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  THE BURNING EDGE

  TRAVELS THROUGH IRRADIATED BELARUS

  ARTHUR CHICHESTER

  © 2018 ARTHUR CHICHESTER. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

  ROBACUNA PUBLISHING

  All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be produced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the author except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  Cover photo: Somewhere on the borderlands near Slavgorod

  Back cover: Siboli residents. Slogan-building near Hotimsk. Vova. Radiation sign near Vetka

  All photos are the property of Arthur Chichester

  First edition published by Robacuna Publishing 2018

  ISBN: 9781980787518

  Follow your dreams Chigs…but first go and do your homework

  DEDICATION

  On the edge of a dark wood situated in a northern suburb of the Belarusian capital stands a white church. Up in the bell tower the bearded priest grips the rope with powerful hands and sinks his cloaked body to the ground, sending the reverberating sound of the iron bell out over the treetops where it dissipates into the night sky.

  Inside the church, watched over by icons, a coffin lays on a table surrounded by the friends and family of the middle-aged man it contains. The deceased lies in his best suit with a peaceful look on his face as though he’s just resting after a long day at work. The women present, all with their heads covered by shawls, take turns to read prayers from the Orthodox Bible at the lectern, filling the large echoey hall with the gentle sound of ancient Slavonic words. Meanwhile, us men sit beside the coffin in thoughtful silence, our stares alternating between the face of our deceased friend and our own clasped hands, no doubt like myself they are contemplating their own mortality and how a man who recently seemed so healthy could now be lying here in the wooden box in which he shall soon be buried.

  Perched close to the coffin on a small wooden stool is the deceased man’s mother, an elderly woman with deep wrinkled features who has not taken her eyes off her dead son’s face since I arrived an hour earlier. She will end up staying the night beside him, refusing to leave his side and take rest even for a minute despite friends offering to take her place, assuring her that her son shall not be left alone. The partner of the dead man, a beautiful red haired woman dressed head to toe in mourning black like all the women in the hall, silently makes tea and sandwiches in the cramped kitchen at the back of the church for the mourners who have come to pay their respects at this late hour of a summer’s evening. She masks her pain with smiles and by feigning interest in the small talk at the church’s kitchen table; mundane conversations we engage in to somehow cope with the brevity of the situation. But she isn’t really with us. Her mind is elsewhere, no doubt somehow trying to come to terms with the sudden and unexpected loss of her partner and friend and, I expect, with what the future holds for her and knowing that she will have to face it alone. Just a couple of months before I had been in their apartment sharing a meal with them at their kitchen table in the suburbs of the city, toasting their health. And now so suddenly, so unexpectedly, this.

  The man in the coffin, holding a small wooden cross in his carpenter’s hands, made the bed on which I slept whilst I was in Minsk. It was the bed in which one night I woke and in the darkness lay imagining a journey into the radiated forests of Belarus.

  His name was Igor and this book is dedicated to his memory.

  PROLOGUE

  I write this from a rundown hotel room constructed long ago in a small bleak town hacked out of the dark forests that surround it. It is a place where outsiders rarely visit and where those with the opportunity to do so have left long before.

  Outside through the cracked window, as the evening darkness rolls in slowly over the grey town I see Lenin, his arm is held aloft pointing past me somewhere towards the abandoned factories that stand guard on the edge of town, encasing the place inside a wall of cracked cement and rusting rebar. In contrast to the emaciated people who walk the streets in this distant outpost of the country Lenin is well cared for, his plinth freshly painted, the black tiles beneath his thick shoes shiny and new.

  At one end of the square the same people whom I have spent the last few weeks travelling among huddle under a steel bus shelter to avoid an unexpected evening downpour, all waiting for their way out of the town to arrive. To where I don't know. This town situated in what locals collectively call ‘The Zone’, is surrounded by villages and settlements where life is even harder, where the people feel even more neglected by a government who do not have the budget to provide well for them. Places unknown to all but those who live there, but where, despite the hardness of a life lived in a land that has suffered the cruelest of fates, the spirit of the Belarusian people refuses to be extinguished.

  Belarus is a land which is synonymous with suffering. A historical pawn of greater powers: Poles, French, Swedes and Germans have all rolled over this flat marshy land by horse’s hoof and tank’s track, trampling all beneath them. And when no enemy appeared from the forests to the west they were killed instead by their Slavic brothers from the east in terrors and reforms done in the name of failed ideologies. Nowhere suffered more in the 20th century than this small green land, its soil stained red as though the national flag were turned upside down.

  Every town and village I visit has a memorial inscribed with the names of men and women who left to fight for their land, for their family, or sometimes not knowing for what exactly, but who did not return. Blood lines that had survived unbroken from distant times destroyed by bayonet and bullet, the only reminder to their very existence a name engraved in stone. And as though the land had not suffered enough, in 1986 Belarus suffered one final cruel invasion, a victim again through no fault of its own.

  When the reactor exploded at Ukraine's Chernobyl nuclear plant on that fateful day in April it sent its deadly poison into the night sky from where it slowly drifted north, over the border from where it came before settling down onto the towns and forests, rivers and farmlands of this small country, infecting everything and everyone in some way.

  I have spent the last few weeks riding antiquated buses and suburban trains to the end of the bumpy line. Walked muddy roads and remote forest tracks, staying in run down hotels and wooden cottages in ancient villages unmarked on modern maps, a flaneur of the nation’s tragic hinterland, wanting to see for myself a corner of Europe so little known to outsiders but at times questioning my own sanity and will to continue.

  It's now half past nine and the passengers sheltering beneath the bus stop are gone. The town square is empty except for Lenin who stands awake in the darkness, his eyes fixed on the constellations. A few lights dimly shine out from the pre-fabricated apartment buildings opposite, and as the rain rattles the window of my hotel room I return to my bed and fall asleep to the voice of a moustached president speaking from the television screen in the corner.

  PREFACE

  Somehow unexpectedly I had ended up living in Minsk, the austere capital of the Republic of Belarus, studying at the State Linguistic University that is situated just a stone’s throw from the Eternal Flame which commemorates the victory over the fascist armies who had burned and slaughtered their way across the country almost eighty years before.

  My original plan had been to go to Moscow for my studies but a sudden last minute demand for more tuition money than originally agreed upon had left me hastily searching around for an alternative school on a matter of principle. Phone calls were made and faxes sent to unfamiliar international dialling codes and a week later I found myself waiting for an interview in a small subterranean room at the red bricked Belarusian embassy building tucked away in a salubrious corner of West London. An hour later
I had my visa and a week after that I landed at Minsk 2, the capital’s functionally named international airport.

  The Russian language course I had enrolled on would, I hoped, take me from the conversational level I had arrived in the country with to somewhere further along the road towards fluency. However, not long after the start of my studies it became abundantly clear that the rigid classroom environment with its endless grammar drills and stuffy text translations that my lecturers insisted upon were not wholly conducive to my improvement. That just wasn’t the way I learned best. I needed to speak to people.

  To alleviate the boredom I would spend much of my lessons looking out of the classroom window gazing at the grey apartments and office buildings opposite, imagining the lives and events going on inside them: office intrigues, spousal affairs, celebrations and heinous crimes hidden behind heavy curtains…It was there that I decided I would seek to improve my Russian instead.

  I had arrived in Belarus determined to suppress any preconceived notions as to what exactly would await me, trying as much as possible to ignore what was written about the country and its infamous ‘Last Dictator’ as the Western press had labelled the President. To read newspaper articles and books written by Western academics was to believe that Belarus was an oppressive state akin to North Korea where the inhabitants lived lives cowering in constant fear, all the while being spied upon by an ever present secret police force willing to do away with anyone who dared criticise. Once inside the country however it did not take long to realise that that was just a lazy misconception written by people who had either a taste for gross exaggeration, or more likely, had never actually spent any time in the country itself. Despite the supposed experiences of others I was never followed by men in trench coats, my room wasn’t bugged, nor unfortunately was I honey-trapped by beautiful women wanting to compromise me. It was all a bit disappointing, a bit too normal.

  However, I soon began to fall in love with the city, with its grand Soviet architecture, its immaculate parks and underground bars full of sweet hubble-bubble smoke, but most of all with the people who called Minsk home.

  The natives of the city were a gregarious and outspoken bunch who possessed an extremely dry humour and joie de vivre that made living there a hugely enjoyable experience. Good friendships were formed easily and when classes were over for the day I’d head out to spend my evenings at kitchen tables in apartments located at the end of buckled tram lines in the rougher outer regions of the city such as the down at heel worker’s quarter of Serebranka. Places where foreigners were not seen. And it was there in those Soviet housing estates where along with new found friends I’d sink endless bottles of the locally produced Wild Duck vodka and sing the songs of Tsoi and Vysotsky, all the time gradually improving my Russian to a point to where it was consistently usable no matter what the situation.

  Conversations were always candid in the capital city. Contrary to what I had been told to expect by authors of books and articles, the people were keen to discuss politics and current affairs. In supermarket queues, on trams and buses or in apartment kitchens where I spent my evenings, locals gave their opinions about life and politics in Belarus honestly and openly. People did not hold back in their criticisms of the Government or the President and what changes they would like to see. Nobody lowered their voice so as to not be overheard or looked over their shoulder before saying what they thought in public. As one friend scoffed early on during my stay when I naively asked if people were afraid to speak openly; ‘We are the grandchildren of the men and women who defeated the Nazis.’ The meaning was clear; Belarusians feared nobody.

  Friends of mine in the city occasionally reminisced about growing up in distant towns and villages located along the Russian border in the east of the country, and how after Chernobyl they had been forced to evacuate those very towns and villages they had been raised in leaving behind all they knew and that was familiar. What became rapidly clear was that there were two Belarus’; there was Minsk with its shopping centres and trendy wine bars and five star hotels and then there was the hinterland which was an altogether different place. A place that seemingly came to a standstill when the first radiation particles began to rain down all those years ago. A place that few people went back to.

  And so despite my Russian steadily improving I was always acutely aware of the fact that I could only know so much about a country whilst sat at a kitchen table in the capital. If I wanted to know Belarus a little better, and what it was my friends had left behind there after what had befallen the region, I’d have to go see for myself and venture out beyond the palisades of conifers that encircled Minsk.

  As my flight took off and I headed back to London at the end of my studies I looked out of the window of the old Russian plane and gazed down at a green land sprinkled with small wooden villages that were of another time altogether. Then the plane banked and Belarus disappeared from view beneath the grey clouds. At that moment I made a promise to myself that one day I would return and visit the irradiated region I had been told about.

  ONE

  On a hot summer’s morning I left Kiev, the golden domed capital of Ukraine heading north on a melting provincial highway. It was almost three years to the day since I had watched Belarus disappear beneath the clouds. Earlier I had crossed the wide Dnieper river that dissected the city down the middle and ridden the metro to the last stop on the East Bank, the rundown area of Lisnaya where Kiev’s poorest residents: African students and washed up Turkish sex tourists resided in crumbling concrete towers surrounded by factory workers and women who despised them. I exited the heavy doors of the metro station and walked along the two lane highway, passing beyond the metal kiosks and cheap roadside prostitutes who stood in the fish-netted uniform of their profession, and on an empty stretch of the heat buckled road held my hand out looking for a lift to the border. Soon afterwards a rusting Volkswagen with Belarusian plates pulled up beside me. I climbed in the back, wedging myself in amongst cardboard boxes and plastic shopping bags emblazoned with familiar brand names.

  Vitali and Irina, a Belarusian couple in their early thirties, were returning home to Minsk from a shopping trip to the Ukrainian capital where prices for just about everything were substantially lower than back home. My plan to travel through rural Belarus raised barely contained scoffs in the front seats.

  ‘What do you think you are going to see there? The provinces are just full of drunks,’ Irina said, not taking her eyes off the pencil straight road that stretched out ahead of us.

  ‘That’s all we have in our towns, drunk men and their suffering women working to keep food on the table. Better go to Nesvizh castle instead, it’s very beautiful.’

  Once we were past Kiev’s satellite town of Brovary with its skyline of cranes and half built apartment buildings the road towards the border became emptier and the villages through which we passed visibly poorer. Just before the city of Chernigov, with its gilded church roofs, as a summer rain storm exploded over the endless fields of sunflowers, we turned west onto a rough road that was deserted except for the occasional rusting car displaying Belarusian plates.

  We were headed to a little used border post that straddled the muddy banks of the Dnieper which flowed down through Russia and Belarus before entering Ukraine on its way towards the Black Sea, hundreds of miles to the south.

  As we sped on westwards elderly village residents sat by the side of the road in front of their wooden cottages selling an assortment of home-grown fruit and vegetables on small rickety tables. Poverty was not just limited to the rural regions of Ukraine however. Kiev was full of pensioners lining up in food queues at charity trucks waiting for a ladle of soup and a chunk of black bread. Others had resorted to begging or selling detritus collected over a hard-lifetime on suburban pavements hoping to earn a copeck or two. There were however few takers for their broken Soviet remnants. Ukraine after the Maidan revolution, or as it had been officially named by some EU think-tank, ‘The Revolution of Dignity’, was
an infinitely harder place to live for most of the population than it had been before Yankovich had been undemocratically ousted and forced to flee eastwards towards the safety of Russia. Even staunchly pro-Maidan Ukrainian friends of mine were questioning if it had all come at too great a cost. The answer to that question was written large on the faces of the hollow pensioners that had been reduced to begging in the city’s subway underpasses and the new contours of the nation’s borders.

  Eventually we came to a forlorn border post which consisted of nothing more than a collection of corrugated huts above which the Ukrainian flag limply fluttered in the afternoon breeze. Surrounded by nothing but forest and far from the nearest city it was a bleak outpost for a border guard to have to while away his career checking the passports of the few travellers who passed by on this rarely used back-route between the two countries. A young fresh faced guard with rainwater gushing off his cap’s wide brim inspected our passports before stamping them firmly and waving us through with a large smile. Ukraine may have been reduced to a shell of what it had been but the natural friendliness of the Ukrainian people was as unwavering as ever. We drove up and over a rough concrete bridge that spanned a river which flowed wide and slow beneath us, the colour of cobalt as it meandered between fenceless fields of tall grasses where chestnut horses grazed in the downpour. Vitali weaved the car between concrete bollards until after a kilometre we pulled up at the Belarus Custom’s post. A platinum blonde border guard in a neatly pressed uniform handed me an immigration card as I entered the hut.