1
Strange images move me. I think it's a romantic impulse. It happens when some arrangement of sense data — colors, textures, forms, their associations &mdash seems deeply odd, and at the same time, harmonious. The scene just strikes a chord.

Belarus was like that from the beginning. It started in my North American apartment, when I came across some aerial photos of Belarusian bogs. Moss and water ran together like green-blue paint spills. Puffy clouds bobbed in the sky while their doubles on the ground below phased between shadow and reflection, moving across the bipolar terrain. Birds I’d never seen before romped in the bogwater.

It all had that odd sense of harmony. Even better, it clashed just so with the preconception I had of Belarus: shabby tenements, grim and gray, a Stalinist dystopia. Intrigued, I pulled up the country in Google Maps. It was a knee-jerk reaction, out of pure curiosity; I guess I thought a map might shed light on the dissonance. Instead, the land stood out like a bald spot: wiped empty, no data at all — as if the entire place had been censored. Somewhere in my neural architecture, a tiny circuit exploded. I wanted to go there immediately.

2
I flew into Minsk from Latvia on a Wednesday afternoon. The flight was nearly empty. Minsk-2, the international airport, was all but locked up by the time my plane landed at half past three. The terminal itself was a brutalist fantasy of concrete and exposed pipes standing between me and passport control. I passed through it as quickly as possible, finally pausing in customs to look over my paperwork before the final checkpoint. The room was small, with few exits, and all of them were guarded by men with guns. Next to the doors sat a cadre of dagger-eyed immigration officers, encased in bulletproof glass. Their red lipstick and tight ponytails only increased the aura of villainy. As I stood, I sensed the quiet breathing of someone coming up behind me.

I turned and found a tall German traveler, swaying gently, like a tree. He'd been one of the few people on the same flight. He peered over his wire-rim glasses and spoke to the wall of customs forms before us. "Anything to . . ." he began, in a pleasant sing-song accent, trailing off as his eyes flitted over the fine print. He looked down and gave me what seemed like a grin. "Anything to . . . consider?"

His backpack looked threadbare and grimy from use. I figured we’d get along fine. Great, because we were forty kilometers outside the city, and neither of us knew how to get to it. The information kiosk we'd both been counting on had already closed for the day — actually, it looked closed forever. We stood around outside for a while: no buses, no cabs, no nothing. Eventually, at the edge of the airport’s deserted parking lot, we found a rogue minibus bound for Minsk and climbed in through the sliding side door.

Stefan revealed that he’d had the same experience with Google Maps back in Berlin. But unlike me, he’d had the wits to consult Google Earth as well, from which he’d printed a black-and-white satellite image of the capital city. Speeding down the highway, we pored over the creased printout, memorizing landmarks while our driver blared insipid techno and flattened the gas pedal under his boot. It was the only map we had between us.

3
Two days later, to the minute, I found myself wedged into the back seat of a sagging Toyota on the highway outside Minsk, heading for the Polish border with a team of archaeologists and five hundred pounds of gear. Stefan and I had said our bon voyages after locating real maps, ones with words, in a Minsk metro station. I was now en route to an archaeological dig in Krasnaselsk, a tiny town in northwest Belarus, which was known, if at all, for its sprawling cement factory.

Let me explain: I myself am not an archaeologist. I found one on the internet who studies this part of the world, and she didn’t refuse volunteer labor. That’s how I ended up shoulder-to-shoulder in the cramped confines of her transport vehicle, staring out the windshield at the hind end of a Russian oil tanker, hurtling toward a speck in the void.

4
When cement factory smokestacks appeared in the distance, we knew we were closing in on our town. In person, the factory's paint job, blue as a peacock in the sun, was bright enough to make our irises cinch uncomfortably — or it was as long as we trained our eyes on the small portion that was completed before the workers ran out of paint. The rest of the massive complex stood dull, bare and indifferent. Hello Krasnaselsk. Очень приятно.

We pitched camp, plotted our trenches, and spent the next few weeks on hands and knees, picking away, covered in sand and chalk dust. We lived under somewhat primitive conditions. Around the campfire, we cooked nothing that required more equipment than an aluminum pail and a stick. Some members of the expedition, sick of buckwheat porridge at every meal, turned to roasting grasshoppers and butterflies. Thrice a day, we crouched on the banks of the narrow, ice-cold river that wound through the woods near our campsite and scrubbed our cooking pails with handfuls of wet sand. Much less frequently — much less frequently — we plunged in to bathe, letting our shampoo bottles float on the surface, batting them close when the current was strong.

Through it all, the cement factory was our steadfast companion, rising up from the ground a kilometer north of camp. Only a beast could fail to feel some kind of affection for it. Its orienting floodlights were indispensable during late-night trips to the toilet trenches. It had a cafeteria where you could order a pint of sour cream for lunch and eat it with a spoon. Its silhouette was the inspiration for Krasnaselsk's town symbol, the Smoking Triple Prong, which was stamped in a slab of native cement and displayed near the city limits. And perhaps most importantly, it was home to the most eligible bachelor in Krasnaselsk.

5
We already knew about the most eligible bachelor in Krasnaselsk because we'd received a phone call from him on our way into town. How he got our number is anyone's guess. But as head of the cement factory museum, he wanted us to know how eagerly he was anticipating the arrival of fellow scholars.

His initial descent upon our campsite took us by surprise. We were hanging around one afternoon, playing poker and contemplating bathing, when we saw a man in head-to-toe white linen marching towards us through the meadow. He was coming from the direction of the cement factory. He carried a bottle of vodka in one hand and a jar of pickles in the other.

By the time he reached the jagged stump that marked our reception area, beads of sweat garlanding his brow only compounded the already pearly radiance of his ensemble. Truly, this gleaming stallion could be none other than the most eligible bachelor in Krasnasielsk. He introduced himself as Denis — with a final accent, like Denise — and offered the vodka and pickles as a token of hospitality.

He invited us to visit the cement factory’s one-room museum, where he would personally guide us on a journey into the depths of history, vis-a-vis the glorious cement factory. He also reported that the local division of the Ministry of Ideology was eagerly anticipating our attendance at a youth summit the following weekend.

The Ministry of Ideology? Now this was a surprise.

6
Belarus, unlike its Baltic neighbors, is partially stuck in a Soviet time warp. The KGB here out-Russia'd Russia by never even changing its name: no one in Belarus bothers to pretend it's anything other than the same old secret police. So the existence of a Ministry of Ideology shocked no one. What concerned us was the government’s interest in our presence, especially since “youth summit” was obviously a euphemism. This sounded like an indoctrination session. The question was, how sinister would it be?

Our minds were strong, but it wouldn't be enough. Eastern Bloc ideologues relish physical humiliation via athletics, especially in the case of weak and decadent Westerners like us. We needed to prepare. We went to the edge of the meadow and practiced throwing axes at trees. We found badminton rackets and deteriorating shuttlecocks and rallied across an imaginary net. We talked strategy over fortifying lunches of meat and gruel in the cement factory cafeteria. We decided costumes might be our answer. Brilliant: we would dress up like giant storks, strutting and squawking until we ruined our opponents' concentration. Surprise, yes: surprise would be our strategy.

At 9:58 AM the following Friday, we convened outside the cement factory’s main gate to await the bus that would take us to Ideology Fest. The juggernaut finally rumbled up, in a cloud of dust and sputtering diesel. We boarded tentatively, one by one. But instead of the empty seats we'd expected, we were met by a sea of eyes, Polish and Belarusian, blinking back at us.

Who were these strangers? Why was the bus painted this familiar shade of blue? Why was the Polish contingent in uniform? Was it too late to turn back?

The words had barely scrolled across the movie screens of our minds when the bus door slammed shut behind us — ominously, like a portcullis. The driver shifted into gear, and our fortress began to roll away, with us, the captives, locked inside. We glanced nervously at each other and took one last look out the windows. Storms moved on the horizon. A snarl of clouds ate up the sun. Surprise was no longer a viable escape tactic, as all the talk about stork suits had been a giddy conceit from the get-go. We had no option but to bide our time, packed like pickpockets into the paddywagon of doom.

Little did we know: this was only the beginning...

go to PART 2

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