THE TRAIN TO ODESSA is careening along at ninety miles an hour in the green light of dusk, hurdling copper-colored rivers, plunging south toward the Black Sea across the long, tilted plain of Ukraine. The compartment is quaking as though possessed by the devil, sending everything on the little table topsy-turvy, and the three-hundred-pound guy in the overhead bunk is snoring and tossing around so loudly that I’m afraid he’s going to come crashing down on me. I’ve already been hit by his backpack, a shower of loose coins, and a bottle of mineral water. As we were pulling out of the station, he asked me, “Where are you from?” I answered, “Italian,” and laughing in disbelief, he asked, “Why in the world did you come to this country?” I replied with a sigh, “Your country is a marvelous land,” but he just turned his huge bearlike body on its side and plummeted into an instantaneous lethargy, anesthetized into a deep night of the senses.
The first stars, already sporting the fiery yellow of Provence or Turkey, are so luminous they make halos on the windowpane, like the celestial torches of a hallucinating Van Gogh. The Ukrainian giant is snoring but there’s no way I can get to sleep in this mad race verging on derailment. The map shows the names of cities I’ve never heard of, Zhmerinka, Kolyma, Kotovsk. But no, Zhmerinka I’ve heard before; Primo Levi passed through there after he was freed from Auschwitz, on the long train ride that took him to Belarus and then back home through the Balkans. The locomotive accelerates again. For more than two hours now it has been clinging to the same straight line—that’s how it is in the East, from the Carpathians to the Urals, no curves and no tunnels. It’s as though this train is trying to make up for the crazy zigzag route of the longest uninterrupted journey of my life, thirty-three days now, from the frozen Arctic Ocean to the Mediterranean, a giant slalom, crisscrossing the eastern frontier of the European Union.
Odessa! After thirty-six hundred miles of hinterland, the city calls out to me with the imperious name of an opera singer. It’s the perfect embarcadero, the head of the line of the ferry that will take me to Constantinople, which in turn is the departure point of the train that will take me across the Balkans to Trieste, following the route of the Orient Express in reverse.
I’m not the only one in the compartment who’s awake. In the other upper bunk there’s a businessman from Kiev who never stops talking on the telephone, but his conversations are all drowned out by the clamor of the rampaging train: jolts, lurches, thumps, on the brink of a crash. In the darkness, the engineer searches for the sea as though hypnotized by the compass needle stuck on southeast, venting all the claustrophobia of this vast featureless landscape that is the Other Europe. The summer night is teeming with long-distance trains, glowing caterpillars heading south, to the tune of seventy or eighty hours of travel time, standing-room-only trains from Murmansk, Omsk, Yekaterinburg, and Baku.
What an adventure. And what encounters! A giant-crab fisherman and buxom vendors of blueberries and sour cream, a special-forces Rambo in Chechnya now turned priest, and a tenant couple living in a former synagogue turned into a barn by the Nazis. I’ve met a reindeer herder engaged in a desperate war against Putin’s Gazprom, and a writer named Wolf in a solitary house amid the lakes in the wilderness of Karelia, north of Saint Petersburg. I’ve crossed paths with smugglers and submariners, young coast guard officers freshly promoted to be commanders of rust buckets in the frozen seas of the North. I’ve seen a bunch of women on a train sticking packs of DVDs to their thighs using Scotch tape as garters, and walking by a river, I met an old woman named Lyuba with three goats on a leash who told me her version of Genesis. In Ukraine, I looked on as a pack of thugs beat up a taxi driver who refused to pay for protection, and in a restaurant in Belarus, I watched the unbridled dancing of twenty young hairdressers, beautiful and happy to be there without men.
The heat is oppressive. The Podolsky Express is a Soviet rattletrap, hermetically sealed to prevent drafts and imbued with the stratified odors of generations of travelers. As a consequence, the doors to all the compartments are kept wide open to capture all the available air from the tiny windows along the corridor, the only ones that open. I exit the compartment into a billowing swirl of coffee-colored curtains; the train has been invaded by spirits sucked in from the surrounding countryside—Galician rabbis, Moldavian farriers, Polish cavalry squadrons, Gypsy violinists, Muscovite police commissars, and boatmen from the Dnieper. I try to walk straight but the jolts are too powerful. Direct lateral hits, as if a mallet were battering the side of the train. My face grazes the pairs of feet sticking out of the bunks, women’s feet, children’s feet, the feet of grown men and old codgers, Russian feet and Ukrainian feet, bare or with socks, all pointing out into the air, then I manage to grab onto the air vent and fill my lungs with fresh air. The night is hot and smells of grass; Ukraine is a warm mother.
Under the bunk is my luggage space with my backpack and shoes. That’s all I have. Fifteen pounds of luggage, and it could have been less. I’ve traveled on trains, buses, ferries, and barges; I’ve traveled on foot and hitched rides. On some occasions I’ve regretted this decision—Rumiz, who was it that convinced you not to travel by car?—but I’ve always managed somehow, and I’ve always met someone who has been happy to lend me a hand. My state of need has made it easier for me to understand the human temperature of the places I’ve visited; the hardships have become stories, and the journey has worked itself out without my needing to plan anything at all. I started out lame from a recent fracture of my right foot, walked in pain for miles and then, after meeting a monk in the Solovetsky Islands, threw my cane into the White Sea, betting that I would make it. That has become a story, too.
The Slavic people of the East have big souls. To be treated as a friend, all I’ve had to do is be seen, with my Western appearance, as I get off the train with my white beard, backpack, and uncertain step. “Where are you going?” they ask me. “Where do you come from? Why aren’t you traveling like a tourist? Aren’t you afraid of riding on Russian trains?” All I’ve had to do is tell them I’m Italian, I’m going to Istanbul, and I’m not the least bit afraid of Russian trains, and the welcoming machine is set in motion. It begins with an invitation to tea, then the tea turns into dinner, and the dinner becomes an offer of a bed for the night.
Exhausted, Monika is asleep in the other lower bunk. In her backpack, shut inside her luggage space, are a hundred or so rolls of film. She always sleeps like a rock, but tonight her sleep is especially deep. She’s been doing the work of three people. Photographer, Russian interpreter, interviewer—tasks she’s able to perform simultaneously. Without her, I wouldn’t have seen half of what I’ve seen. I wouldn’t have met old Lyuba and her goats, wouldn’t have received the confidences of a young Russian lad from the North just released from a forced-labor camp, would never have realized that a private home in easternmost Latvia was actually a former place of Jewish worship, with its basement still full of holy books, forgotten amid cigarette butts and shards of shattered glass.
I am heading into the Mediterranean night, the black night of the Black Sea, crossing the black lands of Ukraine, and in the forest of exchanges, I recite like a litany all the different shades of negritude. Karadeniz, Chorne More, chernozyom, ochi chorniye.1 The darkness—what a marvel, the darkness after the overdose of light in the North; and what a blessing to imagine the sun going down into the sea while the tavern keepers of Odessa, Smyrna, and Istanbul, all aligned on the same longitudinal meridian, spread out white tablecloths on outdoor tables to the sound of pots and pans coming out through the windows of their old buildings. Lights, smells, prairies, and torrents have marked the segments of this journey on the edge of night, but more than anything else, it’s trees that have punctuated our progress southward. First the birches, then the lindens, then the oaks, then the vineyards, then the plane trees, and then the fig trees. I’ll never be able to forget the emotion of my encounters with my first linden tree and my first horse chestnut tree in Estonia. I said their names out loud like the name of a long lost friend.
I could have gone from south to north in order to avoid extreme temperatures and let the progress of spring and summer attenuate the rigors of the North. I chose to do the opposite, to use the calendar to extend the latitude. In this way, instead of thirty parallels, it’s as though I’ve crossed fifty, and instead of one month, I’ve lived three, the ones that come between the end of winter and the beginning of summer. It snowed in Murmansk, just a month ago, and in order to cope I had to put on all my clothes in layers. Now I’m dripping with sweat as if I were on the outskirts of Calcutta. I realize that in this past month, I’ve seen unfold right before my eyes an unimaginable range of scenic backdrops. Frozen lakes and fields of grain, cold forest dawns and sultry Southern nights. A “vertical” journey that has dragged me toward the lower realms of the globe almost by force of gravity.
There are no maps that contain all of Europe from the Arctic Ocean to the Gulf of Sirte. From a longitudinal perspective, they are all partial maps, which seldom go farther north than Saint Petersburg. This made it difficult for me not only to plan, but even to imagine my journey. Before my departure, a sense of the distances escaped me. The immense boreal lands were too shrunken, those closer to the Mediterranean too enlarged. So I had to make my own map, on a scale of one to one million, transferring pieces of various atlases onto a single strip of paper, long and narrow, folded like an accordion. I marked out my possible itinerary in red, thousands of versts2 long, and next to it in blue the European Community frontier, and between the two lines there was a kind of courtship, with each endlessly pursuing the other. At the margins of the strip, as in a dazibao,3 a slew of annotations drawn from books, Russian maps, notes gathered catch-as-catch-can from other travelers.
Since my departure, I haven’t added anything more. I’ve had to concentrate too much on the going to spend time chiseling my road map. Nomads know this all too well: maps aren’t useful for directing you during your journey, but rather for dreaming about your journey during the months leading up to your departure. It would have been blasphemous to add notes about things actually seen to my notes about the things I had dreamed about or imagined. So my map of the European frontier became untouchable, the representation of a different, imaginary journey. I dive back into it to re-evoke those magnificent moments of excitement and anxiety that mark every departure’s eve. I lose myself in a forest of annotations. The synagogue in Grodno, the wizard of Lublin, the monuments of Pinsk, the decaying grandeur of Daugavpils. On the Russian-Finnish border I read, “Mannerheim Line, immense fortifications in the middle of the woods.” Or: “Seto minority—Estonian language, Orthodox faith, pagan mentality.”
Finally I doze off, and an hour later there it is, the first ray of sunlight darting in and out among the rows of poplars, gilding the blue mattress of dew covering the fields. It’s already an Asiatic sunlight, wispy and warm, apricot colored, like the Anatolian high plateau. Meanwhile, the corridor of the car is filling with people who silently return their pillowcases and sheets to the conductor, a big, snarling Ukrainian woman in the proto-Soviet mold. The women conductors I encountered in Russia were better. Dressed like flight attendants, they were efficient, affectionate, almost maternal. The trains in Russia were better, too. Immaculate toilets, lace curtains on the windows, impeccable ventilation, and samovars restored like new. The decline of empires always begins on the periphery.
Five thirty a.m. We’re slowing down amid dilapidated houses, acacia trees, hanging laundry. We barely have time to realize that we’re coming into Odessa and we already have to get off the train. Platform number eight is full of people: vendors of strawberries, blueberries, and raspberries, ladies in pantsuits offering seaside apartments for rent—“Dacha na morya”—and school groups just arrived from mythological cities: Samara, Luhansk, Saratov, Kaliningrad. The whole of the Other Europe is gathering here in the early morning hours, under the dome of the station at the foot of the age-old plane trees of Odessa—the first of my journey—in a magnificent radiant sunlight, with no shouting, no arguments, in a liquid, patient flow.
Hungry as a wolf and breakfast at six, with fried cabbage, rice and meat rolls, unmistakably Turkish, and fish stuffed in the Jewish way with radish, the dish for which, in the words of Isaac Babel, “it’s worth converting to Judaism.” Detraining has gone wonderfully; I’ve already dropped off my backpack at the hotel and fended off the taxi drivers of Odessa, the most brazen in the empire when it comes to jacking up fares. I’ve walked across Pushkin and Uspenskaya boulevards and taken the measure of the nineteenth-century city with its rectilinear neighborhoods and their immense courtyards. I’ve encountered the latest night owls and the earliest street sweepers, sniffed the smell of coffee, salted sardines, and warm bread. On every block, somebody is washing the sidewalk. The whole of Odessa is engaged in its morning toilette. Odessa is Istanbul and Lisbon, Saint Petersburg and Trieste, all rolled into one.
On the streets, faces that are Slavic, Caucasian, Turkish, Central Asian; freckled blond beauties and Mediterranean women with defiant black eyes. A film passes before me with the extras who have peopled this adventure I’ve been on from the hyperborean lands of the North to the frightful ones of the Minotaur. Jews have been an essential part of the cast; from Saint Petersburg south, I’ve seen impressive signs of their presence-absence, and in fact, here they are, passing before me here, too, groups of three and four on their way to the synagogue on Osipova Street. I follow them, they let me go in with no checks, they give me a yarmulke, and then they get on with reciting their prayers in an adorable Levantine confusion.
But what am I saying, the East? Where I am now is the center. The belly, the soul of the continent. Moreover, this soul is completely outside of that bureaucratic scaffolding that calls itself the European Union. Even geographically, this is the center. On the Tibiscus, in Ukraine, I found an Austro-Hungarian obelisk that marked the midpoint of the continent from the Atlantic to the Urals, and from the Mediterranean to the Barents Sea. Even back then, they knew that Mitteleuropa was not to be found in Viennese cafés but much farther east, even beyond Budapest and Warsaw. The heart beats here, hundreds of miles beyond the ex–Iron Curtain, among the birches and the great wandering rivers, in a terra incognita made of forgotten peripheries.
On my do-it-yourself map, there are no nation-states, only historic border regions that have been swallowed up by geopolitics. Here are their names: Bothnia, where the frozen bottom of the Baltic melds into the tundra; Karelia, a labyrinth of rivers between Russia and Finland; Livonia, covered with lakes and fir trees; and listen to the soothing sound of Courland, with its lagoons and sand dunes battered by the wind. Look in an atlas for East Prussia, Latgale, and Masuria, I get chills down my spine just from pronouncing their names. And what do you say about Polesye, the flattest watershed in the world, the land from whose marshes it was once possible to travel by boat to both the Baltic and the Black Sea? Or the endless rolling hills of Volhynia?
And that’s not all. How about Ruthenia, Podolia, or Bukovina? Try mentioning these names to a travel agent. They’ll think you’re off your rocker. But don’t give up; show them the map. Tell them that these are real places that have rivers, cities, monasteries, synagogues, plains, and mountains. Tell them that you also want to see Budzhak, the last projection of Ukraine before the Danube Delta, a wild island of minarets in the middle of a sea of orthodoxy, an uncharted land of shepherds and Gypsies. Demand to visit Bessarabia, Dobruja, and Thrace. Reeducate the tourism industry; explain that with sky-high oil prices, travel has to become once again adventure and discovery—stay away from the famous places, choose the unknown peripheries, go back to traveling light. For thirty-six hundred miles, I haven’t come across one tourist village nor even one Chinese restaurant. Italians fewer than few. All of this must mean something.
From Norway south, I haven’t found any nations, only a slow transcoloration that is oblivious to borders and their ridiculous barriers. Poles in Ukraine, Jews in Belarus, Finns in Russia, and Russians in Latvia. The peoples of the frontier always surprised me; they never conformed to cliché, and they were always distant from the political and administrative centers of their countries. They did not echo Italians in saying “Moscow’s a thief,” but they weren’t far from it. Everywhere I went, I found relics of the moving frontiers of past empires—Russian, German, Ottoman, and Austro-Hungarian—abandoned like erratic blocks in the middle of the Alpine foothills. In Ukraine, I saw a golden Madonna shining atop an ex-minaret. In the Carpathians, I came across tombs of soldiers from Trieste—my hometown—who from 1914 to 1917 had fought in the war for Austria against the czar; in Poland, castles built by Teutonic Knights; and in Belarus, titanic monuments to Stalin.
Do I want to go back home? Not in the least. And I know perfectly well why not. Every time I’ve reentered the EU during this zigzag down the zipper of Europe, I’ve felt disoriented and I’ve asked myself, What am I doing here? Crossing the border into Estonia or Poland, I had a burning sensation: to the west, my adventure would be over, the scribblings in my notebook were bound to wither away, and the air was tainted by that unmistakable blend of saccharine Catholic respectability and obsessive Protestant “busyness” that poisons my world. I felt an immediate distaste for its moralism, its pharmaceutical cleanliness, its annoying flowers on the windowsills, and its unjustified presumption of innocence. And its conviction that it is the brain and nerve center of a political space capable of self-control, and not its stomach, susceptible to bellyaches of the most banal origin.
In the East, things were better. More brotherhood, communication, curiosity. Primordial landscapes, more sacred places. On its western border, my frontier displayed the heavy impact of this closeness. It had a Slavic soul, the spirit of a great people that has suffered and loved. Throughout my entire itinerary, the lingua franca was Russian, and saying spasibo (“thank you”) always worked. Just one Ukrainian ticket seller, at the train station in Uzhgorod, not far from the Hungarian border, barked at me that she was not required to speak the fucking language of her ex-masters, so I answered her unperturbed in English, soliciting an even more ferocious response. Russians, Ukrainians, Belarusians, the difference among them as far as I was concerned was like the difference between Serbs and Croats, sworn enemies whom Miroslav Krleža has ironically defined as “Shit from the same cow pie, cut in two by the wagon wheels of history.”
“Look at this land, isn’t it wonderful?” a Ukrainian peasant woman asked me one evening in front of an ocean of grain, swaying in the wind. “It could feed the whole of Europe,” I commented. To which she, as though talking to herself, said, “Then why are we so poor? Why do millions of us emigrate? Why is there so much uncultivated land? Why do so many of our women go to Italy to take care of your old people?” Then, after a long silence, “I’ll tell you why: we’re governed by bandits. And you, over there in Italy, do you have bandits in power, too?” I avoided the question.
This journey to the East has been a bath of humanity. More than any other, this has been a journey made not by me but by the people I’ve met. Put another way, the journey has made itself, without any regard for my expectations. Maybe it worked because I didn’t know very much before I left, and perhaps the most successful journeys are the ones you don’t have enough time to plan. The ones you set out on without the ballast of a ton of books. Lightly. Carrying nothing except the experience of your previous wanderings.
Initially, I thought I would go as far as Cyprus, skimming past Turkey along the Greek islands that dot its shoreline, and maybe even go on to Alexandria, inhabited up to just the other day by Greeks, Jews, Italians, and the French. Now I realize I’ve already seen too much. I’ve skinned the Russian bear, filled seven eighty-page notebooks, and what I’ve seen is more than enough. I’m saturated. Seven notebooks and a series of accompanying drawings, to better fix details and landscapes in my memory, all gathered in a blue cardboard folder. I’ve patiently reproduced the labels of Eastern beers, bilingual signs, multicolored train tickets, trapezoidal antique maps. I can’t go any farther. Odessa is a perfect terminus. I know almost nothing about this place, but I can feel that it contains within itself my entire journey. The road home starts here, on the shore of the Black Sea.
Mediterranean sunlight. We’re anxious to plunge into the water to wash away ten countries’ worth of dirt, and getting to the beach in Odessa is really easy. Just follow the stream of pedestrians carrying beach bags. I walk down through a grove of acacia trees, pass by stands of dried fish, baskets of ruby-red shrimp, and dusky-brown sole hanging on a line, and end up on the cleanest and most civil free swimming area I’ve ever seen. A populace of two million Russians and Ukrainians comes to the sea here, without invading one another’s personal space, without strutting about to show off new swimsuits or sunglasses, without littering, without bickering, without screaming spoiled brats, and without playing deafeningly loud music. “It’s like this because the rich, arrogant Russians are at the seaside in Italy,” laughs to my amazement a still attractive seventyish woman with a glitzy red rose in her hair.
I dive in against the wind. The water is only slightly salty and vaguely oily. The sun is scorching hot, and in just two hours, I’m on the verge of a severe sunburn. Out at sea, way out at sea, a dozen or so containerships look as though they’re already lined up for the Bosporus. Around eleven o’clock, the wind whips up from the south and, backlit by the sun, the water turns the color of pewter. Off in the distance, I can see some agitated movement down on the pier: a platoon of diving cormorants has signaled the presence of a school of sardines. There they are, wrinkling the surface like a light sunset breeze. Everyone has seen them, the fishing lines are already whizzing this way, without breaking the perfect silence. I’m surrounded by people it seems I’ve known forever. I sit down in the shade to write, at an outdoor table of a bar. I’m joined by a pearly-headed Cyrillic beer, and the story begins.