NOT the border entrance
october 28, 2011
we were purged from the bus with no indication of which way to turn, as every other rider seemed to move in their own independent direction, shattering the mental myth i had cultivated that we would all trudge as one towards our doom. some gathered in front of the incredibly anomalous grocery store that suddenly loomed up ahead of us. everything around us screamed “official” and “desolate,” what the hell was a biedronka(1) doing there? catering to travelers, i suppose. we got our bearings and then turned in a likely direction. to the left of us was chain link, surrounding mysterious buildings. ahead, a driveway blocked by a guard, by a wooden-armed-gate … was that it? didn’t look too much like an actual crossing, but who knows? but, no, it was a yard for buses. or vehicles. parts sold there. or something.
vendors, both legal and illegal, lined the street we had driven down, lined the fence, moved in lines like giant snakes as they shifted back and forth, displaying their wares to new arrivals. somehow we found out: back down the road a short distance, following the lines of vendors to what looked like a field, to our right. but, no, not just a field; a gray sidewalk cut through it, rolling away from us, around corners and rises, destination screened from our eyes. that way. i tried to gather my courage to take photographs of the middle-aged women brazenly displaying, in arms cradled as if holding children, bottles of whiskey, cartons of cigarettes, which they had obviously just finished carting over the border into Poland. i couldn’t do it.
well, it's something
there were so many of them, meeting, dispersing, clutching at every passerby for a moment, hoping they could get a firm grasp. i tried to take a picture of the woman selling used clothes by the side of the path, some of the contraband sellers behind her, but i moved the camera too soon and got something that, while interesting to me, doesn’t really capture the scene.
sigh.
mystery ...
but my mood was lightened as we turned the first corner of the path. we were finally able to get a first glimpse of the border complex, but my attention was drawn primarily to the bank of biedronka shopping carts(2) that were gathered at the bend. my mind reeled a little. why were they partway down the path from the ukrainian side? were they abandoned by shoppers crossing into ukraine who had suddenly realized that they weren’t supposed to take them? or were they left there by smugglers who would return to them later, when they crossed back over to ukraine? i mean, yeah, people needed some way to get their wares across the border, but did the border guards really allow them shopping carts? what the hell were they doing there, so many of them, so far from any people?
no answers were forthcoming from anyone and we were too nervous for much speculation so we just carried on, following the band of youngsters ahead of us who suddenly seemed to be the only humans on earth. in fact after we turned the corner, the vendors instantly behind us, things got dramatically quiet and still. the kids were carrying big bags and instruments, three guys and one girl, and i couldn’t help but think of them as dorothy and her companions, following the gray brick road to the most fucked up emerald city ever.
more path, uphill, fences moving in until we were just rats in a maze, and suddenly a few people passed us going the other way. like apparitions, they startled. we hadn’t really been walking that long, but time slowed and stretched out there in no man’s land.
and then we came to a stop. of course, the path ended in a line.
it wasn’t moving. hard to tell how long it was, as it snaked through a revolving door of thick metal pipes, invisible into the building beyond. we stood, we waited. and waited. people were coming out through a door to our left, but they were obviously passing into Poland. not many of them, a trickle. we waited some more. i tried to listen to what the young’uns were saying while also attempting to remember my cyrillic enough to read the signs around, which were also in Polish and english. i was struck with the level of my hubris, for the second time. this had happened during the first trip to ukraine. then i had thought, “different alphabet, no problem. i’ll pick it up.” i had studied the internet-provided cheat sheet a little before we left, but it wasn’t until our train was drawing close to our destination that i started to panic and attempted to shove it all into my head in one go. i had gotten pretty good at it then, so i just assumed it would all come back to me.
it didn’t.
my mom, though, was a superstar. aside from speaking fluent Polish, she has studied both ukrainian and russian, (the latter more than the former, though) and is pretty good with both cyrillic alphabets. so i didn’t need to panic, but it took me a little time to remember that.
the gateway ...
finally people stopped trickling through the other door and our line started moving, one at a time, through the revolving monster. ever since getting stuck in the revolving door at the bank where i work i’ve been really nervous around the beasts. this one would only allow one person in at a time, so you had to cram yourself into what was essentially a narrow cage and wait for the green light to tell you it was time to push. somehow we were almost the last people in line, so the revolving door spit us out into a space inadequate for the amount of people that had entered before us. when the space is packed, or when they have to let people through from the other side, they freeze the door, which is what we had been waiting for outside.
two lines, one for EU citizens, one for everyone else. i decided, despite my irish passport, to stick with my mom, who is saddled with her US identity. also, i was concerned at the amount of grumbling that was coming out of her mouth, the target of which was a poor woman who was just trying to get out of the way of the last few people being thrust into the room. her only choice was to move to the side of the line, almost next to us, to avoid being crushed into our backs. my mom obviously thought she was trying to cut the line, and her sense of justice was duly inflamed. i had to assuage her volcanic tendency to right supposed wrongs, so i stood by her on the line, patted her shoulder and tried to change the subject.
a metal barrier that we were all shoved against in turn, waiting for another green light, no honor system here. a grizzled man in farmer’s clothes swung his giant bags over the barrier long before it was his turn, just trying to get them out of the way, but it felt too much like an infraction. every cold-war-era drama that had reared my imaginative mind was coming back to haunt me. the line thinned. and then it was my mom’s turn.
something about waiting for a green light to condone my movement makes me incredibly nervous, especially in bureaucratic situations. is this a test? if i try to push before the light goes off, am i considered too eager? dangerous? if i am too slow to push, am i an idiot? unfit to enter? why do they want to stop me, anyway!!?? psychological profiling could never reach the level of my imagination. so, one hand on the gate, i looked between the light and my mother, who, due to our family tendency to over-explain, had been coached to answer that she was a tourist.
the man looked at her passport, said not a word, stamped it and she was through. she waited on the other side for me, beyond the plexiglass booth, so i could see her staring at me as the green light came on and i easily pushed the gate and approached passport control.
the man seemed completely confused. what the hell was i doing in his line? the other line was for EU passports, not his. since ukraine is not in the EU, i imagine he sees fewer EU passports than other European border crossings, and he did not seem equipped to deal with overflow from the other line. of course, all of that is known in retrospect — at the time all i could see was that there was a problem. he rifled through the pages of my passport, stared at my picture, looked through it all again, then got up and went to his colleague in the EU booth. the door to his booth was behind his seat, so he opened it right into the general area of my mom, who jumped right into explaining that i was her daughter and i didn’t speak very good Polish and was there a problem? he waved her off with a mixture of annoyance and uncertainty.
i waited by the space where he had been, watching him confer with the woman in the other booth. she barely glanced at him as she was checking the last passports in her line, and then eventually waved him off in the exact same way he had waved off my mom. fine fine, scan this part here. he came back, looked through everything once more, and handed the passport back. forgetting that i was just clearing Polish immigration here, i expected a stamp. my mom had gotten a stamp, where was mine? i attempted to ask in Polish. “nie potrzebuję …?” the word for stamp would not be conjured, so i made a hand motion that i hope defined “stamp stamp stamp” and not, as it surely could have looked, “stab stab stab.” he shook his head. i took back the passport and met my mom on the other side, breathing a sigh of relief.
as i said, i had forgotten that that was just the first part of the process.
last view of poland, through metal
we exited through the doors and found ourselves back on the gray path, but this time the tall green fences cut us off not only from the fields around us, but also from the people coming through from ukraine. claustrophobic. we were joking about the fact that i really hadn’t thought my EU passport would be the problem, but at least it wasn’t really a problem, after all, but, boy, had that felt scary! to our right we could suddenly see the vehicle entrance to Poland, lines of cars with their engines running, not moving. my shoulders drew up involuntarily. turn off your engines! and then these words from my mom’s mouth, “ukraine welcomes you,” i looked up and saw the sign she had just read, and my heart sank when i realized that it wasn’t over. yet.
ukraine welcomes you
my previous run-in with ukrainian customs and border control included darkness and waiting and yelling and giant guns. repeat. repeat. so i was decidedly nervous as we entered the tiny shack with the poorly-fixed welcome sign. no revolving doors nor green lights here, just a line up to one window, on the other side of which sat a young man with humorless yet somewhat nervous eyes. my mom approached him first and he barked a command at her that was incomprehensible in its suddenness. “i’m sorry, could you repeat?” she said in Polish, thinking it safer to stick to a language she knew well instead of attempting his language. he repeated, again too fast. she leaned closer. and again, this time a pause and then it got through. “oh!” she exclaimed, as her hand flew to remove the sunglasses she had forgotten were covering her eyes. he stared from her picture to her face, back and forth, and then stamped her passport and let her through.
i tried not to pay attention to the woman in uniform, who was pacing back and forth in front of the door to freedom, ready to pull aside those whose bags seemed suspicious. she really looked like she was half a wardrobe malfunction away from being in a david-lee-roth-era van halen video. my mom was forced to wait near her as it was my turn at the window. it’s really hard not to flinch when someone that serious is staring into your eyes, trying to determine if your identity is true. it felt less like he was trying to catch me in a crime and more like he was trying to find out if i had betrayed him personally. i wanted to apologize for whatever i may have done, for lying, for breaking his heart. whatever. anything. my only reprieve was when he looked back to my picture. but then it was back to my eyes. picture. eyes. finally, after what seemed like decades, a stamp. here you go. have a nice day.
i tried not to look the van halen guard woman in the eyes as i pulled our small suitcase behind me and we made our way to the last section of gray sidewalk. she moved to intercept a man behind me and i slipped out the door, immediately stunned by the sheer numbers of people waiting to be let in the other way. no small line before a revolving door here. no, on this side there was a locked gate, far back from the building, people shoved up against it clutching their bundles of possible contraband. there was something terrifying about the cage, the closeness, the faces waiting with resignation. such a long line. when would they start letting them through? did anyone know? i turned my attention to a small cat, who seemed to be singing us into the country with its purrs of pleasure. it didn’t seem abandoned, but rather just there.
to one side running cars, to the other people in cages, behind us bureaucracy, ahead of us a beautiful, happy cat.
welcome to ukraine.
Despite a stunning lack of guns, dogs, soldiers, darkness, no passport in hand and (let’s not forget) windows that won’t open I think your experience walking through the border was more terrifying than taking the train through. I think. I suppose I’ll have to try it myself to really know for sure.
And uh, remember how much trouble I went to, locked in the border cage at the train station, trying to snag photos of the Polish customs women without being shot? And here you had a UKRAINIAN customs woman? And no picture?
?!?
i KNOW, i feel how awful it is that i didn’t get a picture — but it was so much quicker. well, the part where i was exposed to the Ukrainian customs woman was much much quicker. no long waits in cages for us — just a lot of walking.
i don’t know, i think the added darkness of the train trip upped its terror quotient, but you definitely need to walk across the border to find out for yourself. which means you have to come to europe.