And so there were seven of us left, suddenly feeling very sober, trapped in between the borders without a roadworthy driver or roadworthy vehicle. As far as the legal side of things was concerned at least. One option was to wait, but then the ‘driving’ that was required at the moment comprised of 30 meters of crawling toward the queue to the Ukrainian side of the check point. Border control officers were eyeing us suspiciously. It didn’t help that we seemed to have parked in some limbo zone, a longer stay in which risked unsettling the balance of the universe so we better be on our way. Also, there was a chance that the next 30 meters would mark the end of our escapade if the Ukrainian officials were to find our car paperwork wanting. It would be nice to know sooner rather than later, to start planning. Or despairing.

This is the second half of the story of us trying to cross the Polish-Ukrainian border. You can read the first part here.

After damage control negotiations, a driver self-nominated and approved by others as risking the least and looking passably respectable was ready to resume the crossing. I started googling fines for drunk driving. Five meters later we resumed queuing. The spirits were low.

Another five meters [oh just learn to think in meters people] later we realised we didn’t have the green card. Obviously, that too was the task S was responsible for.

T and MW started cursing, knowing they should have done it themselves, as they always did. But not all was lost. P and MC volunteered to go and buy it. You could always buy green cards at the border. So off they went. And then there were five of us.

The queue was actually moving now, and we were getting close to the Ukrainian check point, which at this point we couldn’t cross because P and MC were still gone and we didn’t have the green card. So we left the queue and parked a little to the left of it, waiting for the guys to come back. Minutes pass and finally we get approached by a female Ukrainian border officer, asking us for bila karta. We explain, in Polish, that yes sure green card, we’re getting green card. It won’t be a moment. All good. She leaves us alone.

P and MC are still not coming back. We call them. They don’t answer. M and A decide to go to the toilet again. And then there were three of us. Out of nine. In a crucial moment of crossing. And obviously that was the moment when another border control officer appears, this time male. He starts talking in rapid Ukrainian. We understand bila karta again. We try to explain that we’re buying a green card this very moment but that doesn’t seem to satisfy him.

It’s beginning to dawn on us that probably they don’t mean the green card, especially as the word for green is almost the same in Polish and Ukrainian [zielona/zelena]. And so is the word for white [biała/bila]. Clearly, they want some sort of a white card from us. What white card? They keep asking how many of us there are in the car, as if it was somehow related to the mysterious white card.

‘9. Sorry, no, 7.’

‘Siedem, siem, Sieben, seven!’

Just to be on the sure side, we also show them on fingers. Seven fingers, still three people in the car. But then luckily A and M join us. Seven fingers and five people looks slightly better. We try to explain there are two more morons somewhere trying to get us the green card. Seven people, seven fingers, one bloody important card, can we just forget about its colour?

They ask for our passports. We give them the passports. There is a tiny white note inserted into one of them with a handwritten 7 on it. In the whole confusion caused by having our driver turned back, we forgot the polish border official gave us this slip of paper when crossing. The Ukrainian guards’ looks suggests we’re not doing well to represent our nation to our neighbours. But as far as our trip is concerned this is progress! They leave us alone.

Finally, our green card scouting party are calling. There are… complications.

‘Where the fuck are you!? Come here or they will turn us back, the Ukrainians are already annoyed with us, we can’t wait in this zone!’ – MW is shouting to the phone, losing his cool. – You are doing what?! What do you mean you’ll cross in another car?! What Portuguese man?!’

Well, it turned out that on their way back to our car, they were stopped, as this crossing was car only and one couldn’t simply walk between the checkpoints. They were stopped in some sort of no-go zone, not far from our car, but the Polish border control official, after listening to their predicament and laughing at them, explained it’s illegal to cross this zone by foot. They needed a car and as our minibus had already crossed the zone, they needed another car. The helpful guard said not to worry, they simply needed to wait for a half-empty car in the queue, get in, cross 10 meters, get out and get back into our minibus. Logical, right?

The first suitable car turned out to be a white Mercedes driven by a lone Portuguese man. The Portuguese man, as P and MC described to us when they finally joined us in the minibus, seemed to be only slightly perplexed when a border control officer told him to take those two Polish men and cross the border with them. In fact, he considered himself a connoisseur of Eastern Europe and had probably seen stranger things. He spoke no English and P and MC spoke no Spanish or Portuguese so it’s surprising how much they managed to learn about the friendly, but sleazy, middle aged man on a lone trip in foreign lands. Apparently, this wasn’t his first time either; he came to Poland and Ukraine when the two countries co-hosted the UEFA Euro in 2012. It seemed his love for the region was mostly related to football and sex tourism. He described, in words and gestures, how fond he was of beautiful or, as his hands seemed to suggest, chesty Eastern European women. Then the conversation turned to Spanish football and then they crossed to the Ukrainian side at last and P and MC could escape from the white Mercedes and the overfriendly Southerner.

Right, all seven of us together, having important bits of paper, white and green, we’re back in the queue to the Ukrainian check point. It doesn’t take long before an older dissatisfied looking official asks us for passports and car documents. We hold our breaths. He’s peering at the name written on the car rental documents. He checks through passports. He looks at our current driver.

‘Where is S? Are you S?’

And we know it ain’t gonna happen. We don’t give up, but pleading doesn’t work with this guy. He turns us back, so our driver decides to look for more sympathetic ears in the checkpoint building. We equip him with a mint chewing gum and convenient packets of currency in Pounds, Euro, Polish Zloty and Ukrainian Hryvnas and start praying they don’t arrest him for a) drunk driving b) bribery.

He comes back with no success. Where is this famous post-soviet corruption when one needs it? Well, at least he comes back.

We get told to join, surprise, another queue; this time for those waiting in no man’s land to enter Poland. W, getting restless, spots a young border control officer and decides to try his luck again. We’re slightly hidden now, in between official queues, and it seems that the argument that we could pay a fine for the error in our documents is not immediately dismissed. But then another officer appears and we are directed to the queue to the Polish checkpoint. W gets irritated, the officer gets irritated, then W gets aggressive trying to prove he’s not aggressive after the officer told him not to be aggressive. We’re watching and waiting for him to get arrested. The bickering escalates and culminates with W jumping in frustration like an agitated rabbit, showing the border officer the universal sign of fuck you with both his hands – a double fuck. He finishes with sharing his passionate thoughts about Ukraine. Surprisingly, he doesn’t get arrested, the young Ukrainian keeps his cool.

But he gets told to stay in the car. We’d rather he didn’t as his anger is catching. Aaand so we queue again. To enter Poland, which we’ve not even left. A young Polish officer approaches us, noting our Polish plates. We explain the situation and that the only reason we weren’t allowed into Ukraine was a wrong name on a bloody car rental agreement.

‘Well why don’t you scribble another one on your knee? It’s just a piece of paper’.

We get quiet. We’d not thought of that. Until then our only hope was to try to get another car or new rental documents, both of which would be difficult before Monday or without going back to Krakow. Now, new avenues have opened before us. If the border control officer thinks it’s not a big deal to forge documents, we might just as well give it a go. Handwriting is out of question; Ukraine requires all documents to be translated into Ukrainian and none of us can write in a Ukrainian, or any, Cyrillic. We need to amend the printed version then. That means a scanner, photoshop, printer. A plan is forming. We’re going to the nearest town to get the documents in order. The Polish checkpoint waves us through without even stamping our passports. But, Ukraine, we’ll be back.

And so, an hour later, here we are, waiting for A to scan the documents at her old colleague’s house in Przemysl, contemplating going to Croatia instead of another attempt at breaching the impenetrable Ukrainian border. The scanning takes more than an hour, by which time the rest of us is almost as bored as you, my reader, who must be wondering when our ordeal will finally end.

Well, we’re only halfway there. We’re off to the centre of a sleepy city of Przemysl to watch the England-Belgium third place match. On the main market square, we find a half-empty restaurant that’s pretending to be an English pub. We order beers and dinner involving different combinations of potatoes, meat and cabbage and crack on with the forgery. Photoshop in hand, we realise we don’t quite know what the document is saying. It’s written in Ukrainian Cyrillic and gives us no clue where we should be erasing and changing information.

‘Anyone knows anyone who speaks Ukrainian?’

‘I know a girl, Sasha!’ – P, uncharacteristically for him, saves the day. No one is surprised he knows a girl, but everyone is surprised this has some utilitarian value. P calls Sasha who luckily agrees to translate it on the fly for us. She’s either a lovely person or desperate for P to get her another modelling contract, either way, thank gods for all the Ukrainians who’ve recently migrated to Krakow.

Energy levels get low. C is working on making sure the scanned document and the stamps on it don’t look scanned. The rest is falling asleep, watching the least interesting football game that season – Belgium destroying England in the third place play-off. In the meantime, S (the idiot) is getting all his ducks in a row for a temporary passport in another sleepy town of Rzeszów, 80 kilometres away. Somehow he’s pulling it off. He found a fake urgent business need that would take him to Ukraine, got in touch with someone from the firm to procure documents certifying the urgency and businessnes of said trip, and managed to find an open passport bureau to process it in two days, over the weekend. Suspiciously lucky, probably involving favours from the gods below.

It’s time to leave the pub and wake up our driver, who’s been sleeping off the tiredness and hangover in the minibus. I doze off and wake up in the underground parking lot in a shopping mall. The documents are printed out and we just need to make them look more legit; fold them in half, staple and put them in an old clear wallet to discourage everyone from looking too closely.

And then we’re off, driving into the sunset and toward the border again. Just to be on the safe side we choose another crossing to get to the Ukrainian side. Before we even get a glimpse of the border, we spot the queue. We forgot about that part. The queue of cars looks just as immovable and long as the one in the morning.

The feeling of victory starts to dissipate. It starts to rain. Evening turns into the night. On the positive side, the driver has time to get completely sober and we have time to get drunk. It will be another five or six hour-long wait, but we don’t know that yet. For now, we settle into the routine of waiting. In the moments when the rain eases off, the souls in transit emerge onto the road to engage in small tasks that break the expanse of time into manageable chunks; walks, cigarette breaks, phone calls, trips to the beginning of the queue.

An hour or so in a Ukrainian woman approaches our car and starts pleading to allow her to go ahead of us as her child is sick and she wants to get to hospital, or was it home, as soon as possible. We agree of course, feeling all decent and human. Another sick child request half an hour later makes us realise we’re suckers. No one else gets to jump the queue. There will always be those who cross the line when crossing the border, but all must suffer their due when facing the all-seeing eye of the state.

It’s near midnight when we finally get to the crossing. It’s dark, it’s raining, and the border control officer looks like he couldn’t care less. We give him our home-made car rental documents. He doesn’t even take them out from the clear pocket. We get waved through, into the night. Gradually, as we’re driving away from the border, the street lamps disappear, the darkness descends, the road surface deteriorates, the rain intensifies. Ukraine welcomes you. It doesn’t feel particularly welcoming, but we’re in.

Living in interconnected Europe, it’s easy to forget those barriers. To dismiss how real they are when you’re entangled in one, trying to surmount the unmetaphorical walls that separate what stays inside, what stays outside. To forget their many layers; the barriers spun from language – with confusing half-familiar words that make you feel inadequate, reduced to using pantomime. The barriers built from bureaucracy, with its paper walls and stamps and forms. The barriers constructed through architecture, with barbed wire and imposing buildings where you are always watched. There are barriers set by law, history, money, custom, force and politics. All conspires to convince us that the things on both sides are so very different. Or is it that they’re so fragile that without the borders to contain them, to bound them into identities, they would cease to exist?

Some social scientists argue that boundaries don’t separate things; it’s how things get created in the first place (see article by Abbott, 1995, “Things of boundaries”). I like that view. The view that things come into being as a result of how we draw the lines and set boundaries between, around and across differences. And so, this border is not here to keep Poles and Ukrainians neatly apart; without this border there would be neither; those identities wouldn’t be distinct enough to warrant separate names. The border is there to make those who live in this corner of the world into Poles and Ukrainians, to create tensions that pull those two populations into difference. Perhaps this is what the critics of the EU worry about; about not being a thing anymore but slowly dissolving, spilling over the lands of sameness. Not here though, not yet, at least. In this corner of the world, in the Eastern Borderlands[1], the boundaries might be spun mainly from memories, but they feel insurmountable, the edges of identities sharp. Ukraine welcomes you. Come in, shut the door.

El.