Ignoring the fisherman’s counsel I continued across the rusting pontoon before stepping onto the gravel track that would eventually lead me to the two distant villages hidden somewhere in the forest. Old radiation signs erected long ago, the paint on them long since worn off by the passing of time, greeted my arrival on the eastern bank, forbidding me to leave the track and enter the forest. I walked on surrounded on both sides by marshland and beautifully coloured fields that were once a part of the collective farm but were now too contaminated to be turned by the plough, filled instead with wild flowers over which darted swallows and butterflies. Breathing in the fresh air I felt an intense sense of contentment to be alone in nature. And then the rain started.
Gently at first, just small drops that made little circles as they hit the gravelly track, but as I continued to walk on, leaving the open marshland behind and finally entering into the forest, the rain grew steadily fiercer as though sent as a reminder that I had no right entering this burnt edge of the continent. Distant thunder rumbled closer and lightning lit the grey sky as the rains quickly turned into a vicious downpour that immediately turned the track to a river of mud and grit that flowed over my shoes, soaking my feet. Deciding on the lesser of two evils I ignored the radiation signs and left the open road seeking shelter under the forest canopy instead. I had left most of my belongings in Gomel, deciding instead to carry as little as possible for the walk. I had neither a tent nor waterproof jacket, foolishly not having considered the possibility of such inclement weather. All I had in my small rucksack was a groundsheet, some socks and t-shirts. The trees however provided no real shelter from the storm and so with no other choice and not wanting to return to the pontoon and an inevitable ‘I told you so’ look from the fisherman, I returned to the track, walking on in the hope of finding somewhere dry in which to sit out the rain.
The prospect of a warm cottage in the forest where I might spend the night pushed me on in the face of the storm but after another couple of miles, cold, wet, and with no sign of any houses I started to contemplate the very real possibility of having to spend the night out in the open. Just then in the distance I heard the rumbling of a vehicle racing along the track. I stuck my arm out hoping to be seen and for pity to be taken on me as a truck appeared over the brow of the hill. However, the driver ensconced high up in the warmth of the cabin ignored my appeal for help and hurtled by without slowing, soaking me in muddy water. There had been occasions on my drive through the countryside where I had not stopped to pick up mushroom pickers having not been in the mood for company. This was my payback.
On I trudged for another hour soaked to the skin, my eyes constantly scanning the woods in search of some kind of abandoned building in which to take shelter but there was nothing except trees for as far as my eyes could penetrate. Eventually I came to a rusting signpost that indicated there was a village some two kilometres further along the road. My body instantly warmed at the prospect of sitting in front of a log fire whilst a kindly babushka prepared a warm meal for me. On I walked, oblivious to the rains, whistling a happy tune and inwardly laughing at the fisherman’s concerned warning until I reached the turn off and my heart sank. There was nothing left of the village except a wooden cross. I wiped the rain water from the brass inscription plate. It read: Village founded 1543. Abandoned 1991. Buried 2008.
There was perhaps another six or seven miles of walking to do until I made it to the first village and by then it would be midnight, a time when people would be reluctant to open their doors to an unexpected knock. But then, just as I started to prepare myself mentally for a miserable night spent sleeping in the woods, I heard a noise approaching from the stormy darkness behind me and soon after I was illuminated by car headlights. The vehicle passed by at speed ignoring my sodden wave, but then slowed, no doubt the occupants deciding whether to pick up a stranger in the forest at night, before eventually stopping. The steamy passenger window of an old Volga sedan rolled down to reveal a family of seven crammed into the car.
‘Get in,’ the driver said, cutting me off as I began to explain where I was heading.
I removed my backpack and squeezed onto the back seat next to four young children and a beautiful young woman in a velour tracksuit.
‘Where are you heading?’ the driver’s wife in the front passenger seat asked, as we sped on through the woods.
‘But there’s nothing after Klyapinskaya Buda except forest,’ she said, confused by my answer.
‘You can’t be in the forest alone at night,’ the young woman beside me said, leaning as far away from me as possible, trying to avoid getting her expensive tracksuit wet.
‘Nobody ever goes into the forest at night.’
We drove on at speed, splashing through giant puddles that had filled the dips in the track, banging our heads on the ceiling of the little car as we hit submerged potholes, until after sometime the headlights of the car illuminated a handful of miserable looking buildings in an abandoned settlement on the edge of the forest. Consisting of little more than two boarded up two-storied apartment buildings and a concrete bus shelter, it was as bleak an outpost as I’d seen on my journey in the Zone, and yet for some inexplicable reason I can’t explain I suddenly told the driver to stop the car and let me out. Perhaps I thought that if the family would see the derelict buildings I would be forced to spend the night in they would take pity on me and offer a warm bed in their home, maybe tracksuit girl would let me share hers. But as I climbed out of the warmth of the car, hoping someone would stop me and tell me how stupid I was being by risking hypothermia or a mauling by a wolf, nobody said a word, as though spending a night in an abandoned bus shelter during a thunder storm was considered a perfectly reasonable thing to do in the provinces. I looked at tracksuit girl with a look that I hoped she would read as: ‘Invite me stay and who knows where the future may lead, we might fall in love and move to Gomel together. I could buy you as many velour tracksuits as you want.’ But she wasn’t a mind reader. That or she just didn’t need any more velour in her life.
‘Well I guess I’ll just spend the night here then…,’ I said, slowly closing the door as the rain lashed down on me, waiting, hoping, for someone, anyone, to stop me.
‘OK, good luck,’ the driver said cheerily, and with that tracksuit girl pulled the door closed without a second glance and the car accelerated off along the track. My last chance of a warm bed had disappeared into the darkness.
I ran over to the bus shelter which was no more than a small concrete shed with a wooden plank inside it balanced on bricks, and sat there staring out into the rain filled darkness that enveloped the hamlet. The only sounds were that of water running off the roofs of the abandoned buildings and the thunder that was slowly growing louder with every deep rumble. I changed my t-shirt and socks and sat on the wooden bench of the shelter protected for the most part from the rain.
And there I sat eating a chocolate bar in the dark as the storm intensified and the trees swayed in the howling wind as though I was on the set of some film noire movie, but despite the storm and the thunder I must have eventually nodded off to sleep because I woke some hours later in the dead of night, upright and shivering whilst the rain lashed into the bus shelter at a vicious angle. I needed to find somewhere dry to take shelter in quickly but although I knew that the village of Klyapin and tracksuit girl must be somewhere nearby I had no idea how far along the track it was and I wasn’t keen on getting caught out on the road in the middle of the storm again. Instead, using the light from my phone, I ran over to one of the abandoned apartment buildings, threw my bag over a ground floor balcony and heaved myself up. The door of the apartment was loosely boarded with planks which I leveraged off before entering into the darkness of what was once someone’s living room. It smelt of wet cement but fortunately was dry. I found a spot in the furthest corner and sat there waiting for morning to come.
TWENTY-THREE
The silence of a provincial dawn was broken by the crow of cockerels co
ming from somewhere behind a row of trees. The village of Klyapin and a warm bed had unbeknownst to me been situated just a few hundred metres away around a bend in the track. Cold and hungry and with angry skies above I left the derelict building and began walking back along the track in wet shoes towards Korma. Torn branches and forest debris thrown around by the storm littered the way. After a few miles I heard a machine approaching and soon a small tractor appeared along the road attached to the back of which was a small cart containing three crouching babushkas who were sheltering from the rain under black umbrellas. I climbed in with them and slowly chugged back along the track to Korma.
I spent the day drifting in and out of sleep under the warm blankets of the town’s hotel. My waking hours were divided between watching Soviet war films on the television set in the lobby and scanning the ominously dark skies, hoping for signs that the rainstorm would eventually blow itself out. It seemed however as though it would continue forever. The empty main square on which the hotel stood had turned into a lake of brown water in which were reflected the town’s administrative buildings above which the national flag fluttered in the breeze. The only sign that there was in fact any kind of life out there beyond the hotel was the town’s policeman who drove his patrol car around the town in slow circles, appearing in the flooded square in front of the hotel like clockwork every ten minutes.
In the evening I left the warmth of the hotel in search of food, stumbling upon a run-down restaurant on the edge of town owned by an Armenian immigrant. We sat together in the empty dining room sharing a bottle of Ararat cognac whilst he poured out his frustrations at running a business in provincial Belarus.
‘There’s simply no money here, so I usually only open the kitchen on weekends. I would be better off getting a job on the farm I suppose, a steady wage at least, but I borrowed money from the bank to open this place, so I have no choice but to carry on,’ he said despondently.
I returned to the hotel in the relentless rain, skidding along liquid back paths that passed by dimly lit apartments. People stood on their balconies smoking in silence, blowing fumes into the blackness of a provincial night. The only other guest in the hotel, a Moldovan businessman in town to buy farm machinery from the collective farm, was relaxing on the lobby sofa in his vest that stretched tightly around his rotund torso, flirting with the buxom receptionist. I returned to my room, chased a sleeping tablet down with a beer and after some time fell asleep to the muffled sound of a familiar female voice coming from Moldovan’s room next door.
TWENTY-FOUR
Sunlight flooded into the room through the transparent curtains, warming the side of my face and waking me from a deep sleep. The storm had finally passed over the region revealing a vast sky that was once again azure and cloudless. I left my key at the empty reception desk and in clothes that smelt horribly of dampness bought two bottles of vodka in a corrugated shop and re-traced my footsteps along the muddy footpaths out of Korma and back towards the pontoon. A car heading in the same direction stopped and offered me a ride to the river. Yuri was on his way to catch fish that his wife would later prepare for supper. I asked him about the wolves that inhabited the woods I would be walking through.
‘Don’t worry about the wolves they won’t harm you, it’s the bears you need to be careful of,’ he said with a malicious grin.
I crossed the Sozh with the heat rising, the dampness in my clothes and the squelching in my shoes evaporating with every step. It felt good to feel the warmth of the sun on my face again after so long spent under cold grey skies. After a couple of miles I heard a car approaching and stuck my hand out.
Valentina was heading to the village of Klyapin to collect her mother who needed hospital treatment in town.
‘You must be crazy, did nobody tell you that it’s dangerous to go walking alone in the forest?’ she said when I told her of my night in the abandoned hamlet.
‘Why didn’t you go to Nesvizh instead?’
She asked about my journey through the region.
‘Well it’s good you speak Russian or who knows what would have happened to you. You’re a foreigner and people don’t have much here in the Zone. Desperate people can do desperate things.’
Wolves, bears, people…the only thing nobody mentioned was the one real danger that was all around us. I asked how she felt raising kids in a town situated in the most radiated part of the country.
‘Of course I don’t like it, you think I want to raise my children here in the Zone or feed them contaminated food from the forest? No. I wish I was able to feed them fresh seafood and vegetables like you no doubt eat in England but I don’t have that choice. I have two university degrees, and yet I make just $300 a month, so tell me how exactly can I change something?’
She said all this with a complete lack of bitterness in her voice. In fact, in all my time in the countryside, despite the hardships, despite the low wages and small pensions, despite living in contaminated lands, the people never sought sympathy, never showed anger, never wanted pity. The way the locals continued to laugh and smile through it all was testament to the strength of character of the Belarusian people.
Valentina dropped me off at the entrance to the village of Klyapin which now contained no more than twenty pretty cottages and a village shop that had closed down years ago judging by the empty shelves inside. At the far edge of the village the footpath split in two directions. I called over the picket fence of a cottage and after a few minutes the owner appeared from his garden clutching a watering can. I asked him the way to Klyapinskaya Buda which was the last village.
‘My son will be happy show you,’ he said before calling out his name.
A young man with an intelligent face appeared from the house surprised to find a foreigner in his village.
‘Follow the left-hand path to the school and wait for me there, I won’t be long,’ he said.
The path headed behind the cottages and led to a pretty school building set in a well tended garden. I entered the gate and walked the empty corridors passing tidy classrooms containing empty desks and children’s cots before stumbling upon the headmistress who was on her hands and knees scrubbing the hallway.
‘The children will be arriving tomorrow for a summer-camp, so we are getting everything ready for their arrival,’ she said whilst wringing out a dirty rag into a metal pail.
It seemed an odd choice of place to send kids for the summer located as it was in the middle of a radiated forest.
‘Well the government declared the village clean from contamination not long ago, so they get sent here now,’ she said. ‘Better for them to be here than in the city anyway.’
She invited me to drink tea in her brightly painted classroom. It was clear that the teachers had invested their energy into the school to make it as pleasant as possible for the students, but despite the village having recently been declared safe there was bad news from the local administration in Korma.
‘They plan to close the school next year, we only have seven children now from the two villages so it doesn’t make sense to keep it open. I have no idea what will happen to us,’ she said sadly.
The school was the only employer in Klyapin and Klyapinskaya Buda and besides the teachers, the school employed a gardener, maintenance man, cleaner and cook. If the school closed they’d all be out of a job and facing uncertain futures.
‘The farm closed years ago so there is nowhere else to find work in the villages. I don’t know what we will do without the school, but we’ll survive, we’ve survived worse.’
Afterwards I sat on a bench waiting for my guide to come and show me the path. The school’s handyman joined me on the porch for a smoke. He wore a t-shirt across which was written ‘Fuck me I’m Irish’. In a region where many people could only afford to buy clothes at second hand shops that sold cheap imported items you were always sure to find people wearing random slogans, the meaning of which the wearers no doubt did not understand. I’d once seen an elderly man in Minsk wearing a
t-shirt across which was written ‘Big Dave’s Berlin Stag Do’. I presumed the old man had never actually met big Dave or been on his stag do.
‘The headmistress told me the region has been declared safe from radiation now. That must be a relief to the villagers,’ I said.
He laughed cynically.
‘You know why they did that right? People living in contaminated regions receive bonus pay from the government, so now Batska is declaring the whole country safe in order to stop the handouts. When the politicians are building dachas down here I’ll believe it’s safe.’
The young man with the intelligent face appeared at the school, and we left, following a path that passed the abandoned farm buildings and cow sheds of what was once the collective farm.
‘When I was young there were houses there, and there, and over there,’ he said, pointing at what were now empty patches of discoloured grass.
I had friends in all the houses and after school we’d explore and ride our bikes around but most families left as soon as they were offered re-locations. My parents worked at the school, so we had to stay. I struggled for a long time with that and in truth I was angry at my parents for not leaving, but now as an adult I understand the sacrifice they made by staying behind.’
We walked on in the rising heat following the grassy path through the woods until after half an hour we reached a gravel track that led towards the village of Klyapinskaya Buda.
‘Thank you for making this journey,’ he said as we shook hands preparing to part ways.
‘Young Belarusian people have no real interest in the provinces. My friends in Minsk have no idea where Korma is on the map and there is little interest in the traditions of the villages so you coming here and writing a book about the region is important. Maybe foreigners will read it and want to come in the future,’ he added finally, smiling at the thought.
The Burning Edge Page 11