by Roger Deakin
We follow the road for a couple of miles through dark woods of spruce as far as Bereska, another huddled, silent village. To say there is a deathly hush about these villages would be literally true. Unspeakable genocidal brutality raged all through the Bieszczady villages during the last war, particularly during the little-known struggle between the Polish and Ukrainian partisans. Tens of thousands of civilians were massacred, and whole villages were exterminated. We heard harrowing accounts of how everyone, including children, would be herded by the SS, Ukrainian partisan or Soviet troops into one of the old thatched barns, the doors locked from outside, and the barn set alight. Everything in these mountain villages was of wood or thatch. There were even wooden pavements along some of the village streets. When the houses, barns and sheds were burnt, all trace of the village would be erased, even its wooden church. All that remained would be heaps of wood ash and charcoal: all that lived on would be the orchards and gardens. Between 1939 and 1945, successive waves of fear swept through south-east Poland, first from the Nazis, in league with the local Ukrainian patriots, then from the Soviet Army when they invaded in 1944, and at last from Poland’s new communist government, who ethnically cleansed the entire Bieszczady region by moving everyone, perhaps 200,000 people, at a few hours’ notice, into Russia or another part of Poland. Only in the past ten years have some of the sons and daughters of these mountain people begun to move back into their original villages and towns.
Heartened to find that a track marked on our map actually exists, we trudge uphill out of Bereska along a muddy holloway on the droving road that leads through old beech woods towards Baligrod. Woodmen must have been carting timber down this way to the village sawmills for centuries, carving a deep channel overarched with branches. Travellers, woodmen, trees and the land have all evolved in symbiosis here, creating shelter from the storm, a natural haven from the piercing, snow-laden wind that drives across the mountains as we walk on the blessedly soft loam, carpeted by a springy crust of rich brown beech leaves.
Higher up on the same old woodland track, we hear the sudden crack of a twig, and there are fallow deer, white tails bobbing as they bound away through a low underscrub of fine brambles. We have reached a wooded mountain-top at about 2,000 feet, and it is still snowing when we stop for lunch in a clearing on the doorstep of an old wooden hiker’s refuge, a half-ruined A-frame of pine boards clad in torn roofing felt. At least it affords some shelter as we sit munching apples and chocolate, watching snowflakes settle on the beech branches.
It is at about this point that we lose our way. Among tall beeches, we follow a wooded ridge towards the south. The woods fall away steeply to our left, and we are going in the general direction of Baligrod. Then the path suddenly veers off the opposite way, and we find ourselves going due north. Instead of remembering we are in mountains and doing the natural thing, which is to trust the path and let it zigzag around the contours of the ridge, we make the mistake of assuming we have missed a turning to our left and strike off downhill through the woods, hurdling fallen trunks. We find no path at all, and eventually reach the stream in the valley bottom. We stumble along following it, lurching under or over the mossy boughs of hazels and beeches. I curse myself for abandoning the hard-won ridge, squandering the height we had gained on a dumb, impulsive hunch.
The problem is that compass and map do not concur. I have since concluded that the map was awry, showing straight lines for paths that actually snaked their way around the mountain contours. Wolves, lynx, bison and bear all live in these Bieszczady woods, but we neither see nor hear a living creature, except for a few robins. There are no more deer, only tracks by the stream here and there as we follow it to a confluence and emerge from the woods to the easier going of open moorland. Our view of the terrain ahead also becomes clearer and we spot a foresters’ track that follows a river downhill.
The river is swollen with brown meltwater jumping the rocks, and seems to hurry us along the track, whose wheel ruts and puddles are the first signs of human life we have seen for hours. We pass an untidy collection of recently felled poplars and alders by the riverside, then several neat rows of apple trees or plums show up clearly on the edge of the woods. This is one of the lost villages sought out and destroyed by fire during the war: there is nothing at all left of the houses. Even if parts of them had escaped burning, firewood, bricks and other building materials are such valuable commodities in a poor region like this that they would soon have been salvaged and carried off. The only signs of former habitation are, as so often, botanical. Patches of willowherb suggest the acid soil of places where fire has left behind charcoal and wood ash. Nettles betray the enriched soil of a village midden. The orchard trees remain, still bare branched from winter, and a beekeeper has set out a whole new village of colourful wooden beehives among them. There are perhaps thirty or forty, with pitched felted roofs. Their gaily painted pale blues, terracottas and yellows are probably intended to help the bees in their homing, but they lend a strangely festive air to this solemn, haunted place, so that it is easy to imagine the hibernating bees inside and the fruit blossom that will soon transform the scene.
Further down the track in a clearing we come across a charcoal-burner’s hut and kiln, a huge square rusty iron furnace with an eight-foot steel door. Sacks of charcoal stand beside it in a heap, and snow has settled on the beechwood and coppiced hazel that are neatly stacked ready for the next firing. It was impossible to ignore the ghostly overtones of the scene: the massacres, the pogroms, the mass transportations to the work camps in Siberia or Kazakhstan, or to Auschwitz itself, not so many miles away, outside Kraków. The cruelty of the war was so massively traumatic here that it feels as though it had all happened last week, and one might soon come across the still-smoking ruins of a village, or its looted possessions scattered like rags across the fields. A palpable atmosphere of terror permeates this land like soaked blood. The habits of oppression die hard. People here keep within doors, avert their eyes, say as little as possible, regard strangers with alarm.
By now thoroughly disorientated by the twists of the hills, the dark woods and the uniform dullness of the day, we press on along beside the racing river for another mile or more. Out of the approaching dusk emerges the ruined church of Zernica Wysna, perched on a steep bank to our right, surrounded by tall beeches and limes. It is an elegant limestone building with three simple Gothic windows each side and a pitched roof of rusting, pale-grey corrugated iron. The onion minarets of metal over the porch, at each end of the ridge and at the corners of the roof suggest it is Ukrainian Orthodox. We scramble up the bank, almost a fortification, and look inside through the open oak doors. Inside is still gloomier than outside. The place has a powerful, unsettling atmosphere, as if it has been abandoned like a ship, all at once and in a hurry. Some of the original wall paintings are still discernible in the gloom across the dusty stone floor. In a little stone chapel at one corner is a shrine of flowers in posies and a makeshift wooden cross to St Christopher, his name inscribed on the cracked, cobwebbed plaster wall. There are signs that people have sheltered here before, lighting fires that charred the floor. The temperature outside is now falling, and it occurs to me that if we don’t succeed in finding the track to Baligrod before dark, we might have to spend the night in here. I voice the thought to Annette, who shudders and says she couldn’t bear to sleep here: she would rather endure the cold and spend the night outside. She is right. The atmosphere inside the church is overwhelmingly desolate. To have merited a church of this size, whose beauty had once been cherished, the village of Zernica Wysna must have been a substantial one, prospering from the timber in the surrounding woods. Now there is no sign of it at all. Walking away past the graveyard, we feel that those who are buried here are the fortunate ones. They lived out their lives at home, and died natural deaths.
After some deliberation over the compass, we decide that a green lane that branches off and fords the river to climb uphill the other side of the valley is our pat
h to Baligrod. The river is so full of melting snow from the mountains that for us to attempt fording it is out of the question. Instead, we find a fallen tree that spans the flood and cross it gingerly, balancing on our bums and shifting ourselves along on our hands inch by inch above the torrent. Our track threads its way along the humped back of a hill in a deeply grooved holloway that might be thousands of years old. Ancient pollard oaks and coppiced hazels line it on either side, very like an English green lane, and higher up there are gorse bushes and heathland off to one side, deep, old woods of oak and beech off to the other. By now we are walking in the dark. Two miles of steady climbing bring us to the ridge and our first view of Baligrod. We stand and watch its few muted lights twinkling weakly in the cold night, eat the last of our chocolate, then plunge downhill and skid down a steep, muddy holloway tunnelling through tall hedges of hazel and wild plum. Approaching the village, the track leads by a farmyard towards the lights we had seen. Watched by the farmer, we stride on into the darkness, straight to the edge of a ford across the hugely swollen river. It is utterly impassable, and the farmer is still there when we retrace our steps, regarding us without a word. We find a wide, wooden planked bridge across the roaring river and arrive in Baligrod at the silent bus station, opposite the Jewish cemetery.
It is late, and we trudge on and on past the darkened houses to the town square and the one bar. We are pathetically grateful to find it still open for its two customers; still more relieved to get a room for the night. Someone even stands us a drink. Crisps and a few Martinis are all we can muster for a celebration dinner, and we are even grateful for these too, retiring to our spartan quarters as if to a palace bedroom. Everything in it is brown but still we love it: the prickly nylon carpet, the limp blankets, even the scorch mark on the lampshade. Shifting the single beds together, we accidentally reveal a gluey mound of desiccated condoms. Pleasure is something you snatch here. It is strange being tourists in a town that hardly knows the meaning of the word. The uneasy feeling might have kept us awake if it hadn’t been for the sweet mingling of triumph, relief and fatigue.
We buy breakfast in the baker’s and sit eating it on a bench in the chilly square beside an antique tank, its muzzle still aimed squarely at the Ukraine. A multicoloured crocodile of school children clutching balloons on strings and singing a patriotic-sounding song issues from the school and straggles past us on an outing to the grimy old Orthodox church, onion-domed and now dilapidated. We wander the village streets, admiring the single-storey wooden villas with their mustard-yellow walls and pale-grey tin roofs, the bright washing hung out on lines high up between the houses. Each has an overhanging roof and a veranda, often reached by elaborate wooden steps. The orchards in the big front gardens boast several notably splendid old apple trees, grown twisted and unpruned for years. There is an overwhelming silence about the place: such a sense of desolation beneath the apparent normality. People watch us from their windows or doorways, or straighten up from their labours in back yards, but there are no greetings. The roots of their caution go deep.
At the far end of the village we find the sawmill where Annette’s father once worked as a student. It is not much more than a big circular saw and a cradle of rollers to conduct the log towards the blade. Planks of pine and beech are stacked to season, and a few old army lorries with cranes mounted behind stand about in the wood yard before a small mountain range of sawdust piles. There is no one about, just another dog on a chain. In a farmyard beside a wall of big-eyed rabbits in wire-netting pens, I find a tractor that must date from before the Soviet era. It comes from the Bronze Age of tractors, a beautiful, cumbersome, elaborate machine, all flywheels and pulleys, with a rude grey bulbous bonnet, a stout chimney of beaten tin and an office typist’s chair adapted as the driving seat. Whichever way you look at it, it looms towards you like a telephoto image of itself. It is the one thing of real beauty in Baligrod: testament to its owner’s independent spirit. Once he gets it started and wheezed into life, nothing can defeat it, or stand in its way.
As we wait for the bus to take us away to Sanok, we wander through the Jewish cemetery, where hundreds of anonymous Jews from the decimated villages of the Bieszczady Mountains are buried in identical graves, marked only by a star of David. The woods that cover the mountains are forgiving: they have grown over those villages and all but concealed the signs of their former existence. Gradually, the villages, woods and fields are being repopulated. This corner of Poland has achieved a difficult regeneration, from being a place where everything happened, almost all of it brutal and bloody, to a place where hardly anything happens at all. At the post office, Annette sends a postcard to her father in Australia. He is happier living there, as far away as possible from Baligrod and its memories.
Cockatoo
The screeching of a pair of red-tailed cockatoos as they barrelled through the gum trees aroused me from fitful sleep. I had woken more than once in the night, to the call of what sounded like a cuckoo weaving itself into my dream. ‘A night cuckoo,’ I thought vaguely, and dozed off again. It was the boobook owl, mopoke, a totem being to the Arrernte Aborigines of these arid lands along the Macdonnell Ranges to the west of Alice Springs. I lay on my back and watched the big cockatoos gliding and swooping together, the red feathers in the thick, black tail of the cock bird flashing as it banked and landed in the river red gums that grew along a creek where the land dipped into shadow. I was rolled up inside a canvas swag, sleeping out on Latz’s old iron bed frame under a wiltja, a rough open-sided shelter he had thatched with the dried brushwood of mulga bushes supported on four posts. A mosquito net hung from the roof in a wigwam, tucked in and anchored under my swag. I drew aside the net and lay listening to the mad, abandoned cries of flocks of pink-and-grey galahs that raced over me now and again, rolling and tumbling, revelling in their early-morning aerobatics. Some of them alighted briefly in the slender bare white arms of a solitary ghost gum that stood fifty yards from the foot of my bed. Its pale, smooth trunk gleamed pinkly in the morning sun. The ghost gum is a dancing woman in the Arrernte songs that tell the dreaming stories of the creation of this land. The tree’s graceful form was actually created by the gallantry of generations of amorous cock galahs: they would roost in it, break off the terminal shoots of its twigs with their strong parrot beaks and offer them as love-tokens to the hens, which always politely accept them, then discreetly drop them. The constant pruning causes the branches to grow in curves from their lateral shoots and gives the whole tree the fluidity of a dancer. Behind the tree stretched the giant caterpillar dreaming of the Macdonnell Ranges, glowing electric crimson, purple and ochre as the sun came up. A 250-mile-long caterpillar.
There was something homely, even maternal, about this ghost gum that immediately attracted me. It wasn’t until a day or two later that I realized it reminded me of the ash tree at home in Suffolk: smooth and pale skinned, with the graceful sinews of a dancer in the wind. The twigs and branches of the ash all make the same embracing gesture, growing obliquely, shyly, towards the sunlight. I notice this circling effect at night when I look through the tree at the moon, and every branch seems woven round it in a halo.
I was travelling the desert parts of central Australia with my friend Ramona Koval, and we had come to stay with the ethno-botanist and conservationist Peter Latz in the bush along the Ilparpa Road outside Alice Springs. Ramona’s keen sense of the ridiculous and her unfailing humour in the face of the hardships and uncertainties of desert travel meant that we muddled along in a state of continuous hilarity at the curious outback world around us. We must have seemed a pair of very whitefellas indeed to the Aboriginal people we met, with our pink cheeks and Ramona’s blue eyes and striking cascade of curly fair hair.
Her sense of the ridiculous began with me. On our first day ‘out bush’, she had spontaneously pointed at a flock of budgerigars in a tree and I had patronizingly explained that instead of pointing, which could disturb the birds, she should give a more discreet verbal indic
ation of their whereabouts, preferably out of the corner of the mouth. Thereafter, ‘budgerigars at three o’clock’ became a private watchword throughout our trip whenever either of us noticed anything interesting.
Alice Springs, in some ways a deeply tragic place, seemed to us like a big desert waiting room. Everywhere you went, Aboriginals sat or stood about as if waiting for something. In the streets the men went about with an expression that said, ‘Now where did I put that screwdriver?’ or ‘Now why did I come into this room?’ They scratched their heads, stopped suddenly and turned around, then wandered off in quite another direction. The shocking human dereliction on the streets and in the dusty bed of the Todd River, where Aboriginal families camp out in makeshift wiltjas of blankets and sticks, is related to the grog and the hospital. So many Aboriginal people, women especially, suffer from diabetes or kidney failure that they become dependent on the hospital, which draws them in from desert places far beyond the town for treatment, or to be near a dialysis machine. Others come simply for grog from the supermarket because it is banned from the desert outstations.