Dancing Bears

by Witold Szablowski

  “Meaning?”

  “They know that in their corner of hell they’ll never earn as much as we do. We sometimes meet up with them privately for a barbecue and a drink. They don’t live too badly. But they say that to get into the Ukrainian customs service, you’ve got to bring in twenty thousand dollars just for starters. And then each month you have to give the boss his cut. Three years in the job and you’ve got to contribute another twenty thousand or they’ll throw you out. So they take two zlotys from each old lady with two packs of cigarettes. And they take five from every old man who’s carrying petrol. Because they have to bring in that twenty thousand as fast as they can.”

  “But do you know that for sure?”

  “Well, I’ve never caught them in the act,” says Marek, frowning. “I’m just repeating what they told me.”

  “What about the Polish customs officials? Do they take bribes?”

  “Not from us. To them we’re retailers. If they do, it’s solid cash, for a whole truckload of cigarettes. Besides, they don’t have a problem with letting a car out of Poland, if all the papers are in order.”

  “And are they?”

  “Do I look like some kind of Balkan greaser who goes around stealing cars?” says Marek indignantly. “The exchange rate is good enough for us to ship cars we’ve bought legally. I bought this one in Germany for just under five thousand euros. I’ll make another two thousand on it, but I’ll share out more than half of that with the guys. These people here on the border are going to get some cash now. Then the police across the border will get some too, and at the end of the month I’ll go have a drink with them and leave them a bit more. Even after that I’ll be left with twenty thousand zlotys for my own needs. How much do you earn, Ed? How much?! The drivers working for me get more than that. I could pass the occasional job your way. Then you’d earn a bit of extra—what do you say?”

  The husband: he doesn’t feel like it

  Yevheniya Cherniak cleans under Polish beds, washes Polish dishes, irons Polish shirts, and makes dinners out of Polish meat and potatoes. Every few months she makes a trip home to her village in Volhynia, western Ukraine. This time she’s traveling with a friend who’s going to visit his mother in the hospital. Both our Passat and their Fiat Ducato have already passed the Polish border point. Together we’re waiting to enter Ukraine.

  Yevheniya has streaks in her hair and wrinkles on her face. But she looks younger than her sixty years of age. “The European Union? I like it very much,” she says dreamily. “The best thing is that nowadays when I get a visa to Poland, I can go and see my daughter in Berlin on the same visa. Poland is now a fully fledged European country. I’ve seen all this change happening with my own eyes. I’ve been going to and fro like this for twelve years now. Take clothes, for example. I remember when the Poles went about dressed like in the Soviet Union. They’d just toss on any old thing and leave the house. But nowadays the women are like out of a fashion magazine. Even the men are starting to take care of themselves. When I’m cleaning the bathrooms, more and more often I see special men’s toiletries.

  “In the old days, when I was at my daughter’s place in Berlin I could recognize a Pole instantly in the street. I could see who was from our part of the world, from the East. But now, until I hear them speak, I can’t tell. You Poles are looking better. And you’re eating better too. These days every Biedronka supermarket sells olive oil. And Italian cheese. And Parma ham. Everyone goes to Poland for their shopping, because in Ukraine, even though we’ve got the best earth in Europe, it lies fallow. You tell me, Witold, where’s the sense in that? Ukraine could be Europe’s granary. You could eat our black earth with a spoon—there’s no soil like it anywhere in the world. But what happens? It just lies fallow. People are only interested in opportunities to earn money abroad. Or to get something for nothing, just as they got used to doing under the Commies. My old man doesn’t meet any of the EU standards. He’s never seen face cream in his life. Whatever cash I send him, he drinks away. I keep telling him: ‘We were given two and a half acres when they closed down the collective farm. You could take just a little bit of it and sow some carrots, cucumbers, and tomatoes. You could raise hens. Why not have something of your own?’”

  “And what does he say to that?”

  “He says he won’t do it! Because he doesn’t feel like it. Unfortunately, the whole Ukrainian nation is just like our marriage. Either they work hard, but abroad, like me. Or they sit in their village and whack a stick against a tree in the hope that a pear might fall. I pray for the EU to come to us too. For the Dutch and the Germans to come here, and the Poles too, and plough that land for us. The collective farm will start up again, but this time it’ll be privately owned.”

  The shift leader: you can drive on

  Right behind our Passat there’s an ancient Zaporozhets—a Soviet-era car—that could easily be put on show in a motor museum. It’s spitting out small black clouds of exhaust. Inside there’s an old couple: Gramps is wearing a beret with a little stalk, and Granny’s in a headscarf. “Small fry,” says Marek, scowling. “They’ve got two rings of sausage and a six-pack of yogurts. And a tankful of gasoline—of course, they’ve probably got extra fuel tanks in the wheel arches. They’ll only make thirty zlotys out of it, but that’ll top up their pension.”

  In front of us there’s a fifteen-year-old Golf, driven by a young man with a shaved head. “Oh, he’s a pal of mine. Hey, Vova, what you carrying?” Marek jovially addresses the bald guy.

  “What’s it got to do with you?” asks Vova with a lilting eastern accent.

  “He’s small fry too,” says Marek, winking at me. “They’re all smuggling sausage and cheese. Every other car has some sort of hiding place—in the door, the roof, or the floor. They bring smokes our way and go back with chow, because in Ukraine everything’s pricier and worse quality than in Poland.”

  We drive forward another ten yards. By now there’s a blue-and-yellow Ukrainian flag looming in the distance. Finally, we get right up to it.

  “This is where it starts to happen, Ed. Watch carefully,” says Marek, then smiles broadly, shouts, “Dobroho dnia!”—Ukrainian for “good day”—to the customs official, and presses something into his hand.

  “Was that a bribe?” I ask.

  “Noooo, just a little gift.”

  It turned out that was just the start of the gift giving. Marek is on first-name terms with all the border guards and customs officials. Even the shift leader comes over to give him a high five.

  “So who’s this?” he asks, pointing a finger at me.

  “A pal. He’s learning,” says Marek, laughing.

  “The shift leaders are the wiliest of all,” he says later. “They don’t accept the gifts with their own hands—they have people to do that for them. And if things were to fall apart—the inspectors do occasionally come from Kiev—the lower ranking guy’s to blame.”

  Indeed, once the shift leader has gone, the customs officials take the money quite openly. They’re not particularly bothered that people can see everything. Marek gives them two fat rolls of banknotes. “I could give them a fifty-euro note each, but there’s psychology at work here too,” he says. “If he gets a wad of banknotes, he feels as if he’s got a lot of cash. If he only got one, he’d be less satisfied.”

  “And what are you actually paying them for, if the car’s aboveboard?”

  “The fact that I’ve entered the country by car is peanuts. But they’re supposed to enter it in their system—I drove in by car, so I should be leaving by car too. If I don’t have a car on my way out of Ukraine, their computer should start to bleep. If I’m not going back in it, I should be presenting a certificate of sale or write-off in Ukraine. Otherwise they can’t let me out.”

  “But they will?”

  “We’re going to go back, and then you’ll see if the computer bleeps.”

  The client: Br
ussels will reduce us to penury

  About seven miles from the border, in a woodland roadhouse by a small lake, the client is already waiting for us. His name is Alyosha and he’s got a stylish shirt, an expensive watch, and a silver Lexus. A driver gets into our Passat to take it on farther.

  “It’s going all the way to Odessa,” says Alyosha in broken Polish, taking some money out of a leather wallet. “Well, boys, you must excuse me, but I can’t chat. My next car’s coming in an hour, at the other crossing. I’ve got fifty miles ahead of me. I must dash.”

  “Off you run, Alyosha. Maybe by the next time we meet you’ll be in the European Union,” jokes Marek.

  “Shut the fuck up about your European Union,” says Alyosha, scowling. “God forbid it ever gets here, or they’ll even up the customs duty and we’ll both be reduced to penury!” He fires up the Lexus.

  “It might reduce him, but not me,” smiles Marek.

  We finish our lunch and set off back to Poland with Andrzej, a colleague of Marek’s who has come specially to fetch us. “A few years ago I bought a piece of land not far from the new border crossing at Budomierz,” Marek tells me. “I have two and a half acres, quite near the road. I might open a shop there, or a pub, or maybe a supermarket. European Union or not, you can always carve a slice at the border.”

  We recross the border just before nightfall. We hand over our passports for clearance. Once again I’ve got my heart in my mouth and am chain-smoking.

  But the young customs official sends us off without batting an eyelid. Nothing bleeps.

  The old age pensioner: may I die before the Union

  Valentina Kalennikova is standing at a small bazaar by the exit from the border crossing in Medyka, between a pizzeria and a parking lot. In one hand she’s wielding two packs of Paramount cigarettes, one of the cheapest brands, and in the other a bottle of vodka with a wholesome-looking ear of wheat on the label. She’s on the hunt for a customer.

  “I’ve got a good eye for people,” she says. “I’m almost eighty now, so I don’t run up to the cars as quickly as the younger women. But I seem to have a sense of who’s going to buy and where to position myself. Besides, the younger girls give me space. They know it’s not so easy for an old granny to stand here all day. In exchange, I say prayers and light candles for them in the church.”

  Mrs. Kalennikova is legally entitled to take two packs of cigarettes and a bottle of vodka into Poland. She sells the cigarettes for four zlotys each and the vodka for ten. Like this, she earns her first thirty hryvnia (there were then about eight hryvnia to the dollar).

  And she’ll get a few more hryvnia for getting into a car that’s carrying a washing machine or other white goods across the border. You can only take one item per person, so drivers who are transporting several at a time have to take extra people with them. How many washing machines have been driven into Ukraine thanks to Mrs. Kalennikova by now? God alone knows.

  On the one hand, Mrs. Kalennikova has heard that the EU will open up the border. That would be good. She wouldn’t have to wait in line for over an hour, day in, day out, in snow and rain. She wouldn’t have to go through under the vigilant eye of the customs officials and EU scanners that cost millions of euros, there to judge whether she’s carrying more than two packs and one bottle.

  On the other hand, what if the price of cigarettes goes up? In Poland they have, and dramatically so. “I might just as well dig myself a grave,” says Mrs. Kalennikova. And she starts to cry.

  “Don’t cry, Granny,” the younger women say. “Even if we do join the European Union, you won’t be on this earth anymore. We’ll be the ones to worry about it.”

  They’re right, so Mrs. Kalennikova adjusts the knot in her headscarf and runs off to find her next customer for a pack of Paramount cigarettes.

  IV. History

  The Bulgarian Gypsies say the females are easier to train—they’re less aggressive and don’t attack people. But the Polish Gypsies regarded the training of the females as dishonorable. In their view the females should bear young, so the keepers will never lack bears for their work.

  Albania: The End of the Concrete Toadstools

  First of all you pack old tires around the bunker and set them alight. Or you put a sack of agricultural fertilizer with a high potassium content inside it. That makes a primitive bomb, and the bunker blows up.

  “All to make the concrete crack,” explains Djoni, a construction worker from Berat in central Albania. “Once it cracks, we whack it with hammers to get to the steel that’s inside. There can be as much as two tons of it—half a pound earns you fifteen (euro) cents at the recycling center. So from one bunker you can make three hundred euros! That’s a lot of money in Albania, especially when it’s literally just lying on the ground. But sometimes you have to keep at it for a whole five days to make the concrete crack. And my boss, the owner of the construction firm where I work, takes most of the money anyway. I earn about twenty to thirty euros per bunker.”*

  1.

  But Djoni’s not complaining. He couldn’t have chosen a better job. For the past few years Albania has been having a construction boom that has inflated the price of steel, which hasn’t even been halted by the crisis in Italy and Greece, where hundreds of thousands of Albanian immigrants work. In fact, the experts are warning that this boom is really just a cover to suit the needs of the Italian Mafia, which is laundering its dirty money by building tower blocks that no one in Albania needs—in some of them more than half the apartments are empty. But the Albanians take no notice of that.

  “The crisis isn’t being felt here in Albania,” stresses Djoni. “Our prime minister boasted that apart from Albania, the only other country in Europe that isn’t in recession is Poland—our growth rate for 2011 was over 3 percent.”

  Djoni also worked in Greece for several years, at Piraeus, but he got fed up with playing blindman’s buff with the local border guards, who regularly catch Albanians working illegally. “My health’s not what it was,” he says. “Here I earn less, but I spend less too. It comes out about the same.”

  So during the day, Djoni builds new housing developments, and in the evenings he tops up his salary by demolishing bunkers. Thanks to the money he has earned this way, he has finished building his own apartment and has sent his children to good schools.

  The construction boom is one of the reasons why the Albanians have started taking notice of the hundreds of thousands of bunkers that are a blot on their landscape all the way from Shkodër on the Montenegrin border right down to Konispol, a stone’s throw from Greece. Until now they have turned a blind eye to them, but now that steel has become considerably more expensive, whatever Djoni extracts from the bunkers during the night he can sell by day as reinforcing wire.

  “Under Communism, I did my military training in bunkers like these,” recalls Djoni. “We were taught how to camouflage them in case of attack. On the one hand, it’s a part of my life, but, on the other, I don’t feel sorry for them in the least bit. They’re a symbol of very bad times—they should all disappear.”

  2.

  Gjergj’s bunker is painted green from top to bottom, and on the front it has a dazzling sign that says Bunker Bar. And although the beach alongside Gjergj’s bar is not one of the loveliest, he’s not put off. “We might not have much sand,” he says, shrugging, “but we do have our concrete mushrooms, our Uncle Hoxha’s toadstools. Poland hasn’t got any, nor has Italy, not even Brazil. People come from all over the world to look at them!”

  Gjergj invites me inside his mushroom and lets me look through the firing slit, which is aimed in the direction of Italy. And then he shows me a large, metal stick hidden in the depths.

  “I used to keep it for drunken customers who don’t always want to pay up,” he explains. “And nowadays I keep it for the guys who come to blow up the bunkers. I’ve been running this bar for twelve years now, and I won’t let the
m lay a finger on it!”

  Gjergj is right about one thing—the Albanian bunkers are unique on a global scale. In a country slightly smaller than Maryland, inhabited by barely three million people, the Communists built about 750,000 of them. No one knows exactly how many there are. “Under Communism, everything to do with the bunkers was top secret—the army never published the figures. And then along came democracy. They lost the documents, and now no one’s capable of counting them precisely,” says Ina Izhara, a political scientist who, like many of the young people here, divides her time between Albania and Italy. “When we joined NATO a few years ago, apparently the alliance command demanded to see maps of their distribution. And consternation arose, because there weren’t any maps. Someone once suggested that there are 750,000 of them, and now everyone keeps repeating that.”

  The fact is, the bunkers have become a permanent feature of Albania’s landscape. They stand in the middle of cities and on the edge of villages, in graveyards and playgrounds; they stand on mountain tops, and half-submerged in the sea. When they plow the land, farmers often have to make a wide detour to go around them. You only have to travel by train from Tirana to Dürres to count several dozen of them, some in courtyards right next to the houses.

  Elton Caushi, a tour guide from Tirana, is fascinated by them. He has worked out a route for his customers to tour the most interesting ones. “For instance, there are several of them in the ancient city of Apollonia, among the ruins left by the ancient Greeks,” he says. “The tourists love them, which the Albanians can’t understand.”

  But why on earth were these concrete mushrooms built at all? Enver Hoxha, who ruled Albania with absolute power from 1944 until his death in 1985, was afraid of being attacked by other states, both Communist and not. “He was paranoid,” says Izhara. “He thought everyone wanted to invade Albania. At first, immediately after the war, he kept in with Yugoslavia. But he soon quarreled with Marshal Tito, and for a dozen years or so he teamed up with the USSR. That relationship ceased to appeal to him when they settled scores with Stalinism. So he made an alliance with China and—seeing enemies everywhere—started to arm the country to the teeth and build the bunkers.”