The next village brought yet another worthless item, this time a mercury-backed mirror in a cheap turn-of-the-century frame. The woman watched his inspection with desperate eyes, her silent plea made tragic by the trio of quiet children gathered around her chair. He decided on honesty and told the young mother as kindly as possible why he could not offer more than a few dollars. The woman accepted the money with pitiful gratitude, and Yussef showed genuine approval. As they left, Jeffrey was struck by the thought that respectful honesty from a stranger was perhaps a rare commodity.
Then, in the next village, he encountered a find that made the entire trip worthwhile. The farmer dug up a ragged bundle from the edge of his compost heap, and offered it with hands and arms stained the color of old teak. Jeffrey unfolded the wrappings and extracted a belt of almost solid silver.
The baldric was a sword belt worn over one shoulder, diagonally across back and chest, and connected with rope or chain or some frilly foppery to the waist. It was long considered an essential part of a gentleman officer’s wardrobe. This particular one was French and dated from the Napoleonic empire. French war-eagles of solid silver rested upon fields of aquamarine. Beside them were rubies carved into stars of rank. Then began a series of silver-framed war symbols done in semiprecious stones, separated from one another by silver family shields set upon mother-of-pearl backing. Jeffrey hefted the belt, estimated its weight at fifteen pounds.
“The spoils of war,” he said.
“The French left behind more than their lives,” Yussef agreed through Ivona, “when Mother Russia introduced them to a real winter.”
****
Vladimir-Volynskij. Luck. Rozisce.
The people were walking lessons in endurance. Serious, heavy women wore comically colored hats against the heat—beach bonnets, undersized cotton cones, floppy straw hats with pom-poms and ribbons. Those without hats carried rusty, ragged parasols whose bright polyester colors fought valiantly against the onslaught of dust and abuse.
Old men were either bloated with layers of blubber or shrunk to skin of leather and muscles of wire cable. Everyone, even the young, had features creased by constant squints. Expressions were fixed in a variety of emotions. Anger. Suspicion. Hatred. Fear. Uncertainty. Resignation. Rage.
The children were overly small, overly quiet, overly serious. Young men, many of them strikingly handsome in a rough-cut fashion, clung grimly to seventies disco fashion—elaborate razor cuts, rayon shirts, and oversized bell-bottoms—despite the withering heat. Stunningly beautiful girls showed faces marred by permanent suspicion and hostility. By middle age, men appeared scarred and stone cold, the women faded and overweight. This rapid aging gave the young the air of hothouse flowers, brought to an early bloom that would swiftly fade.
* * *
Zdolbunov. Slavuta. Iz’aslav.
It began with the simplest question, the smallest observation. As they left one village, Jeffrey watched a bowed farmer and his wife struggle back from the fields under hand-carried loads of hay. Their backs were bent, their faces warped in a struggle as timeless as a Baroque painting. “I wonder why life is like this here,” he murmured almost to himself.
To Jeffrey it appeared as though Ivona stirred reluctantly, drawn into something she did not wish to face. Then she began.
“Our way and yours were divorced in the dawn of modern history. Europe was saved from the savagery of the Mongol hordes, and yet still today they talk of the threat with a thrill of fear. There was no one to save Russia. Russia lived under Mongol rule for more than two hundred and fifty years. While Europe struggled to cast off the Dark Ages and enter the enlightened Renaissance, Russia remained trapped in darkest night.”
“It sounds like a children’s fairy tale,” Jeffrey said.
“It is from such beginnings, too harsh to be told as fact, that ghouls and good fairies arise,” Ivona replied. “But what you must remember is that the Russia of today, along with her sister states such as the Ukraine, still bears the Mongol mark. Look deeply into our society, and you will find roots reaching back over one thousand years. The Tartars, as they were known by the Russians, willed to the people their careless ferocity and utter disregard for the value of human life. They burned into our nation the painful lesson of centralized rule. Our first governments were based upon Genghis Khan’s military authority, which permitted no question or doubt or opposition whatsoever.”
It hit Jeffrey then. Ever since the border, he had been trying to put a finger on Ivona’s attitude toward him. She did not show hostility. Nor did she appear angry. Yet there was something, some barrier she pushed at him constantly. Finally he could name it, though he could still not say why it was there. Ivona disapproved of him. She radiated rejection.
“The Mongols’ code of law was called the Yasa, and it had three underlying principles,” Ivona continued in her toneless singsong. “The first was that all people were equal under the law, rich and poor alike. The second was that all citizens were bound to their position in society for life. Ambition to rise above one’s station was a crime punishable by torture and death. And third, all people lived in complete submission to the Khan’s absolute power.”
“Sounds a lot like life under the Communists,” Jeffrey observed, and wondered why she bothered to teach if she so clearly wished him elsewhere.
“The parallel continues in many different directions, like roots spreading out from a dark and gloomy tree,” Ivona replied. Her quiet, lilting tone carried no sense of enthusiasm. She was like a teacher who was being paid to teach but had no confidence in her student. “All land, for example, was owned by the Khan. It was granted out by title to local princes who ruled in the Khan’s name. Those who actually worked the land, the serfs, were bound to it and could not leave. When the Mongols were finally defeated, the czars and their princes continued this practice. To be a serf under czarist rule, right up to the beginning of this century, was to be a slave.”
“And then came the Communist state, which owned all land in the name of the people. Whoever they were.” Jeffrey shook his head. “But to back up for a moment, how did the Russians get rid of the Mongols?”
“By war,” Ivona replied simply. “Three hundred years of war, during which the Russians adopted every despotic tactic of their enemy. The state became all powerful, controlling every resource and person in the country. Men appointed to the military became soldiers for life. There was no alternative except death.”
Yussef interrupted with a short query. Ivona spoke to him at length. He was silent for a moment, then responded with a few words. She translated them as, “It also taught the Russians to see all the outside world as their enemy.”
“Three hundred years of war would do that to anyone,” Jeffrey agreed.
“It was during this period that Russia’s rulers learned the power of fear as a ruling force,” Ivona went on. “Czar Ivan the Terrible established the world’s first political police, called the Oprichniki. Sight of their uniforms, with emblems of snarling dogs, became enough to instill terror in Russia’s citizens. These six thousand cutthroats employed such savage punishments as impaling, flaying alive, boiling, roasting on giant spits, and frying on great skillets against any man, woman, or child declared an enemy of the czar.”
Jeffrey turned around so as to inspect the woman’s face. She showed no reaction whatsoever to her own words. Ivona calmly viewed the endless dry-brown vista outside her window, her barrier of rejection keeping him at bay.
The road passed through a copse of brown, stunted trees, then ran straight and true across a flat landscape as far as Jeffrey could see.
“Here begin the Steppes,” Ivona told him.
Yussef pointed forward and spoke, his words translated as, “Up ahead there are hills. But beyond Kiev the road runs straight and true for two thousand kilometers. No rise, no curve, no turning. That, my Western friend, is where the real Russia begins.”
They passed a cluster of huts, a meager island of humanity in an endles
s earthen sea. “I’ve never seen anything like this,” Jeffrey said quietly. “Not ever.”
“When the Tartars were finally pushed from Russia,” Ivona said, “part of their tribe settled in the Crimea, which lies in the southern Ukraine. They continued to sweep out from time to time, even traveling so far as to sack Moscow three times. But by that time they were no longer interested in conquest and occupation. All they sought was booty, especially slaves. For over three hundred years, until the seventeenth century, Tartar hordes swept out year after year, carrying off the youngest and the best, leaving death and destruction in their wake. Still today this impression of the dangerous Ukraine lingers on in many Russian minds. The name itself comes from the Russian word Okraina, or Wild Plains.”
At a demand from Yussef, Ivona translated what she had been saying. He nodded and spoke for a time, which she translated as, “The endless land is Russia’s greatest wealth and Russia’s greatest weakness. There were no natural barriers to stop the foes, and towns here were too spread out to help one another against invaders. I once read a story of an official who counted the slaves as they were herded onto the Crimean boats and shipped to the slave markets of Istanbul. After one raid, the number of slaves topped ten thousand men and women, boys and girls. The official grabbed one young man as he passed and demanded, ‘Did they leave anyone there for next year?’”
“It’s amazing to me,” Jeffrey said, “how you could take a lot of these descriptions, modernize them by three hundred years, and be talking about life under Communism.”
There was a moment’s silence before Yussef’s barked command brought Ivona’s translation. He spoke a few words, which she did not interpret. Instead, she paused for a long moment, then asked, “You have heard of Stalin’s program of Russification?”
“Yes.”
“This, too, came from the czars, and as you have heard, they learned it from the Mongols. In the sixteenth century, Ivan III began the rule of pomestie, or state ownership of all land. The czar’s army forcibly relocated the princes already in place to new lands far away from their original holdings. These new lands were granted on the condition of loyal service, including delivery of a certain number of new soldiers each year. The people themselves were known as tyaglye kholopy, or tax-paying slaves. Their duty was to work the land so that the czarist state could support the army required for its endless wars.”
Ivona translated for Yussef, who added through her, “The powerful enemy was defeated only by a powerful central government ruling a powerful army. To draw this power together, they had to learn the lesson of ruthlessness. The importance of individual human life was sacrificed to the needs of the state. It is still so today.”
“Over the centuries,” Ivona went on, “the same problems that later plagued the Communists choked development of the earlier czarist state. The Russian bureaucracy was staffed by people who by law could never be rewarded for good work by promotion. So they became corrupt and ruled according to who held more power and who paid larger bribes. There was little trade, since no one was permitted to make a profit. Cities remained small and distant outposts, since a serf who left his assigned place was put to death.”
She paused while Yussef navigated a series of dangerously dark holes in the pitted road, then went on, “Industry had no labor until the state assigned them serfs, and then companies were forbidden by law to reward skills or performance with bonuses or advances of any kind.”
She translated for Yussef, who offered, “You can see the consequences even today. The price of centralized government is death of the individual. The body lingers on, but the spirit is crushed.”
“So how did you make it through intact?” Jeffrey asked him.
“By being born when people began to see the lie for what it was,” Yussef replied through Ivona. “And by having an aunt who taught me from the cradle to value who I was.”
“Couldn’t other people see they were trapped by the same forces that held them in the past?”
“Much was made of past horrors,” Yussef replied. “But Communism was always painted as the great liberator. Disinformation was a powerful weapon. With their total control over the press and the television and the schools, they could deny that all these problems even existed in modern Russia.”
“To deny in such a society means that the problem officially disappears,” Ivona continued. “Anyone who discusses it also vanishes. End of discussion.”
“This policy dominated contact with foreigners also,” Yussef added. “Suspicion of foreigners goes back to the dawn of Russian history. Under the czars, citizens were forbidden to travel outside their country. For over five hundred years, they locked away all foreign visitors who threatened to return to their homeland and criticize the Russian government. Even visiting priests who dared to criticize the czarist rule were arrested and put to death.”
“More than one thousand years of serfdom,” Ivona continued. “How can the world expect these people to learn new ways overnight?”
“Because there isn’t any more time than that,” Jeffrey replied. “Either they make the change quickly, or their attempt at democracy will fail.”
Ivona was silent a long moment, then translated for Yussef. When she was done the young man removed his attention from the road long enough to grant Jeffrey a look of solid approval. Here at least there was assurance. Yussef was pleased to have him around.
* * *
Sepetovka. Polonnoje. Berdicev.
Zitomir. Their evening meal took place by lantern light and was entirely of goose. Nothing else. Just goose. Their hosts, a dumpy woman in clothes hand-scrubbed to ragged limpness and a man who treated Yussef as visiting nobility, apologized continually while the goose was cooking. Jeffrey assured them every time the words were translated that goose would be fine.
While their hosts busied themselves in the kitchen, Yussef spoke in a quiet monotone that Ivona translated as, “In the stores there is nothing to buy. Nothing. Shopkeepers put nothing on the shelves even if they receive a shipment. They hold the merchandise in the back room and sell at the state price plus fifty or one hundred percent. People who can afford it either buy at these prices or travel to big cities and go to the new street markets. The others,” he shrugged. “Here you see how the others survive.”
Jeffrey glanced around the hovel that was to be their home for the night. He took in the scant furniture, the crude homemade trestle table and benches, the lack of any adornment save a tattered photograph of an icon hung from a cracked and pitted wall.
“Life is not as it should be in my country,” Yussef spoke solemnly. “Our world should be otherwise. Someday we will learn that this is a wrongness, and one that must end.”
When the goose arrived, the couple paid grave thanks to a gracious Yussef. Then they applied themselves to devouring the lot—skin, entrails, bone marrow, and all. Jeffrey squelched his aversion to so much rich meat washed down with warm pepsi. He stuffed himself with roast goose, goose crackling, goose pate, goose liver fried in oil—so much goose that he smelled the greasy odor in his skin.
As dinner was cleared away, the single bulb dangling from the ceiling came to feeble life. He stared in weary wonderment as it was greeted with cries of pleasure and great activity by the woman and her husband.
“Energy cutbacks,” Ivona explained. “Twenty-five percent, the authorities promised, but already it is down to three hours of water and electricity per day.”
The old man busied himself filling the sink and bath. The woman brought out a pile of dirty laundry, apologized with a gap-toothed smile and words that needed no translation, and hurried away.
“Cooking and washing often take place in the wee hours,” Ivona explained.
“Days without light or power this winter,” Yussef said through Ivona. “The thought gives voice to talk more bitter than the bread lines. Imagine a Russian winter in the dark! Word is, the stock of candles and kerosene lanterns has vanished from every city in the land.”
�
�It must be hard for you,” Ivona commented, “imagining how life is here for us.”
“It is and it isn’t,” Jeffrey replied. “I am one-quarter Polish, and over the past year I’ve been coming to know a little about my own heritage. The hardships I’ve found here appear to be similar, only worse by degrees. I’m not talking about the system, just what the system has done to the common man.”
But Ivona and Yussef were caught by what he had said at the beginning. Yussef asked a question, which Ivona translated as, “You are one-quarter Polish?”
“Yes.”
“Which quarter?”
Perhaps it was the fatigue of driving and dealing in the day’s heat. Perhaps it was the flickering lantern light, which remained a stronger illumination than the room’s single overhead bulb. Perhaps it was the sense of calm that pervaded the crudely chinked farmhouse walls, or perhaps merely the companionable light in Yussef’s eyes and the questioning doubt of Ivona’s gaze.
Whatever the reason, Jeffrey found the question to be perfectly logical. And he gave what to him seemed a perfectly logical answer.
“The most important quarter,” he replied. “The part centered around my heart and head.”
Upon hearing the translation, Yussef leaned back and nodded slowly. Ivona, on the other hand, appeared truly shaken. Jeffrey found himself too weary and too full to be concerned any longer, about Ivona or anything else. He stood, bid the pair good-night, and made his way back to the single bedroom, which had been vacated for him. He was asleep before his head hit the pillow.
Chapter 18
He awoke the next morning to Yussef’s impatient knock. Jeffrey rolled from a bumpy mattress that smelled of sweat and cigarette ashes. He folded the ratty covering and dressed in clothes that reeked from the road; everything in his case smelled from the gasoline canisters in the trunk.
The bathroom faucets were dry. He washed in a bucket of water drawn from the brown-stained bath. He walked into the parlor, greeted Yussef and Ivona, and showed ironclad control when pointed toward a breakfast of warm pepsi and day-old bread. He ate and drank in silence, then carried the last sip of pepsi back for brushing his teeth.
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