Summer 2003
Gowanus
But where we live
we speak only of death and think
of somewhere else
-- Karen Alkalay-Gut
Ali falls asleep immediately after a long day of trying to be what she cannot be. She tries to be a newspaper reporter; but she doesn’t really want to be one. She just needs to make some money over the summer to stop being dependent on her parents. She’s exhausted from running all over campus observing things she could have turned into wonderful photographs. Instead, she has to write about them, journalistically, and with a slight accent. Ali can’t help the accent, even when she writes.
She feels she uses too many words when she writes about a biology professor’s wife who, on the day a tornado hit town, was sucking gasoline out of her car through a tube connected to a plastic milk bottle and then ran upstairs to feed the generator that helped nurture the unique bacteria that were her husband’s decade-long work.
Way too many words she uses. Pictures would say it so much better. But the newspaper has enough photographers already.
Ali falls asleep on her bed by the window, and I try to lie quiet on the mattress we have laid on the floor next to the bed. Suddenly sirens go off nearby. While the noise rages I lie thinking about Haifa and how one night, in order to fall asleep, instead of sheep I used to count the sounds of distant ambulances.
I can’t sleep listening to such a bedlam, but I can’t bear to see Ali awakened. So I leave the house to conduct an impromptu investigation. Driving around the neighborhood, I smell burnt rubber. The street parallel to ours is blocked, awash in the blinding lights of police cars and fire trucks. I can only get to the fire on foot, so I go back to the house and talk one of our sleepless housemates into leaving his computer for a while to keep me company.
One building is already a wreck. We sit on some steps across the street, watching the police and firefighters, smoking and talking about life’s unpredictabilities. Even a small college town has plenty of surprises in store. The night is warm, someone has just become homeless, and one journalist who would have loved to cover the story is, hopefully, asleep.
The next morning I wake up at 7:00 to drive Ali to class. If I don’t give her a ride she has to take a bus and so get an hour less of sleep. I ask whether the noise woke her last night, but she says she didn’t hear a thing. I’m glad and don’t bother telling her that she slept through a good story.
Even now, two years later, it cheers me to think she slept well that night — as if she had been my daughter instead of just my friend.
SOMEBODY’S DAUGHTER, SOMEBODY’S SON
Two years later, Ali is dead. Nine other people have been killed with her. I wonder if she knew any of them. I doubt it. I know how much she liked to take solo walks in the crowded parts of every city she visited. This time the city happened to be Tel Aviv.
Ali: a Jewish girl, not an Arab boy. A redhead.
Her father used to be my father’s best school friend back in Russia. Ali’s real name was Alexandra.
My father emigrated to the United States in 1975 when he was twenty-three, without a cent in his pocket, leaving nothing worthwhile behind but his memories and a few relatives who pretended they were not Jewish. In the States he met my American-born mother.
Ali’s father caught my own father’s spirit of adventure soon afterwards and managed to persuade his wife and her parents to move to Israel with him.
It wasn’t just an itch to see the world that lured them out of the Soviet Union during one of its most stagnant, stifling periods. Once when I was eleven I was sitting on the couch with my father watching television, a feature on a Holocaust survivor whose memoir had just been published. At one point I asked him what “anti-Semitism” meant. He turned toward me, took off his silver-rimmed glasses and carefully wiped them on his T-shirt. Then he put them back on, got up and lit a cigarette.
”You don’t know what anti-Semitism is?”
I shook my head.
”You’re serious?”
After an awkward pause, he said, “Here is yet another reason why I was right to emigrate!” Then he went looking for my mother to tell her how smart he was to be raising his kids in the United States, and how lucky she was as an American not to have to live in Russia, and how blessed - blessedly ignorant - his daughter was as well.
Ali grew up in Tel Aviv but visited us every year, always in the summer. We used to spend time in Israel, too, during winter break. But most of my mother’s Israeli relatives lived in and near Haifa and we never had quite enough time to get down to Tel Aviv to visit Ali’s family. My memories of Israel are full of my aunts’ and cousins’ food which I was always full of when I was there.
From her visits with my family Ali learned that a typical American Jewish family was comprised of a few hundred grandparents, cousins, in-laws, uncles, aunts, nieces and nephews, some of whom were lawyers, some hippies selling stuff at flea markets down South, a few shrinks, a few Communists and one or two who somehow happened to be Italian and Catholic. Many seemed to be spending their lives commuting to and from each other’s suburban homes to spread gossip, celebrate wedding anniversaries, birthdays, all the Jewish holidays as well as Christmas and to watch Stanley Cup games.
Ali was used to our medley of a family and fit in almost perfectly. Only a few of my relatives treated her as a foreigner, though discretely, with studied good manners and subdued interest, calling her exclusively by her full, non-Arabic, name - Alexandra.
”Ali” was the name given her by her parents’ Arab friends who had studied in the Soviet Union, spoke Russian fluently and seemed too preoccupied with scientific theories to be bothered by someone’s being Jewish. But, for my father, Ali was always Sasha, and sometimes when he was in an especially sentimental mood, he called her Shurka. Both diminutives were Russian and both were used for females as well as males, he once explained to me. He pronounced either name with a nostalgic smile and with a funny accent that he managed to otherwise conceal.
My father played chess with Ali ever since she was eight years old, something that made me jealous, whether it was because he was paying so much attention to her or because of the time that she was devoting to him instead of to me. Often they switched to Russian, which no one in our extended
family understood. But despite my jealousies, I loved listening to them, as if they were total strangers miraculously transported to our house, like unicorns that would vanish if I so much as said a single word in English.
Ali’s family always seemed overwhelmingly small to me. Her parents and maternal grandparents lived in Israel, and her only aunt was married to a Russian in Minsk. The aunt had chosen to stay in the Soviet Union, not inclined to emulate her brother’s act of abandoning the glorious motherland. Twenty years later she regretted her decision and in every letter to her Israeli splinter of the family complained that her salary had shrunk to $15 a month and that she was starving. She visited Israel once, as a guest and potential immigrant, but quickly moved back to Belarus, unable to stand the Israeli heat, the constant fear of terrorism and the very alien Hebrew
language.
During our own family trips to Israel we eventually learned not to worry much about suicide bombers and other threats that made that country seem like an erupting volcano if all you knew about it was what you read in the newspapers or saw on TV. The situation there was hardest for my mother to bear. She sometimes called her cousins in Haifa in the wee hours to ask if they had survived the explosion she had just seen reported on television. They would angrily interrupt her panic-stricken tears with, “Yes, Bella, we are fine! For God’s sake, it’s two a.m.! What explosion? Where? It’s across the country from us!”
My Israeli relatives’ typical answer to even the most carefully worded question about Palestinians was a condescending, “Arabs? Ah, they work for us.”
Ali’s parents often had Palestinian friends for dinner.
I remember how during one of our rare visits to Tel Aviv, at a dinner party, a handsome young civil engineer named Wasfi, whose English was as fluent as
his Russian, confessed to my mother that his brother had two wives. At first my mother was horrified, but her curiosity prevailed and Wasfi explained that his brother’s first wife was only sixteen when they married and by the time their first child was born he could see that she was a lousy cook and preferred reading and watching TV to being a conventional housewife. After they had three unwashed and underfed toddlers running around the house, he finally decided he couldn’t take it any longer.
His second wife was in her mid-thirties. As soon as she entered her husband’s household the rooms began to shine, the garden bloomed and the younger wife and her children began to gain weight.
At that point my mother swallowed uneasily and said, ”But why couldn’t he just hire a cleaning woman and a babysitter?”
”Well, of course, he could have. But he preferred a second wife,” Wasfi said, smiling in my direction so flirtatiously it nearly made my mother choke.
One night as we were sitting around the TV, watching the news of yet another bombing in Israel, my father muttered with disgust: “It’s all your Arab friends, Sasha.”
Ali turned toward him, as did we all, even my mother. We all knew he shouldn’t have said it, but it seemed wrong to argue with him at that moment: there were six dead, including the suicide bomber, fifty more wounded. No one we knew, thank God, but horrible anyway. There was the usual footage of people in shock, tears and blood running down their faces, other people in uniforms helping them into ambulances--there was an entire fleet of ambulances and fire trucks. Ali got up from the couch and on her way out of the room turned and said something in Russian to my father.
”They’re all the same, Sasha, when it comes to dealing with us!” he called after her in English, laughed bitterly and covered his face with his big hands.
A REDHEAD AND A RED CAT
Ali once told me how she had learned the English phrase “to dodge bullets.”
During her first year in college her next-door neighbor was David, a tall angular guy, and his red cat. David was a harmless graduate student in medieval history who suffered from an obvious crush on Ali. In his inflamed mind the coincidence of Ali’s hair being the same color as his cat’s fur had a huge, almost supernatural significance. The cat’s name was Benny.
Benny liked to follow David everywhere, and there was always the danger that a car would run him over. David said he had invented a system for keeping Benny from leaving the backyard. He would walk slowly to the back door of a neighboring building, Benny following close behind. Then he would dive through a doorway that led into a mailroom and eventually out onto the street. The cat remained behind, paralyzed with confusion.
”I call it ‘dodging Benny,’” he explained to Ali. ”D-o-d-g-i-n-g. We use this word when we talk about bullets flying over a battlefield, for instance.”
When I think about Ali I try to avoid remembering this story, even though I like it. Used to like it, I mean. Just as I used to like David and Benny, though now I don’t think I’d care to see either of them again. No more red cats and no Russian for me, please. And no Israel, or Palestine.
Ali is still dodging bullets up there. Maybe she manages to take a picture of me once in a while, when she’s not too busy.
Showing posts with label 2003. Show all posts
Showing posts with label 2003. Show all posts
Farewell to Shevardnadze
November 2003
Euro-Correspondent.com
It's getting seriously cold here in St. Petersburg, and I am desperately trying to fight off the urge to hibernate. The past few weeks have been a success, for all the wrong reasons. Stuck so relatively close to the North Pole, I've been watching the news from all those blessed, warm localities - Israel, Iraq and Turkey: every single day, so much shock and pain, so much bloodshed.
Saturday afternoon, another eruption, this time in Tbilisi, Georgia. At first, I cried. I just couldn't imagine that what I was seeing live on BBC and CNN could possibly disturb the current destructive pattern. Tbilisi wasn't new to violence, after all.
But within an hour or so, my pessimism was gone. The crowd was so united, and the roses were so not like guns, and the way in which Shevardnadze was ushered out of the parliament building was so pathetic, and the opposition leaders were so confident and astute. I feared something could still go wrong later - but it also looked like it most definitely wouldn't.
It all went smoothly and I'm so happy now. I'm so proud of the Georgian people. And I keep thinking of two minor episodes that to some extent seem to explain to me, a dilettante, what this "velvet revolution" might have been about.
One of my dear friends used to work in Tbilisi several years ago. In December 2000, she came to spend a few days in Kyiv before flying to the States for the holidays. We were at the airport to meet her and, as we moved away from the gate, still hugging and kissing and helping her with the luggage, we didn't notice how something dropped out of her backpack. Someone called after us - and my friend gasped and rushed back so speedily as if it was her wallet, or something as precious, lying there on the floor. It was a flashlight, an ordinary flashlight. "Oh, you don't understand," she told us with some abandon. "It's my most valuable possession, the most indispensable thing I own now." This is how I learned about the never-ending power shortages in Georgia.
Two years later, in October 2002, I was in a cab in Moscow, on my way to the Kremlin Cup finals. The driver was Georgian, and since he seemed interested, I decided to share some of the tournament's highlights with him. One was Russia's ex-president Boris Yeltsin, of course, who had spent over six hours cheering for a succession of this country's players on a previous day. No matter what one's political views might be, Yeltsin the Tennis Fan could be very amusing, even cute. The Georgian cab driver had a slightly different take on it. He shook his head in disbelief and fired out a curse in Russian so powerful and wordy that I think I blushed. Then he elaborated: "And look at our old fart, Shevardnadze! That's what he should be doing - retire and spend the rest of his life watching tennis! And instead, he is stealing and stealing and stealing, till nothing remains of the country!"
Shevardnadze has been ousted, beautifully. I now hope that besides political satisfaction, the Georgians will have heat and light restored in their homes. I also hope that there'll emerge enough new opportunities for the exiles like this cab driver and his family to return to their homeland.
Euro-Correspondent.com
It's getting seriously cold here in St. Petersburg, and I am desperately trying to fight off the urge to hibernate. The past few weeks have been a success, for all the wrong reasons. Stuck so relatively close to the North Pole, I've been watching the news from all those blessed, warm localities - Israel, Iraq and Turkey: every single day, so much shock and pain, so much bloodshed.
Saturday afternoon, another eruption, this time in Tbilisi, Georgia. At first, I cried. I just couldn't imagine that what I was seeing live on BBC and CNN could possibly disturb the current destructive pattern. Tbilisi wasn't new to violence, after all.
But within an hour or so, my pessimism was gone. The crowd was so united, and the roses were so not like guns, and the way in which Shevardnadze was ushered out of the parliament building was so pathetic, and the opposition leaders were so confident and astute. I feared something could still go wrong later - but it also looked like it most definitely wouldn't.
It all went smoothly and I'm so happy now. I'm so proud of the Georgian people. And I keep thinking of two minor episodes that to some extent seem to explain to me, a dilettante, what this "velvet revolution" might have been about.
One of my dear friends used to work in Tbilisi several years ago. In December 2000, she came to spend a few days in Kyiv before flying to the States for the holidays. We were at the airport to meet her and, as we moved away from the gate, still hugging and kissing and helping her with the luggage, we didn't notice how something dropped out of her backpack. Someone called after us - and my friend gasped and rushed back so speedily as if it was her wallet, or something as precious, lying there on the floor. It was a flashlight, an ordinary flashlight. "Oh, you don't understand," she told us with some abandon. "It's my most valuable possession, the most indispensable thing I own now." This is how I learned about the never-ending power shortages in Georgia.
Two years later, in October 2002, I was in a cab in Moscow, on my way to the Kremlin Cup finals. The driver was Georgian, and since he seemed interested, I decided to share some of the tournament's highlights with him. One was Russia's ex-president Boris Yeltsin, of course, who had spent over six hours cheering for a succession of this country's players on a previous day. No matter what one's political views might be, Yeltsin the Tennis Fan could be very amusing, even cute. The Georgian cab driver had a slightly different take on it. He shook his head in disbelief and fired out a curse in Russian so powerful and wordy that I think I blushed. Then he elaborated: "And look at our old fart, Shevardnadze! That's what he should be doing - retire and spend the rest of his life watching tennis! And instead, he is stealing and stealing and stealing, till nothing remains of the country!"
Shevardnadze has been ousted, beautifully. I now hope that besides political satisfaction, the Georgians will have heat and light restored in their homes. I also hope that there'll emerge enough new opportunities for the exiles like this cab driver and his family to return to their homeland.
Red Dusk
July 2003
Newtopia Magazine
I'm on a train again and there's a fly in my compartment. It may move freely around the car but is unlikely to ever manage to slip out into the bigger world: all the windows are shut - because the air conditioner is on. Trapped inside the train car, this fly will never zigzag over the fresh raw meat at a crowded bazaar. It'll never mate under a Bohemian crystal chandelier, will never land afterwards to rest on one of those dazzling crystal drops, will never dull the drop's magical rainbow gloss with its carefree excrement.
The train fly will never know any of such pleasures - but at least it's safe from the deadly glue strips hanging from the lamps in oh so many cramped kitchens all over this vast former Soviet Empire. If this particular fly is an average representative of its species, it'll live like this for about 20 days. Then it'll die.
It's 9:30 a.m. and I'm about to spend the next 24 hours as a guest in the fly's home. We'll cross the bridge over the Dnieper, leaving behind Kyiv's golden church domes, sunlit and welcoming, nestled cozily on the emerald slopes underneath the monstrous titanium statue of a woman - the Soviet-time Motherland - holding up a shield and a sword in a victoriously ominous way.
We'll travel north, across the Ukrainian border and into Belarus - but by then I'll be reading one of the three books I've picked for the trip, in the relative privacy of the upper bunk, oblivious to the fly somewhere out there, to my human compartment-mates below and to the fresh-air-filled world outside. We'll enter Russia at night, and the next morning we'll be in St. Petersburg, arriving at the oldest Russian train station, Vitebskiy Vokzal, famous for its renovated interiors that Anna Akhmatova and the Russian czars used to pass through a century earlier.
My compartment-mates this time are an exhausted, unshaven man in his early thirties and a plump, middle-aged woman. The fourth one is missing, and for a while the compartment feels like a pleasant breed between a four-bunk second class and a two-bunk first class - until the man decides to take a morning nap.
Like so many people here, he is too poor to pay $1.30 for the bedding, so he takes off his worn-out black socks, hangs them on the rack on the wall as if they were a towel and lies down on the bare upper bunk, placing his head on a darkest dark-blue pillow. The compartment suddenly acquires a feel of a prison cell, and somehow I'm not surprised.
***
I decide to read my book by the window, sitting opposite the woman who, to my delight, is not talkative. All I know is that she, unlike me, has been on this train many times before, traveling to St. Petersburg, the city of her birth, to visit childhood friends. Unlike me, she's not panicking about being canned inside for the next day and night. She's wearing a comfy flannel robe and is busy working through a puzzle booklet. On the table next to her, a Russian edition of Good Housekeeping is awaiting its turn.
I begin to choose between the three books I have and eventually go for the thinnest one, "The Autumn of the Patriarch" by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. The other two are identical in size - but one, "Jerusalem" by Amos Elon, is too relevant, too painful to pass for train reading at the time when yet another Middle East peace plan is going belly-up, while the other, "Love Medicine" by Louise Erdrich, "the saga of two Native American families," according to the blurb, seems way too distant in its subject matter.
A few hours pass. Finally, I have to admit that "The Autumn of the Patriarch" is one of the toughest books - physically if not intellectually. As the first chapter comes to an end, so does the first and the only paragraph in it, 38 thickset little pages long. A train in this part of the world isn't a library; even though it provides relative sequestration, disturbances abound. People walk back and forth through your car, past your compartment; the sceneries are fast-forwarded outside the window; the railroad is bumpy as hell; every once in while the music is turned on, and some awful Russian pop song or an equally awful instrumental rendition of "My Heart Will Go On" never fails to make you wonder if the country that operates this train is indeed signatory to the U.N. Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment. Every time my eyes slither off the Garcia Marquez text, there is no easy way to get them back - lacking those helpful hooks of paragraph indentations, the pages are as unyielding for a train reader as the Everest is for an unfit alpinist.
***
At the Ukrainian border, about four hours into our journey, a very young, blond man in uniform walks in to check our passports. His eyes are the bluest I've ever seen, and I can't help staring at him while he compares my nerdy passport picture to my disheveled train self. I notice he's wearing a wedding ring. I start thinking of his wife, how proud she must be to have snatched a husband who looks like a Russian fairy-tale hero, in this God-forsaken, tiny Ukrainian town.
When the handsome border control guard leaves and the train begins moving again, out of Ukraine and into Belarus, I resume reading - and I read this:
"...I'll only keep the presidential guard who are straight shooters and brave fellows and I'm not going to name any cabinet, God damn it, just a good minister of health which is the only thing anyone really needs in life, and maybe another one with a good hand for what has to be put in writing, and that way we can rent out the ministries and barracks and save the money for help, because what's needed here isn't people but money, we'll get two good maids, one for cleaning and cooking and the other to wash and iron, and I'll take care of the cows and the birds myself..."
Several hours later, the Belarusian border control and customs people visit our compartment. The weather is wonderful and sunny, but I'm slightly nervous: this is the first time I'm going to Russia through Belarus. Normally, I take an overnight train from Kyiv to Moscow and, in the middle of the night, have to deal with Russian, not Belarusian, officials. On this route, however, Russia has entrusted Belarus with deciding who may enter the former via the latter and who may not. Ukrainians still have visa-free access. Americans and other "Westerners" who fail to obtain a Belarusian transit visa will most likely be taken off the train right here, in the town of Gomel, Belarus, population 503,711. The train will then proceed without them to Vitebsk, the hometown of Marc Chagall, where it'll finally cross into Russia undisturbed by another set of border formalities.
Though I can't speak for the rest of the train, our compartment doesn't hold interest for the Belarusian border control. Surprisingly, they turn out to be very friendly and polite, unlike some of their Russian counterparts. This does surprise me because I've heard so much about the evil regime of Aleksandr Lukashenko, how he thinks that half of the U.S. Embassy staff are spies, et cetera. Not that I have any relation to American diplomats, though.
I return to my book. I read:
"...because they could not admit that the mother of the chief of state would hang a pouch of camphor around her neck to ward off all contagion and tried to jab the caviar with her fork and staggered about in her patent leather pumps, nor could they accept the fact that she kept a beehive on the terrace of the music room, or bred turkeys and watercolor-painted birds in public offices or put the sheets out to dry on the balcony from which the speeches were made, nor could they bear the fact that at a diplomatic party she had said I'm tired of begging God to overthrow my son, because all this business of living in the presidential palace is like having the lights on all the time..."
This, of course, is when an obvious thought crosses my mind: Here I am, on a train again, passing through the land of one dictator, reading a book about another! The fictional dictator with a nutty mother, and Lukashenko, the real one, with a wife who allegedly continues to live on a farm in the village of Ryzhkovichi, milking cows, while he, a former director of a collective farm, runs his little country the way he pleases.
Just when I put "The Autumn of the Patriarch" down on the table to give my eyes some rest and muse about the strange ways in which fiction and reality sometimes join forces, the woman in my compartment shuts her Good Housekeeping magazine and says bitterly: "I thought this would last me the whole trip - but it's so full of ads. Only ads and nothing else! The rest is boring. Such a waste of money." I nod in sympathy - because when she puts the magazine on the table, I can see the cover headlines: GEISHAS - SEEMS LIKE THERE'S SOMETHING TO LEARN [FROM THEM] and WHY DO WE [WOMEN] GET MARRIED? Where are the recipes, I think, and where are the stories about gardening, and the anti-ageing tips?
***
The man who was taking a sockless nap is now sitting next to me, savoring a tabloid whose headlines announce that apes, just like humans, know how to have safe sex, and that ultra-sound is the reason why so many left-handed kids are being born. The man has his socks back on, but I can't keep myself from thinking arrogantly: Thank God, I don't have to marry someone like him.
But, even if I wanted to, I wouldn't have time to let him know. He gets off the train at the first post-border stop.
I make my bed and climb up, thinking of a nap. Just then the toy vendors appear.
Each one is concealed under a furry, colorful menagerie; as a group, they rush through the car with a marketplace buzz, one after another, pausing at every compartment to let the passengers have a look at the toys available. There are Lion Kings, and Dalmatians, and Mickeys, and Tiggers, and blue elephants, and the yellow ones, and plenty other creatures that I just can't identify. The woman in my compartment buys a crazy-looking yellow-pink puppy from a skinny female vendor with sad eyes.
"I already have an order for my trip back: a lion for my niece," she tells this Belarusian vendor, handing her a few Ukrainian paper bills.
"Do you have a return ticket? I could write down the date and the car number and then I'll bring you one," the vendor replies. She doesn't sound hopeful, nor does she look begging; she is pragmatic and business-like, offering quality service to a potential regular client, doing her best to beat a pack of competitors who are breathing down her neck, literally.
"No, I don't know yet when I'll be going back," my compartment-mate says, and even though the vendor with the sad eyes doesn't act like someone asking for pity, I suddenly feel so sorry for her, for her business skills going down the drain, earning her so little in such a tough and humiliating way.
When we arrive in Zhlobin, there are dozens more toy vendors, all ready to storm the train from the outside. But though the car door is open, the stepladder is up. For the next 15 minutes or so, these people are doomed to jostling one another down below on the platform, holding up and waving their animals dramatically, and when this train departs, they'll retreat to the blue wooden benches nearby to wait for the next one.
I stand by the window with my camera, stepping back every time a toy vendor spots me and rushes in my direction to entice me with a toy. It breaks my heart, every single time. But the name of the town, written in pale letters on the train station building, amuses me. I begin to think of a way to translate it into English: Zhlobin - Redneck City or Rednecksville? In Belarus, there's at least one other town with an embarrassing name, meaningless in any of the Slavic languages, but quite graphic when spelled in English: Slutsk.
The sky-blue building of Zhlobin train station is being renovated; a new, unpainted wooden fence encircles it. A teenage girl with two lions walks down the platform. She is wearing a flowery cotton dress that has two dark triangular spots on her flat breasts: she must have gone for a swim while there were no trains and still has her wet swimming suit on, underneath the dress.
I look at the toys passing by; I avoid making eye contact with the people carrying them. This is all so surreal that suddenly I'm reminded of a cannabis re-legalization rally in New York's Washington Square, in 1994, when each one of the hundreds of people there had a joint, and I kept mistaking pigeons for airplanes descending on me at full speed.
"Oh, there used to be a lot more toy vendors here a few years back," my compartment-mate says. "They were so much worse off then, they'd drag you off the train to have you buy something from them."
I don't ask her where they get all these toys - I can guess the answer: these people produce them (or perhaps they produce the artificial fur the toys are made of), and then they are being paid in kind, with these very toys, by their employer. In this part of the world, you may receive your salary in toys, canned pineapples, coffins, bras, grocery carts, condoms, piles of manure, meat grinders, crystal vases, dildos, and Indian rugs.
***
To be honest, I usually learn about these salary substitutes from the media; this is why I'm so shaken by the toy vendors' parade, the real thing that seems so unreal. Everyone I know earns cash - some as much as a few thousand dollars a month, others as little as $50. All would probably say their incomes are "average" - and, of course, they'd like to earn more.
I doubt, however, that anyone I know seriously aspires to turn into one of those proverbial post-Soviet "stinking rich" one day - by stashing large chunks of state funds in offshore accounts while those hapless toy vendors, the electorate, are busy surviving at the train station. I also hope none will ever descend to the level of the proverbial post-Soviet "dirt-poor" - by working patiently without pay for years and drinking oneself to near death to make this hard life slightly more bearable.
Where I live, people driving new Mercedes and BMWs outnumber people sleeping in the street, and somehow, I don't want to know how either managed to get this way. That is, I don't want to know any more than I already know, and what everybody knows.
In this part of the world, everybody knows about Pavel Borodin's bizarre attempt to attend George W. Bush's inaugural "candlelight dinner" in January 2001. As soon as he stepped off the plane at New York's JFK International Airport, Borodin, the State Secretary of the virtual Union of Russia and Belarus and formerly the chief of the Kremlin property department overseeing $650 billion in assets, was arrested on an extradition request from the Swiss authorities. Bernard Bertossa, Swiss Prosecutor General, aimed to prove that Borodin was guilty of pocketing some $25 million in kickbacks from two Swiss firms, in return for $492-million contracts to refurbish the Kremlin and re-fit President Yeltsin's personal airplane. Once a close associate of Boris Yeltsin, a man who at one point had the future Russian President Vladimir Putin as his deputy, Borodin found himself at the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn, as inmate No. 55217-053, missing all the festivities for which Bush's inaugural committee had raised a record $40 million. Later, Bertossa somehow failed to collect sufficient evidence against Borodin, allowing this flop of a white-collar criminal to return home on a $2.9-million bail. In spring 2002, Borodin was fined $300,000 and the Swiss case was closed.
If only the ordeal of Pavel Borodin were some anomalous exception, awe-inspiring but singular. We'd spend a few days staring uncomprehendingly at all these millions and billions, and then we'd go back to watching football or arguing about the distant Israeli-Palestinian conflict. But the former Soviet Union is teeming with stories like Borodin's, and we do treat them as football at times - we root for the good guys kicking asses of the mega-bad ones and ignore small-time "players" as we would minor teams. And often we seem to pretend that the thieves aren't our compatriots but citizens of some obscure country, dealing in an unheard-of currency that may well be as funny as the Turkish Lira, with all the meaningless zeroes at the end.
I enjoy switching into football-watching mode - for how else is it possible to digest even the most basic facts of another story, the story of Ukraine's former Prime Minister Pavlo Lazarenko?
He got sacked in 1997 and was charged with large-scale corruption and embezzlement in Ukraine. In early December 1998, he fled to Switzerland (on a Panamanian passport, for some reason) and was promptly arrested at the French-Swiss border. The omnipresent Swiss Prosecutor General Bernard Bertossa charged him with money laundering, but then allowed him to go home on a $2.5-million bail. The home Lazarenko chose to return to wasn't in Ukraine, though: in late February 1999, he flew to the United States, where his final destination might have been the 41-room Marin County mansion that once belonged to Hollywood comedian Eddie Murphy. But at JFK, it turned out that something was wrong with his U.S. visa, and Lazarenko was detained. When he finally did reach California, they wouldn't let him enjoy his 18-acre, $6.75-million estate - instead, they charged him with laundering $114 million and locked him up at FCI Dublin, Alameda County, for the next four years. In June 2000, the Swiss convicted Lazarenko in absentia as he admitted to having laundered $9 million (although in 1996 and 1997, the years of his premiership, he reported his annual income as mere $5,040 and $5,570, respectively, perhaps trying to pass for an average Ukrainian). In June 2003, Lazarenko (federal prisoner No. 94430-011) was granted $100-million bail, which has enabled him to participate in late-night teleconference depositions of high-profile Ukrainian witnesses (which he has preferred not to attend in person - possibly because Ukraine still has charges pending against him over his alleged involvement in the murders of two Ukrainian businessmen, back in 1996 and 1998). His trial is set to begin on August 18, and if it does, Lazarenko will become the second highest ranking foreign citizen to be prosecuted in the United States since the Panamanian dictator, General Manuel Noriega, was convicted on drug trafficking, money laundering and racketeering charges in 1992.
***
My compartment-mate is asleep. I wait till it gets dark, hoping that the dim light over my bunk and "The Autumn of the Patriarch" will save me from train insomnia, the most torturous kind that I, both a train guru and a guru insomniac, have ever had to deal with.
I'm trying to remember what it was that caused this lengthy meditation on the two evil namesakes, Pavel the Russian and Pavlo the Ukrainian, or, as they are known to the masses here, Pal Palych and Pavlo Panama. The toy vendors in Zhlobin - they suddenly remind me of Pavel Mazheiko - yes, yet another Pavel, and an ex-con, too, though his story is a different type of post-Soviet farce.
In September 2001, President Lukashenko swept to his second five-year term, winning 75 percent of the vote in the elections that most observers called "neither free nor fair." Mazheiko, a Belarusian journalist, had written critically about Lukashenko - and pissed him off. The newspaper he worked for was closed in November 2001, and Mazheiko, along with the editor-in-chief, was charged with libeling the president. In June 2002, they were convicted. Mazheiko was sentenced to two years at the Zhlobin minimum-security prison, but his sentence was later reduced to one year, and on March 21, 2003, he was granted parole due to his "good behavior."
When he arrived in Zhlobin, Mazheiko hoped he'd be allowed to serve his two years working at a local school or newspaper. But the prison authorities happened to be short of "unskilled labor" and Mazheiko ended up mixing bitumen for them. Despite obvious hardships, he didn't lose heart and started a prison library, accepting book donations from Zhlobin residents, the Belarusian Association of Journalists and his own friends. Soon after the journalist was released, the U.S. Embassy in Belarus contributed a 57-volume collection of works by American authors, translated into Russian. Mazheiko got to visit the prison one more time then, with the Embassy representatives who delivered the books.
***
We pass the endless forests, swamps and meadows of Belarus. Occasionally, the outskirts of nameless Belarusian towns with their rusty and dusty industrial remains interrupt the peaceful panorama. If the sky hadn't been so clear and the sun so happily blinding, it wouldn't have taken me so long to start thinking of Tolkien's Gollum leading the two hobbits through the Dead Marches, and of Tarkovsky's Stalker taking his two companions, a writer and a scientist, into the heart of the Zone.
If it hadn't been for all the distractions, I would've remembered Chernobyl much sooner. Belarus is slightly smaller than Kansas, and a quarter of its territory is something of a Zone: it received more than half of the radioactive dust expelled from the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant in April 1986. Kyiv, Ukraine's capital with a population of 2.5 million, is just 60 miles or so south of Chernobyl. But, for the first few days after the explosion, the wind was blowing northward, carrying much of the lethal iodine and cesium away from us.
The train advances through the Gomel and Mogilyov regions of Belarus, the most severely contaminated ones. I hate to think about Chernobyl; it depresses me to know how many villages/people were evacuated, how many poor souls returned to live in the unlivable lands, how many people milk cows that feed on radioactive grass, how many children consume the radioactive milk, how Lukashenko's regime encourages people to till the rich but radioactive farmland because otherwise people would have to go without food, how it is now possible to buy a one-day "ecological" tour to Chernobyl and have a picture taken with the "Sarcophagus" in the background, only 100 meters away. It's all making me sick.
In 1986, when I was 12, everything seemed kind of fun. In the morning of April 26, my mother set out to play tennis with a friend - but found a dog instead, a poor scared thing that almost got run over by a car. My mother's friend wasn't upset they didn't get to play; she was tired because her husband, a fireman, had been summoned in the middle of the night - something's happened at Chernobyl, she told my mother rather calmly. When he finally reached his headquarters, however, everyone was already gone, so he returned home (seventeen years later, he is still alive, while those who made it to Chernobyl that night aren't). I came back from school that day and we spent a few hours choosing a name for the dog. We called her Zosya.
On April 28, they first announced there'd been an accident: it was a dry, four-sentence government statement on the evening news. Nothing to worry about. So we continued to walk with Zosya the dog - I was so proud of her. I participated in a tennis tournament, very happy that the Moscow team arrived in the morning and departed in the evening, as soon as they learned about Chernobyl. It never hurts to have fewer really strong opponents, we all thought. I don't remember when school was cancelled, but I still have a clear memory of how excited I was about not having to take that horrible math exam, the first one in my life.
On May 1, the joyful demonstrators marched past our building, waving their red flags and papier-mache flowers, but by that time we'd been advised to stay home as much as possible - advised by my parents' well-informed friends, not by the authorities. I don't remember when Gorbachev finally made his first statement, recommending that we better keep our windows shut, but I'm still wondering how many people will never forgive him for that protracted silence. My parents sent me off to Moscow on the evening of May 7; most other kids had to wait until the middle of May before the official evacuation of Kyiv schools began.
In 1999, I attempted to read a book about Chernobyl, by Svetlana Alexievich, a Belarusian author in exile. It was one of the most powerful books I had ever held in my hands: a collection of voices of the Chernobyl dead and the Chernobyl living, a history of Chernobyl and a history of the beginning of the end of the Soviet Union recited in a choir of monologues. Needless to say, President Lukashenko's people accuse Alexievich of working for the CIA, her "Voices from Chernobyl: Chronicle of the Future" has to be smuggled into Belarus and she has found refuge in France.
I wasn't able to finish the book, though. I wasn't strong enough. When I think of it, I always think about one narration, by an ethnic Russian refugee who escaped the civil war in Tajikistan in the early 1990s. A maternity ward nurse, she had once seen a group of armed men grabbing a newborn girl and throwing her out of the window. This woman re-settled to one of the most contaminated areas of Belarus, where she enjoyed taking long walks in the nearby woods, content at last. She didn't worry about radiation; as long as there were only trees around her and no people, she felt at peace.
***
A mustached man takes one of the vacant bunks in our compartment somewhere in Mogilyov, when it's already dark outside and I've almost defeated my train insomnia.
In the morning, the three of us drink tea and have a conventional human conversation about TV. The man says that the Belarusian state channels are impossible to watch - all they do is make money by broadcasting personal text greetings - dear this, dear that, happy birthday, happy wedding anniversary. But he has a satellite dish and is addicted to Discovery Channel. He laughs as he talks about a documentary he's seen: just imagine, there exist some savage islanders who never eat raw bananas - they cook them!
I'm still half-asleep, so it doesn't occur to me that I should appreciate the company of a cheerful and well-off Belarusian citizen - for my own sake, at least, because wouldn't it be nice to end this long journey through the westernmost splinter of the once great Soviet Empire on a good note, brushing off all the grotesque, nightmarish visions that have been parading through my head for the past 24 hours?
An idiot, I ask the man what he thinks about the journalist exiled to the town of Zhlobin.
He frowns and replies, "Well, they criticize Lukashenko too much. They aren't being fair to him.
They deserve what they get. He is a good president. They should abide by the code of ethics, the journalists' code of ethics, and they never do."
The sweet woman chimes in, too: "Yes, they keep slamming the authorities, keep saying things that annoy the authorities, and then they are surprised they end up in jail. They do deserve it."
I am fully awake now to realize that it's better not to ask any more provocative questions. I even nod as I listen to them, as if in agreement. I hate being dragged into train arguments.
***
It's raining in St. Petersburg.
The mustached man and the plump woman leave the compartment first. We exchange such warm good-byes that for a second it seems as if we're going to miss each other. This affectionate phoniness is one thing I like about trains.
I have too much luggage, and as I'm trying to devise an efficient way to carry it all at once, I spot the fly. It is zooming around the table, preparing to feast on the crumbs we've left.
The fly's feast will last till a big woman with a mop arrives to clean the compartment. But no matter how diligent the cleaner is, some crumbs will still remain. There'll always be crumbs on the train, and, indifferent to the national borders it keeps crossing, the fly will live happily through whatever remains of its 20-day life.
Newtopia Magazine
I'm on a train again and there's a fly in my compartment. It may move freely around the car but is unlikely to ever manage to slip out into the bigger world: all the windows are shut - because the air conditioner is on. Trapped inside the train car, this fly will never zigzag over the fresh raw meat at a crowded bazaar. It'll never mate under a Bohemian crystal chandelier, will never land afterwards to rest on one of those dazzling crystal drops, will never dull the drop's magical rainbow gloss with its carefree excrement.
The train fly will never know any of such pleasures - but at least it's safe from the deadly glue strips hanging from the lamps in oh so many cramped kitchens all over this vast former Soviet Empire. If this particular fly is an average representative of its species, it'll live like this for about 20 days. Then it'll die.
It's 9:30 a.m. and I'm about to spend the next 24 hours as a guest in the fly's home. We'll cross the bridge over the Dnieper, leaving behind Kyiv's golden church domes, sunlit and welcoming, nestled cozily on the emerald slopes underneath the monstrous titanium statue of a woman - the Soviet-time Motherland - holding up a shield and a sword in a victoriously ominous way.
We'll travel north, across the Ukrainian border and into Belarus - but by then I'll be reading one of the three books I've picked for the trip, in the relative privacy of the upper bunk, oblivious to the fly somewhere out there, to my human compartment-mates below and to the fresh-air-filled world outside. We'll enter Russia at night, and the next morning we'll be in St. Petersburg, arriving at the oldest Russian train station, Vitebskiy Vokzal, famous for its renovated interiors that Anna Akhmatova and the Russian czars used to pass through a century earlier.
My compartment-mates this time are an exhausted, unshaven man in his early thirties and a plump, middle-aged woman. The fourth one is missing, and for a while the compartment feels like a pleasant breed between a four-bunk second class and a two-bunk first class - until the man decides to take a morning nap.
Like so many people here, he is too poor to pay $1.30 for the bedding, so he takes off his worn-out black socks, hangs them on the rack on the wall as if they were a towel and lies down on the bare upper bunk, placing his head on a darkest dark-blue pillow. The compartment suddenly acquires a feel of a prison cell, and somehow I'm not surprised.
***
I decide to read my book by the window, sitting opposite the woman who, to my delight, is not talkative. All I know is that she, unlike me, has been on this train many times before, traveling to St. Petersburg, the city of her birth, to visit childhood friends. Unlike me, she's not panicking about being canned inside for the next day and night. She's wearing a comfy flannel robe and is busy working through a puzzle booklet. On the table next to her, a Russian edition of Good Housekeeping is awaiting its turn.
I begin to choose between the three books I have and eventually go for the thinnest one, "The Autumn of the Patriarch" by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. The other two are identical in size - but one, "Jerusalem" by Amos Elon, is too relevant, too painful to pass for train reading at the time when yet another Middle East peace plan is going belly-up, while the other, "Love Medicine" by Louise Erdrich, "the saga of two Native American families," according to the blurb, seems way too distant in its subject matter.
A few hours pass. Finally, I have to admit that "The Autumn of the Patriarch" is one of the toughest books - physically if not intellectually. As the first chapter comes to an end, so does the first and the only paragraph in it, 38 thickset little pages long. A train in this part of the world isn't a library; even though it provides relative sequestration, disturbances abound. People walk back and forth through your car, past your compartment; the sceneries are fast-forwarded outside the window; the railroad is bumpy as hell; every once in while the music is turned on, and some awful Russian pop song or an equally awful instrumental rendition of "My Heart Will Go On" never fails to make you wonder if the country that operates this train is indeed signatory to the U.N. Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment. Every time my eyes slither off the Garcia Marquez text, there is no easy way to get them back - lacking those helpful hooks of paragraph indentations, the pages are as unyielding for a train reader as the Everest is for an unfit alpinist.
***
At the Ukrainian border, about four hours into our journey, a very young, blond man in uniform walks in to check our passports. His eyes are the bluest I've ever seen, and I can't help staring at him while he compares my nerdy passport picture to my disheveled train self. I notice he's wearing a wedding ring. I start thinking of his wife, how proud she must be to have snatched a husband who looks like a Russian fairy-tale hero, in this God-forsaken, tiny Ukrainian town.
When the handsome border control guard leaves and the train begins moving again, out of Ukraine and into Belarus, I resume reading - and I read this:
"...I'll only keep the presidential guard who are straight shooters and brave fellows and I'm not going to name any cabinet, God damn it, just a good minister of health which is the only thing anyone really needs in life, and maybe another one with a good hand for what has to be put in writing, and that way we can rent out the ministries and barracks and save the money for help, because what's needed here isn't people but money, we'll get two good maids, one for cleaning and cooking and the other to wash and iron, and I'll take care of the cows and the birds myself..."
Several hours later, the Belarusian border control and customs people visit our compartment. The weather is wonderful and sunny, but I'm slightly nervous: this is the first time I'm going to Russia through Belarus. Normally, I take an overnight train from Kyiv to Moscow and, in the middle of the night, have to deal with Russian, not Belarusian, officials. On this route, however, Russia has entrusted Belarus with deciding who may enter the former via the latter and who may not. Ukrainians still have visa-free access. Americans and other "Westerners" who fail to obtain a Belarusian transit visa will most likely be taken off the train right here, in the town of Gomel, Belarus, population 503,711. The train will then proceed without them to Vitebsk, the hometown of Marc Chagall, where it'll finally cross into Russia undisturbed by another set of border formalities.
Though I can't speak for the rest of the train, our compartment doesn't hold interest for the Belarusian border control. Surprisingly, they turn out to be very friendly and polite, unlike some of their Russian counterparts. This does surprise me because I've heard so much about the evil regime of Aleksandr Lukashenko, how he thinks that half of the U.S. Embassy staff are spies, et cetera. Not that I have any relation to American diplomats, though.
I return to my book. I read:
"...because they could not admit that the mother of the chief of state would hang a pouch of camphor around her neck to ward off all contagion and tried to jab the caviar with her fork and staggered about in her patent leather pumps, nor could they accept the fact that she kept a beehive on the terrace of the music room, or bred turkeys and watercolor-painted birds in public offices or put the sheets out to dry on the balcony from which the speeches were made, nor could they bear the fact that at a diplomatic party she had said I'm tired of begging God to overthrow my son, because all this business of living in the presidential palace is like having the lights on all the time..."
This, of course, is when an obvious thought crosses my mind: Here I am, on a train again, passing through the land of one dictator, reading a book about another! The fictional dictator with a nutty mother, and Lukashenko, the real one, with a wife who allegedly continues to live on a farm in the village of Ryzhkovichi, milking cows, while he, a former director of a collective farm, runs his little country the way he pleases.
Just when I put "The Autumn of the Patriarch" down on the table to give my eyes some rest and muse about the strange ways in which fiction and reality sometimes join forces, the woman in my compartment shuts her Good Housekeeping magazine and says bitterly: "I thought this would last me the whole trip - but it's so full of ads. Only ads and nothing else! The rest is boring. Such a waste of money." I nod in sympathy - because when she puts the magazine on the table, I can see the cover headlines: GEISHAS - SEEMS LIKE THERE'S SOMETHING TO LEARN [FROM THEM] and WHY DO WE [WOMEN] GET MARRIED? Where are the recipes, I think, and where are the stories about gardening, and the anti-ageing tips?
***
The man who was taking a sockless nap is now sitting next to me, savoring a tabloid whose headlines announce that apes, just like humans, know how to have safe sex, and that ultra-sound is the reason why so many left-handed kids are being born. The man has his socks back on, but I can't keep myself from thinking arrogantly: Thank God, I don't have to marry someone like him.
But, even if I wanted to, I wouldn't have time to let him know. He gets off the train at the first post-border stop.
I make my bed and climb up, thinking of a nap. Just then the toy vendors appear.
Each one is concealed under a furry, colorful menagerie; as a group, they rush through the car with a marketplace buzz, one after another, pausing at every compartment to let the passengers have a look at the toys available. There are Lion Kings, and Dalmatians, and Mickeys, and Tiggers, and blue elephants, and the yellow ones, and plenty other creatures that I just can't identify. The woman in my compartment buys a crazy-looking yellow-pink puppy from a skinny female vendor with sad eyes.
"I already have an order for my trip back: a lion for my niece," she tells this Belarusian vendor, handing her a few Ukrainian paper bills.
"Do you have a return ticket? I could write down the date and the car number and then I'll bring you one," the vendor replies. She doesn't sound hopeful, nor does she look begging; she is pragmatic and business-like, offering quality service to a potential regular client, doing her best to beat a pack of competitors who are breathing down her neck, literally.
"No, I don't know yet when I'll be going back," my compartment-mate says, and even though the vendor with the sad eyes doesn't act like someone asking for pity, I suddenly feel so sorry for her, for her business skills going down the drain, earning her so little in such a tough and humiliating way.
When we arrive in Zhlobin, there are dozens more toy vendors, all ready to storm the train from the outside. But though the car door is open, the stepladder is up. For the next 15 minutes or so, these people are doomed to jostling one another down below on the platform, holding up and waving their animals dramatically, and when this train departs, they'll retreat to the blue wooden benches nearby to wait for the next one.
I stand by the window with my camera, stepping back every time a toy vendor spots me and rushes in my direction to entice me with a toy. It breaks my heart, every single time. But the name of the town, written in pale letters on the train station building, amuses me. I begin to think of a way to translate it into English: Zhlobin - Redneck City or Rednecksville? In Belarus, there's at least one other town with an embarrassing name, meaningless in any of the Slavic languages, but quite graphic when spelled in English: Slutsk.
The sky-blue building of Zhlobin train station is being renovated; a new, unpainted wooden fence encircles it. A teenage girl with two lions walks down the platform. She is wearing a flowery cotton dress that has two dark triangular spots on her flat breasts: she must have gone for a swim while there were no trains and still has her wet swimming suit on, underneath the dress.
I look at the toys passing by; I avoid making eye contact with the people carrying them. This is all so surreal that suddenly I'm reminded of a cannabis re-legalization rally in New York's Washington Square, in 1994, when each one of the hundreds of people there had a joint, and I kept mistaking pigeons for airplanes descending on me at full speed.
"Oh, there used to be a lot more toy vendors here a few years back," my compartment-mate says. "They were so much worse off then, they'd drag you off the train to have you buy something from them."
I don't ask her where they get all these toys - I can guess the answer: these people produce them (or perhaps they produce the artificial fur the toys are made of), and then they are being paid in kind, with these very toys, by their employer. In this part of the world, you may receive your salary in toys, canned pineapples, coffins, bras, grocery carts, condoms, piles of manure, meat grinders, crystal vases, dildos, and Indian rugs.
***
To be honest, I usually learn about these salary substitutes from the media; this is why I'm so shaken by the toy vendors' parade, the real thing that seems so unreal. Everyone I know earns cash - some as much as a few thousand dollars a month, others as little as $50. All would probably say their incomes are "average" - and, of course, they'd like to earn more.
I doubt, however, that anyone I know seriously aspires to turn into one of those proverbial post-Soviet "stinking rich" one day - by stashing large chunks of state funds in offshore accounts while those hapless toy vendors, the electorate, are busy surviving at the train station. I also hope none will ever descend to the level of the proverbial post-Soviet "dirt-poor" - by working patiently without pay for years and drinking oneself to near death to make this hard life slightly more bearable.
Where I live, people driving new Mercedes and BMWs outnumber people sleeping in the street, and somehow, I don't want to know how either managed to get this way. That is, I don't want to know any more than I already know, and what everybody knows.
In this part of the world, everybody knows about Pavel Borodin's bizarre attempt to attend George W. Bush's inaugural "candlelight dinner" in January 2001. As soon as he stepped off the plane at New York's JFK International Airport, Borodin, the State Secretary of the virtual Union of Russia and Belarus and formerly the chief of the Kremlin property department overseeing $650 billion in assets, was arrested on an extradition request from the Swiss authorities. Bernard Bertossa, Swiss Prosecutor General, aimed to prove that Borodin was guilty of pocketing some $25 million in kickbacks from two Swiss firms, in return for $492-million contracts to refurbish the Kremlin and re-fit President Yeltsin's personal airplane. Once a close associate of Boris Yeltsin, a man who at one point had the future Russian President Vladimir Putin as his deputy, Borodin found himself at the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn, as inmate No. 55217-053, missing all the festivities for which Bush's inaugural committee had raised a record $40 million. Later, Bertossa somehow failed to collect sufficient evidence against Borodin, allowing this flop of a white-collar criminal to return home on a $2.9-million bail. In spring 2002, Borodin was fined $300,000 and the Swiss case was closed.
If only the ordeal of Pavel Borodin were some anomalous exception, awe-inspiring but singular. We'd spend a few days staring uncomprehendingly at all these millions and billions, and then we'd go back to watching football or arguing about the distant Israeli-Palestinian conflict. But the former Soviet Union is teeming with stories like Borodin's, and we do treat them as football at times - we root for the good guys kicking asses of the mega-bad ones and ignore small-time "players" as we would minor teams. And often we seem to pretend that the thieves aren't our compatriots but citizens of some obscure country, dealing in an unheard-of currency that may well be as funny as the Turkish Lira, with all the meaningless zeroes at the end.
I enjoy switching into football-watching mode - for how else is it possible to digest even the most basic facts of another story, the story of Ukraine's former Prime Minister Pavlo Lazarenko?
He got sacked in 1997 and was charged with large-scale corruption and embezzlement in Ukraine. In early December 1998, he fled to Switzerland (on a Panamanian passport, for some reason) and was promptly arrested at the French-Swiss border. The omnipresent Swiss Prosecutor General Bernard Bertossa charged him with money laundering, but then allowed him to go home on a $2.5-million bail. The home Lazarenko chose to return to wasn't in Ukraine, though: in late February 1999, he flew to the United States, where his final destination might have been the 41-room Marin County mansion that once belonged to Hollywood comedian Eddie Murphy. But at JFK, it turned out that something was wrong with his U.S. visa, and Lazarenko was detained. When he finally did reach California, they wouldn't let him enjoy his 18-acre, $6.75-million estate - instead, they charged him with laundering $114 million and locked him up at FCI Dublin, Alameda County, for the next four years. In June 2000, the Swiss convicted Lazarenko in absentia as he admitted to having laundered $9 million (although in 1996 and 1997, the years of his premiership, he reported his annual income as mere $5,040 and $5,570, respectively, perhaps trying to pass for an average Ukrainian). In June 2003, Lazarenko (federal prisoner No. 94430-011) was granted $100-million bail, which has enabled him to participate in late-night teleconference depositions of high-profile Ukrainian witnesses (which he has preferred not to attend in person - possibly because Ukraine still has charges pending against him over his alleged involvement in the murders of two Ukrainian businessmen, back in 1996 and 1998). His trial is set to begin on August 18, and if it does, Lazarenko will become the second highest ranking foreign citizen to be prosecuted in the United States since the Panamanian dictator, General Manuel Noriega, was convicted on drug trafficking, money laundering and racketeering charges in 1992.
***
My compartment-mate is asleep. I wait till it gets dark, hoping that the dim light over my bunk and "The Autumn of the Patriarch" will save me from train insomnia, the most torturous kind that I, both a train guru and a guru insomniac, have ever had to deal with.
I'm trying to remember what it was that caused this lengthy meditation on the two evil namesakes, Pavel the Russian and Pavlo the Ukrainian, or, as they are known to the masses here, Pal Palych and Pavlo Panama. The toy vendors in Zhlobin - they suddenly remind me of Pavel Mazheiko - yes, yet another Pavel, and an ex-con, too, though his story is a different type of post-Soviet farce.
In September 2001, President Lukashenko swept to his second five-year term, winning 75 percent of the vote in the elections that most observers called "neither free nor fair." Mazheiko, a Belarusian journalist, had written critically about Lukashenko - and pissed him off. The newspaper he worked for was closed in November 2001, and Mazheiko, along with the editor-in-chief, was charged with libeling the president. In June 2002, they were convicted. Mazheiko was sentenced to two years at the Zhlobin minimum-security prison, but his sentence was later reduced to one year, and on March 21, 2003, he was granted parole due to his "good behavior."
When he arrived in Zhlobin, Mazheiko hoped he'd be allowed to serve his two years working at a local school or newspaper. But the prison authorities happened to be short of "unskilled labor" and Mazheiko ended up mixing bitumen for them. Despite obvious hardships, he didn't lose heart and started a prison library, accepting book donations from Zhlobin residents, the Belarusian Association of Journalists and his own friends. Soon after the journalist was released, the U.S. Embassy in Belarus contributed a 57-volume collection of works by American authors, translated into Russian. Mazheiko got to visit the prison one more time then, with the Embassy representatives who delivered the books.
***
We pass the endless forests, swamps and meadows of Belarus. Occasionally, the outskirts of nameless Belarusian towns with their rusty and dusty industrial remains interrupt the peaceful panorama. If the sky hadn't been so clear and the sun so happily blinding, it wouldn't have taken me so long to start thinking of Tolkien's Gollum leading the two hobbits through the Dead Marches, and of Tarkovsky's Stalker taking his two companions, a writer and a scientist, into the heart of the Zone.
If it hadn't been for all the distractions, I would've remembered Chernobyl much sooner. Belarus is slightly smaller than Kansas, and a quarter of its territory is something of a Zone: it received more than half of the radioactive dust expelled from the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant in April 1986. Kyiv, Ukraine's capital with a population of 2.5 million, is just 60 miles or so south of Chernobyl. But, for the first few days after the explosion, the wind was blowing northward, carrying much of the lethal iodine and cesium away from us.
The train advances through the Gomel and Mogilyov regions of Belarus, the most severely contaminated ones. I hate to think about Chernobyl; it depresses me to know how many villages/people were evacuated, how many poor souls returned to live in the unlivable lands, how many people milk cows that feed on radioactive grass, how many children consume the radioactive milk, how Lukashenko's regime encourages people to till the rich but radioactive farmland because otherwise people would have to go without food, how it is now possible to buy a one-day "ecological" tour to Chernobyl and have a picture taken with the "Sarcophagus" in the background, only 100 meters away. It's all making me sick.
In 1986, when I was 12, everything seemed kind of fun. In the morning of April 26, my mother set out to play tennis with a friend - but found a dog instead, a poor scared thing that almost got run over by a car. My mother's friend wasn't upset they didn't get to play; she was tired because her husband, a fireman, had been summoned in the middle of the night - something's happened at Chernobyl, she told my mother rather calmly. When he finally reached his headquarters, however, everyone was already gone, so he returned home (seventeen years later, he is still alive, while those who made it to Chernobyl that night aren't). I came back from school that day and we spent a few hours choosing a name for the dog. We called her Zosya.
On April 28, they first announced there'd been an accident: it was a dry, four-sentence government statement on the evening news. Nothing to worry about. So we continued to walk with Zosya the dog - I was so proud of her. I participated in a tennis tournament, very happy that the Moscow team arrived in the morning and departed in the evening, as soon as they learned about Chernobyl. It never hurts to have fewer really strong opponents, we all thought. I don't remember when school was cancelled, but I still have a clear memory of how excited I was about not having to take that horrible math exam, the first one in my life.
On May 1, the joyful demonstrators marched past our building, waving their red flags and papier-mache flowers, but by that time we'd been advised to stay home as much as possible - advised by my parents' well-informed friends, not by the authorities. I don't remember when Gorbachev finally made his first statement, recommending that we better keep our windows shut, but I'm still wondering how many people will never forgive him for that protracted silence. My parents sent me off to Moscow on the evening of May 7; most other kids had to wait until the middle of May before the official evacuation of Kyiv schools began.
In 1999, I attempted to read a book about Chernobyl, by Svetlana Alexievich, a Belarusian author in exile. It was one of the most powerful books I had ever held in my hands: a collection of voices of the Chernobyl dead and the Chernobyl living, a history of Chernobyl and a history of the beginning of the end of the Soviet Union recited in a choir of monologues. Needless to say, President Lukashenko's people accuse Alexievich of working for the CIA, her "Voices from Chernobyl: Chronicle of the Future" has to be smuggled into Belarus and she has found refuge in France.
I wasn't able to finish the book, though. I wasn't strong enough. When I think of it, I always think about one narration, by an ethnic Russian refugee who escaped the civil war in Tajikistan in the early 1990s. A maternity ward nurse, she had once seen a group of armed men grabbing a newborn girl and throwing her out of the window. This woman re-settled to one of the most contaminated areas of Belarus, where she enjoyed taking long walks in the nearby woods, content at last. She didn't worry about radiation; as long as there were only trees around her and no people, she felt at peace.
***
A mustached man takes one of the vacant bunks in our compartment somewhere in Mogilyov, when it's already dark outside and I've almost defeated my train insomnia.
In the morning, the three of us drink tea and have a conventional human conversation about TV. The man says that the Belarusian state channels are impossible to watch - all they do is make money by broadcasting personal text greetings - dear this, dear that, happy birthday, happy wedding anniversary. But he has a satellite dish and is addicted to Discovery Channel. He laughs as he talks about a documentary he's seen: just imagine, there exist some savage islanders who never eat raw bananas - they cook them!
I'm still half-asleep, so it doesn't occur to me that I should appreciate the company of a cheerful and well-off Belarusian citizen - for my own sake, at least, because wouldn't it be nice to end this long journey through the westernmost splinter of the once great Soviet Empire on a good note, brushing off all the grotesque, nightmarish visions that have been parading through my head for the past 24 hours?
An idiot, I ask the man what he thinks about the journalist exiled to the town of Zhlobin.
He frowns and replies, "Well, they criticize Lukashenko too much. They aren't being fair to him.
They deserve what they get. He is a good president. They should abide by the code of ethics, the journalists' code of ethics, and they never do."
The sweet woman chimes in, too: "Yes, they keep slamming the authorities, keep saying things that annoy the authorities, and then they are surprised they end up in jail. They do deserve it."
I am fully awake now to realize that it's better not to ask any more provocative questions. I even nod as I listen to them, as if in agreement. I hate being dragged into train arguments.
***
It's raining in St. Petersburg.
The mustached man and the plump woman leave the compartment first. We exchange such warm good-byes that for a second it seems as if we're going to miss each other. This affectionate phoniness is one thing I like about trains.
I have too much luggage, and as I'm trying to devise an efficient way to carry it all at once, I spot the fly. It is zooming around the table, preparing to feast on the crumbs we've left.
The fly's feast will last till a big woman with a mop arrives to clean the compartment. But no matter how diligent the cleaner is, some crumbs will still remain. There'll always be crumbs on the train, and, indifferent to the national borders it keeps crossing, the fly will live happily through whatever remains of its 20-day life.
Ten-Twenty-Three
March 2003
Newtopia Magazine
November 2003
The Story Garden
In times of distress, I turn to Italian pop music of the 1980s: Riccardo Fogli and Pupo have the strongest therapeutic effect on me. Passionate yet soothing, and only God knows what they are singing about in this wonderful language of theirs. Must be love, sunshine and the breathtaking blue-eyed beauties. I continue thinking my gloomy thoughts, with Fogli or Pupo serenading in the background, and then, all of a sudden, I'm happy again, or writing something too sentimental.
On October 29, it was different. In the evening, I was trying to take a break from thinking about the dead and the surviving former hostages. When I finished my second glass of red wine, I had a vision: a huge, ugly face - a blend of Putin the Sly Spy and Zyuganov the Communist Joker - almost rubbing against my cheek, grinning in this crazy, angelically ominous way. The face of Russia, I thought.
When I was about to put on the Italians CD, an unknown force diverted my hand and I ended up listening to Pet Shop Boys. Very soon, my delirious sobriety returned: less than a week since 10/23, with three Kremlin red stars and two proud Russian flags visible from my window at night, I had no other choice but to believe that a song called "The Theatre" was about Moscow, not London - about the Chechens, and not about the disadvantaged young Brits.
"While you pretend not to notice
All the years we've been here
We're the bums you step over
As you leave the Theatre
It's another world here
Somebody is singing
I was only wishing
For a bit of cash
From a patron of the arts
Or at least the phantom of the opera
Will I catch your eye?.."
October 29 must have been marked as the Day of Revelations on some PopJunkie Saint's calendar.
***
"And perhaps 'The Theatre' could be used on a radio piece about that gay club, Central Station-2, which opened at the end of September in the 'Nord-Ost' theater's basement. There were rumors that the terrorists had hidden their explosives there and that the special forces blew up one of the club's walls to storm the besieged building."
This was an irrelevant afterthought that I shared the next day with an American journalist I was assisting, one of the few precious people who helped me keep my sanity throughout most of the 10/23 ordeal.
The first chaotic steps away from helplessly sitting guard in front of the TV, however, I took on my own. On Friday, October 25, some forty hours since the hostage crisis began and seventeen more to go before gas would be pumped into the theater, I decided to go to Red Square, where a small group of the hostages' friends and relatives was trying to hold an anti-war rally.
A Russian acquaintance called me just when I was ready to leave. Forgetting that he never missed a chance to expose my touchy-feely nature, I greeted him the only way I could then: "I hope no one you know is in there." "Veronica, my friends aren't the kind of people who go to musicals. What about yours?" he replied. I didn't tell him that in this particular context his words sounded almost as foolish as, "Our friends aren't the kind of people who fly planes, take subways, eat out occasionally, live in apartment blocks and walk the streets of Moscow." All I said was that there seemed to be no one I knew in there, either.
By the time I reached Red Square, the protesters had heeded the city authorities' "request" to disperse and had moved back to the "Nord-Ost" neighborhood. In fifteen minutes I, too, was walking past dozens of buses lined up from the Proletarskaya subway station all the way to where the riot police, rescuers, diggers, journalists, relatives, friends, politicians and gawkers mingled at a safe distance from the besieged theater.
A neatly dressed elderly man - small, pale and subdued - caught up with me and asked how to get to the rehabilitation center for the hostages' relatives. I knew from the news that the place - misnamed by one journalist as the "filtration" center - had been set up in a technical school nearby, but I wasn't able to guide the man. He continued walking next to me for a couple more minutes, stooping as if someone sat on his shoulders, looking so lost, so lonely. "Do you have anyone in there?" I asked, and he whispered - almost exhaled - his reply: "yes.my son.and his girlfriend."
He soon crossed the street to ask a cop for directions, and I passed the crowds and entered a maze of crumbling five-storied apartment blocks and rusty garages that surrounded the theater packed with explosives. I spent some time eavesdropping on janitors, soldiers and the locals, wondering what Putin would have done had his daughters been inside the theater, along with 800 other poor souls, of whom I felt I already knew at least two.
When the rain turned into a real distraction, I went inside a bar within, maybe, half a mile from the theater. The TV on the wall was blaring a commercial of J-7 juices (sponsor of "The Last Hero," the Russian sibling of "Survivor"): "Everybody loves their freedom, everybody loves, everybody loves their freedom!"
***
On Sunday, October 27, I was back in the "Nord-Ost" area with the American journalist. At 1:30 p.m., there seemed to be as many reporters in front of the City Hospital #13 as there were relatives of the former hostages. The majority of the rescued - the conscious, the unconscious and the already dead - had been brought here more than 30 hours before, but there were still no exhaustive lists available. Family members were not allowed inside the hospital and had to continue their despairing vigil in the cold, rainy weather. The one hour deducted out of the three and a half days of their wait - with the switch to winter time that occurred at 3 a.m. on this last Sunday of October - hardly made any difference.
Two women walked away from the crowd by the hospital gate and, finding a patch of relatively mud-free surface on the edge of a sidewalk, lit up their cigarettes in silence. One of them, Nadezhda, was the wife of Viktor Martynov, a clarinetist in the "Nord-Ost" orchestra; the other was his sister. They had no idea whether he was in Hospital #13 or in any of at least a dozen others; they did not know if he was dead or alive. They were getting no help from the officials, and only through a network of friends was it possible to obtain bits of information, which - so far - hadn't fused into a simple and definitive answer Nadezhda and her sister-in-law were looking for. They were so drained it was hard to tell if they were in their 30s, 40s or early 50s, and there were moments when Nadezhda was choking down tears and apologizing for these lapses into emotion. I stroked her shoulder and repeated several times that everything would be fine, that she'd soon find her husband healthy and happy. I didn't have courage to say that she'd find him alive, for that would have implied that he might be dead.
The City Hospital #13 is located on Velozavodskaya St., named after a bicycle factory. Very close to it is Sharikopodshipnikovskaya St., named after a plant that produces "sharikopodshipniki," or ball bearings (defined in my Collins Dictionary as bearings "consisting of steel balls rolling between a metal sleeve fitted over the rotating shaft and an outer sleeve held in the bearing housing, so reducing friction"). The building that housed the musical (and the gay club) used to be the ball-bearing factory's cultural center. Although the area is loosely called Dubrovka, a name that conditions one to think of an oak forest, the grim industrial connotations are more resilient. It is tempting to describe Dubrovka's scenery, both before and after the hostage tragedy, as lifted out of Tarkovskiy's "Stalker" - if it wasn't for the basic attributes of a functioning magapolis: lots of people and cars.
Right across the street and a parking lot from the battered "Nord-Ost" theater, a few people were waiting for a bus at a stop that, for the past year and four days, received those from the musical crowd who chose to take subway to Proletarskaya and then switch to a bus. Three women at the stop, and their little children, watched as the cars slowed down, reaching a makeshift memorial just slightly off the road: flowers, flowers, flowers. We asked them what they thought about the war in Chechnya, and they said there was no war. One of the women said the Chechens had a propensity for warfare in their genes and then, disregarding the presence of the kids, called the terrorists "vyblyadki," a very strong word that can be translated as "the whore's children." As we talked, people with bouquets were stepping out of cars every now and then, and the flower memorial continued to grow.
In the evening, we visited one of Moscow's mosques, intending to speak with a Chechen Diaspora member about the impact the hostage crisis had had on this large and very diverse community.
On my way there, I talked with a cab driver, a young Muslim of Azeri descent. I mentioned that I had once tried to study Arabic and still remembered a line from the Quran, "Iyyaka na'abudu wa iyyaka nasta'iin" ("You alone we worship, and to You alone turn for help"). He asked me, all of a sudden: "What do you think - is it necessary to kill all non-Muslims?" I turned all the way to him and said, totally incredulous: "Are you asking me?!" And he replied, "Yes." I told him that, of course, no one should kill anyone, no matter what the clerics say, because many of them are so good at producing interpretations that fit their goals. He seemed to agree with me, saying that when his uncle was translating the Quran, he realized that the verb usually rendered as "to kill" had another, less extreme meaning. When I tried to pay my fare, he refused to take the money. But I insisted because I felt I owed him not just for the ride - but also for that little reminder that there could be some consensus and things might not be as bad as they appeared.
The Chechen man who had earlier agreed to be interviewed, was reluctant when we met him in person. Having spent a quarter of an hour waiting for him outside the mosque's courtyard, we felt it was reasonable to take no for an answer. Some of the men who gathered at the mosque that night for a Sufi group meeting kept coming in and out of the courtyard, giving us suspicious, seemingly inhospitable looks. The paranoid atmosphere of the place was reinforced by the four residential buildings that encased the mosque, fencing it off the abnormally quiet street - in the post-10/23 circumstances, this encouraged strangers like us and, no doubt, the regulars of the mosque, to imagine a zillion Russian intelligence agents watching us from every single window.
When we left the premises of the mosque, a tiny part of me was discontent: if they really had nothing to hide, I thought, why were they afraid to talk? Halfway to the subway station, we heard steps behind us and then a male voice, calling for us to wait. We turned and recognized a young, clean-shaven man who had been around when we were waiting outside the mosque. Awkwardly, he asked about the purpose of our visit to the mosque, and I immediately thought he was an undercover Federal Security Service agent.
He agreed to be interviewed, though, and spent the next 40 minutes talking non-stop about his fear for his own life, the danger that nearly all Chechens and others from the North Caucasus were facing in Moscow, the peaceful nature of Islam that he truly believed in, the Russian ex-girlfriend he had been dating for a whole year (who initially was convinced he was a clandestine terrorist) and his numerous Russian friends (who abandoned him after 10/23). He wasn't a Chechen but an Ingush, which, in the eyes of the Moscow police and other witch-hunters, was exactly the same thing. He was 26 and very eager to escape from "this damn country." He wasn't speaking for the others who stayed behind at the mosque, and I could see how his innocent confessions could potentially get him in trouble. Thanks to him, I realized that it would have been wrong to blame those others who chose to remain in the shade: each one of them was on his own when it came to safety, and most of them had families to care for, too.
***
I am not one of those people who think all Muslims are evil; nor do I share the minority view that Muslims are better than the rest. There was no way I could think of the Azeri cab driver and the Ingush man as some rare, unique representatives of their faith. But I was still incredibly pleased to meet them because there are times when my rationality crumbles, and these two encounters helped me restore a huge part of it.
Unfortunately, episodes incomparably smaller than 10/23 sometimes seem enough to tip over the precious common-sense balance in my head. Three weeks before the hostage crisis, I was in another cab, with another Azeri driver. When I told him I was Ukrainian, he asked if I thought it would have been better had Adolf Hitler conquered Ukraine during World War II. No way, I replied. At that time, to think that the Nazis would have treated Ukrainians better than the Communists was a horrible yet common mistake; to continue believing this in 2002 was criminal. The driver, however, turned out to be a Hitler fan: he said Hitler was a wise man who understood that because Jews were clever, they had to be exterminated.
It is always a shock to see swastikas scribbled on the walls in Moscow or St. Petersburg; it is disgusting to see the local breed of skinheads on the evening news, carrying out drunken pogroms at markets as the police are looking the other way - or are looking on, approving, not interfering. But to meet an Azeri man praising Hitler in Moscow was like tripping over a freak show character in my own living-room. The man's jet-black hair and beard, his dark complexion and his accent made him a perfect target for Moscow's skins and cops, and yet, he sounded just like them. I asked if he was aware of that, and he shrugged rathercarelessly and replied that the kids who attack his folk at the markets are too young and ignorant, and shouldn't be taken seriously.
I wasn't going to preach humanity to this man; all I needed was to get home at the end of a long day. Before I got out of his car, though, I came up with a rhetorical question for him: isn't it better to have a country full of clever people rather than kill them all and go on living with the stupid ones?
***
This episode, obviously, has little or nothing to do with 10/23, but I do admit that sometimes I find it hard to remain rational and avoid generalizations. And I'm not the only one. The most blatant and yet, an absolutely justified, sweeping statement has been the comparison of 10/23 to 9/11.
Although the historical and political realities that had shaped these tragedies were as distant as could be, their psychological implications seemed similar. Now and then, there were people who defied despair and whose compassion for the victims was genuine and unconditional; there were also those who didn't hesitate to point out that "terror has come home" (as if it was something anyone could possibly doubt); and, of course, there were some who cheered these "acts of retribution"; and more than just a few who didn't care.
One of my flashbacks to 9/11 occurred when we were by the "Nord-Ost" impromptu flower memorial on that long, damp Sunday after the rescue operation. It reminded me of the flower mound that had grown in front of the U.S. Embassy in Moscow after 9/11 - in just one day, too. And I couldn't help thinking of that couple my boyfriend and I encountered the night of September 12, minutes after we put our flowers and took a trolleybus home: an old, mountainous Communist comrade-wife and a meek husband by her side.
There was a minor traffic jam by the Embassy (just like the one in Dubrovka), and the trolleybus was arduously advancing towards the tunnel, giving some passengers their first chance to see the flowers and the sad crowd, and some their second one. The woman - whose old-style Soviet elite polish still shimmered through - suddenly threw her hand in the direction of the Embassy and declared, "Ha! And how many people they've killed!" There was no passenger reaction to her outburst and, encouraged, she said something nasty again before disembarking at the next stop. I remember the rest in slow motion: my boyfriend almost crashing the window with his middle finger, me hypnotically doing the same, the old docile man remaining unmoved and the woman responding with a dignified Russian equivalent of the "up yours" - a fist with the thumb stuck between index and middle fingers. Then they walked away - most likely to their once-luxuriant apartment in the very center of Moscow, acquired with the help of millions upon millions of the Gulag dead.
***
I am not one of those people who expect everyone around to feel what I feel and do it in unison with me: life is much more complex than a universal switch to winter time at 3 a.m. October 27. But I hate it when someone disrupts my grieving spells the way the woman on the trolleybus did. After 9/11, I've learned to dodge certain people and certain authors for the time it takes me to recover, though occasionally I do get hit.
Early morning on October 27, still feeling it was late at night on October 26, I absent-mindedly clicked on a Reuters story, headlined "Chechnya Peace May Be Casualty After Moscow Raid." Somehow, the headline didn't seem contradictory right away. But then I read the lead, which I did find ambiguous: "Russia counts the cost Sunday of the bloody end to a theater siege by Chechen rebels, but the chief victim could be peace in the Muslim region of Chechnya." What peace, I thought, and if there was any indeed, why saving a few hundred people would affect it?
The story had been posted 16 minutes before I opened it, so there is a chance Reuters provided some clues later. But I haven't seen any follow-up headlines preceded by the word "CORRECTION," nor was I really looking for them. I just went back to grieving for all those who died, got hurt and were still searching for their dear ones, as well as for those innocent people who were likely to suffer in the aftermath of 10/23 all over this country.
A few weeks later, when I toughened again, I visited Reuters' web page to learn about the agency's editorial policy, written by Stephen Jukes, Head of News, and last updated in April 2002. I found out that Reuters journalists did not "voice their own opinions" ("No, never.") and that their "news stories [were] sourced very clearly and precisely to enable readers and viewers to form their own judgment." (I did form mine, even though I was unable to locate any explicit attributions for the nonsensical lead statement.)
Reuters also claimed to be "committed to reporting the facts and in all situations avoid the use of emotive terms." I did agree that it was an established fact that "Putin has long linked so-called international terrorism to the problem in Chechnya where rebels have been battling on and off since 1994 to break from Moscow's grip" - but whoever wrote this sentence had been guided by emotions and, perhaps, a hope that the editor was dozing off at the moment. (And I am not referring to the "so-called international terrorism" part - I understand that by now, Reuters must be really tired of all those who believed that the World Trade Center and the Pentagon had been attacked by terrorists and expected this reliable news source to confirm their impression. I know that they are following "a long-standing policy to avoid the use of emotive words," and that's why they "do not use terms like 'terrorist' and 'freedom fighter' unless they are in a direct quote or are otherwise attributable to a third party." But isn't the phrase "Moscow's grip" too figurative to be considered non-emotive?)
The story ended with a quote from Dominique de Villepin, French foreign minister, who did use the T-word as discreetly as if he had studied Reuters' editorial policy page: "I believe one must distinguish between things: terrorism, which is reprehensible in all its forms and wherever it might be, and crises which genuinely call for the search for a political solution. This is clearly the case in Chechnya, we've said it for years[.]" Yet, the reporter's dissent was irrepressible and pushed him (or her) to introduce the quote as "a voice of criticism" that "[would] have given [Putin] a rude awakening."
My judgment here is that this prophecy might or might not have come true, but the editor sure did find much stuff to fix when he (or she) awoke. And somehow, I sympathize with the reporter, especially when I remind myself of what Ryszard Kapuscinski, a renowned Polish war correspondent, once said about "the horrors of a press agency writer" in a Granta (#21: The Story-Teller) interview: ".these anonymous markers of events, these terrible victims of information, working day and night in the worst of all possible conditions."
To end this brief review of the so-called neutral coverage on a good note, here is the beginning of an October 24 piece from the Istanbul-based Agency Caucasus: "Action is carried by Barayev the dead man. Russia had claimed to have killed him. Chechen sources said that the action is carried by Movsar Barayev. Moscow movie raiders asked Russia to pull out from Chechnya." They did not demand, they just asked.
Perhaps Reuters could learn something about truly dispassionate reporting from their Caucasian colleagues, and in return offer them some tips on the English grammar, and a few more on untangling all those confusing facts. (I can't resist offering one clarification: Movsar Barayev was a nephew of Arbi Barayev, a notorious kidnapper killed in summer 2001. Allegedly, among the ruthless uncle's victims were four Western telecom engineers beheaded in 1998, as well as numerous Chechens; allegedly, he collaborated with the Russian Special Forces; and, allegedly, many Chechens hated his guts.)
***
Anna Politkovskaya is no match for Reuters. She may be closer to Ryszard Kapuscinski who, in that same Granta interview, said that his condensed news agency stories always had counterparts that "[expressed] what I actually felt, what I lived through, the reflections surrounding the simple news story." But his writing covered much of the turbulent world, while Politkovskaya's stories do not even embrace the whole of Russia. They are limited to Russia's self-inflicted wound, Chechnya, which has been bleeding all over the place for the past decade.
Politkovskaya has so far dissected an incredible expanse of Chechnya's tissue, following blood streams from the battlegrounds in Grozny to the refugee camps in the neighboring Ingushetia; from the army barracks in Daghestan to the offices of corrupted generals in Moscow; from the war zone nursing homes to the out-of-the-way homes of bereaved families of the missing Russian soldiers.
She doesn't seek to be in the spotlight but gets caught in it anyway: either through her noble initiatives to help the most miserable among her sources, or through the government's clumsy yet menacing attempts to silence her. The last time she drew everyone's attention was during the hostage crisis, when the Chechen terrorists named her as one of those they would have liked to negotiate with.
Hours after Politkovskaya had arrived in Los Angeles to receive a Courage in Journalism Award from the International Women's Media Foundation, she had to start planning her trip back to Moscow. Around noon Thursday, October 24, a Russian TV channel arranged a live phone conversation with her, and she explained that at the moment she was having problems exchanging her Delta ticket for an earlier date. I thought that was so ridiculous, having to worry about tickets when the lives of nearly 1,000 people were at stake. And only when my American colleague and I visited Politkovskaya at her Moscow apartment ten days after 10/23, did I understand that the time difference, not red tape, had been to blame: it was the middle of the night when the news of the siege reached LA, and many people were asleep.
Smiling ironically, she told us how she had wanted to see Hollywood and the celebrities' mansions while she was in California. That was when I first caught myself feeling as cozy and ordinary as if I were sitting in the kitchen with my landlady: a daughter greeting us at the door; a son stopping by briefly to say hello to us and tell his mother he was off to work; a dear old Doberman, so excited about the guests that we all worried he might have a stroke. But Politkovskaya then began telling us how hard it had been to think of something to write in the note for the award ceremony she was going to miss, and I knew I was back in the kitchen of a woman whose magnitude was close to Andrei Sakharov's.
In her LA note she wrote: ".I have always believed that Russian journalism, first and foremost, is the journalism of action. The journalism of taking the step that you simply must take. Please pray for us, those who are directly affected by this crisis. And of course, say a prayer for me. I am ever more convinced that the war in Chechnya must be brought to an end. And today, the time has come for me to appeal to President Bush and plead with him to use his influence on President Putin to stop the bloodshed in Chechnya, and to prevent it in Moscow."
Back in Moscow, she did meet with the terrorists, and with some of the hostages, and she returned to the "Nord-Ost" building a few more times that day, October 25, carrying boxes of juice for the people inside. Journalists and firefighters contributed their own money to buy the first portion of juice; later - almost too late - the government decided to participate, too. (Some of the J-7 juice must have seeped inside the theater, while some of us, outside, were musing over the deeper meaning of the brand's slogan: "Everybody loves their freedom.")
In Politkovskaya's kitchen, we drank tea and did not talk about October 25 - by that time she had already described her errands in the bi-weekly Novaya Gazeta and other publications. She told us about the people she knew among the hostages: her daughter's 24-year-old friend, a "Nord-Ost" orchestra member; her own childhood friend with her family. The young musician survived, and Politkovskaya published an interview with him later; her friend lost her son and husband, and Politkovskaya attended the double funeral, and wrote about it, too.
My colleague asked her about the current racist moods in Moscow, and Politkovskaya confirmed that they were on the rise. Regardless of whether we want it or not, she said, the hostage crisis has only made it worse for all those who've been demonized by the media and the President, those who are routinely called "the blacks" here. Two weeks on, in mid-November, she published the first two stories of a series documenting the newest wave of anti-Chechen abuses in Moscow.
It is a purely post-Soviet phenomenon that the war in Chechnya is nowhere near the end and the discrimination against Caucasians is rampant all over the country - all despite Anna Politkovskaya. Her brave reporting is easily accessible in print and on the Internet; her astonishing book, "A Dirty War: A Russian Reporter in Chechnya" (Harvill Press, London, 2001) is available not just in its English translation but in Russian as well. Her stories cannot have but the most profound impact, and yet, no major changes seem to occur.
***
Chapter 7 of Politkovskaya's book, "Ingushlag: A New Concentration Camp," is about Chechen refugees in Ingushetia. On October 27, 1999, three years before 10/23, a group of them was watching Russian missiles swish by, one after another, high in the sky. "Why do they continue firing missiles into Grozny after the tragedy in the Central Market? Each missile immediately hits a great number of people. That many fighters never gather in a single place, even our children know that. So it's genocide," said Mir Khadjimuratov, a 25-year-old refugee from Grozny. "And those who didn't want to fight are now ready to."
If it hadn't been so obvious, it might have been a prophesy.
Politkovskaya told us that the Moscow hostage crisis would make some people finally notice the correlation between terrorism and the Army's brutal methods of conducting the second Chechen campaign. One of the "Nord-Ost" producers and a former hostage, Georgiy Vasilyev, went even further, calling what had happened a horrible "educational action."
He said that many of those who came to see a musical about "the great Russian history" - highlighting exploration of Siberia and the heroic deeds of the Soviet army during World War II - ended up learning a few facts from the history of Chechnya. In the 57 hours of the siege, their female captors, wrapped in explosives, shared tales of the Russian-Chechen wars of the 19th century, the deportations of 1944 and the more recent tragedies of the Chechen people. Vasilyev's attitude towards war in Chechnya hadn't changed: he had been opposed to it before 10/23, and he was still against it.
He spoke at a press conference October 30, after the funerals of Arseniy and Kristina, two teenage "Nord-Ost" actors who hadn't survived the rescue operation. We gathered in a room from which the musical's team, four days earlier, had been contacting Moscow hospitals and later, when all hope vanished, Moscow morgues. A bottle of Novopassit, a tranquilizer, still remained on a window-sill.
The young actors didn't die at the hands of the terrorists, Vasilyev said, but were killed by those who were trying to rescue them. However, had the terrorists not taken them hostage, Arseniy and Kristina - and the rest of the dead - would still have been alive. He said he wouldn't have wished to be in command of the rescue operation, for one needed immense courage to take responsibility for the lives of so many people. He thanked God at the end of the press conference - not for having survived, but for having been one of the victims. "And the feeling of guilt," he added, "will stay with me for the rest of my life."
Politkovskaya remembered one man among the hostages she'd been allowed to see on her first trip into the theater: he kept recounting things that the people inside needed most and, as he was being led away by the terrorists back to the auditorium where all the hostages were held, he continued shouting requests to her. "They tried to shut him up but he just went on and on," she said. "It was very brave of him." Later, when she saw him on TV, she realized the man was Georgiy Vasilyev.
Vasilyev said that although the female terrorists did not treat hostages with explicit cruelty, their male counterparts were quite fierce at times, and all seemed ready to die. Their determination did not become obvious immediately, however, and many hostages were able to maintain some of the casual attitude for a while, referring to the terrorists' leader as Mozart instead of Movsar, a name that at first sounded too foreign to remember.
But as Vasilyev furtively watched the masked people set up the explosives, he knew they were all doomed. The constant screech of Scotch tape used to keep the devices together served as just another chilling reminder to everyone. Moreover, Vasilyev managed at one point to start a conversation with a widow-terrorist seated nearby. It turned out to be easy, he said: he just asked her to translate the Arabic words on a black banner that had been placed upon the stage. She explained it was a prayer, and then confessed that she liked the way he was preparing for death. Eventually, the woman gave Vasilyev a piece of paper with a prayer scribbled on it in Arabic. She said that if he learned it by heart, he would be received in paradise as Muslim.
***
Before leaving the room in which Vasilyev's press conference had taken place, I stopped by a message board and, holding my breath, read the "Nord-Ost" casualties list.
Eighteen names; one of them - Viktor Martynov, a clarinetist, born in 1963, not yet forty. I still cannot get his wife out of my mind. His widow.
But life goes on. At least, this is what one talk show host said on October 25, roughly 12 hours before the rescue operation and around the time Politkovskaya was delivering the freedom-loving J-7 juices to the hostages. Life goes on. And if it did then, it surely does now.
The remnants of the "Nord-Ost" troupe began rehearsing for two commemorative concerts shortly after all their dead had been buried. A few newspapers reported that the Russian Special Forces were planning to wrap the terrorists' bodies in pig skins and bury them that way, to make sure they wouldn't be clean enough to go to heaven. Putin toughened up and famously invited all who wished to become "radical Muslims" to come to Moscow for circumcision.
The now-elderly Italian pop stars of the 1980s (Riccardo Fogli and Pupo among them) arrived here one month after the 10/23. Too late to have a soothing effect on me; too early to lure me into a crowded concert hall; so I ended up skipping their show.
And I still do not know whether the old man's son and his girlfriend survived. I doubt I'll ever find that out.
Newtopia Magazine
November 2003
The Story Garden
In times of distress, I turn to Italian pop music of the 1980s: Riccardo Fogli and Pupo have the strongest therapeutic effect on me. Passionate yet soothing, and only God knows what they are singing about in this wonderful language of theirs. Must be love, sunshine and the breathtaking blue-eyed beauties. I continue thinking my gloomy thoughts, with Fogli or Pupo serenading in the background, and then, all of a sudden, I'm happy again, or writing something too sentimental.
On October 29, it was different. In the evening, I was trying to take a break from thinking about the dead and the surviving former hostages. When I finished my second glass of red wine, I had a vision: a huge, ugly face - a blend of Putin the Sly Spy and Zyuganov the Communist Joker - almost rubbing against my cheek, grinning in this crazy, angelically ominous way. The face of Russia, I thought.
When I was about to put on the Italians CD, an unknown force diverted my hand and I ended up listening to Pet Shop Boys. Very soon, my delirious sobriety returned: less than a week since 10/23, with three Kremlin red stars and two proud Russian flags visible from my window at night, I had no other choice but to believe that a song called "The Theatre" was about Moscow, not London - about the Chechens, and not about the disadvantaged young Brits.
"While you pretend not to notice
All the years we've been here
We're the bums you step over
As you leave the Theatre
It's another world here
Somebody is singing
I was only wishing
For a bit of cash
From a patron of the arts
Or at least the phantom of the opera
Will I catch your eye?.."
October 29 must have been marked as the Day of Revelations on some PopJunkie Saint's calendar.
***
"And perhaps 'The Theatre' could be used on a radio piece about that gay club, Central Station-2, which opened at the end of September in the 'Nord-Ost' theater's basement. There were rumors that the terrorists had hidden their explosives there and that the special forces blew up one of the club's walls to storm the besieged building."
This was an irrelevant afterthought that I shared the next day with an American journalist I was assisting, one of the few precious people who helped me keep my sanity throughout most of the 10/23 ordeal.
The first chaotic steps away from helplessly sitting guard in front of the TV, however, I took on my own. On Friday, October 25, some forty hours since the hostage crisis began and seventeen more to go before gas would be pumped into the theater, I decided to go to Red Square, where a small group of the hostages' friends and relatives was trying to hold an anti-war rally.
A Russian acquaintance called me just when I was ready to leave. Forgetting that he never missed a chance to expose my touchy-feely nature, I greeted him the only way I could then: "I hope no one you know is in there." "Veronica, my friends aren't the kind of people who go to musicals. What about yours?" he replied. I didn't tell him that in this particular context his words sounded almost as foolish as, "Our friends aren't the kind of people who fly planes, take subways, eat out occasionally, live in apartment blocks and walk the streets of Moscow." All I said was that there seemed to be no one I knew in there, either.
By the time I reached Red Square, the protesters had heeded the city authorities' "request" to disperse and had moved back to the "Nord-Ost" neighborhood. In fifteen minutes I, too, was walking past dozens of buses lined up from the Proletarskaya subway station all the way to where the riot police, rescuers, diggers, journalists, relatives, friends, politicians and gawkers mingled at a safe distance from the besieged theater.
A neatly dressed elderly man - small, pale and subdued - caught up with me and asked how to get to the rehabilitation center for the hostages' relatives. I knew from the news that the place - misnamed by one journalist as the "filtration" center - had been set up in a technical school nearby, but I wasn't able to guide the man. He continued walking next to me for a couple more minutes, stooping as if someone sat on his shoulders, looking so lost, so lonely. "Do you have anyone in there?" I asked, and he whispered - almost exhaled - his reply: "yes.my son.and his girlfriend."
He soon crossed the street to ask a cop for directions, and I passed the crowds and entered a maze of crumbling five-storied apartment blocks and rusty garages that surrounded the theater packed with explosives. I spent some time eavesdropping on janitors, soldiers and the locals, wondering what Putin would have done had his daughters been inside the theater, along with 800 other poor souls, of whom I felt I already knew at least two.
When the rain turned into a real distraction, I went inside a bar within, maybe, half a mile from the theater. The TV on the wall was blaring a commercial of J-7 juices (sponsor of "The Last Hero," the Russian sibling of "Survivor"): "Everybody loves their freedom, everybody loves, everybody loves their freedom!"
***
On Sunday, October 27, I was back in the "Nord-Ost" area with the American journalist. At 1:30 p.m., there seemed to be as many reporters in front of the City Hospital #13 as there were relatives of the former hostages. The majority of the rescued - the conscious, the unconscious and the already dead - had been brought here more than 30 hours before, but there were still no exhaustive lists available. Family members were not allowed inside the hospital and had to continue their despairing vigil in the cold, rainy weather. The one hour deducted out of the three and a half days of their wait - with the switch to winter time that occurred at 3 a.m. on this last Sunday of October - hardly made any difference.
Two women walked away from the crowd by the hospital gate and, finding a patch of relatively mud-free surface on the edge of a sidewalk, lit up their cigarettes in silence. One of them, Nadezhda, was the wife of Viktor Martynov, a clarinetist in the "Nord-Ost" orchestra; the other was his sister. They had no idea whether he was in Hospital #13 or in any of at least a dozen others; they did not know if he was dead or alive. They were getting no help from the officials, and only through a network of friends was it possible to obtain bits of information, which - so far - hadn't fused into a simple and definitive answer Nadezhda and her sister-in-law were looking for. They were so drained it was hard to tell if they were in their 30s, 40s or early 50s, and there were moments when Nadezhda was choking down tears and apologizing for these lapses into emotion. I stroked her shoulder and repeated several times that everything would be fine, that she'd soon find her husband healthy and happy. I didn't have courage to say that she'd find him alive, for that would have implied that he might be dead.
The City Hospital #13 is located on Velozavodskaya St., named after a bicycle factory. Very close to it is Sharikopodshipnikovskaya St., named after a plant that produces "sharikopodshipniki," or ball bearings (defined in my Collins Dictionary as bearings "consisting of steel balls rolling between a metal sleeve fitted over the rotating shaft and an outer sleeve held in the bearing housing, so reducing friction"). The building that housed the musical (and the gay club) used to be the ball-bearing factory's cultural center. Although the area is loosely called Dubrovka, a name that conditions one to think of an oak forest, the grim industrial connotations are more resilient. It is tempting to describe Dubrovka's scenery, both before and after the hostage tragedy, as lifted out of Tarkovskiy's "Stalker" - if it wasn't for the basic attributes of a functioning magapolis: lots of people and cars.
Right across the street and a parking lot from the battered "Nord-Ost" theater, a few people were waiting for a bus at a stop that, for the past year and four days, received those from the musical crowd who chose to take subway to Proletarskaya and then switch to a bus. Three women at the stop, and their little children, watched as the cars slowed down, reaching a makeshift memorial just slightly off the road: flowers, flowers, flowers. We asked them what they thought about the war in Chechnya, and they said there was no war. One of the women said the Chechens had a propensity for warfare in their genes and then, disregarding the presence of the kids, called the terrorists "vyblyadki," a very strong word that can be translated as "the whore's children." As we talked, people with bouquets were stepping out of cars every now and then, and the flower memorial continued to grow.
In the evening, we visited one of Moscow's mosques, intending to speak with a Chechen Diaspora member about the impact the hostage crisis had had on this large and very diverse community.
On my way there, I talked with a cab driver, a young Muslim of Azeri descent. I mentioned that I had once tried to study Arabic and still remembered a line from the Quran, "Iyyaka na'abudu wa iyyaka nasta'iin" ("You alone we worship, and to You alone turn for help"). He asked me, all of a sudden: "What do you think - is it necessary to kill all non-Muslims?" I turned all the way to him and said, totally incredulous: "Are you asking me?!" And he replied, "Yes." I told him that, of course, no one should kill anyone, no matter what the clerics say, because many of them are so good at producing interpretations that fit their goals. He seemed to agree with me, saying that when his uncle was translating the Quran, he realized that the verb usually rendered as "to kill" had another, less extreme meaning. When I tried to pay my fare, he refused to take the money. But I insisted because I felt I owed him not just for the ride - but also for that little reminder that there could be some consensus and things might not be as bad as they appeared.
The Chechen man who had earlier agreed to be interviewed, was reluctant when we met him in person. Having spent a quarter of an hour waiting for him outside the mosque's courtyard, we felt it was reasonable to take no for an answer. Some of the men who gathered at the mosque that night for a Sufi group meeting kept coming in and out of the courtyard, giving us suspicious, seemingly inhospitable looks. The paranoid atmosphere of the place was reinforced by the four residential buildings that encased the mosque, fencing it off the abnormally quiet street - in the post-10/23 circumstances, this encouraged strangers like us and, no doubt, the regulars of the mosque, to imagine a zillion Russian intelligence agents watching us from every single window.
When we left the premises of the mosque, a tiny part of me was discontent: if they really had nothing to hide, I thought, why were they afraid to talk? Halfway to the subway station, we heard steps behind us and then a male voice, calling for us to wait. We turned and recognized a young, clean-shaven man who had been around when we were waiting outside the mosque. Awkwardly, he asked about the purpose of our visit to the mosque, and I immediately thought he was an undercover Federal Security Service agent.
He agreed to be interviewed, though, and spent the next 40 minutes talking non-stop about his fear for his own life, the danger that nearly all Chechens and others from the North Caucasus were facing in Moscow, the peaceful nature of Islam that he truly believed in, the Russian ex-girlfriend he had been dating for a whole year (who initially was convinced he was a clandestine terrorist) and his numerous Russian friends (who abandoned him after 10/23). He wasn't a Chechen but an Ingush, which, in the eyes of the Moscow police and other witch-hunters, was exactly the same thing. He was 26 and very eager to escape from "this damn country." He wasn't speaking for the others who stayed behind at the mosque, and I could see how his innocent confessions could potentially get him in trouble. Thanks to him, I realized that it would have been wrong to blame those others who chose to remain in the shade: each one of them was on his own when it came to safety, and most of them had families to care for, too.
***
I am not one of those people who think all Muslims are evil; nor do I share the minority view that Muslims are better than the rest. There was no way I could think of the Azeri cab driver and the Ingush man as some rare, unique representatives of their faith. But I was still incredibly pleased to meet them because there are times when my rationality crumbles, and these two encounters helped me restore a huge part of it.
Unfortunately, episodes incomparably smaller than 10/23 sometimes seem enough to tip over the precious common-sense balance in my head. Three weeks before the hostage crisis, I was in another cab, with another Azeri driver. When I told him I was Ukrainian, he asked if I thought it would have been better had Adolf Hitler conquered Ukraine during World War II. No way, I replied. At that time, to think that the Nazis would have treated Ukrainians better than the Communists was a horrible yet common mistake; to continue believing this in 2002 was criminal. The driver, however, turned out to be a Hitler fan: he said Hitler was a wise man who understood that because Jews were clever, they had to be exterminated.
It is always a shock to see swastikas scribbled on the walls in Moscow or St. Petersburg; it is disgusting to see the local breed of skinheads on the evening news, carrying out drunken pogroms at markets as the police are looking the other way - or are looking on, approving, not interfering. But to meet an Azeri man praising Hitler in Moscow was like tripping over a freak show character in my own living-room. The man's jet-black hair and beard, his dark complexion and his accent made him a perfect target for Moscow's skins and cops, and yet, he sounded just like them. I asked if he was aware of that, and he shrugged rathercarelessly and replied that the kids who attack his folk at the markets are too young and ignorant, and shouldn't be taken seriously.
I wasn't going to preach humanity to this man; all I needed was to get home at the end of a long day. Before I got out of his car, though, I came up with a rhetorical question for him: isn't it better to have a country full of clever people rather than kill them all and go on living with the stupid ones?
***
This episode, obviously, has little or nothing to do with 10/23, but I do admit that sometimes I find it hard to remain rational and avoid generalizations. And I'm not the only one. The most blatant and yet, an absolutely justified, sweeping statement has been the comparison of 10/23 to 9/11.
Although the historical and political realities that had shaped these tragedies were as distant as could be, their psychological implications seemed similar. Now and then, there were people who defied despair and whose compassion for the victims was genuine and unconditional; there were also those who didn't hesitate to point out that "terror has come home" (as if it was something anyone could possibly doubt); and, of course, there were some who cheered these "acts of retribution"; and more than just a few who didn't care.
One of my flashbacks to 9/11 occurred when we were by the "Nord-Ost" impromptu flower memorial on that long, damp Sunday after the rescue operation. It reminded me of the flower mound that had grown in front of the U.S. Embassy in Moscow after 9/11 - in just one day, too. And I couldn't help thinking of that couple my boyfriend and I encountered the night of September 12, minutes after we put our flowers and took a trolleybus home: an old, mountainous Communist comrade-wife and a meek husband by her side.
There was a minor traffic jam by the Embassy (just like the one in Dubrovka), and the trolleybus was arduously advancing towards the tunnel, giving some passengers their first chance to see the flowers and the sad crowd, and some their second one. The woman - whose old-style Soviet elite polish still shimmered through - suddenly threw her hand in the direction of the Embassy and declared, "Ha! And how many people they've killed!" There was no passenger reaction to her outburst and, encouraged, she said something nasty again before disembarking at the next stop. I remember the rest in slow motion: my boyfriend almost crashing the window with his middle finger, me hypnotically doing the same, the old docile man remaining unmoved and the woman responding with a dignified Russian equivalent of the "up yours" - a fist with the thumb stuck between index and middle fingers. Then they walked away - most likely to their once-luxuriant apartment in the very center of Moscow, acquired with the help of millions upon millions of the Gulag dead.
***
I am not one of those people who expect everyone around to feel what I feel and do it in unison with me: life is much more complex than a universal switch to winter time at 3 a.m. October 27. But I hate it when someone disrupts my grieving spells the way the woman on the trolleybus did. After 9/11, I've learned to dodge certain people and certain authors for the time it takes me to recover, though occasionally I do get hit.
Early morning on October 27, still feeling it was late at night on October 26, I absent-mindedly clicked on a Reuters story, headlined "Chechnya Peace May Be Casualty After Moscow Raid." Somehow, the headline didn't seem contradictory right away. But then I read the lead, which I did find ambiguous: "Russia counts the cost Sunday of the bloody end to a theater siege by Chechen rebels, but the chief victim could be peace in the Muslim region of Chechnya." What peace, I thought, and if there was any indeed, why saving a few hundred people would affect it?
The story had been posted 16 minutes before I opened it, so there is a chance Reuters provided some clues later. But I haven't seen any follow-up headlines preceded by the word "CORRECTION," nor was I really looking for them. I just went back to grieving for all those who died, got hurt and were still searching for their dear ones, as well as for those innocent people who were likely to suffer in the aftermath of 10/23 all over this country.
A few weeks later, when I toughened again, I visited Reuters' web page to learn about the agency's editorial policy, written by Stephen Jukes, Head of News, and last updated in April 2002. I found out that Reuters journalists did not "voice their own opinions" ("No, never.") and that their "news stories [were] sourced very clearly and precisely to enable readers and viewers to form their own judgment." (I did form mine, even though I was unable to locate any explicit attributions for the nonsensical lead statement.)
Reuters also claimed to be "committed to reporting the facts and in all situations avoid the use of emotive terms." I did agree that it was an established fact that "Putin has long linked so-called international terrorism to the problem in Chechnya where rebels have been battling on and off since 1994 to break from Moscow's grip" - but whoever wrote this sentence had been guided by emotions and, perhaps, a hope that the editor was dozing off at the moment. (And I am not referring to the "so-called international terrorism" part - I understand that by now, Reuters must be really tired of all those who believed that the World Trade Center and the Pentagon had been attacked by terrorists and expected this reliable news source to confirm their impression. I know that they are following "a long-standing policy to avoid the use of emotive words," and that's why they "do not use terms like 'terrorist' and 'freedom fighter' unless they are in a direct quote or are otherwise attributable to a third party." But isn't the phrase "Moscow's grip" too figurative to be considered non-emotive?)
The story ended with a quote from Dominique de Villepin, French foreign minister, who did use the T-word as discreetly as if he had studied Reuters' editorial policy page: "I believe one must distinguish between things: terrorism, which is reprehensible in all its forms and wherever it might be, and crises which genuinely call for the search for a political solution. This is clearly the case in Chechnya, we've said it for years[.]" Yet, the reporter's dissent was irrepressible and pushed him (or her) to introduce the quote as "a voice of criticism" that "[would] have given [Putin] a rude awakening."
My judgment here is that this prophecy might or might not have come true, but the editor sure did find much stuff to fix when he (or she) awoke. And somehow, I sympathize with the reporter, especially when I remind myself of what Ryszard Kapuscinski, a renowned Polish war correspondent, once said about "the horrors of a press agency writer" in a Granta (#21: The Story-Teller) interview: ".these anonymous markers of events, these terrible victims of information, working day and night in the worst of all possible conditions."
To end this brief review of the so-called neutral coverage on a good note, here is the beginning of an October 24 piece from the Istanbul-based Agency Caucasus: "Action is carried by Barayev the dead man. Russia had claimed to have killed him. Chechen sources said that the action is carried by Movsar Barayev. Moscow movie raiders asked Russia to pull out from Chechnya." They did not demand, they just asked.
Perhaps Reuters could learn something about truly dispassionate reporting from their Caucasian colleagues, and in return offer them some tips on the English grammar, and a few more on untangling all those confusing facts. (I can't resist offering one clarification: Movsar Barayev was a nephew of Arbi Barayev, a notorious kidnapper killed in summer 2001. Allegedly, among the ruthless uncle's victims were four Western telecom engineers beheaded in 1998, as well as numerous Chechens; allegedly, he collaborated with the Russian Special Forces; and, allegedly, many Chechens hated his guts.)
***
Anna Politkovskaya is no match for Reuters. She may be closer to Ryszard Kapuscinski who, in that same Granta interview, said that his condensed news agency stories always had counterparts that "[expressed] what I actually felt, what I lived through, the reflections surrounding the simple news story." But his writing covered much of the turbulent world, while Politkovskaya's stories do not even embrace the whole of Russia. They are limited to Russia's self-inflicted wound, Chechnya, which has been bleeding all over the place for the past decade.
Politkovskaya has so far dissected an incredible expanse of Chechnya's tissue, following blood streams from the battlegrounds in Grozny to the refugee camps in the neighboring Ingushetia; from the army barracks in Daghestan to the offices of corrupted generals in Moscow; from the war zone nursing homes to the out-of-the-way homes of bereaved families of the missing Russian soldiers.
She doesn't seek to be in the spotlight but gets caught in it anyway: either through her noble initiatives to help the most miserable among her sources, or through the government's clumsy yet menacing attempts to silence her. The last time she drew everyone's attention was during the hostage crisis, when the Chechen terrorists named her as one of those they would have liked to negotiate with.
Hours after Politkovskaya had arrived in Los Angeles to receive a Courage in Journalism Award from the International Women's Media Foundation, she had to start planning her trip back to Moscow. Around noon Thursday, October 24, a Russian TV channel arranged a live phone conversation with her, and she explained that at the moment she was having problems exchanging her Delta ticket for an earlier date. I thought that was so ridiculous, having to worry about tickets when the lives of nearly 1,000 people were at stake. And only when my American colleague and I visited Politkovskaya at her Moscow apartment ten days after 10/23, did I understand that the time difference, not red tape, had been to blame: it was the middle of the night when the news of the siege reached LA, and many people were asleep.
Smiling ironically, she told us how she had wanted to see Hollywood and the celebrities' mansions while she was in California. That was when I first caught myself feeling as cozy and ordinary as if I were sitting in the kitchen with my landlady: a daughter greeting us at the door; a son stopping by briefly to say hello to us and tell his mother he was off to work; a dear old Doberman, so excited about the guests that we all worried he might have a stroke. But Politkovskaya then began telling us how hard it had been to think of something to write in the note for the award ceremony she was going to miss, and I knew I was back in the kitchen of a woman whose magnitude was close to Andrei Sakharov's.
In her LA note she wrote: ".I have always believed that Russian journalism, first and foremost, is the journalism of action. The journalism of taking the step that you simply must take. Please pray for us, those who are directly affected by this crisis. And of course, say a prayer for me. I am ever more convinced that the war in Chechnya must be brought to an end. And today, the time has come for me to appeal to President Bush and plead with him to use his influence on President Putin to stop the bloodshed in Chechnya, and to prevent it in Moscow."
Back in Moscow, she did meet with the terrorists, and with some of the hostages, and she returned to the "Nord-Ost" building a few more times that day, October 25, carrying boxes of juice for the people inside. Journalists and firefighters contributed their own money to buy the first portion of juice; later - almost too late - the government decided to participate, too. (Some of the J-7 juice must have seeped inside the theater, while some of us, outside, were musing over the deeper meaning of the brand's slogan: "Everybody loves their freedom.")
In Politkovskaya's kitchen, we drank tea and did not talk about October 25 - by that time she had already described her errands in the bi-weekly Novaya Gazeta and other publications. She told us about the people she knew among the hostages: her daughter's 24-year-old friend, a "Nord-Ost" orchestra member; her own childhood friend with her family. The young musician survived, and Politkovskaya published an interview with him later; her friend lost her son and husband, and Politkovskaya attended the double funeral, and wrote about it, too.
My colleague asked her about the current racist moods in Moscow, and Politkovskaya confirmed that they were on the rise. Regardless of whether we want it or not, she said, the hostage crisis has only made it worse for all those who've been demonized by the media and the President, those who are routinely called "the blacks" here. Two weeks on, in mid-November, she published the first two stories of a series documenting the newest wave of anti-Chechen abuses in Moscow.
It is a purely post-Soviet phenomenon that the war in Chechnya is nowhere near the end and the discrimination against Caucasians is rampant all over the country - all despite Anna Politkovskaya. Her brave reporting is easily accessible in print and on the Internet; her astonishing book, "A Dirty War: A Russian Reporter in Chechnya" (Harvill Press, London, 2001) is available not just in its English translation but in Russian as well. Her stories cannot have but the most profound impact, and yet, no major changes seem to occur.
***
Chapter 7 of Politkovskaya's book, "Ingushlag: A New Concentration Camp," is about Chechen refugees in Ingushetia. On October 27, 1999, three years before 10/23, a group of them was watching Russian missiles swish by, one after another, high in the sky. "Why do they continue firing missiles into Grozny after the tragedy in the Central Market? Each missile immediately hits a great number of people. That many fighters never gather in a single place, even our children know that. So it's genocide," said Mir Khadjimuratov, a 25-year-old refugee from Grozny. "And those who didn't want to fight are now ready to."
If it hadn't been so obvious, it might have been a prophesy.
Politkovskaya told us that the Moscow hostage crisis would make some people finally notice the correlation between terrorism and the Army's brutal methods of conducting the second Chechen campaign. One of the "Nord-Ost" producers and a former hostage, Georgiy Vasilyev, went even further, calling what had happened a horrible "educational action."
He said that many of those who came to see a musical about "the great Russian history" - highlighting exploration of Siberia and the heroic deeds of the Soviet army during World War II - ended up learning a few facts from the history of Chechnya. In the 57 hours of the siege, their female captors, wrapped in explosives, shared tales of the Russian-Chechen wars of the 19th century, the deportations of 1944 and the more recent tragedies of the Chechen people. Vasilyev's attitude towards war in Chechnya hadn't changed: he had been opposed to it before 10/23, and he was still against it.
He spoke at a press conference October 30, after the funerals of Arseniy and Kristina, two teenage "Nord-Ost" actors who hadn't survived the rescue operation. We gathered in a room from which the musical's team, four days earlier, had been contacting Moscow hospitals and later, when all hope vanished, Moscow morgues. A bottle of Novopassit, a tranquilizer, still remained on a window-sill.
The young actors didn't die at the hands of the terrorists, Vasilyev said, but were killed by those who were trying to rescue them. However, had the terrorists not taken them hostage, Arseniy and Kristina - and the rest of the dead - would still have been alive. He said he wouldn't have wished to be in command of the rescue operation, for one needed immense courage to take responsibility for the lives of so many people. He thanked God at the end of the press conference - not for having survived, but for having been one of the victims. "And the feeling of guilt," he added, "will stay with me for the rest of my life."
Politkovskaya remembered one man among the hostages she'd been allowed to see on her first trip into the theater: he kept recounting things that the people inside needed most and, as he was being led away by the terrorists back to the auditorium where all the hostages were held, he continued shouting requests to her. "They tried to shut him up but he just went on and on," she said. "It was very brave of him." Later, when she saw him on TV, she realized the man was Georgiy Vasilyev.
Vasilyev said that although the female terrorists did not treat hostages with explicit cruelty, their male counterparts were quite fierce at times, and all seemed ready to die. Their determination did not become obvious immediately, however, and many hostages were able to maintain some of the casual attitude for a while, referring to the terrorists' leader as Mozart instead of Movsar, a name that at first sounded too foreign to remember.
But as Vasilyev furtively watched the masked people set up the explosives, he knew they were all doomed. The constant screech of Scotch tape used to keep the devices together served as just another chilling reminder to everyone. Moreover, Vasilyev managed at one point to start a conversation with a widow-terrorist seated nearby. It turned out to be easy, he said: he just asked her to translate the Arabic words on a black banner that had been placed upon the stage. She explained it was a prayer, and then confessed that she liked the way he was preparing for death. Eventually, the woman gave Vasilyev a piece of paper with a prayer scribbled on it in Arabic. She said that if he learned it by heart, he would be received in paradise as Muslim.
***
Before leaving the room in which Vasilyev's press conference had taken place, I stopped by a message board and, holding my breath, read the "Nord-Ost" casualties list.
Eighteen names; one of them - Viktor Martynov, a clarinetist, born in 1963, not yet forty. I still cannot get his wife out of my mind. His widow.
But life goes on. At least, this is what one talk show host said on October 25, roughly 12 hours before the rescue operation and around the time Politkovskaya was delivering the freedom-loving J-7 juices to the hostages. Life goes on. And if it did then, it surely does now.
The remnants of the "Nord-Ost" troupe began rehearsing for two commemorative concerts shortly after all their dead had been buried. A few newspapers reported that the Russian Special Forces were planning to wrap the terrorists' bodies in pig skins and bury them that way, to make sure they wouldn't be clean enough to go to heaven. Putin toughened up and famously invited all who wished to become "radical Muslims" to come to Moscow for circumcision.
The now-elderly Italian pop stars of the 1980s (Riccardo Fogli and Pupo among them) arrived here one month after the 10/23. Too late to have a soothing effect on me; too early to lure me into a crowded concert hall; so I ended up skipping their show.
And I still do not know whether the old man's son and his girlfriend survived. I doubt I'll ever find that out.
The Demographic Crisis in Ukraine
February 2003
Newtopia Magazine
In 1995, my first journalistic mentor recommended that I try writing a piece on the demographic crisis in Ukraine. All I had to say then was, "What crisis? My best high school friend is about to give birth, and at least a dozen other acquaintances are also pregnant. We're gonna have plenty new babies real soon!"
I'm now aware of the issue's extreme complexity, but sometimes I'm still wondering whether the crisis is my fault to some extent. Ukraine's fertility rate has plummeted to 1.3 children per woman, yet my own fertility rate is even lower so far (zero). I lived in Russia during the Ukrainian census of 2001 and obviously haven't gotten into the database, exacerbating the already alarming demographic situation (minus one more Ukrainian).
Abstract thinking isn't one of my strengths when it comes to writing about post-Soviet population decline. I pretend to be following the conventional steps - I make the unthinkable numbers real by supporting them with real people's stories; I put the real people's stories into perspective by introducing experts' opinions and by throwing in the unthinkable numbers -but inside, I'm confused. How can I explain anything to anyone when all that has to be explained is happening to me or around me?
I don't give up right away, though.
To warm up, I skim headlines of a number of stories I've downloaded for preliminary research. They are all about Russia, Ukraine's neighbor: 'UNEARTHING THE RUSSIAN WAY OF DEATH' (by Michael Church, the Independent, January 15, 2001); 'DISREGARD FOR HEALTH IS KILLING RUSSIANS' (By John Daniszewski, the Los Angeles Times, December 16, 2001); 'THE DEATH OF A NATION' (By Andrew Meier, the Time Magazine (Europe),January 22, 2000); 'A PEOPLE SKATING ON THIN ICE' (by John O'Mahony, the Guardian, February 3, 2001); 'DEAD SOULS' (by Murray Feshbach, the Atlantic Monthly, January 1999).
I'm overwhelmed, and I haven't started reading yet.
To gain perspective, I move on to my favorite resource: the U.S. Census Bureau's international demographic database, a user-friendly online collection of estimates and projections for 227 countries and areas of the world. My goal is to find as many countries as possible that have fewer births and more deaths per 1,000 population than Russia.
The only such country, it turns out, is my native Ukraine. According to the 2003 estimates, it has 9.9 births/1,000 and 16.4 deaths/1,000 (while Russia has 10.1 births/1,000 and 14 deaths/1,000). Bulgaria's situation is as grave: 8 births/1,000 (fewer than in Ukraine) and 14.3 deaths/1,000 (more than in Russia).
Before I am bogged down in further amateurish scrutiny of statistics, I note that Russia's annual rate of natural increase (-0.39 percent) is higher than that of Bulgaria (-0.63 percent) and of Ukraine (-0.65 percent). The fact that Russia's making headlines in the Western media while Ukraine and Bulgaria don't, may have a simple explanation: Russia (pop. 145 million) possesses nuclear arms, whereas Ukraine (pop. 48 million) and Bulgaria (pop. 7.5 million) are harmless; even if Russia is dissolving at a slower rate, the impact may still be way too powerful.
I continue looking at the 2003 birth and death rate projections.
Birth rates in Bulgaria, as well as 12 other European countries and Japan are lower than in Ukraine, yet their mortality statistics are nowhere as gloomy as ours. Ukraine's death rate places the country alongside the world's most destitute nations. Chad has the same 16.4 deaths per 1,000 population as Ukraine, which is the lowest rate among the worst off 25 African states and Afghanistan. But Chad's birth rate is 47.1 births/1,000 - and it's not an exception among these drought-, poverty- and war-ridden countries. Afghanistan has 40.6 births/1,000; Rwanda - 41.1 births/1,000, Mali - 47.8 births/1,000, and Niger sets the world record at 49.5 births/1,000 (or five times Ukraine's rate). Botswana's birth rate is "only" 25.5 births/1,000, while its death rate is the highest in this group (31 deaths/1,000), which makes it the only African country experiencing a natural decrease of population.
By now, I seem to begin losing any perspective I may have gained. One sign of this is that the death rate statistics remind me of how a man at a New Jersey grocery store once asked me, "Ukraine. is it somewhere in Africa?"
So finally, I attempt reading those apocalyptically headlined stories about Russia, keeping in mind that they are as much about Ukraine.
"Over the past 10 years, Russia has been hemorrhaging humanity at a rate unprecedented for a modern, industrialized nation, except during times of famine or war," writes John O'Mahony.
"So much of the shrinking Russian population may soon be so ill that long-term solutions to the country's political, economic, and military problems will be inconceivable," concludes Murray Feshbach, a renowned U.S. demographer and former Sovietologist.
At first, this kind of reading scares me to death, but eventually I develop a sort of immunity to it. I realize that I'm ready to interview Ukrainian doctors and ordinary people - even though I don't feel like it. I know what questions need to be asked, but I also know most of the answers. Very unjournalistically, I identify with those poor souls O'Mahony and Feshbach are dedicating epitaphs to.
What if I, or someone I know here, is one tiny drop in the post-Soviet human hemorrhage?
Not necessarily, anyone truly versed in statistics would tell me. Such fear is even more irrational than the fear of flying. What am I so worried about, anyway? That by 2050, if the U.S. Census Bureau's forecast comes true, Uzbekistan will replace Ukraine as the second-largest former Soviet country? But even if its population expands from today's 26 million to 48.5 million 47 years later, Ukraine isn't just going to vanish. We'll still have about 38 million people then, which seems like a lot.
This coming spring, the daughter of my high school friend will turn 8. She is bright, healthy and beautiful, and when I think about her, it seems easy to ignore the fact that, since the year she was born, Ukraine has lost some 7 percent of its population, or more than 3 million people. Nothing matters as long as this one little girl is there. And, of course, there are so many more kids in Ukraine - in 2000, the U.S. Census Bureau counted nearly 5 million, from newborns to 9-year-olds. If at least some of them are as cool as my best friend's daughter, then Ukraine's got a future!
But it's foolish to be so optimistic, and it is difficult, too. When I read that only about 25 percent of Russian children are born healthy, I find it a bit too abstract to really make my heart sink. My best friend's daughter and other lively kids I see around serve as an imaginary shield that's fending off the horrible implications of health care statistics.
There is another little girl, however, who makes the numbers - those 75 percent of sick children - come alive for me.
In 1997, when I lived in Iowa City, I became close with the family of a visiting Ukrainian history professor. His daughter - just like the daughter of my Kyiv friend - was 2.5 years old then. At the hospital where she was born, back in Ukraine, she had been infected with staphylococcus, and by the time I met her, she'd had two cases of pneumonia, each followed by numerous complications.
The girl's temper tantrums, which often included screaming and kicking, are among my most vivid and persistent memories of her. I've never felt as helpless as I did then: she wasn't unhappy about some childish problems; through sobbing, she seemed to be trying to spill out her two and a half years of constant pain. Neither her despairing parents, nor doctors could bring her relief. On her good days, though, she liked to sit at the kitchen table and scribble something in her tiny pink notepad. I loved asking her what she was doing, because she always replied, with much of her father's intellectual superiority: "I'm writing a dissertation."
In 1995, when she was born, her father was juggling three jobs in Ukraine. He was freelancing for a newspaper, selling imported sweaters and coats at a wholesale market, and teaching at a university. The university often received its state-budget funding belatedly, and the professor often didn't see his 100-dollar monthly salary for months. In order to feed his wife, infant daughter, teenage step-son and himself, he turned into a moonlighter, which to some extent affected the quality of his teaching: sometimes, he was so exhausted he was dozing off during seminars he was conducting.
The state-run hospital, in which the professor's daughter was born, also lacked sufficient funding, and the quality of its services suffered as a result, too. Nurses used to feed several newborns from the same bottle, without sterilizing it, and were rude to the women who failed to bribe them, causing some to lose their breast-milk supply. After the professor's daughter was delivered and taken away to a separate baby room, a nurse approached the professor's wife and lied to her that her baby had an abnormally short neck. Although the girl's neck later turned out to be perfect, her immune system was shattered by the staph infection. Breast milk would have been crucial for restoring the girl's health, but her mother didn't have any because of the shock inflicted on her by the nurse, who was just trying to make a living.
Throughout 1997, I was busy reading all I could find about the Armenian Genocide of 1915 and other more or less recent atrocities. I couldn't imagine stories more depressing than those in the books and journals that filled my apartment. But this Ukrainian family turned everything upside down for me. Suddenly, the genocide images turned distant and blurry, replaced in the foreground by the sickly little girl, my own memories of dilapidated Ukrainian health care facilities (which I had repressed as soon as I arrived in Iowa) and a scary revelation that in six months I would be back in Ukraine.
I decided to write about this family, putting their experience into perspective. I interviewed several American health care professionals who had visited Russia on a USAID-funded family medicine development program. Although they held their Russian colleagues in high esteem for persevering in very difficult circumstances, their assessment of the general state of post-Soviet health care field left little room for optimism.
"The equipment, which we would consider disposable, was re-used just out of necessity. It really was something that I would have expected to see in the United States in the 1930s or maybe in the 1940s," one of the doctors told me, meaning not just the bottles for newborns but also syringes, bandages and rubber gloves.
"Cats were used for rodent control in all the hospitals we observed," said another.
- How awful, - thought the Americanized part of my self on hearing this last observation. - What an incredibly graphic reminder that there is nothing surprising in the fact that we are dying out.
- But cats are better than rats, aren't they? So much cleaner, and cute, too, - argued my Ukrainian self, dormant up till then. - If you don't mind a cat on your kitchen table, why are you so opposed to having one at the hospital?
Soon afterwards, the Ukrainian history professor provided me with a confirmation that there could be more than one view on just about anything in the world. By then, I had finished reading and writing about genocide and was slowly recovering. But one day I slipped and found myself watching an astonishing film, Welcome to Sarajevo, which made me cry as I hoped I'd never have to again. When I told the professor about this totally unforeseen experience, his reaction was as stunning. He said: "Well, actually, Bosnians are much luckier than we are - because their genocide received so much publicity, while our [state-imposed] famine [of 1932-33] remains virtually unknown to anyone but a bunch of scholars."
The Ukrainian famine, by some estimates, wiped out about 10 million people, and the efforts to let the world know about this tragedy are yet to be made. And I can't wait for this time, when my historian compatriot would be able to announce that justice has been done and the famine victims have become as "lucky" as the Bosnian Muslims. I only hope that he isn't getting too upset about the fact that Russia's demographic crisis is getting all the attention now, while Ukrainians are left in oblivion again.
I wish I could look at the world from a mountaintop, as the history professor did. Then I'd be able to consider his little daughter very "lucky," despite all the pain she'd been through, because as an infant, she managed to survive - something that 22 out of 1,000 babies in Ukraine fail to accomplish, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.
If my abstract thinking skills were stronger, I'd write a much more logical piece. Maybe one day I'll do better. For now, however, I'll try to learn from Anton Chekhov's A Journey to Sakhalin, a 1894 treatise documenting the appalling conditions to which the Russian government subjected people exiled to this insular penal colony.
"In order to make my task easier and to save time, I've been kindly offered assistance," Chekhov wrote in Chapter III, "but since my main goal in carrying out the census wasn't to obtain the results per se but, instead, the impressions inherent in the information gathering process, I accepted extraneous help on very rare occasions."
Newtopia Magazine
In 1995, my first journalistic mentor recommended that I try writing a piece on the demographic crisis in Ukraine. All I had to say then was, "What crisis? My best high school friend is about to give birth, and at least a dozen other acquaintances are also pregnant. We're gonna have plenty new babies real soon!"
I'm now aware of the issue's extreme complexity, but sometimes I'm still wondering whether the crisis is my fault to some extent. Ukraine's fertility rate has plummeted to 1.3 children per woman, yet my own fertility rate is even lower so far (zero). I lived in Russia during the Ukrainian census of 2001 and obviously haven't gotten into the database, exacerbating the already alarming demographic situation (minus one more Ukrainian).
Abstract thinking isn't one of my strengths when it comes to writing about post-Soviet population decline. I pretend to be following the conventional steps - I make the unthinkable numbers real by supporting them with real people's stories; I put the real people's stories into perspective by introducing experts' opinions and by throwing in the unthinkable numbers -but inside, I'm confused. How can I explain anything to anyone when all that has to be explained is happening to me or around me?
I don't give up right away, though.
To warm up, I skim headlines of a number of stories I've downloaded for preliminary research. They are all about Russia, Ukraine's neighbor: 'UNEARTHING THE RUSSIAN WAY OF DEATH' (by Michael Church, the Independent, January 15, 2001); 'DISREGARD FOR HEALTH IS KILLING RUSSIANS' (By John Daniszewski, the Los Angeles Times, December 16, 2001); 'THE DEATH OF A NATION' (By Andrew Meier, the Time Magazine (Europe),January 22, 2000); 'A PEOPLE SKATING ON THIN ICE' (by John O'Mahony, the Guardian, February 3, 2001); 'DEAD SOULS' (by Murray Feshbach, the Atlantic Monthly, January 1999).
I'm overwhelmed, and I haven't started reading yet.
To gain perspective, I move on to my favorite resource: the U.S. Census Bureau's international demographic database, a user-friendly online collection of estimates and projections for 227 countries and areas of the world. My goal is to find as many countries as possible that have fewer births and more deaths per 1,000 population than Russia.
The only such country, it turns out, is my native Ukraine. According to the 2003 estimates, it has 9.9 births/1,000 and 16.4 deaths/1,000 (while Russia has 10.1 births/1,000 and 14 deaths/1,000). Bulgaria's situation is as grave: 8 births/1,000 (fewer than in Ukraine) and 14.3 deaths/1,000 (more than in Russia).
Before I am bogged down in further amateurish scrutiny of statistics, I note that Russia's annual rate of natural increase (-0.39 percent) is higher than that of Bulgaria (-0.63 percent) and of Ukraine (-0.65 percent). The fact that Russia's making headlines in the Western media while Ukraine and Bulgaria don't, may have a simple explanation: Russia (pop. 145 million) possesses nuclear arms, whereas Ukraine (pop. 48 million) and Bulgaria (pop. 7.5 million) are harmless; even if Russia is dissolving at a slower rate, the impact may still be way too powerful.
I continue looking at the 2003 birth and death rate projections.
Birth rates in Bulgaria, as well as 12 other European countries and Japan are lower than in Ukraine, yet their mortality statistics are nowhere as gloomy as ours. Ukraine's death rate places the country alongside the world's most destitute nations. Chad has the same 16.4 deaths per 1,000 population as Ukraine, which is the lowest rate among the worst off 25 African states and Afghanistan. But Chad's birth rate is 47.1 births/1,000 - and it's not an exception among these drought-, poverty- and war-ridden countries. Afghanistan has 40.6 births/1,000; Rwanda - 41.1 births/1,000, Mali - 47.8 births/1,000, and Niger sets the world record at 49.5 births/1,000 (or five times Ukraine's rate). Botswana's birth rate is "only" 25.5 births/1,000, while its death rate is the highest in this group (31 deaths/1,000), which makes it the only African country experiencing a natural decrease of population.
By now, I seem to begin losing any perspective I may have gained. One sign of this is that the death rate statistics remind me of how a man at a New Jersey grocery store once asked me, "Ukraine. is it somewhere in Africa?"
So finally, I attempt reading those apocalyptically headlined stories about Russia, keeping in mind that they are as much about Ukraine.
"Over the past 10 years, Russia has been hemorrhaging humanity at a rate unprecedented for a modern, industrialized nation, except during times of famine or war," writes John O'Mahony.
"So much of the shrinking Russian population may soon be so ill that long-term solutions to the country's political, economic, and military problems will be inconceivable," concludes Murray Feshbach, a renowned U.S. demographer and former Sovietologist.
At first, this kind of reading scares me to death, but eventually I develop a sort of immunity to it. I realize that I'm ready to interview Ukrainian doctors and ordinary people - even though I don't feel like it. I know what questions need to be asked, but I also know most of the answers. Very unjournalistically, I identify with those poor souls O'Mahony and Feshbach are dedicating epitaphs to.
What if I, or someone I know here, is one tiny drop in the post-Soviet human hemorrhage?
Not necessarily, anyone truly versed in statistics would tell me. Such fear is even more irrational than the fear of flying. What am I so worried about, anyway? That by 2050, if the U.S. Census Bureau's forecast comes true, Uzbekistan will replace Ukraine as the second-largest former Soviet country? But even if its population expands from today's 26 million to 48.5 million 47 years later, Ukraine isn't just going to vanish. We'll still have about 38 million people then, which seems like a lot.
This coming spring, the daughter of my high school friend will turn 8. She is bright, healthy and beautiful, and when I think about her, it seems easy to ignore the fact that, since the year she was born, Ukraine has lost some 7 percent of its population, or more than 3 million people. Nothing matters as long as this one little girl is there. And, of course, there are so many more kids in Ukraine - in 2000, the U.S. Census Bureau counted nearly 5 million, from newborns to 9-year-olds. If at least some of them are as cool as my best friend's daughter, then Ukraine's got a future!
But it's foolish to be so optimistic, and it is difficult, too. When I read that only about 25 percent of Russian children are born healthy, I find it a bit too abstract to really make my heart sink. My best friend's daughter and other lively kids I see around serve as an imaginary shield that's fending off the horrible implications of health care statistics.
There is another little girl, however, who makes the numbers - those 75 percent of sick children - come alive for me.
In 1997, when I lived in Iowa City, I became close with the family of a visiting Ukrainian history professor. His daughter - just like the daughter of my Kyiv friend - was 2.5 years old then. At the hospital where she was born, back in Ukraine, she had been infected with staphylococcus, and by the time I met her, she'd had two cases of pneumonia, each followed by numerous complications.
The girl's temper tantrums, which often included screaming and kicking, are among my most vivid and persistent memories of her. I've never felt as helpless as I did then: she wasn't unhappy about some childish problems; through sobbing, she seemed to be trying to spill out her two and a half years of constant pain. Neither her despairing parents, nor doctors could bring her relief. On her good days, though, she liked to sit at the kitchen table and scribble something in her tiny pink notepad. I loved asking her what she was doing, because she always replied, with much of her father's intellectual superiority: "I'm writing a dissertation."
In 1995, when she was born, her father was juggling three jobs in Ukraine. He was freelancing for a newspaper, selling imported sweaters and coats at a wholesale market, and teaching at a university. The university often received its state-budget funding belatedly, and the professor often didn't see his 100-dollar monthly salary for months. In order to feed his wife, infant daughter, teenage step-son and himself, he turned into a moonlighter, which to some extent affected the quality of his teaching: sometimes, he was so exhausted he was dozing off during seminars he was conducting.
The state-run hospital, in which the professor's daughter was born, also lacked sufficient funding, and the quality of its services suffered as a result, too. Nurses used to feed several newborns from the same bottle, without sterilizing it, and were rude to the women who failed to bribe them, causing some to lose their breast-milk supply. After the professor's daughter was delivered and taken away to a separate baby room, a nurse approached the professor's wife and lied to her that her baby had an abnormally short neck. Although the girl's neck later turned out to be perfect, her immune system was shattered by the staph infection. Breast milk would have been crucial for restoring the girl's health, but her mother didn't have any because of the shock inflicted on her by the nurse, who was just trying to make a living.
Throughout 1997, I was busy reading all I could find about the Armenian Genocide of 1915 and other more or less recent atrocities. I couldn't imagine stories more depressing than those in the books and journals that filled my apartment. But this Ukrainian family turned everything upside down for me. Suddenly, the genocide images turned distant and blurry, replaced in the foreground by the sickly little girl, my own memories of dilapidated Ukrainian health care facilities (which I had repressed as soon as I arrived in Iowa) and a scary revelation that in six months I would be back in Ukraine.
I decided to write about this family, putting their experience into perspective. I interviewed several American health care professionals who had visited Russia on a USAID-funded family medicine development program. Although they held their Russian colleagues in high esteem for persevering in very difficult circumstances, their assessment of the general state of post-Soviet health care field left little room for optimism.
"The equipment, which we would consider disposable, was re-used just out of necessity. It really was something that I would have expected to see in the United States in the 1930s or maybe in the 1940s," one of the doctors told me, meaning not just the bottles for newborns but also syringes, bandages and rubber gloves.
"Cats were used for rodent control in all the hospitals we observed," said another.
- How awful, - thought the Americanized part of my self on hearing this last observation. - What an incredibly graphic reminder that there is nothing surprising in the fact that we are dying out.
- But cats are better than rats, aren't they? So much cleaner, and cute, too, - argued my Ukrainian self, dormant up till then. - If you don't mind a cat on your kitchen table, why are you so opposed to having one at the hospital?
Soon afterwards, the Ukrainian history professor provided me with a confirmation that there could be more than one view on just about anything in the world. By then, I had finished reading and writing about genocide and was slowly recovering. But one day I slipped and found myself watching an astonishing film, Welcome to Sarajevo, which made me cry as I hoped I'd never have to again. When I told the professor about this totally unforeseen experience, his reaction was as stunning. He said: "Well, actually, Bosnians are much luckier than we are - because their genocide received so much publicity, while our [state-imposed] famine [of 1932-33] remains virtually unknown to anyone but a bunch of scholars."
The Ukrainian famine, by some estimates, wiped out about 10 million people, and the efforts to let the world know about this tragedy are yet to be made. And I can't wait for this time, when my historian compatriot would be able to announce that justice has been done and the famine victims have become as "lucky" as the Bosnian Muslims. I only hope that he isn't getting too upset about the fact that Russia's demographic crisis is getting all the attention now, while Ukrainians are left in oblivion again.
I wish I could look at the world from a mountaintop, as the history professor did. Then I'd be able to consider his little daughter very "lucky," despite all the pain she'd been through, because as an infant, she managed to survive - something that 22 out of 1,000 babies in Ukraine fail to accomplish, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.
If my abstract thinking skills were stronger, I'd write a much more logical piece. Maybe one day I'll do better. For now, however, I'll try to learn from Anton Chekhov's A Journey to Sakhalin, a 1894 treatise documenting the appalling conditions to which the Russian government subjected people exiled to this insular penal colony.
"In order to make my task easier and to save time, I've been kindly offered assistance," Chekhov wrote in Chapter III, "but since my main goal in carrying out the census wasn't to obtain the results per se but, instead, the impressions inherent in the information gathering process, I accepted extraneous help on very rare occasions."
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