The Wapping Project - To Step Across the Line

Kapka Kassabova

To Step Across

the Line

Kapka Kassabova

To Step Across

the Line

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There is something about borderlines that attracts and repels at once. As soon as a line is drawn in the sand, a desire arises to step across it. Like the need to tell stories, the need to step across the line may be hardwired in our brains. The favourite neighbourhood game of my childhood was hopscotch. All you needed was a piece of chalk. You drew a few lines on the asphalt, and you created a microcosm of meaningful boundaries. You jumped in and out, in and out, and the winner was she who didn’t stumble and lose her Balance.

All my life, I have had a hyper-awareness of borders. I grew up behind the iron curtain in a country whose villages, rivers and mountains within twenty or so miles of the national border were a militarised, no-go Border Zone. This was in fact Europe’s southernmost stretch of the iron curtain, and it was ostensibly there to protect us, though — I saw this later but sensed it even as a child — its barbs were pointing inwards.

The border, a near-mythical entity that couldn’t be approached, seen or touched, was a wall as long as the country, electrified and alarmed by Soviet technology in 1961 — the same year as the Berlin Wall went up.

Hidden by Balkan peaks and impassable forests, the border was out of sight but everywhere, like the State. It was the background hum of the days, the barely perceptible buzz of the nights. It was that which never slept. It was near the Black Sea beaches where we went for holidays along with the burntskinned East Germans, Poles and Czechoslovaks, some of

whom went swimming towards Turkey, swimming until they were swept out to their deaths by unexpected currents, or made a run for the forested land border, or — on one occasion — went up in an air balloon and crossed into Turkey, like a bird.

Like the tens of thousands of storks that darkened our Pontic skies in spring and left for Africa in autumn.

It was near the mountain villages where we went to pick berries and climb fir-trees from which you could see Greece but not visit it.

The border was in the expression zad granitsa, ‘beyond the border’, which simply meant ‘abroad’ but had a shivery one way feel to it, a beyond-the-pale feel. ‘Beyond the pale’ is in fact a colonial phrase, all the way from a 14th century expression coined in Ireland where it meant any territory that remained beyond English dominion, meaning beyond the pales, or stakes, demarcating its outer edges. Which brings to mind the Scottish Borders.

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Back in the day, border reavers collected ‘taxes’ from travellers, and The Book of Scots law decreed that you couldn’t pollute Scottish rivers — unless they flowed across the border into England. Four centuries after the Union of Crowns put an end to the political border, their name has remained, and to this day, the empty roads and denuded hills of the Scottish Borders retain an eerie charge, a ghostly desolation. This is the way of borders and margins: they remain haunted for decades, generations, centuries after their sombre power has lapsed. Today, the most border-like experience available is on the train from London to Edinburgh. Somewhere before North Berwick, you may hear an announcement that gladdens your heart, or mine at least: ‘Welcome to Scotland.’ Though I haven’t heard it for a few years. Here, the crossing into another realm is an act of the imagination — the very opposite of the first physical border I sighted, in 1984. That was the Berlin Wall, complete with soldiers and barricades, asserting with grim finality that the two sides would never meet again.

But all hard borders are destined to fall, one day. Twenty-five years after the fall of that wall, I travelled back to the border zone of my childhood. It has been demilitarised, but it is still a realm that operates on its own terms, as fairytales do, and traumatised topographies. I wanted to step across the once-forbidden line, to make up for lost time.

At the Bulgarian-Turkish checkpoint, Europe’s busiest land crossing, lorries queued up for miles, waiting to be processed into the European Union. Sometimes, it took days, and resigned to the wait, drivers set up stoves along the road to brew tea.

Some of them carried the kind of cargo that could land them in jail, though not all of them knew what they carried. I saw Bulgarian border police bust a Turkish lorry driver who carried Iraqi-Kurdish stowaways. They looked emaciated, he looked close to tears, and the border police looked indifferent, but not immune to bribes. Smuggling has always been brisk on this border, and profitable. In the days of Communism, border officials were the wealthiest locals.

Today, border police on both sides of the border strike deals with people smugglers, so that the already-robbed of this world would be robbed again, and returned to no man’s land.

Leaving the derelict Communist-era silk factories behind, I drove across the line, and a shiny mosque and shopping mall welcomed me to Turkey. My first port of call on the ‘Asian’ side was the ancient city of Edirne, a distorted mirror image of ancient Svilengrad (Silk Town) on the ‘European’ side. In Svilengrad, you can almost hear the muezzins of Edirne; in Edirne, you can almost hear the thumping of Svilengrad’s casinos. Gambling is banned in Turkey so Turkish gamblers head to Bulgaria. Family values are compulsory in Turkey, but on weekends, the hotel-casinos of Svilengrad heave with trans-border sex tourism. At Edirne’s Friday Market, you can bag snake oil or fake Levis for a few euros.

This border is hell for the refugee, and heaven for the entrepreneur and the corrupt official, the smuggler and the story-teller.

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A few weeks later, I entered Turkey from Greece, at a somnolent small-town checkpoint. The Greek guards, apparently struck with some kind of sleeping illness, yawned as they waved me through, but the spell lifted on the Turkish side which welcomed me with armed soldiers and a customs official who proceeded to gut the contents of my rented car. Later, I was told that the typical drug mule at this border is a woman in a rented car, with a passport to one of the Balkan nations — just like me. The previous week, a Romanian woman had been arrested with a stash of cocaine sewn under the seats. I stood sweating in the sun — checkpoints feel hot even in winter — as a busload of Greek tourists looked on. Their bags were being checked too.

They were not ordinary tourists, as it happens, but ancestral tourists. Every summer, the children and grandchildren of refugees from the Balkans Wars (1912-1913), World War One, and the Greek-Turkish War (1919-1922) travel to the abandoned houses of their ancestors, in Turkish border villages and towns.

The Turks can’t travel so easily into Europe, so they sit in their village squares drinking glasses of tea, and feeling all the emotions of their Greek and Bulgarian visitors: the loss, the grief, the confusion. Because they too are grandchildren of one-time Muslim refugees from Greece and Macedonia, Bulgaria and Bosnia — the peoples of the former Ottoman Empire whose borders in Europe were being redrawn by militant Balkan nationalisms and the ruthless games of the Great Powers.

All of this haunts the land, making the stress of border crossing in the Balkans hard to convey — even in broad daylight, with the right passport and nothing to declare. With clammy hands, I drove down the corridor of barbed wire between Greece and Turkey, narrow and one-directional like a birthing canal. It was a living souvenir from the cold war, when this border was darkened by the armies of three ‘enemy’ countries: Greece, Turkey, and Bulgaria. A pink flamingo from the border River Evros flew above me like an omen, though good or bad, I couldn’t tell.

Borders express our collective anxiety for clarity and certainty, here and there, us and them. But over time, borders flicker like mercury, move like shifting sands beneath our feet, collapse yet haunt the landscape, and are redrawn, a generation later, in the name of some new fear that isn’t new at all.

In the meantime, they inflict psychic wounds.

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Just as my book Border was coming out, I travelled to SouthEast Asia, and accidentally stumbled across the closest Asian equivalent to my border: the notorious crossing at Poi Pet, at the Thai-Cambodian border. ‘Infamous Poi Pet’ is infamous for much deadlier reasons than tourists realise, worried as they are about visa scams and impromptu fees demanded by officials in currencies you don’t have.

About twenty miles from the checkpoint, coming from the Thai side, you begin to experience a tense, border kind of feeling.

Thai army road-blocks appear at regular intervals, along banners that read ‘Country, religion, monarchy, people’. This was once the site of the largest refugee camp in Asia, housing 250,000 traumatised Cambodians who had survived the genocidal regime of Pol Pot, but didn’t wish to remain in Cambodia.

Thailand didn’t want them either. Some families of Cambodian refugees who had crossed into Thai territory were turned back at gun-point by Thai soldiers, and forced to march across mined terrain back into Cambodia. Their bones remain here, in these lesser known Killing Fields.

Once you reach the Thai border town of Aranyaprathet, it becomes clear that a brisk border economy thrives here. The young Finnish couple who shared a taxi with us had blank faces and empty suitcases. They had no intention of going across into Cambodia, they were not interested in Angkor Wat or the legacy of the Khmer Rouge. No, they were here to shop, and the unambiguously named Border Hotel was just across the street from the border shopping mall.

Cambodians go across to buy Thai produce at the border market or do seasonal work, and Thais go across to Poi Pet town, to gamble their lives away, sometimes literally. Every year there are murders in the casinos on the Cambodian side, involving the three main gambling nationalities of the region — Chinese, Thai, and Korean. Although Cambodians have recently been banned from gambling, prostitution and sex trafficking remains big business here. If the Thai side is a cheerful purgatory where you run a dusty gauntlet to the checkpoint, of stalls selling fried beetles, the Cambodian side is a beautiful inferno.

You enter the Kingdom of Cambodia through a massive gate of carved Khmer stone, straight into the arms of hawkers who will sell you everything you don’t need, from contraband cigarettes to ‘massage’. A miasmic odour rises from the canal that runs across the border and where I glimpsed shadowy figures scuttling across — Cambodians skipping passport control — and worried for them.

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As with the Bulgarian-Turkish and Greek-Turkish border, the ThaiCambodian border is radioactive with human trauma, but also ultra-porous. As porous as the history of the region and the morality of its power brokers. On the Cambodian side, until only fifteen years ago, the road to Siam Reap and Angkor Wat (now driven in two hours) was impassable; the border zone was being mined by the Khmer Rouge well into the 1990s. The hills in the more remote border areas are still mined.

Here, as in my native borderlands, nightmares come and go in the shape of political regimes and rapacious governments, each replacing the next, but gambling remains a long-standing speciality in the geo-political game of monopoly.

For as long as hard borders are nightmared into being by the ruthless and the fearful, the powerful and the brainwashed, the deadly hopscotch for grown-ups will continue. And with it — the human need to tell the stories of what happens when you step across the line, quickly, terribly light with just the clothes on your back, and your hopes, and everything that you left behind. Trying not to stumble and lose your balance.

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