It’s been a long time now since I last sat in the car, turned the key in the ignition, and waited for those sixty seconds until the oil pump delivers lubricant to every part and corner of the old weary engine.

With schools on quarantine, and shopping malls closed, and work happening remotely, there was simply nowhere to go. The vehicle gathered dust on the parking lot and I no longer experienced these sixty-second meditations. Images of roads would float before my inner eye as I used to sit staring at the dashboard, caressing the gear stick – turns I would take to get me to the destination of the day, and roads that had been driven before.

One road in particular would haunt me: from the town where I used to live to Moscow and then on to Belarus and Białystok. I could follow its many turns in my mind. The dam where you cross the Volga without seeing much of the river. Unexpected pine woods near Penza. Forsaken and foolishly poor-looking Mordovia, with its monstrous agglomeration of suspicious eateries in Umyot. The ups and downs of hills under Smolensk, and that big rise which lets you know that the increasingly less than virtual border with Belarus is near.

Vast, agricultural and somewhat deserted farmlands in Belarus, and the sudden appearance of the woods. The turn from the highway into the wilderness you take if you want to enter the Schengen Zone at Bobrowniki rather than Brest. The dam near Volkovysk that rises like a wall next to the road, giving you the creepy feeling that the water may just go over the top, over your head. The narrow cut through the pristine woods on the Polish side, and you suddenly find yourself in Białystok. Parts of this town still hint at its Red Empire heritage, but from its eastern border you enter a perfectly and unexpectedly European middle-class suburb.

These images were slightly tortuous – symbols of something that was within arm’s reach and yet inaccessible, a key to escape from the everyday that I dared not use – and yet, as consequent events showed, therapeutic.

Perceptions

Driving a passenger car, as a method