Page 210 - The Mirror of My Soul. Vol. 1

Nicolai Levashov. The Mirror of My Soul. Vol. 1. Born in the USSR

parasites, as I called them later. However, right then I felt sadness, observing how people

became petty before my very eyes...
We were lucky—there were no traffic jams on the autobahn—so, we advanced very
quickly. After we had been driving for seven or eight hours, we turned right and started
to move to the east. Soon we crossed a former border between two Germanys. This fact
48
was easy to note just visiting a rest room. On the territory of the former GDR rest
rooms were certainly better than in the USSR of 1990, but their cleanliness differed
greatly from that of Western Germany. The same can be said about the roads of former
GDR—they were also worse in quality! Regrettably, there was nothing else to
compare—we did not pass through any of GDR’s towns, not even a small one.

At midnight that first day we reached the German-Polish border and decided to rest

a little. We lowered the back seats as far as they would go and slept right there in our
cars. Certainly, it was not a five-star hotel, but we more or less succeeded in resting for
several hours. But before we could continue on our way, we had to wait for the customs
office on the German side to open so that we could get our VIT (tax return).

I got back a pretty large sum, exchanged some Deutsche Marks into Polish Zloty
and crossed the German-Polish border without any problems. German frontier guards
only glanced at my documents and let me through; the Polish frontier guards put a transit
stamp in the passport and ... off we went—travelling the roads of our recent good
“friend”—Poland. Polish roads were even worse than that of the GDR, although there
were no pits and pot-holes. Polish gas-stations were also different—we found good
stations and some very far from good. It was obvious that “perestroika” in Poland still
failed to involve all the country, especially rural areas.

We crossed Poland also at maximum speed, where possible. Fields and forests and
lakes flashed by; we swept along large and small rivers; one landscape changed into

another. Our route passed through Warsaw, but we did not stop there. We had not the
least wish to get lost; therefore, we carefully followed direction signs on the road, doing
our best to not deviate from the route. We passed Warsaw pretty quickly and moved
toward Brest.

The road to the Soviet border was very narrow. It had only one traffic lane in each
direction. That is why we had a curious incident on the road not far from the Soviet-
Polish border. My companion’s car was ahead of me and I saw that he was going to
overtake a truck. According to our agreement, I should follow him. I did it. When I
pulled out after him, I discovered that it was not one truck, but an endless string of trucks.
Moreover, every truck was practically on the “tail” of the previous one, so that it was
near to impossible to “squeeze” in between them.

My acquaintance’s car began to gather speed in order to overtake the trucks as
quickly as possible and I did the same, because it was impossible to drive in the opposite
traffic lane for very long. Cars could appear there at any second with all the inevitable
consequences. I saw how the car of my fellow-traveller overtook the first truck of the
string and was already feeling relieved that everything finished without any problem, as
unexpectedly his car stopped in the opposite traffic lane right in front of me! There was

48 The German Democratic Republic (GDR; German: Deutsche Demokratische Republik, DDR; commonly known in
English as East Germany) was a socialist state created by the Soviet Union in the Soviet Zone of occupied Germany and
the Soviet sector of occupied Berlin. East Germany existed from 1949 until 1990, when its re-established states acceded to
the adjacent Federal Republic of Germany (West Germany), thus producing the current form of the state of Germany.
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