The Best Travel Writing Page 6

  My people always felt this force whisking through their beings, so they carved, painted, and drew it upon their treasures: jewelry, tools, precious metalwork, and always the stones.

  What does the shape signify? The self-expanding out or the natural world reaching in? The spiritual balance between ourselves, the sun, and the cosmos? Land, sea, sky or the Holy Trinity? The constant spiraling of the soul through death, initiation and rebirth? The answer is unknown because myths and spiritual ideas in Celtic culture were passed down one generation at a time, through ritual, storytelling, music and dance, but never the written word—these secrets were too sacred.

  One thing is sure: Theories and sophisticated stories were spun to explain our existence, and we Irish developed brilliant minds and unparalleled lyrical grace that remained unsullied through centuries of enslavement.

  Throughout my years in Ireland, the green ribbon grew like stardust out of a magic wand, sparking in one long line that looped up and around and through my eyes, ears, skin, hair and heart, tingeing my life with magic.

  Childhood passed swiftly. It seemed suddenly I was a grown woman living in America, married into a clan who kept Irish traditions by producing a never-ending stream of children, celebrating life’s end with four-day-long wakes, and declaring love often with kisses on the lips and long-winded, sentimental toasts.

  Now my home is Washington State where the rain keeps everything green, but I pine for patchwork farms and roads lined with wild fuchsias. I think of Ireland so often that this country intertwines with that country until both places are one.

  The ring I wear has three spirals, the tristele, a tiny silver reminder of what winds within. This shape is, to me, álainn: beautiful. I chose it to decorate my home: My favorite upholstered chair is covered with gold threads of spirals, the rug beneath my feet is bordered with wavelets of them, and a print upon my wall of van Gogh’s Starry Night has in its center an undulating starswirl in greeny white-blue—all around my house spirals pirouette. There is even a calligraphic curlicue at the top of the first letter of my own symbolic name.

  I see widening gyres in my mind’s eye, next to me on life’s journey, gently rolling or flying forward. Through times of poisonous loneliness, stinging sorrow, or the dark grip of grief, they illuminate my path like a chain of tiny emeralds pulled across an expanse of black velvet, making visible the invisible, making brighter the divine.

  These sixth-sense Irish arabesques steer clear of the English in me and skirt the Scottish, but cling to my Americanness. Their motion is ceaseless, their repetition reassuring—up and down and around and around again and again, these Celtic spirals, spinning on their predestined course. They are mine to keep; when my spirit leaves my body they will fly with me.

  I came again to that Kerry coastline years later and the vortex inside me lit up like phosphorescence. As I stood on the bluff over Ventry Bay, out of the corner of my eye I saw tips of long strands that ignited and flashed from auburn to silver as the breeze again swirled my hair around my shoulders.

  I returned, with my husband and sons, to fields where black and white cows lounged in front of rugged castle and cathedral ruins, to the land of the navigator whose name I gave one of my strapping sons, and the place that holds the illuminated manuscript the other son is named after. The taste of soda bread dripping with butter and honey orbited my tongue, taking me back to simple meals with many bodies wedged around a rough-hewn table inside a country cottage.

  John O’Donohue, Irish poet, philosopher, and scholar, wrote that the eternal world and the mortal world are not parallel, but fused, as captured in the Gaelic phrase fighte fuaighte, woven into and through each other. I felt this fusion when I returned alone at night to that megalithic circle.

  Drombeg sat silent and stoic upon its high plain, the stones shimmering silver in the moonlight. I had heard when the site was excavated they found the remains of an adolescent wrapped in a thick cloth inside a pot in the circle’s center. I stood again inside the circle remembering the raised dagger and the hair on my arms rose: What had happened the night I crossed over?

  When all is said and done, how do we not know but that our own unreason may be better than another’s truth?

  For it has been warmed on our hearths and in our souls, and is ready for the wild bees of truth to hive in it, and make their sweet honey.

  —William Butler Yeats, The Celtic Twilight

  I ask: Is a soul decorated only with the times and places that the body inhabits? Is not the lace we are made of more intricate and complicated than that, woven of what exists within our senses and what we sense from our existence? Is yours forged within the confines of reality? Mine is not.

  For I was not born in Ireland, nor did I grow in many cottages there, or climb the wild cherry to the echo of the uilleann. I first set foot on Irish soil when there were slivers of silver in my reddish hair and my sons were nearly grown. But when I arrived, it was—to every cell in my body, each neuron in my brain, and all the sensors in my spirit—a homecoming, a return. The coils inside me glowed and sizzled as I remembered—in the truest sense of my experience of memory—a past I didn’t possess.

  Unreasonable to some, perhaps. But whether placed there gingerly by my ancestors—for I am surely of Irish heritage—or, stranger still, through a series of previous lives spanning thousands of years, these curls cling sweetly. I suppose there is a way to test the truth of this.

  Into my soul, which has been honeycombed with golden spirals, I invite the bees.

  Erin Byrne is a writer whose essays have won numerous awards, including the 2012 Silver Solas Award for Best Travel Story of the Year. Erin’s work has appeared in Everywhere magazine, World Hum, The Literary Traveler, Brave New Traveler, Best Travel Writing 2011, Crab Creek Review and many other publications.

  DAVID FARLEY

  A Chip off the Old Bloc

  Minsk, austere capital of Belarus and former Soviet satellite, harbors Beatles cover bands, bookish bohemians feasting on pig fat and vodka, and the curious legacy of Lee Harvey Oswald.

  John Lennon was late. He’ll arrive in about an hour, George Harrison told me, snapping his cell phone shut. So, along with Ringo, sitting with a bongo drum between his legs, and Paul McCartney, plucking away at his bass, the band would start without him.

  I had met “George Harrison,” whose real name is Ivan, the day before when a Minsk-based friend of a friend, whose name is also Ivan, drove me out to the countryside for a bucolic Belarusian afternoon of barbecuing and beer drinking. In the company of a half-dozen shaggy-haired hipsters in their 20s, as large pieces of pork cooked on the grill, Ivan and I had nursed oversize bottles of Alivaria, the local brew, and watched water-skiers cruise by on the wide Ptich River. That’s when George Harrison had a lightbulb moment: Since I wouldn’t be in town to see the band’s next gig, they should stage a private concert for me.

  And so there I was, a day later, sitting in the drab living room of a small apartment on the outskirts of Minsk, the capital of Belarus, a landlocked country wedged between Poland and Russia, watching a Beatles tribute band called the Apples. The L-shaped couch was crammed with the band’s friends. On the coffee table, half-liter bottles of vodka framed plates of zakuski, or vodka snacks—sausage, tomato slices, cheese, black bread, and more sausage. The landscape outside the large picture window was spiked with tall gray, uniform panelky, or “commie condos,” as they’re sometimes irreverently called. When the band busted into “Back in the U.S.S.R.,” the irony of the moment was so thick I had to sit back and close my eyes, lest I spontaneously combust.

  After all, I pretty much was back in the U.S.S.R.

  At least it really felt like it at times during my stay in Minsk. Much of the impression is due to the architecture: This city of nearly two million people was rebuilt from the rubble of World War II as a shining example of Stalinist city planning. In addition, it is still sculpted with grandiose neo-classic buildings, wide city-center avenues suitable for victory par
ades, and expansive pedestrian walkways.

  Minsk is also one of the few places in Europe where the statues of Soviet heroes have not been buried. Columns topped with red Soviet stars, faded over time, still sit at the center of city plazas and squares; you can still stand on the seemingly anachronistic intersection of Marx and Engels; and pro-government slogans, in the form of large block letters stretched across rooftops, still force-feed ideology to the populace. The country even has a mustachioed strongman president, Alexander Lukashenko, who runs the place. (More on him later.)

  And if that wasn’t enough to send me straight to the Belarusian consulate to apply for a long-term visa, there was this bizarre nugget of historical minutiae: For two and a half years in the early 1960s, Lee Harvey Oswald—one of the most mysterious Americans of the twentieth century and the alleged assassin of John F. Kennedy—called Minsk home.

  How is Oswald remembered here, I wondered, and what trace of his Cold War-era residence did he leave behind? Also, how did it come to pass that while many of Belarus’s Soviet comrades have consciously broken with their past, Minsk stalled at the starting block, the capital of a country lost in time and space, still partying like it’s 1959? Except for Russians who come here to lose their rubles in the city’s many casinos, and the odd male Italian who explores the clubs to hit on the exceptionally beautiful Belarusian women, tourists of the world aren’t exactly uniting here. There are no backpackers with dog-eared copies of Lonely Planet Belarus tucked under their arms, no fanny pack-clad vacationers wandering Minsk’s broad streets.

  That tourism gap is part of Belarus’s appeal. We live in a world that’s growing smaller, more totally connected, but also—from Perth to Prague, Bangalore to Boston—more homogenous. In coming to Belarus, I yearned to find a place that had managed to eschew twenty-first-century globalization. I wanted to say I saw Minsk before it became “the next Prague.”

  The day after the Apples concert, I found myself at yet another party. This time it was full of writers instead of musicians. Another friend of a friend, Siarhiej (pronounced SER-gey) Kalenda, a well-known Belarusian novelist, told me to meet him at Ў, a combination bookstore, gallery, and publishing house hidden in the courtyard of an apartment complex near the center of town.

  Once in a while, a full-scale after-hours bash breaks out at Ў, and this was apparently one of those nights. As black-clad twenty-somethings flowed into the gallery, Kalenda, twenty-five, gave me color commentary: She’s a poet. He’s a writer. He’s a painter. She’s a graphic artist. A tall brunette delivered vodka shots to waiting hands; then came baskets of creamy, salty (and utterly delicious) salo—a pig-fat delicacy, the only delicacy worth smuggling out of the country.

  But Kalenda didn’t bring me here solely to eat pork products and meet a bunch of artists. After all, as he explained to me, these people weren’t just poets and painters; they were individuals taking part in a simple act that would make Lukashenko’s mustache hairs bristle.

  I looked around. The young faces in the crowd looked like normal pig-fat-eating, vodka-shooting Belarusians to me.

  “Do you understand anything they’re saying?” Kalenda asked.

  “No,” I said, and reminded him that I don’t speak Russian.

  “That’s it,” he said, pushing his empty plastic cup into my chest. “They’re not speaking Russian. They’re speaking Belarusian.”

  Kalenda continued: “This bookstore? You won’t find anything in Russian here. Just Belarusian. The publishing house?” He pointed to a small office where a group of people huddled around a computer screen watching YouTube videos. “They publish books mostly in Belarusian.” Even the name, Ў, was a cold slap in the Russky face. It’s the only letter in the Belarusian alphabet that is not also a letter in Russian.

  “So what’s the big deal?” I asked. Kalenda gave me a brief history lesson.

  Belarus’s autonomy grew out of the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991. For the first few years, the country was, like the rest of post-communist Europe, on a path toward free-market capitalism and democracy. But then in 1994 Alexander Lukashenko, a once obscure collective-farm manager and hockey fanatic, was elected president. He has since refused to leave office. It’s true that he won reelection in 2002, 2006, and 2010 by very wide margins. But it’s also true that international election-monitoring organizations ruled those elections flawed. Cementing his totalitarian reputation, Lukashenko tried reattaching the country to Russia, which my new friends told me was part of a post-Yeltsin power grab. The theory was that if Belarus officially became a province of Russia, then Lukashenko would be in a position to become leader of Belarus and Russia. It didn’t work, but the president still has pro-Russian leanings, thanks in part to the country’s dependence on cheap Russian natural gas.

  In one of his first acts as president, Lukashenko made Russian one of the official languages of the country. Belarusian is still an official language, but since the beginning of the Soviet Union in 1917 (when Belarus was a founding constituent republic), the majority of the country has spoken Russian. No one is sure exactly why Lukashenko favors Russian over Belarusian, both of which are Slavic languages. Some say he can’t speak Belarusian.

  I nodded, alternating sips of vodka and bites of pig fat as I listened to my friend against the din of conversation in the bookstore party around us.

  Just then a few people who’d been congregating across the room joined us. Andrei Khadanovich, a tall thirty-seven-year-old poet, the director of the Belarus PEN Center, and an advocate for the Belarusian language, and Julia Tsimafeeva, a translator, had been listening to Kalenda’s history lesson and wanted to give me their two rubles’ worth.

  “We speak Belarusian first as an aesthetic choice,” Khadanovich said when I asked him why he chose it as his main language. He became entranced by Belarusian in college and now speaks it with his wife and young daughter, something, he says, that is becoming increasingly popular. But he admits that Lukashenko’s assault on the language has made speaking it a political statement. “It’s us against the government. And because artists and writers and such are choosing to speak Belarusian, it has become the language of the intelligentsia.”

  Tsimafeeva, who works for a translation agency that specializes in the Belarusian language, said she and others are translating English-language authors such as Charles Bukowski, Ken Kesey, and Jack Kerouac into Belarusian. “By translating cool writers into Belarusian, we’re hoping younger people will be more motivated to want to speak it,” she said.

  “The problem,” Kalenda said, “is that Belarusians don’t have any identity. Because we’ve been in the shadow of Russia for so long, and before that a part of Poland, our only identity is ‘not’—not being Russian or not being Polish.”

  Václav Havel, the playwright, Communist-era dissident and eventual president of the Czech Republic, came up in conversation at least half a dozen times during my evening at Ў. So did obscure historical Czech figures like the nineteenth-century scholar Josef Jungmann, who is credited with reviving the Czech language and identity. Which was fitting, because I felt as though I were back in Prague in the early 1980s, mingling with members of Charter 77, the Czech dissident group founded by Havel and others.

  I also felt a tad paranoid. I sensed that the KGB, which, not surprisingly, still exists in Belarus, might break down the door at any second and arrest us all. I had spent the last few days wandering around Minsk with a slight sensation of fear tingling in my stomach. If it wasn’t the neoclassic KGB headquarters or the ominous, boxy, and heavily patrolled presidential palace (which is strictly verboten to photograph) or the ubiquitous police presence (Belarus has one of the highest ratios of cops per capita in the world), it could have been the general Stalinist design of the city. The sprawling buildings that line the streets in the city center appear so omnipotent, so rigid and heavy—many are a block long—that they dwarf the average pedestrian, implicitly suggesting the state can, and will, crush you if necessary.

  But
in the carefree setting of Ў, my fears were put to rest when someone refilled my cup with more vodka. “Budzma,” we said: “cheers” in Belarusian. We consumed even more pig fat. Our conversation gave me hope and made me want the rest of the world to cheer for a freer Belarus.

  “If only the rest of the world knew Belarus existed,” Tsimafeeva said, inspiring snickers.

  Kalenda jumped in, saying, “Whenever I travel around Europe and people ask where I’m from, I say Belarus. They say, ‘Where? Belgium?’ And I say, ‘No, Bel-a-rus.’ And they ask, ‘Oh, right. That’s part of Russia, yes?’”

  It’s partly understandable why Belarus gets lost geographically. The only international press the country gets consists of reports about Lukashenko’s power-grabbing ways, from efforts to dissolve parliament to crackdowns on political opponents. In 2005, then-U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice referred to the country as Europe’s last dictatorship. It’s no wonder the only souvenir I could find in Minsk was a red t-shirt emblazoned with the hammer and sickle. The state image hasn’t been a very good advertisement for the tourism industry. But then there’s that one famous person who did find his way to Minsk, about fifty years ago: Lee Harvey Oswald. He called the Belarusian capital home from 1960 to 1962. Did Oswald’s time here shape his later actions? I decided the only way to find out was to get into his apartment. Which appeared to be a long shot. How do you find the apartment of a shadowy historical figure when there are no plaques or signs or public information directing you to it? I had managed to find an address on the Internet before I arrived in Minsk. I mentioned this to Kalenda, but he doubted I had the correct information. “Everything is filtered through the government,” he said. “And no one here really knows Oswald’s address.” Indeed, when I asked at Ў if anyone knew where Oswald had lived, I received nothing but blank stares. In fact, few people even knew that Oswald had lived in Minsk at all.