In the middle of Europe
Translated by Lucy Renner Jones
According to French calculations, the middle of Europe lies somewhere north of the Lithuanian capital Vilnius. The states of Belarus, Estonia and Lithuania, where I was able to spend part of summer 2009 thanks to support from Halma, the network of European literature institutions and the Swiss cultural foundation Helvetia, consequently make up the continent’s real heartland. At the same time, there is quite a sharp line dividing this side and the other side of the EU external border. So the following meetings I describe are, to a certain extent, impressions from a part of the world that is divided at heart.
“Anarchy” in Minsk
Before the reading, I quickly go for a pee. I am quite nervous - this is the first time I’ve ever read outside a German-speaking country. Standing alone in the small cubicle in the basement of the Museum of Belarusian Literary History, gloom behind me and bare concrete in front of me, my nervousness escalates when it occurs to me that sixty-five years ago, this was nothing but a vast wasteland of ruins; the German occupiers almost completely wiped out a large section of the Jewish population in the Belarusian capital. I don’t imagine life here today is easy under “Europe’s last dictatorship” as the press like to dub Alexander Lukashenko’s regime. Not a small proportion of Minsk thirty-somethings seem to have become acquainted with the back section of the green police vans; some regime opponents have vanished without a trace and others have been put behind bars for weeks for “vulgar use of language” in public. Won’t the people waiting up there in the hall simply shake their heads when I read about the sad fate of the mentally ill and drug-addicted in Switzerland? Won’t they say, those are just problems for the privileged– you should come and have a look at what’s going on here!
To my amazement, however, my texts go down very well. The twenty or thirty people in the hall immediately relate the depressive Friedli from Bern’s uplands and his son, the junkie Fibi, to the underdogs in Belarusian literature, where there seems to be an abundance of underdogs anyway. The audience seems to think I’m particularly clever not to tell Friedli and Fibi’s story in a clean, standard German but in a blend of dialect and high-level language that Sergei, the translator, renders in a mishmash of Russian and Belarusian. I regret that I only started the Power Course Russian – Learn Russian in 4 Weeks! one week before I flew to Minsk. All the finer details of the translation escape me. I’m happy if I can decipher the names “Fibi” and “Freidli” from his Slavic word soup.
Sergei translates for me that I thought it unfitting to write in standard German about people who don’t fit the norm. The sprinkling of dialect is an expression of the revolt against norms which people like Friedli and Fibi do not conform to. As it turns out, Belarusian in modern Belarus has a much stronger rebellious character. Not every Belarusian can speak Belarusian: it’s spoken mainly in the countryside. During the short democratic phase in the 1990s, Lukashenko’s strongest political opponents, the Nationalists, wanted to make Belarusian the country’s single national language. That is why Belarusian is a taboo under today’s (Russian-speaking) regime: it’s still tainted with a whiff of the opposition, just like practically everything that is a reminder of Russia’s independent history, whether medieval bagpipes, for example, or the colours white/red/white, a symbol of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania that Belarus belonged to in the late Middle Ages. Does the audience regard me as one of the opposition? In any case, a poet carrying a white/red/white bag shoulder bag, and who’s also called Sergei, invites me in broken English to a bagpipe evening after the reading.
Sergei seems to be a really popular name. A third Sergei, a trainee doctor, who lived in Berlin for a few years, tells me in accent-free German that hard drugs are also a problem in Belarus. The poison, he says, doesn’t stop at borders; there’s even a methadone programme supported by the EU but the regime doesn’t broadcast it widely. By this point, I’m flabbergasted. A methadone programme is not what I expected in “Europe’s last dictatorship”.
The “last dictatorship” is demonstrated to me more clearly after the reading. Two of the Sergeis and Rahneda, a publisher, stroll with me to Victory Square where we want to wait for the underground to take us to the bagpipe evening. The square, which is circular and surrounded by buildings that look like monstrous, yellow ice-cream cakes with whipped cream, is cordoned off. Everywhere red and green flags flutter, the official country colours and historically the symbol of the Russian or repectively Soviet province Belarus. On both sides of the obelisks and the eternal flame in the centre of the square that commemorates the victims of the Second World War, a strange procession of bearded men on heavy motorcycles is moving past at walking pace. Every few metres they stop and those who have reached the flame get off and lay down a red rose in front of it. A podium has been erected at the exit of the square where President Lukashenko stands, casually dressed in jeans and a colourful, checked, synthetic pullover like from a mail order catalogue. Beside him stands a child, also dressed in mail order catalogue fashion. Rahneda says that’s Kolja, Lukashenko’s five-year-old son that his father has chosen as his successor.
A biker wearing a sprayed-black Wehrmacht steel helmet on his head - perhaps the leader - climbs up onto the podium and appears to hand Lukashenko a present. It seems to be the same leather waistcoat that he himself is wearing. Then he indicates to the President, who puts on the waistcoat straight away, that he should sit down on the motorbike seat in front of the podium. Lukashenko seems surprised and first declines but Kolja whines and so he sits down on the seat behind his son. Smiling slyly, he revs up the motor a couple of times on the spot. What a racket. Then he puts the stand up and drives off with the entire troupe of bikers following him. It is only then, as the gang thunders off into the golden evening sun along Minsk’s main drag, that I spot the patch sewn on the back of the President’s waistcoat: “Anarchy on wheels”.
It takes a long time until we get to the underground and even longer until we reach our destination: a lush, green meadow somewhere outside of Minsk. A few fir trees are dotted here and there, and in among them, a big bonfire burns and around it, about fifty young people hold hands and dance. The moon has just gone up, full and white: it is amazing how electrifying these bagpipes can sound, played by a man with blond dreadlocks. Sergei, the poet, gets black bread and cheese out of his shoulder bag – to line our stomachs for the harelka, as he puts it. We nibble on the bread and cheese. Mmm, great cheese, a Belarusian Tilsiter that I like almost better than the Swiss kind I scoff for breakfast in Bern. In the inner circle of dancers, I now notice that some dancers have scarves in their hands. Rahneda explains that it is an old folk dance. The dancers on the inside dance alone until they find someone in the circle that they like. He or she puts a scarf around their neck, gives him or her a kiss and changes places – this way, all kinds of couples had found each other.
Judging by their clothes, there are the same communities in Minsk as in the west: goths, punks, preppies, then simply ‘alternative’ types and guys who only wear khaki-coloured clothes, and I even see a couple of hip-hop hats mingling about behind the bushes.
I went to H&M especially before I flew here so that I could come across a bit swanky and western but compared to most of them, my look is pure mail order catalogue. I ask Rahneda where all the trendy clothes shops are in Minsk – and already work out in my head that I should be able to get hold of a few great outfits at considerably lower prices than in Switzerland. Rahneda laughs. In Minsk, practically the only clothes shop is the state-owned Gum, which sells work outfits, pyjamas and ill-fitting shirts. Precisely for this reason, clothes are really important to young people and they get them from the West, from second hand shops in Poland and Lithuania. Sergei, the soon-to-be doctor, unscrews the harelka. After drinking a mouthful from the bottle, I am told to wash it down with juice. Mmm, delicious. What’s that? Birch juice?
Lukashenko certainly has followers among the population; even an economic crisis won’t cause him to totter so quickly. In Belarus, a deep abyss traditionally divides the people from their regime. Even under the Tsars’ rule, the attitude was: Let us be thankful that the father state deals with dirty politics so that we can devote ourselves to private matters with a pure heart. An organised, opposition capable of action barely exists nowadays.
All the intellectuals are abroad, if they haven’t vanished into thin air. Rahneda teaches me a toast: “Baichali!” That’s what Gagrin shouted out when they ignited his space rocket: “Let’s drive!” - “Come on,” she says, “let’s dance.”
Jellyfish off the coast of Käsmu
I can already smell the fried chanterelles from the veranda. I’ve just come back from the sea, my hair is still dripping wet and when I enter the kitchen, I finally set eyes on her for the first time: Jaana, the elderly, Estonian author who has been living with me for the last three days in the house of the Estonian writer’s association in Käsmu and who has stayed in her room up until now. “Oh, you make egg mushrooms with the traditional Gerstengrütze”, I say. Jaana has collected the mushrooms herself in the never-ending pine tree and spruce wood that begins just beyond the kitchen window and which reminds me of Rahneda in Minsk as she often suddenly stopped while showing me around to quickly check the mushroom situation in a piece of woodlands. I rave on a bit to Jaana about Minsk especially about the “bagpipe evening by a great fire”. I’m happy to have someone around again who I can talk to in snatches of English and German, as Käsmu is a little fishing village and my Estonian, apart from “Piim” for “milk”, is practically non-existent. That’s why I have been simply listening most of the time for a week. I hear the rustling of the reeds growing on the banks when I plunge into the already chilly Baltic Sea from the sandy beach at the edge of the village; or the hammering of woodpeckers when I smoke in the evenings on the veranda; and not least the croaking of the little frog that waits for me every morning behind the shower curtain although I take it back to the wild every evening with a plastic bucket. There must be a hole somewhere in the wall.
The fact that Jaana can speak a little German is because the Estonian population was made up of German large-scale landowners and their Estonian employees until 1945. A German supposedly invented the Estonian written language only one hundred years ago; it features a lot of double vowels and has a fondness for double umlauts. It all seems a bit Finnish to me and that’s not far from the truth as Jaana affirms between two forkfuls of Grütze; Estonian belongs to the Finno-Ugric languages.
“Ach Gott”, she says in German as I come back to the “bagpipe evening” in Minsk and the “lovely feeling of community”. At the end of the 1980s and the beginning of the 1990s, she, along with whole herds of enthusiasts, looked for her national, primeval Estonian roots while running around in a traditional linen wrap skirt. Admittedly, she was soon cured of this shortly after independence; the whole national rubbish served mostly as a excuse to make money and anyway, those at the nerve centres of culture and economy are still the same people who were in power under the Soviets. Jaana resolutely washes her empty plates in the sink. Somehow it feels daft to ask her the question that I was going to ask: These jellyfish that are suddenly everywhere in the sea, are they poisonous? Do I have to be careful?
The Desert beyond Nida
I’m hiking through a wood on the edge of the Lithuanian bathing resort of Nida when I pick up Rudi. He steps out from behind a spruce at the edge of the path, a small, round man with sticking-up hair; with his hands, he is still fumbling around with the zip on his greasy jeans. When he sees me, he throws his hands cheerfully in front of his face and calls out to ask whether I come from Germany. Switzerland is just as good to him: the main thing is that someone can understand him at last, not like in “Memel over there” in his cheap hotel where everyone just shrugs their shoulders if he wants to have a second cup of coffee for breakfast. Rudi notices that I frown at the name “Memel” at which his story instantly gushes forth. Everything used to be German here once: the Curonian Spit, the spit of land that Nida is situated on, as well as the harbour town Klaipeda in the north were both called “Memel”.
“My mum had to flee from Memel in ’45. That’s why I’ve wanted to come here for a long time. And then I saw this special offer at Christmas for a hundred and ninety euros by ferry from Saßnitz.” I see that Rudi’s front teeth are missing. He has a couple of boils on his face that he scratches from time to time.
As we carry on and the pine trees slowly thin out, Rudi acquaints me more intimately with his family history. His mum is not his real mum but his stepmum. Despite his fifty years, he still lives with her in Eisenach where I’m also immediately invited. He is in fact a tourist guide in Eisenach and he could show me the Wartburg. “It’s got 879 steps, the Wartburg!” he cries out. And even though he’s already panting, as if he was climbing up those steps because our path is now going steeply uphill and is getting more and more sandy, he carries on giving tourist information about Thüringen as if he were a cassette player. “Luther was in Wartburg from 31st July 1521 to 2nd May 1522”, he gasps. Or: “Eisenach has five youth hostels; the neighbouring town, Bad Salzach, has only got one.”
Thüringen might be really nice, I think, but this area is not bad either. We have now arrived at the destination of our journey on the ridge of the Great Dune at the outer limit of Nida and spread out in front of us is just sand, sand, sand; left and right is the sea and inbetween is a roughly two-kilometre wide strip of sand that disappears southwards on the horizon. Somewhere there must be the border to the Russian exclave Kaliningrad. I feel like I am in the Sahara although I’ve never been there. Rudi asks what that strange thing is glittering over there in the bushes.
It is an enormous sundial made of black marble that someone had built on the ridge of the dune. It measures some twenty metres in diameter; the stone pillar that used to stand in the centre has fallen over and is covered in rune scripts. Even in Rudi’s travel guide, it doesn’t say anything about the sundial but just then, someone cycles up on a fold-up bike and Rudi shouts out to him if he knows what kind of structure this is. The cyclist doesn’t know either but he’s German: Herbert from Kiel. I don’t like Herbert from the outset. He’s tall, gaunt, with a flashy watch, a prune-like face that gapes out from his wind jacket and white sailing trousers. Most of all, I’d like to be alone with my Sahara feeling but then Rudi drags Herbert along to introduce us. “Ah, a writer?” murmurs Herbert and raises his eyebrows in a strange manner. “Then you’re probably here in Nidden to look at Thomas Mann’s holiday home, right?”
Right then, of all times, Rudi suddenly remembers that he has to leave immediately to be on time for his bus back to “Memel”. “Cheerio, Swissman, come to Thüringen!” he shouts out to me as he wades off through the sand. Great, now I’m stuck with Herbert on my own. Rudi disappears behind the ridge of the dune and then Herbert says, he won’t make any bones about his opinion of Thomas Mann who used his Nobel Prize money to build a little house here that belonged to Hermann Göring a few years later. The Manns, snarls Herbert, were a “thoroughly rotten family”, they mixed themselves with “inferior blood”. “And what was the result? The children were all insane, depraved and queer!” And his, Herbert’s, son since he’s read Thomas Mann at school has been acting all queer too; “I’ll have to show him what a real breeder is!” - I pretend I have to go behind the bushes and hope that Herbert won’t follow me. Once I reach the other side, a brown hare hops away. It doesn’t run off wildly, zigzagging; it just makes a few leisurely jumps towards the south, towards the Russian border until it’s out of sight. I follow it.