Eto ne fotografia...: Images from a train across the Ukraine

Eastern Ukraine, Sept. 29, 2011

There are places on earth that no matter how hard I try I can't really see on their own terms. So when I was on a train rolling across the Ukraine a year ago, heading from one part of my life to another, I didn't really see the little farms and towns of an impoverished, distant corner of Europe. Most of what I saw was history and ghosts.

This is the first anniversary of that trip, when we left Moscow's Kievskaya Vokzal in the evening, and a day and a half later we arrived at Budapest's Keleti Station. Along the way we had little to do but stare out the window at the scene unfolding.

Travelling by train is a great way to see a place, but a limited one for experiencing it. You have no power to linger over something interesting, or to engage with the people you see and expose yourself to the possibility of a surprise or a challenge. You are alone with your thoughts, which you have no choice but to confront, and have the time to fill the landscape with something like that linear narrative that we so often prefer.

This part of the world, the opening of the steppes of Eurasia, perhaps gets such a reputation because there is a sameness to it. Along the way are farms, large and small, usually with cattle grazing precariously close to the tracks. There are gardens, well-tended in a rough and practical way, and little houses often in some form of disrepair. The towns are perfectly Soviet, which is one of the weird architectural legacies of the USSR. From the Polish frontier clear across the globe to the Pacific Ocean, you'll find dotting the land the same brutal apartment blocks, the severe, ersatz neoclassical train stations, the modest commercial downtowns. There will be kiosks selling all manner of things, and more than a few Lada taxis waiting nearby. After it all, the contrast with Europe — even the rougher parts of eastern Europe — is striking.

But while life goes on, the past is always there. The images and stories of the eastern front were always right there. It is a landscape that has seen so much suffering that you can't imagine it without armies marauding back and forth, about each little copse or hill was the scene of some drama, which claimed the lives of millions upon millions within living memory. It was in my mind when we arrived in Kiev, on what I knew was the 70th anniversary of the beginning of the Babi Yar massacre. I wonder how the city, the country, would remember this event, which was one of the first horrible chapters of the Holocaust, when the killing was immediate and brutal and had not yet evolved into the chilling, industrial process that is perhaps more potent in our memory. As the Yevtushenko poem described it, the silence screams.