Tower of the Sun: Stories From the Middle East and North Africa (35 page)

“Well, that’s just great,” I said. We were the first foreigners they’d ever seen? Just a few miles from the Polish frontier?

“Go back and take the road that goes to the left,” Sean said. “I’m pretty sure it’s that one.”

“How can you be pretty sure that it’s that one?” I said. I had no idea where we were and wanted someone who lived there to tell us.

“It just feels right,” he said. “If we see any more people, we can stop and ask.”

I was in no mood to argue, and his guess was as good as mine, so we drove back to the four-way intersection and took a left. And we found ourselves in a forest.

 “This doesn’t look right at all,” I said.

“How do you know what it’s supposed to look like?” he said.

“I don’t,” I said. “It just looks like we’re going into the middle of nowhere.”

“Everywhere we’ve been is in the middle of nowhere,” he said.

Perhaps he was right. Suddenly the road improved slightly. I could increase our speed, so I did, but then BANG. I ran us into a sink-sized hole in the ground at twenty miles an hour. The car shuddered as though a land mine had blown off a wheel.

Sean had rented this car on his credit card. “Oh my God,” he said. “Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God.”

“It’s okay,” I said, though I didn’t for one second believe it. “There’s still air in the tire.”

“Not for long,” he said and put his face in his hands.

I drove onward again, slower this time. We passed a dark house. Somebody lived out there in the forest.

“There are some people up ahead,” Sean said. “Pull over and ask them where the hell we are.”

I pulled the car over next to the two figures. Like the others, they looked ghost-like in the headlights. Like the others, they shuffled along as though they were wandering toward no place in particular for lack of anything better to do in a village at night without light.

This time we encountered not two scared teenagers, but an elderly man and his wife.

They looked startled as though they couldn’t believe someone was out and about in a car.

“Excuse me,” I said. “Do you speak English?” I was certain they didn’t.

The woman flinched and the man said, “eh?”

“We’re trying to get to Lviv,” I said. Then I pointed at the map. “Lviv.”

Not knowing better, I pronounced it “Luh-viv.”

They had no idea what I was talking about.

“Luh-viv,” I said again, and pointed at the map.

“Eh?” the woman said. “El-veev?”

“Da,” I said, Russian for yes. Many ethnic Russians live in Eastern Ukraine and even ethnic Ukrainians in the west can speak Russian though they’d rather not. The bits of Russian that Sean and I knew were useful wherever we happened to be.

“Da,” I said. “El-veev.”

She pointed in the direction we were heading. “Poland,” she said.

“Unbelievable,” I said. We were on our way back to Poland?

“Argh!” Sean said.

 “We’ve been driving around for hours,” I said, “and we haven’t gone anywhere.”

So we turned back. I drove five miles an hour. I weaved around giant holes in the road, but still ran into five or six small ones per second. I had no idea where we were or where we were going. The night was almost half over and we had made zero progress. All we had done so far was damage the car and burn half the gas in the tank.

We eventually came to another small town even though we saw no more signs to even Sambir, let alone Lviv or Kiev. This time a few buildings were lit. One was a gas station. Incredibly, it was open.

I pulled in. Sean and I got out. We both inspected the banged-up wheel. It looked okay and apparently was not leaking air. We were lucky.

A man emerged from the office and asked us—I assume—if we needed gas.

“Do you speak English?” I said and chuckled. I knew he wouldn’t.

Of course he didn’t. A gas station attendant in rural Ukraine is no more likely to speak English than a gas station attendant in rural Kansas is likely to be fluent in Russian. Unlike the others we’d spoken to, though, he didn’t seem surprised or alarmed that the wrong language came out of our mouths.

He filled the tank. I pointed at the map and said “Sambir.” He gave us complicated directions that neither Sean nor I could make sense of. All we could really glean from him was which direction to start with.

I heard children giggling behind the gas station office. A young boy and a young girl, each no older than five, peeked their heads around the corner. They pointed at us and laughed as though we wore clown suits and squeaky shoes. Sean and I were the evening’s entertainment. We spoke an alien language and that made us freaks.

“Good grief,” I said. “Are we going to have to put up with this all week?”

I can only imagine how the locals would have reacted if we were black.

We drove in the dark on hideous roads for another hour. The gas station attendant told us we were supposed to turn left at some point, but we had no idea where.

“I hope it’s not like this everywhere,” Sean said.

“If it’s like this everywhere,” I said, “we won’t even get to Lviv, let alone Kiev and Chernobyl.”

“Turn left here,” Sean said when we came to a road that looked promising for no apparent reason.

“Sure,” I said. “Why not?”

I turned left. After a few minutes we came to a rusting dinosaur of a factory. It was dark and abandoned and clearly had been for decades. After we passed it, the road somehow managed to get worse. I had to slow down to three miles an hour to prevent the car from breaking apart. We’d need an off-road vehicle to keep going.

“This can’t be the way to Lviv,” I said. “No one can drive on this road.”

So we turned back. And eventually we found the town of Sambir. We found it by sheer chance, but we found it. There were a few cars here and there, and some street lights, too. There wasn’t much to it, but it was the closest thing we had yet seen to civilization in Ukraine. And we finally knew where we were on the map.

We had been in Ukraine for four hours and had barely made twenty miles of progress. Lviv was sixty more miles away.

I saw a sign on the side of the road pointing to Львів.

“That must be Lviv,” I said. “I guess their в is our v. And the letter i is the same. I can tell by the way they spelled Sambir on the other signs.” Over the next couple of days, Sean and I would eventually figure out and memorize the entire Cyrillic alphabet this way.

The road did improve after we left Sambir and headed toward Lviv.

“We need food,” I said, though I wondered if that would be possible in a countryside that hardly even had light.

“Look for a sign that says pectopah,” Sean said.

“A sign that says what?” I said.

“Pectopah,” he said. “That’s Russian for restaurant. That’s not how they say it, but that’s what it looks like when they spell it.”

A few moments later we saw a well-lit building on the side of the road that looked like a restaurant. A sign read “Ресторан.”

“There we go,” Sean said.

“It even looks open,” I said.

And it was.

We stepped inside. The place was half full and a few people were still grimly eating.

“Do we wait to be seated or just grab a table?” I said. I had no idea how to behave in this country. Rural Ukraine doesn’t have any handles. We were on the European continent, but we sure weren’t in the West any more.

To keep reading, purchase
Where the West Ends
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ALSO BY MICHAEL J. TOTTEN

The Road to Fatima Gate

In the Wake of the Surge

Where the West Ends

Taken: A Novel

Resurrection: A Zombie Novel

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In memory of Christopher Hitchens

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Michael J. Totten is a foreign correspondent and foreign policy analyst who has reported from the Middle East, the Balkans and the former Soviet Union.

He’s a contributing editor at
World Affairs
and
City Journal
. His work has also appeared in the
New York Times,
the
Wall Street Journal
, the
New Republic
and numerous other publications.

His first book,
The Road to Fatima Gate
, won the Washington Institute Book Prize in 2011, and his second novel,
Resurrection
, was optioned for film in 2014. He won the 2007 Weblog Award for Best Middle East or Africa Blog, he won it again in 2008 and was named Blogger of the Year in 2006 by
The Week
magazine for his dispatches from the Middle East. He lives with his wife in Oregon and is a former resident of Beirut.

Visit his blog at www.MichaelTotten.com

Copyright © 2014 by Michael J. Totten

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in

any form or by any means without the prior written permission of

Michael J. Totten

First American edition published in 2014 by Belmont Estate Books

Cover design by Kathleen Lynch

Edited by Elissa Englund

Manufactured in the United States on acid-free paper

FIRST AMERICAN EDITION

Totten, Michael J.

Tower of the Sun

ISBN-13: 978-0692297537

ISBN-10: 0692297537