“You don’t fight the system,” Valentin said, pouring them all bad coffee. “You give it a better story. The militia don’t care about your peat harvesters. They care about looking competent. So tomorrow, you will go to the station with a letter from the Ministry of Tourism—which Yelena will have by morning—declaring your film to be an official cultural exchange project about ‘Traditional Belarusian Bog Agriculture and Its Intangible Heritage.’ You will also bring three bottles of good vodka, not the supermarket kind, and you will thank the officer for safeguarding your equipment from ‘potential smugglers.’ You will not mention the memory card. Yelena will handle the card.”
First, she called a man she called “the Archivist”—no name, just a whisper of a title—who confirmed that Dmitri was being held at a local militia station not for espionage, but because he had once signed a petition against a shopping mall development. The camera was leverage. The memory card was collateral.
Yelena looked at the gray sky. Snow was starting to fall, soft and indifferent. “We do what Belarusians have always done. We make a different film.”
“I’ve been planning this since you arrived in Belarus,” Yelena said. “I just didn’t know which problem you’d create first. You’re filmmakers. You always create a problem. My job is to fix it before it fixes you.”
Yelena sighed. It was the sigh of someone who had calculated the cost of a problem down to the kopek and found it over budget. “You were filming something you shouldn’t have seen. Did you know that?”
Yelena finally looked up. “The Berezina. Near the old partisan bunkers?”
That’s when they called Yelena.
“We were filming peat harvesters,” whispered the sound engineer, a nervous man named Leo. “Old women cutting turf. How is that sensitive?”
