At the Gomel train station the toilet is of a squatting variety with half-doors that do not conceal heads and legs, and a bucket for used toilet paper. It certainly trumps yesterday’s train toilet, the one with the dubious cloth stuffed in the wall. Billie is beside herself with horror and amusement, but all her proud resistance is gone. We pay three hundred and eighty Belarusian roubles for two squares of brown toilet paper. In the cubicle she is giggling so hard she cannot pee from laughter. ‘If toilets were anything like this at Australian schools, no one would go,’ she says.
Dear Diary,
Now I am in a train station in the middle of Belarus waiting for the train to Kiev that comes at 2 in the morning, that is eleven hours away. While I am writing I’m staring at the statue of Lenin and listening to Soviet music, how comical.
A milky-white statue of Lenin is in front of us; I have to get close to make sure it is what I think it is. This is what journalist Alexander Feduta describes as the Belarusian President Aleksandr Lukashenko’s successful attempt if not to stop then to really slow down time. I am tempted to say to Billie, ‘Look around, this is a ready-made slice of the Soviet Union for you. The Empire is long since dead but this is like its living museum.’ For a moment I wonder if there was a reason for us to be taken off the train to Kiev after all, because where else could Billie see such an embodied approximation of her mother’s childhood?
Since his election in 1994, Lukashenko, who is colloquially referred to as Bat’ka (slang for Father), has acquired international fame (or infamy). He is what is known euphemistically as a ‘colourful personality’, a former farm manager who styles himself as a man of the people and likes to be photographed in a combine harvester or next to one lucky cow. He is making the tiny country he leads famous too, for it is the last European dictatorship left standing. (Russia may still catch up, though not quite yet.) He cultivates friendships with Cuba and Iraq, and accuses Western countries of espionage and subversion. As we observe his crude, transparent, comical manipulations of his people we may fall over laughing but, whatever it is that Lukashenko does, it has been working for well over a decade. Alexander Feduta, an erstwhile press secretary for the president who has written extensively about his own radical change of heart, points out that Belarus is about ‘the only one of the post-Soviet states that not only does not conceal the ideological basis of its economic policies as well as the direction of its foreign policy, but is most sincerely proud of it’. Ideology, rather than shared ethnicity, blood, soil or language is the binding substance of ‘Project Independent Belarus’. All tertiary students are required to complete a university subject, ‘The Fundamentals of Belarusian Ideology’, just as several decades before, their parents and grandparents could not graduate without completing ‘The Foundations of Marxism–Leninism’. And this ideology is not strictly speaking simply neo-Soviet or neo-Communist. After all, Belarus is not a dazed former republic refusing to accept the demise of the Empire, it is a post-Soviet nation that has used parts of Soviet legacy and iconography for its own purposes. It retained the so-called Soviet middle class – teachers, doctors, engineers, who work for the government and depend on the government for their livelihood. This Soviet middle class, to which my parents belonged, no longer exists in Russia, where even those people in the government’s employ have to seek other sources of income to survive.
For the five US dollars we spend at a grocery store not far from the train station, Billie and I eat like kings. For dessert we buy crème brûlée and the Eskimo ice-cream of my childhood, which tasted like angel’s tears dripped in fructose. With hours to kill before our train arrives in the middle of the night, we get a rest room – fourteen thousand Belarusian roubles for twelve hours – with two single beds and no heating (even though it is European autumn). The rest room attendant has layer upon layer of jumpers and shawls wrapped around her. In the basement, the cloakroom attendant snoozes on the table underneath her artificial fur coat. Desperate for some sleep, Billie and I put on everything we have with us, and then on top of that we don our coats, boots, hats and gloves. In this state, barely able to move our limbs, we throw ourselves onto our beds.
‘How is it possible to fall asleep in your coat and boots?’ Billie is puzzled and amused at once.
‘If you need to sleep, you will,’ I reply. ‘It is not that bad actually. We have beds to stretch out on, we have warm clothing, no one is bothering us. A real traveller can sleep standing up if need be.’
‘Yes, actually, it is not that bad,’ says Billie. ‘It’s good for the book too.’ She quickly gets up to take a photo of me. I look too ridiculous for this moment, drowning in my own clothes, not to be captured for eternity. One day her kids will laugh, looking at this photo of their grandma. As Billie gets back into bed I make a wish. It is very simple. If my daughter, despite the utter weirdness and discomfort of our sleeping arrangements, and in the face of everything else we have been through in the past twenty-four hours, manages to fall asleep here and now, then everything will be OK. OK not just on this trip, but in general, in our lives. I close my eyes and doze off. When I open them reluctantly, Billie is asleep.
In the middle of the night we board the train for Kiev. It is about 3 am when we approach Teryuha railway border crossing. I hear Sidorov’s voice before he comes through the door of our cabin. He is ordering the train attendant – a man in his thirties – to turn the lights on everywhere. Sidorov takes our dark-blue Australian passports and, satisfied, returns them to us with a smirk.
‘See,’ he says, ‘and you were worried. Now everything is in order. You can get to your Ukraine.’
‘Yes,’ I say, ‘we had a great time in Gomel, cultural leisure and all.’
‘Pleased to hear,’ he replies.
I am waiting for something to go wrong at the last possible moment, for some other obscure bureaucratic procedure to be revealed that would prevent us from getting to Ukraine, but Sidorov is walking away from us, his hands are empty, our passports and suitcase are with us, his steps are receding and, get this, we are free, mobile and warm (the train is heated). Billie hugs me and falls asleep in an instant – no longer a hysterical novice, by now an authentic veteran of our travels into the otherland.
11
1941
AS A HISTORIAN I study human memory or, more precisely, its social dimensions. I am interested in how memories of the past bind us together, but also in the speed with which they can toss us onto the opposite sides of barricades. Historians, especially the ones who are not afraid to talk to people, know all too well how flawed human memory is – fragmented, unreliable and blinkered. Sometimes people unconsciously replace their own experiences with newspaper headlines. Sometimes they do just the opposite, assimilating things they have read or heard about as their own experiences. Sometimes – actually quite often – they struggle to speak in their own voices, slipping into a prevailing public idiom and all its accompanying clichés. Human memory is not only selective, it is incredibly responsive to environment.
For all my professional knowledge of memory’s many flaws, I was still taken aback to discover the gaps and imperfections in my own recall of the years I spent growing up in the USSR. I had to ask Marina how exactly our trip to Grebenshikov’s apartment on Perovskaya Street ended, because I could not bring it to mind at all. She, on the other hand, did not have to think hard. The colour of the gouache paint we brought with us, the words of the disgruntled neighbour, fell out of her as if these memories were just sitting there waiting for the question to be asked. I also had to ask my parents to fill in the blurry bits of 1989 and they did not hesitate – they remembered dates, names, emotions and whole blocks of dialogue. I found too that I could not remember things about World War II that I had once known by heart; possibly because having discovered the extent of lies we were told, I have dishonoured most of the historical knowledge I acquired in adolescence. (I don’t know if the baby got thrown out with the bathwater, but there was plenty of bathwater on the floor.) My memory, I discovered, was just like that joke about holey cheese.