Natacha
My first day in Minsk I met Natacha. She was preparing food for apprentice actors. She was ridding and I was sitting alone watching her spin around the table, graceful and abrupt. I took her in picture, she played a medieval ballad on the piano and I kissed her.
I went back to France, I studed a Russian dictionary for 2 months, I came back. One February night, it was minus 38 degrees celsius. I loved her, I was stuck.
I made this trip a dozen times. From her childhood I know little and she didn’t tell me much about her post-Perestroika youth, it was survival.
During 6 months I photographed the city, Belarusian artistsa and a cemetery of mass executions. I was trying to understand history, Bolshevism, Nazis, Communism, Chernobyl, Lukashenko today. Policy of omission and omerta. The silence, always.
Politics ? She did not care. I tried to understand her through all that. But did I really try to understand her? I wanted to change her, as I wanted this country to change.
I never knew, during these four years, where I lived. I believed for a moment of love and revolution. I lost her. Lukashenko is still president for 26 years.
Dictatorship is history that we don’t go beyond. A wait without consolation. Because the suffering, the memory of a people or a person, remains buried. Misunderstood.
I don’t know, I can’t explain what she did not say.
But I saw her beauty and lightning unfold and resist, gray day after gray day.
More stories by Jef Bonifacino
