I am sat in the departures lounge of Berlin’s Tempelhof airport, waiting for my connecting flight back to London, heading back to Ukania. The airport cafe’s and shops are all gone and it is a long wait, but I am at ease sat in the stripped back and bare walled halls since I have a strong feeling for time, a strong feeling for its immeasurable length, both for the historical complexity and the particularity of its geographical location.
Where have I been? To Russia. We go to Russia for truthfulness. Time was I was unable to fetishise, but age brings its consolations and I was in transit from the Argentine pampas to… Where was it now? In transit from the Argentine pampas to… (“alone, disconsolate, and in some way, interesting” is one option referred to by Borges in his 1951 essay The Argentine Writer and Tradition).
Ah yes, I remember, to Russia, and now I am heading back to Ukania. Because the political economy of life is laid bare there to the fullest extent, the reality of the extreme gap between the ‘Haves’ and the ‘Have Nots’. I was reading a review of Luke Harding’s new book Mafia State: How one Reporter became an Enemy of the Brutal New Russia (Stephen Homes London Review of Books 05/01/12 p23-27), describing the way democracy works in Russia democracy, vyboria bez vyborathe, “elections without a choice”. Go check it out I thought. So I did, voting with my feet through that other option (the other one which Borges had suggested in his 1951 essay) finding: “room for manoeuver and capacity for innovation”.
To Russia looking for truthfulness. And now heading back, I am halfway to London, and I am stopped again at the Tempelhof Airport outside Berlin. Not a living soul around “the will-o’-the-wisps of the dead are glimering; there’s no sign of a living soul around…”. This time it is the Polish writer Andrzej Stasiuk speaking (boss with his wife of Czarne Publishing), being like Anselm Kieffer a visitor more than once at Tempelhof, and travelling to places nobody else would think to visit, such as Galicia, and obstinately leaving his words for someone else to find, since nothing is washed away without leaving a trace. Not even there. And not even in Ukania.
And in Ukania, the candles are also being lit by invisible hands for the dead.