Wildwood

by Roger Deakin

  The Bieszczady Woods

  Prague railway station, like the rest of the night city, appears to be lit by a single forty-watt bulb. It may help create atmosphere, but not when you’re struggling to read a railway ticket with your reservation details on it in Czech. Prolonged scrutiny with the tiny Maglite I have learnt to carry when in Eastern Europe reveals our sleeping car is Number 315, and we clamber up the steep iron steps and tumble into our home for the next twenty-four hours clutching a bottle of Mikulovsky Muller Bohemian white wine bought on the platform. We stow away our picnic of apples, oranges, bread and Prague ham in a cupboard above the tiny dining table that is also our desk, which is in turn the hinged cover to the washbasin. Life in a sleeping car is a miniature, tightly organized affair, like caravanning, or sailing.

  Our Ukrainian steward welcomes us aboard. Well, he nods briefly as he checks the tickets, anyway. He is a suave, taciturn character with his own den and a stash of Pilsner at the far end of the carriage. We have a compartment to ourselves, and explore it much as you would try out a new Swiss army knife. Everything folds or slides away, and, yes, you can get two people into one bunk, but it’s a squeeze. We draw the net curtains, turn on the bedside reading lamps and pour out the wine. As we slip out of dimly lit Prague, I half wish I had brought slippers and a dressing gown, perhaps even a cigarette holder. We spread out the picnic dinner and trundle through the blackness towards Slovakia and the Carpathian Mountains.

  Later, lying on our backs like knights in effigy, we drift into sleep. To sleep on a train is to be teased endlessly, lulled insensible by the rhythmic mantra of wheels and rail joints, then, just as the dream is getting nicely into its stride, jolted awake by a sudden lurch to the left and the banging of bogeys directly beneath as we sway wildly round sharp bends or squeeze through tunnels, climbing steadily into the Tatra Mountains. We could tell we were in the mountains by the wheeze and screech of steel on steel as we wound upwards.

  Next morning at eight fifteen we are woken by a gentler, more respectful tapping. It is our steward, bringing breakfast of tea, rolls, ham and cheese, and the news that we will soon be reaching the Ukrainian border at Tchop. Tchop Station looks remarkably like a lot of other places in the Ukraine: it is oblong and concrete, and far bigger than it really needs to be, like the giant frying-pan caps worn by the Ukrainian customs police. If they ever smile, it must be behind closed doors.

  We journey out of Tchop across the Ukrainian countryside towards Lviv, past acres of goods yards full of rusting wagons, sets of spare iron wheels, empty grey carriages, and a trainspotter’s dream of wooden guard’s vans and elephantine locomotives, some with snowplough noses, others even complete with resting drivers, feet up on the dashboard, as though they too have been retired with their machines and left waiting in the goods yard until further notice. In the far distance beyond the plain rise the snowy peaks of the Carpathian Mountains. Enormous hedgeless fields slide by, half flooded by the recent rains and in poor heart, the flatness relieved only by rusting dumps of derelict machinery and the hulks of abandoned factories, their windows so diligently smashed by some local Cromwell that hardly a whole pane survives.

  The landscape is eerily empty: we seem to be crossing an immense plain of set-aside land. There aren’t even any birds except an occasional hooded crow picking about in a rubbish heap, and hardly a human figure except for one or two old ladies bent over a cottage potato field. The land looks utterly spent, and rubbish blows about like tumbleweed almost everywhere. Little piles of charred cans and half-melted plastic bottles turn up in the middle of forests or line the banks of grey, lifeless reed beds. The only landmarks in this brown set-aside prairie of ravished earth are occasional empty concrete silos or electricity pylons. Here and there are pathetic patches of grass, parched, starved and stunted, and not a farm animal in sight: no sheep, no cows or pigs, only the heaps of their dung mucked out from the tin-roofed farmers’ sheds, and miniature lollypop haystacks balanced on poles outside every cottage to feed them. Later, there are rivers, swollen and brown with meltwater from the mountains, and poplars full of mistletoe. Every cottage garden has its own miniature orchard: a dozen trees set out in two rows with the lower trunks whitewashed like bobby socks to keep the insects at bay. We debate this whitewashing of the tree-trunks. My travelling companion, Annette, thinks it might be to make them show up at night and help people avoid them as they return home, legless with vodka. My theory is that no streetwise insect would dream of exposing itself to predatory birds by crossing a band of whitewash.

  The Ukrainians take their railways seriously, and as we pass each geranium-filled signalbox its occupant stands at attention outside the open door holding a small flag aloft. By early afternoon we are climbing out of the plain into the Bieszczady Mountains, winding up wooded valleys past wooden farmhouses, once thatched but now roofed in tin, set in steep meadows dotted about with the lollypop haystacks and neat piles of drying beech or hazel coppice wood. The thick woods of beech, hazel, oak and sometimes pine reach right down to the fast-running, shallow, rocky rivers. A group of youths loll on the embankment, their bicycles tossed down beside them. A horse and cart go by. Two boys push a trolley loaded with firewood ready for stacking outside the wall, sawn ends making a random pattern. Long before it is burnt on the fire, the second wall of stacked wood helps keep the house warm by insulating it.

  Each bridge we cross over the mountain rivers is guarded by a lone soldier in a sentry box, and as we speed through the forest we pass timber yards stacked high with the trunks of beeches, and the bull-nosed lorries of foresters in smoky clearings. Every so often in a hillside town, the metal-clad domed roofs of an Orthodox church glint across a valley. Then a long downhill run and a halt in a village station while a wheel-tapper works his way patiently along the train with his hammer, tapping and feeling the wheels for the heat of a jammed brake. He listens to the note of each wheel like a piano-tuner. ‘Now that’s the job for me,’ I think.

  It is dark by the time we arrive in the city of Lviv and step into the big central hall of its imposing antique station, packed with waiting Ukrainians all lined up on benches, hugging huge red-and-white plastic bags tied up with string. Before the last war, Lviv was part of Poland and known as Lvov, and during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, it was known as Lemberg: ‘Lion Mountain’. Everywhere you go in Lviv you are watched by lions: lion faces carved in stone, grinning from the balconies of the old sixteenth-century houses in the splendid Italianate Rynok Square, silently roaring outside the opera house, rampant on every other shopfront. We stay at the George Hotel at one end of Mickiewicz Square and dine on borsch and huge casseroles of baked carp at a suave little café-restaurant near by. They have made a brave attempt at translating the menu, which offers such delicacies as ‘meadows fried on butter’ or ‘frog tights coated’.

  Next morning outside the hotel two ancient sisters in long overcoats, one tall, one short, stand on the pavement singing folksongs in a cappella harmony. They sing simply with profound passion and sadness, and the tall one proffers a tiny plastic cup that she hastily empties into a coat pocket the moment she hears a coin fall in, for both sisters are blind. Further down the street a solitary four-year-old girl sits begging. Everyone seems desperate for a few hryvnia in a blank-faced, resigned way. A few coins or wrinkled notes is all they need to keep them going, but in some countries people seem able to be cheerfully poor, or at least to seem to be. Here they are just desperate, grim, miserable: resigned and worn out by years of it. Things, their faces say, are long past a joke. Rynok Square, the old market, slopes uphill and is lined with the tall, slender façades of houses that date back to 1530, when they were all restored after a fire. Behind the stucco façades they have timber frames. You sense echoes of the old prosperity here and in the bulky pale-green opera house with its cracked walls. Now the market overflows into all the nearby streets, a tide of country people offering pitifully small bunches of carrots or
onions, tiny bags of potatoes or a row of spindly horseradish roots.

  It is Sunday morning, and we take Tram No. 2 through the outskirts to the museum of wooden buildings in Schevchenkivsky Gay, Lviv’s equivalent to Hampstead Heath.

  It is trying to snow as we plod up Machnikova Street past well-tended allotment gardens full of miniature greenhouses improvised from plastic bottles upturned over almost every plant. We pick our way over cobbles between huge brown puddles. A variety of uninhabited wooden farmhouses, barns, even a wooden church with a spire are half hidden among the trees. The solid, single-storey farmhouses are built of massive baulks of pine, each one a tree-trunk squared off with the adze. They have tall, steeply pitched thatched roofs overhanging the walls of the house by three or four feet, to shelter a veranda that runs continuously round the front three walls. The exterior doorways are elaborately decorated with carved pine in the kind of symmetrical flower or leaf patterns we would draw on the backs of our geometry exercise books at school with the aid of compasses. The verandas are generally walled with wood and entered up wooden steps via a sliding gate of carved pine. The dog kennel, set on the veranda round the corner of the house nearest the front door, is the upturned half of a large hollow log. The farmyards are fenced with an ingenious addition to conventional post and rail. Hazel wands are woven vertically between three horizontal rails to create a wattle fence that must be proof against poultry or dogs and probably pigs too. I particularly liked the hollow-log dog kennel, versions of which we were to see all over this part of the world. I resolved to try to make one myself some day, rationalizing my impulse to plagiarism by remembering that this is how ideas and motifs in crafts and woodwork have spread across the world throughout history.

  We take the afternoon train to the Polish border at Premysil. It is a commonplace to say that corruption permeates every corner of Ukrainian society. This is a country whose president, Leonid Kuchma, was actually tape-recorded ordering the contract killing of a journalist who dared to criticize him. Later, the body of the journalist was found in a wood, minus his head. Even the selling of railway tickets is questionable. At a travel agency in town we were asked 54 hryvnia each for tickets to Premysil. We decided to take our chance at the station ticket office, where we paid 22 hryvnia to a woman in a flowered frock who glared at us silently throughout the transaction, ignoring anything we said. Everyone on Lviv Station was highly trained in the art of being really unhelpful. Being in the Ukraine felt like being softened up for an interrogation. One minute they treated you like dirt, the next they were all smiles. So it is on Train 75, in Carriage 14, that our conductress plies us with cups of chai or Nescafé as we perch on our Rexene banquettes gazing at passing fields full of wind-blown rubbish, molehills the size of nuclear bunkers, and nuclear bunkers like molehills, only with tell-tale stove-pipes protruding through their turf roofs. If this is farmland, it is in a pitiful state. There is barely a tree in sight.

  The San River, turbid and brown, runs along the Ukrainian border. Someone had been felling the poplars that lay along its banks, perhaps to afford a clearer view from the watchtower that overlooks it. Along the double border fences topped off with rolled barbed wire there are mute loudspeakers and barking guard dogs. We pull up by a wide platform and the outsized Ukrainian customs hall. We wait, watching the only three figures on the platform: a dog, a crow and a blonde customs woman in black stockings and high-heeled black cowboy boots. Suddenly, once we are in Poland, there are rooks. There were no rooks in the Ukraine, only hooded crows snacking on half-buried rubbish. We will encounter more trees too: rows of pollard willows along the banks of dykes, cottage orchards and even linear apple orchards hedging the fields.

  As we walk towards the sad centre of Premysil, the first thing we notice is a solitary weeping ash in a small park. Its trunk, rendered greyer by some kind of pollution, is a mass of scars and calluses where it must have been repeatedly vandalized all its life. The habit of its branches too is unusually contorted where limbs have been torn off or broken. The amazing thing is how it has hunkered down and survived. After dinner we take a bus through the night to Ustriczi and see a pine marten in the headlights as we drive through the forest. Next morning we catch a bus that follows the railway line a few miles out of town to the remote hamlet of Ustianova.

  At Ustianova there is nothing but a bar in a wooden hut beside the railway line and a drunk teetering about outside and peeing behind it. It is still only half past eleven. This is the place where Annette’s father had got off the train from Lviv during his flight home to rejoin his parents across the border in Poland in his home village of Baligrod at the outbreak of war. He was studying at the Engineering Institute in Lviv and found himself cut off from his family with no passport. At that time, the border with Poland followed the course of the San River, to the south-east of here. Premysil, Ustriczi and Ustianova were all still part of the Ukraine in those days. Abruptly exiled by war, the eighteen-year-old student decided to risk his life by walking home across country, travelling by night to escape detection by patrolling guards from this obscure station close to the border.

  Annette’s idea is that we should walk the same fifteen miles in her father’s footsteps. We climb an embankment and stand on the weedy tracks by the disused station platform looking across country. The station master’s house is now just another small holding. I had found a quite detailed old military map of the area in a library and photocopied it but through a misunderstanding, we find we have left it behind. This is such obvious ground for a pointless row that we laugh about it instead, and study the only other, fairly crude one we have, surveying a landscape of wooded foothills and fields rising towards the Bieszczady Mountains.

  We set off on our south-easterly course towards Baligrod, along a road between fallow fields for a mile or so, then strike boldly up a track across country. We see no one, but there are signs of recent logging in the surrounding woods, and the track is good. We walk on loamy mud, softened by the melting snows, between hedges of coppiced hazel, alder and willow, diving down steeply banked holloways, which shelter us from the cold of the open fields. It isn’t quite raining or snowing, but it is cold. Now and again we pass through the shelter of corridors of felled logs all cut to a standard cord length of four feet and stacked in six-foot walls. Often we are splashing up running streams of meltwater in the ruts of tractors and carts.

  Bending close to scrutinize the water streaming down the ruts, we can make out the tiny particles of sand and clay suspended in it, being carried away downhill. This is how a holloway is made. Each time a cart wheel, hoof or boot goes by, it erodes the earth floor of the holloway a shade deeper, then the rains come and carry the dirt surface away downhill particle by particle, year by year, until it is six or fifteen or twenty feet deep. Along one of the holloways we encounter a solitary hedger at work. He has leant his bicycle against the hedge, and tied up his terrier, which growls fiercely. The man bends closer to his work as we approach and doesn’t return our greeting, whether out of reticence, fear or hostility it is impossible to tell. All over the bank grow tiny wild daffodils, violets and a species of dwarf lungwort.

  Approaching the first houses we have seen, we cross a rivulet and, hearing the farmyard dogs, pause in the hedgerow to cut a pair of stout hazel walking sticks to defend ourselves against their inevitable attentions. Dogs are the one universal annoyance to walkers all over Central and Eastern Europe. The best defence against them is to cut a stick just over four feet long and point it like a magic wand at any animal that threatens you. We pass the farmyard with a minimum of stick-waving. Everything in it is wood or corrugated iron. The barn is timber framed and walled with vertical boards of pine, knotted and weathered grey and orange. Its gently pitched thatched roof, patched with sheets of tin like an old jersey, overhangs a mosaic of cut log ends that wall the whole of the south-facing end. The summer sun will dry out the end grain, drawing out the sap until the wood is pure energy for the fire. A pair of horse carts stand in the yar
d, one still loaded with fresh green bundles of hazel faggots, their white ends gleaming where they have just been coppiced with a billhook. The whitewashed farmhouse is also thatched, with logs stacked against the walls beneath the overhang of the roof and the usual modest orchard of plums and apples whitewashed to the knee.

  The track has now issued into a country road, and at the next hamlet, Lobosew Dolny, we come to a small shop and bar where we buy lunch and sit opposite in the sun on a grassy bank with our backs against a maple tree. In some of the cottage gardens here thatched beehives stand in south-facing rows, and there are rabbits in makeshift hutches. We set off again for the San River, now dammed in a massive hydroelecric scheme to create Lake Solina, crossing the lake along the top of the endless dam wall, looking down to one side where the power station hums, and the San continues on its course hundreds of feet below. We imagine Annette’s father crossing the frozen river that winter’s night in 1939, sticking to the shadows and somehow evading the Russian patrols, choosing his moment to sprint across the ice. Just as he reached the other side, they spotted him and fired, but missed, and he escaped into Poland. The lake stretches away for miles, with woods of pine or beech running steeply into it on all sides. Apart from a few hooded crows and magpies strutting about the rooftops, Solina is utterly deserted.

  We take a path uphill through dense beech woods, then follow the contours of the lake along a ridge. Our idea is to hike as far as Polanczyk by nightfall, stay the night, then set out on the steeper walk over the hills to Baligrod next morning. It is good, springy going on the beech leaves, and a few miles out of Polanczyk a talkative man who is perhaps a forester appears out of the trees and walks along with us, quite unconcerned that we can understand very little of what he says.

  Next morning, over a hotel breakfast of ‘Potatoes without grease’, we worry about the absence of a reliable map of this area. It makes us both uneasy about tackling the next stage of our journey. It is snowing too, as we strike off uphill towards the south. It is at first gentle, even lyrical, floating down through the treetops in big, dreamy flakes. We get lost almost straight away, and it is entirely the fault of my romantic desire to try to find a track across country to the next village, Myczkow, rather than take a short cut along the road. We succeed, but only after wasting time on several wrong turnings in increasingly heavy snow. Myczkow is a village of thatched wooden farmhouses built along the steep banks of a mountain stream. Everyone is inside, hunkered down out of the snow now settling on the thatch. It is the woodsmoke from their stoves that has led us to the village. Each house has the usual modest orchard of a dozen apples and plums and a conical haystack in the yard, hung like a scarecrow’s coat on a fish-bone skeleton of hazel. No doubt there are animals inside the outhouses somewhere, but none are visible. The village hides its inner life, as the people do.