The Man went to the border several times.
Later he would tell himself he went because History was happening.
Which was true.
History was happening.
“History is happening,” he said to O one day. “Can I borrow the car for the day?”
The Editor okays the italicised History. The capital H, with reservations, can stay also, he says. “It’s ironic,” says the Boy. “It’s vaguely moronic,” the Editor says. “But it can stay…and I’ll throw in a free was too.”
O reluctantly hands over the keys. “Go see History, then,” she smiles. “I’ll pick the kids up from school.”
Men, women and children were arriving at the border through the forests and swamps of eastern Poland from places whose names sounded vaguely Babylonian: Syria, Yemen, Eritrea, Afghanistan, Iraq.
They had crossed borders and deserts and camps and rivers and now they were here, in Podlasie, at the edge of Europe, trying to get through one last line.
The television called them the illegals. It said that the wave of illegals would swamp us. Whoever we were.
Some from the forest’s inner cabinet called them beasts and showed videos of the beasts engaging in, well, what could only be described as bestiality.
The activists, when there was enough signal and battery and strength left after the cold, called them by their names: Moses, Jesus and Abraham.
The Man drove east.
Białystok, Hajnówka, Michałowo.
The roads narrowed. The forests thickened. The signs began to speak a new – and very old – language.
RESTRICTED ZONE / EMERGENCY REGULATIONS.
The Man felt, though he could not have said why, as if he were driving not into a place but into a dream he had already had. Or a fairy tale starring a girl in a red cape and featuring grandmothers and a wolf.
The Boy sat beside him.
“What are we doing here?”
“History, mate” said the Man. “History.”
“No,” said the Boy. “What are we doing here?”
History was conspicuously absent on the bench upon which they were sat eating a sandwich. A nearby rubbish bin overflowing with discarded beer cans seemed to provide ample prima facie evidence of nothing very historical happening.
The Man did not answer.
Because he did not know. Or rather because he had too many answers. He had also lost the place on the map and, besides, his GPS was not working.
Escaping, perhaps? Working? Checking that the borders were still there?
He drove to the edge of the forest and stopped. Belarusian radio played Totally Wired on the radio. Mancunium cries. This indicated, the Man thought, a degree of irony he had not anticipated from The Enemy on the other side of the fence.
The Man stood in car parks and church halls and petrol station forecourts with activists in practical shoes and fluorescent jackets while they passed torches, tea, power banks, coordinates and stale biscuits between one another.
“She’s diabetic.”
“They’ve got two children.”
“Where are they?”
“In the woods.”
“Which woods?”
A shrug.
All woods here eventually became the woods.
“Give an inch, they take a mile,” the Editor mutters, his line on italics breached yet again.
A place both real and unreal.
“Liminal,” Lacan started. But thought better of it.
The women understood before he did.
Karolina and Maria. Two middle-aged Polish women in sensible coats and walking shoes, moving through the emergency with the exhausted competence of people who had spent their adult lives cleaning up after male abstractions: nation, Church, history, patriotism, Englishmen with notebooks.
The Man thought he befriended them.
In truth, they befriended him.
“Have you eaten?” Maria would ask.
“I’m fine.”
“No, you’re not.”
“You don’t know that.”
Maria looked at him for a long moment.
“Have a sandwich.”
“I know your type,” she added as he munched.
“The ones who come here because they think the border is about Europe.”
“And it isn’t?”
“No,” said Maria. “It’s about people in a forest.”
Karolina laughed.
“He’s English,” she said. “They always think there’s a theory.”
The Man wanted to protest, because there was a theory. There was always a theory. The border as the return of the repressed. The old eastern frontier. The buried wars. The trains. The camps. The whole European unconscious bubbling up through the marshes.
But Karolina was already putting blankets in the back of a car.
Maria was on the phone trying to find insulin.
The people in the forest did not need metaphysics. They needed dry socks. A warm blanket. A charged phone. A way out.
Lacan appeared in the passenger seat.
“You are enjoying this too much,” he said.
“I’m not enjoying it.”
“The darkness. The flood. The feeling that you are standing beside something immense without having to enter it.”
The Man looked out at the trees.
Torchlight moved between them. Then vanished.
The Boy spoke quietly.
“You love this bit.”
“What bit?”
“The bit before something happens.”
The Man said nothing.
Because it was true.
The waiting. The possibility. The strange conviction that if he remained here long enough that something in him might finally become clear.
Later, back in the hotel, he sat on the bed with a beer and his laptop.
He opened the document.
WHEN MOSES CAME TO POLAND
The cursor blinked.
The Boy looked at the title. “But Moses doesn’t speak in your book.”
It was true.
The next day, the Man went to a farm two hundred metres from the river.
The Bug.
Beyond it, Belarus, and, according to the newspapers, the Wagner mercenaries, recently arrived from Africa where they had been making mischief for Putin.
Now they were here. Or near here. A kilometre away perhaps. Somewhere on the other side of the water in the trees.
“We’ll see you in Warsaw,” one of them had reportedly said.
The road to the farm was absurdly beautiful.
Flat fields. Storks. A dirt track. Late afternoon light layered over a nineteenth-century painting.
A wooden house. A dog. Chickens. Geraniums in the window. The old woman came out slowly, suspicious until she heard the Man’s voice, at which point she became merely curious.
“English?”
“Yes.”
“Ah,” she said, as if this explained everything.
She invited him in.
Tea. Cake. The television on low in the corner saying something about Wagner, Belarus, provocation, the border.
“Can you hear them?” asked the Man.
“Hear who?”
“The Wagner troops.”
The old woman laughed.
“No.”
“Nothing?”
She shrugged.
“Sometimes tractors.”
The Boy looked around the kitchen.
“This is lovely.”
It was lovely.
The tablecloth. The tea. The old couple. A son. The smell of soup. The whole place had the soft, exhausted warmth of people who lived in the middle of an oil painting and had found themselves, through no fault of their own, in a war zone.
Outside, by the river, stood small concrete stubs where the old border posts had once been.
They looked like the ruins of some ancient civilisation.
The Man walked down towards the river.
The Bug slid past quietly between reeds and trees as if it had never heard of NATO or Wagner. On the other side was Belarus. It looked exactly like Poland.
The Man stood there for perhaps three minutes.
Then they arrived.
Three soldiers. Border Guards. A policewoman.
“Documents.”
The Man handed them over.
“What are you doing here?”
“Looking.”
“At what?”
The Man almost laughed.
The river? Europe? His own reflection?
“The border,” he said.
The officer looked at him with the expression of a man for whom this was not an answer but a symptom of a minor mental illness.
They kept him there for an hour.
Calls to Warsaw. Passport checks. Questions.
Why was he here?
Who did he work for?
The Boy sat on one of the concrete stumps. Feet in the EU, head elsewhere.
“You wanted the border,” he said.
“Well, here it is.”
The strange thing was that the Man felt calmer once the uniforms arrived.
Before, the whole place had felt like a dream.
Now it felt like Poland again.
Papers. Mild suspicion. People trying to decide if you are dangerous or merely irritating.
Eventually the senior officer came back.
He handed over the passport.
“My brother lives in Luton,” he said. The Man felt briefly as if he had been recruited into an imaginary European Citadel.
The officer looked at him for a moment longer than necessary.
“I like your Tommy Robinson,” he said.
“Luton’s finest,” the Man replied. The nut in his throat grew ever so slightly bigger.
The toads croaked along the bucolic riverbank. Wagner and his men waited on the other side. Unseen.
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