Aksana is her real name (Ekaterina)
She
is now living in Canada and bearing a large smile on the right...
Resilience? Canada, meet Ekaterina
I was meeting Ekaterina on the steps of Lido in Minsk. Lido is one of those unstructured cafeterias common in Eastern Europe, all the same yet different every meal. Ekaterina doesn’t like it but I knew where it was and thought I could get there.
Ekaterina, 28, was my CouchSurfing host, and I was planning to sleep on her floor for the next three nights. I had driven from Vilnius with a Dutch guy, Joop, who needed a place too. I promised nothing; it was up to Ekaterina. She took us to an armored van parked on the sidewalk to change our Lithuanian litas, then to a trusted ATM for some Belarusian rubles, and finally to a place she preferred to eat, but with Belarusian dishes for her curious guests. A few calls scored Joop a floor with Marina, a divorced friend of Ekaterina’s with a four-year-old son.
CouchSurfing is about trust, taking in for a few nights someone about whom you know only what has been written by them and about them on the site. It works amazingly well. But this was Lukashenko’s Belarus, where things are more repressed than in Putin’s Russia, where the Lonely Planet warns readers to “hide this book” against confiscation for its candor, and where a red and white scarf is taken as nationalism and grounds for arrest. Trust is a little different in Belarus.
Ekaterina seemed rather straight. She was accommodating, cordial and generous, but she wasn’t forthcoming, accessible or self-revealing. Joop’s attempts to engage in political discussion met with complete disinterest. Ekaterina had no opinion, even though Belarus was the only Soviet territory to exit the “bloodless” independence revolutions of the early ‘90s more repressed than before. “How would Lukashenko’s tenure end?” I asked. She said she was happier not speculating. But all this didn’t stop her and Marina from showing us around, explaining the metro, and translating for us over the rough spots. It was good entertainment for them to have visitors.
Both Ekaterina’s and Marina’s flats were in typical Stalinist walk-ups with multiple flights of dark stairs. Two rooms, a kitchen, and a pair of side-by-side closets, one for the toilet, one for a sink and tub. That was it. The high ceilings make them hard to heat; central heating comes on unannounced in the fall and is likewise cut off in the spring, no matter the weather.
The first night Ekaterina woke me to give me another quilt; she suspected correctly that I must be cold. The next night, her cat having opened the communicating door between our two rooms, she woke me to ask me to stop snoring. I would rise early, make instant coffee, read and write in my journal. At first I wrote of Ekaterina’s generosity, and then of her situation. She is such a smart girl, and quick-witted. She deserved better, I thought. She’s a translator, and by all indications a good one. I helped her smooth out a particularly dense, bragging description of child subsidies in Belarus. Later I heard her correct her partner Sasha for his use of “feminism,” which should have been “femininity.”
As our time together lengthened, she shared her love of walking on the grass. She did this mostly at night to avoid reprimand, though sometimes she did it during the day, openly, defiantly. (“In Minsk, the grass is only for looking.”) After more trust had developed she revealed that she translated for the government news agency, the Belarusian version of the old Soviet Itar-Tass. And finally, the day we parted, while Ekaterina and I walked alone, she shared with me her big news: they had received their Canadian immigration visa. It was just six weeks old and worth every bit of two years’ waiting, worrying and hoping. Sasha and she were going! They would not be like her grandmother, who at 17 had been forced to work in Germany during the war and had never again left her Belarusian village. Sasha only needed to pass some exams, cheaper to do in Belarus than in Canada. They must be in Canada by February. And someday soon she would resign her job, without prejudice she hopes, as the blot of being fired might prevent her ever again working in Belarus.
Suddenly it was clear to me. There had been so many signs of her pluck and resilience:
• the frilly underwear left to dry over the hot water pipe in the bathroom;
• lyrics to Edith Piaf’s song “Je ne regrette rien” taped to the back of the bathroom door at seated eye-level;
• Spanish verb conjugations over the toilet roll;
• two passports placed carefully on the counter; and
• signs in a mixture of Russian and English:
“Fishing is the root of all evil” pinned to the back of the front door.
“Fishing leads to estranged wives” painted on the kitchen wall.
Like a tuft of grass pushing bravely through the gap between two concrete slabs, Ekaterina was reaching for the sun, willing their future forward. Sasha’s love for fishing takes time from his exams, which she reminds him of often in mixed-language puzzles. She is adding Spanish to her already strong language set: Russian, Belarusian, English, some Dutch, and even more French. (She is gleeful about improving her French in Quebec!) Ekaterina is a different person behind the gray exterior of her protective demeanor. Like the fecund winter wheat under the snowy Belarusian plains, she is ready to blossom in the spring, but in a new land.
Resilience comes in many forms, even a quietly feminine, intellectually curious, 28-year-old translator from Minsk, who likes to walk on the grass. She knows it will come back; it already knows how.
Note Ekaterina, Marina and Sasha are fictitious names.
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Aksana is her real name (Ekaterina) |
Jay Sames Submitted from L’viv, Ukraine