-Apologies in advance for minor bouts of time travel in ensuing posts which have been floating around on various pieces of dirt smudged, weather worn, time crumpled soldiers of paper-
I realized as I coasted along these sweeping slovakian plains that I've been leaving out a major selling point of this kind of trip: the in-between.
So I'd like to bring you now into my little tent (yep, we'll all fit!) overlooking a field of barley, the color is rust, with shades of red, orange, brown, and a yearning for october, and we can see the sun nonchalantly slipping off the horizon, as if the miracle of hues he is producing is nothing but an everyday occurrence.. really an every millisecond occurrence, that magnificent sun of ours has been making those colors somewhere, so many somewheres, every moment of it's existence, and still this set is enchanting.
We are currently under siege! I count now 20 mosquitos all desperately trying to penetrate this befuddling forcefield. I'd rather not admit the extent that this smug pleasure fulfills me, watching them writhe in frustration, my blood so tantalizingly close.. but honestly, I deserve it, after the dance I do for them every night. You know, putting up a tent is not so easy as just putting the poles together and the like, you have to be hopping and clapping and shaking your every limb so none of those little vampires can land on you, and then when you've finally gotten everything in and zipped up, then starts the massacre, hunting down every daring buzz that managed to slip through. But, we can relax now, we're safe, would you like some cherries?
We are in the beginning of July (or were when I wrote this!), and to my great fortune, cherries are in season here in Slovakia. There are so many cherries, that vendors are all but paying you to take their cherries. But even for free, I wouldn't take them from a box, all the fun is in finding the perfect tree and climbing all over it to find the juiciest, darkest rubies! Now, I come from a family of 6, but when cherries are concerned, we are generally at least 15 at some beach or park picnic setting; and in all of my life it has never occurred to anyone to buy TWO bags of cherries. Among many other things we are a considerate bunch, and so the game of how-many-cherries-can-you-fit-into-your-mouth? is one I have been long deprived of.. but I currently have 9 in my mouth (good thing I'm writing, not talking) and I believe part of the game is that you can only spit out the pits.. Success!
The endless road can give fruit, it can flavor your skin with the aroma of wheat, corn, manure, it can make you silly with swerving in and out of the lonely lines on the road or it can be a terrifying whirlpool of wind where trucks suck you closer and closer into their gnashing wheels. The road can flirt with you, sending you down long stretches of pleasant curves, with a lovely little village in sight, before one huge decisive curve sending you straight up and away from that cluster of cheerful huts. The road can sing to you, with its crickets and its birds, its wind and its creeks, and when it is sullen, my Rocinante has no qualms filling in the silence with his own thoughts on the matter. The road is a force of its own and is not just an in-between. This is something I think many of us have a hard time with- wherever you go, there you are! Thank you Dr. Sues, I wish your wisdom were easier to come to terms with.
But when the road does bring me into these little villages, it is here that I am always glad that I am not on a train, or a plane, or even a bus, for why would you get off in this tiny little town, Dulovce, Slovakia? Well, you get off because otherwise you would miss this fascinating kind of architecture, a hint of russian influence in the little old churches, minimal small houses, generally of concrete and it seems you must be pretty well off if you have paint on your walls. You would miss these faces of such depth and history- I have gotten some requests for more pictures, and the thing is I never think of taking pictures, except when I see these kind of faces- where the eyes are sunk a few inches back from their face, and the skin is so weathered you'd think they'd never been inside, and the bones are gnarly and the hair is straw, where the teeth protrude at the most unnatural but human angles, where cheeks are caverns and eyebrows are forests, and the long drooping ears can hear in my belabored breath that I come from far away- but then it would be really quite rude. You would miss these old men scowling at you in a line raising their hoes, or the lone boy pretending not to look while hauling a trailer full of junk behind his bike of rust. You would miss the playground of children, who gather round as you play for them.. children always seem to feel so natural hanging at the feet of a musician.
But I would have missed, if I were asleep on the train, or reading my book on a bus, being so egregiously conspicuous, as in the case of yesterday, a biker rode up to me to ask me to stop for some beers and stories. Which led to his taking me to his village here in Slovakia to meet his parents, and see what life is like in this post-soviet land.
Communism! I said it, communism! I've been investigating communism and the likes and dislikes about communism and the communist regime and if communism was merely a terrible terrifying tyranny where thoughts were banned and personality shunned or if maybe communism was a better life, where the people paraded proudly, all for all, happiness and comfort abundant.. We all have to go through our communist phase, yes? And it is very fun to write communism communism communism a million times on the internet and see if you get any hassle from those that are so anti tyranny and oppression. But here the term communism is not taboo at all, the subject not at all either. Indeed, people very much enjoy talking about those days, here mostly called 'the good old days'. By 'here' I mean all of these ex-soviet lands which I've covered so far being, (as I am amending much later than Slovakia) eastern Germany, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, and Croatia, in all of these lands I have asked as many people as I could about their opinion of those times and here I will give a brief summary of my survey.
I have not had the pleasure to interview any that experienced the really violent Stalinist times, my sample size is a bit limited, especially as even when I meet one of such venerable years, they usually learned Russian, not English in school. So simply by age exclusion what sounds like the worst of the communist era is not really part of my survey.
But the next age group that lived through the later part of it and obviously through the conversion to capitalism are 9 of 10 times say without hesitation that they would want communism back. They tell me of how safe those times were, how safe their children were, how safe their future was and how safe their well being was. That the government raised the standard of living for the majority of people tenfold and that one never had to worry. They speak of the beguiling vision of the west and capitalism as a bamboozlement that stripped them of their basic human needs. The 'freedom!' cry that is typically so persuasive here was not, even in their retrospect, much hankered after at all. The everyday man, the truck driver, the farmer, the shop tender, the majority of which usually don't make enough money to travel very much anyway, were more content with enough food and a functioning house and reliable health care than the right to go to other countries. Now granted this is all coming from a woman who is traveling around the world by bike wanting to see as many cultures as possible and the restriction of my experience to one country or one region would be quite infuriating, but I speak not of my experience.
The next age group, those born at the end of those times, and that mostly just hear their parents rants and see the after effects, and are aware of the western take of those times generally preface everything by saying 'Well of course communism was terrible and evil and all that', and then go on to summarize the opinion of their parents, above, and add on some thoughts on the resulting ripples. The governments, it sounds like, were a total free-for-all and the people that came to power did so by a combination of brute force and luck, and from what I hear it has somewhat stayed that way. I have heard so many gripes about the current political situation here, where corruption is brazenly ubiquitous. Scandals will reach the news about some politician swindling away millions of dollars and nothing happens. The man not only slips jail, but also somehow retains power. One of my interviewees said that he feels this is partly an aftereffect of the communist era- people were taught to simply accept and not question, and thus they do nothing. Another ripple that has surprised me, and is rather local to my original goal, was how it has effected the gypsy community. Until the communist times the gypsies were still itinerant and actually as such were a much more accepted social group. They were your knife sharpeners, your handymen, your musicians that didn't need a fixed locality and were no competition in the regular work force. But the soviets made homelessness illegal, everyone got a home, everyone got a job. This was against their nature, and something they never took kindly to, but stuck, and now they are in the ghettos of villages and cities. They are seen by the majority of locals as parasites, be they hard working or not, earning their means by legitimate means or not, because of many of the reasons Americans say the same about immigrants. Gypsies are the perpetual immigrants and so always discriminated against, especially when competition in the job market, or too near the home. The little village in Slovakia to which I was whisked away was maybe 1/4 gypsy, all of whom lived together, but a stone's throw away from the slightly less bedraggled area. The proximity seemed an unspoken itch to all concerned. As I biked around that area, the gypsies all stared at me like an alien, though from skin, I looked just like those across the street. But those across the street don't go through that area. It is such harsh segregation here, and racism a blatant root, but we'll get to that later. Their situation is one of those all too familiar cycles of poverty, a culture raised in poverty, and this one notoriously in crime, will teach the younger generations those values, and this way of life, which perpetuates itself. And all over Europe, but especially here in Eastern Europe, the 'natives' complain about the gypsies. It is almost an epidemic to which no government has attempted much of a remedy. An interviewee claimed that the soviets made the only successful attempt at integrating them, or at least raising their standard of living enough so that crime was not necessary. But now their jobs are not ensured, in fact, they are much less likely to get hired than their native competitors because of simple unchecked racism and I suppose because of the locality imposed upon them all by the soviets.
There was one person in my survey that swore of his hatred of the russians, and his paranoia of their returning and spoke fervently of freedom and I want to say this group certainly exists, especially among those interested in higher education and travel. But on the whole, I got a very different impression of communism from these locals than I learned in school. I always had the impression that communism was a failed attempt here in Eastern Europe and in Russia and I was rather unaware of how functional it actually was, how much it raised the standard of living, how nostalgic people are these days for those.
And with that I settle the summary of my socialist soviet survey!
