The Burning Edge Read online

  ‘I’ve never seen a British passport before,’ she cheerily informed me whilst closely inspecting it under a fluorescent light.

  It was still possible to feel like a pioneer in this part of the world.

  Eventually after a phone call to a superior and repeatedly scanning my passport pages she squashed the orange rubber entry stamp onto my visa, the barrier was raised, and on we drove into a land of dark impenetrable forests.

  TWO

  On April 28, 1986 radiation detectors at a Swedish nuclear plant began to twitch rapidly as alarms went off. At first the scientists thought that a nuclear bomb had been detonated somewhere on the Continent. However, as alarms started to trigger at plants all across Europe and then further afield, the source of the radiation was traced to the little known nuclear power plant of Chernobyl, located in what was then the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. A few days later, and after endless denials, the Soviet government led by Mikhail Gorbachev reluctantly admitted that there had indeed been an accident and millions of deadly radiation particles had been thrust into the Soviet skies.

  I remember returning home from school around that time and finding my mother and father glued to a news report which showed grainy images of men in lead suits climbing down from helicopters onto a vast roof and rapidly shovelling debris into a gaping hole of torn steel and concrete.

  In the following weeks teachers at school asked us to fill shoe boxes with anything we could spare: old toys, clothes and books, which would then be sent to schools in the region most affected by the disaster, namely what was then the Soviet Republic of Belarus. A place we had never heard of. Along with our bric-à-brac we were encouraged to enclose letters addressed to children we would never know or meet nor fully understand exactly what it was that they had suffered. And then not long afterwards, when it was clear that the radiation would not affect us in any life changing way in our corner of Europe, the news programmes moved onto other stories and the greatest of man-made disasters was slowly forgotten about.

  However, whilst we far from the tragedy returned to our lives and carried on as before, those who lived in the regions directly affected by the Chernobyl accident did anything but. Far away at the other end of the Continent, people north of the reactor who had lived in the path of the falling radiation particles that sunny April morning and the days which followed, were being evacuated from their homes in towns and villages all along the eastern part of the small Soviet republic. Whilst we in England gathered around our television sets to watch the World Cup, in the forests of Belarus villages were being bulldozed and buried beneath the contaminated soil and hospitals were rapidly filling with the first influx of sick people.

  That was over thirty years ago and yet despite the winters and summers that have passed, the people of Belarus continue to suffer.

  THREE

  On winding roads we sped through orderly villages and towns: Komarin, Savichi, Bragin. This was the backwaters of a country that was itself the backwaters of the Continent. When friends back home had asked me where I was preparing to travel my response had usually drawn confused expressions, not sure if they had misheard. Like the nation of Syldavia from the Tin Tin comics, nobody was quite sure if Belarus really existed at all. Eventually I just started replying ‘Russia’ when asked. It was easier that way.

  Irina continued to point out what she considered to be the folly of my travel plans.

  ‘Look at these places,’ she said as we passed through poor wooden villages strung out along the empty rural highway.

  ‘What are you going to see here? Nesvizh has a beautiful castle, tourists usually go there. Let us take you there instead.’

  When I insisted that pretty castles and tourist sights held no real interest for me and that I was more interested in seeing something of the hinterland, regardless of the poverty, she changed tack.

  ‘Someone could kill you, people don’t have much out here and you’re a foreigner. Tell him Vitali.’

  But her husband seemed more positive about my trip.

  ‘You will not be killed,’ he promised cheerily before adding, ‘but you will almost certainly be robbed.’

  I knew however that the only inconvenience I might possibly face would be that of the loneliness one occasionally suffers as a solo traveller on the road.

  And it was all along that road, on the neat grassy verges on the edge of the woods that we sped past, that small signs began appearing at regular intervals. Painted bright red and depicting a skull above the words ‘ENTRY FORBIDDEN’, they were the first hints of what had befallen the region.

  FOUR

  The town we were heading to stood on the edge of the official Chernobyl Exclusion Zone, a huge tract of the country evacuated and sealed off with guard posts and road barriers from all but the few who were willing to work inside it. It would be hundreds, if not thousands of years before the land within would be safe enough for regular human habitation to begin again. However by looking at the map and tracing the boundary of the official Zone with large towns such as Mozyr and Hoiniki sitting just outside of it, it was obvious to me that it had been created with more than just dangerous radiation levels in mind, it had been created by simple economics. Certain towns had simply been too big and expensive to evacuate. Either that or by some immense fluke or Godly intervention the majority of Chernobyl’s fallout had landed on villages and forest alone and none of the larger towns. In other words, although towns like Hoiniki or Bragin lay outside the Zone, they were I was willing to bet no less radiated than many of the evacuated villages within it.

  We eventually turned off the highway at a junction marked with large concrete letters spelling out the name Hoiniki from where my journey into the country would begin. Vitali guided us through the quiet streets of the distant outpost of the Republic until we pulled up outside the town’s hotel, a squat Soviet construction set back from the road in a pretty garden of apple trees. I leveraged myself out of the overloaded Volkswagen and offered some dollars towards the petrol which was refused with a wave of the hand. As they drove off I could see Irina shaking her head, no doubt she was telling Vitali that I should have gone to Nesvizh.

  The hotel entrance was protected by two sets of heavy doors designed to keep out the winter winds that barrelled through the country as summer came to an end each year. On entering, I walked the dark corridor to the reception where a middle-aged woman sat knitting a pair of mittens behind the counter.

  ‘I suppose you’re a Pole,’ she said, handing me a form to fill in as I laid my passport on the wooden counter top, revealing the lion and unicorn of the United Kingdom’s coat of arms.

  ‘An Englishman? Well fancy that! Here for work I expect. No?! Tourism! In Hoiniki?!’

  ‘Did you hear that Tanya?’ she called out into the silent darkness of the hotel corridor.

  A woman wearing a bright blue sweater with the words ‘Love Machine’ emblazoned across her chest in English popped her head out of a doorway in the shadows.

  ‘Yes I heard! English! A tourist!’ she repeated excitedly.

  I climbed the staircase to fumble for my room along the dimly lit corridor whilst downstairs in the reception hall I could still hear the women discussing my arrival in excited tones.

  ‘English! A tourist!’

  In Soviet times there had been only a handful of towns foreigners could visit in what was then the BSSR, and Hoiniki being so close to a major nuclear plant and so far from a transiting national highway was most certainly not on that short list. And so strangers with passports of different colours were certainly an oddity in the region that was only relatively recently opened up to outsiders. Not to mention of course that the very idea that a foreigner would travel from far away to visit a provincial town in Belarus such as Hoiniki for no other reason than to take a look around was to locals somewhat incredulous, and no doubt, a little suspicious.

  As the sun set over the southern corner of the country I went out in search of food, walking along Kirov Street wi
th its Soviet architecture of boxy five storied apartment buildings and Grecian columned government offices that you see all over the fallen empire. I could have been anywhere in the former USSR, little distinguishing the town from places I had visited in Ukraine or Russia or further afield. The only uniquely Belarusian feature was the deafening quietness of the place. As I headed up Kirov Street I pulled on door handles to cafes that were all closed, signs informing me they were open only on Saturdays, locals no doubt not having the disposable income for such luxuries as meals outside of the home very often. The streets of the town were practically devoid of people, the exception being some elderly residents who passed time in contemplative silence on painted benches outside their apartment buildings. In the centre I bought an ice cream from a street-vendor who had placed her mobile freezer in front of a bar where rough looking patrons sat drinking beer on a terrace locked behind a steel cage. A police car drove slowly past, the driver watching me intently, a new face in town.

  Aimlessly I continued walking the wide empty streets of Hoiniki looking for a place to eat, eventually stumbling upon the Broadway Bar which was hidden away on the second floor of a grey industrial building that overlooked a muddy car park full of rusting cars that had been abandoned long ago. Three bored looking teenagers sat in the gloomy half-light of the bar sharing a glass of beer between them. Hungry from the journey I ate a burger containing a type of meat I didn’t recognise and then with no other entertainment options to be found despondently headed back to my hotel.

  By chance, I passed a modern memorial that stood overlooking a field of sunflowers on the edge of the town. A statue of a mother holding a dove in her hands behind which curved a concrete wall inscribed with the names of villages in the region that had been evacuated and buried after the Chernobyl disaster: Radin, Borshevka, Sintsi, Lesok, Novopozhrovsk, Khvoshevka…the list curved on and on. Villages that had been founded half a millennium before, torn apart by the metal jaws of the bulldozer and buried, taking their history and contamination to the muddy depths with them leaving no trace of their existence. Chernobyl had caused a cultural holocaust.

  I continued home but it did not take long walking the streets in the enveloping darkness before I realised I could not possibly be heading in the right direction. Instead I was somewhere on the outskirts of town having passed the last of the concrete apartment buildings and was now heading along a road lined with small wooden cottages surrounded by pretty picket fences. It was eleven at night and no cars were passing. Unsure how to find my hotel and not wanting to walk further out of town I waited on a bench outside a cottage until eventually in the distance I heard the rusty squeak of bicycle wheels and I shouted out to the approaching outline of a cyclist that was slowly emerging from the evening darkness.

  ‘A tourist?’ Edvard questioned, surprised by my foreign accent as he dismounted and shook my hand. He spoke Russian with the soft pronunciation of someone born in the southern borderlands. Not as guttural as the Russian spoken in the cities, it was a way of speaking I would hear throughout my journey.

  We walked back together in the direction I’d come from, Edvard pushing his squeaking bicycle beside him. Strapped to the back-rack with an old inner tube was a small greasy sack from which drifted the smell of fresh blood.

  ‘Meat,’ he said noticing my interest.

  ‘That’s how they pay us Zone workers now. It’s fortunate I’m not a vegetarian. Still, others in the town have it worse, some have not been paid anything for months. It’s the crises the bosses say when we ask when we’ll be paid. The crises seems to be the answer to everything these days.’

  Was he not afraid of the dangers of working in the exclusion zone?

  ‘I’m alive aren’t I? Anyway the radiation levels in the Zone are three times lower than here in Hoiniki,’ he chuckled.

  It was exactly as I had suspected.

  We passed a Soviet tank perched on a plinth that commemorated a bloody local battle and then continued on past my hotel, heading instead towards the town’s park. Edvard had lived in Hoiniki all of his twenty-eight years and was keen for me to see something of it. After a mile we came to a stop outside a small white bricked shop that worked through the night. We banged on the metal door until a grilled shutter opened out of which peered the smiling plump face of a middle-aged woman.

  ‘Let us in Valya, I have a foreigner with me. Let him see what a real provincial shop looks like,’ Edvard said.

  ‘Why is he speaking Russian if he’s not one of ours?’ the woman asked, not sure whether to believe him or not but nonetheless sliding the bolt on the metal door to allow us to enter.

  Belarusians always referred to each other and people from the former Soviet republics as “ours”. It was a club that as an Englishman I would never be a part of no matter how many years I spent in the country, how fluent my Russian became or how many vodka bottles I polished off with friends. When I was introduced to people in Minsk people would enquire about me, ‘Is he one of ours?’ “Oh no he’s not ours, he’s English,” came the usual answer. And for some reason it always stung a little that I wasn’t permitted entrance into the exclusive ‘ours’ club, that despite the years I had spent in the wider former Soviet region, the friendships I had formed, my efforts to master the language, there would always be a divide between us.

  The shop was just a small square room packed on three sides with bottles of beer, vodka and chocolates with only a small corner reserved for shelves offering essential food-staples. It would be the same in every shop I visited in the country. In fact in no country I had visited did the people have such sweet-teeth and the desire to get plastered as they did in Belarus. I always saw it as the mark of a great nation where the people had their priorities in the right order.

  We left clutching a bag of plastic beer bottles and headed to the nearby town park. Edvard left his bicycle and meat-wages leaning against a tree by the entrance.

  Should you not lock your bike I asked, or at least take the packet of meat. Someone could steal it. Edvard was confused by my concern.

  ‘This isn’t Moscow, things like that don’t happen in Hoiniki. I never lock my door, in fact I don’t even think I have a door key anymore. That’s our problem in fact, we Belarusians are too obedient.’

  It reminded me of the occasions I had broken minor laws in Minsk, impatiently crossing the road on a red light or drinking a bottle of beer on a tram, and the looks of disbelief on people’s faces, as though they were not sure what such a rule-breaker was capable of doing next; I might take a shit on a war memorial or murder a pensioner.

  An old manor house stood at one end of a gravelled walkway that skirted an abandoned factory made of rough concrete slabs which still had their rusting lifting hooks cemented into them from the time it was constructed.

  ‘A Polish prince lived there once, he built the manor but of course that was long ago. Then the Bolsheviks came and he disappeared. Under the Soviets the manor house became a canteen for factory workers, now it’s a museum.’

  The Soviet government had had a habit of reducing reminders of all that happened under the old ways to something cheap. Churches became pig sties, palaces became worker’s canteens, and the former inhabitants of both became nothing more than whispered memories as they were sent to northern camps in boxcars.

  We came to a newly constructed amphitheater where local musicians performed concerts in the short summer months to local families who were brave enough to withstand the attacks of mosquitoes that buzzed around constantly.

  ‘The concerts are boring, just kids from the music school playing their instruments, but there isn’t much else to do here on weekends so people come to watch. I play in a rock band, but we have never been allowed to perform here despite asking the local council repeatedly. I think we are seen as too avant-garde for local tastes,’ he said, barely concealing his pride at the fact he was part of a blacklisted group.

  We sat on the stage of the amphitheater in the empty park under the orange glow
of street lights and slowly polished off our bottles of beer discussing life in small town Belarus.

  ‘I used to come here regularly with my wife and daughter on weekends, we’d eat ice cream and walk around the park, there’s nowhere else in town to go. But then Svetlana left me and moved to Minsk with a guy. She hasn’t let me see my daughter for months, so I’m taking her to court but if that fails to sort things out I don’t know what I’ll do…’

  He trailed off lost in his thoughts before taking another swig of beer and snapping out of his melancholia.

  ‘Hey, know any Russian songs?’

  And so we stood on the stage as night merged slowly into morning, drinking bottles of Belarusian beer and singing the Soviet rock songs you hear in bars from the Baltic to the Sea of Okhotsk. Finally, Edvard had gotten to perform in Hoiniki’s amphitheater.

  At dawn as the first crack of light appeared over the top of the manor house where the White prince had been disappeared by the Red commissar, we walked back to the hotel, the sound of squeaking wheels and the smell of raw meat accompanying us.

  ‘You know life really isn’t bad here, you’ll see the goodness of the Belarusian people on your journey,’ Edvard said when we arrived back at the hotel.

  ‘I just wish we had a bit more money in our pockets to live normal lives like you do in England. I don’t think that is too much to ask for.’

  With that he straightened the packet of meat on the back of his bicycle, mounted and peddled off unsteadily in the direction of home. The words of Viktor Tsoi drifted into the early morning sky behind him.