Monday, August 15, 2011

Day 30. Heading Back to Baby on Beautiful Street

Don’t ever try and accomplish anything on a Lithuanian national holiday.
It won’t happen.
I would hate for an incident to occur on these days- a child trapped down an elevator shaft, an elephant escaped from the zoo- nobody would be there to aid in it, no service even exists.

It was the last day of the job, and things weren’t looking easy.
For starters, the final story was a huge pile of RUBBISH-
A trip out to the local landfill.

“How do you like that Chanel No. 5?” The unshaven owner of the landfill laughed at me, as I gripped my nose in grief.

Other than him, nobody was around to give quotes, to open doors, or even to usher me away like an alley cat.
So I decided, liberally, to fuck work and finish the remainder of what I had to do out here in peace.
To go looking for filthy Russian pornography, moose meat, and to flog my clothing to a hobo- the usual ‘To Do’ list for a person with only a fraction of the mind left to do them.

First, the clothing had to go. A rucksack packed full of dirty and disintegrating garments: jackets, sneakers, work shoes, sleeve shirts and a whole other universe of unknowables. These items were never going to make it on the plane, or I may be considered a terrorist. A stinking bomb threat. They had to go.
So I stalked the streets, for two days running: and even on non-national holidays, the second-hand shops didn’t want a whiff of my stale goods.
It was a gift! My generosity was met, usually, with startled looks, and hand-halting refusals. On the other, less peaceable instances, it was greeted with anger.
As if I were an exhibitionist, flashing faulty gadgets, rather than giving away a bounty of free threads.
Why?
They’re not big on recycling, the Lithos. Well, if you took a trip to the local landfill and inhaled those sweet shades of Chanel No. 5, you’d see that with 100 thousand tonnes of trash piling in per week, ‘recycling’, was a term used exclusively in regards to underwear overuse on more than a five day sequence.

But I was determined not to simply ditch this beggar's birthday suit- they had memories! Stained and tainted memories.

From the brown Bulgarian dinner jacket, which was bought, worn and ruined for a Bob Dylan concert in Sofia, to the swiss-cheesy timberlands (affirmatively the most comfortable shoes in the solar system) which padded my toes as the lone walkers all the way from Australia.
But on the national holiday- there was no hope! Nothing was open.
Various items of clothing began to be scattered out like confetti.
A three-dollar shirt in a skip-bin, an ill-fitting pair of boots strung by the laces around a shut second-hand shop’s doorknob.

Then, out of the mid-morning haze he appeared: the handsome, soon-to-be recipient of this one-of-a-kind classic dinner jacket, which was once owned by Bob Dylan (well, that would be the write up on ebay).
He was digging through a dumpster. Suddenly, his hand, caked in murk, began operating like one of those claw-machines at a supermarket which picks up plush toys- and from the depths of the dumper he pulled out a slimy old Playboy.

“Would I be ‘killing two rabbits with one bullet’ here (as the Lithuanian saying goes)?” a shot of clarity grabbed at me. “I’d have my friend’s requested Russian sleaze AND a new owner for my fine brown blazer.”
I approached him without caution. On closer inspection of his treasured magazine, his grimy teeth glinting in glee at it, I decided he could keep it.
Then, as I removed the jacket from my Santa’s sack, his eyes jumped joyously!
Or more so, with confusion and hesitancy. But still, they jumped.
Somewhere in the field of his Delirium Tremens, his brains did fathom that this was a freebie, and so he accepted it: the brown, candle-wax coated blazer, (with the hole cut into the inside lapel, a specific invention to allow the sneaking of long necks at short notice, for taking tallboys to the lowlifes, into small-town high-brow events).
So off he staggered, away into the park- to prance and pass out in fashion, wearing a jacket I could never give justice to.

And so onward! This final parade around my private paradise, where the sun was singing on this holiday surrounding Saint Mary- a religious occasion for the sinners to go out and get shitfaced. Hallelujah!
All will be forgiven, (just as long as somebody sells me my moose-meat).

One of the few souvenirs I had under request to bring back, was this, a tin filled with flayed hoofs and antlers. Yeesh. A Bullwinkle barbeque was on the cards.
Once this was sorted- and it was, somehow, without worries- there was but one item left on the rotten agenda.

My scraggly best mate, an alleged artist from Sydney, had sent through his demand for, quote, “weird low-budget European pornography.”
I’m not sure what lead him to believe I had any (what??) but I didn’t, so I trailed off on the seedy search.
I had expectations of frog-fetishes, midget kebabs, broke-back mounting of mules, grotesque insertions of gherkins in surgery, and homo-exotic chainsaw feuds.
But did I mention it was a national holiday??
“HALLELUJAH!” I screamed into the mid-summer miasma, at finding yet another shop shut.
I noticed at this stage: I was sweating profusely from the heat, and even shaking slightly, like a nut from nervous energy.
Had I succumbed to the lifestyle out here?
Was I now a Litho-maniac??
Before I dwelt too long on this thought, I rustled through my backpack, and pulled out my papers. I double-checked the documents.
Flight tomorrow.
Germany.
Heading back to baby on Beautiful Street.
Ach so dann, zurück nach mein heim an Schönstraße.
Das bedeutet, kein mehr ‘Litho-Mania’.

And I exhaled an infinite sigh of relief- I let it float there for a second, in front of me, so I could watch it and realise it was real- then I let the wind whip it away, and add it to the trillions of sighs hovering out in the atmosphere.

But still I had these trusty timberland shoes- what to do with them?
Without really thinking, I tied the laces together, and with an almighty fling, set them free from the threat of the landfill. (Actually, I gave them three 'almighty flings', before they decided to settle there, swaying steady in the late afternoon).
I gazed up at the electricity wire, which was humming from the base power disturbed by the two new intruders, and wondered...
...Where would the world be flinging this Old Boot to next?
And I took a last look around, at a magnificent moon, ate up the summer air, then turned to go- off to offer an untranslatable fit of farewell, to the one-armed old man in the Blocks.
And already wishing I had my shoes back.


THUS = THE END OF LITHO-MANIA.
THANK YOU FOR YOUR PATIENCE, AND HAVE A NICE RIDE HOME.
PEACE AND CARROTS, MFG. 2011.

Sunday, August 14, 2011

Day 29. Atop the Hill of Three Crosses


There is a back path of wooden planks, which cuts alongside the river Neris, and spirals up to the grassy peak of the Hill of Three Crosses.
If you’re prepared to take this treacherous route, tripping and stumbling over rotted boards and branches, you are rewarded with your own section of solitude- isolated from the hordes of Russians, Poles and Western tourists who hike up the opposing side of the hill every day for the view.
The ulterior pathway comes equipped with human headspace. Out of the crevasse of computer life, away from the businesses of supermarket shopping, landlords and all other forms of daily modern labour, the hill unwinds into a peaceful shroud of pines and Baltic bird-life.

As the wilderness engulfed me, I could feel the last four months begin to unfurl. Now that this space was here, and I was away from everyday stresses which reached out to woe me- deadlines, faultlines, lifelines- now retrospect was opening up in my weary head like an acid trip.

The rain was dripping gently, constant, almost tropically. The trees, likewise, posted a canopy of umbrellas, not unlike a wetland rainforest. I ventured through this jungle, lost almost in a stream of subconscious.

With thoughts otherwise occupied, I failed to notice: I was suddenly standing on the edge of the apex, the Three Crosses to my side.
The city of Vilnius lay gracefully below- an aging Lithuanian beauty, decked out in all her exotic finery, and sprawled lazily in the grey day upon her brass bed of histories, mysteries and time. How much this old lady had been through!
The green domes of the Orthodox Church glinted out in the distance. Gedimino’s Castle cast her rigid shadow over the bubbling Neris. The television tower spurted from the ground like a syringe on the backdrop. And closer, a spiky sea of steeples rose from out of the outcrop of Baroque architecture, communist blocks, and Old Town abodes.
She had been good to me, this lovely lady, this Vilnius.
But I was leaving her all the same.

Peering out over the panorama, still emersed in the solitude, I began to realise how needless, pointless and petty all my modern stresses were.
In a seamless segueway, thoughts began to drift toward a different old Lithuanian lady, one who too, like me, had left the lanes of Vilnius, though long ago, and not entirely by choice.

In the 1940s, my grandmother spent days hiding in the forest, bunking on a blanket, alongside her husband, my grandfather, as the soviets rounded up and deported her neighbours to Siberia. She was forbidden from attending her studies once the Nazis rolled in- an SS guard had towered outside her faculty, clutching a machine-gun, for anyone who tried to argue. She bore two children, my uncle and my aunt, who were forced into the whirlwind of wartime displacement as she was. Clutching her kleine kinder under her arms, along with whatever possessions she could carry, she was forced to flee her home country, alone. She never saw her parents again. Like a lost soul, separated from her husband, she trekked her way through the train lines, to Germany, by the war’s end. She walked by and through blazes of gunfire, burnt bodies in totalled towns. She slept in train stations, in mossy bunkers, in blasted-out barns, her suitcase acting as an occasional cradle for her baby. She gave life to a third child, who would have been the sibling closest to my mother’s age. Due to neglect by staff in a Naples hospital, the baby succumbed to a fever and passed away.

Though this is, of course, a grotesquely short and straggly summary, it’s just to give you an idea.
My grandmother stands as one of the world’s great survivors. A boat person who made it to Australia in 1949, with her life, her husband and her two children in tow.
She settled down as a teacher, in Sale, Victoria, where her fourth child was born: a pretty girl (who would become, among many other prosperous things, my mother).

Now 91 years old, my grandmother resides in a Sydney nursing home. Here she reads, reflects, relearns languages, and watches as Crimson Rosellas and Rainbow Lorikeets feed from birdseed on her balcony. Her husband has long since died. Her eldest son, living in Melbourne, turns 70 this year.
In 25-odd years, I have never heard my grandmother whisper a negative word about life.
The optimism imbued within her has been the biggest inspiration of my time. Through everything that went to pass within her days: As a wartime refugee, to a migrant, to a published Australian writer. Through everything she saw, read, loved, lost, grieved for, longed for, fought for and forgot: she’s always radiated the light of an essential faith in humankind. She recently sent me an email, in regards to the tsunami in Japan. Within it was a mention, in a fleeting sentence, which one was left to think of for days, about the absolute fragility of human existence.
Without boundaries of class or wealth, the beggars, the boat people, the blind or the bankers- we all are of this same broken breed.
This is one thing she has taught me.

As I wrote this entry, sitting, huddled against a birch tree (ants crawling up my leg!) atop the Hill of Three Crosses, life suddenly made a heap of instant sense.
In the dedication page of her book, Elena’s Journey, (which was written and published in both Lithuanian and English- her third language, of about five) it reads:
to my Grandchildren.

All her struggles brought us into existence, and allowed us to grow up in the free world of Australia.
As I prepared myself to replicate a version of her feat: leaving from Lithuania, off toward a modern Germany, the irony was inescapable.
Though I had no firm grasp of where my life was leading, I would be travelling in the comfort of today’s transport (yeh, well, Ryanair…) with a certainty of a bed and a friendly face at the other end.
In other words: the exact same trip, but the complete opposite.
Now I get ready to retrace her steps, at least, figuratively, and in a different dimension. In gratitude and thanks for all I’ve seen, in some ways I've been living the free life she could never stick around for, out here in Lithuania.

I descended the Hill of Three Crosses, stumbling back down the same soggy path- with no more stress for what’s to come, and only hope imprinted on my brow.

Wednesday, August 10, 2011

Day 28. Off the Rails, and Return to Reality

An Ode Owed to Re-Finding the Fields of the Frangipanis

In a whine and a bump, the train shunted out of the station.
The monoliths of Minsk shrunk and sank beneath the hills, as if the city was suddenly swallowed.
As we rolled along, the rafters underneath the carriage rumbled in rhythmic consistency to the thudding clunks inside my chest.
B-dm, b-dm, b-dm…continuous on both sides, yet somehow without depth, devoid of all but the solitude of silence.
B-dm, b-dm, b-dm, b-dm…

The carriage was dolled up almost like somebody else’s motor home. Quasi-Persian rugs reached along the corridor, hiding trapdoors and crap stains and whatever else for which a train from Minsk could possibly use a Quasi-Persian rug.
Furry blankets out of granny’s cupboard shimmied down from their receptacles, acting as makeshift shade-cloths for the late-afternoon glassy glare.

In this train, opposed to the last, the passengers were sectioned off from each other, cordoned into individual blue patterned booths. These were perfect for diving into an undisturbed doze, but a spoiler for any amount of people perversion you wished to partake in on your lonely way back to base-camp.

Not that there were floods of other persons anyhow- a toddler squealed a tantrum three rows to the rear, and the occasional boulders of a middle aged redhead rolled around the aisle.
Our hostess was a cougar.
Her shimmering pink lip gloss emboldened only her mouth, leaving the rest of her faded features to face the havoc caused at every curve or canter the pink lips pulled.

There were no shiny statues singing from this corner either. The twine stitching was tethering.
The luggage beneath my eyes was all bloated at the seams.
In numb facilitation, I turned them to ponder the scenery steaming past.
Again, we encountered the slideshow projector changing the image at rapid rates.
The landscape outside now ran like what I imagined were Welsh valleys, out in a sprint to the horizon until they hit the pillaring pine forests halting them to a dead end.
A Dead End.
Minsk rode through my mind like a masquerade: A brilliant ballroom blazing from the unknown. The communist city skirted within me, making me marvel at how I could probably never reach behind its many masks.
I pulled out the pocketbook and began jotting jagged notes.
The City of the Red Star…’ and I began to scrawl and salivate.

Distance and time spindled by, and energy ebbed.
Twelve or so pages of haggard handwriting later, I phased out, in pure just, nothing.
Staring into the glass rather than through it, it reflected a curious waste.
What had happened?
Without caring to dwell on the wreckage waiting to keep me hostage, I flipped a few pages forward.
The fresh paper sat stagnant: the gaping rock face of a clear white one, blinding me like a blizzard without a word as its imprint.
Villages unwound outside, and I wondered what would happen if I got off and stayed there, forever, but I decided probably nothing reasonable or worthwhile.
So I pulled up my posture, which was slumped and folded, like a rotted drawbridge to an abandoned castle.
And I peered out into the backwoods of the Belarusian fields, which were washing to purple from the onset of sunset: or rather, I pierced my peering through them too.
All I could see was one shining ember pulling apart the cobwebs of my consciousness. And she wore a straw hat.
And she shimmered like the Sun when you stare at it.
And I wrote and I scribbled a million mishandled consonances, exclamations and vowels from the curls of my bowels, to the Girl of the Frangipanis.

The pen was perspiring, rather than printing, and continued to drip out all the sorry story sorrows which one can only muster once the custard sweetening the brow has disappeared and left the being to fear and frowns.

Then as if the time machine had touched down, the slide projector was trapped in a spin-cycle and the whole system was slipping out of my grasp, we were there, pulling into the station, back in Lithuania.
Back to Vilnius: where I’ve called my home for the last how many months.

Sweeping myself and mystuff out of the wagon in a flurry of forced movement, I began to trail my steps out of the station.
“Back from the mayhem of Minsk. I made it,” the thought wanted to win. “I’m home now.”
Though there was something not especially homey about it all, but I couldn't quite work out why not.
And then the loudspeaker lauded out in thick Lithuanian:
“The train on Platform One is going to Moscow, via St Petersburg. Now boarding, Platform One, Moscow via St Petersburg.”
Wow. The cusp of real Russia. Was I really so far away, from where I once was?
What does it even mean? How did I get all the way out here?

The automatic doors steamed open in answer, and beckoned me out to the last of the light. I craned my head to look down the Crescent.
The exterior of Vilnius station was abuzz from clacking faces checking clocks, grinning, greeting, grabbing palms in pleasure, happy haunches heading to their shacks of shade and safety.
The loudspeaker announcement echoed through my memory. A group of latecomer Russians bustled past to purchase tickets.
As they swore in Cyrillic I wondered again, how did I get all the way out here?
B-dm, b-dm, b-dm, b-dm…

I could tell there was a sense of The Ending in the air.
The rain began to tumble down, and I laughed and removed my hat: as if ready to begin busking to the heavens.
I began to whistle dixie, and turned to trundle back up to The Blocks: ready for a new week, ready for anything.
The Sun was in my mind, the raindrops racing down my jacket.
I soon became saturated as the monsoon marooned me further, which seemed to trigger an unreasonably hilarious internal tickle.
The meaningless drinking, stinking, and pelting every which way but homewards: All parts of the Litho-Mania: was soon coming to a closure.
“YAHOO!” I bellowed it into the wall of water, and tap-danced the rest of the route back to base.

Tuesday, August 9, 2011

Day 27. The City of the Red Star


Gazing out the tinted glass of their tenth storey apartment window, over what appeared as an infinite cemetery of humongous housing blocks, my focus pulled into alertness.
This was it.
Minsk, Belarus: The Iron Curtain’s Final Frontier.

As these impressions washed over me, I stood oblivious to the Russian hooting of my ‘aunty’ beckoning me back for borsch.
Though I soon roused, and scooped up a hearty three courses of curious cuisine (what is ‘buckwheat’ anyhow?).
As I ate, my cousin bundled our belongings together ready to hit the station for the city.
*
Soon, down in the metro, I stood unmoving, in awe. The image which smashed normality like, well, a hammer, was a beachball-sized slogan of Bolshevik bad times, pillaring over the main platform.
Televisions mounted on either side of it blared synchronous broadcasts: grainy footage of rollerskating couples, laughing children, layered within a montage of men labouring. It was accompanied by the beeping soundtrack of an eighties Atari cartridge. The actor builders were sweating and smiling, apparently from the satisfaction of work ethic.
Get the message? Socialism is Great!
And don’t breathe otherwise.

As a westerner whose childhood was as unrelated to the USSR as iPods to the elderly, it was a stun-gun to the senses. Was anyone believing this guff?
Bewildered, I scanned the starring actors of this wild new movie manifesting around me.
Military musclemen sporting red stars were the first noticeable breed.
But upon closer look: they were just kids! My cousin caught my astonishment.
“Men must go to the military once they finish university, for one year. University starts around age seventeen here, so they have to go in pretty early,” she informed me in her manner of preciseness.
Military culture continues to serve as a major portion of Minsk existence, at least visually. As the bus leads you in to the centre, billboards of anonymous generals, decked out like Christmas trees in baubles and badges of a thousand unknown triumphs, dot the main roads as reminders.

As we waited, darting my eyes further across the platform, an aesthetic anomaly, bar, a happier one, diverted the attention span.
The fairer sex, certainly were. They sauntered around as if, in their border locked and propaganda pasted island, they had absolutely no idea of their own absolute and copious finery.
As if out of Dior’s production line, they flowed in rivers, one by one by the next, and I thought of converting to communism.
“So this is why Lukashenko keeps the doors closed, the sly fox,” I surmised, hit by a bullet of clarity. It made perfect sense!
All these hammers and sickles were constantly going at it hammer and tongs.
Who would want to let the rest of the world in?
We boarded the bus, as I wallowed in my whiplash.

As I began to soak in the magnitude, just the utter difference from life I had always known, looking around I realised how actually everything was really tidy, elegant and grand.
We were approaching the inner sanctum now, the Minsk main centre.
As we rode, my cousin began to dish out in energy some skerricks of everyday life lived under the thumb of a ‘dictator,’ here named President Alexander Lukashenko.

She studied at a university, was free to learn languages, make friends, take trips.
Alexander Lukashenko was not all bad, she told me. While he has spoilt a lot of things, and selfishly bars his own little enclave from being able to join the remainder of modern Europe, he does do his bit for Belarusian present.
“The new communications faculty by the main train station is just one of many new projects,” she enlightened me, pointing towards a glimmering glass shark’s fin of modern architecture.
And the streets were admittedly spotless- later in the evening we even saw a cleanup truck individually torch-lighting, from the passenger seat, every single bin as it mowed along.
Who would have imagined Alexander was an anal retentive? But there it was.
But the weak points of the politics, in her perspective, shining sidewalks aside, soon surfaced.
“Lukashenko does not give his people a say,” she told me, shaking her head in grim acceptance.
Each week, protests take place in different locations around the city, trying to create noise about democracy and fair rights, though demonstrators often face the threat of being imprisoned for it.
“He builds huge new stadiums, and our main railway station is said to be one of the best in Europe. But when it comes to repairing hospitals? I went with a friend of mine to one in an outskirts district, and it looked like out of a horror movie. Walls peeling, insects, the whole thing,” she revealed in her broad Russian accent.

Though the middle of Minsk, where people were watching, did not immediately appear like it was without money.
Strange, considering the massive debt the country was currently weighed underneath.
“The government tells us the economy is good, much money is being earned. But then, why do things cost four times as much as six months ago? They are lying to us,” she shook her head in scepticism.
Belarus encountered an all-encompassing currency crash in May, when their money was devalued by over 50 percent. A kilogram of apples today costs around 12 thousand Belarusian rubles, when before it cost just three or four.
So where had all the money gone?
Standing beneath the skyline, it began to come clear.
“Woah…” was the deepest offering I could muster.
Monoliths weaved out into the distance, huge, freshly painted power-block buildings stretching into the horizon.
As if someone had taken a polaroid of baroque Vienna, enlarged it by ten-fold and slapped it to the brim with hammers and sickles, here would stand the blueprint of inner Minsk.
It was clean, beautiful and not just slightly BIZARRE.
The checklist for travel hopes was now getting close to complete.

It was a soviet memorabilia museum, but alive and buzzing. And not at all downtrodden or cast, (perhaps because the sun was pouring down, unable to be controlled by the vigilant visa restrictions).

For all the civil rights infringements we’ve heard about, though I’m positive they exist, as there is no democracy in some hounds dictatorship, for today, I saw a different side to the city.
The sun glinted off the glasses of the girls strolling past, emersed in chatter with umpteen companions or hugging close to a boyfriends (just don’t mention homosexuality). Families sat about sharing a giggle or a grill-plate, and gangs of apparently sass-loving sailors, wearing berets and singlets, donning sickles and all, commemorating some kind of Air Force holiday, were entertaining themselves with bottles long into the afternoon.
“Is this the everyday fashion in Minsk?” I looked at my cousin, flabbergasted at the sailor’s popeyed styling.

So it was, in short, sunny day anywhere, free world or far away.

We trundled by the cinema, a futuristic movie-set from the 1930s: an idea of what the world could have looked like, if Stalin had won the war.
“Woah,” I repeated my witty commentary.
Another aspect to the city was its adorning paraphernalia.
In the Baltic states of Lithuania and Latvia, the hammer and sickle slogan is banned, and production of it is counted as criminal.
In Poland, the distribution of such symbols can carry a sentence of two years in jail.
In a call for it to be forbidden EU-wide, ministers of these countries composed a letter stating the denial of soviet war crimes, and their underlying connection to this symbol, "should be treated the same way as the denial of the Holocaust. They must be banned by law."
But not in Belarus.
Here, as if paying tribute to the conquering totalitarians of the past, the hammers happily own the awnings of the buildings young and old-
-including above McDonalds.

This trendy capitalistic hotspot of Maccas is a fashionable choice for young Minskians.
“Some people go there every night. It’s always crowded. Don’t ask me why!” my cousin laughed.
Well, if fighting against the system here means chowing upon a cheeseburger, it sounds feasible enough for a fashion to me.

As we strolled onwards, the buildings kept growing bigger, more daunting and dominant. As if we were meant to notice our own insignificance shadowed by some omnipresent power: there lorded the KGB headquarters (dubbed by my cousin, ‘The Residence of Evil’) and the government house. Lukashenko’s residence itself was an icebox version of Buckingham Palace. One lone open window on the top floor wavered slowly on the soft breeze: The President catching some rays? We decided not to dally and find out, as a guard patting his pistol began to eyeball us.
Then, as if the time machine had finally delivered us to the source of the soviet saturation, there he stood.

Superhuman sized, the statue of Lenin brought a look of immense distaste into my cousin’s features. Behind him, the Belarusian parliament balanced her flag of red and green, as storm clouds appeared to circle over it ominously, and singularly, as the rest of the city remained immersed in sunlight.
She scoffed at the scene.
“Nobody likes Lenin,” she spat.
This tourist however, modelled for a photo in shameless excitement.
Though, the situation was tense. We were unsure if political photography was legal, and so were hesitant to take a dozen snaps. Two or three, a glimpse of a guard lingering in the background, four, and we were gone.
Trailing through the digital images later, the fleeting tourist photograph seemed to capture more than just a novelty niche of Europe.
There was something about the greyness which rang out a tone of sorrow, about this buzzing and beautiful city continuing to be trapped behind the bars of bureaucratic and traditional totalitarianism.
Though, all seemed not lost.
T-shirts emblazoning way-out western logos, band names, English taglines were everywhere. It seemed it was a quiet rebellion, or at least, the proof of a population not resigning to living behind the cultural walls this dictator has set up.
“Lukashenko has to die one day,” my cousin shrugged the unwavering truth.

Minsk was a hospitable place, more so than other capitals in the EU which I’ve visited… *cough* Bucharest *cough*…coated, as it was, in flowers and peaceable people.
Untainted by the throngs of western tourists (well, almost) and free of mass migrations from unsavoury sections of Euro society…
Minsk has got it made!
As a grin straddled my gums and these thoughts ran through me like quicksilver, my cousin suddenly gravitated me back down to land.
We were standing outside a Metro station, one with colourful CCCP murals livening its exterior. A cluster of candles dripping wax on black shawls placed over boxes was positioned outside the entrance, nestled between hand-placed crucifixes and icons.
“This is where the bombings happened, in April,” she spoke solemnly, as it had affected her too. “A music teacher from my school was injured. Another boy, from my uni, was badly hurt.”
She was referring to the results of a bomb attack, an explosion of nails and ball bearings, this year, from where fourteen people were killed, and at least two hundred others badly injured.
“It was just so strange, to happen in Minsk. We are such a small country, we can’t harm any others. The only people we could injure are our own,” she said in grief.
Nobody really knows who was behind the bombings. A popular media myth was Lukashenko set it up, to detract attention from political opposition.
Whatever the case, Minsk remains a contradictive city: unburdened from the outside turmoil of what Lukashenko calls “nauseating” democracy, though at times, at war within itself.

Without noticing it, the cloak of night had covered the block surroundings, and we set off back towards her micro-district home.
While trudging the ten kilometres, we wandered into a spectacular marvel of Minsk: electronic strobes emitting from the thousands of bulbs attached to the rhombicuboctahedron (that’s right) shaped national library.
The show danced like manic fireworks, furnishing the back boroughs from its lightning shards.
“Wow,” I mumbled another wisdom. Then wondered: “But how can they afford the electricity?”
My cousin shrugged. This left me with the impression, its best not to ask how or why or what.
In Minsk, the best thing to do was soak in as much as you could, then be on your way: like a sponge at the edge of a mysterious ocean.

Sunday, August 7, 2011

Day 26. On the Rails to White Russia


As a foreigner bouncing along on the bumpy train to Minsk, the feeling is somewhat akin to slouching in a hospital waiting room, before an operation. You have no idea what to expect, but know the outcome is going to go one of two ways: either you’ll end up better than before, or you’ll be dead.

Crazy Russian rap blared through the carriage as we rolled out of Vilnius. We were zooming towards what has become known in newspapers as “Europe’s Last Dictatorship,” the capital of Belarus.
Not exactly the darling of travel brochures, all reports had alerted me the rail to Minsk was more like a time machine than a train.
Just three hours away from Lithuania’s capital and you enter a zone known like North Korea, what can today safely be described as a living Soviet museum.
The intrigue had always been inside to explore this unknown city- probably primarily because authorities always tried to keep you out of there. There were steadfast visa restrictions for outsiders, and you needed an invitation from somebody living inside to be allowed into what were, presumably, their huge cast-iron gates.
Now pocketing my accepted, stamped and raring little visa card, I was boarded and off, being showered on by rowdy Belarusian Muzak.

It happened as such: After a cyclone of organisation, tableside discussions with distant cousins, it had become evident- there was a link awaiting me in Minsk.
The daughter of the deceased brother of my mother’s cousin’s father: obscure to understate it mildly, lived within the borders of dictator Lukashenko’s love-in.
The relation was unknown to me as the country she slept in.
From family broadcasts, the latest report was the young lady was accustoming her mirror to a recent bout of rhinoplasty, so even if I’d ever seen a photo of her, chances were slim as her new sinus for an automatic recognition.
But, all the same, the generosity from the unknown is often incomparable, so I gratefully accepted the offer, and happily took the stranger’s candy.
So with all the legwork done, I leant back in the anti-chamber of this crazy commie caboose, and let the scene flow over me.

Outside the window, a lush wash of absinthe appeared to have been doused upon the fields. Everything was sparkling in a somewhat surreal tinge of green.
But maybe it was merely my eyesight.
Synagogue domes burst out through the rooves of farmhouses, suicidal billy goats strayed close to the tracks, and villagers in army get-up visored palms over their working brows to catch a look at the steaming engine speeding by.
Inside the cabin, it was a slightly scarier story.
Passengers in my vicinity ranged from garish princesses to bearded vigilantes, none of whom I could brave eye contact with at this early hour of the AM.
I ignored the squeeze and kept busy percolating over my migration forms, trying to maintain a steady pen grip.
But it worked for only so long. My brain was whipping up a blend of thoughts: What could be expected within the borders of this, a landlocked country so regularly vindicated by global media as being chock full of abuses on human rights?
I had read profusely about the amount of journalists they had locked up in Minsk for expressing their views in the free press.
I double checked my visa form:
Occupation: NONE.
I was safer as a drifter than a journalist, I surmised. I leant my head back, clamped my eyelids, and tried to block out the commie crud serenading from the speakers.
The Belarusian border was sidling in out of the distance.
*
The border crossing was less of a bullfight than predicted. A few minor discrepancies did arise, however. A rather severely handsome woman placed my documents upon her reader. All seemed okay…’but what kind of planet are you from?’ steamed from her glare.
She shot me a threatening question in Russian.
Non comprehendo, lady.
The surname ‘Garrick’ suddenly threw her into a tailspin of confusion and disbelief: as if its utterance brought on some kind of perverse and powerful curse, or were the secret codename of her turbulent lover lost in battle an eon ago.
Though, after some repugnance at my lack of comprehension, she tossed me my papers and left me to transfix on my thoughts once again.

Soon enough the train would be rolling in. Soon enough we would see what all this hubbub was about.
As if someone had quickly changed the slide on the projector, the backdrop altered completely from just ten minutes prior. The farmers toiling in their trenches, their cows half-dazed by the passing commotion were no more to be seen.

Now outside the glass, hundreds of obelisks, like the anthills of the Australian outback, though on a rather grander, greyer scale, jammed the horizon. These were the housing complexes, brimming from the million plus population of Minsk. Manmade escarpments of gritty greys were juxtaposed between brazenly bizarre buildings painted in the fluorescent fashions of Gold Coast teenagers.
Alongside of the train tracks, construction workers leant against crates of supplies, wiping perspiration on already soaked shirt sleeves.
The interesting aspect: some of their caps donned the hammer and sickle slogan.
A rising intensity grew from inside me. I swallowed it down as if it were medicine, and carried on looking.
The station was blooming into focus now. The brakes tweeted out in the universal language, “we’ve made it,” jangling us around like seeds in a pod. The lulling Russian strumming began to peter out.
We had made it to Minsk.
*
Scrambling rather than stepping out of the carriage, the station immediately dizzied me. I became aware, if these mysterious cousins weren’t here to meet me, I would have to toil with public telephone boxes, a feat comparable to opening the tomb of Tutankhamen.
For forty seconds standing motionless, I waited for fate to guide me.
Behold! I was greeted by amiable countenances, excited to see somebody from the strange kangaroo-eating village of Australia.
The lady there to greet me, to save confusion, ‘my aunty’, was a striking character. Her face was dwarfed by magnificent pink-rimmed spectacles, and a firestorm of curly red hair, dangling each which way, down to her shoulders. A chunk of amber was slung around her neck. My cousin was black haired, youthful, and, thankfully, English spoken.
“Hi! You made it! Are you really from Australia?”
At this point, I was no longer sure. It felt as though I’d been living in space for the last years, but I decided to let it drop.
“Sure! Great to be here!”
And no sooner had these words been spoken, did I notice the so-called City Gates dominating the backdrop.

Soviet statues lined the gates like snipers. Somehow, it was a refreshing sight to see all these hearty soldiers, buxom farmer lasses, beckoning the crowds, all of us equally, with fearsome waves of welcome.
Again the intensity rose, but once more it was swallowed back down like a bad batch of cough syrup.
“Mother asks, are you hungry? She’s just made a big batch of borsch,” my cousin questioned.
Multiple hungers were writhing within me, but I couldn’t be sure if one of them was borsch. But hastily I shot back a,
“Sure, I’d love to!”
And without further explanation, we dove down into the Minsk city metro, bobbing like pinballs through the socialist streams of peek hour workers.

(To Be Continued…)

Saturday, August 6, 2011

Day 25. The Blocks (Colloquially: Da Blox)


*A day dedicated to documenting the life directly outside these Iron Curtains*

MORNING


Around 5AM, on cue, a choir of car alarms rouse like the rooster all the sleeping sapiens bunkered in The Blocks.
As if an orchestra of primary aged orphans tootling on recorders, all out of time and tune, have taken camp underneath your windowsill, the alarms bloop and bleep until you crush the pillow against your scalp in moaning.
Whether hit by a falling leaf or a flying vodka bottle, the hair trigger systems appear to be tied harmoniously into the cycles of the day: as they will only choose to sound either deep in the dead of night, or, as mentioned, together in unison at the bleating of the dawn.
Soon, the clopping of heels, the swishing of soles against sidewalk and the little pip-pips of car key buzzer beepers to open their caterwauling car doors contribute to this otherwise unfathomable salad of sound.
Then cometh the bagpipe of all street noises: the baby. More specifically, the baby wail.
Training for the Accadacca Achievement Awards, these baby Bon’s could certainly stir up the levers on some seismographs.
I’m not sure what they are doing to them out here. Neither am I interested in finding out.
But, for all awaiting the results, the author has decided the Victoria Park Centrelink orifice in Perth is no longer the Capital of Early Morning Baby Bawling, after existing four months in The Blox.

After this, amid these early hours, as hot teacups gently allay the shaking of frayed fingertips, various arrays of moustaches and dog chains shuffle past. A particular highlight comes in the form of Mr Potato-Head’s crossbreed with Jeff Bridges, as he staggers by on his morning stroll, always wearing the same t-shirt, brandishing him as the “Easy Dude.” (Take it easy, Dude, wherever you may be).

Almost foaming into the footpath, the rally course utilised as a parking station causes no end of grief to the many mufflers driven in, over and inevitably, away from, The Blox.
As if caused from a series of spent landmines, the potholes and ditches patterning the sandy lot exceed any auto-mechanics wet dream. The stationary vehicles which pile up within it, featuring a catwalk of flat tyres, cracked windscreens, dented fenders, and grumpy stickers on twisted bumpers, contribute to the air of a way-out-west wrecker’s yard.
Scrap metal collectors too, rise with the screaming of the alarms. They know within their scabbing hearts, an hour will pass and a dropped number plate, a hurled off hubcap or, even, for the true purveyor of metallic monetary value, a coathanger aerial, could be awaiting the scrummage of them, the scavengers.

As the morning kicks into rhythm, so too do the elderly washer-women, unchanged in their working routines since Einstein discovered atoms. Pegging linens with crab-like virtuosity, alongside moo-moos, and a mysteriously wide variation of undergarments, they reveal a display which will float for the day like flags in the wind.
Centring the all-seeing eye of the Blox, a petite slapdash set of pylons called a playground sits, which within it, among potential glass hazards and other spiky spinnerets, play the offspring of dozens of Blocks inmates. Charging at each other, the tykes transform into an imaginary army. The puny-partisans frolic for their freedoms clutching on to a fragment of fibro or an amputated birch branch as their weapon. Lurking stealthy behind an archway, in a sleek spring motion, they slip out like a sniper for a series of POWPOWPOWs at their peers.
A slim few of their ‘fathers’, though not all may agree they distinguish this title, adhere to the strict diet of bad parenting: slug booze back, lay back like a slug, then slug kid.
This may appear judgemental, if not just plain mental, but paying attention, you notice a couple of the mini-mites sporting omnipresent markings of blood and blisters on their filthy ice-cream covered faces in the local canteen, as daddy buys another plastic bottle to transcend his morning into midday.

AFTERNOON

Communities of crows and pigeons dig at discards from the green trash train of dumpsters which centre The Blocks like grim monuments. Another unfortunate scrounger soon swooshes the devilish birds away with his fist, so he can make sure they haven’t made off with his lunch.
Raking through the remnants of awful off-cheese parcels and scooping out slurps from an unfinished yogurt, either a stubbly gent who won’t look you in the eyes, or a scarfed ancient widow who dreamed once of different things, do their duties on a daily basis.

A stoic lone local heaves a single-blade lawnmower, the type on two wheels, over a hectare of daffodils and beanstalks threatening to surpass him in height.
Two chatterboxes crouch and gesticulate in expressions of grandeur next to the bench, long lost chums apparently regaling the treasures of some heroic weekendly experience.

The Blocks themselves, relics of the Russian occupiers, are made up of around eight to ten twenty by twenty people drawers, shelving units to fit the many squadrons of humanity, particularly, unfortunately, the poorer bracket, within them.
When you lazily pace the grids of granite and grass acting as thoroughfare between The Blockish buildings, one is struck immediately by the dozens of trailing eyes, watching from their windows. Historical generations with nothing left to do but gawk, abstractly, as the day shuttles slowly by.
An autistic girl gets home from school. As if locked in gallows she hollers to the hills, almost as an animal, turning at her mother, who walks beside her in such practiced patience you would believe she was either a saint or drugged beyond the heavens.
As the sun marches lordly over the Blocks, come mid-arvo, pillars of glass, large windows centring each individual block, reflect laser flashes of syrupy gold on to the passer-bys.

The washer-women’s daily rituals bring her back to her line by now, to collect her husband’s tainted trousers, clicking them off with her peg-like fingers.
Balconies, with their rusted palings, brown as toothpicks and nearly as fragile, harbour jungles of potted ferns, plastic umbrellas, cigarette ashtrays and Donald Duck towels which hang over their precipices, as if looking to escape back to Disneyworld.
The Block buildings vary in sizes: from the minute five storey to the granddaddy twelve. Each has her own shadow which carves over the puddly ground during the dusky segway to sunset.

EVENING

Light lingers like a vagrant in Lithuanian summer, dallying over the inscape of the Blockades as would a spider over a large and fruitful fly.
The worker’s waddle homeward now, once again clopping heels, shuffling shoes, carting shopping bags slinging from sleepy sleavecuffs.
She, the grandmother, her face a map tracing the paths of fabled seafarers, her skin the bumpy tides, the waves of wrinkles, bends to tap the pooch upon his hopeful head.
Doctor, the Belarusian neighbour, ambles home in his acrylic jacket, appendicitis victims on his ailed mind, as usual, distancing him from the window watchers, the omniscient onlookers.
Easy Dude meanders down his straight arrow line, back the other way, as if Waylon Jennings blasts in his aura wherever he may forever wander.
Munted mufflers rattle back into the vicinity, slugging out up Mt Blockmore, into the wildebeest grazing zone of the pot holed paddock carport.
Dusk continues to settle over the ogreish oblongs, painting them a thin tone darker.
Individual bricks lose their borders in the sundown, and the Blocks become one uniform mass of material.
In the twilight eyes still twinkle at their watching perches, as they ready for bed and or to depart and transfer their furry views to the television.

The Blocks, these Space Odyssey Monoliths, sink down beneath the darkness now, as night slips in and cuts off the visuals of their life.
A stunning transformation here occurs: like approaching a city coated in blackness while looking from an aeroplane, rows of lamps in individual interiors switch on in steady flows. The huge black monsters are lit intermittently, one by one, flicking on, in a dazzling electrical display.

And here the Life of the Blocks privatises each member out to their own luminescent little worlds: to live and love and get ready to be ripped from sleep by the clamour of the car alarm choir, one more round, at the friendly hour of 5AM tomorrow.

Thursday, August 4, 2011

Day 24. Dancing in the Meadow at Midnight


Weaving along a cracked concrete path into forest, I felt as if there were rifle butts puckered up against my sternum, sucking me forward.

Though, the shooters were subconscious: a messed-up mental ambush I had prepared for myself, in order to send me off to work on a day I least delighted to.

So skipping out into the woods, externally a Little Red Riding Hood in his little yellow laced boots, internally the Big, Bad Rotten Old Wolf, he was radiating work ethic, off to meet the grandmother of all stories, hiding somewhere out between the wildberries.
Well, not such a charming fairytale as all that.
The metaphor of the rifle butts was succinct for this ominous occasion.

In this spot where I was walking, seventy years odd prior (for history’s sake, between the nineteen hundred years of 39 and 44) in this exact gloomy garden where I was gallivanting, 100,000 Jews were marched in rows, no doubt spurred not by rifles, but machine guns adhering to their shoulders, to their deaths.

The Ponary Massacre in Lithuania was one of the worst Jewish genocides of World War Two.
Staring at the faces of the families hanging on the tumble-down walls of the feat of drunken architecture which was the Ponary Massacre Memorial Museum, you could not help but wonder why it once all turned so sour, out here in little Litho-land.

But to get to the massacre memorial site, the forest, where weeds protrude like grappling hands through the concrete pathways, one must first trek to the edge of Paneriai.

Paneriai is a village of wooden sheds, jovial direction givers, and nasty scowls from unwed Russian milk-maids.
Out here, practically zooming through the heat, privately unhappy about a recent hacksaw haircut, I was tracing the path of 100 thousand murdered, burnt, and secretly disposed of humans.
During Nazi occupation, 95 percent of Lithuanian Jews were deleted from existence. The forest shivering on the edge of Paneriai silently swallowed many of these bodies.
The lives of doctors, jewellers, lovers, children, were ripped apart out here by bullets then fire, as if they were but an end season sugar cane crop, which would grow again after the traditionally post-harvest burning.

The air tasted bitter around the graniteblock statues of the Ponary Massacre Monument, as if it was fetid with the guilt and the shame of the crime’s accessories.
Lithuanian people were involved in the dirty work of Ponary, alongside the Nazis. Feelings of resentment, jealousy, (as ex-PM Bob Hawke once put it, “hatred and envy are the most corrosive elements in life”) thrust Lithuanians to corrode and kill their own countrymen.
People with the Star of David apparently tattooed upon their souls were denied participation in the world of the day.
And the sick fact is: some of the countrymen living today deny it ever happened.
What I was out here looking for, was to photograph a recent slur on the Semites.
Red spraypaint apparently vomited over one of the monuments, in Russian cyrillics, proclaiming, “Hitler Was Right” underneath a swastika.
Ok, but I think you’ll find you were wrong there buddy… though I won’t be the one to tell you in person, as I don’t want to end up number 100,001 of bodies deposited in the Paneriai forest.

So as you skipped along this twisted pathway, craning around this forest of ghosts in search of unintelligible Russian skulduggery, something to call a story with a pretty little photo of an anti-Semitic slur in a cemetery, who else would you happen to run into, but...
“Labas!” I spat out a greeting in order to gauge a local for directions.
“Sorry, I only speak English!” came the unarguably antipodean response.
Her head cocked sideways, a flush of dehydration in her cheeks, and she wore the pilgrim’s star of many massacre sites, strung boldly in the valleys of her throat.
“Hey! That’s good, me too.” I wheedled over and stood like a lamp. “Have you seen any graffiti around? I’m looking for this vandalised stone.”
“What? Nah, I didn’t see it! I’ve been here for two hours, and didn’t geta glimpse!” Aha. Revealed through the telltale shortening of speech.
“You’re an Aussie?”
”Sure am!”
“Out here in the backwoods of Panarai?”
Her eyes moved in an awkward eclipse around the scenery, as if it had just dawned she’d been teleported from Gloria Jeans in Gosford.
“Guess so!” came the half-mock reply. “And you are too I guess,” she slammed it, as if her mind’s alarms were blasting, “CAN’T ESCAPE ‘EM! CAN’T ESCAPE ‘EM!”
As for me, I hadn’t seen a wild random Austral in months, and this was the luck of the wicked playing LoveSick Sally for my senses.
“Yeh, for sure. From Sydney! Balmain.”
“Oh yeh?” She laughed through her nose (a typically Sydneysider response), “I’m from Bondi!”
I too scanned the vista around, as if I had been teleported back to Bondi, for a quick surf and a lark instead of trudging into a Holocaust massacre scene.
We shared some homecooked wordplays, reminiscing of Sydney this and that, then swam about our separate ways, myself, searching for the story that never was, she to take her chances on the cannonball run known as the district rail service.

We departed from each other, and I went back into Holocaust grumbling mode for two slivers of a second.
While ascending the steps of a dugout, a cylindrical manmade hole apparently for disposing of wasted lives, I suddenly decided I was feeling faded.
The realities of the scenery far surpassed my unnerved response to my hacked up hair job, and I needed to sit and not think about burned bodies.
I slumped against the neat Hebrew carvings middling a massacre memorial stone, and drifted out into a heatstricken memory montage.

…Her hair was matted, a lack of showering, and she bade me to hush by placing a palm over my mouth. Nothing subtle. Her eyes were electrified, perhaps out of her own personal craziness, or the adrenaline of the situation. I wore no rubber boots, and so her electrical pulse ran through me as she grabbed my hand. We were ready to bolt. And out we dashed, two white rabbits, running across the meadow, doing our best not to be spotted from the homestead. The living room lights were still on and spitting out between the cricks of the Victorian veranda. It was midnight, or surpassing it into the wee hours, and the two lives ran skipping through the sprinklers, out into the irrigation paddock on her father’s farm.
As if it were procedure, once the dirt amassed between their toes, they dropped their dacks and began dancing through the droplets, under a moon shaped and sharing light like a disco ball, and twenty million barroom crystals shaking and staring down from around it.
Bare to their birthmarks and howling as the freezing droplets slapped against their skins, their back-foot boogying blasted each other in a bounty of mud.

Then I drifted, back to the friend I had just made in the forest, and her falsified teleportation temptation back to Bondi…
I thought of diving underneath the moss slimed pontoon skirting the wall of Dawn Fraser’s saltwater pool in Sydney harbour…blood drawing from a heel against a barnacle siding a rockpool in Coogee… a beach shower which turns to steam as soon as it hits the eggfrying heat of the midsummer asphalt.

And I reopened my eyes to the crop circle death pit in front of me. A shudder spiralled like a tadpole down my spine. All those poor people…

The modern histories of Europe are as important to world life as mint to a Mohito…
But thank all the bloody deities for letting this one begin in 1980s Australia.
I absconded back up the cracked old concrete path and out of there, without a story to sell.