Since my departure, I haven’t added anything more. I’ve had to concentrate too much on the going to spend time chiseling my road map. Nomads know this all too welclass="underline" maps aren’t useful for directing you during your journey, but rather for dreaming about your journey during the months leading up to your departure. It would have been blasphemous to add notes about things actually seen to my notes about the things I had dreamed about or imagined. So my map of the European frontier became untouchable, the representation of a different, imaginary journey. I dive back into it to re-evoke those magnificent moments of excitement and anxiety that mark every departure’s eve. I lose myself in a forest of annotations. The synagogue in Grodno, the wizard of Lublin, the monuments of Pinsk, the decaying grandeur of Daugavpils. On the Russian-Finnish border I read, “Mannerheim Line, immense fortifications in the middle of the woods.” Or: “Seto minority—Estonian language, Orthodox faith, pagan mentality.”
Finally I doze off, and an hour later there it is, the first ray of sunlight darting in and out among the rows of poplars, gilding the blue mattress of dew covering the fields. It’s already an Asiatic sunlight, wispy and warm, apricot colored, like the Anatolian high plateau. Meanwhile, the corridor of the car is filling with people who silently return their pillowcases and sheets to the conductor, a big, snarling Ukrainian woman in the proto-Soviet mold. The women conductors I encountered in Russia were better. Dressed like flight attendants, they were efficient, affectionate, almost maternal. The trains in Russia were better, too. Immaculate toilets, lace curtains on the windows, impeccable ventilation, and samovars restored like new. The decline of empires always begins on the periphery.
Five thirty a.m. We’re slowing down amid dilapidated houses, acacia trees, hanging laundry. We barely have time to realize that we’re coming into Odessa and we already have to get off the train. Platform number eight is full of people: vendors of strawberries, blueberries, and raspberries, ladies in pantsuits offering seaside apartments for rent—“Dacha na morya”—and school groups just arrived from mythological cities: Samara, Luhansk, Saratov, Kaliningrad. The whole of the Other Europe is gathering here in the early morning hours, under the dome of the station at the foot of the age-old plane trees of Odessa—the first of my journey—in a magnificent radiant sunlight, with no shouting, no arguments, in a liquid, patient flow.
Hungry as a wolf and breakfast at six, with fried cabbage, rice and meat rolls, unmistakably Turkish, and fish stuffed in the Jewish way with radish, the dish for which, in the words of Isaac Babel, “it’s worth converting to Judaism.” Detraining has gone wonderfully; I’ve already dropped off my backpack at the hotel and fended off the taxi drivers of Odessa, the most brazen in the empire when it comes to jacking up fares. I’ve walked across Pushkin and Uspenskaya boulevards and taken the measure of the nineteenth-century city with its rectilinear neighborhoods and their immense courtyards. I’ve encountered the latest night owls and the earliest street sweepers, sniffed the smell of coffee, salted sardines, and warm bread. On every block, somebody is washing the sidewalk. The whole of Odessa is engaged in its morning toilette. Odessa is Istanbul and Lisbon, Saint Petersburg and Trieste, all rolled into one.
On the streets, faces that are Slavic, Caucasian, Turkish, Central Asian; freckled blond beauties and Mediterranean women with defiant black eyes. A film passes before me with the extras who have peopled this adventure I’ve been on from the hyperborean lands of the North to the frightful ones of the Minotaur. Jews have been an essential part of the cast; from Saint Petersburg south, I’ve seen impressive signs of their presence-absence, and in fact, here they are, passing before me here, too, groups of three and four on their way to the synagogue on Osipova Street. I follow them, they let me go in with no checks, they give me a yarmulke, and then they get on with reciting their prayers in an adorable Levantine confusion.
But what am I saying, the East? Where I am now is the center. The belly, the soul of the continent. Moreover, this soul is completely outside of that bureaucratic scaffolding that calls itself the European Union. Even geographically, this is the center. On the Tibiscus, in Ukraine, I found an Austro-Hungarian obelisk that marked the midpoint of the continent from the Atlantic to the Urals, and from the Mediterranean to the Barents Sea. Even back then, they knew that Mitteleuropa was not to be found in Viennese cafés but much farther east, even beyond Budapest and Warsaw. The heart beats here, hundreds of miles beyond the ex–Iron Curtain, among the birches and the great wandering rivers, in a terra incognita made of forgotten peripheries.
On my do-it-yourself map, there are no nation-states, only historic border regions that have been swallowed up by geopolitics. Here are their names: Bothnia, where the frozen bottom of the Baltic melds into the tundra; Karelia, a labyrinth of rivers between Russia and Finland; Livonia, covered with lakes and fir trees; and listen to the soothing sound of Courland, with its lagoons and sand dunes battered by the wind. Look in an atlas for East Prussia, Latgale, and Masuria, I get chills down my spine just from pronouncing their names. And what do you say about Polesye, the flattest watershed in the world, the land from whose marshes it was once possible to travel by boat to both the Baltic and the Black Sea? Or the endless rolling hills of Volhynia?
And that’s not all. How about Ruthenia, Podolia, or Bukovina? Try mentioning these names to a travel agent. They’ll think you’re off your rocker. But don’t give up; show them the map. Tell them that these are real places that have rivers, cities, monasteries, synagogues, plains, and mountains. Tell them that you also want to see Budzhak, the last projection of Ukraine before the Danube Delta, a wild island of minarets in the middle of a sea of orthodoxy, an uncharted land of shepherds and Gypsies. Demand to visit Bessarabia, Dobruja, and Thrace.
Reeducate the tourism industry; explain that with sky-high oil prices, travel has to become once again adventure and discovery—stay away from the famous places, choose the unknown peripheries, go back to traveling light. For thirty-six hundred miles, I haven’t come across one tourist village nor even one Chinese restaurant. Italians fewer than few. All of this must mean something.
From Norway south, I haven’t found any nations, only a slow transcoloration that is oblivious to borders and their ridiculous barriers. Poles in Ukraine, Jews in Belarus, Finns in Russia, and Russians in Latvia. The peoples of the frontier always surprised me; they never conformed to cliché, and they were always distant from the political and administrative centers of their countries. They did not echo Italians in saying “Moscow’s a thief,” but they weren’t far from it.
Everywhere I went, I found relics of the moving frontiers of past empires—Russian, German, Ottoman, and Austro-Hungarian—abandoned like erratic blocks in the middle of the Alpine foothills. In Ukraine, I saw a golden Madonna shining atop an ex-minaret. In the Carpathians, I came across tombs of soldiers from Trieste—my hometown—who from 1914 to 1917 had fought in the war for Austria against the czar; in Poland, castles built by Teutonic Knights; and in Belarus, titanic monuments to Stalin.