Good or evil?

Because our Russian visa expires in six days, we have to hurry to reach the border. Nevertheless, we don’t want to simply turn our backs on the capital of Buryatia without having seen anything. Under a bright blue sky and a pleasant 27 degrees in the sun, we visit the open-air museum, which is well worth seeing, and admire the only living brown bears in the zoo that we have seen during our entire trip to Russia. We visit the Buddhist temple, which was only built in 1990, watch Buddhist monks creating a large mandala and have interesting conversations with them. In the late afternoon, we take the bus to the city center. “Tourist?”, we are asked again and again, not without noticing the special emphasis with which this word is pronounced here. There is something almost admiring, longing, passionate about it. There is a sound in this word that reminds us again and again what an extraordinary gift it is to be able to travel and see the world with our own eyes. Most Siberians never get the chance to leave their region, let alone visit a foreign country, for the rest of their lives.

As Tanja checks the mail in an Internet café before we continue our journey, I use the time to enjoy the life and hustle and bustle on the Council Square. In the middle of the center, I sit on a small wall, the evening sun behind me, and look at the gigantic head of Lenin, who was honored here on his 100th birthday. birthday, he has created an extraordinary monument. The young people meet here at this hour. Skateboarders, break dancers doing somersaults in front of the Lenin head and cyclists performing breathtaking tricks on their little bikes give the once communist-influenced square a touch of freedom and light-heartedness. “Njet! Paschalusta! Upuskat!” “No! Please! Let go of me!” I suddenly hear a boy wailing god-awful. A man has grabbed the thirteen-year-old by the collar and is dragging him mercilessly across the square. “Please let go of me!” the boy calls and whines so heartbreakingly that I follow the unequal couple with my eyes. “What’s going on? Why isn’t anyone helping the boy? Someone has to intervene,” I think to myself and feel like jumping up to help him. The young prisoner wriggles with all his might to free himself from the obviously iron grip. The man is holding a cell phone in his other hand and is constantly trying to call someone. “Noooo! Noooo! Noooo! I don’t want to!” yells the little one. I look across the square to see if anyone is taking notice of the situation. However, nobody seems to care. “Am I making a mistake if I intervene? I am a stranger. I don’t really know what this is about. Maybe the brat is a thief? Did he try to steal something from the man? Who knows? Judging by his poor clothes, it could be a boy from the slums,” I ponder and come to the conclusion that it’s better not to get involved. Meanwhile, the man has dragged the defenceless boy into the shade of an avenue of trees next to the Leninkopf. In the meantime, a few young people have actually gathered around the alleged kidnapper. He is still holding his wriggling victim by the collar. One of the cronies now hands the tormented man a cigarette, which he lights immediately. The nagging stops for a moment. “So how did you spend your time?” I’m unexpectedly distracted by Tanja’s voice, who has just returned from the internet coffee shop. “Yes, an interesting place. But I’ve been observing an unpleasant situation over there for some time,” I say, pointing towards the avenue of trees. But suddenly there is no one to be seen. “Strange, just now there was a man holding a boy. I wanted to help him but I wasn’t sure who was the good guy and who was the bad guy. Or if they weren’t both clean. Strangely, none of the people here reacted. As if the screaming teenager hadn’t been there? As if he had been air? A fiction of another world? It’s strange what you can experience. Apparently the positive and the negative are very close together here. But who knows if the person in need of help wasn’t the culprit after all? Maybe the man was his father? Oh, I’ll never find out,” I say, brooding.

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