The Best Travel Writing 2011 - James O'Reilly [33]
Suddenly, the air was full of shrieks and vibrating wings as a flock of gulls appeared overhead.
Ina peered up at the birds, shading her eyes from the late-morning sun. “Surrealischeski!” she cried.
“Hitchcock,” shouted Lev, the filmmaker.
The gulls had shattered my protective shell of abstraction. As they rose in a mass and receded behind another trash mountain, the scene grew more real, more solid, my impressions specific. My stomach churned as I stared at brown liquid seeping from festering pools on the ground. Rot and dust and the sulfurous vapor of methane hung in the air. Coils of smoke rising from fires scattered over the mountains added the acrid odor of burning paper and wood to the sting of soot seeping through the car’s cracked windows. Identifiable objects came into focus: twisted fenders and mufflers scattered over the clearing, a rag snagged on a piece of metal, rippling in the wind like a tattered flag.
Gradually, the people emerged. Of course, they’d been there all along, standing ankle-deep in muck near the base of the mountain—bent women in ratty headscarves and ill-fitting dresses, men in baggy trousers, one with a shirt tied over his nose and mouth like an outlaw. Farther up, other clusters of scavengers sifted through the avalanche of trash. The pronged maw of a steam shovel scooped up thick sludge. A bulldozer knocked around tires, oil drums, and unidentifiable large objects.
Lev leaned forward from the back seat and called to Marina, who’d closed her eyes and was holding her head in her hands. He gestured toward the path the trucks had taken up the mountain. Hands trembling on the wheel, Marina aimed the Moskveech toward the path, and we plowed our way up on a carpet of trash.
“Koshmar,” Marina whispered, “nightmare.”
I doubted the car would make it up the steep grade, but I kept my mouth shut. Lev was aiming for the full effect, directing the scene he’d wanted the world to witness, the memory he’d tried to snatch back from oblivion.
Marina shifted gears. The Moskveech rattled and wheezed and, miraculously, kept climbing.
A dozen yards from the summit, a tire sank into the mud. The engine stalled. Lev draped his camera strap around his neck, unhooked the door’s makeshift wire fastener, and leapt out.
“Follow me,” he hollered theatrically as he sprinted the remaining yards up the mountain. Turning up the collar of my shirt in a hopeless attempt to cover my nose and mouth, I stepped from the car into a welter of foul-smelling feathers and took off behind Lev, nearly tripping over the rusted springs of a mattress. Marina was soon at my side, pressing the hem of her flowered blouse to her nose, while Ina kept guard at the car like a getaway driver. We stirred up black columns of flies that settled again like soot as we passed. Here and there, gulls and yellow-billed starlings feasted on scraps of food, mixed with splintered wooden slats and leaves and paper—the whole mess strewn with ashes and chicken feathers.
The wind picked up, scouring the outer layer of trash on the summit, where machines, like mindless gladiators, kept scraping and dragging and smashing. Our presence was ignored. The ecosystem of the dump toiled on—fire and methane, machinery and scavengers—all oblivious to the invaders scaling the hill and the little car stalled on the path.
When Marina and I caught up with Lev, he was standing at the edge of a cliff paved thick with bird droppings. The cliff overlooked a half-dozen more trash mountains. Lev was peering through a veil of blowing paper and plastic bags toward the city spread out in the distance, its wedding-cake buildings shimmering in the heat.
On the outskirts of Minsk, beyond the apartment blocks, the countryside stretched to the horizon, a peaceful mosaic of deep blues and greens. With the hand that held his camera, Lev made a sweeping gesture. “The graves are all over this place.” The forest around and beneath the dump was riddled with burial trenches.