There are several types of Belarusian exiles.
Many are political dissidents who left after the 2020 protests against President Aleksandr Lukashenko’s authoritarian regime. Some are economic immigrants. Some are “just in case” immigrants. I’m one of those, because in Belarus you never know at what point your presence might become a problem.
There are more than 850 political prisoners in my country. Some of them became prisoners after living abroad for several years and making the reckless decision to return home, not believing that their cases were political. Year after year, you learn to live with the feeling that you’ll never go home.
And then something magical happens.
I moved to Poland four years ago and still barely knew the country when I first encountered it. Some friends and I had gone down to the banks of the Vistula, the river that divides Warsaw in two. There was some kind of festival, and Belarusian bands were playing. We were by the Vistula, but somehow I found myself on the bank of the Svislach, the river that divides the Belarusian capital, Minsk, into two.
“Do you see it too?” I asked my friend, who is also Belarusian.
No, she didn’t. To her, the Vistula looked absolutely normal. But I was certain that if I turned around, my favorite bar would be behind me and I’d be able to buy one of the legendary crêpes from the Depo pancake cafe.
I told Pavel Antipov, a Belarusian writer, about my strange hallucination on the bank of the Vistula. Being a wordsmith, he quickly gave a proper name to what I had been calling “something”: “portals.” Of course — they were portals that could lead you home from wherever you are.
He knew the phrase because another Belarusian writer, Tatsiana Zamirovskaya, had described these portals in one of her stories. Tatsiana, who lives in America, told me about coming across a concert hall in Boston that looks just like one in Minsk. “It was a surreal experience,” she said. “I genuinely thought I’d been teleported for a second.”
Spurred on, I started asking friends and fellow Belarusian exiles if they’d had similar experiences. It turned out that hundreds of us had. I don’t know what opens a portal. A visual resemblance? Maybe sounds? Or scents? In any case, testimonies poured in.
“Look, I’m back to Minsk! But I have the Colosseum behind my back,” my friend, Ivan Rymsha, wrote to me from Rome. “I found a district in Málaga, Spain, that reminded me of the area in Minsk where I lived for about two years,” Yuliya Matuzava, whom I hadn’t seen in years, messaged me. “Those were my student years. Despite the Soviet-style vibe, I really loved that neighborhood.”
Masha Kalesnikava is a journalist who left Belarus in 2021, a year after the protests began. For journalists in our country, there comes a point when you have to choose between your home and your profession. Twenty-one Belarusian media workers remain in prison. Sitting in my Warsaw kitchen, Masha said: “Wild grasses always open a portal for me.”
Around both her apartment and mine, no one mows the grass. Every time she sees the tall, untamed grass, a portal opens to Polesie, the Belarusian region close to Ukraine where her mother lives.
Wild grass works as a portal for me as well, but it leads to my grandmother. As children we used to trample the clover in my grandparents’ courtyard before anyone had a chance to cut it. Every time I return to my apartment in Warsaw, it feels as if I’ve walked there through the past.
For my university classmate Tatsiana Lukashevich, the smell of poplar bark transports her to her grandmother’s place. “It has a very distinctive scent — whether warmed by the sun or damp from the rain,” she said. “You catch it, freeze for a moment. And then you’re taken back to your grandmother’s village.”
As you can see, portals often send people back to their grandmothers. In the end, portals don’t lead you to “where” — they lead you to “when.”
I was clearly onto something. It’s not my personal quirk, and I don’t think it’s just Belarusian. After all, we live in an age of mass displacement. There are nearly 118 million people displaced worldwide, according to the United Nations, as people flee wars, poverty and disaster. Every time I read another news story about the emigration of thousands of people, I think that new portals will soon open somewhere.
I was talking to a journalist from Syria, Kholoud Helmi, not long ago. The context of our lives was very different, as was our immigration status. But when I asked her about portals, she recognized what I was talking about immediately.
“In the U.K. I was walking along the street and I felt something. I stopped and I started to return back to chase the smell,” she told me. “It felt like home in a very weird way. I realized that one of the neighbors had a jasmine tree. And it reminded me of the smell that I used to smell on the streets at home.”
I’ve heard that sometimes portals close. I don’t know how many years it will take for my last portal home to shut, when Warsaw’s Nowy Swiat will start reminding me of itself rather than Minsk’s Pobediteley Avenue. It has happened already for some of my friends.
But it hasn’t happened to me yet. Recently, I was crossing a road in Berlin and felt another portal open up. I felt as though if I turned around, I would see the old Pobeda Cinema that was under reconstruction when I left Minsk. I wanted to turn around and see how it ended up.
But the main rule of the game is that you’re not allowed to turn around. As soon as you do, the portal vanishes.
Elena Vasilyeva is a Belarusian journalist based in Warsaw.
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