river and the start of my journey through the woods.
TWENTY-TWO
Without knowing what lay ahead I followed the narrow road east out of town with the sound of thunder rumbling from somewhere over the horizon ahead. Soon the small tangle of Korma’s grey pre-fabricated apartment buildings came to an abrupt end and a hundred metres beyond that I passed the last of the town’s wooden cottages that had somehow survived the Sovietisation of the town, almost immediately finding myself surrounded by wheat fields that spread out all around me. Nothing man-made was visible in the distance ahead, just the palisade of trees that spread out from north to south for as far as the eye could see. A wall of green that from where I stood looked impregnable and somewhat intimidating.
A farm worker returning from a day in the fields pushed her bicycle up the sloping road towards me. Keen to confirm what had been marked on my map I asked her what exactly lay ahead of me.
‘Nothing but the villages of Klyapin and klyapinskaya Buda, and beyond that nothing but forest.’
My map had been right for once.
‘Be careful of the wo
lves in the forest,’ she added seriously when I told her that I planned to cross that forest, before she continued wheeling her bicycle onwards towards the town.
A half hour later I arrived at an old pontoon constructed of rusting plates of steel that spanned the narrow river. A fisherman stood leaning on a handrail smoking a cigarette.
‘Where are you going young man?’ he asked as I passed him.
‘The last village.’
‘You’ll not make it by nightfall and there’s a storm coming,’ he said, prodding his chin at the dark clouds that hung ominously over the forests I was about to enter.
‘I’d sit it out if I were you or wait for a car, the forest is no place to be at night especially in a storm.’
But despite the ominous black clouds in the distance I enjoyed the feeling of moving forward, not knowing quite what lay ahead of me. It was ultimately the answer to the question I was repeatedly asked on my journey through the region: Why was I here?
On a subconscious level I suppose it was in part to re-connect with the primeval feeling of discovery which us Westerners with our work days spent in cubicles and weekends spent grazing in air-conditioned shopping centres have somehow managed to suppress. And Belarus whilst being in the geographical heart of Europe was nonetheless an unknown corner of the Continent, a void on the map over which not long before was written ‘Beware, here be dragons.’ I was here to slay my dragon.
The Burning Edge Page 10