The Best Travel Writing

by James O'Reilly

  Unwilling to give up, I charged my friend Ivan, the non-Apple, with the task of helping me locate the apartment. First, though, a little backstory.

  In October 1959, Oswald turned up in Moscow wishing to become a citizen of the Soviet Union. The Russians said no, and Oswald attempted suicide in his hotel bathroom. Thinking he’d do it again and succeed, and fearing the United States would assume Oswald had been murdered by the Soviets, the Russians relented. Still, they suspected Oswald might be a Yankee spy, and they sent him off to Minsk, put him to work in an electronics factory called Gorizont (Horizon), and had the KGB track his every move. For a while Oswald settled down, marrying a local girl named Marina and making a few friends. After a couple of years, though, he tired of Soviet life. He applied for an exit visa for himself and Marina and immigrated back to Texas. The rest, of course, is history.

  But in Minsk it’s a history that still needed to be unearthed. Ivan took me to the address I’d found on the web. We approached a yellow neoclassic building, set in the center of town where Prospekt Nezavisimosti and tree-lined Komunisticheskaya Street meet the slow, snaking Svisloch River. In the leafy interior courtyard, a gray-haired pensioner sat on a bench.

  Ivan asked the man if this was, in fact, Oswald’s old building. The man shrugged. Then he told us that Gorizont used to own the building, so most of the people living there, himself included, are employees or former employees of the company.

  “What do you want to know about Oswald?” he asked. Ivan explained that I had come from New York to see Oswald’s apartment (which wasn’t exactly the whole truth), and we were wondering if there was a chance we could get inside.

  “It’s on the fourth floor,” the man said, pointing to a door across the courtyard from where we were standing, and then added: “I used to work with Oswald.” He paused, then continued. “We used to go hunting together. And let me tell you, that boy could not fire a gun. We were frightened every time he tried to shoot. There’s no way he could have shot Kennedy.”

  The man went on and on, and Ivan eventually stopped translating for me. Finally, we thanked him and wandered over to the door. We weren’t sure which buzzer had been Oswald’s, so I rang all ten at once. The door swung open and we faced a sinewy septuagenarian standing in the foyer, wearing an annoyed look on his face. Ivan explained what we wanted, and the old man said a few quick words and then slammed the door shut. Apparently he said that the apartment was being renovated and we should go away.

  Ivan and I had no other option but to try the door. Much to our surprise, it was unlocked, so we wandered inside and up the stairs. When we got to the fourth floor, there were two apartment doors. Ivan shrugged and knocked on one of them. It was the angry sinewy man again. “I told you: Go away!” he yelled and then slammed the door on us for the second time. I knocked on door number two. We weren’t expecting much, since Mr. Friendly Neighbor had said it was being remodeled. The stairwell was silent. And then, a shuffling on the other side of the door. It opened. There stood a short, elderly man wearing a retro zip-up track jacket.

  Ivan and the man began speaking. I couldn’t comprehend what they were saying, but I understood when the man opened his door wider and waved us in.

  The two-room apartment was crammed with bookshelves and framed photos (including several of Lukashenko). The man said his name was Edward. He was seventy-five years old. He told us he was originally from Kazakhstan and that he did not know about the Oswald connection when he bought the apartment ten years ago. He ushered us onto his balcony and told me to stand at the far end of it. I wasn’t sure what he was doing, but then he handed me a black-and-white photograph of Oswald and his wife. Ivan said, “Look, they’re standing in the same spot you are.”

  It was true. Behind them in the photo, and behind me in real life, were the pediment and columns of the ministry of defense. Then Edward took us inside, a cigarette dangling from his lips, and led us to the bathroom. “See this toilet?” he asked with more enthusiasm than I’d ever heard about a commode. He fanned his hand around it like he was trying to sell it to us. “You can see it’s an old toilet because the tank is up high and connected by this pipe.” We nodded. “This,” he said, taking a moment to catch his breath from all the excitement, “was Oswald’s toilet. Oswald sat right here!” And just in case we needed a physical exclamation mark, he pulled down on the chain hanging from the tank and gave it a flush.

  Like the pensioner we met outside, Edward was convinced Oswald was no killer. He had a theory—a very long one, in fact—that suggested that Oswald was just a patsy, used by “them” because of his history of living in the U.S.S.R. Then Edward sat down at his computer and began playing a video about Oswald’s role in the history-making incident. When Ivan and I looked bored by it, Edward drew our attention to a photograph on the wall, a picture of an attractive, scantily clad young brunette.

  “She’s nice looking,” Ivan said.

  “She’s a fashion model. You want her phone number? Here,” he said, scribbling it down on a piece of paper. Ivan looked confused for a second and then thanked him. “How do you know her?” he asked.

  Edward glanced at the photo of the girl, lying on her back, her eyes looking seductively at the camera. “She’s my granddaughter.”

  Ten minutes later, Ivan and I were sitting in a nearby pub, both giddy from the experience, me because I couldn’t believe I got into Oswald’s apartment, and Ivan because of the phone number in his pocket. The pub was called ID Bar. Fittingly enough for Belarus, the waiters were dressed as police officers, and the space we sat in was a replica of an interrogation room.

  Despite the too-close-for-comfort atmosphere, the ID looked as though it could have been in any European capital city. And the place reminded me, yet again, that the world I’d come looking for—that stark, melancholy rot of communism—was only one facet of Minsk’s personality. The city was indeed stunningly Stalinist in its own way, but it was also more sophisticated than the stereotypical images of bread lines and babushkas. Bars blared ’80s heavy metal and hipper, newer artists like M.I.A. One restaurant offered sushi, served by a waiter ironically sporting a bushy Lukashenko-like mustache. At least I think he was being ironic.

  Just how Belarusians managed to sustain a normal, functioning society underneath the surface of totalitarianism and to persevere through tough political times was a question I wanted to ask again and again. I did gently ask my new friends if, despite Lukashenko’s seemingly endless tenure at the top of Europe’s last dictatorship, they had any hope for the future. Many of the young educated people I questioned had a most surprising answer: that there was no viable opposition at the moment, so the best person to rule was—wait for it—Lukashenko. Scientific my poll was not; shocking it was.

  It reminded me of Václav Havel’s 1978 essay, “The Power of the Powerless,” in which he argues that self-policing among ordinary people is just as important as policing. The ruled become the rulers. Belarusians might not be policing themselves in the way that Czechs did under the Soviet antireform policy of “normalization” in the 1970s, but their acceptance of the Lukashenko regime was, in a way, a similar act of self-preservation.

  The next night in Minsk, I had dinner with my writer friend Siarhiej Kalenda. As I dug into a plate of machanka—chunks of tender pork and potatoes, with a thick gravy that diners sop up with pancakes—I told Kalenda it seemed to me that many of his fellow young Belarusians had fallen into a state of apathy. They seemed to take it for granted that there were no decent opposition figures that could challenge Lukashenko. So they accepted him as the leader of the country. Kalenda didn’t disagree.

  “We all know what the outcome of future elections will be,” he said, telling me that he regularly protests the results and gets thrown in jail for a week or two for doing so. He did, however, harbor some long-term optimism. “Right now, it’s the old generation ruling a younger and very different generation. As we get older, we’ll start to take over the country and govern it the way we
want.”

  We held up our pints of crisp Alivaria and toasted to that. We paid the bill and headed toward the door. The waiter was blocking it. “The president is driving by,” he said. “No one is allowed on the street.”

  Kalenda and I looked at each other. He didn’t seem surprised. We stood there in silence for a long minute before the waiter cracked open the door enough to peek out onto the street. Then he opened it wider and waved us out. The president’s motorcade had passed, leaving the streets with a calm, empty, just-after-the-storm feeling. There was, for a moment, a sense of normalcy in this abnormal city—perhaps a brief foreshadowing of Minsk’s streets when the children of Kalenda and the Ivans and the Apples will be the ages we are now. A time when “Back in the U.S.S.R.” will seem less ironic and more nostalgic.

  David Farley is a contributing writer at AFAR magazine, where this story originally appeared. Farley’s work also appears in The New York Times, Washington Post, Travel + Leisure, Gadling.com, and WorldHum.com, among other publications. He’s the author of the award-winning travel memoir/narrative history, An Irreverent Curiosity: In Search of the Church’s Strangest Relic in Italy’s Oddest Town, and co-editor of Travelers’ Tales Prague and the Czech Republic. Farley has lived in Paris, Prague, Rome, and San Francisco, and currently makes his home in New York City where he teaches writing at New York University. Find more at www.dfarley.com.

  ANNA WEXLER

  Seal Seeking

  Few people succeed in getting a firsthand glimpse of the common, if controversial, practice of seal hunting.

  The west coast of Greenland was rapidly fading into the distance when my bladder sounded the alarm. You have to pee, it said. Normally, this wouldn’t be a problem. But the last hint of land was now a brown crust on the horizon, at least two hours away, and I was on a tiny fifteen-foot fishing boat, alone with three men. There was simply nowhere to go. Worse, I was in the middle of one of the most breathtakingly adventurous moments of my life—seal hunting with the Inuit amidst shimmering icebergs in the Arctic Ocean—and I was the one who had talked my way onto their hunting trip.

  The men, of course, had been relieving themselves all day. One of them, Jens, was already on his third piss: he cut the motor, turned his back to me, and whistled as he let loose a stream into the glassy water.

  “Thirsty?” Jens asked. He had the relaxed look of someone who has just taken a particularly satisfying piss. He rummaged through the side of the boat, amongst the gun cases, and offered me a bottle of soda.

  “No thanks,” I said. Liquid was the last thing I wanted to put into my body. I scanned the sides of the boat for a place where I could hang off the side—the back of the boat, near the motor, looked the most promising—and squat awkwardly over the Arctic Ocean. Just in case it came down to that.

  The closest most people get to thinking about Greenland, aside from documentaries about polar bears and ominous news reports of global warming, is on transatlantic flights, where a sleepy glance at the seatback flight map reveals the little white plane passing beneath Greenland’s southern tip. In the groggy struggle to find the least uncomfortable sleeping position, between the jostle to the right against the arm rest and the toss to the left against the oversized stranger, some people probably have a fleeting Greenland-related thought: That looks big. I wonder if people live there?

  Yes. People live there. Fifty-five thousand of them, to be exact. The size of a small city, except they’re scattered across a frozen wasteland three times the size of Texas. Picture the whole of the East Coast as harsh, ice-covered rocky terrain—with 15,000 people in Georgia, several thousand each in towns flung to the far reaches of Miami, Charlotte, and Washington DC, and 1,000 in the lone northern outpost of Boston—and you’ll get a rough idea of Greenland’s “urban density.” There are no roads between cities (and certainly not between the dozens of small hunting and fishing communities), few places have airstrips, and the piercingly cold winters solidify the surrounding seas, making them impassable by ship six months out of the year. All this makes Greenland’s Inuit inhabitants—the people formerly known as Eskimos—some of the most isolated on the planet.

  Something has always enthralled me about the Arctic. As a child, I used to spend hours staring at an illustrated book about icebergs, and as an adult, hours gazing at the black-and-white photographs of Polar explorers, the hardened lines on their grizzled faces conveying more than their trip reports ever could. Whatever strange force lured them to the northern latitudes—and it was strange, because no one in his right mind would be drawn, almost compulsively, to a land of frostbite, freezing cold, and almost certain misery—also exerted a powerful pull on me. There is something very bewitching about the Arctic.

  I had just one problem: money. Greenland is expensive. Not just London expensive or New York expensive, it’s Tokyo-times-two, your-slice-of-pizza-costs-twenty-bucks expensive. Why? Because if you live in Greenland you might as well be living on the International Space Station. Everything needs to be flown or sailed in. Few things can grow, let alone live, in such bitter conditions.

  It took me six months to save for the plane ticket, supplementing my daily income as a science writer by working nights at a cheap dive bar, serving beer and refilling complimentary pretzel bowls for meager tips. When things at the bar became unbearable I would imagine Greenland. This one is for the midnight sun, I’d think, as I cleaned warm vomit off the floor or scrubbed a shit-spattered toilet.

  I finally earned enough money to buy my ticket to Ilulissat, on Greenland’s west coast, home to the most spectacular icebergs outside of Antarctica. With 5,000 people, Ilulissat is Greenland’s third-largest town and even has some tourist amenities. I logged onto Couchsurfing.com, a website that connects locals and travelers, and contacted the only woman registered within hundreds of miles. She invited me to join her on a hunting trip with her boyfriend.

  Hunting what? I wrote back, but didn’t receive a reply.

  I read that in the summer, Greenlanders hunted musk ox, reindeer, and seal. Then, a month before my arrival, the woman wrote that a work trip was taking her elsewhere in Greenland for the summer: the hunting trip was off.

  Now I was more curious than ever. Was hunting still a major source of food? Did everyone, even people with day jobs, go hunting? And which animal was everyone after?

  I barraged the handful of Ilulissat tour agencies with emails and phone calls, asking if they could help me arrange a hunting trip. Most wrote back that they’d be happy to arrange midnight iceberg cruises, helicopter trips to the icecap and dog sledding tours. But hunting? “Well, most people hunt,” one wrote, “but we can’t help you.”

  If having to pee was a color-coded alert system, then I had just hit Code Orange and was steadily working up to Code Red. It wasn’t quite an emergency, but if I were on a cross-country road trip, I’d be keeping my eyes peeled for the next rest stop.

  How long had we been out for? The constant daylight—the sun does not set in the summer—had robbed me of the intuitive sense of time I now realized I’d taken for granted at lower latitudes. Here there was no feeling that “it was getting late” or “the day was ticking away”; it was as if time had been liberated from the confines of the sun.

  I checked the clock: we’d been out for nearly four hours and still had not spotted a single seal.

  But there were other things to hold my attention: the sun felt impossibly large and near, as if it had decided to violate Earth’s restraining order and come creepily close. The entire half-dome of the sky was lightly brushed with thin, wispy clouds, which provided the background to the most unusual sight of all: a massive rainbow ring that formed a magnificent halo around the sun. At first I’d been overcome with the same awe that accompanies the sight of a rainbow, but as the halo continued to swell—as if to commandeer the entire sky—my awe settled into a kind of constant feeling of wonder and elation.

  Adding to the surreal effect, the glassy water reflected the entire sky, and towards the hori
zon everything faded into soft blues that gently blurred the boundary between above and below. The only hint of a border was offered by what appeared to be small ice cubes, demarcating the horizon. But as we neared, they morphed into colossal ice mountains the size of city blocks. The whole landscape had a mystical quality, as if we were floating through a painting of the heavens.

  The silence was total. Stark. No animals, no people, no ambient noise, not even wind to rustle my eardrum or to whip up waves to lap at the boat. A plastic wrapper crinkled loudly as one of the men retrieved a chocolate chip cookie. Jens stood at the back, boots squeaking against the boat’s floor as he scouted the waters for signs of life.

  I’d met Jens by chance several days earlier, after I’d sought refuge from a torrential rainstorm inside the cozy restaurant at Hotel Icefjord. It was a slow afternoon. I chatted with the waitress, Ivalo, about how Greenland, which has long been a territory of Denmark, has never quite come close to its ruling country’s education level and economic status, despite the Danes’ many efforts (some woefully misguided) and financial injections. The waitress had been born in Greenland—she had the classic dark Inuit features and Asiatic eyes—but her mother had moved to Denmark to provide her with a better education. Like many young Danes, she was working in Greenland over the summer.

  At some point I mentioned my cancelled hunting trip. Ivalo told me that it was seal that most people hunted during the summer, at least in Ilulissat. In fact, she’d recently been out hunting with the chef, the same man who had just brought out my lunch of musk ox burger.

  “I think he might be going out again on Saturday,” she said.

  “Do you think I could join?”

  She disappeared into the kitchen and emerged moments later with a phone number scrawled on a piece of paper. “Meet him at noon on Saturday on the harbor.”