Land of Stone Torches

Visited by a Kamchatkan

Her nails were beautifully done. Her smile, too, was fresh, and genuine.

“You mean you don’t know where I am from?” she answered, her accent thick and Russian. Until the 25th of October, six days ago, she’d worked as a flight attendant, but then the Russian government had declared Transaero bankrupt. When I say Russian government etc etc,what I mean is Putin had been haggling over the exact pay-off he was getting from the airline for a while, and had summarily decided it was too much trouble, so removed their licence to fly. The country’s second largest airlines therefore stopped operations the seconds planes landed, and the ex-Transaero Airlines flight attendant continued travelling anyway, having just arrived from Paris, on her way to Tallinn, then Irkutsk, before heading down to Istanbul.

She put headphones on me so I could listen to a Russian comedy show mocking the English, then worked on a delicate embroidery of butterflies.

Where was she from, precisely? Kamchatka, the land of stone torches — volcanoes, and many of them, in a peninsula of beguiling, wild beauty, near Japan. Cities nearby were sometimes rough, with the mafia involved in much activity, she said, and sometimes very cold, not like Kamchatka, which only descended to -10C or a touch more in winter. But they had soul, that is what made them so special, in cities like Vladivostok and others.

She was hesitating between hitch hiking overnight to Tallinn or taking the cheapest bus, packing her embroidery, lipstick and memories, and bitternesss- “the Ukrainians are happy about the Russian plane crashing in Egypt,” she said, as she got up to leave; “they say that we deserve it, as a revenge. It is such a terrible thing to say.”

I said nothing, as I found her words suddenly harsh, and not true in my experience, in fact not true at all, and was saddened at how she had been slapped twice by Putin’s government, first for removing her from her job, and second for feeding her nonsensical propaganda in its press. I was saddened, and puzzled at how quickly she understood the workings of the first slap, but not the second.

Still, it was not often one meets Kamchatkans, and the picture she sent to my phone from Transaero’s defunct catalogue showed me a different world: “you should see our volcanoes, so beautiful, so dangerous,” she said.

And, I knew, the more beautiful they were, the more dangerous too, from the bright lava to the turquoise lakes near semi-dormant craters, full of sulphuric and hydrochloric acid, with “spirits” in the gas above the waters the lull one into poisoned repose.

But the land had soul.

in the heat of the night
her red polish and perfume linger
lava in my heart

Photos were found here.