Picnic at the Iron Curtain: A Memoir: From the fall of the Berlin Wall to Ukraine's Orange Revolution

by Susan Viets

  As the hours passed, the landscape became dry and empty. We had entered the Qizilqum desert. We saw few other cars. We passed time by telling each other stories about our childhood summers. I longed for our family cottage, for a clear, clean lake that churned up whitecaps like a mini-sea on windy days. There was no sign of water here. Charlotte spoke of summers she had spent with her cousins at their castle in Scotland on windswept moors. Her story was interrupted by a guard who stopped us at a checkpoint.

  He carried a gun and ordered us out of the taxi with all our bags. We struggled into the guard’s cabin. It was sparsely furnished with two narrow beds and one small side table. Sand swirled in through the doorway as we moved. No traffic passed by now. I doubted that any would for several hours.

  “Sit,” the guard ordered. I obeyed and sat on one bed. Charlotte sat on the other. I felt very afraid. I did not like the sight of beds. We had left no paper trail behind for the borders that we crossed. No one knew where we were. We could easily disappear in this desert. The only witness would be the taxi driver, who was a stranger. I did not even know if he was still waiting for us. The guard might have ordered him to leave. Two of us faced one guard, but he had a gun and we did not.

  For once, Charlotte and I did not talk. We remained quiet and compliant. I thought through questions the guard might ask and how best to answer them. I felt comforted by the thought of that agent who had followed us through Tashkent hotels and tailed us all the way to our colleague’s house. The security services must by now know who we were and where we went and know that we posed no threat.

  The door slammed; the guard entered the room again.

  “Documents,” he ordered. We gave him our passports.

  “Visas.” We gave him papers for Kiev. I included my accreditation card. I hoped official status there would help in some way here. I could not judge the character of this guard. His monosyllabic orders left no opening for conversation, no way to strike up a rapport with him.

  Hours passed. Still Charlotte and I barely talked. I felt calmer now. The guard left and did not lock the door, though where could we really run in this desert where there was still no traffic on the road?

  Toward dusk the guard returned. He questioned us briefly. Where had we been? Why were we here? I told him the truth and hoped he would believe me. I emphasized shopping. I downplayed our trip south to Qurgonteppa. The guard left. He returned about an hour later.

  “Go,” he said. He had not asked for a bribe.

  We saw the taxi parked by the post. The driver sat inside. Had he stayed out of loyalty to us or had he been ordered to do so? We did not know and did not ask. We were just grateful for a ride to Samarkand.

  The receptionist at the Intourist hotel in Samarkand did not ask us any questions. We received a big room with a view and no hassle. We spread our shopping across one bed and admired it. Charlotte wrapped a recently purchased scarf around her head, put on her coat and gloves, opened the window and held my shortwave radio out so that we could listen to a BBC news broadcast. Cold air swirled into the room. The newsreader spoke of pitched battles, lives lost in Tajikistan. I thought of our driver from the market and his relatives in Qurgonteppa, as well as the fighters with clarinet guns; some must be dead, and the country was in such a mess.

  Charlotte switched the radio off. We shut the window. The room warmed up quickly. We thought of home. I would soon leave for London. Friends in Kiev had arranged a goodbye party for me and had stockpiled wine and food for the occasion. Would we make it back on time?

  Exhausted from our travels, we slept. In the morning we went to the airport to inquire about flights. Tickets remained cheap – about four dollars to fly across eleven time zones. We purchased two for every Kiev-bound flight over the next three days. The Aeroflot agent warned us of the likelihood that none would actually fly.

  The first flight was scheduled for 3 a.m. the next day. At midnight we checked out of our hotel. By 4 a.m. we sat in a taxi heading back to the hotel as the flight had been cancelled. Large, fluffy flakes of snow fell from the sky, and blanketed the road ahead. The taxi driver lost control of the car on the slippery road and smashed into a car in front of us. Unhurt but dazed, we took our luggage from the trunk and walked the rest of the way to the hotel. We paused to rest several times. Snow soon covered our coats and bags.

  When we got to the hotel, the receptionist said that the room was still ours and gave us the key. We opened the door, flicked on the light and saw lumps in the beds. We recognized two women from the hotel staff. They sat up, surprised to see us. They were annoyed that they had to vacate the room, but they eventually left.

  “They’ve stolen my tampons,” Charlotte said. She had accidentally left a pack behind and had looked forward to reclaiming them.

  The next morning we returned to the airport with our luggage. We hoped the morning flight might fly. The Aeroflot agent allowed us to hand in our tickets.

  “So the flight’s actually leaving,” I asked.

  “Of course,” the agent said, no mention of fuel or cancelled flights. We sat in the departure lounge, feeling skeptical that the flight would leave. Then we heard a boarding call. We passed through security. A guard pulled us aside. He would not let us leave with so much shopping. He wanted a bribe. I fought and negotiated. I pointed out that everyone else was allowed through with a flotilla of suitcases and live poultry. Eventually I gave in and paid. I did not want to loose this rare chance to leave. The guard let us through to board the plane. Our flight went smoothly and we landed in Kiev on time.

  Bill hosted my goodbye party at his apartment. I looked around the room filled with friends I had made over the past two years, the bonds so strong; I would not have survived without these people and would miss so many of them. Newcomers came as well. We met for the first and last time. Wine flowed, music played, smokers clustered on the balcony, a chill in the October air.

  At noon the next day, my Lada so fully loaded that I could barely see, I waved goodbye to Charlotte, who remained behind, and Stephen, who would move into my flat. I drove down Khreshchatyk, remembering my first drive along it with Mary when police officers had stopped us on every block. They had asked why our husbands let us out in the car alone, wanted to know how I had learned to drive and also asked for bribes. No one stopped me now. I took the highway west. Lviv and Hungary lay ahead.

  Now that I was no longer focused on work, I could appreciate the landscape for its beauty. The Carpathian Mountains were ablaze in autumn colours. At the Ukrainian-Hungarian border, guards searched the car. One saw a coin that he said I could not take out of the country. Unaware of this, I handed him the coin, but he refused to take it and said, “If anyone asks, just say you threw it in a field.”

  I did not know that I felt stressed until I picked my way across the final kilometre of potholed Ukrainian roads and crossed safely into Hungary. I loved Ukraine and my friends there, but it was still enough of an arbitrary and unpredictable place that nothing, not even the right to leave, could be taken for granted. When I heard my first Jó napot kívánok [good day], a Hungarian greeting on Hungarian soil, I felt set loose, free.

  A few kilometres inside Hungary I saw a brightly lit service station. It seemed like such a novelty to drive up to a pump in the middle of nowhere and fill up. I opened my trunk, took out four metal gasoline tins and a funnel. I thought that I should fill the tins, even though I realized that I no longer needed to. I left the tins, which had been such important survival tools these past two years, by the pump, and looked back, feeling anxious without them.

  I walked back and forth through the entrance to the service station store a dozen times, mesmerized by the automatic doors that opened and closed with a swoosh each time. I stood in front of the store wall decked with windshield wipers, pressure gauges and all sorts of automobile paraphernalia in packages that hung from hooks. I stared and wondered what to buy, then realized that I needed nothing. Roadside service existed here. But hoarding is a hard habit to
break. I ended up taking windshield wipers and a timing belt to the cash. Before the attendant rung them in, I stopped her and placed the items back on their hooks.

  The payphone outside worked. There were no crackles on the Budapest line when I called Anna. I sped through the Hungarian countryside partly because I could. No potholes jolted the car. No flying gravel cracked the windscreen. The roads ran straight. None ended in a ditch or unmarked construction site. Mostly, though, I sped because I wanted to see Anna, Gyula and their children as soon as possible.

  We spent a leisurely three days together, walking through central Budapest, visiting old haunts and catching up on developments in one another’s lives. I looked up more friends. Everyone seemed well. When it was time to leave one friend travelled with me as far as Germany. We parted company there and I continued the rest of the way on my own, driving my Lada onto the ferry for the channel crossing to England. Once we arrived I had to adjust to driving on the left side of the road with a car designed for driving on the right. As I approached London, I thought of my new life there. Charlotte was doing well professionally. She reported for the Observer on the war in Bosnia, spending long periods in Sarajevo, a city under siege. I admired her courage.

  I would sublet Charlotte’s room. We would share it on her brief trips back. I lived in the centre of the city, somewhere on the border between Bayswater and Westbourne Grove. Shops lined the streets everywhere that I walked. I felt so overwhelmed my first day out. I tried to buy groceries for dinner. In one store I stood by a shelf – goods stretched down a long row; there was too much choice. I had to leave. In the next store I tried the produce section – lettuce, tomatoes, snow peas, asparagus, star fruit, mangoes, beans, peppers and so much more. I could not make up my mind about what to buy. In the end, I chose one cucumber and left. I paid in cash. I ate fast food falafel on the way home.

  10

  CHECHNYA IN LONDON

  I began work the next day at my new job in radio journalism at the BBC. This would be my first desk job in an office. I wondered how I would adjust. I felt nervous on the bus ride in.

  I checked in at the front desk and received a pass. I crossed a courtyard, walked through a warren of corridors and took an elevator up to my floor. I noticed Ron as soon as I entered my new office. I had been hired to replace him. Ron would leave in a few days on a foreign correspondent posting.

  Ron did not see me. He was on the phone and sat with his back to the door on a chair behind his desk in a glass cubicle. The cubicle’s glass walls stopped a few feet short of the ceiling, so all that Ron said flowed out overtop. His cubicle was situated on one side of an otherwise large, open room filled with desks, headsets and reel-to-reel tape decks mounted on wheels. Stubs of blue chalk and razor blades (tools for editing tape) lay scattered across the tape machines and desks. Newspapers were piled up in corners.

  When Ron hung up the phone, he swivelled around.

  “Welcome,” he said, surprised. “Is it nine o’clock already?” He leaped out of his chair, came out of his glass cubicle and shut the door behind him. It closed with a loud click.

  “No!” he said and turned back around. He tried the door. It was locked. We could see his keys on the desk through the glass.

  “Excuse me,” Ron said. Then he pulled a table toward the cubicle, climbed on it and over the top of the glass wall and landed with a thud on the other side. He unlocked the door and came back out. I would have to be careful with the door. At five foot four, I stood no chance of scaling that wall.

  We sat and chatted. Ron briefed me about my new job. I told him about developments in Ukraine, Moldova and Central Asia. Others drifted into the office. One by one Ron introduced me – Gennady, Gregori, Lara, and then a name that I remembered for not being Russian, Alison. She was one of the only non-Russians in the office. I identified with her. If I understood what Ron said well, I had been hired as a link between this world of Russia in London and the main English-language newsroom. I would filter news, cull Russian information gathered here and package it into stories for a non-Russian audience and analyze events. I would be a bridge.

  Ron and the others went back to work. I waited for my formal orientation, scheduled later in the morning. I sat at an empty desk with the daily papers. As I stared at the headlines, my mind wandered. I thought about this life that I began in a city that I knew so well. I had spent time here as a child with relatives and family friends. I had studied here, returned regularly from Hungary and Ukraine, but this time felt different. I had a job and since I also held a British passport, I could settle in London and make the transition from expat to immigrant.

  Alison returned with a large set of headphones around her neck. She plugged them into a tape deck, swivelled tape, cut sections with a razor blade and taped the ends together. I heard her chat in what seemed to be flawless Russian with colleagues.

  When she had finished editing her tape, I complimented Alison on her Russian and asked how she learned to speak it so well.

  “I studied it at university and spent time in Moscow. I met my husband over there, so I have an advantage. I can speak Russian at home,” Alison said. She told me a little bit about her husband, Gagik.

  “He’s Armenian,” she said.

  “Armenia! That’s one republic I never visited,” I told her. “I’d love to go. I hear they have the most extraordinary old churches. I’ve been to a lot of places nearby in the Caucasus. I was in Chechnya almost exactly a year ago and Azerbaizhan last month.”

  Alison cut me off with a laugh, “Don’t tell an Armenian you’ve been to Azerbaizhan. They hate each other!” Then Alison rushed off to the studio with her tape. She had a deadline to meet.

  Not long afterwards I sat in my glass cubicle and read notes about an unusual development in Chechnya. Even though it had won that showdown with Russia when I visited – Russian troops pulled back – Chechnya was still part of Russia. No state recognized Chechen independence. Now I read that Chechnya had appointed a prime minister and sent him to England. This Chechen prime minister, Ruslan Outsiev, arrived in London with his brother, Nazarbek, to arrange for Chechen passports and a Chechen currency and postage stamps to be printed. He was also establishing an embassy in London for Chechnya.

  “Won’t Russia go ballistic?” I asked a colleague. He nodded and rushed into a studio. Later I heard that Alison had interviewed Ruslan.

  “You can’t throw that out,” my sister, Deborah, said as politely as she could but clearly shocked that I had put an empty tin in the garbage can instead of the recycling bin.

  Ashamed, I asked her to explain recycling rules. None had existed when I last lived at home. I had to learn on this trip back for Christmas. It was a small matter but a reminder that places change and can’t be taken for granted.

  Deborah and I finished tidying the kitchen. Our father came in.

  “Anyone for a ski?” he asked. He already wore his toque and coat. Our golden retriever, Chester, stood by the door, tail wagging, ears cocked, happy and impatient to get going.

  “Coming,” I said. We got our skis out of the garage. Chester lay on the ground outside. He gnawed on a chunk of ice. My father and I put skis over our shoulders, held both poles in one hand and walked down a small path to the lake at the bottom of my parents’ housing complex. A trail ran around the lake. We stopped at the trail, slid our boots into bindings, strapped our poles around our wrists and skied down a small embankment onto the snow-covered frozen lake, the sky overhead blue and cloudless.

  Chester, already far in the distance, came racing back. He tried to catch the tips of my skis as I slid forward. He enjoyed his game. The crisp, cold air made me shudder until I built up a sweat, but it suited him well in his heavy coat of golden winter fur. I missed moments like this. I felt at home on this small lake with my father and his dog. I wondered if it was time to come back but could not find answers to the usual questions that rattled round in my head. Where would I live? What would I do? Would I be bored? I worried for a
moment about being caught between the world of London and this world of home, and that I might not fit in properly in either. I pushed these thoughts away. I caught up with my father. We rested for a few minutes on the other side of the lake. Chester lay beside us. He was using his teeth to dislodge ice caught between the pads of his paws. My father pulled a small tape recorder from his jacket pocket.

  “What do you think this is?” he asked as he pressed Play. I heard a familiar sound that I could not place.

  “Footsteps on snow,” he said, so pleased that he had captured it on tape. I wished I could take that sound back with me to London.

  “Just over for a holiday?” the taxi driver asked as we pulled away from Heathrow, onto the motorway that led to central London. “When are you heading back?”

  “I live here,” I said, still surprised to be asked this question, though it happened all the time.

  “Pigeonholed by your accent,” Deborah had commented when I had told her I could never escape it. We had fit in so well as children, visiting relatives with our mother who was born in Wales and studied medicine in London. Alone, I was viewed as yet one more foreigner on holiday here.

  I dragged my bags up flights of long narrow stairs to the top floor of a row house that I shared with Stewart, Charlotte’s flat mate. Charlotte was still in Bosnia. I flicked the light on, dropped my bags in the bedroom and then wove through a pathway between stacks of old newspapers in the living room, walked down a few steps and along a corridor into the kitchen. Half a dozen bottles of wine – each one almost half finished, as per Stewart’s daily habit – lined the kitchen counter. I opened the fridge. It was empty. Stewart must still be away.