THE UKRAINIAN POLICE OFFICER, white shirt and lavender perfume, opens the door for us to the world where a visa is no longer necessary. Then here comes a gigantic woman selling dolls and teddy bears, overflowing with goods and flesh. “Ah, our Gypsy has arrived.” The conductor laughs, and meanwhile the train fills up with what sounds like Serbian music. I hear phrases like “my Ukraine,” “my sweetness,” and “heart of mine.” I’m plunging into the South. The language becomes more modular; the chitchat rises in volume, and the convivial Slavic warmth—momentarily gone into hibernation in Belarus—reexplodes. I recognize pieces of the journey that we’ve already done: a mother from Murmansk with two children, traveling for seventy-two hours. When she left, it was still winter, and here it’s already insufferably hot.
What a metamorphosis! The men who come aboard are less suspicious and the women more robust, suntanned like farmhands. The frequency of pale, slender Baltic beauty tapers off. The train is heading southwest, toward Lviv, in a world that’s more vigorous, sunny, Gypsyesque. Towns are not as well kept, apparently poorer, but the fields are fertile, with grazing horses and geese, as in a Soviet documentary from the 1950s. The cemeteries, joyously colorful with fresh flowers, are not enclosed; they grow up spontaneously by gemmation. The deep green of Belarus has been tinged with yellow, maybe it’s a prelude to the steppe. Saddled horses, dust, riding boots. There’s an air of Middle Eastern caravan, and yet—how strange—I’m getting closer to home. The map says that the elbow of the Carpathians and Hungary are right next door.
My map of wonders indicates that this is the area of the Russian gas pipelines that supply Europe. The stability of the world depends on their spigots. That would be a great journey! Follow the pipe from your very own kitchen stove all the way to Siberia. An epic. I note down words like Klondike, Putinian power. Monika fires me up, talking about the legend of the Rachmani, a subterranean people of fire carriers. The train continues southwest, but now my imagination is galloping northeast, across the Don with the Italian troops at the front in 1942, over the steppes of Oryol and Kursk, where the last open-field battle of history was fought in 1943, to the headquarters of Gazprom in Moscow, the Kremlin. Then the great mother Volga; Kazan, the city of towers on the rivers; the end of Europe and the hyperborean mountains, the Urals.
What a grandiose terrain, unexplored and current. An investigation and at the same time an exploration. Beyond the Urals, toward the oil fields trapped under the permafrost—there you have it, the world’s biggest swamp, an endless horizon of mosquitoes and migratory birds. I see the Ob, monosyllabic river, the Po of the great North, which the icebreakers just barely break open at the end of April, to the tune of dynamite blasts. Siberian stories, the tundra, the Gulags, the Arctic railways built by convicts, mammoths under the frozen ground. Novy Urengoy, the city of Utopia, reachable only by plane; the land where fire is born. Yamal, the last peninsula, the reindeer, the Arctic people threatened with extinction. The frozen Arctic Ocean, and again the madness of the midnight sun. The spaces whence we have come.
The train shoots into long valleys, imperceptible, the first change in the lay of the land since lacustrine Polesye. Until 1918, this is where Austrian Galicia began. Outside there are signs of a different aesthetic, of a different order. A new limes, a new sign of the mobile frontiers that have determined the fate of millions of people. The ethnicities mix. At Brody a blond with a Greek profile comes aboard. She looks as though she just got off a horse, a mythic Amazon. In the back of the car, Monika has found a Gypsy of savage beauty whose eyes invite her on the road to the Carpathians.
The bus for the South is dancing wildly like a crazed tarantist, but the driver is a jelly-bellied jolly guy who sings and accelerates through the potholes because that’s the only way to get by them. The bus is jam-packed, a crowd of farmers who engage in animated conversation, eat, and sing with the windows thrown open, in an amazing vortex of spinning air. The road to Murmansk was a different music. The same potholes, but a leaden silence behind the wheel. Tinted windows hermetically sealed and a bleak gloom among the passengers. Like a paddy wagon full of detainees.
It’s amid this chaotic earthquake that the Vision appears. Beyond the clamor of the confabulating passengers, the fields of grain, the villages with their onion-domed bell towers, beyond the yellow and blue Ukrainian flags fluttering in the wind and the bus’s orange curtains, rumpled and torn by the current, there appears a black line, as wide as the entire horizon, regular as a breaker that rises up following the reflux of the surf. Mountains! The black line of the mountains! It’s not a serrated crest like the Alps, but a barrier with a soft silhouette like a tidal wave. Barrier is the right word because the Carpathians are standing there like a dam, after thousands of miles at zero altitude, amid minimal hills, sand dunes, forests, and vast clearings.
Having a terrestrial limit to hold on to is a blessed thing, and I’m immediately overcome by a rush of good cheer that breaks the dam of reserve between me and my fellow passengers. I offer my neighbors some Uzbek apricots and Bulgarian almonds purchased in Kaliningrad. They thank me and return the favor with pumpkin seeds (another sign of the South!), laugh with a full display of teeth in their bony, caravanesque faces. Who are they? Alans? Sarmatians? Dacians? The legendary Scythians, who ensnared and defeated the Persians on the endless plains? They’re also asking who we are, with our long thin faces and blue-green eyes staring out at the long wave of the last horizon.
Let me try to recapitulate how I ended up in the middle of these people. It all happened in a flash. Outside the train station in Lviv we hopped on the first bus directed toward the Carpathians, to throw ourselves into that frontier “entanglement” where Poland, Slovakia, Hungary, and Ukraine all touch each other. “Run, run, and you might make it,” they told me at the ticket booth, pointing at a bus with its motor running in the middle of a hundred or so motor coaches haphazardly parked in front of the station. If I had stopped in Lviv, I would have lost myself in the city. Too much fascination in that city-bazaar, Gothic, Slav, and Jewish, so Northern for those who come there from the South and so Southern for those who arrive from the North. For the Italian soldiers on their way to the Don, Lviv was the place of their disillusionment. They saw emaciated Jews on the train tracks, pushed and shoved by German soldiers with whips, and they realized what a heinous cause they were going to fight for.
The bus starts to climb and enters the first tunnel on its route, crosses the newborn Dniester, and everything changes again. The Ukrainian neglectfulness ends together with the plain and is replaced by valleys of Alpine tidiness, sprinkled with pagoda-roofed wooden churches. Another frontier between cultures. What to do? The place is worthy of a stopover, but should I get off here? Are there hotels? Inns? Try looking in Turka, they tell me, maybe you’ll find something there. We get off in Turka, but there’s not even the shadow of a bed, and night is about to fall. Poland is right next door, and the border is a tough one. They told me in Warsaw that the Chechen mafia makes money from smuggling across that mountainous border.
The Dnieper Inn emanates an excellent aroma of soup and welcomes us like shipwreck survivors. We order dinner and ask for information, but the waitress knows nothing; she’s not from here. Just as in Italy, the young people have lost a consciousness of place. So I try my luck with a merry table of customers at the bar, three women and four men.
“Why don’t you have a car?” they ask us immediately, looking at our backpacks.
I shoot back, “Because we’re crazy.”
They burst out laughing, followed by a round of vodka.
I ask if there are really Chechens in these mountains.
Another laugh with the reply that those are just Polish fables. “But you two,” they ask, “what are you doing here?”
I tell them about my vertical Europe, about Murmansk still covered in snow and about the EU frontier. They’re left with their mouths agape. “Then you really are crazy!”
But the conclusion is fated: “You did well to come here. In the Carpathians we have open minds.” Meanwhile, the second round of vodka arrives, and the dinner companions open up. The most talkative is the mayor of Turka, Yevstaky Ivanovich. The second is Ivan, a rascal police officer. The third is Bogdan, a friend of the group who offers to take us to a motel and, the next morning, on a tour of the nearby villages.
“You can trust Bogdan,” says the mayor, “the important thing is that you don’t trust the police officer. The police always lie.” More laughter. One of the women at the table explains that the mayor won the election with good humor. Like this, telling jokes.
“Is that right, Yevstaky Ivanovich?” I ask him.
“I’m a Boyko, and you can say whatever you like.” The Boykos are one of the ethnic minorities of the Carpathians. Monika knows them well.
I ask if there are Jews in Turka.
“There were lots of them. Today there is only one left. But he … is careful not to tell anyone.” More laughter, this time with mouths closed. Yevstaky urges me on like a Cossack: “Drink up, have one for your horse, too!” They had warned me: careful of the Carpathians; they’ll drown you with vodka and hospitality. Confirmation arrives promptly.
We head for the longed-for hotel in an indescribable sunset, apple green and apricot, outlined by the serrated profile of the pine groves, amid meadows covered with pale blue fog. In the distance, a lighted train makes a wide, slow curve in ascent. It brilliantly overcomes the steep slope with endless turns and switchbacks. “That’s the Elektrichna,” Bogdan explains, “the Austrians built the line in 1905.” The whistle train that goes up and down the valley and connects with the Trans-Carpathian, toward Hungary, along the watershed that was one of the bloodiest fronts of the Great War. That’s how we’re going to continue our journey.
In the motel, crowded with hyperexcited excursionists, the only available place is over the sauna, and in the room—all in flammable wood—it is at least 100°. But that’s no problem, I’m carried off by a leaden sleep. But at two in the morning, the temperature goes up to 120°, and from underneath me comes a concert of thumps, barbaric grunts, and female whoops. Pandemonium, with the flame from the sauna crackling distinctly just inches under my bed. The room is full of smoke even though the windows are wide open. I go outside to breathe some fresh air, and I realize that this incendiary earthquake is the only hotbed of noise in the boundless silence of the Carpathians.
The next day, they take us to a wooden church near the source of the Dniester. The nave breathes, creaks, hisses, resonates like the bottom of a boat. The pope sings the Lord’s Prayer with just two notes, repeats ad infinitum the word Gospod, Lord, and the women respond in chorus. Candles around the icons, children serious as soldiers, in white shirts. It’s a mixture of Baroque Austria and Orthodox Russia, Rome and Byzantium, all smelling of resin and decorated with lighted candles like Christmas. Monika has been traveling in Central Europe for twenty years, away from the centers of power and the delirium of ideologies. In places like the Carpathians, you understand clearly that in church what is celebrated is the community, and the sense of limits that looms over it.
Out on the street, a grandmother, with a red handkerchief, and a little girl, her granddaughter, dressed as a bride. She is dressed like that for her mother’s birthday, but her mother has nine children and can’t afford to keep her at home. So she lives with her old Osipa, Josephine. “They gave me my name because I was born on Christmas,” she explains, and recounts that she was once a telephone operator and then the letter carrier for the town. “I went around on a bicycle, even in the snow. A hard job but nice, because you get to talk with everyone.”
Osipa has a serene face and lots of tragedies behind her. Here the whole peasant world seems to be suffering unspeakably, even in these towns with genteel names like Strawberry or Apple. Just a while ago, in another church, we heard the pope cry out that “the devil has entered our community” and something had to be done. People were arguing heatedly, the parish was being attacked, and the enemy could have but one name, Satan. Josephine tells us atrocious things: a son of hers was burned alive—she repeats “burned alive”—by a madman. The other son was taken from her at age twenty-five by cancer. And her daughter isn’t able to bring up all those children by herself, so she has to give her a hand with the produce from her vegetable garden. She makes us a present of a liter and a half of fresh goat’s milk that we would drink later, sitting between a sheaf of wheat and a stream.
That evening, the proprietor of the hotel, after moving me out of the infernal room and giving me another, tells me that the hotel was a kolkhoz, of which only the walls were left because everything else had been robbed after the fall of the Soviet Union. “I bought the stones and spent ten thousand dollars to make a hotel out of them. But I have to fight with those damn plants that you see outside there.” He takes us outside and shows us gigantic flowers, ten feet high, that besiege the grounds. “They were planted by the kolkhoz, to feed them to the cows so they would make more milk. They come from Siberia, and they are so happy to be here that they’ve become monsters. Now there are no more cows, but they are still here; they’ve invaded the mountains. You can’t get rid of them even with a flamethrower, and they’re poisonous for people.”
Who knows, maybe the devil that’s tormenting the Carpathians has taken cover in this killer plant. Already, on the Arctic Ocean, I’ve met a giant killer crab from the depths, brought there from Asia in the name of progress. Maybe the demon is globalism, which has made its nest here, too. It’s hard to sleep in these mountains. The Austrian train goes by in the middle of the night.
In the mountain range where the vampires live, local trains come and go, to and from various heads of the line, with nonexistent connections. Especially in Ukraine. But that’s the nice thing about it. It happens that you get off in a place called Yablunka (Apple Tree), in a countryside resounding with cackling hens, and you have three hours to wait for the next train, which might take you only twelve miles farther. But the stop-off offers you the opportunity to meet the signalman, drink a tea together, and see a group of young people on horseback, bareback like Andalusians, riding alongside the tracks. You can’t understand the Carpathians without the syncopated rhythm of the train known as Elektrichna.
At Turka, I stop in for a beer at the blue shack that hosts the Klub for Afghanistan vets. In Syanki, a Ukrainian soldier stops us. We are the only passengers to get off the train with bags, and those bags indicate that we are engaged in a long journey on a train that is used only by local passengers. The man in uniform wants to understand.
“Where are you going?”
We reply, “To Uzhgorod.”
“The next train is the right one.”
“We know that,” I respond, “but we want to see the border. That’s what we’re here for.”
“There is nothing to see here. And above all there is nothing to photograph.”
I explain that I’m interested in this place because my grandfather fought here in 1914, against the Russians.
“Passport, please.”
We give him our documents, and the soldier gets even more upset. The importance of our visas, together with the poverty of our clothing, confounds him. He can’t figure us out.
“You can’t see the border. There’s a cordon here.”
“What cordon?”
“The frontier cordon. The security strip.”
I ask him how wide it is.
“Eighteen miles.”
We try to buy some time in a tavern frequented by Gypsies, smugglers, and the forgotten. The store is interred, has no windows, and no ventilation. Outside, a groaning of engines, wind, dust. Inside, beer, cheese, bread, cigarettes, and turbo–folk music that sounds Dalmatian and gives me once again the false sensation of being around the corner from home. Instead, I’m very far away, trapped in the damned Carpathian elbow, which inscrutable powers have decided to turn into a dead track. Monika asks the customers how it was under the USSR. “Nothing has changed. The barbed wire fences are still the same ones.” An old man is even more pessimistic: “Today, it’s even worse, the cordon is much wider.” I notice that even civilians are wearing camouflage. Since 1914, history hasn’t unloaded anything here except armies and uniforms.
At Uzhok, among bales of fresh hay, we encounter a freight train pulled by four gigantic engines, and as we wait for the next passenger train, we chat with the signalman, in a black uniform, red beret, and a wig. There is always a guardian angel, even in the most out-of-the-way place, and the signalman, having heard about our plan to skirt the Romanian border all the way to Odessa, gets upset and warns us that the train lines along the Tibiscus are called “desire.” And, anyway, if our destination is Odessa, “you have to go back to Lviv.” But he underestimates our stubbornness, and he watches us desolated as we head for the pass. We climb some more, where there is a monument to the fallen Russians and Austro-Germans of the Great War. Another frontier or, better, another front. The one where my grandfather, wearing an Austrian uniform, fought against the Russians of the czar.
The diesel engine bites into the slope, a barefoot grandma in a meadow waves her handkerchief, mountaineers run down from the villages to catch it. The Elektrichna has cars with wooden benches and it carries children, customs officers, lovers, and peasants. It whistles, shakes, creaks, whines, winds around itself, flirts with Poland, and shows you outside the window the Schengen Area guard huts and barbed wire, as solid as the Soviet ones. At Minjova, the station is a small building ten feet away from the barbed wire, but behind it is a Lilliputian world of little houses, chimneys, people, cows, and tunnels like the plastic villages of model trains. Everywhere you look, people intent on mowing the hay.
On the sliding door at the end of the car, a poster: under a pair of lenses with, reflected inside, two little boys in tears, the words DON’T PUT ON THE ROSE-COLORED GLASSES OF WORK ABROAD. It’s the first sign of a country dramatically depopulated by emigration. I ask the ticket taker how many miles it is to Uzhgorod. She answers, “Sixty-one.” I ask how long it will take. “Four hours.” Why so long? “But it’s sixty-one miles!” she replies, her gaze darkening. And we’re already descending toward Uzhgorod, toward Hungary, in a rain forest heavy with vapors, swarming with microscopic, implacable mosquitoes.
Pannonia7 is very close; the Balkans, too. Like a stork, I can feel growing inside me the migratory instinct to fly directly south, following the meridian, toward Belgrade and Greece. But it is right here that the vertical border of fortress Europe makes a brusque turn to the east to outline Romania all the way to the Black Sea.
The faces on board have changed again; they’re pointier. This is the world of the Ruthenians, another minority that has been shaking its fists after the fall of Soviet homogenization. Here’s Nykola, eighty-three, a former orchestra director, from Lviv, thick white hair and deep eyes of someone who has seen it all. He spent his adolescence in Siberia, then in Kazakhstan, manufacturing bullets for the Red Army at the front. But in the meantime, he had already formed a chorus. “The Russians,” he grumbles, “didn’t bring us anything good.” I say that up to now in Russia, we have only met good people. “Well, sure,” he says. “On their home turf they’re fine.” And how is life in Lviv? “Worse. It’s in a state of total anarchy. And the oligarchs have got their hands into everything.” I explain our journey to him, and his eyes pop out. “You could have gone by plane.” I reply that if I hadn’t taken a train, I wouldn’t have met him. He smiles. Then he sings an aria from Der Rosenkavalier.
Ferns, fog, mineral-water springs, paleosocialist factories in the rain. An old man climbs aboard with a pail full of porcini mushrooms to sell. He’s wearing short pants and rain boots. Outside it’s hot; inside it’s a sauna. The train keeps getting more crowded. Nykola: “If you knew how much I love traditional Italian songs … and then, ah, Verdi!” He intones “Catarì,” then “Il soldato innamorato,” and then “O sole mio.” He explains that the Slavs—“we Slavs,” he underlines, including the Russians now, too—adore this kind of music. He writes down meticulously on a sheet of paper his address in Lviv and offers it to us. “Come. It’s really not so far from Italy.”
The station in Uzhgorod is a little jewel with a mausoleum inside in commemoration of a famous assassination victim: Georgyi Kirpa, a former Ukrainian minister, done in, they say, by pro-Russian militants. In the middle of the waiting room, there is a case with his clothes and some tablets with the story of his martyrdom. The hostility toward Moscow is palpable. At ticket window number five, a shrew refuses to respond in the language that I’ve been using now for a month without any problems, even in the Baltic republics. Her nationalism immediately sends blood rushing to my head, because it demonizes the people rather than the criminals who govern them. I send her to hell in Italian and change to window number three, where my vendetta is promptly served up. Two Slovaks, despite knowing how to speak Ukrainian, speak English with the woman behind the glass just to highlight their membership in the club of the rich. She doesn’t understand, but they keep it up, refusing to make themselves understood even though they understand perfectly.
I look for a good hotel. I’m sick of scalding-hot rooms with saunas and discotheques on the floor below, and I find right away that in Uzhgorod everything works. The roads of five nations converge here; there is no lack of business and money. The English language shows up again at the hotel, lobster and Caesar salad on the menu, as well as, naturally, air-conditioning. But superimposed on the slipshod Soviet construction is the costly and marbled nullity of capitalism. And while all of a sudden everything works, just as suddenly there are no stories to tell. The West is the place where the yawn reigns supreme. The equation constructed by my friend Jacek in Warsaw is confirmed: “Difficulty equals story.”
Luckily, there are the Pannonian mosquitoes. The meanest, sliest, most ferocious, and hardest to snag of my entire life. Lying in wait behind the minifridge, hidden in the folds of the drapes, dug in like Vietcong in the darkest corners of the bathroom, they emerge one by one in the middle of the night to prevent us from sleeping and provide us at last with something to recount. I’m too tired for big-game hunting, and I take cover under the sheet. In the darkness, I’m reminded that one day on a comfy and punctual Swiss train, a woman said to me—I swear—that she loved Italian trains because they didn’t work and therefore, “there was at least something to talk about.” Obviously she was a snob and regarded these little inconveniences as the only surprises capable of interrupting her incommensurate boredom.
The next day. New train, to Chop, on the border with Slovakia and Hungary. The idea is to go up the Tibiscus to its source back in the Carpathians, not far from the stomping grounds of Count Dracula. My map indicates a line that goes up the entire valley and then runs down toward the Dniester near the city of Chernivtsi, from where I’ll leave to go down to Odessa. We are traveling full of hope through the desolate flatlands of Pannonia. And Chop isn’t a city; it’s a gigantic terminal full of fog, high-tension electric towers, gas pipelines, networks of tracks, immobile freight trains shiny with rain; and further still, ramps, warehouses, luggage trolleys in the scrub under a forest of electric wires. Long fields, typically Hungarian, on triennial rotation. The banks of the Tibiscus are no more than two or three hundred yards away, covered with tall yellow flowers. On board, the dark faces of Gypsies.
We bend toward the east to outline Romania. The sun comes out; vine-covered hills appear; the Tibiscus River valley begins, and the most legendary of the Danube’s tributaries appears, solitary and wild, under the southern slope of the Carpathians. Meanwhile, I discover that the train has no toilets. “It’s logical,” the ticket checker explains, “it’s a train for people who get on and off for short rides, like a bus.” At Khust, we discover that the train ends there, because the old Austrian line goes only about thirty miles on the Romanian side of the river. The fragmentation of the old Soviet world and then the wall of fortress Europe have destroyed most of the old transnational connections. Nobody will ever persuade me to abandon the conviction that Europe was more European a century ago, when my grandmother traveled by train in one day from Trieste to Transylvania.
In Khust there’s nothing that can’t be bought and sold. The main square is a little bazaar. To continue on our way, we can choose a bus or a car with a driver, which comes at a more reasonable rate than in Belarus—€80 ($110) as far as Rakhiv, sixty miles. Our driver for the trip is Mikhail, a former building engineer with years of emigration behind him. He sings as he drives, loves his country, and has no intention of emigrating. He drives us through a magnificent valley dotted with the houses of emigrants who have prospered, but their houses are nightmare concoctions: medieval-style castles with towers topped with blue plastic roof tiles. The aesthetic model of independent Ukraine is Disneyland. Moscow may be even farther away than it was, and at ticket windows, they may speak only Ukrainian, but nevertheless the centuries-old knowledge of building materials has been lost and the identity of place along with it.
Unreachable on the opposite shore, the Romanian side, is the much more authentic beauty of Maramureş, which I saw years ago, with its wooden churches and its cemeteries adorned with paintings of laughing angels. Beyond the river and the trees, I see the bell tower of Săpânța, one of the jewels of old Europe. It would be magnificent to go over there, but it’s not possible. The border crossing at Teresva has been closed for two years. But it’s all show—“reklama [advertisement],” Mikhail says more precisely—because here, too, smugglers come and go as they please. “Plus, for three thousand euros (five thousand dollars) you can buy a Schengen visa with no problems.” I take a good look at the river. Swimming across it would be a joke. I don’t understand. Why is there an eighteen-mile “cordon” on the border with Poland, and here there’s nothing?
What a put-on, this frontier. Mikhail confirms that during the Cold War, it was worse. No sense of Communist brotherhood; if you swam across, Ceauşescu’s Romanians filled you with lead. We turn north. Now both banks are in Ukraine. Tributaries of the Tibiscus flow down the slopes swollen with clear water between fields of corn and tobacco. Grape arbors in front of the houses, heaps of watermelons for sale under the linden trees, rafts for rent for whitewater river excursions. Then the valley narrows, and right there, treacherously outside the borders of the European Union, an old Austrian plaque marks what late-eighteenth-century geographers identified as the center of Europe—as if to say that the heart of the continent beat in the old empire much more than it does in the European Union.
I find a place to stay in Rakhiv, in a cabin on the river, while in a nearby house, they’re slaughtering a pig, and the poor thing’s squeals are echoing up and down the whole valley. Above us is the roof of the Carpathians, Mount Hoverla, 6,760 feet. I look up at the slopes of the mountains. They’re full of people going up and down. It’s a world that you can discover only on foot. The mountains are populated, high up and on the high meadows, even at dusk; it’s a constant up and down of farmhands at work with hay and herds. There’s a farmhand who’s piling up hay in a typical Carpathian hayrack. “Working on the klatki, you age well,” he tells me, referring to the scaffolding. He has ten children, twenty grandchildren, and he’s as slim as a herring. In the immense silence of the evening, I drink a beer with my feet soaking in the river and a dog by the name of Uaciata sitting next to me, come down to greet me from the house next door. Her name, so tender, means “sketch.”
Stars. Dinner of cured ham and cheese by the hearth in the inn. Above it, the room looks out on the river; that’s the only sound I can hear. The ideal place for a good rest, but I can’t get to sleep. Monika is sleeping so deeply, it seems she’s on another planet. I, on the other hand, suddenly feel crushed under the weight of all the things we’ve seen. Too many. I have no idea why this is happening to me here and now, at the center of the continent. It’s as though all the notes I’ve taken in the last month have fallen on me at once. A month as long as a year. Six full notebooks. How will I manage to decipher them after all this time? I’ve never made a journey so dense with encounters, and all that lived experience turns into weight, ballast. I’ve been working meticulously, maybe too much, like a botanist or an entomologist, gathering, recording, reproducing, investigating with a magnifying glass.
Just before six, just to pass the time, I start rummaging through my pack and discover that my rigid blue notebook that I’ve been filling with drawings isn’t there. I look again; nothing. Nothing, nothing. A month’s work up in smoke. I’d drawn the little Belarusian houses, Lithuanian beer labels, Norwegian road signs, the Cyrillic menus from the inns in Murmansk. I curse, dripping with sweat. The idea of going back up into the mountains above Lviv without a car is simply crazy; plus, I don’t have enough time left for such a long detour. I’m desperate. But just as I’m getting ready to resign myself, out comes the damn thing from a side pocket as dark as night, and for a second, its seventy drawings seem to shine in the semidarkness like the figures of a magic lantern.