Border Crossings
10:50 pm Vilnius
It is June, and warm outside. The bus heater drones on through the night. I bounce and sweat. Outside my window large streaks of lightning ignite corners of the horizon somewhere in the east,in the direction of Tallinn. The rain has just begun to fall on the road and it runs down the side of the glass, a universe of droplet supernova illuminated by the lighting in the distance. The rolling of the bus, the heat, the hypnotic illumination of the lightning —I doze, and these small sleeps are my most fruitful for dreams. I imagine a terrible violent battle, I imagine the cock crowing at the end of the storm in the Dance Macabre.
My friend and I had been in transit and between things for nearly a month. Gazing out windows of moving trains. Checkpoints. Border crossings. The liminal nature of dreams. I wrote in my journal then: “I am thankful I have not been transported to a fight as of yet. War is some storm I never wish to brace. To head into the thunder and bombs like an animal...”
11:30 pm
I have fallen asleep again. When I open my eyes the bus lights are on overhead. Karamazov is open in front of me, to the Grand Inquisitor chapter. Distracted by the heat, perhaps, and sleep, I am having trouble understanding the proceedings.
I think back to the last place we stayed, a hostel in the old part of Vilnius, where an Australian traveler had kept a multi-liter bottle of orange Fanta on his bedside table with a bottle of gin. "Anything goes with Fanta," he grinned. The bus is like a bubble in space, or perhaps a machine for passing through time. With blurred sweeps of light and stars, rain is illumined on the window, light streaks across glass, people's reading glasses, and in the true firmament itself. The bus rolls and lurches towards Estonia. The gears in the transfer case complains and grinds through the night. All these real and reflected lights swirl around me as we bounce and roll on into some black space.
3:30 AM
In the grey twilight we pass a woman sitting on a concrete wall in Riga. She wears a dark burgundy dress. Her stockinged feet hang limply, looking smashed into her heeled shoes. Her hair was in tangles. She sat next to a large brown bottle of beer. Under her dangling feet was a matching one, dashed to shards.
I drove myself through to the end of The Grand Inquisitor. Ivan’s beliefs kept needling me. While Jesus came to earth to lead the masses to perfect freedom, perfect freedom involves... I don’t know. It is very hard. I grasped that Jesus tried to do something at the expense of the humanity that Ivan loves so much. But against the troubling coexistence of goodness and evil I made no headway. Who fucking knows? The 2 a.m. dawn wiped away my philosophical efforts and revealed the Latvian countryside, which was beautiful. It was covered in dark forests. I was also listening to this piece of music called Trisagion, which ends with a real surprising transcendent moment, complementing the dawn, the barely perceivable landscape, the delirium, the gentle roll of the bus, and the effects of alcohol. In the black forests I saw bonfires, and people around them. People were walking out of the forests and along the roads with rings of flowers on their heads. I saw this over and over. Many bonfires were glowing in the night. It was like a dream, or an illusion. Some kind of fairy tale.I looked down and stared at something I had underlined: “Nothing is more seductive for man than his freedom of conscience, but nothing is a greater cause of his suffering.”
3:55 am
There is a little kid on the bus dressed just like the two bus drivers, in a perfect miniature bus driver’s suit with a red jacket and black pants. He is one of their sons. I think his father is the driver whose mustache actually engulfs his face like hedgerows. The kid's main duty is to light cigarettes, allowing the drivers to keep both hands on the wheel. All the time I see the kid click the lighter and lean over to ignite the cigarette. I keep drifting off into a dream that the kid lights the enormous mustache, creating a fatal conflagration that sends us careening into the forest. I wake up as the bus shudders. We are in Estonia now. The light is becoming brighter as we close in on the capital. I looked at my watch for the date —June 21st. Summer solstice. Longest day of the year. In Latvia there is a legend: fall asleep on the day of Jani, and you will be drowsy for the rest of the summer.
9:00 am
Exhausted, I sleep late in the hostel. With a stranger asleep in the bunk above me, I stay in bed and re-read the Inquisitor. After, I do some sit ups on the floor. The stranger gets out of his top bunk to sit right next to me, joining me for sit ups. After about fifty, we stop. He climbs back up into his bunk and drags a white sheet over himself, never speaking a word.
10:30 pm
My friend and I had a steak in a place that was built in 1392, and at a bar in the evening we were asked by a girl our age to an orgy in honor of the solstice. We had told her that we were soldiers. “There will be some American special forces there,” she said, apparently thinking we’d be intrigued. We silently contemplated the certain humiliation of that scenario. Without looking at each other, my friend and I packed a bottle of vodka and a quart of orange juice and headed out to find a place to watch the sun set and rise again over the Baltic Sea. We found a terrace at the top of the Toompea —an ancient mound of stones that the old legends of Tallinn say were the stones that marked the grave of Kalev, heaped by his wife Linda. In the epic poem that tells his story, the Kavelipoeg, Kalev’s son seeks protection for Estonia against the outside world. Protection, at the expense of personal liberty. Bread before freedom. Happiness before freedom. Consider: In an orgy of freedom, our own country had sleepwalked into an ancient dream. One year into the future, our country would be penetrated from the outside; planes into towers. After that came the warring like Kalev’s son to create a new reality. Any war is in part a war of ideas. Freedom, being the most seductive, became our banner. I had no idea then, but the war I had dreamed of and dreaded on that bus during the dawn of the solstice would come true for me and my friend. Lying on the medieval stones, we drank and talked and dozed and dreamed of the future.In just a few hours, the sun rose again over the Baltic Sea. We had slept on the day of Jani. And we remained drowsy all summer.