Don’t Go There: From Chernobyl to North Korea—one man’s quest to lose himself and find everyone else in the world’s strangest places

by Adam Fletcher

  Stood next to him was Sergei, the local student the tour company had hired to show us around. He was a young, blond, baby-faced, born-and-bred Transnistrian. He held his chin at a depressed height that suggested humility. Humility he wore like a cape.

  “Welcome to Transnistria,” the official said. “Delete that photo!” he barked at Mike, an American sneakily photographing the back of the train station. “This is an official building. No photos.”

  We strolled towards the station. Perhaps detecting a certain intimate, jovial glow emanating from the group, he asked, “Have you all been drinking?”

  With the exception of me, everyone had been drinking. A lot. As per usual. Jack, in his misbuttoned yellow duffel coat, staggered forward to shake the man’s hand. “How you doing, chief. Lovely to see ya.” Officially, Jack was employed as one of our two guides. In practice, he was only qualified to lead a tour through a liquor cabinet. He knew his way around liquor cabinets. Or he knew the way in, anyway.

  The immigration officer squinted at Jack. He didn’t seem to know what to do with a Jack. “I heard reports of loudness on train. Of wvhisky and beer?” A wry smile escaped from the edges of his mouth. “You will fit in well in Transnistria, comrades!”

  At the front of the station we found a rectangular sliding window. Behind it sat a bored woman on a swivel chair. It missed a wheel.

  “Hello, darling. Lovely to see ya. You having a good night?” said Jack, crudely balancing his forearm on the frame of her window, his legs swaying beneath it. She said nothing. She didn’t seem to know what to do with a Jack either.

  The immigration officer seemed delighted to have an audience. He strutted around like a small child given a badge and told to patrol the sandpit. We huddled in front of the window while immigration forms were dispensed. Forms he didn’t care if we filled in; he just wanted to talk.

  “Is there anyone here from France?” he asked first. It was three days after the Bataclan terror attack in Paris. Anne-Sophie, from Paris, raised her hand.

  The man raised his fist to the sky, shook it, brought it back down, and kissed its knuckles. “France, very beautiful country…”

  “Thank you,” she replied.

  “I hear you have been having some…” He paused, trying to find the correct word. “Problems there?”

  Anne-Sophie leaned back, seemingly surprised to hear the loss of 130 lives being described about as trivially as getting a bicycle puncture. “The attacks, you mean?”

  “Yez. Problems. In your Paris. Terrible. Terrible.” The man put his fist to his heart. “Transnistria stands with you!”

  This was both nice and unexpected, and would come, no doubt, as a great relief to France. His voice grew solemn. “Are you refugee?”

  Her mouth opened. Nothing came out. She looked at the rest of us for reassurance that her ears were hearing what her brain was reporting. They were. “A… refugee?”

  “Yes, you apply for asylum?”

  “In… Transnistria?”

  The public official puffed out his already inflated chest. “Yes, in Transnistria. Transnistria is great country!”

  I guess that depends on your definitions of great and country.

  “Erm… well…” She suppressed a smile. “No. I’m just here as a tourist.”

  The man lowered his head and closed his eyes. “Tourist, I see. Well, you are welcome.”

  “He’s probably never left Transnistria,” whispered Sergei. “This may have coloured his understanding of world. Play along otherwise we won’t get our forms stamped.”

  It took some time to fill out our forms because the immigration department only had three pens, and our group had forgone packing anything useful, such as pens, in order to create more space for transporting alcohol.

  It was a farcical scene. Twelve people from countries that do exist, being drunk and raucous and disrespectful to a man in an oversized coat and hat and a woman on a broken swivel chair, asking for a visa to a country that didn’t.

  “Is there anyone here from America?” the border guard asked next. Mike, with the itchy camera-trigger finger stepped into the centre of our huddle. “I’ve been reading about your America,” the man said.

  Mike nodded, trying not to laugh.

  “I’ve been reading about Detroit.” He said the word Detroit as if it were Atlantis, his eyes wide with wonder. “A lot of wolves!”

  “In Detroit?”

  “Yes. In Detroit. A lot of wolves.”

  “Okay…” said Mike, tilting his head.

  “Also,” the man continued, “a lot of crime. In your Detroit.”

  That made more sense. We were back on track, conversationally.

  “Yes, a lot of crime,” Mike answered with a sharp nod. Detroit. Crime. Fine.

  “Maybe,” the man added, stroking his beard contemplatively. He might not have been a travelled man, but he still knew a thing or two about the world. “It’s… because of all the niggers?”

  Oh…

  Slowly our visas were approved. Generously we’d been granted permission to remain in this non-country for twenty-four hours. “It used to be twelve hours,” said Sergei, his arms hanging limply at his sides.

  At the taxi rank, opposite the train station entrance, we found just one solitary taxi. “I’m not sure where the others are,” Sergei said, discussing our predicament with the solitary taxi’s driver, whose downcast expression suggested he had also just arrived here and found it as ridiculous as we did. The rest of the group, having pickled their brains in alcohol, couldn’t manage this level of emotional nuance and so wore the stupid, wide, happy grins of indulgence.

  Fifteen minutes later two cars turned, far faster than necessary, into the station’s empty car park. These two dented, dejected vehicles appeared to have just finished a banger race in which they’d placed well outside the medal positions. They were the unofficial taxi drivers called by the perturbed real one. Sergei told them all that we wanted to go to the AIST hotel. “It has closed down,” the official taxi driver said flatly.

  “Oh,” said Sergei.

  With no better ideas, we decided to go there anyway. I ended up in one of the two unofficial taxis. It was driven by a lanky, clean-shaven, middle-aged man. We’d not yet seen any young people, other than Sergei. The man’s cheekbones protruded out from below sunken, sad eyes. I wanted to buy him a warm meal, then several more. He popped the boot of his small car so we could put our luggage inside.

  “Thank you,” I said, moving nearer to it with my sports holdall. Looking down into the boot I saw that it contained just one giant speaker and no space for bags.

  “Oh,” I said, the group’s new motto. The man nodded at the speaker, breathed in deeply, then slammed the boot closed. That was settled. Four of us piled into the small car, luggage clutched tightly to our chests. I got the plum seat in the front because of my obnoxiously long legs. The driver climbed in next to me, made himself comfortable, turned to me, winked, and spun the volume dial on the stereo to DEAFEN. House music began to play at a loudness and intensity that surpassed common decency. We were suffocated by bass. The man cackled loudly as he hit the accelerator, the tyres screeched, and we spurted out into the (otherwise silent) Tiraspol night.

  The journey was painful, aurally, due to the oppressive volume of this maniac’s music. I self-medicated by imagining how awesome it was going to be here if Transnistria continued to pack as much entertainment into the next day as it had the first forty-five minutes at the train station. It was spoiling us. I decided never to leave, which was going to be difficult since I had to in just twenty-three hours and change.

  The journey took no more than five minutes. The city we passed was surprisingly modern, built in a grid fashion, with large, imposing Soviet buildings that all seemed to have been freshly painted and spruced up for something. The streets were empty. We saw no more than ten humans and not a single wolf.

  The tiny car screeched to a stop in front of a huge, drab, concrete, Death Star of a bu
ilding. The driver switched off the engine, turned to me, and cut the air with a sharp nod. We did it, that nod seemed to say. They doubted us, but we did it. I scrambled for the door handle and tripped and fell onto the tarmac, my ears ringing as if punched by Soviet Russia’s finest pugilists. Getting back to my feet, I looked up at the monolith before us. All of its lights were off. It didn’t look like a hotel. It looked like the sort of place hope went to die, had its corpse been dragged out the back and buried, before being dug back up and shot again, just to be sure. What had its architect been thinking? And, perhaps more importantly, had he or she been adequately punished for those thoughts?

  In front of what might have once been the entrance, five gigantic male humans stood in a row, all silhouetted in the moonlight as if they were posing for an album cover.

  Trance-nistria: So you want to (Communist) Party?

  They looked down at this flash flood of foreigners like patients given a long-feared terminal prognosis. “What’s their job?” asked Pierre, a French Canadian who had the useless talent of always looking as if he’d just woken up.

  “Menacing?” someone answered.

  “Ya’ right boys?” Jack shouted up at them, climbing unsteadily up the few steps to the entrance. “How the devil ’r ya? Lovely night for it, aye?”

  The men said nothing, their arms crossed. One turned and unlocked the building’s front door. Its hinges creaked ominously. Inside the lobby we found a graveyard of things that used to be: a smashed-up vending machine covered in a dirty sheet; an eclectic collection of earthenware pots without plants; mismatched furniture thrown together in a heap and left to rust or dust. Sergei talked to one of the men. He confirmed what we were thinking: “Apparently, you’re the only guests.”

  “Tonight or in the last decade?” asked Pierre.

  Behind the reception desk sat an implausibly old woman, almost certainly the oldest person who has ever lived, surrounded by dust and cobwebs. Possibly she’d been sitting there since the last guests checked out, back in 1967.

  “’ello darlin’,” said Jack. Burp. “Lovely to see ya.”

  She said nothing. Perhaps because she was mummified.

  But then, to my surprise, slowly, she rose from her seat and stepped gingerly out from behind reception clutching a great cluster of keys like a medieval jailer. One elevator was out of order, as indicated by the potted plant blocking its entrance, but she gestured to the other elevator before turning her head to us slowly, like a thoughtful, injured owl.

  “I’m not sure about this,” said Mads, as we stepped in. Mads was an affable Dane, a student of law, and my roommate-to-be. The elevator was carpeted. The colour was puke. We held our breath. It groaned its ascent up to the ninth and final floor.

  Relieved at having not plunged to our death, we swiftly stepped out into a dark hallway. The AIST had prepared a welcome committee for us here in the form of several piles of awning, pipes, and other things that used to be attached to a building, probably this building, in 1967. A light flickered overhead.

  “Blimey,” said Jack. “It’s like Bates Motel fucked The Shining.” The old lady shuffled, as if walking was something she’d read about but not got around to trying just yet, wordlessly towards the corridor’s first bedroom. The beds in it were bare. She gestured towards a chest of drawers. There we found blankets and pillows. “I don’t think we’re the first people to use these,” said Mads.

  I fluffed a pillow. It made a cracking sound like breaking glass.

  “We’ll take it!” said Mads.

  The woman nodded very, very slowly, perhaps unsure of its effect upon her aged spine. She creaked back out into the hallway and on to the next room. That room was to be Jen and Anne-Sophie’s, the only two girls in our otherwise testosterone-heavy group. We heard laughter emanating from the hallway. We found the old lady standing with their doorknob in her hand. It was no longer attached to the door.

  “Feckin’ hell,” said Jack, scratching at the stubble on his neck. A light further down the corridor had seen enough; it flicked one final time and quit the business of illumination. The AIST was a place of wonders. If this was the past, I was more than happy in the present, I realised.

  After dropping our stuff, we regrouped in the lobby, keen to explore Tiraspol’s nightlife, not yet aware that it didn’t exist. We found the city’s streets quiet. Very quiet. A dropping pin would have been shushed, had there been anyone around to do so. Two streets later, we did see something moving, when a midnight-blue police car crawled past us. Its driver looked at us as though we were exotic fruit he didn’t know how to eat yet. The police car was a comically small Lada. It looked as if it were made of Lego. Ladas, while beautiful, lack authority. They’re like monkeys dressed as firemen. Ladas are the sort of car eight clowns tumble out of at the circus, one playing the trumpet. It seemed impossible that this could be the vehicle the Transnistrian police used to inspire the respect, awe, and co-operation of the local populace. There must be no crime here. Or no crime committed by people over 1.6 metres. They’d never have fit into the back—well, unless they were clowns.

  I hurried my step so I could get closer to Sergei.

  “Is there a lot of crime here, Sergei?”

  He chuckled. “Seriously? This place is one big smuggler’s den. There are some towns I can’t take you to. They’re just big outposts for Soviet weapons.”

  “Is it always this quiet?” Chris asked.

  “No.” He shrugged. “It used to be quieter.”

  “It’s beautiful, though,” Anne-Sophie said.

  “Yes. The new prime minister is on a painting offensive, for the election. Paint is cheap. You don’t have to do anything with the insides of the buildings.”

  “Is he a good guy?”

  “No, not really, same like others.”

  On the fifteen-minute walk to the restaurant we passed ten pedestrians, about a dozen cars, and two police Ladas. We kept seeing the same word again and again: Sheriff.

  Sheriff Supermarket, Sheriff Hotel, Sheriff Bakery.

  “What is this sheriff?” I asked Sergei between mouthfuls of spicy pepperoni pizza at the only open restaurant.

  “The sheriff is the richest man in Transnistria,” he said, taking a swig of beer. “He used to be the police chief, back in the nineties. Apparently he was the only person who could give out business licences, so gave himself all the business licences. Now he owns almost everything. He gets rid of any competition.”

  I imagined dissidents being whisked away to remote forests, their hands and feet tied, their faces squashed against Lada windows. The sheriff sounded like a malignant Transnistrian Bruce Wayne, with Tiraspol as his Gotham City.

  “I’m surprised that one person can control that much,” said Mads. Sergei lowered his shoulders, his face emotionless. “You shouldn’t be. This is a country that no one knows exists. You can do what you want here.”

  “How bad is the corruption then?” I asked.

  “Hmm… Let me think…” Sergei’s eyes twinkled. “Ah, I remember. It’s all day, every day. For example, next week I will have my driver’s test.” He took another sip of beer. “I’m going to pass.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “The guy told me when I booked it. If I want to pass I need to pay him fifty dollars.”

  Our mouths tumbled open. “This is why I didn’t go to university. You can only pass if you pay the bribe before each test. I don’t have money. So now I stay home. I go to University of Google.”

  As sad as this was, Sergei seemed totally unaffected by it. There was no hint of emotion or resentment in his voice, as if he were reading the weather forecast for a country he knew he’d never visit.

  “In hospital,” he continued, seeing he had an enraptured audience, “if you want to get treatment, you bribe doctor. With bribe you get treated today; without it, in eighteen months.”

  “Do you think Transnistrian culture will change over time?”

  “There is no Transnistri
an culture,” he said, forcefully. “We’re Russian. That’s it.”

  After dinner, the group wanted to go “drinking.” A novel idea and a nice change of pace from all the drinking they’d done earlier in the day, and all the previous days.

  “I know a place,” Sergei assured us.

  “Will it be busier than the restaurant?” Chris asked, scanning the empty seats around us. Three parallel streets of the Tiraspol grid later, we entered a karaoke bar and got the answer: No.

  Upon entering, as if on strings activated by the door, two staff members popped up from behind the bar. There were no other guests. “It’s like The Truman Show fucked The Twilight Zone,” Jack said.

  The bar staff was composed of a short, stocky woman in her mid-thirties with gritted teeth and the demeanour of someone sucking on a thousand lemons and a younger man with ghostly white, almost translucent skin who appeared, at all times, to be apologising for his own existence. The group warbled their way through some terrible Oasis covers followed by some terrible Beatles covers then some terrible eighties covers and then, just when I thought it couldn’t get any worse, it rained men.

  In between, alcohol flowed. I yawned and pinched myself to stay awake. The same two or three exhibitionists traded turns at the microphone. After an hour, an argument broke out. It was between the female bartender and our guide, Chris. “Stop trying to rip me off,” he said, waving his receipt.

  The woman adopted a power pose, dropping her hands to her hips. “You said you vanted big one.”

  “When did I say that? What’s a ‘big one’?”

  She looked him up and down. “You look like you like big one.”

  “What the hell does that mean?” He waved his receipt. “I asked for a double. You’ve charged me for a quadruple!”

  “You asked for qwadruple,” she said, squinting out from under her furrowed eyebrows.