‘Unprecedented times’ a chilling déjà vu from the New East

Unwilling crusaders, we gaze into the tenebrous middle of this pandemic, our global anxiety convulsed into a spasm of momentary respite from the max-level self-isolation, somewhere before the second wave of infections floods the unstable dikes of our innately human hubris and the bubble-gum optimism of #wereallinthistogether. This is the eye of the storm. Not quite the grand apotheosis of Edvard Munch’s The Scream – more like the hold-your-breath foreboding of Francisco Goya’s diabolic donkeys in The Devil’s Lamp. The maddening allegretto is passing the baton to a reluctant entr’acte. Time to collect our thoughts before they flee, like beads of mercury flee a broken thermometer, into the dim corners of Netflix and doomscrolling. What the hell is going on? How ‘unprecedented’ is this ‘new normal,’ really?

To this chip off the old block (the Eastern Bloc, that is), much of this eschatology feels nauseatingly familiar. We have been here before, us, post-Soviets, perestroika survivors (and escapees), the periscopes of our experience hoisting themselves above the sea of daily COVID-19 litanies. In the surreal world of today, personas as respected as the CEO of Ford take up earnings calls to wax philosophical about how “there is no future if we don’t have an economic system that is always on” and how immense is the surprise that “there was an off switch.” But the citizenry of the New East has lived through the flipping of this primordial switch, the syncopated aftershocks of this civilizational crack reverberating through the hollowness of our bones. Through immigration, we packed our proletariat blues and galloped away from those anarchic late-eighties-early-nineties… only to find ourselves strangely back in time, a historic joke courtesy of some RNA and a bit of protein.

The Language of Apocalypse

“The third angel blew his trumpet, and a great star fell from heaven, blazing like a torch, and it fell on a third of the rivers and on the springs of water. The name of the star is Wormwood. A third of the waters became wormwood, and many died from the water, because it was made bitter.” Strange for a godless society, these words from the Book of Revelations were whispered in many kitchen tete-a-tetes after Chornobyl explosion which was a monumental push in the avalanche of revelations (pardon the pun) that brought about USSR’s swan song. Wormwood was not just for making absinthe. Wormwood was also for recognizing the Apocalypse because Chornobyl means ‘wormwood’ in Ukrainian. How’s that for fate. The symbolism of fear and doom was a bizarre life jacket for people trapped in an order where truth was not on the government menu. Today, similarly, many flee from the discomfort of uncertainty toward horoscopes, prophecies, and the good old Nostradamus, while others hang their self-righteous halos on the nail of a theological idea that coronavirus is divine punishment for humanity’s incalculable catalogue of sins. The moral lens of a pandemic is a well-worn-out sleeve  – from the Elizabethan fervor of John Donne and his peers, elegantly resting their metaphysical heft on skulls, candlelight, and other paraphernalia of memento mori, the disease is sin, and suffering is its cure. My grandparents, in those shrouded kitchen conversations of late eighties, talked about how Chornobyl was punishment for the crimes of communism. Today, we talk of how this virus is indictment of environmental destruction, neoliberalism, Pax Americana, and several other sins yet to be codified.

Magical Thinking

Cocaine in France, saltwater in China, cow dung and urine in India, volcanic ash in the Philippines – magic accompanies this pandemic much like it did the Black Death, and to think oneself intellectually above folk remedies and loopy superstitions is, at best, an arrogant habit of one who strayed a bit too far toward the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil and its loquacious serpentine tenant. During perestroika, the nation of multicultural atheist engineers who sent the first human into space would congregate by the televisions every evening, holding jars of water next to their TV sets in hopes that a nerdy ‘spiritual healer’ Alan Chumak would ‘charge’ them for ‘positive energy.’ The longest game of chess between Reason and Superstition, locked in a white-knuckled stalemate, culminated with the cracking of the very chessboard it was played on, and not even the 1991 coup d’etat and the tank armada aimed at the clinical whiteness of the Russian White House could glue back the rebellious pieces.

The Invisible Enemy

Svetlana Aleksiyevich, in her magnum opus that so inspired the Chornobyl miniseries,  tells of a cognitive dissonance experienced when facing the invisible enemy, radiation: “They didn’t understand why we had to bury their gardens, rip up their garlic and cabbage when it looked like ordinary garlic and ordinary cabbage. The old women would cross themselves and say, “Boys, what is this – is it the end of the world?”  In those early days after the explosion, when cherry trees were adorning themselves in milky blossom, when young pioneers were ironing their red ties in anticipation of May Day parade, when it was still possible to lie to your exploited citizenry even though Swedish experts were already sounding the alarm, the ghost of danger aptly evaded the sketch artist’s gaze. Sure, we taped the window frame gaps to prevent this plutonium poltergeist from seeping through the pores of our apartment bloc monotony, but most of this was atavistic, like crossing yourself when you wake up in the middle of the night, sweaty and shattered from an instantly forgotten nightmare. Today, many refuse to wear face masks to shield against the coronavirus, still others don them more out of courtesy or civic duty, or for psychological solace. The invisible enemy has a new name but operates according to the same principle: to obfuscate, to confuse, to evade, to deny. Nihil novi sub sole.

Green Thumb

Divine geometry of the perfect English garden, with a layover on the perfect English lawn (not without the aid of a certain textile engineer who adapted a carpet cutter into world’s first lawn mower), has embraced the pandemic with enthusiasm for growing food from scraps and even foraging, peppering Western publications with advice such as “flowers you can eat, fiddleheads you can fry, weeds you can sautee.”  This conjures up a déjà vu of a typically Darwinian spring of the early-mid-nineties in the New East. No year-round greens. Hyperinflation. Sauerkraut preserves are running thin as we stare into capricious April that mercifully bestows upon our decidedly un-English parks a wild harvest of young nettles, so young they barely sting. Pick them, chop them up, throw them in a salad, boil them in a soup, add a solitary egg, boiled so hard the yolk is blue. A humble meal for the new beginnings. We watch as our new compatriots in the Sated West (or so we thought) excitedly dip their toes into the practice we thought was relegated to our embarrassing past. We feel equally smug (aha, gotcha!) and terrified (this wasn’t supposed to happen, not twice in one lifetime!), but nobody has yet outsmarted history. From food shortages to the panicked pantry padding, this is the work of a narrator who is running out of new stories, so much so that once-in-a-lifetime plot twists are ditching their bathroom breaks, and the seismograph needle of time dances ever faster.

The Isolation of Borders

For us post-Soviets, wielding a Western passport was arguably the pinnacle of success, for it symbolized Freedom in its greatest manifestation. A Soviet subject was, by nature, a prisoner. Going abroad was uncommonly rare and always accompanied by a series of humiliating bureaucratic dances, reference letters, and other proofs of moral fortitude. Homo Sovieticus had to be incorruptible, especially if headed beyond the womb of Warsaw Pact satellites and into the lair of alluring capitalist sirens. Even after the Empire fell, few of us second-rate Europeans could obtain a travel visa to explore the manicured cities of our Western brethren. Instead of euro-trips, we had staycations. A summer in granny’s village, a summer on hot city pavement or, for the lucky few, a summer in some seaside sanatorium with Charcot showers, gruel, and awkward discotheques. Over the last few years things have decidedly improved, as New Europeans, armed with Ryanair (and Schengen Zone membership for the lucky ones), have completed the coveted trips to most notable tourist shrines. With the pandemic shutting of the borders, the feeling is eerily familiar to the stifling claustrophobia of the Soviet era. There’s nowhere to run except toward the greenhouse on your dacha, if you have one. Time, untampered by discount flights and all-inclusive vacations, moves slovenly, like rising dough, and the nauseating feeling, somewhere in the innards of your reptilian brain, is whispering the scariest ‘what if’ for a post-Soviet survivor to face: what if they never reopen the borders?

The End?

We’ve been here before. “But that’s good,” some say, “that’s an advantage.” “Experience builds resilience,” echo others. Experience also births immeasurable fatigue. Fatigue at the thought of bread lines, rationing and coupons, contraband, barter trade, nepotism and backdoor deals, forced minimalism and economizing, isolation, superstition, fear, suspicion and, just an arm’s stretch away, savagery. “Hold up,” post-Soviets groan, “this wasn’t part of the deal, we have already fulfilled our quota of apocalyptic events per lifetime.” Somewhere, in the increasingly legitimized corners of the Internet, a fellow putinist troll will type, with palpable Schadenfreude, “this is your punishment for betraying the Motherland, a traitor always gets what he deserves.” Other politicos will nurse cultural tropes about the moral virtues of Confucianism fertilizing the antivirus exceptionalism of the New New East – this idea of a heavy-handed paternalistic state is also, quite obviously, something us post-Soviets are well-versed in.

At some point, perhaps after a second or a third wave, the hand wielding this pandemic’s scythe will tire and maybe, just maybe we will learn some sort of a global lesson with a modicum of coherence. For now, the mowing is deafening and the déjà vu’s appear like clockwork. Out of the frying pan and into the fire.

Image: a mural on a residential building in Kyiv.