2.

25 June, 2:40 PM, Czernograd International Airport

Jake Voynich knew this was a bad start to his homecoming when within the space of half an hour of touching down at the capital’s airport the Ruthenian and Galician Customs Service confiscated his grandfather’s ashes and an old, pale blue Volvo with a ski rack on the roof tried to run him down outside the main terminal.

In truth, it wasn’t really a homecoming, and after the first thirty minutes in the country it certainly did not feel like one. For Jake Voynich, home for most of his twenty-plus years has been the New York City. If Ruthenia and Galicia was home, it was his grandfather’s, a man that Jake barely knew and barely tolerated. Even then, Bogoslav “Bohu” Voynich had left his birthplace for good a long time ago, in his own youth, to seek a new life across the ocean, like so many others did after the war. Jake was fast beginning to understand why.

Now the old man was dead, the entire six feet two inches, a hundred kilograms, and 86 years of memories and achievements reduced by an intense flame of over 1000 degrees Celsius to a few fistfuls of fine grey powder sealed inside a polished platinum urn. Thus passes the earthly glory, as someone once said. It sounded better in the original Latin, Jake thought, but he was damned if he could remember how it went.

So no, no homecoming. More of a mission. Bohu’s will was read by an elderly attorney in a pleasant corner office overlooking Bryants Park in Midtown Manhattan, his heavy mahogany desk separating him from half a dozen intensely listening Voynich relatives. The will stipulated a generous distribution of the deceased’s sizable estate, but – with Bohu there were always “but”s - on a condition: that his ashes be taken by one of his descendants back to a country the old man had not seen for some sixty years and scattered at an obscure location in the mountains, forty kilometres south of Ruthenia and Galicia’s capital, Czernograd. No scattering, no money. All very simple.

Things you do for your family so that it can enjoy the rich fruits of someone else’s lifetime of work, Jake thought. And being the only male in the family, not counting his chronically ill father, you are the one who gets to do these things. In this case flying New York to London, London to Munich, and Munich to Czernograd, with the ashes of the family patriarch wrapped in two t-shirts and snuggling between a toiletry bag and a pair of jeans in a navy blue Samsonite suitcase bought especially for the trip.

Not that big a deal, really, in exchange for a few million dollars, except for the destination being a country that thirty years ago did not even exist. Then again, neither did the Czech Republic, Georgia or Uzbekistan. But no, this was different; this was a country that almost three decades ago had literally popped into existence seemingly out of nothing. Jake wasn’t even alive then but he knew it was an event that quickly overshadowed the fall of the Berlin Wall and has since then been compared in its significance – not to mention the sheer strangeness value – to a cross between the proverbial UFO landing on the White House lawn and the Second Coming of Christ. Except that the aliens and the Son of God decided to stick around, at once here and not here, accessible but invisible, taunting the whole world with the sheer impossibility and the blatant reality of its existence.

He was hardly a courageous pioneer, going boldly where no one has ever gone before, to a place marked on a parchment map “Here be dragons”. The magic kingdom – Jake wondered why the phrase hasn’t been trademarked yet - of Ruthenia and Galicia has been a tourist mecca for all of its thirty years, defying international trends even after the novelty has somewhat worn off. And he was hardly the first tourist to run foul of the Customs, or for that matter the first one to almost get run over outside the airport. Local drivers were infamous for their cavalier attitude, perhaps a throwback to the olden days of horseback raid and pillage.

And yet Jake’s head was spinning as he slouched sideways on the back seat of an ancient Mercedes taxi. Maybe it was the realisation that the impounded cargo was worth millions, maybe it was the effect of having spent too much time in the air with too much scotch at his fingertips. The pain radiating from his right elbow and through the rib cage and the hip that took the brunt of the fall did not help.

This better get better real soon, thought Jake Voynich. And welcome to Ruthenia and Galicia, by the way.

Photo by Richard Lee on Unsplash