BULGARIA

11 November 1997

There is something about journeys. You're lucky if you manage one in a lifetime and by the time you're done you're swearing 'by GOD never' I'll never do it again. But then some evening, months of years later, while you're browsing through the atlas, whistling or humming or eating, whoop! A few weeks later you're gone. And if you somehow find yourself on one more good long journey, something gets in you, like a worm gone up through your feet. From then on, somewhere inside every unbearable trip (because there will always be another trip), you'll swear up & down "this is it damn it, GOD damn it this is it, period.' But then you'll find your way back to your own warm bed and clean bathroom and beautiful world and discover they're just as they were when you left and after another month or two or six, this thing inside you will start to swell and throb. You'll become restless and sore as if your bed was too soft and your bathroom too bright and suddenly your beautiful worlds has again grown moldy with mediocrity. So you'll pull out the atlas and fall into it and the next morning buy an airplane ticket and just when everyone thought you were finally figuring it out, you're gone.

I suddenly glimpsed the fundamental Soviet-Russian trichotomy: endure passively and move ahead, inch by inch; steal, using either firepower or the prerogatives of political office; or descend into bottomless rage and self-destruct. I had six thousand miles to cross in the former Soviet Union: I would have to endure, to be as mulishly passive and persistent as Russians were, just to survive the trip. Yet my conviction was that passivity only let tyrants reign and made committing injustices appealing. It was wrong to tolerate so much. The whole country either seemed to be queuing up, waiting for changes to be dispensed in increments, if at all, or crashing the lines and looting. Solutions, changes, reforms - all the shibboleths of the post-Soviet era - rang hollow and sounded like the trumpery of Western outsiders, of naifs. The Russian masses - the wizened laborers, the grit-eyed grandmas, the drunks with scarred hands, the thugs with their prison cant - pressed in and crushed ahead, knocking the breath out of those few who worked for change, or those who even hoped for it. It was impossible not to assent to the assertions of my Soviet-era dissident friends who averred that the lines, the corruption, the sham Marxist ideology, were all created intentionally to weary the population into submission to authority, to set people against one another, to quell their spirit of dissent and resistance. Was it by chance that humiliation and despair reigned even in such mundane things as buying train tickets? The thought of what torments lurked in matters of greater significance was daunting; haw could you start a business? Strike out on your own, take a risk? Fully realize your potential? Soviet rule, and now Russian governance and the mafia, ensured that these notions remained Western fancies inapplicable here, and reduced so many to the state of rats gnashing their teeth at one another over scraps. Yet the gnashing itself was rarity; for the most part, Russians accepted and endured, lashing out only under extreme duress or when drunk.