5) Europe’s Last Dictatorship

I awoke in the morning to the sound of a gunshot. I leaped up in a start, and looked at my surroundings. I saw flowery wallpaper, an ancient, multicoloured blanket, and some plain wooden dressers, all constructed at one point or another by the glorious labour of the people. Ok, I thought. Good. So I wasn’t in the Middle East.

Another shot resounded. I jumped out of bed. There wasn’t any sort of violence in this country at all, I reflected. Was I near a shooting range? Was this a normal noise for an Belarusian April morning?

More of them came, in timed succession. I rubbed my bleary eyes, and started to realize that perhaps they weren’t gunshots after all. I had to creep to the window to find the culprit. Four floors down, in the great courtyard below, there was a little babushka with a great stick in her hand, flogging her rugs to death. Across the courtyard, another one was just preparing her rugs for the same activity. The trees were bare, and small piles of dirty snow lay a top of patches of dead grass.

A third old woman, came out, inspired. The multiple violent smacks was far more effective than any rooster. God, those grandmothers could hit hard.

This solved another mystery for me. When I had arrived home last night after walking Katrina to the metro station, I had seen fat, red, T-shaped structures poking out of the ground in the courtyard. I stood staring at them dumfounded, nursing a beer I had bought for the equivalent of seventy-five cents in a local shop. These T-bars, made out of iron, were far too fat to be chin-up bars. They were also too low. The other public structures in the courtyard were children’s toys—a slide, some monkey bars, and some springy horses. But I did not understand the meaning of these great crimson Ts until I saw those babushkas drape their rugs over them and begin thrashing for all they were worth.

Aha, I thought wryly. They were Soviet vacuum cleaners.

For breakfast, I prepared myself cheese, bread, and some freeze-dried borscht which Agatka had given me for the road, a souvenir of her hospitality. All the rest of the food I had was purchased in a shop just around the corner from my house. The bread was moist, tender, black Russian rye, which came in a round loaf—for twenty-five cents. A block of cheese the size of my fist was a dollar. I brought these purchases to the front of the store, absolutely elated that my ship had run aground in a place where the food prices were carefully controlled by the socialist government.

A cashier from across the store hissed at me. When I didn’t notice, I got a full tirade. Without comprehending, I wandered over towards her, and she rang up my bread and cheese. After paying her, I went to the cashier on the other side of the store to pay for my vegetables. A third cashier guarded the beer. I slowly understood—a single store had three partitioned sections, selling three different groups of items; it had three different cash counters run by three different cashiers. No one had thought to make all of the items go through one set of cash desks near the exit. Economic efficiency, I realized, was not the first priority.

Minsk’s metro system was something out of a John Le Carré novel. The walls were all constructed of white marble. Miserable aging ladies dressed in blue smocks sat in glass booths and observed the people walking by. Instead of a more modern system, one paid for pink plastic metro tokens, which had been thoroughly chewed by decades of use—these were plunked into antiquated Cold-war era turnstiles which clacked open and closed noisily. The stations themselves were lined with all manner of Soviet realist art. Katrina laughed when I gasped to see a massive bust of Lenin, or a great hammer and sickle displayed high in some of the more patriotic metro stations.

“Ok, get my picture with this!”

She chuckled as she turned on the camera. “You really like Lenin!”

“Hun, you just don’t know how rare this is!” I told her. “You live here, so it’s normal to you. But for me, this is like stepping back into the Soviet Union. There is nowhere else like this in the world, and there never will be again!”

She smiled at me and took my hand as we walked through the glorious marble halls towards the stairs that led upwards to the city.

Outside, I realized just how much of the story of Minsk could be told through its architecture. The city is almost a thousand years old, but you could never tell. Minsk lies directly in the center of the steppe between Moscow and Berlin, a minor city situated unluckily between mighty opposites. It was taken by the Hitler, it was taken by the Kaiser, it was taken by Napoleon. When the Red Army crashed back across the steppe to victory, Stalin gave Minsk a blank cheque. Everywhere I saw massive square buildings rising into the sky, often with great Doric columns on their front, to invoke the august power and splendour of the empires of Greece and Rome.

“What’s that building?” I asked Katrina, pointing to one of these mammoths, with a bold hammer and sickle etched into its face, imposed upon a background of multiple flapping flags.

“That’s the post office, darling.”

“Oh” I said, a bit deflated. “How about that one?” I asked, a little further down the road. It was a titan of a building; with chubby pillars anchoring it to the ground. It was made of tremendous bricks of brown stone, and a Soviet tank stood outside it on a high marble pedestal, its green barrel pointed into the sky.

“It’s an internet cafe.”

“An internet cafe?”

“Well, I’m sure there are other offices inside somewhere. But lots of the building is not used. The only part we’re allowed to go in the internet cafe.”

The streets were alive with rushing cars and the faint smell of automobile emissions. People walked to and fro—some of the women braved the April weather and began to sport skirts and pantyhose. I passed more than one guy sporting clever red shirts that read ‘Born in the CCCP’. In the shops along the road, I purchased notebooks and vodka, all emblazoned with the bold hammer and sickle or the face of Lenin upon a red background, for a few Belarusian rubles. The cashiers that sold them to me were neutral and bored, not in the least surprised that a foreigner was selecting these items out of all of the other designs I could have chosen in this semi-capitalist shop.

Far from being a touchy subject, Communism had just become another brand.

Eventually we came to Independence Square, which was only recently renamed. It used to be called Lenin Square. A massive iron figure of Lenin rose on a pedestal, higher than a house, leaning over a podium with his trademark workers’ cap in his hand. On the pedestal below him was a classic Soviet scene—a crowd of marching soldiers, looking stoically into the oncoming wind, a great banner flying above their heads.

Behind Lenin was one of the most important government buildings in Belarus. It rose high, wide, and rectangular—built to look bold and immortal, the will of the people frozen in stone and steel. On the top of the building was a great circular emblem. It was an outline of the country of Belarus, flanked by two curving sheaves of wheat, with the rays of the rising sun behind it. Above it, dancing lazily in the wind, was the Belarusian flag.

It was in Belarus that I learned that the trademark Soviet symbol was not the hammer and sickle alone, but something a little more complex. Everywhere, I saw a hammer and sickle imposed upon a globe, symbolizing the eventual victory of Communism over the entire world. This globe was flanked by two sheaves of wheat, a symbol of agriculture, and one of the primary riches of the Soviet Union.

As I stared at the bold symbol of the Belarusian Republic, hanging on the government building behind Lenin, I realized that the only change was that the outline of Belarus had replaced the hammer and sickle. And the flag behind it was the identical flag of the Belarusian Republic when it was incorporated into the USSR, only the small yellow hammer and sickle was missing from the corner.

A tingle crept across my skin as I realized that the Soviet look to the city was intentional, even celebrated. In modern-day Belarus, the Soviet past was glorified, one of the pillars of national pride and national identity. It was as if the whole place had broken off the USSR in 1991 so they could ignore Yeltsin’s capitalist reforms. It was as if the Soviet Union had shrunk to a miniscule size, and still existed in the small space between Poland and the Russian Federation.

As the night fell, I walked with Katrina down Prospekt Independence, the wide main street of Minsk. When the light left the sky, one by one, bright lights flickered to life, and illuminated the vast and chilling walls of these ancient socialist-built giants. Their sides glowed green, orange, yellow, and white; the entire avenue was awash with light.

“You see Kieran! This is why I wanted you to live near the center. It’s so beautiful at night!”

I was mesmerized. Eventually, on the left, I came upon a building I had not seen before. It was wide and yellow, and it had four giant Romanesque columns supporting a great triangular roof above the entrance of the building. The wooden door was as high as the door to a cathedral. The lights shone pale upon its sides, and cast the whole building into a ghastly glow.

“Katrina, what’s that building? It’s one of the nicest in all of Minsk!”

She gave me a look that was half laughter, and half worry.

“I think it’s Kuh Guh Buh, dear.”

“Kuh Guh Buh?” I asked, uncomprehending.

“Yes.” Her voice dropped to a whisper.

My skin went cold. I realized that what she was pronouncing was simply the way that Russians pronounce individual letters.

‘Kuh Guh Buh’ meant ‘KGB.’

————

“You’re studying Russian!”

Katrina’s mother was seated across from me at the dining room table. Her balding father, with his high cheekbones and austere ice-blue eyes, was seated next to me.

“Da” I told her, smiling.

“Russian is a great language, a mighty language!” she chimed.

I smiled mutely. With this sentence, she had exhausted my vocabulary. If I was not in the habit of meticulously replaying the Soviet National Anthem a hundred times a day in my flat, I would never have known the words for ‘great’ or ‘mighty’.

“Everybody says that, darling” said Katrina to me in English, once we had finished the meal.

I didn’t quite understand.

“When people find out you’re learning Russian, they always say ‘it’s a great language, a mighty language’. It’s just what people say.”

By the day, I was learning more and more little colloquial phrases. It was fun and difficult. My Russian class was a gaggle of Turks, Afghans, Australians, Koreans, and a Spanish-speaking Jew from Istanbul who explained to me that his community had lived there for five hundred years ever since the Inquisition kicked them out of Spain. All of them had paid for the privilege of not taking the class seriously, neglecting their homework, and exasperating the teacher.

Any extra time I had was spent getting to know Katrina, and little by little, getting to know her family. She was an only child. Her mother was turning forty, her father forty-two. Katrina was nineteen, born the year the Berlin Wall came down. Her parents were teenagers during the bright reform of the Gorbachev years, and the economic disaster of perestroika. They remembered, acutely, the disaster of Chernobyl.

Chernobyl was a massive nuclear power plant in the northern Ukraine which had a meltdown in April 1986. It was first reported in the Swedish press—knowledge of the severity of the problem had not even reached Gorbachev himself, because of the frightened placations of Soviet yes-men. By that time, radioactive dust had been spread high in the atmosphere all over Europe. The country which bore the brunt of the fallout was not the Ukraine, nor even Russia itself. It was Belarus.

“There was a demonstration today in front of the Palace of the Republic” said her mother, when Katrina and I were doing the dishes in their tiny kitchen. “For Chernobyl day.”

It was that time of year, I remembered. April 24^th, twenty-two years to the day. Katrina responded to her mother to ask what happened.

Her mother, wide-eyed, with a nervous smirk, began to explain in quick Russian something which made Katrina gasp. Then she made a motion that needed no explanation. It was the motion of a policeman swinging a nightstick through the air.

I was beginning to realize why the Bush administration had recently dubbed this country “Europe’s Last Dictatorship.” I had known before arriving that this country was a tad repressive, and it wasn’t just the over-zealous cheekiness of the author of the Belarus section of the Lonely Planet. I felt it as soon as I arrived. Katrina and I spent our first days together rushing around to half a dozen government offices to have me registered, so that I could stay in the country without being deported. They took down more of my information than they would if I was going to prison.

Public gatherings were banned in Belarus, especially demonstrations for perfectly legitimate historical grievances, such as Chernobyl. Katrina’s mother had attended one earlier this year, which was also broken up by force.

“She was protesting a new law they are bringing in,” Katrina told me with dissatisfaction. “They want to close all her shops. The government is making big new department stores, and they are closing all the kiosks.”

Katrina’s mother was the breadwinner of the family; she owned a few tiny kiosks which act as corner stores in the Republic of Belarus. They are on every street, and they sell things like chocolate, magazines, and beer. They were her livelihood, and the government was planning to shut them to create more of a market for their larger supermarkets, whose revenue went directly to the state.

“They only said they will do it,” said Katrina. “My mom is skeptical. People are really mad about that here. We are still waiting to see if it will actually happen.”

I shook my head in disbelief. Here was perfectly good Eastern-bloc free enterprise, and the Belarusian state was shutting them down. Small wonder, I suppose. The president, Alexander Lukashenka, was a man from the countryside who began his career working for a Soviet collective chicken farm. He was elected in 1994, and two years later held a referendum which stripped the parliament of its power and extended his term as president. In 2001 and 2006, ‘free elections’ once again returned him to the helm, with all hope of a Ukrainian-style colour revolution crushed by the Belarusian state police.

“He doesn’t even speak Russian. Or Belarusian” said Katrina. “He speaks a mix of the two—kind of a dirty slang language from the countryside. But some people love him!” she said with a sneer. “Especially in the countryside. They think he’s a man of the people.”

I contemplated whether or not more Belarusian youth thought like her. She and I were so much alike—dissatisfied with the boring countries we were born in, using the internet to look outwards. She would profit immensely from the inclusion of Belarus into the European Union, something that would happen only over Lukashenka’s dead body.

Once, as we were walking together towards the park, he passed us in his car, an occurrence which is apparently not uncommon. As we walked down the street, I saw an incredible police car stalled in the middle of the road, blocking all traffic—it looked like a white and blue cross between a spaceship and a tank. As we passed it, we saw armed policemen by the side of the road turn sharply, stand at attention, and salute. I continued to walk nonchalantly, knowing that it would be very unwise to stand and gawk. After two SUVs filled with scary KGB thugs, a sleek black limousine swept passed us, with completely tinted windows, and two small flags of the Republic of Belarus flapping on the hood. I shuddered as he passed. I would have been shot instantly had I stooped to pick up a rock.

“Lukashenka passed me today in his car!” I proudly told my Russian class.

“Really?” my Turkish friend Sirdar looked at me with a giant smile.

“Really! Alexander Lukashenka! It was just in front of the big building with the tank. He drove right down the street beside me.”

My Russian class giggled. But when I glanced at our professor, I froze. She was white as a sheet.

“Alexander Lukashenka” she corrected, in a barely audible whisper. Here eyes were frightened. It was like we were speaking of a ghost—that if we spoke too loudly, we might invoke its evil power.

I cringed. It was probably true.

————

“Let them arrest, me, I don’t care” I said flippantly. “Goddamn Kuh Guh Buh. So it’s illegal to take pictures of your special building, is it? Fine, Arrest me. We’ll just see what happens if they arrest a Canadian citizen.”

Katrina said nothing. We were across the street from the infamous Romanesque structure. I was balancing my camera on the handrail, trying to get a nice long-exposure shot of the thing with a blurry bus rushing past in the foreground. With inexpensive beer coursing through my veins, I was showing off to her my ‘diplomatic immunity’ attitude, arrogantly believing that my status as a Westerner meant far more in this part of the world than it probably did.

She was seated in the small park across the road. A small fountain trickled in the center of it, and ran in terraces downwards. Mullet-topped Belarusian youth sat on benches beside us, cuddling flirty girls in one arm and cheap beer in the other. Cigarette butts and empty bottles littered the marble pavement. Directly behind Katrina and I, glowing pewter in the shining lights that had clicked on with the coming dusk, was a massive bust of Felix Dzerzhinsky. He was the bloodthirsty founder of the Cheka, the infamous Russian secret police force under Lenin, the ancestor of the KGB. In 1991, a triumphant Moscow crowd paraded into Lubyanka square and ripped down Dzerzhinsky’s statue. They showed videos of it all over the West, a powerful symbol of the people’s victory over Soviet oppression.

In Minsk, Dzerzhinsky stood proud and resolute, unaffected by the passage time.

An old lady passed Katrina and I, as I was positioning the KGB building for another slow-motion pose. She croaked something scornfully at us.

“Let’s go dear,” Katrina said. She was visibly spooked.

“What did that lady say?”

“It’s . . . hard to translate. Let’s go dear.”

I took her hand, and we began to walk away from the scene of my illegal anti-government activities.

“Well, could you try to translate it?”

Katrina smiled awkwardly. “Well . . . it’s sort of something you say to someone who is doing something stupid. Like, sort of . . . ‘do you want something to think about when you are in jail?’ And really, I think she’s right. We shouldn’t be doing that.”

I looked puzzled. “Really? She said that? What is the exact translation?”

“It doesn’t translate too well. Literally, it means: ‘do you want adventures for your head?’”

4) The Soviet Union with Cell Phones

Kieran Nelson

Facebook

March 31, 2008

at 8:39am

Friends and family,

This is the first mass email I have been compelled to write simply because I am so behind in the progression of the actual story of my trip, I have to tell at least those close to me how I am doing. I am currently in Minsk, the capital of the Republic of Belarus.

On the day I arrived, I met an old German man on the train who worked with the police and went to Belarus about ten times a year. He coached me through the process of how to deal with the border guards, what to write on my entry card, and exactly how far to zip open my bag so that the guard would probably not check it. I arrived in the Minsk train station to find Katrina waiting there for me. This amazing girl had already rented a flat for me, and we taxied there right away so that we could drop off my absurdly heavy luggage.

Here I am, back in the USSR. Really, this is no joke. Belarus split off of the Soviet Union in 1991 so that it could keep all the old system. It has everything it did under Communist rule…it has about 51% state-controlled economy, it has one basic political party, it has a socialist level of income, it has efficient police control and a low crime rate, it has the same secret police and surveillance systems, and…most importantly…it has all of the old buildings!

In Russia, in St. Petersburg and Moscow, the buildings have so much of an imperial stamp on it that you cannot afford to realize that the place has a history of hundreds of years. That is the feel of the place. Not so in Minsk. Minsk was flattened by the Nazis completely, and rebuilt with Stalinist architecture. Everywhere I go, I see an imposing Soviet Palace of Culture, or a mural of socialist realism art, with the hammer and sickle and the words CCCP written in huge red letters on the bottom. Public buildings still have a statue of Lenin outside it, pointing towards the future with his right hand, and a large banner with flags and the hammer and sickle in the center of it. The monument to the unknown soldier, in the center of the city, is a similar Soviet affair, with the same symbol and the words BCCP below it…which stands for the Belarusian Soviet Socialist Republic.

The train stations are all made of marble, and they have the same imposing motifs that I saw in the Soviet-designed Moscow metro. The same style exists on buildings all over the city…be it the robust three storey flats lining main street, or the old public ministry with the spikey-topped clock that protrudes from the top just like the Soviet-built embassy in Cuba.

A bare minimum of this stuff exists in Russia. In Russia and other places, the people have always been conscious of the abuses of the old Soviet system, and the national ideology and therefore the architecture has changed accordingly. This is especially true for states that have never really felt part of the Russian heartland: Ukraine, Poland, East Gemany, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Latvia…and so many of the Eastern Bloc. Yet Belarus is the exception. It is known as White Russia, and while being just barely culturally different than Russia proper, it has never truly identified with Western Europe. It was not even a satellite state…it was part of the true Soviet Union for all of its existence.

When Communism fell, they elected the leader of a collective farm to power, who was very frightened that he would see his country suffer the awful economic dislocation, unemployment, crime, and other woes of post-communist nations in Eastern Europe. So the system was kept the same in all but name.

Interestingly as well, the grand majority of the country would rather keep it the way it is. The only people that oppose the ruling order are a few youth who want to join the European Union, and ironically, the Communist Party. These people are in extreme minorities here, but they get sensational attention in Western newspapers because Bush would prefer to knock down this Russian-friendly government with another Colour Revolution, and acquire a new ally within a few hundred kilometres of Moscow. But that is likely not going to happen. All it means is that the Belarusian secret police will probably bug my flat and read all my emails so that they can make sure I am not in cahoots with the CIA, or a Western journalist trying to help the opposition.

And nothing could be further from the truth. I wouldn’t dream of trying to change this magnificent Communist relic; indeed, I thank the gods that I was able to come here and walk through the biggest open-air museum in the world while it still exists. This is the only surviving piece of the USSR…it is the same in every respect from the grandeur of the monuments to the way that the guard scowls at you from his marble desk when you enter the state university. It is the Soviet Union with cell phones, and I am so happy to be here, I am planning to defect.

Kieran

3) Weissrussland

“Where are you going?”

It was the inevitable question. As I was waiting for my train, three drunken German girls had flopped themselves down on the bench opposite, all but one of them a little plain. They had noticed my mountain range of baggage with a Canadian flag stitched to the top of it. After raiding the vending machines, playing with their cell phones, and clucking to each other obnoxiously, it was only a matter of time before I became the object of their attention.

“Well…China.”

I couldn’t resist. The girls collapsed into a cascade of extravagant giggling.

“You’re going to CHINA on the train?”

I smiled at them through foggy eyes. I hadn’t slept properly in thirty-six hours.

“I’m going to Belarus first. I’m staying there for about four months. But eventually, I’m taking the train to China.”

“Belarus?”

The three girls looked confused.

“It’s a country….between Poland and Russia.”

“You mean…WEISSRUSSLAND?”

Their cackles echoed in the empty train station. The roof was as high as a plane hangar; light shone through dim portals in the ceiling and through the great doors in which the trains would soon arrive. It was cold on the platform; dew was in the morning air. These girls were in last night’s bar clothing, leaving little to the imagination, and seemed completely unaffected by the temperature.

“Why are you going to Weissrussland?”

“To study Russian. And also…my girlfriend lives there.”

“Whaaat?” they gasped.

Now I had really piqued their interest. They all leaned in to listen.

“What is she doing there?”

“She’s from there. From Minsk. Do you know where Minsk is?”

They started to giggle again.

“His girlfriend is from Weissrussland!” said the plainest of the three.

“Where did you meet her?”

I grinned even wider.

“We haven’t met. Not yet. We met on the internet.”

They exploded. The three girls slumped against one another, convulsing in laughter. I laughed with them, wondering whether or not one of them would fall off the bench.

“I had a boyfriend like that once,” said the least plain of the three. “From Italy. Eventually I took the train to meet him. I promise you—it’s only a dream.”

I adored them. What better cheap amusement could there be while waiting for a six am train?

“Beware the politics in Weissrussland!” said one of them, and started to chuckle. I knew it was a mistranslation of something more profound that this slightly-chubby, over-painted, half-gothic twenty-year-old actually had on her mind. But the message was the same. Belarus was mistrusted in the rest of Europe.

The German name of it had a charming ring to it. Weissrussland. White Russia.

No one really knew why it was called ‘White’ Russia in particular. Some say it is because of the distinctly white cultural dresses of the peasants of that area. But the prevailing legend is that it got its name because it is the only part of Russia that was not overrun by the Mongols. This, the locals say, is why the people there have such white complexions.

I only knew it as a ‘Soviet time capsule’, or so said my guidebook. But it was enticing, no matter how sensational or hip the author was trying to be. When I knew I wanted to travel there, I decided to find a friend, through couchsurfing.com, who could guide me around Minsk for a week or so.

That’s when I met her.

Katrina and I had spent the past eight months getting to know each other on the internet. Throughout my whole trip to the Middle East, we wrote each other constantly and talked often on the telephone. Originally, my plan was to spend four months in Russia and a few weeks in Belarus. Once I met Katrina, I decided to spend four months in Belarus and a few weeks in Russia.

Belarus had a post-Soviet labyrinth of a visa system, which I had begun to wrestle with three months before actually coming. In Egypt, a chubby, stalwart Russian man in a suit shook his head at me from inside the bars of the Belarusian embassy in Cairo.

“It is closed. Konstruction. Repair.”

“Well, how do I get a visa?”

He just shrugged and looked at me blankly. It was the signal for me to depart.

I faxed my university transcripts to Katrina, who translated them and brought them to Minsk State Linguistic University along with photocopies of my passport, medical insurance numbers, and other invasions of my privacy. But finally, after three weeks, they drafted an official invitation letter for me to come and study at the university.

But I didn’t trust the Egyptian post. I had Katrina mail it to a friend of mine who lived in Poland. She had promised to receive it for me, and I would pick it up from her as I made my way east. I only had to get that invitation letter to the Belarusian embassy in Warsaw, and Katrina and I would finally meet. In a matter of days, I would have in my hands the visa that would permit me across the border of White Russia.

————

“This is the castle that Hitler stayed in when he invaded Poland.”

It was dark, and the streets were snow-swept; the castle was illuminated by glowing lights. It was a masterpiece of masonry…the grey stone curled into arched windows crafted in a different style on each of its three stories. It had a slanted roof, and except for a solitary tower which sprung up from its center, it looked more like a cathedral than a castle.

My guide was Agatka. We were walking the central streets of her hometown, Poznan, and checking out the historic sites.

“Those two crosses mark the spot where John Paul spoke when he came to Poland.”

They were mammoth crosses, high as a building. They were built of concrete and had a sculpted iron roped draped diagonally across each of them. At their base, around the dedication plaque, glittered a small host of candles that had been placed there by passing citizens.

“He gave fifteen speeches in twelve days. One of them was in Poznan. Everybody came to watch.”

Agatka was a godsend. Even without most of my baggage, I had exhausted myself searching around for a hostel that didn’t really exist. I reclined, cheerful and defeated, on a barstool in a restaurant in the city’s central square, thriftily nursing every drop of joy from a towering mug of beer. When she met me, she laughed at my story, and at my frame pack which was awkwardly stuffed in the only corner of the restaurant where it would fit.

After calling her mother, she arranged to have me stay at her house. I rejoiced.

Agatka was twenty-eight. She worked in Poland for a company that distributed packets of freeze-dried soup. I had first met her in Prague in 2006, while I was visiting a friend of mine named Sarah who was there teaching English at the time. Sarah introduced me to a few of her friends, including Agatka, and we strolled around together through the Czech capital in the first sunlit days of spring. Now I was in Poland, fulfilling a promise I had made two years earlier to come see where she lived.

“I got a notice that there was something waiting for me at the post office,” she told me, as I was seated at a low table in her house, eating breakfast. “It’s Easter. We’ll have to wait until Tuesday before we can get it.”

Her dog poked its wet nose into my face, and began to assault my plate. I pushed it away with a kind, gentle hand.

“Yoosh!” said Agatka, scoldingly. “Yoosh!”

She made multiple attempts to command the animal to leave, which the pooch categorically ignored. Agatka rolled her eyes and laughed.

“Ahhh….he never does as he’s told!”

I smiled at the creature with loving hatred. I always found it frustrating when social graces prevented me from beating other people’s misbehaving pets. Now I was being forced into a minor evolutionary struggle with the beast as it competed for my nutrition.

“We’ll go into Poznan today to see some of the churches. Today is Saturday…this is when they bless the eggs.”

“Really? I would love to see that.”

Agatka explained this ancient Polish tradition to me. Right before Easter, each family brought a small basket of eggs, bread, and meat to the church a token portion—of the meal they would eat on Easter morning. Each item was laden with symbolism: the egg symbolized life and rebirth, bread symbolized the body of Christ, meat symbolized abundance and prosperity.

I watched as the priest said prayers in Polish, and then sprinkled holy water on the open baskets of food. Agatka had brought me to the small red church where she was baptized as an infant.

“In the smaller villages, they bring all of the Easter food before the priest to be blessed. But most places in Poland, we just bring a basket.”

Poland was fiercely Catholic. Most of the countries of Europe, including members of the former Eastern Bloc, had populations of mixed ethnic, linguistic, and religious background. This was not true for Poland. Ninety-nine percent of its people were white, Polish-speaking, and Catholic. I mused that this was likely the reason that the Polish language was written in the Latin alphabet, rather than the Greek-derived Cyrillic used a little farther East.

We visited many churches that day, all of them filled. The final one was constructed of deep red brick; it towered over a bend in the river and could be seen for miles. It was the Archbasilica of St. Peter and St. Paul, perhaps the most famous in the city. I paused nearby the entrance to examine a wrought-iron statue on a pedestal. It was John Paul II, his face stern and prophetic, holding aloft his right hand in a heroic pose, the wind blowing his papal robes. It chilled me. And what was even more revealing were the bunches of flowers, and dozens prayer-candles that were littered around its base.

It was not until that moment until I realized the full extent of the reverence the Poles felt for the man. He was unquestionably their national hero.

In 1978, a Polish Cardinal named Karl Wolyta, was elected the head of the Roman Catholic Church, and took the name of John Paul II, (‘Jan Pavel’ in Polish). The following year, he embarked upon a tour of Communist Poland. The popular effect of his visit was incendiary. In a matter of months after John Paul’s visit, the Solidarity movement was founded: the first-ever worker’s organization in the Eastern Bloc outside of the Communist Party. The Pope even had a direct hand in its success, for the Catholic Church was a powerful supporter of the movement.

Solidarity was the last demonstration against Soviet power to be crushed by force. In 1981, on orders from Moscow, the Polish government declared martial law. But Solidarity refused to be beaten. In that magic year 1989, with Gorbachev in power in Moscow, the Polish government negotiated with opposition groups to hold elections. Solidarity swept to power, and formally severed ties with the USSR. From then on, the television maps of Soviet influence had an embarrassing hole in the center of northern Europe. In months, the Berlin wall would be opened.

It was all because of Jan Pavel.

Agatka’s mother had his portrait on every wall. The fact that the Church had long since elected another Cold War relic to be the Bishop of Rome was irrelevant. To the Poles, Karl Wolyta was more than just the head of the Catholic Church. He was a symbol of their victory. The television aired a movie about his life just before Easter, with the pontiff played by John Voigt. The fateful moment came when Jan Pavel was wheeled to the window, and raised his hand, quivering from Parkinson’s disease, to address the assembled masses in Vatican square.

His face curled in agony. He was unable to say a single word. As he was wheeled away from the window, and brought to the bed where he would die a few days later, I saw Agatka’s mother silently wiping away tears.

————

The wind was arctic on Easter Sunday morning. Snow fell in tiny flakes, and blanketed the ground. Poznan slept. I was walking downtown on a bitterly inhospitable day, my pack in hand, looking for the hostel that wasn’t there. Oh well, I laughed to myself. At least I was dressed like I was going to Easter dinner.

“You can have breakfast here, tomorrow morning. It’s included in the price. Tomorrow.”

Tomorrow. The joyless blonde receptionist stressed the word just as I saw a wonderful breakfast being prepared for the people who were staying there currently. This was the Frolic Goats hostel, hidden on the second floor of a derelict building with a great steel door, and no sign. The stairs were even and unlit, and the walls smelled like cigarette ash. It looked like an uninviting slum.

When I opened the door, I entered the cozy and beautiful interior of a relaxing hostel. There was a European kitchen, a common room with couches and televisions, and the walls were painted a pleasant green. I was beginning to notice that this was a common theme of Communist-built living spaces: disgusting building entrances, wonderful interiors. It reminded me of Egypt, where an individual’s obligation to cleanliness ended definitively at the doorstep of their house.

“Can I at least have some coffee?”

“Yes. You can have coffee.”

I poured myself a dribble of a weak brew from an ancient coffee pot, added sugar, and nursed it hungrily. Already, a feast of rye breads, eggs, fruit, and three types of cheese had been laid out on the table. I tried not to think about it. Instead, I observed the snowflakes passing in the brick alley below us. There were few people in the street. After all, it was Easter Sunday.

“Alright. You can eat breakfast too, if you want. Probably there no place is open.”

The icy receptionist was melting. I gazed at her in pure gratitude. She nodded her head and continued her work, smiling tightly in admiration of her own benevolence. I sat down to my Easter feast.

Agatka had unceremoniously dumped me on the road earlier that morning. When I met her, her offer to stay was pure providence. But through some mystical accident that I have yet to understand, sometime during three days I had overstayed my welcome. I naturally felt terrible about this, since nothing in the world is uglier, nor more offensive, than breaching the laws of hospitality. Yet since I could do nothing more, I picked up my pack and carried on my way.

At least she was considerate enough to dump me beside a tram line.

I arrived back at her house two days later to gather my baggage and collect the one thing I really needed from her: my invitation letter to Belarus. It finally arrived the Tuesday after Easter. Under the furious gaze of my former host, I packed my bags together and humped them down the stairs. She gazed at me with the merciless contempt of someone who has had her time wasted without her will.

As she handed the letter to me, I looked at her with resignation.

“I’m sorry about this, Agatka. Thank you for all you’ve done for me.”

“I always keep my promises.”

As the door boomed closed behind me, I marveled how people in this part of the world could be so warm, and yet so cold.

————

In Downtown Warsaw I saw a city still trying to erase the marks left upon it by both the Nazis and the Soviets. The center of town was completely new: all the historic buildings had been bombed either by Germany or by the Red Army. After the devastation of that war, Stalin rebuilt the Polish capital. He raised a fearsome, neo-Gothic tower in the center of it, called the Palace of Science and Culture. There was something very eerie about this bulky, Soviet colossus—the central skyscraper in the downtown core. Stone spikes covered its rooftops, which made it appear somewhat like Saruman’s tower from the Lord of the Rings.

Most of the other buildings being put up in the city were more recent. Their style was post-modern: they were not symmetrical in any real way, and they were made totally of glass. This, I recognized, was just as much a political symbol as the mammoth Stalinist phallus that rose out of Warsaw’s center. The transparency, as I was told by a tour guide in Berlin, represents the transparency of democracy.

I got on a bus without a ticket, again. I didn’t know where to buy them; I didn’t know how to ask for them in the language; I didn’t even know what bus to get on. I ignored the whole system.

“Kontrol” was all the man said when he got on the bus. Immediately everyone beside me fumbled for their tickets. Aha, I sighed. This is when the hammer would finally fall.

“Dokument” he said, when I displayed my lack of a ticket. I could have delayed and fumbled, but that would only have postponed the inevitable. I handed him my passport.

Outside, he spoke to me in the most basic English possible that could facilitate communication.

“Two hundred zwotil.”

I looked at him, crestfallen. “I’m sorry. I don’t have two hundred zwotil.”

He looked at me and shook his head.

“No money, no ticket!”

I tried to look more sorry than I really was. My passport was in his pocket. Sometime today it had to get to the Belarusian embassy four blocks away.

“I’m sorry, I don’t have two hundred zwotil. It’s too much.” I said, shaking my head and looking grave. “Too much.”

He did not respond.

“I have…fifty zwotil. Perhaps. Fifty zwotil?”

I looked him in the eye. He knew exactly what I meant. Without a word, he walked behind a local kiosk until we were out of view. He opened his pocket.

I leaned over and peered into it, wondering if my passport was there. It wasn’t. When I looked back, this gaunt, middle-aged Pole was gaping at me, and still holding open his pocket, wondering if people from Kanada were really this stupid.

Oh yeah. This is where I put the money.

I walked around the corner the next moment, passport in hand. I had just bribed my first public official.

Thank God Poland was not yet beyond that.

I began to walk. Along the way, I drank in all I could of that long Warsaw roadway, which ran parallel to the flowing Vistula. The architecture was strange. I could recognize the Communist-built flats immediately—the clusters of large apartment buildings with identical designs. Across the street from them sprawled giant shopping malls, with oversized billboards and glittering lights. I passed a war memorial on my right, to the soldiers and partisans who fought against the Nazi occupation. And then, on my right, a piece of graffiti caught my eye.

Stenciled on the gray concrete of a run-down apartment block, in red ink, was the snarling face of the Belarusian president. Above and below him were the words: “Stop Lukashenko.”

Poland, which is fiercely part of the European Union, detests the politics of its eastern neighbour. Alexander Lukashenko, the authoritarian leader of Belarus, is ardently pro-Russian. Lukashenko has even suggested a possible reunification of Belarus and Russia—something that makes the Poles nervous.

In December 2007, while I was still in the Middle East, Poland, Slovenia, the Czech Republic, and Slovakia—former Soviet satellites all—implemented the Schengen Agreement and eliminated all border controls between them. Now it is possible to drive a car from Poland to Portugal and never once be stopped and asked for your passport.

But in order to do this, the countries have been forced to strengthen control along the eastern border of the Schengen Area. And this mean all these former satellites have been systematically cut off from Moscow’s influence, and cemented into the West. Belarus lay just on the Eastern side.

I strolled up the steps to the Belarusian embassy, invitation letter in hand. The border between today’s West and East, the benign descendant of the Iron Curtain, lay only a few hours’ train ride away.

————

“Have you ever been to Weissrussland before?”

My interlocutor was a tall, gaunt man in his sixties, with square spectacles. The train compartment was a sardine can, as usual, with three beds stacked to the ceiling. He occupied the bottom bunk; I, the top. My swelling, pregnant baggage occupied the middle one.

“No,” I told him. “It is my first time.”

“You are from where?” His English was heavily accented, and at times he had to pause to search for a word.

“Canada,” I replied.

“Ah,” he said. “I am from Germany. I have been to Weissrussland many times. Perhaps ten times a year.”

“Really? What do you do?”

“I work with the militsia. You know what the militsia is?”

I lied and told him ‘yes’. Later I learned it was the Russian term for ‘police’.

“Weissrussland is a great country. They are like us Germans. They have the same ancient central European culture.”

I told him I was excited to see it. He laughed and smiled when I told him about Katrina.

“And what did you tell to the embassy?”

“That I am studying Russian.”

“Good. Good! Tell them that. It is important that you have a good story. They do not admit many people in from Canada.”

I frowned. “Why?”

“America, Canada, and Europe all try to send their spies here. They want to make a colour revolution in Weissrussland.”

“But, they tried this in 2006,” I told him. “That was the last election. It didn’t happen.”

The German nodded. “They will try again. This year, in September, there will be elections for the parliament. They do not admit too many people from America. Or from Canada.”

I shuddered and clutched my passport in my hands. I had blatantly lied to the embassy about the validity dates of my health insurance. And I knew that in a country such as Belarus, no matter what kind of visa I had in my passport, my entry could be refused in a heartbeat.

“Europe does not like the politics in Weissrussland. If you read the news, you will think everyone there hates Lukashenko; that everybody wants him to go. This is not true. Only a fraction of the population does not support him. Except for the youth. But what the youth believe . . .” here he waved his hand disapprovingly, “is like the air.”

“Lukashenko has a strong government. It is good. Everybody has a job. There is no crime. There are no drugs. Did you see the graffiti in Berlin when you there?”

I nodded.

“Germany has a big graffiti problem, all across the country. There is no graffiti problem in Weissrussland. And do you know the story of the Polish gas train?”

Again, I shuddered. It had circulated widely among the young people I met in the hostel. It involved a sleeping agent being added to the air on the train. When everyone was incapacitated, thieves would storm the train and take everything but clothing. Anything of value was stolen, including passports, which would then be circulated into the underground false passport trade.

“Terespol is a city on the border of Poland. It is a city of criminals. Many, many thieves come onto the trains from here. In the border towns of Weissrussland, there is none of this. They are hard on criminals. Europe doesn’t like it. They support anyone who opposes Lukashenko. They even supported the Communismundship Party.”

He gave a look of disapproval. “In Germany, we had Communismundship for a long time. It was terrible. I don’t think the European Union should support the Communismundship Party in Weissrussland.”

At this point, a train attendant came in and gave us immigration cards to fill out. We took some black tea, which was poured into a glass and nestled into a metal holder.

“Russian system,” he told me with a smile. I studied my immigration card.

“They will stop us three times. Once to get your immigration papers and passport. The second time is to search your baggage. The third—to check your health insurance.”

I gulped. I looked at the checklist of things I was supposed to declare when I entered the country. I reflected mentally on what was in my baggage. I had ‘weapons and firearms’ (a can of bear spray), ‘electronic listening devices’ (laptop computer, headphones, and a webcam), ‘paper and printed materials’, (an entire library, including a copy of Mein Kampf).

“The answer to all of those questions is ‘no’” said my friend sternly, when I inquired. I followed his advice, imagining the interrogation I would receive if I checked ‘yes’ on a single one of them. The train rumbled on through the night. He advised me to stay awake until the border control.

“When they come, open your bag only halfway.”

I did. The fat, moustached man in green uniform raised his eyebrows. I nearly wet myself, and fully zipped open the monster. He poked a chubby hand in it, and tried to pull it open to look inside. It was so full of stuff that it barely budged. He realized this, and promptly lost interest. He moved on to the next compartment.

I breathed with great relief, and relaxed in my bunk. Not for the first time, I was saved by the laziness of border guards. Now all there was left to do was drift off to sleep, and pray that I somehow passed the health insurance check without incident.

————

It never came. When I awoke, the sun was streaming through the window. I got up, elated, and checked the time. The train was just an hour away from Minsk.

The German man was already up, watching the landscape pass. It was nothing but fields and fields of melting snow, dotted here and there with small farmhouses and bare stands of trees. He told me that this was where the Nazis tanks moved in June 1941, as they began the invasion of the Soviet Union.

I felt excitement rise in my veins. I locked up the train washroom for far too much time, trying to give myself a sink bath. I had planned this moment for a long time. I thought over everything…the shirt I planned to wear, the pants, the cheap but adequate cologne I had bought in Cairo. I donned it all.

When we got to the platform, I saw him embrace a woman at least twenty years his junior. He smiled at me, gave me his telephone number, and told me to call him if I needed any help.

“Good luck” he said, and shook my hand.

My heart was pounding. I was about to meet my girlfriend for the first time.

2) Eastalgia

The European leg of my journey had begun some months before. I got off the plane in Frankfurt in early March of 2008. I had just flown in from Cairo—only a few hours away by plane, yet worlds apart. German culture hit me like a cold shower. Everyone was whisking about the airport with that icy unfriendliness that I only notice when I re-enter the West. Naked tits poked rudely out at me from nudie calendars that were displayed on sales racks for every passing five-year-old to see. My stomach turned to look at them. In Egypt, it was risque for women to display their hair.

I went to the baggage terminal and heaved my mammoth luggage onto my shoulders. I had a silly habit of carting a library of books with me wherever I went, and I had become very good at packing bags to precisely the maximum weight the airline would allow. Yesterday evening I was dangling all three of them from a meat hook at a Cairean butcher shop, deliberating whether or not I could jam more books into the bursting zippers. Today I put them all on my back. They knocked the breath from my lungs when I picked them up, and after a few steps my shoulders started to burn. I chuckled. These monsters were coming with me from Frankfurt to Beijing by rail.

I floundered helplessly in the airport rail station as a tried to decipher the labyrinth of German that covered all sides of the ticket machine. I strangely found it personally offensive that there was no English. In Egypt, everything was written in English. Germans passed me and bought their tickets, taking no notice of the perplexed Canadian sitting across from the machine atop a mountain of unnecessary baggage. I asked three of them for a bit of help to buy a ticket to Berlin. Two of them didn’t even look at me.

Christ. In Egypt, everyone was friendly.

I was directed to an office where I could get a ticket to Berlin. The battlecraft who sold it to me looked indignant that she had to speak English. She greeted me with a frosty German pout.

“How much would a ticket to Berlin be?”

In Egypt from anywhere to anywhere was about fifteen dollars.

“That will be 120 Euro please.”

I gawked at her.

“I there any cheaper train?”

“Well…there is one for 32 Euro but it will take ten hours and you must change trains eight times. No one wants to do that. And especially with your bags, you don’t want to do that, do you?”

It did not take ten hours, it took fourteen. I cursed my way off of the final connection, and humped my impossible baggage up the stairs to the Berlin metro. The ticket machine dumbfounded me, so I ignored it. I contemplated that the retribution for riding the metro without a ticket was likely to be severe and pitiless. I finally arrived, and a long flight of stairs extended up to the street. I felt like Atlas hauling my way up one painfully slow step after another. My shoulders burned from the baggage straps. When I reached the street, I found that the bottom of my giant bag had a gaping hole from me foolishly dragging it behind me by its strap. I patched it with a prayer and a plastic bag.

On the street, I heard some American girl prattling in English to two friends. I accosted her to ask if there was a hostel close to here. She looked at me as if I had just urinated on her shoes. “I think there’s one near here” she said, in a faux-innocent, mocking tone that meant: never speak to me again, you filthy tourist.

Twenty minutes later I had grunted my impedimenta two blocks away to the door of a hostel. The price inside was thirty Euros—not the ten that the Lying Planet had led me to expect. I refused to pay that much. I trudged back out the door to the rainy courtyard where I had left my bags. My shoulders were red and chafed from the last time I picked them up. I looked at them.

They sat there, as immobile as Easter Island monuments.

I kept looking at them.

I had piled them atop one another; now they sagged outward in a formless mass. Toothbrushes, deodorant, Egyptian statues, one kilogram of green tea, and a mosque-shaped alarm clock that wailed the call to prayer were stuffed haphazardly into my two obese duffel bags and internal frame pack along with a cascade of clothing and twenty thick books which I had somehow convinced myself I couldn’t live without.

They began to gather a dust of rain. A puddle began to form at the base of them.

I walked in and paid the blessed thirty Euros. As I entered my quarters, I fell to my knees in joy. My room was a spotless paradise of starched linen. Swedish furniture adorned the small room with a sloping ceiling; my impregnable haven inside of swirling Berlin. Warmth flared out from the heater by my bed. Out the window, I could see the dying sunlight above the rooftops. It was as quiet as sleep itself.

I murmured a thank you to the gods of traveling before the coup-de-grace. In a bathroom of bleached white tile, with the faint smell of chemical cleaner still hanging in the air, I immersed myself in the steaming rapture of a boiling shower.

————

“Our tour begins today at the Brandenburg Gate, a very appropriate place to begin a walking tour of Red Berlin. My name is Alex, and I will be showing you the key sites of Communist Berlin, during that tense period of time known as the Cold War.”

Our guide was a short thirty-two-year-old with sideburns. He sported a toque and a jacket in the brisk morning air. I had to keep my hood cinched and my hands jammed in my pockets to keep from shivering. The square on the east side of the Brandenburg Gate was packed with tourists—most of them there to see the free tour that was being offered. I showed up for this, but on an impulse I scorned my poverty and forked out some Euros to see the Red Berlin tour. The ticket I was holding showed a historic photograph—an East German soldier jumping the barbed wire and sprinted into the West during the early days when the Berlin Wall had not yet been erected. The other people on the tour with me were the usual suspects: two middle-aged British ladies, some quiet Asian girls, and two pale and staggering American college students gravely trying to hold in last night’s liquor.

“I am actually a child of the Cold War,” Alex explained after we had stopped at our first checkpoint. “My parents were from Romania. My father was a mathematician. And when he realized that he could get paid three times in America what he could make in Romania, they decided to leave. We left for the United States when I was six, and that is where I grew up. I don’t remember too many firsthand experiences of what Communism was like in Romania, but my parents and grandparents do.”

“Today I am going to be talking to you about the DDR. It means Deutsche Democratic Republic, or German Democratic Republic, but I am going to call it by its abbreviation, the DDR. When Stalin vanquished Nazi Germany, of course, Germany was divided up into four zones of control by each of its four conquerors, America, Britain, France, and the Soviet Union. When relations between them went sour, the Soviets blocked off their zone of control and established the DDR in what would become East Germany.”

“Just a few months after the truce in 1945, Stalin began what is known as the Berlin Blockade. You see Berlin, as well as Vienna, was a divided city. Stalin’s plan was to starve West Berlin until it fell, since it was encircled by the Soviet zone of control. The Americans responded by sending planes of supplies into West Berlin. The Soviets didn’t shoot down the supply planes, and World War Three was averted. A new airport was constructed in West Berlin to deal with all the planes…a new plane touched down here every eight minutes. They moved an entire factory here from West Germany by supply plane. And during the entire Cold War, West Berlin was a Western outpost…a thorn in the side of the Soviets.”

Alex had taken us under the flapping British and French flags of the local embassies, before stopping in the shadow of the American one. “No pictures here, please,” he said. “I’m quite serious about this.”

“These embassies have been here since before the Cold War, on the Eastern side. “Berlin, as well as Vienna, was a divided city. As you can imagine, they were centers of intense spy activity. “Right where I’m standing, the Soviets ran underground telephone cables for their communication with their East German counterparts. During the early 1950s, a tunnel was dug beneath the American embassy, and they plugged a little listening device into these cables so they could hear what was being said.

“One day, sometime after the 20^th Party Congress, the wife of an East German diplomat called home to her daughter. ‘Khrushchev just denounced Stalin!’ she said. The speech Khrushchev gave was kept under the highest secrecy by the Party itself, and this was the first time the West had heard anything about it. Officials listening to this were absolutely shocked…they did not see it coming that anyone from inside the Kremlin would actually denounce their old leader. It was the first sign of any liberal change in the Soviet system.”

Alex paused for a second and looked at us.

“Does anybody here know the story of George Blake?”

The group looked at him without reply. The wind whistled through the street between the embassies. People shuffled and stamped their feet to keep warm.

“George Blake was one of the most famous spies of the Cold War. His real name was George Behar, he was originally from the Netherlands. He fled to Britain during the Nazi occupation, and eventually wound up working for the British Secret Service. He was captured by the reds in the Korean War and tortured. Eventually, he was returned in a prisoner exchange. He rose so high in the ranks that he eventually became one of only five people who knew the most carefully guarded secrets in Britain.

“But the Brits didn’t realize that during his internment in Korea, he was under powerful brainwashing techniques. And one day he woke up and realized that he had been fighting all his life for the wrong side. He instantly became the highest-ranking mole the Soviets had in the West. He began passing extremely sensitive information to them, including knowledge of this little listening device here in East Berlin.

“Blake’s position was so important that the Soviets kept passing extremely sensitive information through these wires—they didn’t want to indicate to the West that they knew. Then one day, when Khrushchev thought it would be politically expedient, someone called and said they heard a strange static in the line. They tunneled underground, and found these devices. And no matter how British-manufactured those devices were, Khrushchev blamed it on America. He got the whole world press there to see the American spy tactics against the Soviet Union.

“Know what the Americans thought when they heard of this? They thought ‘good job.’ Because McCarthyism was going on in the States at this time, people were happy to hear their boys in the CIA were doing good work. And as for George Blake, he was eventually caught. His position was revealed by a Polish intelligence officer defecting to the West.

“You may have thought he’d be shot for treason. But spies have an interesting life span. He was brought back to the Soviet Union in a prisoner exchange for British spies. He lived out the rest of his days teaching at a KGB academy in Moscow. In fact,” Alex finished with a laugh, “he was there lecturing when Vladmir Putin was going to school. He might have even taught Putin in one of his classes!”

Alex took us a few blocks away, and the landscape of the city changed. A host of yellow buildings sat innocuously in a rather empty dirt lot. A few naked trees twisted awkwardly up from the ground. The air was brisk and clouds of rain occasionally swept over us.

“This may not look like much,” Alex began, “but this is actually the site of the center of the East German Secret Police—the infamous Stasi. After the war, the Soviets put their man as head of the Stasi—a guy by the name of Erich Mielke. When Mielke came here he found them using all sorts of Nazi interrogation techniques…pulling out fingernails and such…and he found people would give all sorts of panicked answers to keep from pain. He upgraded things so there would be much more psychological forms of torture…like making people stand naked in a cold room for sixteen hours with the constant sound of dripping water. These, he found, were much more effective.”

“They recruited thousands of Germans to help them. They weren’t who you’d think spies would be. They recruited young women and men to seduce foreign diplomats and get them to inform. It’s important to remember, that it wasn’t always just good guys and bad guys. They actually lured in a British politician who was gay, and threatened to reveal this information to his friends and family in England unless he passed them state secrets.

“But that was just their foreign operations. The true extent of the Stasi was their control over the East German people themselves. They had over ninety thousand employees, and these employees worked through something like three hundred thousand main informants. These informants, too, worked through lesser informants too. They estimate that in all, there about one in every seven Germans was working in some form for the Stasi.”

“Can you imagine?” he said, stressing his voice for the tour group. “Can you imagine having one in every seven people spying on you? That’s incredible! They say that in every public building that there was at least one person there to report everything that happened to the Stasi.”

“When my father was working in Romania, he always had a bet with his friends on who the KGB guy in the building was. They were sure they had him nailed—he was always in his office by himself with his typewriter, spooky and unsociable. They would never say anything controversial around him.

“Do you know who the KGB informant actually was? It was the guy at the back who was everybody’s friend. He was the last person anyone would suspect.”

“My grandmother and grandfather were spied upon by the KGB in Romania. And after the fall of the Communist government there, it was imperative that the citizens get to read everything in their personal file. My grandfather and grandmother’s personal files are available to us to read…my parents’ own file will be available to me only when they die. There is even something in the Romanian archives on me! Yes, they saw that my grandmother was sending me chocolates in America, and someone had written: ‘so young, and he is already developing bourgeois tastes!’”

Alex was an experienced talker. He had given this tour a dozen times. He emphasized his voice at just the right times in order to give the intended effect.

“My grandfather and grandmother were never enemies of the people. Incidentally, my grandfather had an affair—but he never did anything contrary to the government. They have full transcripts of conversations that went on over my grandparents’ dinner table. And do you know who spied on them? It was the old lady who lived downstairs; the woman who my grandmother shared recipes with. It was her job, every evening, to get up on a ladder and change a tape in a compartment in the roof that was recording the conversations from my grandparents’ dining room above.”

“And it’s important for me to stress—these are third-world countries we are talking about. They put so much money, and so many resources into all of this espionage that could have been going towards things such as health care, housing, a better economy…but they were used to pay citizens to spy on one another, because the Party was paranoid about dissent.”

Alex’s words hung in the air as he took us to the next site. A middle-aged British lady clucked in front of me about how wonderful it was to be brought up in a free society, how we have no idea what it was like to live under Communism. I couldn’t give her much credence. She was a plump little stereotype who spent our metro rides muttering prejudices against Muslims in Britain.

“This is one of the only fragments of the Berlin Wall left standing. It was built here in 1963 when the Soviets became really dissatisfied with unbridled East German immigration to the West.”

Alex was in front of a large section of the infamous Berlin Wall. It was grey and drab and foreboding; over twice my height, with a curl of black-painted concrete at the top. It appeared as though the city was waging a war with some graffiti artists and losing badly.

“It is almost impossible to imagine the extent of the human tragedy this wall caused. This wall divided families, and sometimes even separated parents from children. There was a woman from East Germany who delivered her firstborn in a West German hospital on the night the wall was to go up. She went home that night, and woke up on the wrong side of the wall from her newborn son. She never knew him; he grew up in the West.

“Right at this spot was the first death to be associated with it. At one time there were some apartment blocks right here, and people would jump through third-storey windows to West Berlin fire crews who were holding safety nets below. In once case, a young woman tried to jump, but a secret serviceman was there and grabbed her arm. She made it out the window, but instead of falling into the firefighters’ net, she fell short and died.

“They had a small space of no-man’s land in between two walls. No one could cross it. Once an East German kid—nineteen years old—tried to make it across. He was shot in no-man’s land. He lay there, bleeding. The American soldiers on the other side couldn’t do anything: to step over the line would be a declaration of World War Three. He died there and the Soviet soldiers dragged him back. Stories like this would be published in the news every week in the West.”

“But even so there were ways of resisting. In one famous example, there was an Argentine man and his East German girlfriend. They were going to make a break for it through the wall in his car. But at the last moment, the East German girlfriend insisted—she wouldn’t go without her mother. The couple would ride in the front cab, and the mother would crouch down in the back of the trunk.

“When they got to the border control, they asked for passports. They gave the passports and ducked, and the Argentine slammed on the gas and broke right through the traffic arm. They made it to the West. And then they published that story in the newspaper, and it happened again twice that week!”

Alex laughed sarcastically.

“My favorite story, however, was of an East Berliner who could fake a good Austrian accent. He came up to the checkpoint, explaining that he was an Austrian student studying in East Berlin, and he would like to visit his mother in a hospital in West Berlin. When the guard asked him where his passport was, he explained it was in the hut off to the left. This was unusual procedure, but the guard called over other guards to watch him, and strode off to the hut.

“The guards then asked him what was the problem. He told them he was an Austrian student studying in West Berlin, and he wanted to visit his mother in a hospital in East Berlin, but he had forgotten his passport in his dormitory. The new guards gave him a puzzled look. Why shouldn’t he just walk back to get his passport from his West Berlin residence?

“He agreed, that it seemed to make sense. And he walked off into the West.”

Alex took us on a fairly extensive tour that day—it lasted a good five hours. He brought us to the customs’ office where the West Germans could go if they wanted to visit relatives in East Germany; the strip in East Germany which the president drove down every day. In side comments he indicated the parts of town that had the most neo-Nazi skinheads, or where some Nazi-style Germanic lettering still hung around on the entrance signs of certain metro stations.

“That over there, is a historic McDonalds,” he told us, while we stopped at one complex of white-brick buildings. “It is the first McDonalds ever to be built in East Germany after the Wall came down. It’s fairly significant that it was built in this building complex too.”

He indicated the buildings all around us that dominated every side of the street.

“This is one of the best examples of Stalinist architecture we have here in Germany. Notice the white bricks, the hard corners, the chrome-blue windows, the stalwart and imposing features? That’s that Stalinist style. In the 1953, right after Stalin died, construction workers working on these apartment buildings went on strike for higher wages and better living conditions.

“In Moscow, there was a power vacuum, and a struggle over who Stalin’s successor should be. Lavrentii Beria, the chief of Stalin’s secret police, thought that if he came to Germany and put down this revolt, surely the popularity he gained at home would make him General Secretary. Here in Berlin, he sent in the tanks and the troops to crush the demonstrations with brute force.

“But when he went back to Moscow, things didn’t go exactly as planned. He was arrested on the tarmac when he left his plane, and tried and convicted on trumped-up charges for being a traitor to the people. Khrushchev had him executed. He was strangled to death by his own secret service officers. A pretty brutal death…but…perhaps a bit appropriate for someone who did so much to create this type of culture in Eastern Europe.”

The sun was yellowing in the sky as Alex led the way to the final stop of the tour. With glee I noticed that it was just two blocks away from my hotel.

“This is known as the East Side Gallery. It is the longest stretch of the Berlin Wall still in existence; it is kept up as a big graffiti gallery in remembrance of the division of Berlin and the partition of Germany.”

I watched it snake away along the side of the river. The sun was setting and casting the whole area into a copper glow. Windows glinted in buildings behind Alex’s head.

“It is important to note that the tour we’ve done today, has been a tour of East Germany history, of the western view of East German history. We have to remember that the winners write the history books, and we have been basically looking at most of the negative aspects of the DDR. But there were a lot of positive things about a Communist society. It has created a lot of what the Germans like to call Ostalgie—‘Eastalgia’, ‘nostalgia for the East’—something like that. It just means nostalgia for some of the way things were in the socialist days.

“One thing that was an immediate disadvantage of capitalism was unemployment—you had lots and lots of East Germans needing jobs. While West German politicians begged West German companies to build factories in East Germany, they built them instead in places like India where labour was a lot cheaper. They’ve had tons of economic problems getting the East reunite with the West. And under Communism, there was always a job, and always a place to live.

“Another thing? Crime. Do you know what is the safest city in the world right now? Pyongyang, North Korea. In East Germany crime has gone up by factors of ten since the Wall fell. There’s a serious graffiti problem in Berlin, as you can see, which never would have existed under the DDR.

“Finally, there is just public morality. When I was growing up in Romania, I used to go to boy scouts. What’s one of the things you did if you saw and old lady walking with bags? You run up to her and carry them for her. And if she needs to cross the street you help her cross the street as well. Needless to say, nobody taught me this in America.”

He paused for a minute, letting the group take in the view of the wall and the river.

“Now I’m going to leave you here to take some photos of the East Side Gallery before the sun sets. This is the end of the tour. Thanks very much guys, and enjoy your time in Berlin.”

————

I walked up and down the hundreds of meters of wall, covered with elaborate graffiti. There were cartoon drawings of the soldier on my ticket who jumped the barbed wire; the Argentine who smashed through the border with his car. There were drawings of the Brandenburg Gate with the wall snaking around it, in its old form. There was a timeline of the lifespan of the wall, beginning with its construction in 1961, concluding with its fall in 1989.

When the wall was first erected, President Kennedy stood in front of it and gave a speech, known afterwards as Ich bin ein Berliner (I am a Berliner), in which he staunchly protested the construction of this wall and the division of the German people.

Twenty years later, Ronald Reagan stood in front of it, with the Brandenburg Gate behind him, and challenged Gorbachev to show that he was truly serious about reconciliation with the West.

“Mr. Gorbachev, come to this gate. Mr. Gorbachev, open this gate.”

The crowd before him erupted. American and West German flags waved back and forth in the air. Reagan, clearly not finished, waited until a natural silence settled from out of the cheers.

“Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!”

In 1989, Gorbachev announced that he would allow Eastern European countries to secede from the Soviet sphere of influence without the fear of military intervention by Soviet troops. Protests erupted across East Germany for a change. One November evening, an official announced publicly on television that there would be permission given to cross to the West to visit. While the order was to be for the next day, it was publicized as being immediate.

Millions of East Berliners watching television instantly flooded the checkpoints in the middle of the night. The border guards, who had no instructions to let them cross, were overwhelmed and held them back. They faced crowds of furious people arguing with them, berating them for not doing as the government had supposedly promised.

Soon the border guards realized that no one in the East German border authority would give the order to use force on the crowd. The guards had no other choice. They opened the gates. Thousands of East Berliners streamed through the checkpoints into the West.

One year later, the reunification of Germany had been achieved. There was no more East and West. The Cold War was buried. And by that time the Berlin Wall had been broken and chipped away, not only by the military but by individual citizens taking historical souvenirs.

Now, almost a full twenty years after the day, the old pieces of the Wall have to be forcibly preserved, lest its history fade forever in public memory.

I came upon perhaps the boldest piece of graffiti in the East Side Gallery: a giant picture of a three-part flag—the Israeli Flag, the Palestinian Flag, and the German Flag together in one.

An inscription beneath a nearby work of graffiti read:

NO MORE WALLS. NO MORE WARS. A UNITED WORLD.

The sky was growing dim. I started up the hill in the direction of my hotel. On my way I passed two huge medieval-looking towers on a bridge over the river. A historical photo stood nearby…of the two towers blown to bits during the Second World War. They were now restored and celebrated as monuments to historical Berlin.

It was 2008. There was no more Wall. There was no more Cold War. Perhaps the world was not united, but the traditional barriers that kept me from heading Eastward had fallen.

I could never give a rational explanation of what attracted me to the Communist World. I was in no way a socialist. But already I had been to Russia once, to a former Soviet satellite nation in Africa, to the Czech Republic, and to Castro’s Cuba. Perhaps I had a feeling of historical attachment for a system of government that is an endangered species; one that will go extinct in the coming century.

I was going to the Republic of Belarus, lauded in the Lonely Planet as a Soviet time capsule, for four months to study the Russian Language. I would meet my mother and brother in Russia and tour Moscow and St. Petersburg with them. I would head eastwards across Siberia on the longest railway in the world, and cut south into Mongolia, Moscow’s former satellite in the Soviet days. And finally I would conclude by going to China—the People’s Republic in name; the capitalist powerhouse in practice—for the Olympics in Beijing.

I was on my way eastward, propelled by my own Eastalgia. I was going to seek out the crumbled temples to the God That Failed, and scavenge among the ruins for souvenirs.

But with this trip in front of me, which would consume at least half a year of my time, most of my thoughts were not on the allure of the East and its history and culture.

My thoughts were on the girl I had asked to come with me.

1) Unbreakable Union

As I lay on my back in the bustling train car, I did everything I could to appear tranquil. I was in my little train bed with my eyes closed before most people had even boarded. My heart thumped maniacally in my chest, and I exhaled slowly to try to control my nerves. It didn’t work. Nothing worked. While I lay there, knowing that I would pass the night in a paranoid daze with very little sleep, I placed my arm on my stomach and held up my train ticket for the attendant to easily snatch without any personal interaction. My eyelids were shut like the lips of a vise, and I prayed that it would help me melt into the very wall.

I reflected that sneaking into Russia illegally was perhaps the stupidest stunt I had ever tried to pull under the nose of one of the world’s authoritarian governments. And to boot, I was stealing across the border of a country that was paranoid out of its wits about Western spies. I had brought along my passport, absolutely useless without a Russian visa, except only perhaps to show to the police to convince them of who I actually was in case…

I blocked the thought out of my mind. It would not happen. It could not happen. I was going to Moscow for a single day–I would arrive in the morning, and leave in the evening. In and out. It would be easy to go unnoticed, even in a city patrolled by half a dozen types of police. My freedom depended upon one thing alone–that nobody recognized me as a foreigner.

I stared down at the giant “Vancouver Canucks” label splayed across my chest in shining, obvious white lettering. Oops. Bad choice of attire. I pulled the scratchy, train-issue blankets up to my chest, and glanced around to see if anyone had noticed. The last thing I wanted to see was another half-tipsy Russian giving me a thumbs-up and yelling “Pavel Bure!”

I was riding platskart. The entire train car was one long barracks, so that a dozen extra beds could be packed into the sleeping area. Sleeping arrangements were very common on Russian trains, not as in the rest of Europe where the trips are are often short. Almost any distance covered in the vast expanse of Holy Russia was at least twelve hours by train, and required beds.

Platskart was third class–the way that ordinary Russian people rode the train. The car resembled a refugee camp. Old men fumbled to change into bed clothes, and poured themselves glasses of warm vodka to drink over cards. There were fat ladies chopping up sausage for their children on tiny train tables, and old ladies petitioning for help to stow away their luggage. The smell of beer wafted through the car as men opened tepid bottles and slugged them down. They would duck into the room at the end of the car and reappear five minutes later with the wet smell of cigarettes hanging on their fingers. And the train attendants, known as provodnitsas, were circulating furiously, bringing pillows and bedding to everyone and taking their tickets.

I reviewed my plan. I was going to go the whole time without talking to anyone. Anything I mumbled in choppy Russian would instantly betray me a foreigner. There was a group of men sitting right near me, babbling drunkenly and playing cards, but I knew they would not bother me. I was going to spend the full twelve hours pretending to sleep, without making eye contact with anyone; without entering any situation which may require me to speak.

It was all going wonderfully until someone sat down on top of me.

“Izvi-NIETzsche!” he said, as he jumped up in surprise. “Excuse me!”

He stumbled to regain his balance. He was a white-haired man with his shirt hanging open; he smelled like a vodka factory. His friends laughed at him as he rejoined the card game. As he slurred an apology, I smiled at all of them and tried with all my might to look half-awake. I turned to the wall. My heart threatened to leap out of my chest; blood pounded through my ears. I closed my eyes and tried to hypnotize myself to sleep. It didn’t work. All I could think about was how much I did not want to spend the night in a Russian prison.

This latest feat of idiotic traveling was made possible by a political glitch in the modern visa system. As of 2008, the Russian Federation did not have border controls with the Republic of Belarus, its small neighbour to the west. This made it possible, as the Lonely Planet noted, to travel in between Belarus and Russia without a visa for a short period of time, so long as no police officer caught you doing it. As I leafed through my travel guide, this fact piqued my curiosity, and I smiled confidently and knew that I would never try something so ludicrous. Yet it sat there on the page, silently beckoning to me, waiting patiently for the day when I would invoke it out of pure necessity.

And this night, I was praying to the gods that the rules had not changed, and that Russia was still pretending that Belarus was not a separate country.

If the clock were turned back twenty years, things would be a little different. It would be 1988, the Berlin Wall would still be standing, and all the land to the borders of Poland would be part of the Soviet Union. The KGB would be standing guard, and Mikhail Gorbachev would be the General Secretary of the Communist Party, the second most powerful man in the world.

Since those days, politics have altered the playing field. The breakup of the USSR was the most recent imperial collapse in history. Overnight, fifteen new independent nations were created: six in Europe, including Belarus and the Ukraine; five in Central Asia; three in the Caucasus. And the rest–a land still vast enough to stretch from the shores of the Baltic to the islands off Japan–was reincarnated as the Russian Federation.

“Yup, that’s what the breakup of the Soviet Union means to me…a big visa headache!”

Katrina chuckled and held my hand as we walked together towards the Russian embassy. She was a beautiful girl, born to young parents in Minsk the year the Berlin wall came down, two years before the Soviet Union finally imploded. Her country, Belarus, was younger than her.

“It’s alright dear,” she said. “We just have to be patient. And don’t be pushy. Russians don’t like it when you’re pushy.”

I had been to this embassy before. Last time I spent two days getting the correct fee in American dollars and filling out the application, only to be told that I needed the original of my invitation letter.

“But when I came here in 2006, all I needed was a photocopy!”

The Russian lady behind the glass looked at me with indifference.

“I’m sorry. The rules have changed.”

That fiasco cost me $150. That was the charge for shipping an invitation letter, issued by one of Russia’s hotels, from Moscow to Minsk. But it arrived on time, and I was able to go to Moscow and meet up with my mother and brother. Now I needed a second visa, and therefore a second invitation letter. But since I had a full two months to get it, I relaxed. I knew that I had more than enough time.

“I can’t believe it’s been thirty days and it still hasn’t arrived! What do we do?”

“I don’t know dear. It seems the post has lost track of it.”

I swore and oath to the sky and held my head in my hands. The trip of my dreams—-to go across the Trans-Siberian railway east to Mongolia and China—-was about to be thwarted by the extraordinary incompetence of the post-Soviet post.

“Well, they have another letter waiting for me in Moscow, but how can we get it here??”

Katrina and I had been planning for some time to go by rail across Russia to China. Under no circumstances would this trip fail. I would not let it. We rushed to the DHL office in central Minsk. Katrina, my avid translator, argued for a great length of time with a flightly blonde who was working there. DHL, that great engine of world transport, told us that the fastest the letter would arrive no matter how much we paid, was a week.

“Sorry. It’s a holiday!”

Tomorrow was July 3rd, Independence Day in Belarus. You might expect that Independence Day was the day that Belarus became independent from the Soviet Union and began its new path as a sovereign nation. This isn’t so. Independence Day in Belarus is the celebration of the day the Red Army liberated them from the Nazis.

The subtle message seemed to be that Belarus and Russia weren’t really two different countries at all.

“One week! That won’t do! We have to leave in a week! And it takes them seven days to process my visa. We need it now! And if I rely on DHL, it will be too late and we will have no time to see Siberia. And my visa says I have to be out of Belarus by July 15!”

Katrina looked distraught. “Well what do we do?”

“This is ridiculous!” I shouted in frustration. “Best American shipping company in the world, and it takes them seven days to ship a piece of paper to a city twelve hours away! For God’s sake Katrina…it would be easier if I went to get it myself!”

After I spoke those words, both of us froze. I had meant them only in jest. But now that I thought about it…

————

I lay in the dim lights of the train car. From time to time the engine halted, and I heard the metal clank of a boarding passenger on the train stairs. Each time we stopped at a station, I prayed silently for the train to lurch forward again and start moving. The good part was I was not simply relying on the Lonely Planet’s 2005 edition. On my earlier trip to Moscow, I had been through this gaping hole in the border, and I rolled into Byelorusskie Station the next day without ever being stopped. But my mind wandered. What if this train got stopped? What if they checked randomly? What if they ‘changed the rules’ ? What if I got taken off the train by steel-faced Russian policemen and marched into a cell? How would I explain it to my father over the telephone? Would I ever see my girlfriend again?

Suddenly I felt two large hands clutch the front of my shirt. A barrage of Russian assaulted my ears as I was shaken violently awake. I opened my eyes–and beheld none other than the drunken man who had sat on me earlier, his shirt still hanging unbuttoned and open. I gaped at him like a mute.

No sooner had I opened my eyes that he began to look a bit embarrassed, as though he had just bent over me and shaken me awake by mistake. His eyes were glazed with vodka.

“Izvi-NIETzsche!” he said. “Isvi-NIETzsche.”

He returned to his bunk to play cards.

I laughed tears of joy. I could have kissed the man! Here I was, shaken furiously awake by my shirt collar, and it had not a thing to do with visas, passports, prison, or deportation! My assailant was not a policeman, nor a border guard, nor an OMON soldier, nor a whistle-blowing provodnitsa. It was just a shirtless stereotype, at home in his natural habitat, shaking me awake just to see what I would do.

I didn’t give more than half a glance to the chuckling crowd who had just observed the whole spectacle. I couldn’t say one word. I pulled the blankets up once again over the crumpled symbol of the Vancouver Canucks on my t-shirt, and resumed my silent prayers that the night would henceforth pass uneventfully.

————

I got my invitation letter right away.

I walked up the yard and missed the hostel completely. Eventually I entered what clearly used to be a large block of flats, of Soviet design. They were characteristically large square apartment blocks, at least three or four stories, which looked out onto a courtyard that was adorned with metal children’s play equipment. An unnoticeable paper sign lay behind a smudged window.

It read ‘Comrade Hostel’.

The crooked staircase was wretched and smelled like animal piss. It ascended three unnecessary floors, which the architects left as empty, squandered space. The aqua-blue paint on the walls was peeling. The whole building looked like it should have been demolished years ago. At last I came to a door with a half ripped sticker saying “Hostelworld.com” plastered to it. And aside from that indication, there was no way to know that I was at the right place.

I walked out with the invitation letter in my hands not thirty seconds after I walked in. I didn’t give the guy working at the desk the chance to look at the passport photocopy and realize that I was, indeed, picking up an invitation letter in the capital of the very country that I needed it to get into. I strolled outside into the morning sunlight, and relaxed in a park in China Town, a part of Moscow that has never had any Chinese population whatsoever. On the bright lawn, I sat and opened my backpack, snacking on my indigestible breakfast of crackers, cheese, and kolbasa sausage.

My train was leaving in fourteen hours. I now had all day in Moscow, and nothing to do–my only guideline was that I did not speak to anyone. I strolled down the street to Red Square, and saw the bright onion domes of Orthodox Cathedrals on my left; the glittering Moskva river snaking off behind them. Around the bend shone the candy-cane whorls of Pokrovksy Cathedral, improperly known in the West as St. Basil’s. The red brick glowed, along with the white and orange paint; the nine domes stood majestically against the morning sky.

I sat on the grass across from the Cathedral, carefully noting any policemen or guards in my line of sight. They didn’t bother me. Unlike a few years ago, they would approach us to grab our passports and extort us for money. I stretched out on the grass beneath a tree, with my back to the red walls of the Kremlin, and opened a book by David Remnick called The Last Days of the Soviet Empire.

————

“Citizens of Russia!” Yeltsin’s voice was stern and measured. The silver-haired politician had just marched down the steps of the White House, the Russian parliament building just around the bend in the river from the Kremlin. He climbed atop a T-72 tank of the Taman guards, shook the hands of the bewlidered soldiers, and gave his address to the thousands who had assembled.

“The legally elected president of the country has been removed from power…We are dealing with a right-wing, reactionary coup d’etat…Accordingly, we proclaim all decisions and decrees of this committee to be illegal…We appeal to the citizens of Russia to give an appropriate rebuff to the putschists and demand a return of the country to normal constitutional development.”

He spoke with clarity and gravity, addressing not so much the swarms of Russian demonstrators, but the cameras pointing at him from below the T-72. Around him, covering the steps of the White House and spilling over onto the driveway, were thousands of ordinary people. The red, white, and blue Russian tricolour–the old Tsarist flag–was waved above the crowd by a man sitting astride the arm of a cherry-picker. They had come to support Boris Yeltsin, their only hope of resistance.

The year was 1991. Mikhail Gorbachev had ruled the Soviet Union for six years. When he began his term in 1985, he immediately called for glasnost (‘openness’) and perestroika (‘restructuring’). He was doing what the West thought impossible–reforming the system from the inside. Overnight, the authoritarian hand of the Soviet Union dropped away. Freedom of speech was established; Party Congresses were broadcasted on national radio and television. Gorbachev initiated market reforms, and he pulled the troops out of Eastern Europe. The Berlin Wall crumbled.

While the West celebrated the end to hostilities of the Cold War, the old guard in the Communist party fumed. Most of them remembered the bitter and costly battles of the Second World War, and what their countrymen had sacrificed to build the USSR into the world’s second superpower. They watched as the democratic Gorbachev unraveled Soviet military might in Eastern Europe, and drove the Soviet economy into the ground.

Gorbachev was ready to do away with Communism forever. In two days he would return to Moscow to sign a new treaty. The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics would become the Union of Soviet Sovereign Republics. He was about to reincarnate the entire Soviet system as a Western-style social democracy.

But first, he needed a vacation.

Gorbachev was relaxing in Foros, in his magnificent dacha built on the Black Sea, when the KGB arrived. They were the first agents of the coup in Moscow. A committee of eight of the old guard, including ministers that Gorbachev himself had appointed, had taken control of the Kremlin and declared a state of emergency. They were preparing to return the country to its old state, where dissent was silenced and at least the shops had enough food. His captors asked Gorbachev to give his support to the committee and make it legitimate.

It is here where most polite versions of the story do not translate the exact phrases that Gorbachev used. Katrina tells me Russian swear words are among the dirtiest in the world.

The KGB entered the newspapers and television stations in Moscow. Tanks rolled in the streets. By the dawn, the radio had broadcasted the state of emergency, saying that Gorbachev was too physically ill to respond to the situation. The Emergency Committee took power.

At his dacha outside Moscow, Yeltsin strapped a bulletproof vest on before donning his suit. He was a new radical politician–one who believed that Gorbachev hadn’t gone far enough. He had been elected the president of the Russian Federation, the largest of the fifteen republics within the USSR. And unlike Gorbachev, he had been elected by the first truly democratic elections to be held in Russia since 1917. He hastened to the White House, the parliament building of the Russian Federation with his aides. He was going to barricade himself inside and use the building as a symbol of resistance.

At noon, he went on the radio.

“Soldiers and officers of the army, the KGB, and the troops of the Interior Ministry! Countrymen! The country is faced with the threat of terror. At this difficult hour of decision remember that you have taken an oath to your people, and your weapons cannot be turned against the people. You can erect a throne of bayonets, but you cannot sit on it for long. The days of the conspirators are numbered…Clouds of terror and dictatorship are gathering over Russia, but this night will not be eternal and our long-suffering people will find freedom once again, and for good. Soldiers, I believe at this tragic hour you will make the right decision. The honour of Russian arms will not be covered with the blood of the people.”

Tanks sent from the Kremlin surrounded the White House, sent by an elite division known as the Taman Guards. Already thousands of demonstrators gathered to support Yelstin. Men pleaded with army officers not to shed their blood. Girls climbed onto the tanks. Old ladies shrieked into the windows for the boys to turn around and get out. The tank drivers sat bewildered on their tanks, unsure of what to do. One of the officers, named Sergei, received a call from Yeltsin’s deputy.

“You know the people who ordered you to do this are criminals?” he said.

Sergei did not know what to say.

“What do you think? Will you help us?”

That was his key phrase. Sergei realized at once what he was being asked to do…support Yeltsin, betray the military, and risk death for treason.

“I will help.”

The crowd roared as the tanks slowly began to point their barrels away from the White House. The soldiers had turned. They were now ready to defend the parliament and the resistance of Boris Yeltsin.

————

Across the Soviet Union there was subtle rebellion against the coup. The regional commander of Leningrad refused to send in his tanks to occupy the city. A hundred thousand people staged a demonstration of support in Yeltsin’s hometown. The young staff at the newspaper Nezavisimaya Gazeta were told by their editor-in-chief to print the official line of the coup leaders, and nothing by Yeltsin. They refused. They printed Yeltsin’s statements on the second page of the paper, right after those of the putschists.

One of the coup leaders, Gennady Yanayev, was asked to give a press conference. He had been awake all night, drinking vodka heavily and preparing for the hard hours ahead. He had been dragged into this mess at the last minute by coup enthusiasts; he perhaps now he was regretting his decision. He was frightfully nervous; his hands were shaking of their own accord.

After the press conference, he ordered the people at the news station Vremya to edit out his trembling hands, the laughter in the hall, and the scoffing reactions of the news correspondents. They edited nothing. Vremya aired that night, and the Soviet people got to see the spokesman for the new order, drunk and nervous, barely able to read his statement because of his shivering hands.

At the White House, the people had placed the rebel tanks behind a makeshift barricade. They waited outside for two rainy nights, determined not to go inside. Yeltsin and his team were using them as human shields. They were betting on one desperate chance…that the coup leaders would not dare create a river of blood in downtown Moscow, on live international television. The young men in the tanks sat waiting in dread of the moment the order might come.

“Is there really someone here who wants to storm the White House?” Yanayev asked.

He was holding a meeting with the coup members. Things were not going so well. Gorbachev had not cooperated, the army was not fully responsive, and Yeltsin was shaming them all. The Emergency Committee had already lost faith in itself. To this question, no one responded. Every man stared at the floor.

Yelstin received a call from Kryuchkov, another member of the Emergency Committee. He suggested that they both fly to Foros and resolve it all with Gorbachev. The troops were ordered back to their barracks; the crowd surrounding the White House erupted with joy. The coup had ended. They had won, and they were all alive.

Back in Moscow, Gorbachev gave a press conference. He talked like he always did–about the renewal of the Party by the defenders of true socialism, who had routed the putschists. At the end, his aide Yakovlev approached him.

“You have just given the worst press conference of your career,” he said. “The Party is dead. Why can’t you see that? Talk about ‘renewal’ is senseless. It’s like offering first aid to a corpse!”

He was right. Two days later, Yeltsin passed two decrees. One suspended the activities of the Russian Communist Party. The other gave the member republics the right to secede from the USSR if they so chose–which they did. The following day, on August 24th, Mikhail Gorbachev resigned as General Secretary. And with that, Communism–the spectre that haunted Europe–vanished on the night breeze as quietly as it had come.

————

I strolled to the White House, now the House of the Administration of the Russian Federation. It was massive and robust–the characteristic features of Soviet construction. It was built to look as glorious and imposing as the Party that commissioned it; propaganda turned to stone. I looked at the double-headed eagle, the resurrected symbol of the Russian Tsars, shining golden from the highest point of the building. And as I examined the building closely, I could make out scars, worn into the white stone, from where the hammer-and-sickle once stood.

I had been thinking all day about something called the ‘Great Man’ theory of history. It is the theory that the most powerful leaders in the world, male or female, are the determining forces in history. Believers in the theory say the world would look completely different if it were not for the will and agenda of individual men: people such as Caesar, Napoleon, Hitler, or Genghis Khan. This is contrary to the theory which true Marxists themselves believe: that it is the material conditions of the population as a while, not the individual, that determine the character of revolution. By this logic, if Napoleon had been shot by an English cannon early in his career, another hero of the same stature would have arisen in his place.

The Great Man Theory is currently not in vogue in Western academia because of its undemocratic connotations. And it is certainly true that there is more to the history of the world than the decrees and actions of a few powerful individuals. Yet as I pondered the story of the end of the Soviet Union, and Yeltsin’s courageous defiance, I realized that at the most critical moments, the course of history is actually decided by personal mettle. The coup members were so hesitant they could not even name a leader–one soul brave enough to take responsibility for the actions of the committee. When it came time to address the nation, it was Yeltsin’s speech atop a tank to Yanayev’s waggling hands.

I recalled a quote from Henry David Thoreau, something he had written in his diary in the mid nineteenth century. He was talking about great masses in history, and how the historian tries without success to make them meaningful. “It is for want of a man that there are so many men,” he wrote. “It is individuals who populate the world.”

————

The day was waning. In the fading light, I sat in a garden across from the Kremlin. I watched old ladies walk past with shawls and old bags on wheels, saying “beer, cigarettes; beer, cigarettes.” One of them approached me. I thanked the woman and said no. Maybe later.

Her old face wrinkled into a smile. “Oh, I have to catch a train later. You better have one now.”

I popped open a Starry Melnik, my favorite Russian brew, and watched the amber glow of the sunset against the walls of the bright yellow government buildings inside the Kremlin. The McDonalds on the tier beneath me was packing up with people to buy American burgers at American prices. McDonalds opened their first shops in Russia in 1990, when it was still the Soviet Union. I thought of the American businessman who woke up one morning and thought it would be hilarious to put a McDonalds–an archetype of American capitalism–across the street from the world epicenter of Communism.

To my right, Russian teenagers on a park bench lit cigarettes and played with their cell phones. Titanic Russian special policemen walked bored throughout the park, ignoring the open beer bottles they saw. As the light faded, little garden lights began to glow, as did the water fountains nearby. A group of American college students bantered loudly, a few girls went off in search of a place that would serve them a White Russian. I could have told them that their search would have been totally fruitless, but I did not.

I couldn’t speak to anyone.

In the darkness I took the Moscow metro back to Byelorusskie station. Across the street there were rows of construction and a man reading a magazine in a one-bulb shop. I sat beneath the awning of an Orthodox church, shut down for construction, and pretended to play with my cell phone while I eyed the seedy characters inhabiting the alleyways not too far away.

When the anointed hour came, I got up and marched into the railway station. Now it really counted. I was in another country illegally, and no one could do a thing if I reached Minsk safely. When I arrived at the station, I instantly saw Russian policemen standing about the train platforms looking bored. They hadn’t been there this morning.

For an instant I almost swerved in my step. I could turn around and spend the next night and day in Moscow, I thought. I’ve stayed up all night before. And then I could just buy another train ticket…

I realized I could not buy another train ticket. I would have to show my passport.

My heart in my throat, I walked calmly towards my train past the idle cops. In front of me, one was looking at the passports of a man and his family. They were a shade of brown–Armenians or Georgians probably. I prayed it was not a general inspection, and I decided to treat it like it wasn’t. I walked past them. I caught a glimpse to the right of a Provodnitsa opening a man’s passport.

I breathed. I didn’t have a problem looking relaxed. My nerves were swimming in a lake of beer.

I gave my ticket to the provodnitsa, and she told me my seat number. I boarded the train and found my sleeping quarters without saying even as much as a grunt to anyone, in a routine I had practiced already two dozen times in my head. On my train bed, my form still, my mind racing, my heart pounding in my chest, I felt the train lurch to life; I felt the fingers of the provodnitsa snatch my ticket from my outstretched hand.

I barely slept. I could not say the hour when my nerves finally became exhausted; when I finally faded into oblivion. I did not know I was safe until I saw the shine of the two Stalinist towers of the Minsk Gate, standing tall and pale in the clear Belarusian dawn.

————

“I’m sorry, the visa won’t be ready in a week. Fifteen working days.”

“WHAT?”

“Fifteen working days. That is the policy.”

I tried not to explode.

“But when I came here just two months ago in April, it was done in a week! Look, I have the original invitation letter, just like you said!”

“I’m sorry. The rules have changed again.”

I submitted my application and passport, and walked outside with Katrina to laugh my frustration to death. What could I do? The entry visa requirements to this country changed on the wind! And what’s worse, it would be twenty-one days before I could get into Russia, and there was no way they could extend my requested stay. I would have to get from Moscow to the Mongolian border in nine days; I would not have time to see much of Siberia.

But what really caught my eye were my dates of departure. After my little illegal adventure in Russia had passed without incident, I was going to have to stay ten days over my Belarusian visa before I got my passport back. I would have stay illegally in Belarus, the only post-Soviet country where the KGB were still the KGB.

My one way out of Belarus was the train to Moscow. The only way to get out of the country without being noticed was through that very same hole in the visa system that I had just jumped through. I laughed when I realized that the trip of my dreams—across the trans-Siberian to China—was made possible only by the political ghost of the Soviet Union.

23) The Odyssey Continues

   
This is a message to all friends, relations, and people I have met along the way…

As is the case with most stories that you write as you go, I am going to have to end my journey in Egypt with no solid conclusion. I am currently writing this from Minsk, Belarus. It’s certainly a change from the cultural climate of the Arab world, but that is my current situation. To make a long story very short, in March I spent two weeks in Alexandria, then took a plane to Germany. It took me two weeks to make my way across central Europe, lugging bags that were half my weight on and off of a dozen different trains. I passed a snowy and frigid Easter in Poland, and finally crossed from Warsaw over the Belarusian border and onto Minsk.

Belarus, also known as White Russia, was my place of choice to learn Russian. It is a little republic that broke from the USSR in 1991 so that it could remain communist. It has an economy of which the central government owns 51%, all of its staues of Lenin and other heroes are still around, and all of the architecture was built in the Stalinist style in the early fifties after the city was wiped by the Nazis during the war.

In Belarus they speak Russian. But they have a far smaller population than Russia, the prices are cheaper, and the people are much more polite and don’t prefer to be identified with Russia. Belarus is to Russia what Canada is to America. I have been here for two months and I love it; it’s an excellent place to learn the Russian language; the Soviet Union with cell phones.

Now, in order to fully commit myself to these lessons, and to do a bit more traveling, I am going to have to drop work on the blog and the mass emails until sometime in September. This is the first summer in five years that I have not spent in the wilderness of western Canada, slaving for school or travel money. Instead…I am going to spend this summer in the wilderness of Siberia.

The current plan, if I am lucky enough to pull it off, is to take the longest railroad in the whole world…the Trans-Siberian. I plan to spend time in Siberia and Central Asia…the empire that Russia never lost. I will go to Mongolia, and onwards to China and beyond. When I finally find another place to rest my feet for a period of months, I shall hopefully have another story to forward to all of you, piece by piece.

I want to thank you all for reading my emails and my blog; it has been a pleasure writing them. I thank you all for your feedback, and I have tried and almost succeeded in replying to every one of you. If any of you want to write me, I would of course love to hear from you and unless I am forcibly away for the net for a period of time, I will write you back.

I hope you have a fantastic summer. Inshallah, I will be writing to you again when the days get shorter.
Kieran

22) My House is Your House

 

After a time, I finally bid goodbye to the city of Jerusalem. Sean was going to stay in Israel to travel around and see more of it. But I had been living out of a backpack for five weeks, and I was desperate to get back to Cairo, to our empty flat waiting there. Among other things, my clothes really needed a wash, and I was just tired of hoisting up my heavy backpack and always moving on.

Eilat is the southern border town of Israel…one that occupies a tiny stretch of ocean in between Jordan and Egypt. Israel has signed a peace treaty with both countries, and so there is relative peace, and a consulate of both countries in the city.

“You have to go to the Egyptian consulate if you want a visa…if you cross at the border you will get a Sinai-only visa.”

This advice was given to me by a 20-year-old traveler named Paul. He got off the bus with his two friends, Nathan and Brenda, in Eilat, and warned me not to go straight across the border as I had planned. They were also waiting to visit the consulate. I forgot about my pledge to get across the border as fast as possible, and not to spend any unnecessary Israeli shekels, and checked into a hostel with them.

The three of them were American students from Wisconsin. I was really happy to have some company, and not slum around a darkened hostel by myself. They were Jews, non-practicing Jews as so many American Jews are, and they had just been on the Birthright tour of Israel. They had postponed their plane tickets home, because they all wanted to spend a week in Egypt before heading back home to school.

“Wow”, Paul exclaimed to Nathan. “Now that we’re off that trip, I kind of feel like we should go find some meat and cheese and put them together.”

They told me about a line in the Bible that says ‘you should not cook a lamb in its mother’s milk’. This one line was interpreted to mean you are not allowed to eat meat and dairy products at the same meal: a spoiler for pizza-lovers. It became incorporated into Torah law over the thousands of years, right beside the law that says that you are not allowed to turn on light switches on Saturdays.

“It gets ridiculous. As Birthright participants we all spent a night in the house of an Orthodox Jewish family. It was interesting, but I could never practice like that myself.”

There are three types of Judaism: Orthodox, Conservative, and Reform. The Orthodox follow the traditional laws that have been handed down for thousands of years. They wear skullcaps outside and often have single curls of hair coming down behind their ears. They all wear a prayer shawl with white tassels that hangs down beneath their clothing: this is a symbol for their memory of what the Hebrews wore when they were following Moses through the Sinai. They follow all the strict Kosher dietary laws, and they do no work on the Sabbath. The Sabbath, the Jews’ holy day, lasts from sundown on Friday until sundown on Saturday. During this time, some of the strictest keep a non-Jew in their house to open doors for them and to turn on light switches, as both of these are technically forbidden by a strict reading of the laws.

Orthodox Judaism is the only type officially recognized by the state of Israel. Conservative Jews still practice the dietary laws, but the recognize the need to assimilate into whatever culture they have joined. They do not wear skullcaps, or dress in a distinctly Jewish way. Reform Jews are even more radical; they eat bacon.

The Americans were headed to Cairo eventually, but first they were going to see Jordan and then head south to Luxor and Aswan. When we parted, I invited them to give me an email when they passed through Cairo, and that they were welcome to stay at my flat.

At the Egyptian consulate, I arrived just in front of a large group of Spanish-speaking people. Their passports said they were from Argentina…most of them were around my age, though a few of them were younger. After we passed through the checkpoint that let us into Egypt, this group beckoned me over to them, and one of them who spoke English asked if I wanted to share a taxi to Cairo.

By the end of the trip, I had invited all of these Argentinian travelers to my house. They had slept for three days in a tiny flat in Eilat, and they were overjoyed that my house was so big and had so many spare places to sleep. The next day I sent them off in taxis to see the pyramids, and then we all met again to go to El Azhar park in Cairo, to watch the sun set and listen to the call to prayer. We went to the Grand Bazaar all in a giant group, and finally returned to the house exhausted and ravenous for pizza and beers.

When they left, I had all of them slapping me on the back and thanking me prodigiously for two nights in my house and for leading them around Cairo. What they didn’t understand is that it was even more fun for me: instead of coming back to a dark flat in Cairo by myself, I brought a party. And beyond that, it was truly fantastic to be able to guide friends around and make their short stay excellent in a part of the world that I knew fairly well. For all the times that people have given me hospitality, I was finally able to pay it forward, and say ‘my house is your house’ to a group of fellow weary and broke student travelers.

—–

I invited Tamer over to meet my new American friends. They had just been down to Luxor and were now circling back to Cairo to see some of the rest of Egypt. Tamer came into my house bringing a bag of beers and a big sheesha pipe. He greeted all of them with glee, even though he understood not one word of English and I had to translate.

“Are they Christians?”

“Of course they are!” I replied with a smile. He nodded in approval. Any Jew immediately turned into a Christian when he crossed the border into Egypt. Many Jews traveled to Egypt, but none wanted to risk the social reprisals they might get if a lot of Muslim Arabs found out their true religion.

“He’s Christian though, Kieran. I wonder if he would care if we were Jews or not.”

Paul made an interesting point. I knew Tamer was quite racist against Muslims in his own country…perhaps he would side with a people that also traditionally didn’t get along with Muslims. As the old saying goes, the enemy of my enemy is my friend.

“Jews? NO! I don’t like Jews. Jews are no good.”

Tamer waved his finger in disapproval, and then took another pull; the water in the pipe bubbled fiercely. I couldn’t imagine he would like Jews. Christians have a traditional dislike of Jews that goes back two thousand years…right back to the days when groups of Jews stoned the first Christian prophets to death. Egyptian Coptic Christianity was no different than the Christianity that existed everywhere else.

But there was likely more to his view than simple religious prejudice. Jews have a bad name in this part of the world because of Israel, and only because of Israel. Nowhere is this more true than among the Muslims of the Middle East. Jewish communities have lived in the Muslim societies of the Middle East for over a thousand years. They were given the freedom to practice their own religion and follow their own religious laws. There was no hatred between Muslims and Jews until 1948, when Israel displaced the Palestinians and began to exercise their own muscle upon the Arab world.

Egypt’s last major war with Israel was 1973, called the Yom Kippur war by most of the world, and the 6th of October War by Egypt. Six years before, in 1967, the Israelis had taken the Sinai peninsula and marched their troops to the Suez Canal. Egypt wanted it back. It conspired with Syria to attack Israel on the same day. On the Jewish festival of Yom Kippur, when the Israeli Defence Forces were manned by a skeleton crew, they attacked.

There is a special war memorial built in Cairo in honour of the war, known as the “6th of October Panorama.” I visited it with my friend Sarah one afternoon. It was housed in a large circular building, surrounded by gates. The grounds around this buildings were reserved as a display area for some of the equipment that was used. There were jets and mounted rockets; there were pieces of fuselage from Israeli skyhawk planes shot down by Egyptian forces. There were tanks and gun batteries from either side; there were sand-coloured Egyptian tanks, there were smaller green British model tanks, and American anti-tank guns captured from Israel. All the Soviet-built Egyptian tanks had their guns pointed upwards; all the gun-barrels on captured Israeli machinery were lowered in defeat.

Inside the round building was probably the most laughable monument to false nationalism that I had ever seen. There were six stone-sculpted reliefs on the walls, arranged in a panorama, moving right to left just like Arabic script. The reliefs were of every war in Egypt’s history that was remotely similar to the 6th of October War. There was one of the oldest wars known, that of Pharaoh Narmer who unified Upper and Lower Egypt, thereby making it again one country. There was another Pharaoh shown chasing out the Hyksos, another foreign people who had come to dominate Egypt. The third sculpture was of a great battle in which Arab cavalry expelled Christian crusaders.

Finally, there was a plaque called “The Great Crossing”–a memorial to the day when Egyptian troops stormed across the Suez Canal and pushed the Israeli troops back. The depiction of it was jaw-dropping. It had reliefs of strong, glorious-looking Egyptian soldiers marching boldly, carrying the flag of Egypt. It showed Zodiac landing boats filled with soldiers, and it showed rows of tanks and rocket-mounted trucks advancing in line precisely in the same way that the ancient Egyptians showed chariots advancing in line on the walls of temples. And the mighty centerpiece of The Great Crossing was a handful of defeated Israeli soldiers, on their knees with their eyes closed and heads bowed in surrender, their helmets bearing the Shield of David lying on the ground before them.

The next relief was called “The Return of the Land”. It showed president Anwar Sadat, who led the war, standing with a flag of Egypt in his hands. A large public celebration was going on in front of him; old men clutched their prayer beads, men danced with joy, small girls offered bunches of flowers to lines of soldiers who stood by looking on.

The Great Crossing, and the Return of the Land. I took a picture of the archway between the two. The war memorial missed a relief. They forgot the one where the Israeli army retaliated and smashed their army all the way back across the Canal to the gates of Cairo.

The Egyptian army was crushed, as it always was, by the superior firepower, technology, and organization of the Israelis. But the Yom Kippur War nevertheless was a victory for Egypt, the historians all agree. Egypt was the small kid in high school that always got his lunch money taken away by the big Israeli bully. One day the small kid had had enough, and he fought back, kicked the bully in the shins, and bit him. The bully then beat the tar out of the kid in retaliation. But the bully won’t take the lunch money away again, because he knows what sort of retaliation that can evoke.

Sinai was returned to Egypt during the Camp David Accords. Among the conditions of that peace were the following: Egypt no longer became the center of Arab resistance to Israel, Egypt recognized Israel’s right to exist as a nation, Egypt would permit Israelis Sinai-only visas to travel to resort towns on the Red Sea, and through some loophole, the local Bedouins were legally allowed to grow marijuana.

Paul sprinkled a dash of Egyptian hashish onto the sheesha tobacco, and Tamer took a long pull before passing it on. He didn’t care for Jews at all; none of his countrymen did. Twenty percent of the army was Christian; they had all suffered equally at the hands of the Israelis. For Tamer this was just one more knee-jerk xenophobic prejudice that I found somehow childishly charming.

“What are they reading?” Tamer asked. My American friends were engrossed in a bit of the literature I had picked up from one of Cairo’s mosques, encouraging others to convert, and professing the scientifically proven existence of Allah. I handed the book to Tamer, who couldn’t read even a symbol of the English on the cover. But within seconds he had understood the photo of the crowds of people praying around the Kaabah in Mecca. He snarled and pitched the book across the room, folded his arms, and frowned.

This prompted unbridled giggling from myself and my friends, and so I went back to my bookshelf to present him with something else. This one was a book on St. Paul, one of the key figures in early Christianity, and on the front of the book was an icon of him. Tamer nodded in reverence and mumbled Arabic words of approval, hey crossed himself and kissed the cover, saying a small incantation with his eyes turned towards heaven.

Next I brought him a book by Friedrich Nietzsche with a big picture of the German philosopher on the front, with his big, bristling moustache. While my friends giggled furiously, I watched Tamer’s face react with puzzlement to this seemingly neutral book. Next I picked up “A History of the Muslim World”, a small paperback with a picture on the front of a mosque and minarets. He grunted and bounced it violently off a nearby wall.

When my friends had stopped chuckling and drying their eyes, Paul spoke. “Kieran, after we leave you should tell him that we are Jews.”

“Yeah, I think I will.”

The night wound down when we ran out of beer and sheesha. The Americans wanted to get to sleep for another good day in Cairo, and Tamer needed to get back to his house. He had church in the morning. While the Americans went back to their rooms, Tamer invited in his friend Asharaf, a local taxi driver. The men smoked the last of the sheesha together, laughing and slapping each other on the knee.

“Bush…is a donkey!” they said, using one of the more pointed Egyptian insults.

“And president Mubarak…is a donkey!”

“Yes, Mubarak is a big, big donkey. When is he going to die?”

I had challenged Tamer’s hypocrisy earlier on, when I asked him if he liked Asharaf, the Muslim taxi driver. “No,” Tamer said. “He’s a Muslim.” I replied of course, but everyone here is a Muslim. The people who run the coffee shop next to you are Muslims, and the people who buy from your shop are Muslims. And besides, isn’t Asharaf your friend?

“No”, Tamer shook his head. “He’s a Muslim. Muslims are no good.”

And yet, as I looked at Tamer and Asharaf, sitting across from each other, trading jokes and talking about prostitutes, and laughing deeply, I shook my head in amusement. Was Tamer really pretending to be this man’s friend? Or was he pretending not to be?

—–

When I approached Tamer’s fruit shop a few days later, he pulled up an extra chair and bellowed at the man in the nearby coffee shop for tea with lemon, my favorite drink.

“Where are Paul and Nathan and Brenda?”

“They had to leave for America.”

Tamer looked insulted. “They didn’t even say goodbye? Why didn’t you bring them here to tell me goodbye!”

“Sorry my friend, they didn’t really have time.”

“Why does Paul keep hanging up on me? I call him every day and he just hangs up.”

I started to laugh. “He doesn’t speak any Arabic!”

“I know, but I can still say ‘hello.’”

“What time to do you call him? During the day?”

“Yes.”

“That’s the middle of the night in America! Tamer, don’t call up these guys in America and speak Arabic to them at 3:00 in the morning!”

He looked sheepish. “Ok, I won’t. No problem”

“Did you like them?” I asked as I started in on my tea.

“Yes they were great. I really liked them.”

I nodded.

“You know something? They were Jews. All of them. Paul, Brenda, and Nathan.”

He paused, and regarded me with surprise.

“Huh” he said, and smiled. “Well, they were great.”

21) The Third Tribe

We met Abdullah outside of a bank on Thursday morning. He was Osama’s brother; he was along to do translation for our last day of filming for the TRC. The Treatment and Rehabilitation Center had lined up a few interviews with subjects outside of Ramallah, and they sent along two women psychologists with us in order to make our subjects comfortable.

Abdullah was slightly older than Osama, and he dressed in a grey suit. He walked out of the Bank of Palestine, and we took his car to the needed villages. We were late, but that didn’t stop him from a few much needed errands. Half the way, he did nothing but talk on his cell phones. One hand would be used for driving, the other would flip open his Motorola and he would argue forcefully in Arabic. Then another phone would ring, and he would put one man on hold and talk to another.

“Wow, you have three telephones.” I remarked.

“Four” he told me with a smile.

I took him for a man with a very stressed and aggressive personality…perhaps forced upon him by his demanding business career. He stopped to drop off a cheque, and another time to get some greasy chicken shwarma. He would bark threateningly into his telephones, and he acted the whole time as though we were an unwelcome tax on his precious time.

We interviewed one man who owned a gas station. He had been captured by the Israelis and tortured in prison after an altercation at a demonstration in which his brother had been shot and killed. He had a photo of his brother hanging on the wall. While we were busy asking the man how the center helped him reintegrate back into society, Abdullah’s cell phone rang. On running camera, he forsook his post as translator, and walked behind us to bleat harsh instructions to his subordinates. We lost good chunks of the interview because of this.

“It’s too bad” he said when we were back in the car. “I could have found you so many good contacts. The head of the former Al-Aqsa Martyr’s Brigade is a good buddy of mine…I could have gotten you an interview with him. What we’re filming now is nothing.”

In the end, Abdullah was quite helpful. We interviewed a woman whose husband was shot to death in front of his shop. It was an accident; the protestors had gathered someway down the street, and this man was merely closing the doors and windows to protect his merchandise. The Israelis didn’t even stop to apologize. The woman was closely attended by her mother and sisters; her three children chased each other around the house after we arrived.

We got some good footage that day. We all piled back into Abdullah’s car to go back to Ramallah. On the way home, as the sun started to sink, Abdullah thankfully began to relax. The working day was over. His cell phones stopped torturing him. We talked a bit about his brothers, working in a hostel in Jerusalem, and about life in Palestine.

“You have children?” I asked him.

“Of course.”

“How many?”

“Guess how many.”

“A man like you, must have at least three or four children” I estimated.

“You have named half of them” he laughed. “I have eight children.” Five boys and three girls. Their ages ranged from twenty-three, just finishing university, to his newborn daughter.

I was amazed. Eight children. For Arabs, large families are the norm. Yet in most places in the developing world, the people with the middle to upper-class jobs tended to have smaller families. I though Abdullah, with his successful bank job, would have chosen to have a smaller family in order to keep a high standard of living.

Indeed, commentators on modern society have long remarked on the absence of children in developed, Western nations. The topic is largely hushed from most public debates, because of its ugly racial implications, and the contrast it draws between the developed north and the developing south. But the fact of the matter is, population growth for every Western nation is almost invariably negative. In Canada, the average family has 1.5 children. In Germany, a full third of women have decided to go childless. In Russia, the state is scrambling to provide incentives for people to reproduce. In Japan, there are special brothels for women in their thirties to go and lose their virginity.

The reasons most cited are the fact that in a modern capitalist economy, women have demanding careers, and it is more and more expensive to have children. People could have four or five children and live modestly, or they could have one, two, or no children at all and live in abundance. Certainly the booming market of thousand-dollar baby carriages and other astronomically expensive baby items does nothing to help the situation.

The world will be forced to look this discrepancy in the face as my generation grows to maturity. Arabs, Africans, Asians, and South Americans are birthing millions of children to the West’s thousands. Our modern economies will not be able to sustain themselves with too few people to fill the places of their retiring mothers and fathers. And no country wants to even talk about immigration because of the contradiction that comes with it: every nation is supposed to look beyond race and culture, but no Western country wants to import large numbers of non-white immigrants that will pose possible political and racial turmoil in their country.

Nowhere in the world is the difference in demographics felt more than in Israel. Jewish Israelis live life with the high standard of living of Europeans or North Americans; they have one child or possibly two, if at all. Palestinians live in a third world economy, in which it is economically profitable to have more children rather than less. And furthermore, most Palestinians have chosen to have more children in the name of their cause…they know that the more people they have, the greater their own political gravity in the struggle for their own nation against the Israelis.

More than anything, the Israelis fear not that the Palestinians will one day have their own state. They fear that the Palestinians will demand inclusion into the Israeli state. They fear that they will campaign not for their own independence, but for a right to vote, which every democratic nation around the world will support. If this is given to them, the Palestinians will easily control the country within two generations.

“We don’t talk about having our own country anymore” said Abdullah. “It’s like a joke for us now. The Israelis have taken everything from us. Now, with this wall, we cannot even go to the cemetery in Jerusalem to bury our dead beside their grandfathers. Osama makes films about the wall, but what good will that do? It’s like the man we interviewed today said.”

We had asked the man who owned the gas station if he had any message for the rest of the world. He replied curtly that he has no message, because the message has already been sent to the rest of the world thousands of times, but nobody seems to listen.

“It’s alright,” said Abdullah. “We are patient. Nobody can stay here forever. The Turks were here for four hundred years, but then they left. Then the British came, and then the British left. One day, the Israelis will leave. But nobody knows when.”

Nobody knows, but I could venture a guess. Perhaps it will be when Abdullah’s sixty-four grandchildren start having kids.

—–

We knocked on the door to Abdullah’s house (a different Abdullah), in the town of Belainn. A veiled woman opened the window above and leaned out to look to see who it was. Sean called up to her.

“Hi, we’re crackers. Were here to die for Palestine.”

She welcomed us inside with Arabic and hand motions. This was the place. Abdullah’s house was a free hotel for Western backpackers who came to join in the Friday Protest that had been going on every week since 2005. We settled in on a few mattresses in the downstairs room. We could see countless pictures posted of the Belainn protest, Westerners standing in front of Israeli riot shields; being hit with tear gas; being cared for by Palestinian medics. Posters comparing the Palestinian territories to the Bantusan homelands of the Apartheid regime hung on the wall. Two Italians, a boy and a girl, had already laid down their sleeping bags in the room.

Looking at that room full of pictures, I finally realized that there were more than just two tribes fighting for the control of Israel and Palestine. There was a third tribe as well. It was us. The Palestinian cause has more presence in the Western press than any other oppressed people in the world. For forty years or more, Western protesters have tried to intervene in the Palestinian struggle. They have done this with cameras, filming the plight of Palestinians under the occupation. They have done this with personal assistance, through NGOs and workers’ organizations. They have done this through providing money, medicine, and other supplies to the starved economy of the region.

And here, in Belainn, they helped the Palestinian cause with their physical bodies. They stood with the Palestinian protestors to prevent the Israeli soldiers from using live ammunition. If only Palestinians demonstrated, the IDF would hit them with lead bullets and grenades. If Westerners stood with them, they would hit the crowd with rubber bullets and tear gas.

“A rubber bullet can be fatal if it hits you in the head” a friend of mine named Ferdinand warned. “They are trained in how to use them, and they won’t be out to kill you. They will probably aim for your knees. Just don’t duck when they fire at you.”

Ferdinand was an Austrian. He had taken a giant movie camera on loan from his film school, and neglected to tell them that he was taking it to Palestine. He had crafted himself a large jacket with black letters against a yellow background that read “FOREIGN PRESS”. He was outside in the crowd, testing his equipment, and waiting for the mosque’s megaphone to stop barking so the protest could begin.

“Also, you may want to buy an onion and some chewing gum to help you deal with the tear gas.”

I followed his advice. Outside, Sean and I waited for everything to begin. Friends from the Faisal hostel began to show up in minibuses. What was most surprising to see was dozens of young Japanese and Korean tourists. They piled out of the buses and primed their cameras for what they were about to see. Some of them bought little bracelets of the Palestinian colours that little Arab children were selling us, using Hebrew words for the amount of shekels they wanted. It was obvious that they weren’t there to fight for the freedom of Palestine as much as they were there out of curiosity to what was going on.

The realization hit us. We had showed up to attend the tourist version of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

“I really hope that none of us gets seriously injured,” I told Sean. “I know I wouldn’t miss this for the world, and I doubt you would either…but the fact remains that this isn’t our fight.”

Sean nodded silently. This wasn’t our fight. Just like the struggle against Bashar Assad in Syria wasn’t our fight. We were in Palestine, and we were pitted against a stronger enemy, whose objective was to make these people’s lives so miserable that they willfully abandon their country. But all the same, we felt the feeling that all Western observers generally feel: we are there to observe, and not to sacrifice. We care about the plight of others, but not so much that we want to put our own body on the line for it. We are not Rachel Corrie. We want to witness everything, but we do not want to give our own lives or our own health for someone else’s cause.

The mosque stopped barking. Palestinians filtered out; as they left they took up a flag which was handed to them from some patriot who waited at the door of the mosque. There were flags flying the Palestinian colours; there were yellow flags flying the emblem of Hamas or some other militant crest that we knew not. The crowd swelled to a few hundred in the narrow street. A march began.

And so, a few hundred stone-slingers of the tribe of Palestine marched off to meet Goliath. Children were out in force: the youngest being about eight years old. They carried flags and whooped along with their protesting parents. Chants sailed over the heads of the crowd as they walked off in the soft rain to raise the flag against the Israeli wall. A man out in front turned around and waved his arms together.

“Mish shabbab, mish shabbab!”

No youth, no youth! He wanted the children to stay back from what was going to come. The adults continued on, with the Japanese and Western observers always jumping in front of the line to get good camera angles. The sky was grey; the rain moistened our hair. The march stopped and spread out along a line of razor wire. Up the road we could see a dozen Israeli soldiers standing in front of an armored transport. They were ready for action.

I crouched down near a wall near the very front to get a good cross-angle photo of the protesters at the rolled razor wire. A few Japanese guys crowded near me. The Palestinians were standing and shouting and waving their arms. They did not cross the wire. They did not make any attempt to attack or threaten the Israelis. After three years, this protest had turned into a ritual.

Suddenly I saw them shouting and pointing off to behind my back. I turned, to see Israeli soldiers waiting silently in the brocade less than a hundred metres off to my right. I had knelt down by the wall for a photo leaving only my head exposed. I kicked myself for the lack of a soldiers’ instinct, and I stood up. I snapped some photos of the marauders, and I looked around. The Palestinians looked almost bored, and they hurled insults at the Jews. The Japanese shifted listlessly. Nothing was happening.

Suddenly, gunfire thundered through the grey sky. The Japanese around me immediately ducked. Was it rubber bullets? Tear gas? Were they shooting near me? Near the Palestinians? At the Palestinians? I couldn’t tell. I turned tail and paced towards the back of the line, while more shots exploded behind me. At every crack I felt the maddening sensation of wanting desperately to duck, and forcing myself not to because I didn’t want a low-aimed bullet to hit me on the crown.

Tear gas. Canisters landed near the front line, spewing clouds of white gas. It was far away though…those white clouds weren’t too close to me. I turned on my camera.

Immediately my eyes began to sting. What? There was no white fog around me. I thought the gas was far away! No matter, turn on the camera and take a picture. “Change the batteries” my camera said. Perfect. My eyes felt like a nest of bees had landed in them, my legs started pumping, out of pure instinct. It took all my presence of mine to load new batteries into my camera, and turn about face for one thematic tear gas photo. Then I ran, coughing and spluttering.

That is what tear gas does. It makes your eyes so uncomfortable that you literally lose conscious control of your body. As a natural reflex, you turn, and you run. You have no choice.

Shots kept pounding out of the Israeli line. The sparse crowd of Palestinians was in disorder. They were bouncing around backwards. No one was at the line of razor wire. The Israeli soldiers moved closer across the razor wire, up the street.

I crouched behind another wall and pulled the onion out of my jacket pocket. My fingernails tore a hole in the skin, and I shoved it against my nostrils and breathed deeply. The relief was instant. The sting of the tear gas immediately fled, and I was fine again. A chubby Korean guy, about my age, was pacing desperately up the hill out of the white clouds. I offered him my onion for a minute, and he groaned in relief. He kept running.

Palestinians were shouting near the front. Only a small group of them remained there. A man had been shot near the front of the line, and he lay wounded on the ground. Five men stood by to help him. They bleated at the Israeli soldiers not to advance, because of the wounded man. The Israelis marched forwards unheeding. With desperate and angry shouts, the Arabs hoisted up their comrade and marched up the road.

At my shelter point, I saw a Palestinian medic handing out smelling salts to protestors. An Arab ran up to him, shrieking at him desperately to go help the wounded. He picked up his bag and ran. The wounded man was trotted to an unfinished house, writhing the whole time in his friends arms. I recognized him as the ringleader…the same man who was shouting “mish shabbab” and leading the protests near the wire. I snapped a picture of him before they entered their makeshift clinic. Arabs in front of me screamed and waved their arms in mourning and indignation…the Israelis had shot their friend! I rushed inside the the unfinished house to see the man’s wound…my knowledge of first aid could possibly help the situation.

He was laid down on a cot, and grasped his leg in pain. I looked to his wound. It was a purple bruise, no larger than a thumbprint, on the side of his knee. No blood. The Israelis had got him with a rubber bullet, and he was temporarily crippled.

I left the unfinished house for a vantage point across the street. I climbed the stairs to another unfinished dwelling, this time being very careful about peering around the structure with only my eye instead of my whole head. I couldn’t see any soldiers. I could see Palestinian children, hurling rock slings in circles around their heads, and letting the missiles go in the general direction of the rifles. Canisters and rubber bullets kept cracking into the air. The streaming white bombs would bounce along the grass, and the eight-year-olds rushed up to them to kick them forward like soccer balls.

A tear gas canister bounced right into the unfinished house where the immobilized man was being treated. I watched in horror as rubber bullets spattered around the entrances and the walls. They were all being corralled inside to choke down that horrible gas. What sadists.

The rain came as a saviour to the gas-choked orchard. It washed the chemical from the sky. The people calmed down, and walked more slowly backwards. I snapped dozens of photos: of young Palestinians retreating with their mouth and nose tucked inside their jackets, of young children with slings. One child had collected two spent gas canisters in his hand; he posed for a photo at my request.

Then I saw a twelve year old with a grenade. A chubby, green, live fragmentation grenade the size of a softball. He showed it to me, and my eyes went wide. I held out my hand, asking if I could see it. He protected it. I held up my camera and asked if I could at least snap a photo. Not at all. He marched off down the road.

I found Sean after a good period of time; he was taking shelter an another unfinished house when he wasn’t busy shooting the protest with his video camera. We trudged down the satisfied that most of it was probably over. Ferdinand came up behind us, his coat draped over the camera to protect it, his eyes red and bleary. He had been caught inside the unfinished house when it was full of tear gas and under fire.

Sean rolled camera for a moment and pointed it at me.

“What are your thoughts on today?”

“Well…I first don’t have any idea why they don’t just let them protest. People protest all the time in Canada and America, and it doesn’t change a damn thing. And now it’s over. Another Friday protest. The wall hasn’t fallen; the soldiers are still there. The world hasn’t changed. And now all the Palestinians are going to back to their homes, and we are going back to our hostel.”

20 – A Russian New Years

I met Dasha on couchsurfing.com, in an attempt to contact Russian Israelis. We were thinking of a short film on life as an Israeli immigrant, and the most recent large demographic of Israeli immigrants came from Russia. After the Second World War, most of the Jewish communities in the world that felt unwanted, persecuted, or uncomfortable immigrated to Israel. And most of their host countries let them go, for they were eager to get rid of them. The only true exception was the Soviet Union.

The Soviet Union had always preached a philosophy of universal acceptance of all races of humankind, and their integration into the collective whole of Communism. The USSR would not let go of their Jews, because that would be to admit two things to the world: first, that communism created an awful life that people were happy or desperate to escape; second, that deep inside their collective hearts, Russians were still the heavily racist, Jew-hating people that they had always been since the time of the Tsars.

In the late 1980s, the Russians were tired of the ineffective communist system, and began to reform. And at the same time, a wave of suppressed anti-Semitism swept the nation, as individuals looked to the traditional scapegoat to explain some of the system’s problems.

In 1991, communism collapsed, the Soviet Union became Russia, and the borders were thrown open. The very next year, hundreds of thousands of Russian Jews emigrated to Israel. Today, over a million of seven million Jews in Israel are Russians.

Dasha had been in Israel since she was eight years old. She learned Hebrew and grew up in Jerusalem. Like all Israelis, she had been drafted into military service for two years after high school.

“They were two of the greatest years of my life” she told me over a beer in some West Jerusalem bar. “I had so much fun in the army…and I met so many great people.”

Dasha said that the army gave her and a few other friends a free ten-day trip around Israel in the Taglit program. ‘Taglit’, known as ‘Birthright’ in English, was a program designed to encourage immigration to Israel. Young Jews from around the world–Ethiopia, South America, Europe, North Africa–all who apply are flown to Israel and given a ten-day tour of the country for free.

Dasha said that they regularly included at least three IDF soldiers on every Taglit tour. And not for protection. They included them so that they could explain to the foreign Jews that the military service isn’t actually so bad. And perhaps some of the youth would return to Israel a few years later as immigrants.

“Have you ever been back to Russia?” I asked her.

“Yes, once. I went back to St. Petersburg where I was born. But…it’s different there, I don’t really feel safe.”

“I hear the Israelis don’t really like Russians that much here. Would you ever want to move back?”

She laughed and took a sip of beer. “Yes, we are discriminated against here. But it’s nothing like how Jews are treated back home. I would much rather be a Russian in Israel than a Jew in Russia.”

As we talked, the conversation moved to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the settlements, and the wall.

“I’ve been thinking about this place a lot,” I told her. “In Canada, everyone criticizes Israel for the occupation. But what I think about is how they would think if they were born here. It really is easy to think Israel is cruel when you come from Canada or America, societies where there really is no danger.”

Dasha chuckled. “You don’t need to be from Canada or America to think that! You can be from Tel Aviv,” she said. “Really, on the surface it looks peaceful. Most people have no idea just how many threats there are on Jerusalem every day. I worked in the security forces…translating intelligence and monitoring threats, and I can tell you if there weren’t hundreds of people working on this all the time, it would be a complete warzone.”

Indeed, Israel had been very quiet lately…very few attacks. One of the reasons for this was because of the wall. Since it went up, terrorist attacks have decreased no less than 95%. It is an oppressive tactic that was used to keep Palestinians out of Jewish territory, to make their lives miserable, and to seize their land. Yet what if in Vancouver Canada, the Chinese citizens developed a grudge and started to blow themselves up on our city buses? And then what if building a wall around the suburb of Richmond made those attacks all but cease?

I shuddered. Here, just like in Lebanon, it was much more comfortable for me, an outsider, to wear the moral goggles I developed while studying abstract thoughts in university. It was far more unnerving to place myself in their shoes and on their soil…and see how my ideas might change.

——

It was New Years’ Eve. Dasha had invited me to a little gathering at her flat in Ma’ale Admium for a Russian New Years Party. I took an Israeli city bus from the central bus station in West Jerusalem. It winded around the city, and then went north and onto a major highway. It was headed east, but it didn’t dare travel through the heavily Palestinian East Jerusalem.

Eventually we arrived at Ma’ale Admium. This was a large Israeli settlement on the eastern outskirts of Jerusalem…well beyond the Palestinian part of the city. These settlements, technically within the West Bank, have two important functions: they hedge in and surround East Jerusalem with Jews, and they also form a buffer zone between the heavily populated Palestinian zones and the Jordan river.

The Jordan river is the unmentioned stake in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. You never hear about it on the news. But it is without a doubt one of the most important prize that each side is vying to claim. The Israelis can easily see that in their Middle Eastern state that is half desert, the water resources of the Jordan river will soon become more valuable than gold or oil. And the Israelis have been busy building settlements on the far eastern side of any Palestinian cities in the West Bank, desperate to have outposts near the river so that they can use them for a pretext for its control.

“Settlements are unique in Israeli society,” Sean told me. “They are populated either by the most religious Jews who are eager to claim back the land of the Bible, or by immigrants. Life there is dangerous, and ordinary Israelis really don’t want to live there. That’s where they send the new immigrants.”

“Are there lots of Russians in Ma’ale Admium?” I asked Dasha.

“Absolutely. There are thousands of them. They make up a large percentage of the community.”

“Yes,” I said. “I heard that most immigrants get put in places like that.”

Dasha shrugged. “We moved there because it was cheap. We used to have a flat in Jerusalem…but my parents found a much better place in the settlement for less money. In Israel, you will find Russians anywhere that it is cheap.”

She introduced me to six more Russian friends. More were on their way. The festivities began immediately…for what would New Years be without buckets of Vodka? One girl there was from the USA: she had fallen in with this crowd. She could not speak Russian but she was busy learning.

It was nearing 11:00. There was a big commotion in the flat, as everyone hurried to get in front of the television. They switched on the screen, and they watched as two men dressed like two old ladies sat on some stage and squawked out comedy for the last few minutes of 2007. And then, the moment came.

I was told that Russians around the world celebrate New Years whenever Moscow does. At the anointed hour, the TV flashed images of flags flapping at the Kremlin, and the Russian national anthem played. The hands on the giant clock of the Kremlin tower shifted to midnight. A cheer went up in the audience. And after the applause died down, Vladmir Putin himself came on television to give a speech. My Russian Israeli friends watched and listened with intent. I talked to them afterwards…it wasn’t that they liked Putin in particular. It wasn’t that they didn’t like him either: they lived in Israel, and I don’t really think they cared. I got the feeling that no New Years was truly complete without the traditional speech from their leader.

Russian rap and pop music was rebounding off the walls. The table was laden with food: salad, bread with caviar, potatoes, chicken, and a purple Russian dish known as ’shuba’. It looked strange at first, but it was a mixture of red cabbage and fish, and it was surprisingly delicious. We threw back shot glasses filled with vodka and stuffed ourselves with food.

I went outside with the group while the majority of them had a cigarette. I stared from Dasha’s balcony onto the night landscape of Ma’ale Admium. It was a tailored community…much like those you could find in a suburb of North America, called some pleasant-sounding name like “Amblegreen Acres”. Every house was exactly the same; there were green lawns with almost no trees, and street lamps illuminating everything. The streets were wide, clean, and deserted.

How different this place looked from the East Jerusalem only a few minutes drive away.

——

I said goodbye to Dasha and caught the last bus home. I had expected to find a crazy New Years celebration raging at the Faisal hostel. Instead, I found a handful of people sluggish from drinking for half of the day. There were some conversations, and a bit of music, but not much of a party to speak of.

I fell into conversation with a German man named Paul. Paul was twenty-seven years old, and he wore a black, red, and orange scarf that three of his buddies were also wearing to signify their membership in the German army. He had been to Israel and Palestine three times, he explained. He was a combat medic in the German army, and he was here mainly to see Palestine and attend the Belaain protest.

“Really? I’m thinking of going this Friday. I’ve never experienced tear gas before.”

“Tear gas is…not fun. But it’s not really that bad. Rubber bullets are worse. They are little pellets of metal wrapped around with rubber. They are designed to cause intense pain and immobilize a person. But they can be fatal if they hit you in the head. Just whenever they shoot, remember not to duck. They will probably be aiming at your legs, and you don’t want to put your head in the way.”

“Are there a lot of internationals there?”

“Absolutely. There are tons. I’ve been to the protest seven or eight times. It has changed my entire view on the conflict. The way they treat those people, just for having a protest…”

He shook his head as his voice trailed off. I could see the resolve build in this man’s eyes. He explained to me how he was disgusted with the way the Israelis treated them.

“In fact, I actually taught a few of them what to do. I gave them a bit of training on how to deal with tear gas. And basic first aid.”

“Really?”

“Yeah, but I had to hold back. Because…I don’t want it to be known that a guy from the German army trained some Palestinian protestors in how to be combat medics. I have my career to think of, after all.

“But go to the protest. It is a little bit dangerous, but most people make it out alright. And as a foreigner, you’re not really giving such a sacrifice…just think of the people who live there and who do it every week. We are all taking a taxi from here together on Friday. Come with us. I swear to you, it’s unforgettable.”

19) A Walk in the Gardens

 
After Yad Vashem, we retreated back across the Green Line. The taxi wanted to overcharge us, and so we paid him less than he asked for. He honked at us, and shouted out the window, but we simply walked a few metres in front of the Damascus Gate. Once we crossed that imaginary line, we were no longer in Israel. We were in East Jerusalem; we were in Palestine. And although I felt perfectly safe there, the Israeli Jews did not. In fact, often I heard that there were some cases of even murder that went uninvestigated in East Jerusalem. The police would not go in, because it was universally understood that it was too dangerous for them.

Our hostel was right on the line dividing the two tribes. This afforded us the luxury of being able to enjoy the benefits of both cultures by walking only for two minutes in either direction. What I liked best was that whenever one culture got to you, you could simply walk across the line into the other.

Tired of garbage on the sidewalk that keeps sticking to your shoes? Tired of dingy little restaurants and hankering for a place that feels like Starbucks? Cross onto the Israeli side. Tired of high prices and expensive food? Annoyed to have to wait at crosswalks when no cars are passing? Cross to the Palestinian side. Want to go find a shop that sells alcohol? Cross to the Israeli side. Stores closed on Saturday? Cross to the Palestinian side. Stores closed on Friday? Cross to the Israeli side.

Jerusalem really is one of the most unique cities in the world. It is divided into two clean-cut halves, with the walled old city forming a nucleus in the center. It is a far cry from Beirut, with its crazy patchwork of warring tribes, where your personal security and street smarts can alter so radically from block to block. And although it is certain that the whole city lives in tension, and that each side is suspicious of the other, they do live out each day in a tenable peace. And that does indeed make it one of the world’s great multicultural cities.

——

I awoke to a loud, business-like knock on my hostel room door. I opened it to find a female Israeli soldier standing on the other side, in military fatigues bulging with radios, tasers, and other equipment. She looked at my half-naked body, and I stared back at her, mouth gaping, for half a minute. Then it occurred to me to reach for a shirt. Sean, lying in his bed in nothing but a pair of shorts, looked up from his book and frowned.

“Passport.”

I gave her my passport. She flipped through it while I stood there, watching her with concern, wondering what on earth gave this woman the right to wake me up, open up my room, and demand to see my identification. She seemed unfazed.

“You were in Egypt, Lebanon, Syria, and Jordan?”

“Yes.”

She gave it back to me. I’m really glad she didn’t ask me what I was doing there. I’m sure I would have responded by saying something incredibly flippant, and I promptly would no doubt have received a full interrogation on my travels and my intentions, and probably so would have my comrades. And then, after the soldiers left, Nickie would have ripped my face off.

“They come by every once in a while to check people’s passports. The checks are totally random.”

I asked Ali, Osama’s cousin, what business the soldiers had showing up in their hostel. I thought it might have been because of the freckle-faced American who came to the hostel and took a hundred photos of it a few days before. But it appeared the checks were relatively regular.

“You see, in Israel, every hotel and hostel has to register a person’s passport online immediately after they check in. That way, the security services always know where people are. But in Palestine, we don’t give them this information. So the only way they can keep track is to show up here themselves.”

“Where’s Osama?” I asked him.

“He always leaves whenever they come. They don’t like him because of all the films he makes.”

“How does he know when they are coming?”

Ali smiled. “Someone calls him. We are all friends here in Palestine. We look out for one another.”

I remarked on this to Osama when he came back. He smiled benignly at my uncomfortable shock that the Israelis regularly invaded his hostel.

“This place is known. Most of the journalists and foreign activists choose to stay here. Even the Lonely Planet says ‘come for the politics’. You know, Rachel Corrie stayed here for a couple of weeks.”

“Did she?”

Rachel Corrie was an American girl who came here to protest the occupation. She died in 2003, when she stood up in front of an Israeli bulldozer that was there to demolish a Palestinian house. She refused to move, just like that famous video of Tiannamen square, when the democratic protester held out his hand and forced a whole line of tanks to stop.

Only sometimes, the tanks don’t stop. The bulldozer crushed Rachel and flattened the house she was standing in front of. She was 21 years old.

Osama was helping to film a documentary on the incident. There is a memorial website up for Rachel right now, and a play has been put into production, called “My Name is Rachel Corrie.”

Indeed, the Faisal hostel was a haven for foreigners coming to document the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. And for our group especially, it was a haven for a different reason. At nine dollars a night, it was the cheapest hotel in town. And we developed such a firm repore with Osama and the other owners that we felt completely comfortable leaving our valuables there. All this was easily worth putting up with the cold showers and the frigid temperatures during the December nights.

But we got ready quickly. We were taking the bus to Tel Aviv that day. We had only three days left until the girls flew out…we wanted to see a few other places in Israel, and the Jewish cities of Tel Aviv and Haifa were on the list.

Tel Aviv was just as uninteresting as we thought it would be. It was only 60 years old, making it one of the newest cities in the world. It was a port on the Mediterranean Sea, and of course, 100% Jewish. It held Israel’s international airport, and no excellent sights. Except the beach. And that’s precisely where we went for Maccabee beers at one in the afternoon after we arrived.

Tel Aviv was cool in one respect: we were sitting in a city that was entirely North American in style in the Middle East. Everywhere else we visited was clearly influenced by Arab culture, even the Christian cities of Lebanon. But in this one, the buildings were new and made in the modern, office-building style, the streets were well layed out, there was a city bus system, and all the shops were of the same style and cleanliness as any city from home. It reminded me of Vancouver or New York, except that every street had a Hebrew name.

The city also showed the diversity of Israeli Jews far better than Jerusalem could. In Jerusalem, if you lived near the old city, you would think that every Jew was either a practicing Orthodox zealot, or a non-practicing European taxi-driver or shop owner who spent their time listening to music that was something out of Fiddler on the Roof. But in Tel Aviv, you could hear groups of American Jews speaking English, and the streets were lined with Moroccan and Ethiopian restaurants.

As we walked half-bored through the sunny streets, the gang urged me to call our contact for the next day. “You can only go as part of an organized tour, and there are two terraces. They had a spot in the Upper Terrace tour for tomorrow, but the tour is only in Hebrew. I reserved a place for all of us.”

We were on the train to Haifa the next morning. We were going with one purpose only: to see the Baha’i Gardens.

——

The Baha’i faith is one of those small-time new religions. It was born in the 19th Century in Iran, and today it holds only about six million believers. Even so, it is one of the most international faiths in the world…its texts have been translated into over 800 languages, and traveling preachers have brought it as far east as Southeast Asia, and as far west as Europe and America.

The two most major Baha’i shrines in the world are both in Israel. They are in Haifa and Acre. In Haifa, a small orange-domed building housed the bones of the Bab…one of the founding fathers of the religion who was executed in Iran over a hundred years ago for preaching a doctrine contrary to the teachings of Islam. His remains were smuggled out of the country and brought to the holy land.

The Baha’i have bought a mountainside in Haifa and created a magnificent garden out of it. It is a fantastic geographical choice for a monument…because it is composed of an entire hillside, everyone in the city can see the beautiful terraces from far away. Also, when we showed up at the top of the Upper Terrace, we had a sparkling view of Haifa: thousands of white buildings shone in the sun, and the sapphire ocean stretched across the horizon.

The terraces themselves were tailored and beautiful. Each of them had their own fountain. Running beside the flights of seven hundred stairs were small streams of water, also flowing down channels cut in a stair pattern. Some marvellous architect had cut the angles of them so that as it flowed down each set of ten stairs, the water in built to a head, and splashed louder and louder as it went. Between that and the fountains, the whole gardens were filled with the therapeutic sound of running water.

We passed on our right a building known as the Universal House of Justice. It was all white, constructed with domes and pillars. It is the seat of the governing body of the Baha’i faith…a council elected to deal with all its affairs. The Baha’i believe that Moses, Jesus, Muhammed, Zoroaster, Krishna, and many other prophets around the world were all messengers of the single God. They believe that all religions aim at the same thing, and they work against the racial and religious prejudice that divides the planet.

They are perhaps the only religion in the world that believes, as a central tenet, in the establishment of a world federal system. They believe in the political unity in all humankind.

To my annoyance, however, we were not allowed to go near the Universal House of Justice, since we were not Baha’i. The same with the Shrine of the Bab…we could take photos of its exterior, but we were not allowed insider it, or even near it. It’s the same principle by which we were not allowed inside the Dome of the Rock. Even the Baha’i faith, with its all-embracing acceptance of the rightness of every other religion, knows the value of drawing boundaries. By excluding outsiders from certain places, they tighten the bonds between the faithful.

——

We bid goodbye to Nickie and Kristen on the night of the next day. We packed their bags into the taxi that had come to the door of the hostel, and sent them on their way. Nickie still needed some more footage for the mental health short film, and Sean and I had plans to go north to Ramallah and conduct some more interviews.

Nickie got a four-hour interrogation at Tel Aviv airport, where Israelis went through her film equipment and her computer in excruciating detail. And finally, she and Kristen boarded a plane and made their way back to Canada. It was one month, but it felt like four. For them, and excellent odyssey had come to a close. But for me, it still had barely begun.