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.