The Stranger in the Bed
The airport at Minsk looks as if it’s been welded together from a pile of air-conditioning cowls. Beyond its gates lies the monumental architecture of Belarus in all its bombastic grandeur and, as in the old Soviet empire, there are still those endless sets of railings, just as I’d imagined. You need to be led and guided, orders must be anticipated and followed, and proscriptions have to be imposed. And yet, in amongst all these restrictions there arises a desire to transgress the boundaries, accompanied by sheer craziness and subversive thoughts. You feel you’ve just got to break out, scream and shout, commit some outrage.
But instead people bow their heads and keep their eyes firmly fixed on the green and red lines on the airport floor, which mark the prescribed pathways you’re expected to follow. Shuffling along these, in line, are a woman with peroxide-blonde hair done up in a bun, an elderly man with a reptilian face, and an office wag dressed in a wrestler’s singlet. They don’t even dare to strut their stuff. Their compliance is provocative. No sooner have they passed by, as introverted as female Pietists, than the soldiers on guard duty checking their documents resume their sullen expressions. But a foreigner approaches them and enquires:
‘Might you have a toilet for me?’
This clumsy formulation rebounds firstly off the uniforms and then the demeanour of the soldiers. Only their walkie- talkies keep on twittering.
Once outside, waiting is the order of the day. There’s no avoiding it. People wait in large throngs for buses, drivers, wives. Some of them even manage to stay happy in this perpetual state of waiting. They’re the lucky ones. It’s like they’re saying: as long as we live, we’ll be grateful for everything that’s also alive. It’s the elderly who feel the rigours of the arduous journey more deeply, yet it’s they who still wait more patiently, more self-sufficiently than others, just trembling in their exhaustion. Business travellers, on the other hand, are always a step ahead of the current situation. One of these White Russian bundles of energy has started to make conversation with me:
‘Have you seen your Paris Hilton on the poster there?’
We both turn to look at the woman on the advertisement, lounging there drinking canned prosecco. Seen from Minsk, it would appear she belongs to my world.
‘Stunning woman,’ the businessman tells me appreciatively, like I was responsible for creating her. For my part, I search in vain for anything stunning in that entirely vacuous face.
‘And you know what’s really stunning about her?’
‘The prosecco, maybe?’
‘Her composure.’
So, this guy’s lust is of a more refined type. Even so, I’d rather retreat into my own sense of composure by gazing at the blank walls between the posters. The soldiers continue to cast a beady eye over the new arrivals as they stagger helplessly out of the airport terminal.
A white-faced Goth wearing a miniskirt and woollen tights is led aside by a policeman. She looks flattered by the attention. On her thigh, there’s a badge with the number 23 on it; from where she’s pinned it, a ladder has started to run up her tights, which soon bends purposefully inwards towards her inner thigh. Suddenly, the heel of her left shoe gives way, sending her sprawling onto the tarmac, a monstrous apparition composed of black and white clothing and face powder. As the policeman tries to drag her to her feet again, she makes like she’s disabled, theatrically spreading her legs, showing everything to passers-by. That’s how she wants it. Evidently her shame isn’t at a premium.
Hours later, and I’m already on the streets of the capital. Where is the city centre? I’d enquired, and the taxi driver replied with a gesture like he was trying to mock me: Up there, down there, it runs for kilometres all the way to the horizon, it’s all the city centre. So now I’m standing bang in the middle of it. A man with neurodermatitis is leafing through a rotating stand holding reproduction posters from the Soviet era, groaning with pleasure like it’s a sexual experience.
Certain places like Amman, Kabul or Bombay are cities at high tide. But Minsk is a city decidedly on the ebb. Only survivors emerge from it, grimacing as they do so like people who’ve escaped by the skin of their teeth, and blinking in the bright light.
In truth I’m enjoying the possibility of being in a city and yet being unable to truly locate it. The streets are so wide it seems they’re trying to burst their banks. The settlement must lie at their confluence, the city sea churning in the swell of the high-rise buildings. The façades are smooth and impermeable.
Somewhere out back, in their courtyards, urban life must be going on. The park is almost deserted, with just a few dull-looking types sitting under the trees, chatting. Between the trunks, uniformed men stand around like peeping Toms or exhibitionists. The palaces impose themselves as colossal monuments of a feudal age. They render people superfluous, and people duly walk around as if they feel themselves to be so.
Just one little Inconnue de la Seine has the ghost of a smile on her face. But she’s so drunk that her face can’t help but wear a smile. She’s clutching a wilting bunch of black tulips. At her side is a smiling man blowing on a yellow pinwheel to make it go round. Evidently, he’s beyond the phase of having to ‘play the man’, at least in her company. You can see it clearly in the looks he casts, and in hers too.
There are girls on the street, too, girls walking along with an exaggeratedly upright posture, because it’s only a fortnight since their breasts developed. Beneath loose-knit woollen sweaters, they’re balancing the visible achievements of a womanliness that their faces have already been rehearsing for a long time. Give it a few more months, when they’ve got completely used to being looked at, and they’ll already be past masters at adopting that fixed expression that focuses on a point in the far distance. You really do want to gaze at them, and so you glance in their direction, but it’s like you don’t exist, such is the immature coldness of these girls.
‘The most beautiful thing bar none,’ said Vassili, who accompanied me on my strolls round the city for a couple of days, ‘is Belarussian women.’
But all the ones I saw were wearing beige tights and had expressions as hard as those of transvestites. I’d see them on the main boulevard and in the park outside the Linguistics Department. Sometimes, they’d have flashy golden chains round their ankles and be wearing gold-coloured sandals. Those girls always had long legs and short skirts. Finally, as I was sitting there in the park as inconspicuously as I could, they all ended up congregating around me and smoking, all those bottle-blondes and bottle-redheads, and the girls clad in fake leopard skin, all those girls who for some reason or another were standing and waiting there, letting their lives pass them by.
There hasn’t been such a hot summer here for ages. Bank employees are wearing their shirts outside their trousers, and as a group of nuns shuffle past, they leave a distinctly frowsty odour in their wake. It’s far too steamy for any contact. Anyone who goes around in these conditions holding hands must really be deeply in love. At the market, they’re busy putting up sunshades, even over the lilies planted in troughs, but even so they’re still beginning to wilt from midday onwards. A Roma father and his son play ‘Petite Fleur’ on an accordion and clarinet, three times in succession until they run out of steam, and I struggle somewhat to suppress a wave of emotion that swept over me as I remembered the sound of Sidney Bechet playing this same song in my nursery, and I yearned one day to have something as elegant and sophisticated in my life as the things his clarinet spoke of.
Flies dozed off on the tourists’ salads, two women pulled their bras off through the hole at their armpits, and the pigeons failed to make it up onto the head of the statue, and settled for just loafing around the plinth instead. And then a trumpeter hove into view and, straining every muscle, gave a rendition of ‘Il Silencio’. But the passers-by angrily shooed him away:
‘Give it a rest! You’re getting on our nerves!’
So the trumpeter moved off and took up a pitch further on.
But the people there reacted the same: ‘Don’t play here either! You’re annoying us!’
In fact, the only ‘Welcome’ I encountered that day was the one woven into the mat in the lift.
Sunday afternoon. The city’s full of brides. You can tell from their faces that the wedding night is going to be an ordeal for them. And for the bridegrooms too. Everyone keeps crossing themselves the whole time. It’s only when you follow their line of sight that you notice they’re looking at a church or a tabernacle. The old chess player’s been sitting in the park since seven that morning, but it’s only now that he gets out his board and plays a few games against himself. Then he gets up and goes from bench to bench, asking whether anyone would like a game with him. Mostly he returns empty-handed, and goes back to winning against himself.
Meanwhile, I’m busy looking at two women and a man who are crouched over a camera discussing the photo they’re about to take. I approach them and ask:
‘Here, give me the camera, I’ll take it for you, then you can all be in it.’
They protest weakly, but I tell them:
‘No problem at all, afterwards you’ll be glad I offered. I’ll take a landscape format, then a portrait. Just to be on the safe side.’
In the photos, they stand there awkwardly like they’re not with one another. Finally, the three of them gently explain that they’re actually not a group – the second woman was just a passer-by whom the couple had stopped in order to get her to take a photo of them. That same evening, I’m playing ‘Petite Fleur’ to her on my laptop.
‘Not bad,’ Elzbieta says. ‘But have you got Utyosov singing “Lilies of the Valley”?’
The next morning finds me sitting on the Cathedral Square among the tourists; some of them are gazing, others observing, still others examining, a fourth group researching, a fifth travelling in the capacity of experts, and others as people who have simply been marooned here.
‘I really don’t want to be here,’ says the perplexed man sitting next to me.
I’m thinking I’d like to get far away from this place, too, to a country where aspirins are called ‘Aspjelena’, where the souvenir booths have signs proclaiming ‘Memories’ and the women have deep belly buttons, with wisps of downy dark hair growing out of them, pointing the way downwards. But then it struck me that I was far away already; I am precisely in that country already, and am still searching for the reality of this city.
Minsk lies on a river, a busy commercial river whose eight lines divide the city in two over a length of sixteen kilometres. From time to time you’re forced to veer off into side streets to get away from the noise, but it’s impossible to escape it. And no sooner do you enter the parks than you’re surrounded by exhausted citizens – old women in tracksuit bottoms, and middle aged ones who seem to grow more jaded before your very eyes. They either look all out of focus and puffy like Boris Yeltsin, or rapt with concentration like Marika Kilius.
The city was flattened by German bombardment in the Second World War. Afterwards, because there were so many unexploded aerial mines and bombs under the rubble, it was decided to rebuild Minsk at a site forty kilometres away. But when a referendum was held among the inhabitants it turned out that they wanted everything to be rebuilt exactly the same and in precisely the same location as before. And so, from 1958 onwards, the entire inner city was reconstructed in its original style. The upshot was that socialist labourers were engaged to recreate iconic examples of imperial architecture from the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. They were painstaking and pedantic in adhering to the plans in order to achieve complete accuracy, but somehow the spirit of the original buildings eluded them; the honest truth of it being that socialist workers found themselves incapable of erecting plausibly imperial and imperious buildings. Instead, what they created were Potemkin villages, mere mock-ups.
These historical buildings are situated far apart from one another, like on a Monopoly board. They maintain a safe distance, keeping a watchful eye on each other. Only the churches are teeming with people. Beneath the soaring vault of the central nave, the multitude of the faithful undulate like dough that’s still proving, all the while murmuring and mumbling. So huge is the crowd that some people are even standing outside the main porch, listening to the service relayed on loudspeakers that blare tinnily across the square.
Everything is spick and span in this city, progressive in other words, with the housing estates laid out in straight lines and all the monuments free-standing in plenty of space. Across the board, the city planning laws have prevented any agglomeration of new developments, only the residential silos on the outskirts cluster together. The banks of the river are devoid of all life too. It might just as well be the bed of a watercourse that’s made its way underground and isn’t flowing visibly anymore. As I sit there on the fringes of the green space, still nonplussed by everything around me, beggars approach my bench with faces full of yearning but no language with which to express it. Lush meadows are sprouting all around me, with over-manured wild herbs, dandelions and marsh marigolds in full bloom. And suddenly I really couldn’t care less where I am. The main thing is that I remain enveloped in the sheer foreignness of it all.
Travellers are people who become what they are while underway. Their movement transforms places into settings. They arrive, look around, and observe how people in unfamiliar places go about their business and interact with others, and this very act of observation alienates the alien. Everyone living here is history, and hauls their history with them through the space. Only the traveller is pure immediacy, only he sees the city in its here-and-nowness.
On a leaflet in the drawer of the bedside table in my room, I find a German translation of the hotel’s safety procedures, which informs me that ‘If the hotel is on fire, place a couple of wet hand towels against the base of the door, open the window and give the fire brigade a wave.’ For the rest of the day, I wander through the city looking for anything that might resemble such ‘a wave’.
The following morning Minsk wears rainy weather like a dress. It is a city that wants to be seen like this. On Belarussian TV, a housewife in a miniskirt can be seen cleaning her apartment to the strains of the Brandenburg Concertos. She’s very pretty, and when she gestures with the pan she’s holding, she does it ironically, like she knows full well that she’s too pretty to be a housewife, but just pretty enough to play a Belarussian housewife accompanied by a bit of Bach.
I call up Vassili, and we cruise the streets in his big car. He eyes the streets warily. In his anecdotes, certain stretches of road loom up as the site of wars, crises, accidents, or arrests. You get the impression that the city’s an environment he feels compromised by. By contrast, the thing that doesn’t embarrass him is his son, a boy whose head is full of his future prospects rather than girls. I ask him:
‘Doesn’t he see himself settling down with a girl sometime?’
‘No, he’s really mature. One time, he told me: “Father, I don’t go out with girls, they have only two things in their head: Pizza and fucking.”’
‘Pizza?’
‘He reckons all girls are prostitutes.’
‘All of them?’
‘Well, he distinguishes between two types of prostitution: lazy prostitution and dirty prostitution.’
‘So he has no need of a girlfriend, then?’
‘He did have one. Her name was Pralinka. But they’d only been going out for a couple of weeks before he came to me and said: “Dad, I’ve got her pegged. She’s an airhead.”’
‘At least he’s still got pizza.’
‘Now he’s got a carp in a pool instead. I dunno – I guess it’s better than some unfaithful girl. But honestly, you tell me: what kind of person keeps a fish as a pet? Do they give you any warmth? Or follow you? Or let you stroke them? I’ll tell you what my best mate said: only a man without a dick would keep a carp as a pet. That’s what he said.’
On the scraped-up earth in the front garden of the building behind my hotel there are a pile of wooden fence slats and a few posts covered in peeling paint. Women in burgundy-red pinafores are sitting in a line on one of the remaining fence crossbars and chewing gum. They’re in the same position they were yesterday. Yes, they’re nurses, pale Belarussian ward angels. I wander through the entrance to the hospital – looking for what? Perhaps for some place where I can finally become real, or for a state, a situation, that I might cling on to, just so as to be able to experience something resembling a situation in this city and then to leave it behind. The patients let me pass; they’ve got other worries. And passers-by cast indifferent glances at me.
I’m treating this whole thing as a dare, and have entered the hospital in the hope of finding someone who’ll stop me. But the only people sitting in the vestibule are two old hags in miniskirts who are smoking and who don’t notice me. So I go on, down the stairs. In the cellar, there is a glass screen; you pass through a door in it and find yourself in a neon-lit grocer’s shop like in a children’s book, with jams with old-fashioned photographed labels on the shelves. In a display cabinet, there are warty gherkins in glass bowls, which an assistant fishes out with wooden tongs and puts in wax paper for you. Likewise for the silverskin onions, cooked beetroot and fillets of buckling.
The shop assistant is tinkering away absentmindedly on the floor behind the counter, which she does for a full ten minutes without noticing me. Her bib has slipped out of the waistband of her skirt, revealing a large expanse of her pelvis, on which the broken veins in her skin have left a distinct delta pattern. When she finally gets up, her face is red and square, and she’s got a dramatic case of nasal herpes which looks like a piece of bark on her face. She’s finished stacking a cube of soya milk cartons and now stands with her chin jutting forward at me, her only customer. I buy two large gherkins in greaseproof paper and make myself scarce, because she’s giving me a look like I really ought to clear off.
On the first floor, the glass doors are opaque and closed. On the second floor, they are also frosted, but at least one opens onto a corridor, whose sole occupant is an old man shuffling along while hooked up to a drip stand. I find the door of the second ward along ajar. Looking in, I see that the nearest bed is unmade but empty, while in the far bed a lonely, pale profile is propped up against the pillows. I pull up a chair, put my gherkins down on the edge of the bed and stare at the face of the sleeping old man. This is where I was meant to end up.
The man’s breathing sounds thin and watery. He inhales air with a noise like sucking through a straw, and it is gradually swallowed by his narrow chest. Then he goes on snoring, barely audibly, until he suddenly comes to a stop. You can hear the clock ticking. Then, with a long sigh, he’s in the clear once more, as though the breather has to take individual leave of every breath.
The old man’s flannelette pyjamas are made of a well worn, washed out, blue-grey fabric, as threadbare and transparent as the man himself. They’re stained, but still clean, as the dirty patches have been bleached out by being put through so many wash cycles. The faded fabric exhibits the same kind of sophisticated decay as aged Roquefort. Of an outmoded design, it is faintly reminiscent of something that was formerly known as ‘deathly chic’. These pyjamas are like a dog that has grown old and grouchy at the side of its master, but still manages to be a source of comfort to him.
One of the old man’s hands is lying on the bedspread; brown and raw, chapped and hard from all the work he had to do; it lies there like a hand that has never caressed anything, like a piece of farmland. Perhaps the frail man had become so familiar with the soil that he didn’t want to let it go, and likewise the earth seemed to have grown so accustomed to him that now it was only allowing him to depart with great difficulty.
I look long and hard at his face: the sparse eyebrows, the liver spots that have themselves been bleached out on his pale skin, the irregular patches of pigmentation on his lips, the wrinkled mallow leaves that are his eyelids, the bitterness of the lines that have formed around his mouth, and the flat moles that seem inlaid all around his eye sockets.
Where might all his relatives be? Anyone who hovered around expectantly at his birth and enthused about his future life must be long dead, while all the new people who only came into his life later on were presumably simply indisposed today, had to go to the cinema, or had just forgotten about him altogether. But it might just be the case that he was someone without any particular charisma, lacking the urge or the knack of attracting people. Yes, perhaps he clung to life in its deserted form. How else to explain it?
I’d loved to have known how life came to him and unfolded within him, and at what stage he’d grasped it with both hands and shaken it. I’d loved to have known when he’d been at the pinnacle of his joie de vivre, and when and how it had then ebbed away from him, and when he’d started to lose his grip on life. The sweetest smile he’d ever received may have been just a fleeting one, and the most moving music he’d ever heard may have been ‘Lilies of the Valley’ by Leonid Utyosov. Perhaps he’d never yearned to move or to be what he wasn’t. People with different, less peasantlike hands would have talked of the ‘art of the moment’.
And still I longed to know more about him: on his path through life – the only feasible path he could have taken, the one that he was predestined to travel – at what point had he become a boy or a teenager, or a man and a grown-up, a worker and a citizen, a sickly old man, or a frail dotard on his deathbed? And as one phase morphed and developed so seamlessly and unconsciously into the next, what did his conscious mind hanker after then, once these things had come to pass? Did he long to transcend the perceived world? To what end?
By the time I got up to go, the man’s breathing was no stronger than the merest exhalation wafting over the downy hair on the face of a baby. I stood up when his breathing came to a halt once more, not daring to wait and find out whether it might ever become audible again. In the doorway, I turned around; all I could see was his motionless profile, standing out from the pillows like it was a wooden cut-out, and his carp-mouth gaping in anticipation. These were the final moments in a failed struggle for life, which now appeared devoid of any impact or pathos. It was only when I was out on the main boulevard once more that I remembered the two gherkins I’d left behind on the edge of this deathbed.