Open Mic Night in Moscow

by Audrey Murray

  The reason tourists can visit Chernobyl and Pripyat today is that these areas were largely decontaminated by liquidators, who spent years collecting and disposing of radioactive material. Some of these men volunteered, seeing their actions as a heroic sacrifice for their motherland. Others were sent involuntarily. Many of these men went on to have health problems as a result of the radiation to which they were exposed.

  So where are the victims of Chernobyl, the children who stayed in my neighborhood back in Boston each summer?

  Some are those of the liquidators, who are now spread throughout the former Soviet Union, some living, others not. The children we tend to picture when we think of the accident grew up largely in Belarus, which received the majority of the radioactive particles released from the accident. But sometimes it can be hard to pin casualties squarely on the Chernobyl disaster. Some studies suggest that children in Belarus had higher rates of thyroid cancers, others point out that the general population isn’t typically screened for thyroid cancers. In the years that followed Chernobyl, Belarus was also afflicted with higher rates of poverty. Sometimes it was hard to say if health problems in children came from Chernobyl or impoverishment.

  Despite the manifold caveats and nuances, the most commonly accepted statistic says that four thousand deaths can be attributed to Chernobyl directly. And I think everyone agrees that, given how easily it could have been prevented, that’s four thousand too many.

  So, Janice, I hope this answers your question.

  15

  Halloween in Your Lover’s Homeland (Belarus)

  There’s no quick fix for a broken heart, but the badly stricken try to find one anyway. Some turn to tequila, others exercise, ice cream, poetry, a new boyfriend who looks just like the old one. If all else fails, you can always go to Belarus.

  Belarus is a country you may not have heard of surrounded by countries you probably have. It snuggles up against Poland to the west, Ukraine to the south, Latvia and Lithuania to the north, and Russia to the east. It’s an isolated, authoritarian state said to most closely replicate life behind the iron curtain.

  It can be difficult for foreigners to visit Belarus, which I suspect, for some, is part of the appeal. To get a visa, I had to buy Belarusian health insurance. But the country also doesn’t present itself as a particularly appealing tourist destination.

  Belarus is often referred to as “Europe’s last dictatorship.” Its President, Alexander Lukashenko, has been in power since 1994.

  Whenever Anton’s friends from Belarus visit China, they all have the same reaction. Not long after I meet Anton, we’re in a taxi with his friend Anya speeding down an elevated highway that passes neon skyscrapers, TV billboards, and sprawling brick colonial buildings. Anya says something to Anton in Russian. I assume she’s marveling at the view. But then she switches to English for my benefit. “I was just saying, everyone here is so free!” she exclaims.

  “Free?” I don’t understand.

  “Yes—no one will stop people on the street and ask them for their documents, or tell them, ‘No, you can’t stand here.’ At home, the police are always doing this.”

  When I get to know him better, Anton rails against this, too: the indignity of being harassed by police officers while walking down the street, the absurdity of a floundering economy burdened by state-owned businesses. Belarus has one of the highest numbers of police per capita in the world. It emerged from the Soviet Union with high standards of living and a highly industrialized economy, which the government has since run into the ground.

  The picture Anton paints of his homeland is often bleak. He remembers the chaos that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union and the promise of changes that never materialized. He describes hardship that morphed into desperation and finally settled into a hopeless resignation.

  I suppose you could ask, given all this, why I wanted to go.

  Anton and I still communicate a few times a year, usually just on special occasions, like when I have the flimsiest excuse to reach out. A few weeks before I leave for this trip, I tell Anton that I’m planning to visit Belarus and ask if he has any recommendations. He helpfully recommends that I not go. “This place can be very unpleasant for foreigners,” he explains.

  This makes me sad.

  It has been two years since Anton and I broke up, and in that time I’ve missed him in different ways. Sometimes I miss his presence in a way that aches physically; other times I miss the possibilities he represented. I still half expect to bump into him one day, and both go, Dude, what the fuck, this was so silly, and laugh like this was all some huge joke. But mostly I just miss him.

  The actual breakup happens in an airport Burger King. The split is planned—we had booked a nonrefundable trip to Vietnam for our back-to-back birthdays, then decided we were sick of the logistics our relationship required, then decided to go on the trip anyway.

  We get in from Saigon early in the morning, and our plan is to go our separate ways as soon as we land. But we are both hungry, and the only good place to eat at the airport is Burger King, so we decide to postpone the breakup until after breakfast.

  “It was still a good trip,” I tease, both because I did all the planning and because it doesn’t seem real. He is reticent, morose, and, most creepily, he has ordered something off the nonbreakfast menu.

  “Whatever.” He scowls. His face shouldn’t still strike me as remarkable, but it does. He has smooth skin and a smile that the world has to work for; when he does grin, his face melts like you’ve won some prize. He keeps his hair perfectly coiffed and dresses however he pleases. He looks exactly how I want him to.

  “Will you at least kiss me goodbye?” I ask as I stand up to leave.

  “No.” He shakes his head. “I don’t think you understand this is real.”

  “I do!” I protest. I’m keeping things light. He is a stand-up, too, and my favorite joke of his goes: “My girlfriend is also a comedian, so it’s hard to take our relationship seriously. But we’re madly in love! People always ask if she writes my jokes, and I say, ‘Just that one.’”

  “Okay, I gotta go,” I say, and I try to kiss him anyway, but he turns his head.

  It takes a few days for reality to set in, but when it does, sadness swallows me whole. It feels like this needs to be the end of something bigger, too—this stage of my life, or China, or spending my days tutoring. For reasons that have nothing to do with Anton, what comes next is a question to which I have no answer, or even a gut feeling. Anton had been the one who knew the path forward—without him, I don’t know how I will ever be great, or even better. Between the pain of heartbreak and fear of uncertainty, the former is less difficult to dwell in. And so I step into heartbreak with both feet.

  Which is not to say I don’t miss Anton. I fucking miss him, man. In some ways, it feels like we never broke up, because his physical absence is more than offset by his starring role in my thoughts. My mind has become a mere venue for The Anton Show, a carefully curated collection of euphoric moments that have now become excruciating memories, conjectures about his exact whereabouts at any given moment, and brutal assessments of my own shortcomings that prove Anton never loved me at all.

  In time, The Anton Show subsides, though never completely fades, along with the pain, but the pull of Belarus doesn’t. If anything, it grows in intensity, and with it, my sense that I won’t be able to navigate the country without Anton. When we were in love, I longed to go to Belarus because I longed to soak up every aspect of Anton’s being—his mere scent triggered intoxication. Now that we’re not, what could his homeland possibly hold for me?

  I’ve always joked that I fall in love with Russians because I want to go to Russia. But I’m starting to wonder if I have it backward. Maybe I want to go to Russia because I fell in love with Russians.

  This feels, sounds, and is less logical than my first read, but somehow, it makes more sense to me. Even if I’m wrong, there are times when I feel like the only way to get Belarus out
of my head is to just go there and get it over with.

  In the end, I decide that if something has such a hold on you, you might as well explore it and try to figure out why.

  It’s strange both how much and how little distance two years can create. Even now, Anton still lingers in the back of my thoughts. And yet in the real world we’ve grown to be strangers. I know this because Anton’s e-mail is a mark of his forgetting my personality. Two years ago, he would have known that telling me not to go to Belarus would be the one thing guaranteed to get me there.

  My trepidation is multifold as I wait on the bus to Brest, Belarus. Which, coincidentally, is the source of trepidation number one: entering Belarus by bus does not exactly feel like the triumphant I made it anyway I’m going for. If a bus is a statement, it’s more of a meek I didn’t plan ahead or a whispered The train website wouldn’t take my credit card.

  This bus, by the way, smells truly terrible. And I say that as someone well aware that few buses really smell neutral, and that no bus ever smells good.

  The larger and more salient causes for trepidation are: Will everything in Belarus remind me of this lost love, the person I once knew and now do not? Will this shroud me in a post-Soviet-style cloak of misery that will prove impossible to shake? Am I willingly walking into more suffering? Is Belarus a dark, cruel country with a population that matches its atmosphere?

  When Belarus shows up on the news, it’s rarely for something good. It’s for protesters being beaten and jailed so readily that they’ve been forced to come up with new, innovative ways of expressing dissent, promoting the government to retaliate with new, innovative ways of cracking down on dissent.

  Take the “clapping protest,” in which three thousand people gathered in a square and seemed to give a round of applause to no one in particular, though everyone knew it was a proclamation demanding the resignation of Lukashenko, who, at that point, was seventeen years into what was looking like a lifelong presidential term. Police rounded up clappers, and officials rewrote the constitution, which had previously banned “gatherings for any action,” to now ban “gatherings for any action or no action.”

  Belarus is known for average salaries that hover around a few hundred dollars a month and the second-lowest life expectancy in Europe.

  It suddenly seems obvious that everyone on this bus will hate me: the old man in the newsboy cap, the young guys with hands stuffed in pockets, the group of women who seem much younger than me but have children that look incongruously close to adulthood. The fifty-something woman with short hair and penciled-in eyebrows sitting behind me.

  I take a seat and do my best to avoid all eye contact.

  Sometimes I still replay the past in my head and only remember it’s a terrible idea halfway through. I made it this far, I think. Might as well see how it ends.

  Like this: I’m picking Vadik up from his Chinese preschool, at a time when my Chinese is limited to a handful of basically scripted conversations I have every day: “I’m going here,” “How much does this cost?” “Do you have Diet Coke?”

  I’m here to pick up a five-year-old Belarusian is so beyond my taxi and restaurant vocabulary that by the time I find him, he’s one of the last kids left.

  “Audrey!” he squeals when he sees me, running over and hugging me so tightly that it suddenly brings back a sensation from my own childhood that I’d forgotten. I know exactly what he’s feeling: I remember, viscerally, what it was like to wait for my mother to pick me up and take me home, how every second felt like an eternity, the fear that she’d never come, the unrestrained joy that came with the arrival of the expected face.

  That night I tell Anton about it and he has no clue what I’m talking about. Vadik’s asleep in his room and Elena’s in Belarus and Anton’s insisting he and I squeeze into one sleeping bag to stay warm. None of our apartments in China have heating. It’s so uncomfortable but I’m laughing—I don’t remember why.

  Sometimes I wonder what I could have done differently or how I can forget Anton or if I’ll ever find love again. I like to imagine that he’s tortured by my absence, but in terms of thinking about his feelings, that’s as far as I’ll allow myself to go. It’s easier for me to picture him as someone unburdened by complex and contradicting human emotions. That’s why I don’t wonder why he wouldn’t let me kiss him goodbye in the Burger King or what the e-mails and phone calls and messages that have come since mean. I milk them for evidence that he’s being punished and discard everything else. I avoid questions of whether stumbling across my name or unexpectedly seeing my face jolts him like it does me, because I’ve long assumed that it doesn’t, that he may have been sad for a brief moment, in the way we mourn the smallest changes, and then he shrugged and moved on. That way, I’m absolved of any wrongs.

  Is Belarus all that I didn’t understand about Anton, about my relationship with him, about myself? Anton had always represented places I’d never been, and I thought he could show me how to get there. Not just Belarus, but to the other parts of his life that seemed foreign to me: marriage, parenthood, the domestic version of adulthood to which I’d been raised to aspire. Is coming to Belarus my attempt to confront that on my own terms?

  Maybe this, too, is why I find myself unexpectedly jumpy on the bus to Brest: it somehow feels like Anton could pop out at any moment and ask me what I’m doing here. But it’s a trepidation tempered by equal parts excitement. I made it this far. Might as well see how it ends.

  I also worry that Belarus will be a nation filled with people like Anton, people who will hurt you suddenly and decisively, without meaning to, but still.

  After we break up, I decide to stop talking to Anton, because I sense that’s the post-breakup protocol that my spiritual guru, the book Why Men Love Bitches, would recommend. Also, just hearing Russian makes my heart pound—how is our casually texting about TV shows going to make me anything but miserable?

  His absence defines my life in ways I didn’t know longing could. It always feels like he’s not there. Some days, everything I see seems sent to torture me with memories. That pencil! I think. Anton used to use pencils.

  But each time he reaches out, his overtures don’t feel like enough. Once, he e-mails me after eating in a restaurant we used to frequent. “Went to DSD tonight, and fucking everything reminded me of you,” he writes, “which was difficult, but also nice.” I know exactly what you mean, I think, but what I say is nothing. I never respond.

  He can be cold, too. And this is my new image of everyone else on the bus: cold, and capable of unexpected callousness.

  They have been hardened, I imagine, by decades of hardship. Anton’s stories of home were never happy ones. They were of a woman weathered in a way I’d never seen—not even forty, probably, but with skin that had been tanned and cracked and worn until it looked decades older—waiting outside of a wine shop at 8:55 in the morning because it opened at nine. They were of poverty and the things it drove people to, the relatives who couldn’t remember his son’s name but still hit him up for money. When he came back, he told me, people begged him to marry their daughters and get them out of Belarus.

  Belarus was hit hard by the collapse of the Soviet Union, in no small part because of Lukashenko, who bolstered his popularity by maintaining the untenable programs that had bankrupted the USSR. The elderly got the pensions promised by a now-defunct nation. Unprofitable Soviet state-owned enterprises became unprofitable Belarusian state-owned enterprises.

  So now I’ve forgiven both the bus and Belarus in advance for the difficulty and cruelty it’s about to inflict on me, because life in this country has been marked by more difficulties and cruelties, and also because, I guess, on some level, I understand that my oceans of pain don’t mean I was the only one who ever felt any. That maybe I was hurtful, too. That perhaps in the same way I see Belarus as responsible for all of my tears, it sees me as the cause of Anton’s.

  The driver starts up the bus and goes outside for one last cigarette, and as he doe
s a lanky kid jumps on and asks us if we can spare a little money. To my surprise, pretty much everyone pulls out their wallets and hands him a few bills. I’m trying to figure out how to square this with my image of an uncaring populace, but then the kid thanks us all and hops off the bus and the driver puts out his cigarette and we pull out into the Ukrainian countryside.

  The Ukrainian countryside is so beautiful, it makes me understand why Russian novels digress for a hundred pages to describe farmland. We pass rust-colored fields framed by fresh bales of hay and birch trees with thin white trunks topped with golden crowns of leaves. Grass grows easily, the vibrant green of long-awaited spring.

  I go to take a sip of my water and realize the bottle is empty. A moment later, the woman behind me taps me on the shoulder and hands me a plastic cup filled with water.

  “Thank you!” I exclaim.

  A little while later, there’s another tap on my shoulder, and the same woman has now made me a sandwich. She continues feeding me for the duration of the trip.

  In keeping with the theme of natural resplendence, the border crossing takes place in a national park. Golden light filters through a thicket of trees. We cross lakes and rivers running with water pure enough to drink. It is the Beyoncé of border crossings.

  On the Ukrainian side, we pull over in a clearing and our documents are checked by two soldiers who board our bus. One is a woman with perfectly manicured, bedazzled fingernails. I’m taken aback by the sight of a female soldier—an effect, I realize, of my time in Central Asia. But I was only there for six weeks. I’m surprised by how quickly my expectations adapted to my surroundings.

  After driving a few minutes from the Ukrainian checkpoint, but before we reach the Belarusian side, we pull over and let some women out in the middle of the woods. They disappear into the trees as we keep going.

  I turn to my new snack friend behind me.

  “Are they okay?” I ask, worried that they’ve unknowingly embarked on some kind of Ukrainian Survivor spinoff.