In Europe (71 page)

On 29–30 September, 1941, just after Kiev was taken, the city's 33,771 Jews – the number was carefully noted – received orders to prepare for transport to Palestine. They were to bring money, valuables and warm clothing with them. After the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, Stalin had banned all criticism of Germany, and few or no reports about the persecution of the Jews had reached the Soviet Union. And so almost all the Jewish families of Kiev walked to the edge of town, a colourful crowd of people, chatting quietly, convinced they were leaving for the Promised Land. Later, the same spot was used to murder Ukrainians, Russians and Poles.

The massacre at Babi Yar was kept out of the history books for years. In 1944 Ilya Ehrenburg wrote an impressive poem about the killings, but after that all remained shrouded in silence. From 1947, Stalin's paranoia turned against the Jews and it was forbidden to mention Babi Yar. In the late 1950s – after Stalin had died – Kiev's municipal administration decided to empty the old Jewish graveyard and build a huge sporting and television complex on that spot. In 1961 the writer Viktor Nekrasov penned a stirring appeal ‘not to forget Babi Yar’, the poet Yevgeni Yevtushenko wrote a song of protest and Dmitri Shostakovich gave his Thirteenth Symphony (1962) the title
Babi Yar
. The first two were arrested and convicted. During that same period, almost all the Jewish gravestones and monuments were removed. In September 1968, when the Soviet authorities set up a memorial, the authorities who spoke at its unveiling fulminated, not against the Holocaust, but against the state of Israel. A Jewish listener who protested – he had heard someone say that 100,000 Jews were ‘not enough’ – was sentenced to three years’ hard labour.

It was not until 1970, with the publication of the novel
Babi Yar
, that the story was told in full. The book described, for the first time, exactly what had happened, how the families had walked through the streets, what was said and shouted during the final moments. It wasn't until ten years after that that people first dared to gather here on 29 September.

In one corner of the park, amid the bushes and nettles, I find a few
fallen gravestones from the old Jewish cemetery, badly damaged, probably overlooked during the clearance. Only one name is still legible: Samoeïl Richter.

One name. Eight million. Between 1941–5, a quarter of the population of the Ukraine was murdered: eight million boys, men, girls and women. What is one to do with a number like that?

Kiev's war memorial is, as noted, a singularly ugly thing, a towering iron maiden dominating the city with her sword and shield. At the base of this juggernaut lies the war museum. What one sees there is not soon forgotten. Of course there are the ribbons, the medals, the elegantly arranged cannons and the artistically lit wreckage of a plane. But then one arrives at the hall of the dead and the living, a hall with drunken dance music and a long table covered in death notices. On that table, too, are the dented canteens, the old cups and mugs in a long row, and across from them the modern glasses, the glasses of the living, and on the enormous wall behind the photographs of the dead, a huge collage of thousands of family pictures that speak of their lives: a young family in front of a tent, a group portrait of a regiment, a young couple laughing before a kettle of soup, below that three soldiers, standing rigid and upright, a middle-class family in a garden, a sailor, two children in their Sunday best. And the dance music plays on, that eternal dance music for all of us, the living and the dead.

By last light I leave Kiev on the night train to Odessa, with Irina waving from the platform and the ever-melancholy sound of the station announcer's voice. On the outskirts of town, boys and girls are strolling along the rails. A village: one half houses, one half freight containers. The old straw roofs have given way to corrugated iron. Beneath the trees a family is eating at a large table. Beside the tracks are numberless kitchen gardens, little private fields of grain. A woman is dragging a heavy sled loaded with potatoes along the sandy path beside the rails. Then the endless plains.

When I climb down from the train the next morning, it is Sunday. The bells are ringing, there are rattling sounds coming from the direction of the harbour, the air tingles with the nearness of the sea. My hotel,
situated on the loveliest boulevard in the world, is called the Londonskaya, and it is the city's most famous. In July 1941, during the bombardment, Konstantin Paustovsky stayed here for free, as the final guest, while the windows popped from their frames and the two old waiters calmly served the menu of the day: tea with nothing in it, and slimy brown vermicelli. Fifty-eight years later, fame has gone to the owners’ heads. I spend one night there and pay a sum which the average Ukrainian family could live on for three months.

The view, however, is still unbeatable. Across from me, to one side, are the famous steps running down to the harbour, the steps that played such a central role in Eisenstein's
Potemkin
. The sea. Right below my window is the boulevard with its benches, lanterns and rustling chestnut trees. Beside and behind me, the city, its houses light green and ochre, its streets of a nineteenth-century allure, with only a few cars, old cobblestones, the house fronts a tableau of faded glory.

Everything a lover of Russian literature could dream of can be found in Odessa: the palace where Alexander Pushkin courted Yelizaveta Vorontsova, the wife of Governor Mikhail Vorontsov; the editorial offices of the naval gazette
Moryak
where Paustovsky carried out his own revolution in 1920; the courtyards ruled over by Isaac Babel's king rat, Benya Krik.

Along the boulevard one hears the cooing of the doves, the sound of music. Boys and girls walk back and forth here all day, because they have no money to sit in a café. There are ponies for the children. You can have your picture taken with a monkey. The swallows bob and weave between the rooftops. It is like a Sunday from long ago.

‘Odessa has experienced prosperity and is now going downhill – a poetic, rather carefree and extremely helpless downhill,’ Babel wrote in 1916. An old woman with grey, mussed hair is moving down the steps towards the harbour. She staggers. She shouts: ‘The communists are gone! God is gone! God doesn't exist! The state doesn't exist. The only ones left are poor people, robbers and bandits. God help us! Robbers! Bandits!’ And she keeps shouting that, all the way to the waterfront.

Here you can watch an empire collapse before your eyes. Ten years ago, from Riga to Volgograd, from St Petersburg to Odessa, you could pay with roubles. Now my pockets are full of the widest spectrum of
banknotes, printed in meaningless denominations with the portraits of obscure gentlemen. The gigantic trading network of old Russia and the former Soviet Union has been tossed for a loop, the new nationalism has thrown up thousands of new obstacles, and the consequences are being felt everywhere: in the Lithuanian border town that lives off exports to Russia, in the vacant tourist hotels of Moscow and Kiev, in the port of Odessa where shipping revenues have gone down by two thirds since the dissolution of the Soviet Union, in the dozens of bankrupt ships lying here off the coast, waiting.

I wander into the Literature Museum. Beside Babel's lone spectacles – in a panic, he left them lying on his nightstand when he was arrested on 15 May, 1939 – I actually find a few old copies of
Moryak
. They date from 1921, they are printed on the back of packaging material used to ship tea, and they include Paustovsky's first stories. In the great hall – the museum is actually a palace – a sixtieth wedding anniversary party is underway. A women's chorus of veterans and pensioners, dressed in beautiful Ukrainian costumes, sings one rousing song after another. The bridal couple, old and fragile, stand up to receive the congratulations. The stars and ribbons of the late Soviet Union hang on their chests.

Isaac Babel wrote: ‘In Odessa you have caressing and refreshing spring evenings, the penetrating aroma of acacias, and above the dark sea a moon that incessantly sheds its irresistible light.’ Nothing of that has changed. I was in love with this city for a long time, before I ever set foot in it. I had first come here a few years back, travelling passenger class aboard a freighter from Istanbul that shuttled back and forth across the Black Sea, along the nether reaches of Europe. That ship, the
Briz
, was like an old man, its hull overgrown with crusts and tumours, and it had been carrying traders back and forth between Odessa and Istanbul for as long as anyone could remember. But the lifeboats and life jackets all said Odessa, Odessa, Odessa.

Halfway across, a cable became tangled in the propeller and we were adrift for hours. Almost none of the passengers seemed to notice. Most of them only came on deck to inspect their goods anyway. Had the fridges stayed dry? Were the Italian lawn chairs lashed down well? Were the deck-hands stealing too many tomatoes from the hundred of crates piled up
there? Then they would retreat to their cabins or the ship's minuscule bar.

That was how it went, all the way to the much talked-of outer limits of Europe: an old rust bucket, a group of surly men in jogging suits, vodka, a few ship's whores, and a dozen dolphins swimming around it all.

In Istanbul, as we pushed off from the Golden Horn, we heard the call to prayer from dozens of minarets, but on the street one saw fewer women in head scarves than in a working-class neighbourhood in Rotterdam. And in Odessa everything was European again: the houses, the opera, the writers, the museums and, last but not least, the young people. For who else would one find parading here hand in hand along the boulevards but the great-great-grandchildren of Italian traders, Greek sailors, Russian civil servants, Jewish and Armenian craftsmen and Ukrainian farmers?

Europe's clearest border is the great historical divide sketched by Samuel Huntington, a Harvard professor, in his – incidentally, controversial –
The Clash of Civilisations
. It is the line that runs between the Christian peoples of the West and the Eastern Orthodox and Islamic cultures, a rift that goes back to AD 395, when the Holy Roman Empire was split in two. Both empires went their own way after that, and all those differing historical experiences caused traditions and cultures to grow asunder.

Huntington's fault line has been in more or less the same place for almost 500 years. It runs roughly north to south, from the border between Finland and Russia, along the edge of the Baltic States, straight through White Russia, the Ukraine, Rumania and Serbia, and ends in the Adriatic between Croatia and Bosnia.

On the western side of that line people drink espresso or filtered coffee, they observe Christmas on 25 December, they are influenced – usually without knowing it – by scholasticism and humanism, they have been through the Reformation, the Renaissance and the Enlightenment and they have experienced democracy and a rule of constitutional law – although in some countries this is still quite fresh and new. On the eastern side of it people drink coffee with grounds in the bottom of the cup, they celebrate Christmas by the Orthodox calendar or don't celebrate it at all, and most of them have lived for centuries under the yoke of the Byzantine Empire and other more or less absolutist regimes.

Huntington's view is shared – sometimes openly, more often tacitly – by most Western Europeans and their leaders. Yet there are also other voices to be heard. One can wonder, after all, whether there is any sense at all to the discussion concerning ‘European identity’, whether it is not in fact diametrically opposed to the entire history of the ‘European concept’. For if anything serves as the true hallmark of European civilisation it is diversity, and not a single identity.

And if there is one city where this European variegation is in full bloom, it is Odessa. Only a few years after this half French, half-Italian city was raised up from the steppe by pioneers around 1800, Czar Alexander I wrote to Governor Vorontsov that Odessa was becoming ‘too European’: soldiers walked around with their uniforms unbuttoned, and Odessa was the only city in Russia where one was allowed to smoke or sing on the street. A ‘native language’ census held in 1897 showed that a third of the city's population spoke Yiddish, and barely half spoke Russian. Only one out of every twenty inhabitants spoke Ukrainian; almost an equal number had Polish as their native tongue. Many Russians hated Odessa. For Russian nationalists, the city served as a litmus test: anyone who liked Odessa was European. Anyone who did not like Odessa was faithful to Mother Russia. And Odessa today still has its own brand of civic pride that makes people say, not ‘I come from the Ukraine’ or ‘I am Russian’, but ‘I am from Odessa.’

As Pushkin put it:

There is a Frisian folktale about a young man whose father sent him into the world with an oar over his shoulder, and who was only allowed to stop roaming when he came to a land where people would ask him:
‘What is that strange stick you've got there?’ During my travels, I applied the same methodology with regard to the question of where Europe stops. I soon noticed that, in day-to-day life, the problem is not all that complicated: people decide for themselves where they belong, and they make no bones about it. Whenever there was talk of holidays ‘in Europe’, the quality of ‘European clothing’ or family members ‘in Europe’, I knew one thing for certain: I had crossed the shadowy outer limits of Europe.

That had happened in St Petersburg, in Moscow, in Volgograd – oh, how badly my tour guide there wanted to move ‘to Europe’ – as well as in Vilnius, and even one time in Warsaw. In Istanbul, too, the common parlance is as clear as can be: on the ferries across the Bosphorus, people speak of the ‘European’ side and the ‘Asian’ side. But in Greece or Bosnia, officially on the ‘Byzantine’ side of the line, I have never heard anyone say he was going to Europe. Huntington's line may seem convincing at a glance, but the reality is much more jagged, much more ruled by the emotions of the day, much more, too, by recent experiences.