by Tyler Keevil
Shortly after, the Corsa is let through and the guard in the booth beckons you forward.
You stub out your cigarette, roll down your window the rest of the way, and take your foot off the brake, easing forward. The guard is not burly but young, clean-shaven, with a blonde crew cut, the short hairs glinting like a wire comb on top of his head. You smile at him and he smiles back. He asks for your passport and you hand it to him, open to the photo page: a younger you, the you from years ago. Your hair longer, hanging loose to your shoulders. Your face smoother, your eyes wider, larger, more hopeful. He looks at her and then looks at you. You wonder if he is struck by the difference, comparing the two of you. If he sits and wonders about the changes in people, the way time works away at them. Or if he is simply clinical, doing his job, making sure that, at one point, you could realistically have been that girl.
He asks you the purpose of your trip. You already have your answer prepared: that you are staying in Prague, that you wanted to see some of Ukraine, and that your grandfather was from the region. Another small deceit that comes to you readily, convincingly. You’ve prepared a fake itinerary in case he asks, but he doesn’t. He just stamps the passport, snaps it shut, and hands it back to you. ‘Enjoy your trip,’ he says. ‘Welcome to Ukraine.’ Giving you no hassle, no trouble at all. Here, as at the airport, you are the good kind of traveller.
Which, of course, is why Mario recommended you, why Valerie chose you.
Then, before you pull away – emboldened by your success – you gesture out your window, and ask him if the field next to the border is used for farming.
He blinks, caught by surprise, and turns to look at it, considering. The fumes from your engine are rising around the two of you like mist. That distinct exhaust scent.
‘I think so,’ he says. ‘Yes, I think they grow hops in it.’
You don’t comment on the strangeness of it – that would be pushing it – but you think about it, after you thank him and drive on. Perhaps it isn’t so strange, after all. Perhaps it is your definition, or conception, of borders that is strange: permanent, rigid, insurmountable. But what is the difference between a ‘hard’ border and a ‘soft’ border, between this one and the other, between the Czech and Slovak Republics, between Europe and Ukraine? They’re all just lines on a map, which can change, which have changed. You crossed over so easily – the checkpoint might as well not have been there. Perhaps the act of crossing, of transgression, isn’t so risky, or dangerous, as we’re taught. No need to jump barricades or scoot under barriers. No smashed head or crashed vehicles.
Still, the very ease of this crossing makes you decidedly uneasy. In theatre, a poor dress rehearsal makes for a good opening night. A smooth, trouble-free dress rehearsal is a terrible omen. And this, of course, was merely a dress rehearsal for tomorrow.
do not open
Despite your musings on the permeability of borders, after crossing you are very aware that you are somewhere else, or elsewhere – though at first it’s hard to say what creates this impression, why it feels different from crossing into Slovakia. The countryside looks largely the same. Low hills and desolate fields. Rows of stunted, frost-covered trees. A cobalt sky. A sun simmering low on the horizon. So what has changed? What’s different?
Not the landscape, but the atmosphere. The milieu. It’s evident in the road signs, and place names – no longer in the Western alphabet, but Ukrainian, in Cyrillic script. Some of the letters stand out as familiar: T, R, P. But others look so foreign they may as well be hieroglyphs. Blocky and chunky and indecipherable. It’s evident, too, in the roads themselves, the infrastructure. As you progress, the tarmac becomes rougher, rippled with cracks and tiger-stripes of tar. A noticeable lack of upkeep. You feel the bumps through your seat, the vibrations travelling up your tail bone, along your spine.
You should feel more exposed here, more vulnerable, but you don’t. If anything, you have a greater sense of freedom, a stronger sense of autonomy. You’re alone, secure, encased in your Octavia, accelerating through this foreign space, both part of the landscape, and apart from it.
According to the satnav, you still have another hour to go. You see very few other vehicles. Occasionally you pass a crossroads, a cluster of farm buildings, a rusted-out tractor, but mostly it’s seemingly limitless stretches of tarmac. You spend much of the time thinking about the suitcase you have in the back. Until the border, you hadn’t given its contents much thought. Any thought, really. It had been forgotten, in the boot. But the fact Valerie seemed so unconcerned about you crossing with it both intrigues and irritates you. What are you going to exchange, for this person you’re picking up? If it’s drugs, or money, then they’ve put you at risk. If it isn’t, you want to know what it is. You deserve to know. You are, after all, the courier. You are more than that, actually. You are the messenger, the harbinger.
Back in Prague, even on the other side of the border, you wouldn’t have considered opening it, going against Valerie’s instructions. But out here, alone in this bleak, blasted landscape, it seems not just an option, but a genuine possibility. Why not? What could happen? Who else is there? It would be a transgression, but not a risk. Not an immediate risk, anyway. The threats they levelled at you back in their house seem insubstantial, far removed. Buffered by distance and borders.
Curiosity killed the cat, sure. But how many cats were killed from lack of curiosity, from ignorance, naïvety, timidity?
You pass an open gate, giving access into a field. At the centre of the field, a single tree, bent and twisted and gnarled. Its branches dotted with birds, blackly still. Crows or ravens. The same as the one at the border, but not pecking away. These ones just sit. Watching. Waiting. For you? A mile further along, you slow to a halt. You swing wide, easing on to the hard shoulder, and circle around casually, heading back the way you came. This time, at the gate, you turn in. Twin ruts lead through the frosted grass, guiding you towards the tree. Rolling to a halt underneath it, you get out. Stand for a time in the cold, breathing. You can see every horizon. The late afternoon light dimming, shadows stretching across the ground. You feel small, isolated as the tree, insignificant as the ravens. Your car, the case in it. All of it transitory, empty of meaning. Shapes against a void.
Meaning comes from within. We give things meaning. Nothing means anything without human knowledge, and perspective. So thinking, you walk around to the back of the car, insert your key in the lock, and twist. The lid of the box-like boot pops open. You raise it, letting the hydraulic struts ease it up, hold it, and reach in to move your duffel bag aside.
The suitcase sits there, clamped shut like a clamshell.
You lift it, feeling its weight again. You look around. There is nobody. Kneeling, you lay it in the snow and examine the latches. They are locked, yes, but they don’t seem to be particularly secure. It’s not an attaché case, not a government briefcase. Not even metal. The body is plastic, coated in a layer of faux-leather. Shoddy hinges, spray-painted chrome. Just the kind of case you could buy at any discount market stall, which you imagine is exactly what they did.
You know a trick. Not a particularly good one. Something your mother taught you. One of the many uses of a hairpin. Pulling one from your duffel bag, you straighten it into a thin stem of wire. Stiff enough to act as a makeshift lock-pick. You remember your mother using it against you, when you’d locked yourself in your bathroom. A petulant teen, pulling a strop. Your bathroom had one of those ineffective locks, built into the door knob. Easily picked.
The suitcase is even easier. You fit the safety pin into the keyhole of one latch, and wiggle till you hear the click. It opens. Satisfied, you move on to the other latch. You have more trouble with it, but not too much. Soon both are open. Valerie is either overconfident, or careless. You sit there, savouring the sense of defiance, disobedience. Of crossing her. Knowing this is a turning point. You could re-latch it, put the case away, stash it back under your duffel bag, and leave it at that. Like sneaking out of
the house and returning without getting caught.
But you want to know. Need to know. What are they exchanging for a person? It must be money, or even gold. A lot of it, judging by the weight. The thought doesn’t occur to you that you might covet it, take it and run away with it. There’s no appeal at all in that. It’s just the knowing. Just the knowledge. That’s all you want.
You open the case.
You are unsure about what you’re seeing, at first. It is so unexpected. So bizarre. You reach inside, pull one out to make sure. Rough-hewn, grey, heavy. Hard. A rock. It’s just a rock. Inside, there are mostly rocks. All about the same shape. All chosen to fit in, to give the case some weight, some heft. Underneath, as if as an afterthought, there are some notes, cash – more along the lines of what you expected. But not in cool, sleek bundles tied by elastic bands, as you see in films. These are loose, scattered. Grimy and crumpled. The denominations aren’t even consistent, and at least some appear to be old Czechoslovakian koruna, from when the two were one country. The currency now long-since outdated, defunct.
No wonder they didn’t worry about you crossing the border, or bother with a proper lock. They are not careless or overconfident at all. They are cynical, clinical. Ruthless.
You feel cheated. Tricked. Even though the trick is obviously meant for someone else, the person you’re paying. Above you, one of the ravens croaks, curious. You look up. A dozen or so glinting beaks are pointed down at you, like daggers. And black, inscrutable eyes. An unkindness. You remember that a flock of ravens is called an unkindness. You lean back, raise your arm, consider throwing the rock at them. But you don’t.
It is not the ravens who have been playing tricks.
arriving
Brown water running along the gutters. A dried-up fountain, with a statue in the middle, missing its head and arms. Just a torso. Buildings that are concrete boxes – square or rectangular, grey or brown. Broken windows. Fallen archways. Collapsed roofs. Facades crumbling like chalk, to reveal girders, pinions. Roads without curbs or sidewalks or lane markings, or even paving. These are your first impressions of your destination. The place you have driven almost a thousand kilometres to reach. The town sign defaced, illegible, as if somebody wanted it smeared out of existence.
Out in the countryside the poverty was less noticeable, particularly as it’s winter – how to tell if those fields you drove through were fertile, plentiful, rich and rewarding, or barren, hard, and impossible to scrape a living out of? The fences were untended, falling down in places, but that’s not uncommon, in your experience of the countryside. And the distant farmhouses? Hard to judge anything from afar. But here, in this urban area, the sense of poverty is stark, shocking. The genteel words you have been trained to use – rundown, underprivileged, impoverished – hold no sway here. This place is devastated, wrecked, ruined. That is the word: ruined. It feels as if you are driving through a ruin – the remnants of what’s been left behind after a war. The desolation accentuated by the winter weather, by the slurries of brown snow on the ground, the emptiness of the streets. Only a few people are about, wrapped up in layers of clothing, peering from beneath hoods, scarves, caps. They see you from the side, in quick glances. Then scurry on rather than stop to stare. The car must stand out: new, expensive, with Czech plates. You intuit their suspicion, their hostility towards you – the foreigner – but that could be paranoia, fed by the fading light. You know other parts of Ukraine are not like this. Not the major cities. Kiev. You’ve seen pictures of Kiev. You’ve seen it on TV, on Eurovision. Hello, from Kiev! The shrill greeting of the presenter. But this place, away from those cosmopolitan centres, has been left to wither. Too far from the tree. Then again, you know there are places back in Wales almost like this. In America, too. Tod told you about Detroit, the blight. And mining towns in Northern England. Here, it is heightened by the foreignness, the unfamiliar look and feel. That sense of otherness.
You have limited knowledge of the situation in Ukraine, a vague understanding of its history. Just a few facts picked up in school, or from the news. The Chernobyl disaster. The country was once a territory of the USSR. At the edge of the Eastern Bloc, and a front line in the Cold War. A history of trouble: economic, social, political. Maybe the condition of this town is a result of that turmoil. Maybe it’s typical of the towns in the region, or maybe it’s an anomaly.
You don’t know for certain. What you do know is that this is where you’re meant to be, today, to make the exchange.
You have the address on a piece of paper, in your wallet. Fortunately, the satnav still functions here. It’s more nonchalant than you: the Czech guide sounds just as calm, placid, and soothing as ever. Odbočit vlevo. Turn left. Turn right. Go across the next roundabout – even when the roundabout is a broken circle of old cobblestones, with a section of steel truss work blocking one of the exits. Not your exit, luckily.
You carry on. You seem to be in a residential area. Here, at least, the buildings show some signs of life, of inhabitation: balconies with laundry racks, or rusted kettle barbecues. The occasional flag, hung from a window. The yellow and blue of Ukraine. Perhaps in defiance of Russia. Or perhaps some sporting contest is currently going on. Down one alley, three children dressed in winter coats play a game with sticks and a ball. Street hockey. They stop to glance up at the sound of your vehicle, and then you have passed by.
On the satnav, beyond three more turns, you can see the little chequered flag that marks the end of this journey, and the next stage in your errand. You manoeuvre around a burnt-out Jeep and turn into a cul-de-sac. A five-storey horseshoe of tiny apartments. Each with an iron-railed balcony. Sliding glass doors. You see more laundry racks, lawn chairs. Potted plants, withered and frosted.
You pull over beside a street bin, overflowing with black bags. Your wheels grind down to stillness. You have the sense of being watched, which, of course, you are. Curtains twitch at some windows. The shadows of heads peering out. It’s a menacing spot. You don’t just feel hemmed in – you are hemmed in. Blocked on three sides, with the only exit the narrow alley you entered by. You don’t even think you have room to turn around. You’ll have to back out. When the time comes.
Your satnav is telling you, repeatedly, Dorazil jsi. You have arrived. You switch it off. Kill the engine. Sit for a minute, hoping that somebody will appear, come out. You were given no instructions about the actual meeting. Just that you were to go to this address.
After a few minutes, you get out of the car. You shut the door, and the noise of it resonates in the confined space, bouncing hollowly off the concrete walls. Echoing up, up, dissipating eventually over the rooftops. From the backseat you get your jacket and beanie, pull these on. More for the false sense of protection they provide than as barrier against the cold. A faint stink lingers in the air. Refuse and other human rot.
You take a few steps forward. Stop. Look around. You see a man. He is not more than twenty metres away, previously shielded from view by the large bin. He is standing in an open archway – tunnel-like, an exterior walkway of some sort. And staring at you. Drinking from a bottle tucked in a paper bag. Thick wool mitts on his hands, fingerless to allow for grip. Looking at you, he tilts back the bottle and takes a long, deliberate swig.
You walk over to him, confident that this is who you are here to see. He watches you approach. He is older than you. Around fifty, fifty-five. Aged further by alcohol. His nose a mass of veins, his cheeks ruddy, his eyes rheumy and bloodshot. You can smell the drink on him. Vodka, or some kind of moonshine – maybe even methyl alcohol. He doesn’t say anything, and neither do you. Just stop in front of him, at a safe distance. Several paces back.
He sneers, showing blackened teeth. Mutters something in another language – you assume Ukrainian. You tell him you don’t understand. You tell him that you’re here to meet somebody. You try it in English first, and then Czech. You can’t tell if he registers this. But he seems to get something from it. He spits at your feet, and says somethin
g shocking, and oddly striking.
He calls you an evil witch, in English.
Then he withdraws into his corridor, like some kind of subterranean creature, and all you hear are his footsteps padding away, slopping in puddles. Such a strange insult – almost comical. Not a bitch but an evil witch. Why evil? Doesn’t he understand its meaning? Was it muddled in translation? You can’t remember a single time, in your entire life, that anybody has accused you of being evil. You would laugh it off, if you weren’t so puzzled.
You’re considering getting back in the car, reversing out of there. Maybe calling Mario, for clearer instructions. But, as you turn away from the man’s hallway, you see that a figure has come out on one of the third-storey balconies: a short, squat woman. Her hair loose and scraggly around her face. She is holding up a piece of cloth – a dishrag, or a dirty old shirt – and waving it forlornly. Less like somebody trying to get your attention, and more like somebody giving up, offering to surrender.
the trade
A criminal on the run, some member of their organisation who needs to cross the border. Or a refugee, somebody who has made it here, this far, and is willing to pay extra to get into Europe. Or a smuggler. Or a slave. Somebody who has been sold, or sold themselves, into slavery. To be used, possibly abused, on the other side. To be auctioned out to a wealthy family, or a brothel owner. A pimp.
You’ve had plenty of time to consider who you might be picking up. Long hours in the car, when you puzzled over what you’ve been told – which isn’t much. But you know that it is illegal, and in light of that all these various possibilities have occurred to you. You have discounted none of them. You assess and reassess your expectations while you wait for the woman who signalled to you. She pointed and called something that might have been ‘stay’. So you stay. You get the suitcase out of the boot, and stand by the car. Waiting.