Salt-Sprinkled Slug

     In 1941 my German grandfather helped invade this sad, flat country. In three years the Nazis killed a quarter of the Belarusian population. Stalin purged another ten percent. Go there today, as I do with my Belarusian sister-in-law and her new husband, and 19th century peasant life butts up against 21st century brand-name consumer jag. In between, the 20th century's failed Leninist experiment writhes like a salt-sprinkled slug.

     US Secretary of State Rice calls Belarus, cradled between Poland, Russia and Ukraine, "the last dictatorship in the center of Europe." In the post-Soviet vacuum Alexander Lukashenka, a former collective farm manager with a bad comb-over, won a rigged election in 1994. He has tightened his control ever since, turning this country into a living communist museum.

Smuggler's Train

     The Polish border station of Kuznica smells of coal smoke, piss and sweat-steeped perfume. For twenty hours we sat on the bus from Munich to Bialystok, Poland, then caught a train here. Now, travel glazed, we await the border train to Grodno, Belarus, my sister-in-law's hometown.

     Around us traders repack bolts of cloth and bags of washing powder to be less conspicuous to custom inspectors on the Belarusian side. Each day these smugglers take the train from Grodno to Kuznica and trade cheap cigarettes and booze for whatever they can sell in Belarus.

     After the train arrives, we board and sit and shiver on hard plastic benches. The train walls are bent and missing screws where, for years, smugglers have hidden their contraband.

     Sister-in-law tells me, "If by chance the university authorities had not clamped down on unaffordable admission bribes the one year I applied to get in, I'd probably be one of these traders too." She subsequently won a scholarship to the US, enabling a life so different from one of exchanging Russian-made Winstons for Polish-produced washing powder.

     In the dim Grodno station we shuffle towards the customs officials. They give the smugglers' bundles token pokes. But a couple of foreigners are a novelty, and officials ask if I'm carrying any video recorders or laptops. Knowing that Belarus is not journalist-friendly, I'd stripped my luggage of all business cards, computers and cell phones. "Just a tourist," I say and they stamp my passport.

Wolves In Winter

A stapled note next to my Belarusian visa instructs foreigners to register at the Ministry of Internal Affairs within three days of arriving. So for the first two days in Grodno we stand in lines, fill out forms, and pay obscure fees to young women wearing lipstick that perfectly matches the Red Star insignia on their military jacket lapels.

     The next day, to purge our bureaucratic funk, sister-in-law's father takes us wild mushroom hunting in the birch forests where he, as a child, ran free. This former headmaster, with a PhD. in biology, must now sell building materials to keep up with inflation. At home he carries resentment like a cement sack on his back. But here, in his element, he walks with primal confidence and describes hearing wolves howl in winter.

     Sixty years ago the Partisan resistance fought the invading German army here, my grandfather amongst them. Recently I found a box of photographs he sent back from the Eastern front. They showed trucks stuck axle-deep in mud, death-bloated horses, and skinny soldiers shaving.

     Now I hear stories of the other side. Like the Partisan great-grandfather captured by the Nazis and sent to a POW camp. He escaped and snuck back to fight again. But Stalin's paranoid logic deduced that only traitors were allowed to escape, and he was sentenced to eighteen years in Siberia.

Uninvited Guest

     The next day we travel to the village where sister-in-law spent childhood with her grandparents. They planned a feast to celebrate her civil marriage to my brother a year ago in San Francisco.

     We enter the rough-hewn farmhouse in a flurry of handshakes, hugs and bristly kisses. The extended family is here, and in the living room we gather around a twenty-foot long table, heaped high with food and drink. The honored couple sit at the head, the grandparents - Babushka and Dedushka - sit at the other end. An uncle fills shot glasses with vodka, father proposes a welcome toast, and the feast begins.

     With bent aluminum forks we skewer herring, pork sausage, mashed potatoes and stuffed cabbage. An aunt says: "It's hard to imagine, looking at all this, that we Belarusians are poor."

     We eat and laugh and with each sip of vodka my Russian improves. More steaming platters of food appear, all cooked on a two-burner gas stove in a rudimentary kitchen.

     Shot glasses never stay empty: "To your health… to your wealth… to your children to come… we welcome you now to our family." And Babushka says, "All I want is a great-grandchild before I die," then disappears into her bedroom and emerges with vodka she has hoarded for ten years just for this occasion.

     And spoken and unspoken, like the uninvited guest, is the fact of history, that sixty years ago I would have shot these people and they would have slit my throat. But now, with each toast, the past dissolves, and it's just human-to-human and history be dammed, all because two people fell in love two years ago at a Massachusetts party.

     After the feast a great-uncle shows us the house where he was born. It is cold and I shiver and he takes my arm, and we walk the dark streets shoulder-to-shoulder sharing warmth. At the gates of an old house he points to a tree. "My placenta is buried there. I just wanted to show you."

Sullen Streets

The Minsk city streets run dense with blank-faced people. As a rare foreigner I feel their probing eyes relentlessly watching. But return the glance and my eyes crash like birds into one-way glass. I ask my sister-in-law why, and she says, "We're ashamed and suspicious, so in public we hide what we feel."

     Despite a largely state-run economy, President Lukashenka knows that to survive he must attract foreign investment. Some brand-name multinationals have heard the grumble of consumer hunger and hesitantly stepped in. There's a Gap and Nike store here, and under posters of Woodstock hippies and Geronimo the Apache, a banner flashes: "Nothing is More American than Levis."

     Every city-center street displays monuments to the Partisan victory over the Nazis sixty years ago. "Our Heroes Will Never Be Forgotten" radiates in neon letters atop two State buildings. But now the Partisans must share public space with the Marlboro Man.

     In a coffee shop I ask a student if he's expecting a color-coded Belarusian revolution, like the Orange one that recently toppled the government of Ukraine. "Not in the foreseeable future," he says. "Why not?" I ask. "We Belarusians fear change too much. Every day Lukashenka claims more power, yet we just shrug, and say, it could always be worse."

Ronald's Blessing

     Brash and flash and hip, McDonald's is everything communism is not. A hoard at the counter clamor for Happy Meals. Two expressionless waitresses, in matching uniforms, mop in synch across the gleaming floor. Every table is taken. Mirrors reflect young lovers making out. A pack of teenagers mix MTV ghetto posturing with Russian Mafia swagger. And all of them gulp Big Macs and Cokes, "just lovin' it."

     But only the rich can afford to partake. I ask the waitress what she earns: About $0.63 per hour or $100 per month. On a napkin I do the math: If a Big Mac here costs 3880 rubles, or about $1.60, this waitress can afford less than two a day. Yet still they come, lines out the door, for Ronald's blessing.

Belarusian Bling

     In the Komarovskiy Food Market in central Minsk, broad-shouldered butchers split whole pigs with large axes. Each bone-crunching blow echoes off the vast concrete ceiling. Severed heads hang from hooks, grinning and grimacing. Women in white smocks lay out the cuts on steel trays, their fingernails red-rimed with blood.

     Across the street in boutique clothing stalls, sullen attendants sit like exotic birds in glass cages. Here you can buy $200 boots, Siberian fox fir coats, and ripped designer jeans. The poor come here to window-shop and long. The new rich finger clothes with distracted distain.

     Caught between the bread lines of communism and the just-out-of-reach promise of capitalism, the hunger for consumer goods is raw and childlike and people strut their Belarusian Bling. Women wear make-up masks and helmeted hair and stride boldly in high-healed boots down the potholed streets. Naively I imagine a Stiletto Revolution of ten thousand angry women splitting this dictatorship wide open.

     One night over dinner I describe my vision to a computer programmer. "We pretend we're rich," he shrugs "but our refrigerators are empty. The best we can do is survive and wait."

End