. . . writing the BOOK
The idea for a novel occurs to many potential writers who never get past the scattered-notes stage. Similarly, by 1997 a small pile of jumbled, unrelated notes, the barest genesis of by the White Book, had collected in an ancient briefcase. The notes were put into rough order, supplemented with fledgling research efforts and the project had begun. The first three or four chapters were hammered out at night, after work, on an old laptop under a working title that varied - 'Far Angelus, Highland Planet' was a contender for several months.
But the ultimate stimulis which eventually became by the White Book began years before, in Moscow . . . .
It's mid-July, 1988. Picture Moscow, if you can, in late evening. Deep in the KGB District near Dzerzinsky Square, about ten minutes from the nearest Moscow Metro station, is a five-story building, an old residence, serving at the time as a rather delapidated warehouse. Up by way of a rattling, halting lift to the top floor and along a long, narrow, dimly lit hallway to a large, gloomy, high-ceilinged room. One wall facing tall dirty windows is covered with amateur avant-garde paintings distined for sale to tourists in exchange for "hard currency" on the narrow lawns of the Rossiya Hotel across town.
Across a low table holding a Russian samovar filled with steaming, black Chinese tea are two very dissimilar men. One is dark, short, bearded and barrel-chested in grey slacks and a light windbreaker. That's our author. He drops a small knapsack at his feet. His Russian is little more than basic.
The other's slim build makes him appear tall, and his pale short hair seems at odds with his olive complexion and slightly almond eyes. A Kyrgyzstani musician in Moscow without a required prospiska permit. Kyrgyzstan is far to the east, bordering on China. He is a long way from home, but it does not seem to unduly concern him. His English is excellent.
The topic? How to get a passport for the Kyrgyzstani who wants out of the USSR altogether.
"Within four or five years you'll walk out without 'borrowed' papers."
Our Kyrgyzstani is reluctant to agree.
"I have to live here, like a prisoner. How would you, a visitor, know that?"
"Exactly because I am a visitor. I have passed through East Germany to get here, and twice before that, in 1984 and 1987. Glasnost and the US dollar are the undoing of the system. It's faltering. It will fall altogether, and soon."
Our author had already observed the Communist experiment up close. In 1987, on the autobahn north out of Berlin to Varnemunde he found himself on a bus delayed for forty minutes by the Vopos, the East German police, detained when the bus driver had mistakenly pulled in to an unauthorised rest-stop. Later that summer he was delayed en route from Budapest into Austria at a tourist trap just off a ferry across Lake Balaton, six hours of sweltering in the summer heat just to fix a flat tyre. Before that, in 1984, times were obviously more tense for the casual traveller. Today it's no more than a mildly interesting place with souvenir stand, but our author could recall standing in a line-up in the no-man's-land of Checkpoint Charlie for twenty minutes as Vopos, "people's police", with Kalashnikovs slung over shoulders, carefully matched passport pictures to faces while others poked wheeled mirrors under every vehicle or sniffed through buses with German Shepherd dogs. The unexpected can be enlightening in a communist country.
"Yes," the Kyrgyzstani agreed. "The USSR is becoming an economic colony of the Amerikanski Empire, like everywhere else on the planet. Or even off the planet, who knows. Even inostranih," he joked, "use the US dollar here."
"Inostranih?"
"Aliens. Kto snayit? Who knows? They abduct our people, why not our economy as well?"
