Pen vs. Sword

One morning last summer, Vidanava got up early to make a telephone call home. Her parents were serving lunch to a reporter in their small dacha on the outskirts of Minsk. She called to remind her mother, an unsinkably good-humored woman, not to talk too much. The call prompted a chuckle from her father and hearty laughter from the kitchen, where Olga Karol was bustling about a meal of prunes stuffed with garlic, Georgian cheese pie and potato-and-pork pancakes. There seemed a mutual agreement among all three, even though they live on different continents, that these daughter-mother calls were obligatory whenever guests came by -- and that the calls never did any good. Nor did anyone care very much, because her mother's burbling stream of conversation was as relaxing as the crickets and late afternoon sun.

A bottle of Georgian red wine was produced, the thick grass and fruit-laden trees seemed to hum, and for a moment it was hard not to think of a Belarusian proverb, a proverb with currency in other countries that have suffered in the orbit of Russia over the centuries. God made the land so beautiful, they say, that He felt obliged to compensate by giving the people bad rulers. It was the sort of afternoon that Turgenev described in "On the Eve," a novel about a country pregnant with revolution: It was an afternoon of "radiant haze," when "it was pleasant to sit in the cool shade and hear that hot sound of life."

In Minsk, a half-hour away by car, the parks were filling with young people, some of them cocooned in the spell of MP3 players, other sharing bottles of beer and -- perhaps it was the brew or the summer sun -- laughing . At least a little.

"Isn't it a selfish word," asked one of Turgenev's characters, about the idea of happiness, about the kind of feeling one has on a radiant summer afternoon. "I mean, a word that keeps people apart."

After centuries of suffering at the hands of the Russians, and especially the Germans, the country is at peace. Many of its younger people know no other leadership than that of Lukashenko; many of its older people have known much worse. Many, it seems, are content to leave democracy to others and spin out passably decent lives. Not Vidanava, or her father, or her mother.

She will go back, she says, if charges are filed. The Belarusian government generally tends to be very bad at things people wish governments would do well. It can take an hour simply to mail a package in the government post office. And it tends to be very efficient at things that people wish it would do less well, like keep tabs on its citizens. But, just like the silent bureaucracy that threatened Joseph K. with The Trial, the government of Belarus is also capricious and hard to predict. Vidanava thinks she can mount a defense, if need be, even on the government's own terms.

But it's not really a question of whether she can win her case. Returning isn't a question at all.

"I am Belarusian," she says. "That's the most important thing, and I love my country. I feel comfortable there despite all the problems. And I want it to be better."