Amazing Places on This Planet

May 5, 2018
Večer (in Slovenian)

Friday, April 27

I’ve been walking around Kyiv too much these past few weeks. Today, I’ve done 15 km. The city’s such a happy place again, after half a year of winter’s cold and gloom.

Yesterday, I suddenly realized that 32 years ago, when the Chernobyl Power Plant blew up on April 26, 1986, everything was exactly the same as it is now: people were drunk with springtime joy, the city was crazily beautiful and so tender, life was good because we’d all survived yet another winter. That day, my mother took in a dog from the street, and I, a 12-year-old then, couldn’t have been happier when I got back from school: a dog of my own, finally! And, until much later, hardly anyone knew anything about the horror that was happening just 100 km to the north of Kyiv.

Chernobyl is about thousands of disrupted human lives, the criminal cowardice and silence of the authorities, the fear of the invisible threat, which lingers on for years afterwards. It is also about an interrupted Kyiv spring.

Saturday, April 28

We’re flying to Istanbul tomorrow, so today is the day of packing. I can’t wait, I love traveling, but at the same time I hate leaving, always feel desperate, even when we’re just going on vacation. There are these brief trips that don’t involve any heartbreak, such as saying goodbye to dear friends, and then there are the real, long-term departures, when you’re leaving places and people you love for long enough for it to feel like forever. And a tiny part of me refuses to admit that there’s a huge difference between the two. What’s good about it, though, is that I love returning to those places and people I once left, and this seems like a good explanation (though not the only one) of why we’ve been stubbornly traveling to Istanbul as often as we can for the past 19 years, ignoring other amazing places on this planet.

Sunday, April 29

Getting through passport control in Istanbul and then, through a traffic jam, to our friends’ place takes longer than actually flying here from Kyiv. But these 40 minutes of waiting just to get your passport stamped prepare you well for what’s ahead, for Istanbul’s scale, the amount of life here, all the people, cars, boats, cats, food, laughter, noise, everything. Istanbul is like a huge puppy that can crush you to near death, accidentally, just playing happily with you, unaware of its own force. It’s an incredible city, always overwhelming, never boring. Tiresome, too, perhaps, but we’ve never stayed for more than three weeks here, and somehow that’s not enough time for me to get tired of Istanbul.

We are flying on to Edremit tomorrow, so we’re spending the night with our dear friends who live close to the airport. I take a walk along the seafront, where hundreds of people are enjoying the sun, barbecuing, flying kites, riding bicycles, taking selfies, eating out in cafes, and watching airplanes fly by just a hundred meters above us. Every two or three minutes a plane appears over the Sea of Marmara and heads for landing, bringing in all those crowds of people from all over the world that we hung out with at passport control earlier today. It’s mesmerizing to watch these planes, I could do it for hours, checking where each one’s coming from with the Flight Radar app, imagining what those places are like, dreaming of traveling to some of them one day, looking at the sea in between these arrivals. It’s a good way to fight my fear of flying, too, very reassuring — so many planes, and they all land without any problems.

Monday, April 30

The day’s first call to prayer wakes us up at dawn, reminding us that we aren’t in Kyiv anymore. But no matter how different Istanbul is from Kyiv, it feels just as much like home, just as precious.

Our flight to Edremit takes about 40 minutes, our friends pick us up at the airport. Our friends, who have long been like family to us. Each time we return to them, it feels as if we’d never left.

After two antiques shops and a delicious lunch — oh, how I always miss these hedonistic meals that we have here! — we finally make it to the mountainous village called Kayalar, which translates as the Rocks. Our friends’ beautiful house sits right above the village, but it’s the Greek island of Lesbos a dozen or so kilometers away across the Aegean Sea that dominates the view: you see it once, you cannot take your eyes away until you leave, and even then this view stays on in your mind. As always, I have no words to describe the beauty of this place.

Tuesday, May 1

If it weren’t for the minibus with loudspeakers and May Day stickers all over it, riding through the streets of Edremit yesterday, blaring “Yaşasın 1 Mayıs!” (“Long live May 1!”), I’d probably not remember about May Day today. Here, the holiday still has a genuine feel, with the annual attempts to hold rallies in Istanbul, despite all the police and their water cannons, tear gas, and helicopters circling above Taksim Square.

Back home, it’s just an extended weekend for most people, the time to go to their country houses, plant potatoes, detox or get drunk, relax. In the former Soviet Union, May Day is an anti-work holiday.

My mother says they stopped taking it and other Soviet holidays seriously after Nikita Khrushchev’s 1956 speech, in which he denounced Stalin and his crimes. I somehow have a very vague memory of just one May Day rally, the one they forced people to attend in 1986, on the sixth day after Chernobyl. This is something that is still hard to fathom and impossible to forgive. The official evacuation of Kyiv’s schoolchildren began two weeks later, in mid-May. I was sent away on May 7, for a whole year. That summer my father wrote me in one of his letters: “The most striking thing about Kyiv now is that you won’t see a single child as you walk outside. Just imagine, a city of 3 million and no children whatsoever.”

Wednesday, May 2

In the courtyard of one of the antiques shops that we stopped at on the day we arrived, I noticed five cannonballs of slightly different sizes. I lifted one, it was rusty and very heavy.

“Imagine how horrifying it is to have those flying all around you,” I told our 12-year-old daughter.

The shop’s owner said they were from the WWI battles that took place in Çanakkale, an hour or so away by car.

Troy is over here, too, whatever remains of it. Mount Ida is nearby, and that’s where the Greek gods sat watching the Trojan War.

Behramkale-Assos has the ruins of its ancient temple on top of the hill, and the view of Lesbos is simply perfect from there. Pure tranquility. Aristotle lived there, St. Paul passed through. An elderly local man once told us his ancestors’ graves were on Lesbos and out of reach to him — an echo from the 1923 population exchange between Turkey and Greece. Fishermen’s boats make for a beautiful tourist sight, but coast guard boats are there as well — the magnificent Lesbos, so idyllic from a distance, is now witnessing the tragedy of thousands of refugees.

This is the ancient land, packed with stories and myths from the distant and not-so-distant past, and it is so full of life still.

Thursday, May 3

A few weeks ago, I spent an hour looking through old Soviet postcards at Kyiv’s book market, three boxes of signed ones, sent by strangers to their family, friends and colleagues 30–40 years ago. The vendor said he had 30,000 more stored in the corner of his tiny, dark shop, and I immediately saw myself spending the rest of my life there, sorting through this treasure trove. Then I reigned myself in and bought just 15 cards for less than 50 euro cents.

Some of them are handwritten calligraphically, with pencil-drawn lines, some are even typewritten, a Soviet practice I’ve totally forgotten about. Some make me a bit depressed, others make me smile. I have them all in front of me now because I’d been hoping to write about them. But Kayalar is a very fjaka-inducing place, so it’ll have to wait.

But here are two teasers.

From a 1979 New Year’s card, Astrakhan to Kyiv: “Nothing good in our lives, all the same over and over. Drinking is ruining everything.”

From a 1983 March 8 card, to the same recipient, from a different, Leningrad-based, friend: “I’m thinking about last summer so often. How good it was. Wish we could repeat it at least once more.”

===

Nika Smetana (aka Veronica Khokhlova) lives between Kyiv, Moscow, Istanbul, and Otok Vis; loves walking, languages, cities; loves telling stories to herself and to anyone who’d listen; has always kept some sort of a diary, got herself a blog in 2003; occasionally writes and edits Central & Eastern Europe content for various venues.

New Kids on the Bloc

November 26, 2004
The New York Times

Kiev, Ukraine

A family friend who has a 17-year-old son told me this last week: "Young people today are so different from what we used to be, or even from what your generation is. They don't have our fear - they don't know it. But they know their rights, and they know how to defend them. They aren't scared to."

With Ukraine now gripped in a political crisis stemming from the disputed results of Sunday's presidential election, I can see what that friend meant.

For example, I have a 20-year-old friend, Tanya. When I was 16 and the Soviet Union collapsed, she was 6. Monday night, Tanya returned to Kiev, where she is a history student in college, from her hometown, Zhytomyr, where she had been observing the election.

On Tuesday morning, she, along with half a million other people, was at Kiev's Independence Square, protesting the declaration by Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovich that he was the winner. From there, together with thousands of other students, she marched to Shevchenko University, whose leadership had refused to allow its students to join a growing nationwide strike.

They weren't letting anyone out of the university, Tanya told me when I ran into her that evening at a huge rally outside the Ukrainian Parliament building. The students were locked inside, she explained, but they opened all the windows, and the protesters were passing them orange flags - the symbol of the opposition candidate, Viktor Yushchenko, whom most everyone feels was cheated out of victory. One guy climbed the drainpipe to the second floor to deliver the flags, Tanya said, and the students pulled him in through the window. Soon after, the administration relented, the students were liberated, their classes canceled.

By the time of the rally that night, Tanya had been up and running for 10 hours in the freezing cold dressed only in a thin green coat, an orange scarf around her neck and orange ribbons tied into her braids. She didn't look tired or cold; as we set out in search of a quick cup of coffee, she made us stop by a loudspeaker and listen to Mr. Yushchenko addressing Parliament inside the building.

Then, as we moved again, she and her friend started singing the Ukrainian national anthem. They didn't sound phony; they were singing for themselves, not loudly, and in beautiful voices (both are members of a Ukrainian choir), and it moved me to tears.

An hour later, around 7 p.m., we were at Independence Square again, at another huge rally, listening to Mr. Yushchenko on the loudspeakers again. Tanya, along with everyone else, was shouting "Yushchenko! Yushchenko!" and I, standing next to her, found myself shouting too, with confidence and inspiration I hadn't felt before.

And over and over one hears the chant, "My razom, nas bagato, i nas ne podolaty!" ("We're together, and there are many of us, and we can't be defeated!") Three weeks ago, I would have probably said that this was what students shouted at their rallies, but now everyone does, and so many people mean it.

When opposition party leaders asked the crowd to stay in the square through the night, taking turns in order not to get too cold, Tanya started making plans for the next day. She intended to return at 6 a.m.; she must have been very tired and cold by then, but it still wasn't showing.

The past four days have taught me something valuable: when I'm watching the situation unfold on television, I grow tense, fearful that it's not going to end well. But when I return to the crowd, I feel elated, thanks to people like Tanya, tens of thousands of them, and to everyone else who's out there, people of all ages, hundreds of thousands of them, fearless.

And our international support has heartened us as well. Almost every international observer - including experts from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe and from NATO - has accused the ruling party of widespread voting fraud. On Wednesday, Secretary of State Colin Powell said that the United States "cannot accept this result as legitimate." The only foreign leader who has sided with Mr. Yanukovich has been President Vladimir Putin of Russia, which, needless to say, hasn't done much for the prime minister's credibility.

Which brings up a joke I've heard a few times recently: a Ukrainian man shows up at work, all his clothes rumpled. When his colleagues ask what happened, he replies: "I turn on the TV this morning, and there's Putin praising Yanukovich. I switch to another channel, and there's Putin again, praising Yanukovich. So I switch the channels again, and there's again Putin praising Yanukovich. I turn on the radio, and Putin is there, too, praising Yanukovich. So I figured there was no use turning on the iron."

I'm not sure if it's a remake of an old Soviet joke. It may be. But it fits November 2004 in Ukraine beautifully: there's little use watching TV, what's happening now is available to everyone firsthand, out there in the streets of Kiev and other Ukrainian cities. And if the students have no fear in defending their rights, why should the rest of us?

Diary of a Protester

November 25, 2004
The Guardian

This is an extract from the blog of Veronica Khokhlova

Wednesday November 24 3.15am

At 3am, the city's so loud you'd think it's daytime. In our backyard, there's always someone peeing - boys, not girls, of course, for it's too cold for a girl to pee outdoors now: cold and snowing. But tonight, somehow, I'm not mad at those who use us as a toilet. I'm sitting in my cosy, warm room, and they're out there in the cold.

I spent some time at the rally by Verkhovna Rada, and we walked down to Maidan after the parliamentary meeting. It ended roughly around the time Yushchenko swore himself in - I guess it was more like swearing on the Bible to be loyal to the Ukrainian people than swearing himself in as president; he knows the laws, after all.

Yushchenko and Tymoshenko spoke at the Maidan rally, and then the crowd moved to the presidential administration building. By that time, I was already drinking tea after tea at one of the bars nearby, but when I saw the footage of the riot police in full gear facing the protesters, my heart sank. Every so often a journalist announced that, according to some well-informed sources, the riot police were beating everyone up, or that the armoured personnel vehicles were approaching the city.

Those were all rumours, thank God. Later this evening, reports came in that the riot police are acting friendly and tolerant, and that they've declared their support for Yushchenko, and that they aren't embarrassed to put some orange stuff on themselves. I assume it happened thanks to Yulia Tymoshenko - thanks to her charisma.

Speaking of charismatic politicians, the president of Georgia, Mikhail Saakashvili, is one. He spoke wonderfully - and in Ukrainian!!! - about the situation in Ukraine, and everyone in the bar started applauding when the footage was shown on Channel 5.

There was also a football game tonight, Dynamo Kiev playing against Roma. We won, 2:0!

7.18pm

The election commission announced the official election results less than half an hour ago. They were showing the meeting live and it was such a shame.

The opposition representatives (there were more than a dozen of them, but Katerynchuk, Zvarych, Khmara and Tanyuk are the only names I remember) stood in the corner, squeezed between the door and the TV cameras, and the chairs taken by the pro-Yanukovich guys. Very humiliating. When Zvarych, Yushchenko's assistant wanted to sign the protocol on the results in the foreign voting district, he had to put the paper on the back of his colleague and write this way. It could not be more humiliating. At some point, someone from the opposition complained that one of the pro-Yanukovich thugs hit someone from the opposition "between the legs".

Yanukovich supporters got up and began applauding when the commission signed the final protocol. They were shouting: Yanukovich! Yanukovich! Yanukovich! Grigoriy Surkis, president of Dynamo Kiev, was the only one I know. They were also waving those blue flags of Yanukovich campaign.

They discussed a few other issues but I wasn't listening. The opposition was protesting loudly from their corner but the commission members went on with their business, ignoring the protests.

At the very end, the opposition and some journalists were shouting very loudly: Hanba! (Shame!) and Yushchenko!

And that was it.

One of the journalists had tears in her eyes, another shook her head in disbelief.

Surkis was laughing loudly; most of his other comrades were just smiling.

Remembering Chernobyl

April 26, 2004
The Morning News

On April 23, one day after the North Korean train explosion, a BBC World news anchor talked live to Stanislav Varivoda, a Pyongyang correspondent for ITAR-TASS, Russia’s largest state-owned news agency. With an accent that sounded Korean to me and Ukrainian to my husband, Varivoda described one of the side effects of the secrecy surrounding the disaster: the atmosphere of total normalcy in the North Korean capital. When the anchor asked the Russian journalist about the nature of the regime’s secretiveness, Varivoda, instead of going into a routine analysis of the Communist ways of suppressing information, mumbled something about Chernobyl and how 18 years ago, the Soviet authorities took forever to find the guts to admit something horrible had happened there. The BBC anchor didn’t seem satisfied with the answer, so she pressed Varivoda some more – but he remained vague and, after a while, she was forced to interrupt the conversation, somewhat coarsely.

Varivoda’s Chernobyl reference may have sounded like a non sequitur to the British anchor, but it made perfect sense to me. Watching the inadequate reports on the train explosion, I kept thinking, ‘Oh, so this is how it must’ve felt to be ‘on the outside’ in April 1986: All they could do was take wild guesses and speculate about what was happening inside the Evil Empire.’ When the alleged number of the North Korean dead went down from 3,000 to 54 overnight, my husband said he remembered foreign newspapers being shown on Soviet TV after the Chernobyl explosion stopped being a secret: The headlines claimed there were thousands of corpses strewn around Ukraine. (In reality, 31 people died on site or within weeks of the explosion, but there is no unanimous opinion on how many more have been affected by the radioactive fallout, and to what extent.)

Since we were only three days away from the 18th anniversary of Chernobyl, I couldn’t help focusing on what it was like to be ‘on the inside’ in 1986. The official Soviet news outlets were the last thing you’d turn to for news; foreign radio stations were being jammed, as always. At some point, we began using the grandson of the Ukrainian Communist Party chief as our radiation-measuring device: My parents kept calling their well-connected acquaintances to check whether Vova Shcherbitskiy, a 12-year-old just like me, was still in Kiev, about 60 miles south of Chernobyl. He was, and for a while this calmed us – until someone wisely pointed out it was insane to expect this privileged grandson to be evacuated, no matter how high the radiation level: So many eyes were on Vova that the moment he skipped a day of school, panic would have emptied Kiev of its residents (and boy, what a shame that would have been!).

Eventually, some three weeks after the explosion, Kiev school kids were moved to Crimea; I had been sent to Moscow a week earlier. That summer, my father wrote in a letter to me: ‘The most striking thing about Kiev now is that there is not a single child visible in the streets. Just imagine, not a single child in the city with a three million population.’

North Korea’s death toll is rising again (several hundred people are now reported to have been killed and thousands injured), and I feel so sorry for them and their families. The cover-up attempted by the authorities is both sickening and frightening. But there are two things I’m almost happy about: The casualties are still not nearly as high as first reported (I did think about Sept. 11 briefly when I saw the 3,000 figure), and, even though the damage is immense, it can hardly be classified as anything but local (unless, of course, the trains secretly carried some kind of deadly nuclear waste – which, I hope, is unlikely).

As for Stanislav Varivoda’s tiny BBC fiasco, he just seemed to talk as someone who is used to a different type of audience: an audience not expecting explanations of government folks’ mysterious ways, an audience that takes for granted that those who run their country – or a country that reminds them of their country, as it used to be a few decades ago – have all kinds of heavily-guarded secrets, small and large. I’m not sure Varivoda was aware of this difference between the Western and post-Soviet audiences, nor do I think BBC World’s anchor had any idea why her guest’s comments sounded so out of place. ‘Poor guy,’ I said to my husband. ‘He should’ve asked her to explain why Britain needs the Queen.’

Red Dusk

July 2003
Newtopia Magazine

I'm on a train again and there's a fly in my compartment. It may move freely around the car but is unlikely to ever manage to slip out into the bigger world: all the windows are shut - because the air conditioner is on. Trapped inside the train car, this fly will never zigzag over the fresh raw meat at a crowded bazaar. It'll never mate under a Bohemian crystal chandelier, will never land afterwards to rest on one of those dazzling crystal drops, will never dull the drop's magical rainbow gloss with its carefree excrement.

The train fly will never know any of such pleasures - but at least it's safe from the deadly glue strips hanging from the lamps in oh so many cramped kitchens all over this vast former Soviet Empire. If this particular fly is an average representative of its species, it'll live like this for about 20 days. Then it'll die.

It's 9:30 a.m. and I'm about to spend the next 24 hours as a guest in the fly's home. We'll cross the bridge over the Dnieper, leaving behind Kyiv's golden church domes, sunlit and welcoming, nestled cozily on the emerald slopes underneath the monstrous titanium statue of a woman - the Soviet-time Motherland - holding up a shield and a sword in a victoriously ominous way.

We'll travel north, across the Ukrainian border and into Belarus - but by then I'll be reading one of the three books I've picked for the trip, in the relative privacy of the upper bunk, oblivious to the fly somewhere out there, to my human compartment-mates below and to the fresh-air-filled world outside. We'll enter Russia at night, and the next morning we'll be in St. Petersburg, arriving at the oldest Russian train station, Vitebskiy Vokzal, famous for its renovated interiors that Anna Akhmatova and the Russian czars used to pass through a century earlier.

My compartment-mates this time are an exhausted, unshaven man in his early thirties and a plump, middle-aged woman. The fourth one is missing, and for a while the compartment feels like a pleasant breed between a four-bunk second class and a two-bunk first class - until the man decides to take a morning nap.

Like so many people here, he is too poor to pay $1.30 for the bedding, so he takes off his worn-out black socks, hangs them on the rack on the wall as if they were a towel and lies down on the bare upper bunk, placing his head on a darkest dark-blue pillow. The compartment suddenly acquires a feel of a prison cell, and somehow I'm not surprised.

***

I decide to read my book by the window, sitting opposite the woman who, to my delight, is not talkative. All I know is that she, unlike me, has been on this train many times before, traveling to St. Petersburg, the city of her birth, to visit childhood friends. Unlike me, she's not panicking about being canned inside for the next day and night. She's wearing a comfy flannel robe and is busy working through a puzzle booklet. On the table next to her, a Russian edition of Good Housekeeping is awaiting its turn.

I begin to choose between the three books I have and eventually go for the thinnest one, "The Autumn of the Patriarch" by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. The other two are identical in size - but one, "Jerusalem" by Amos Elon, is too relevant, too painful to pass for train reading at the time when yet another Middle East peace plan is going belly-up, while the other, "Love Medicine" by Louise Erdrich, "the saga of two Native American families," according to the blurb, seems way too distant in its subject matter.

A few hours pass. Finally, I have to admit that "The Autumn of the Patriarch" is one of the toughest books - physically if not intellectually. As the first chapter comes to an end, so does the first and the only paragraph in it, 38 thickset little pages long. A train in this part of the world isn't a library; even though it provides relative sequestration, disturbances abound. People walk back and forth through your car, past your compartment; the sceneries are fast-forwarded outside the window; the railroad is bumpy as hell; every once in while the music is turned on, and some awful Russian pop song or an equally awful instrumental rendition of "My Heart Will Go On" never fails to make you wonder if the country that operates this train is indeed signatory to the U.N. Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment. Every time my eyes slither off the Garcia Marquez text, there is no easy way to get them back - lacking those helpful hooks of paragraph indentations, the pages are as unyielding for a train reader as the Everest is for an unfit alpinist.

***

At the Ukrainian border, about four hours into our journey, a very young, blond man in uniform walks in to check our passports. His eyes are the bluest I've ever seen, and I can't help staring at him while he compares my nerdy passport picture to my disheveled train self. I notice he's wearing a wedding ring. I start thinking of his wife, how proud she must be to have snatched a husband who looks like a Russian fairy-tale hero, in this God-forsaken, tiny Ukrainian town.

When the handsome border control guard leaves and the train begins moving again, out of Ukraine and into Belarus, I resume reading - and I read this:

"...I'll only keep the presidential guard who are straight shooters and brave fellows and I'm not going to name any cabinet, God damn it, just a good minister of health which is the only thing anyone really needs in life, and maybe another one with a good hand for what has to be put in writing, and that way we can rent out the ministries and barracks and save the money for help, because what's needed here isn't people but money, we'll get two good maids, one for cleaning and cooking and the other to wash and iron, and I'll take care of the cows and the birds myself..."

Several hours later, the Belarusian border control and customs people visit our compartment. The weather is wonderful and sunny, but I'm slightly nervous: this is the first time I'm going to Russia through Belarus. Normally, I take an overnight train from Kyiv to Moscow and, in the middle of the night, have to deal with Russian, not Belarusian, officials. On this route, however, Russia has entrusted Belarus with deciding who may enter the former via the latter and who may not. Ukrainians still have visa-free access. Americans and other "Westerners" who fail to obtain a Belarusian transit visa will most likely be taken off the train right here, in the town of Gomel, Belarus, population 503,711. The train will then proceed without them to Vitebsk, the hometown of Marc Chagall, where it'll finally cross into Russia undisturbed by another set of border formalities.

Though I can't speak for the rest of the train, our compartment doesn't hold interest for the Belarusian border control. Surprisingly, they turn out to be very friendly and polite, unlike some of their Russian counterparts. This does surprise me because I've heard so much about the evil regime of Aleksandr Lukashenko, how he thinks that half of the U.S. Embassy staff are spies, et cetera. Not that I have any relation to American diplomats, though.

I return to my book. I read:

"...because they could not admit that the mother of the chief of state would hang a pouch of camphor around her neck to ward off all contagion and tried to jab the caviar with her fork and staggered about in her patent leather pumps, nor could they accept the fact that she kept a beehive on the terrace of the music room, or bred turkeys and watercolor-painted birds in public offices or put the sheets out to dry on the balcony from which the speeches were made, nor could they bear the fact that at a diplomatic party she had said I'm tired of begging God to overthrow my son, because all this business of living in the presidential palace is like having the lights on all the time..."

This, of course, is when an obvious thought crosses my mind: Here I am, on a train again, passing through the land of one dictator, reading a book about another! The fictional dictator with a nutty mother, and Lukashenko, the real one, with a wife who allegedly continues to live on a farm in the village of Ryzhkovichi, milking cows, while he, a former director of a collective farm, runs his little country the way he pleases.

Just when I put "The Autumn of the Patriarch" down on the table to give my eyes some rest and muse about the strange ways in which fiction and reality sometimes join forces, the woman in my compartment shuts her Good Housekeeping magazine and says bitterly: "I thought this would last me the whole trip - but it's so full of ads. Only ads and nothing else! The rest is boring. Such a waste of money." I nod in sympathy - because when she puts the magazine on the table, I can see the cover headlines: GEISHAS - SEEMS LIKE THERE'S SOMETHING TO LEARN [FROM THEM] and WHY DO WE [WOMEN] GET MARRIED? Where are the recipes, I think, and where are the stories about gardening, and the anti-ageing tips?

***

The man who was taking a sockless nap is now sitting next to me, savoring a tabloid whose headlines announce that apes, just like humans, know how to have safe sex, and that ultra-sound is the reason why so many left-handed kids are being born. The man has his socks back on, but I can't keep myself from thinking arrogantly: Thank God, I don't have to marry someone like him.

But, even if I wanted to, I wouldn't have time to let him know. He gets off the train at the first post-border stop.

I make my bed and climb up, thinking of a nap. Just then the toy vendors appear.

Each one is concealed under a furry, colorful menagerie; as a group, they rush through the car with a marketplace buzz, one after another, pausing at every compartment to let the passengers have a look at the toys available. There are Lion Kings, and Dalmatians, and Mickeys, and Tiggers, and blue elephants, and the yellow ones, and plenty other creatures that I just can't identify. The woman in my compartment buys a crazy-looking yellow-pink puppy from a skinny female vendor with sad eyes.



"I already have an order for my trip back: a lion for my niece," she tells this Belarusian vendor, handing her a few Ukrainian paper bills.

"Do you have a return ticket? I could write down the date and the car number and then I'll bring you one," the vendor replies. She doesn't sound hopeful, nor does she look begging; she is pragmatic and business-like, offering quality service to a potential regular client, doing her best to beat a pack of competitors who are breathing down her neck, literally.

"No, I don't know yet when I'll be going back," my compartment-mate says, and even though the vendor with the sad eyes doesn't act like someone asking for pity, I suddenly feel so sorry for her, for her business skills going down the drain, earning her so little in such a tough and humiliating way.

When we arrive in Zhlobin, there are dozens more toy vendors, all ready to storm the train from the outside. But though the car door is open, the stepladder is up. For the next 15 minutes or so, these people are doomed to jostling one another down below on the platform, holding up and waving their animals dramatically, and when this train departs, they'll retreat to the blue wooden benches nearby to wait for the next one.



I stand by the window with my camera, stepping back every time a toy vendor spots me and rushes in my direction to entice me with a toy. It breaks my heart, every single time. But the name of the town, written in pale letters on the train station building, amuses me. I begin to think of a way to translate it into English: Zhlobin - Redneck City or Rednecksville? In Belarus, there's at least one other town with an embarrassing name, meaningless in any of the Slavic languages, but quite graphic when spelled in English: Slutsk.



The sky-blue building of Zhlobin train station is being renovated; a new, unpainted wooden fence encircles it. A teenage girl with two lions walks down the platform. She is wearing a flowery cotton dress that has two dark triangular spots on her flat breasts: she must have gone for a swim while there were no trains and still has her wet swimming suit on, underneath the dress.

I look at the toys passing by; I avoid making eye contact with the people carrying them. This is all so surreal that suddenly I'm reminded of a cannabis re-legalization rally in New York's Washington Square, in 1994, when each one of the hundreds of people there had a joint, and I kept mistaking pigeons for airplanes descending on me at full speed.

"Oh, there used to be a lot more toy vendors here a few years back," my compartment-mate says. "They were so much worse off then, they'd drag you off the train to have you buy something from them."

I don't ask her where they get all these toys - I can guess the answer: these people produce them (or perhaps they produce the artificial fur the toys are made of), and then they are being paid in kind, with these very toys, by their employer. In this part of the world, you may receive your salary in toys, canned pineapples, coffins, bras, grocery carts, condoms, piles of manure, meat grinders, crystal vases, dildos, and Indian rugs.

***

To be honest, I usually learn about these salary substitutes from the media; this is why I'm so shaken by the toy vendors' parade, the real thing that seems so unreal. Everyone I know earns cash - some as much as a few thousand dollars a month, others as little as $50. All would probably say their incomes are "average" - and, of course, they'd like to earn more.

I doubt, however, that anyone I know seriously aspires to turn into one of those proverbial post-Soviet "stinking rich" one day - by stashing large chunks of state funds in offshore accounts while those hapless toy vendors, the electorate, are busy surviving at the train station. I also hope none will ever descend to the level of the proverbial post-Soviet "dirt-poor" - by working patiently without pay for years and drinking oneself to near death to make this hard life slightly more bearable.

Where I live, people driving new Mercedes and BMWs outnumber people sleeping in the street, and somehow, I don't want to know how either managed to get this way. That is, I don't want to know any more than I already know, and what everybody knows.



In this part of the world, everybody knows about Pavel Borodin's bizarre attempt to attend George W. Bush's inaugural "candlelight dinner" in January 2001. As soon as he stepped off the plane at New York's JFK International Airport, Borodin, the State Secretary of the virtual Union of Russia and Belarus and formerly the chief of the Kremlin property department overseeing $650 billion in assets, was arrested on an extradition request from the Swiss authorities. Bernard Bertossa, Swiss Prosecutor General, aimed to prove that Borodin was guilty of pocketing some $25 million in kickbacks from two Swiss firms, in return for $492-million contracts to refurbish the Kremlin and re-fit President Yeltsin's personal airplane. Once a close associate of Boris Yeltsin, a man who at one point had the future Russian President Vladimir Putin as his deputy, Borodin found himself at the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn, as inmate No. 55217-053, missing all the festivities for which Bush's inaugural committee had raised a record $40 million. Later, Bertossa somehow failed to collect sufficient evidence against Borodin, allowing this flop of a white-collar criminal to return home on a $2.9-million bail. In spring 2002, Borodin was fined $300,000 and the Swiss case was closed.

If only the ordeal of Pavel Borodin were some anomalous exception, awe-inspiring but singular. We'd spend a few days staring uncomprehendingly at all these millions and billions, and then we'd go back to watching football or arguing about the distant Israeli-Palestinian conflict. But the former Soviet Union is teeming with stories like Borodin's, and we do treat them as football at times - we root for the good guys kicking asses of the mega-bad ones and ignore small-time "players" as we would minor teams. And often we seem to pretend that the thieves aren't our compatriots but citizens of some obscure country, dealing in an unheard-of currency that may well be as funny as the Turkish Lira, with all the meaningless zeroes at the end.

I enjoy switching into football-watching mode - for how else is it possible to digest even the most basic facts of another story, the story of Ukraine's former Prime Minister Pavlo Lazarenko?

He got sacked in 1997 and was charged with large-scale corruption and embezzlement in Ukraine. In early December 1998, he fled to Switzerland (on a Panamanian passport, for some reason) and was promptly arrested at the French-Swiss border. The omnipresent Swiss Prosecutor General Bernard Bertossa charged him with money laundering, but then allowed him to go home on a $2.5-million bail. The home Lazarenko chose to return to wasn't in Ukraine, though: in late February 1999, he flew to the United States, where his final destination might have been the 41-room Marin County mansion that once belonged to Hollywood comedian Eddie Murphy. But at JFK, it turned out that something was wrong with his U.S. visa, and Lazarenko was detained. When he finally did reach California, they wouldn't let him enjoy his 18-acre, $6.75-million estate - instead, they charged him with laundering $114 million and locked him up at FCI Dublin, Alameda County, for the next four years. In June 2000, the Swiss convicted Lazarenko in absentia as he admitted to having laundered $9 million (although in 1996 and 1997, the years of his premiership, he reported his annual income as mere $5,040 and $5,570, respectively, perhaps trying to pass for an average Ukrainian). In June 2003, Lazarenko (federal prisoner No. 94430-011) was granted $100-million bail, which has enabled him to participate in late-night teleconference depositions of high-profile Ukrainian witnesses (which he has preferred not to attend in person - possibly because Ukraine still has charges pending against him over his alleged involvement in the murders of two Ukrainian businessmen, back in 1996 and 1998). His trial is set to begin on August 18, and if it does, Lazarenko will become the second highest ranking foreign citizen to be prosecuted in the United States since the Panamanian dictator, General Manuel Noriega, was convicted on drug trafficking, money laundering and racketeering charges in 1992.

***

My compartment-mate is asleep. I wait till it gets dark, hoping that the dim light over my bunk and "The Autumn of the Patriarch" will save me from train insomnia, the most torturous kind that I, both a train guru and a guru insomniac, have ever had to deal with.

I'm trying to remember what it was that caused this lengthy meditation on the two evil namesakes, Pavel the Russian and Pavlo the Ukrainian, or, as they are known to the masses here, Pal Palych and Pavlo Panama. The toy vendors in Zhlobin - they suddenly remind me of Pavel Mazheiko - yes, yet another Pavel, and an ex-con, too, though his story is a different type of post-Soviet farce.

In September 2001, President Lukashenko swept to his second five-year term, winning 75 percent of the vote in the elections that most observers called "neither free nor fair." Mazheiko, a Belarusian journalist, had written critically about Lukashenko - and pissed him off. The newspaper he worked for was closed in November 2001, and Mazheiko, along with the editor-in-chief, was charged with libeling the president. In June 2002, they were convicted. Mazheiko was sentenced to two years at the Zhlobin minimum-security prison, but his sentence was later reduced to one year, and on March 21, 2003, he was granted parole due to his "good behavior."

When he arrived in Zhlobin, Mazheiko hoped he'd be allowed to serve his two years working at a local school or newspaper. But the prison authorities happened to be short of "unskilled labor" and Mazheiko ended up mixing bitumen for them. Despite obvious hardships, he didn't lose heart and started a prison library, accepting book donations from Zhlobin residents, the Belarusian Association of Journalists and his own friends. Soon after the journalist was released, the U.S. Embassy in Belarus contributed a 57-volume collection of works by American authors, translated into Russian. Mazheiko got to visit the prison one more time then, with the Embassy representatives who delivered the books.

***

We pass the endless forests, swamps and meadows of Belarus. Occasionally, the outskirts of nameless Belarusian towns with their rusty and dusty industrial remains interrupt the peaceful panorama. If the sky hadn't been so clear and the sun so happily blinding, it wouldn't have taken me so long to start thinking of Tolkien's Gollum leading the two hobbits through the Dead Marches, and of Tarkovsky's Stalker taking his two companions, a writer and a scientist, into the heart of the Zone.

If it hadn't been for all the distractions, I would've remembered Chernobyl much sooner. Belarus is slightly smaller than Kansas, and a quarter of its territory is something of a Zone: it received more than half of the radioactive dust expelled from the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant in April 1986. Kyiv, Ukraine's capital with a population of 2.5 million, is just 60 miles or so south of Chernobyl. But, for the first few days after the explosion, the wind was blowing northward, carrying much of the lethal iodine and cesium away from us.

The train advances through the Gomel and Mogilyov regions of Belarus, the most severely contaminated ones. I hate to think about Chernobyl; it depresses me to know how many villages/people were evacuated, how many poor souls returned to live in the unlivable lands, how many people milk cows that feed on radioactive grass, how many children consume the radioactive milk, how Lukashenko's regime encourages people to till the rich but radioactive farmland because otherwise people would have to go without food, how it is now possible to buy a one-day "ecological" tour to Chernobyl and have a picture taken with the "Sarcophagus" in the background, only 100 meters away. It's all making me sick.

In 1986, when I was 12, everything seemed kind of fun. In the morning of April 26, my mother set out to play tennis with a friend - but found a dog instead, a poor scared thing that almost got run over by a car. My mother's friend wasn't upset they didn't get to play; she was tired because her husband, a fireman, had been summoned in the middle of the night - something's happened at Chernobyl, she told my mother rather calmly. When he finally reached his headquarters, however, everyone was already gone, so he returned home (seventeen years later, he is still alive, while those who made it to Chernobyl that night aren't). I came back from school that day and we spent a few hours choosing a name for the dog. We called her Zosya.

On April 28, they first announced there'd been an accident: it was a dry, four-sentence government statement on the evening news. Nothing to worry about. So we continued to walk with Zosya the dog - I was so proud of her. I participated in a tennis tournament, very happy that the Moscow team arrived in the morning and departed in the evening, as soon as they learned about Chernobyl. It never hurts to have fewer really strong opponents, we all thought. I don't remember when school was cancelled, but I still have a clear memory of how excited I was about not having to take that horrible math exam, the first one in my life.

On May 1, the joyful demonstrators marched past our building, waving their red flags and papier-mache flowers, but by that time we'd been advised to stay home as much as possible - advised by my parents' well-informed friends, not by the authorities. I don't remember when Gorbachev finally made his first statement, recommending that we better keep our windows shut, but I'm still wondering how many people will never forgive him for that protracted silence. My parents sent me off to Moscow on the evening of May 7; most other kids had to wait until the middle of May before the official evacuation of Kyiv schools began.

In 1999, I attempted to read a book about Chernobyl, by Svetlana Alexievich, a Belarusian author in exile. It was one of the most powerful books I had ever held in my hands: a collection of voices of the Chernobyl dead and the Chernobyl living, a history of Chernobyl and a history of the beginning of the end of the Soviet Union recited in a choir of monologues. Needless to say, President Lukashenko's people accuse Alexievich of working for the CIA, her "Voices from Chernobyl: Chronicle of the Future" has to be smuggled into Belarus and she has found refuge in France.

I wasn't able to finish the book, though. I wasn't strong enough. When I think of it, I always think about one narration, by an ethnic Russian refugee who escaped the civil war in Tajikistan in the early 1990s. A maternity ward nurse, she had once seen a group of armed men grabbing a newborn girl and throwing her out of the window. This woman re-settled to one of the most contaminated areas of Belarus, where she enjoyed taking long walks in the nearby woods, content at last. She didn't worry about radiation; as long as there were only trees around her and no people, she felt at peace.

***

A mustached man takes one of the vacant bunks in our compartment somewhere in Mogilyov, when it's already dark outside and I've almost defeated my train insomnia.

In the morning, the three of us drink tea and have a conventional human conversation about TV. The man says that the Belarusian state channels are impossible to watch - all they do is make money by broadcasting personal text greetings - dear this, dear that, happy birthday, happy wedding anniversary. But he has a satellite dish and is addicted to Discovery Channel. He laughs as he talks about a documentary he's seen: just imagine, there exist some savage islanders who never eat raw bananas - they cook them!

I'm still half-asleep, so it doesn't occur to me that I should appreciate the company of a cheerful and well-off Belarusian citizen - for my own sake, at least, because wouldn't it be nice to end this long journey through the westernmost splinter of the once great Soviet Empire on a good note, brushing off all the grotesque, nightmarish visions that have been parading through my head for the past 24 hours?

An idiot, I ask the man what he thinks about the journalist exiled to the town of Zhlobin.

He frowns and replies, "Well, they criticize Lukashenko too much. They aren't being fair to him.

They deserve what they get. He is a good president. They should abide by the code of ethics, the journalists' code of ethics, and they never do."

The sweet woman chimes in, too: "Yes, they keep slamming the authorities, keep saying things that annoy the authorities, and then they are surprised they end up in jail. They do deserve it."

I am fully awake now to realize that it's better not to ask any more provocative questions. I even nod as I listen to them, as if in agreement. I hate being dragged into train arguments.

***

It's raining in St. Petersburg.

The mustached man and the plump woman leave the compartment first. We exchange such warm good-byes that for a second it seems as if we're going to miss each other. This affectionate phoniness is one thing I like about trains.

I have too much luggage, and as I'm trying to devise an efficient way to carry it all at once, I spot the fly. It is zooming around the table, preparing to feast on the crumbs we've left.

The fly's feast will last till a big woman with a mop arrives to clean the compartment. But no matter how diligent the cleaner is, some crumbs will still remain. There'll always be crumbs on the train, and, indifferent to the national borders it keeps crossing, the fly will live happily through whatever remains of its 20-day life.

The Demographic Crisis in Ukraine

February 2003
Newtopia Magazine

In 1995, my first journalistic mentor recommended that I try writing a piece on the demographic crisis in Ukraine. All I had to say then was, "What crisis? My best high school friend is about to give birth, and at least a dozen other acquaintances are also pregnant. We're gonna have plenty new babies real soon!"

I'm now aware of the issue's extreme complexity, but sometimes I'm still wondering whether the crisis is my fault to some extent. Ukraine's fertility rate has plummeted to 1.3 children per woman, yet my own fertility rate is even lower so far (zero). I lived in Russia during the Ukrainian census of 2001 and obviously haven't gotten into the database, exacerbating the already alarming demographic situation (minus one more Ukrainian).

Abstract thinking isn't one of my strengths when it comes to writing about post-Soviet population decline. I pretend to be following the conventional steps - I make the unthinkable numbers real by supporting them with real people's stories; I put the real people's stories into perspective by introducing experts' opinions and by throwing in the unthinkable numbers -but inside, I'm confused. How can I explain anything to anyone when all that has to be explained is happening to me or around me?

I don't give up right away, though.

To warm up, I skim headlines of a number of stories I've downloaded for preliminary research. They are all about Russia, Ukraine's neighbor: 'UNEARTHING THE RUSSIAN WAY OF DEATH' (by Michael Church, the Independent, January 15, 2001); 'DISREGARD FOR HEALTH IS KILLING RUSSIANS' (By John Daniszewski, the Los Angeles Times, December 16, 2001); 'THE DEATH OF A NATION' (By Andrew Meier, the Time Magazine (Europe),January 22, 2000); 'A PEOPLE SKATING ON THIN ICE' (by John O'Mahony, the Guardian, February 3, 2001); 'DEAD SOULS' (by Murray Feshbach, the Atlantic Monthly, January 1999).

I'm overwhelmed, and I haven't started reading yet.

To gain perspective, I move on to my favorite resource: the U.S. Census Bureau's international demographic database, a user-friendly online collection of estimates and projections for 227 countries and areas of the world. My goal is to find as many countries as possible that have fewer births and more deaths per 1,000 population than Russia.

The only such country, it turns out, is my native Ukraine. According to the 2003 estimates, it has 9.9 births/1,000 and 16.4 deaths/1,000 (while Russia has 10.1 births/1,000 and 14 deaths/1,000). Bulgaria's situation is as grave: 8 births/1,000 (fewer than in Ukraine) and 14.3 deaths/1,000 (more than in Russia).

Before I am bogged down in further amateurish scrutiny of statistics, I note that Russia's annual rate of natural increase (-0.39 percent) is higher than that of Bulgaria (-0.63 percent) and of Ukraine (-0.65 percent). The fact that Russia's making headlines in the Western media while Ukraine and Bulgaria don't, may have a simple explanation: Russia (pop. 145 million) possesses nuclear arms, whereas Ukraine (pop. 48 million) and Bulgaria (pop. 7.5 million) are harmless; even if Russia is dissolving at a slower rate, the impact may still be way too powerful.

I continue looking at the 2003 birth and death rate projections.

Birth rates in Bulgaria, as well as 12 other European countries and Japan are lower than in Ukraine, yet their mortality statistics are nowhere as gloomy as ours. Ukraine's death rate places the country alongside the world's most destitute nations. Chad has the same 16.4 deaths per 1,000 population as Ukraine, which is the lowest rate among the worst off 25 African states and Afghanistan. But Chad's birth rate is 47.1 births/1,000 - and it's not an exception among these drought-, poverty- and war-ridden countries. Afghanistan has 40.6 births/1,000; Rwanda - 41.1 births/1,000, Mali - 47.8 births/1,000, and Niger sets the world record at 49.5 births/1,000 (or five times Ukraine's rate). Botswana's birth rate is "only" 25.5 births/1,000, while its death rate is the highest in this group (31 deaths/1,000), which makes it the only African country experiencing a natural decrease of population.

By now, I seem to begin losing any perspective I may have gained. One sign of this is that the death rate statistics remind me of how a man at a New Jersey grocery store once asked me, "Ukraine. is it somewhere in Africa?"

So finally, I attempt reading those apocalyptically headlined stories about Russia, keeping in mind that they are as much about Ukraine.

"Over the past 10 years, Russia has been hemorrhaging humanity at a rate unprecedented for a modern, industrialized nation, except during times of famine or war," writes John O'Mahony.

"So much of the shrinking Russian population may soon be so ill that long-term solutions to the country's political, economic, and military problems will be inconceivable," concludes Murray Feshbach, a renowned U.S. demographer and former Sovietologist.

At first, this kind of reading scares me to death, but eventually I develop a sort of immunity to it. I realize that I'm ready to interview Ukrainian doctors and ordinary people - even though I don't feel like it. I know what questions need to be asked, but I also know most of the answers. Very unjournalistically, I identify with those poor souls O'Mahony and Feshbach are dedicating epitaphs to.

What if I, or someone I know here, is one tiny drop in the post-Soviet human hemorrhage?

Not necessarily, anyone truly versed in statistics would tell me. Such fear is even more irrational than the fear of flying. What am I so worried about, anyway? That by 2050, if the U.S. Census Bureau's forecast comes true, Uzbekistan will replace Ukraine as the second-largest former Soviet country? But even if its population expands from today's 26 million to 48.5 million 47 years later, Ukraine isn't just going to vanish. We'll still have about 38 million people then, which seems like a lot.

This coming spring, the daughter of my high school friend will turn 8. She is bright, healthy and beautiful, and when I think about her, it seems easy to ignore the fact that, since the year she was born, Ukraine has lost some 7 percent of its population, or more than 3 million people. Nothing matters as long as this one little girl is there. And, of course, there are so many more kids in Ukraine - in 2000, the U.S. Census Bureau counted nearly 5 million, from newborns to 9-year-olds. If at least some of them are as cool as my best friend's daughter, then Ukraine's got a future!

But it's foolish to be so optimistic, and it is difficult, too. When I read that only about 25 percent of Russian children are born healthy, I find it a bit too abstract to really make my heart sink. My best friend's daughter and other lively kids I see around serve as an imaginary shield that's fending off the horrible implications of health care statistics.

There is another little girl, however, who makes the numbers - those 75 percent of sick children - come alive for me.

In 1997, when I lived in Iowa City, I became close with the family of a visiting Ukrainian history professor. His daughter - just like the daughter of my Kyiv friend - was 2.5 years old then. At the hospital where she was born, back in Ukraine, she had been infected with staphylococcus, and by the time I met her, she'd had two cases of pneumonia, each followed by numerous complications.

The girl's temper tantrums, which often included screaming and kicking, are among my most vivid and persistent memories of her. I've never felt as helpless as I did then: she wasn't unhappy about some childish problems; through sobbing, she seemed to be trying to spill out her two and a half years of constant pain. Neither her despairing parents, nor doctors could bring her relief. On her good days, though, she liked to sit at the kitchen table and scribble something in her tiny pink notepad. I loved asking her what she was doing, because she always replied, with much of her father's intellectual superiority: "I'm writing a dissertation."

In 1995, when she was born, her father was juggling three jobs in Ukraine. He was freelancing for a newspaper, selling imported sweaters and coats at a wholesale market, and teaching at a university. The university often received its state-budget funding belatedly, and the professor often didn't see his 100-dollar monthly salary for months. In order to feed his wife, infant daughter, teenage step-son and himself, he turned into a moonlighter, which to some extent affected the quality of his teaching: sometimes, he was so exhausted he was dozing off during seminars he was conducting.

The state-run hospital, in which the professor's daughter was born, also lacked sufficient funding, and the quality of its services suffered as a result, too. Nurses used to feed several newborns from the same bottle, without sterilizing it, and were rude to the women who failed to bribe them, causing some to lose their breast-milk supply. After the professor's daughter was delivered and taken away to a separate baby room, a nurse approached the professor's wife and lied to her that her baby had an abnormally short neck. Although the girl's neck later turned out to be perfect, her immune system was shattered by the staph infection. Breast milk would have been crucial for restoring the girl's health, but her mother didn't have any because of the shock inflicted on her by the nurse, who was just trying to make a living.

Throughout 1997, I was busy reading all I could find about the Armenian Genocide of 1915 and other more or less recent atrocities. I couldn't imagine stories more depressing than those in the books and journals that filled my apartment. But this Ukrainian family turned everything upside down for me. Suddenly, the genocide images turned distant and blurry, replaced in the foreground by the sickly little girl, my own memories of dilapidated Ukrainian health care facilities (which I had repressed as soon as I arrived in Iowa) and a scary revelation that in six months I would be back in Ukraine.

I decided to write about this family, putting their experience into perspective. I interviewed several American health care professionals who had visited Russia on a USAID-funded family medicine development program. Although they held their Russian colleagues in high esteem for persevering in very difficult circumstances, their assessment of the general state of post-Soviet health care field left little room for optimism.

"The equipment, which we would consider disposable, was re-used just out of necessity. It really was something that I would have expected to see in the United States in the 1930s or maybe in the 1940s," one of the doctors told me, meaning not just the bottles for newborns but also syringes, bandages and rubber gloves.

"Cats were used for rodent control in all the hospitals we observed," said another.

- How awful, - thought the Americanized part of my self on hearing this last observation. - What an incredibly graphic reminder that there is nothing surprising in the fact that we are dying out.

- But cats are better than rats, aren't they? So much cleaner, and cute, too, - argued my Ukrainian self, dormant up till then. - If you don't mind a cat on your kitchen table, why are you so opposed to having one at the hospital?

Soon afterwards, the Ukrainian history professor provided me with a confirmation that there could be more than one view on just about anything in the world. By then, I had finished reading and writing about genocide and was slowly recovering. But one day I slipped and found myself watching an astonishing film, Welcome to Sarajevo, which made me cry as I hoped I'd never have to again. When I told the professor about this totally unforeseen experience, his reaction was as stunning. He said: "Well, actually, Bosnians are much luckier than we are - because their genocide received so much publicity, while our [state-imposed] famine [of 1932-33] remains virtually unknown to anyone but a bunch of scholars."

The Ukrainian famine, by some estimates, wiped out about 10 million people, and the efforts to let the world know about this tragedy are yet to be made. And I can't wait for this time, when my historian compatriot would be able to announce that justice has been done and the famine victims have become as "lucky" as the Bosnian Muslims. I only hope that he isn't getting too upset about the fact that Russia's demographic crisis is getting all the attention now, while Ukrainians are left in oblivion again.

I wish I could look at the world from a mountaintop, as the history professor did. Then I'd be able to consider his little daughter very "lucky," despite all the pain she'd been through, because as an infant, she managed to survive - something that 22 out of 1,000 babies in Ukraine fail to accomplish, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.

If my abstract thinking skills were stronger, I'd write a much more logical piece. Maybe one day I'll do better. For now, however, I'll try to learn from Anton Chekhov's A Journey to Sakhalin, a 1894 treatise documenting the appalling conditions to which the Russian government subjected people exiled to this insular penal colony.

"In order to make my task easier and to save time, I've been kindly offered assistance," Chekhov wrote in Chapter III, "but since my main goal in carrying out the census wasn't to obtain the results per se but, instead, the impressions inherent in the information gathering process, I accepted extraneous help on very rare occasions."

Am I a Woman or What?

September 2002
Newtopia Magazine

"Last summer, someone at work called me 'cutie' - and only now, after taking this class, do I realize how offensive that was," announced a petite blonde sitting next to me in a classroom full of women. Some nodded with approval, others lowered their eyes sympathetically, but none smiled.

This is, indeed, an excellent reason to attend college, I thought. Where else can you find a women's support group but in a class that requires a diligent, semester-long recital of the "women are victims, men are monsters" mantra, a class containing in its title the sacred trinity of "gender, class and race"? The four males taking the class were frozen down into their chairs most of the time, and when one found courage, during a discussion of the evils of film industry, to remark on the subtlety of Quentin Tarantino's work, he drew only blank stares from the audience and a dry "Who?" from the professor.

In this class, which I took the first semester of my grad school, I felt and acted as a traitor to my gender. I reached the highest point of my infidelity when I stumbled upon an idea for the midterm research paper: it had nothing to do with women, class or race; I chose to write about anti-Muslim bias in major U.S. newspapers' coverage of the Oklahoma City bombing.

In the fall of 1996, unlike now, this theme was not self-evident, and I was lucky to have eavesdropped on a conversation between two of my next-door neighbors. One, a Muslim boy I would spend the next two years desperately trying to befriend, spoke about some truly outrageous things that had happened to American Muslims in the first few days after the blast. The other - a man who would stalk me for the next year or so - knew about the injustices and kept the conversation going long enough for me to see that this was my chance to escape the dogmatic limitations of the gender discourse imposed on me that semester.

The woman in me failed to feel degraded when I followed this lead from the two silly men bent on trying my patience - each in his own spectacular way - as no one else had ever had. The woman in me was not disturbed by the fact that I was writing about people whose religion seemed to deprive certain women's rights activists of their sleep. The woman in me effortlessly erased the recent memories of Middle Eastern engineering and medical students in the streets of Kyiv, Ukraine, yelling "Habibi! Hey, ha-beee-beee!" at me, as I walked by with all the dignity I could assemble (their shouts, in this context, could be roughly translated from Arabic as "Hey, baby!").

Eventually, the woman in me triumphed as the professor gave me an 'A' for the paper and asked me to present it in class. But my dissident spirit suppressed the woman in me and talked me out of this submissive act, returning me to the traitor's orbit.

A year and a half later, I was back home in Ukraine, crushed by the revelation that regardless of my views on feminism, Islam, ethnic and other minorities, freedom of the press and just about anything else, I was doomed to a career of an English tutor. By December 1998, I had four students and an income of approximately $200 a month. I wasn't starving; moreover, I was beginning to notice those tiny little things that I couldn't exactly control but was sort of able to keep from slipping away. I made my room look like my room again by convincing my parents that they didn't need so much extra storage space; I fell in love with reading local newspapers and secretly dreamed of doing a dissertation that might later inspire me to launch a Russian/Ukrainian branch of The Onion; I got used to a typewriter and resumed writing.

Then one day I realized that my U.S. driver's license was about to expire. Its actual value at the time was nil, for there was no way I could afford a car or dare navigate it through the jumble of European-standard road signs and swarms of corrupt traffic cops. Yet, the symbolic significance of this plastic card was immense: it certified my ascension to the class of drivers, which no one in my immediate family had ever belonged to, and to a less numerous subclass of female drivers, known in the former Soviet Union mainly as "the killers on the road" (a stereotype I had been consciously, and successfully, trying to defy while I was in the United States). Letting the license expire equaled to having my master's degree in journalism annulled, an incident that wouldn't have had any impact on my everyday life but that would still have obliterated a huge part of my dear little self. This peril had to be averted at any cost, and so, without delay, I set out to obtain a Ukrainian driver's license.

The first step (or, to be precise, a series of steps) was to have a myriad of doctors confirm that I was a healthy individual. Briefly, the woman in me appeared to be quite a burden because, in addition to a checkup of my eyes, ears, nose and throat, as well as an inspection of a matchbox of my feces and a jar of my urine (a routine required of both males and females aspiring to drive a vehicle), I had to pay a visit to a gynecologist. Or so I thought at first. After some reconnaissance, I encountered a young doctor willing to sacrifice his integrity and provide me with all but two of the needed certificates for just $10. The un-bribable personnel of this hospital included a psychiatrist and a doctor known in our part of the world as "a narcologist."

For a number of reasons, I was not all too eager to meet a Ukrainian psychiatrist. I sat on a chair by his office, tense, waiting and listening to a Russian pop song that was coming from behind the closed door. Soon, a man appeared down the hallway; he smoked a cigarette as he walked, and when he approached me, I was struck by how familiar he looked: dressed in a white gown, he looked like a more mellow Karl Marx. He nodded, inviting me in, discarded his cigarette into a sink in the corner of the room, asked my name, and on a pre-stamped form wrote down his judgment. In his opinion, I was mentally fit to drive a car.

Filled with enthusiasm, I expected similar brevity from the narcologist - a quick look at my veins, perhaps, and a friendly suggestion or two about how dangerous it was to do drugs and to drink and drive. But first, a nurse took my blood sample. Then she accompanied me to a small auditorium where half a dozen more people, mostly men, were seated, listening to a bespectacled woman, the narcologist, whose white gown didn't manage to conceal her intimidating, high-school teacher appearance. I realized I was late for something when she paused for just a second to give me a harsh glance.

For the next two hours, she talked about everything I never wanted to know about car accidents and the subsequent first aid. I may still remember how to tell whether someone is experiencing clinical death or is actually dead; I know that it's worth trying to resuscitate a person for as long as 50 minutes; I have been warned that when someone's internal organs are lying next to him on the ground, I should never attempt to put them back inside the person, for this will most likely cause peritonitis. "If a person is unconscious," the narcologist said by the end of her lecture, "you need to take his tongue out of his mouth and pin it down to his shirt. Please note: to his shirt, not to his cheek - even though it's not your cheek so you don't care." All of a sudden, I found myself asking a truly journalistic question: "Excuse me, and how long is the human tongue?" She chuckled and gave me the most excruciating quote in my life: "Miss, it's the shirt that you're gonna pull towards the tongue, not vice versa!"

She spent the last fifteen minutes speaking about zero tolerance, the four hours that it takes 50 grams of vodka to vanish from our blood, and the spooky "physical effects of alcohol abuse" (see illustration below). When she was done, a line quickly formed by her table. Two men - truck drivers who had to go through this ordeal every two years - were the first to get the narcologist's signature. "Why such a hurry?" she inquired, as they were elbowing their way to the door. One of the men turned around, smiled a conspiratory smile and replied: "Time for a drink!"


"Physical Effects of Alcohol Abuse" (from a booklet distributed by a narcologist to practicing and wannabe Ukrainian drivers)

When my turn came, the narcologist crossed off a square on the form that said that I normally had one drink a week - wine or champagne. I had a question mark in my eyes, and she explained: "This is what all the girls who come to us say--they don't like vodka or cognac." I pointed out that beer in this country was extremely good, but she had already signed the paper, and I was free to go, for once feeling as a very good, average Ukrainian woman - not really myself, but that was the last thing I cared about at the end of that long day.

The next step was actually getting the driver's license, and it was a much more pleasant experience, if somewhat shameful again. My still-valid U.S. license helped me avoid the obligatory, state-administered driving classes. A few useful connections, and chocolate and cognac for bribes, transported me over much of the red tape that rules Ukrainian traffic police. I landed right onto a relatively small but comfortable red carpet that led me to my goal, by way of an anonymous police boss - a useful connection of my own useful connection - who didn't mind getting an extra New Year's gift in exchange for a brief phone call to his subordinates who were to issue me a license, without subjecting me to a driving test (which I would have flunked) and ignoring the results of my computer-based driving rules and situations exam (which I did flunk).

In the next four years, I haven't had a chance to drive a car in Ukraine or Russia, and I still do not intend to. The doctors and cops who were so lenient to me and so trustful need not worry about one more potential murderess they've let loose. But even if I do decide that I'm ready to drive, they should not despair, because every now and then I wonder: am I a woman or what? In this part of the world, so many things force me to have doubts about my true gender. And if I'm not really a woman, then what's so dangerous about me sitting in the driver's seat?

I feel uncertain about my womanhood when I drink beer instead of wine or champagne, and when I drink beer more often than once a week, as the narcologist had prescribed me. I feel as an impostor when I announce to a hairdresser that I haven't had a haircut in more than a year, or when I confess to a manicurist that at age 26 (two years ago), this is my first time to have my nails done. Newspapers sometimes give me a mixed feeling of panic and euphoria when I stumble upon paragraphs like this:

"Women are usually not attracted to modest guys in glasses and ragged jeans - they don't consider them men." (My boyfriend of nearly seven years wears glasses, is one inch shorter than I am and has spent a considerable portion of his life wearing jeans and hitchhiking around the Soviet Union. So, am I a woman or what?) "But women immediately fall for the other type of men - those who wear golden crosses and smell of expensive perfume." (My boyfriend's Jewish - that sure does disqualify me from the women's ranks, I guess.) "As a result, it turns out that the first type of men can actually make decent husbands and fathers." (Really? Well, thank you.) "But girls, unfortunately, do not understand this. They keep waiting and hoping, when it is clear from the start that there's nothing here to hope for." (Oh well. I am not one of them, definitely.)

The same newspaper story (see illustration below) recommends women to analyze reasons for their celibacy. Here is how: "In America, there is a university called 'How To Get Married?' Disciplines offered there range from psychology to psychoanalysis, and tuition costs around $75,000. Recently, the rector of this university has created a family with one of the professors. Through her own experience, she has demonstrated that this is a skill that could be easily learned."


"Beautiful, Cold, Lonely..." A family newspaper, Russian style: one possible way of reading this article is to have the whole family - mother, father and their unmarried daughter - sitting on a couch; the mother reads the text out loud, the daughter listens and takes notes, the father admires the picture.

Looks more like a imaginary example of sexual harassment to me, but, as I mentioned earlier, we here have a different perspective on everything. In any case, not married and confused though I am, I would still prefer to do a dissertation on our newspapers. After all, I've already spent a semester in a class supposed to empower women, but ended up feeling nothing but guilt.

Mikhail Zhvanetskiy, the funniest and the most insightful comedian of the Soviet times, once noted that "in this country, the political impact of women during daytime is very low." Once in Ukraine, I was buying newspapers from a man approximately my age while his friend stood nearby and kept saying: "And for yourself? Aren't you gonna buy something for yourself?" It took me some time to understand what he meant: he thought I was buying "serious" papers for a husband (or a father, or a grandfather, or a boss) and wanted me to buy a "girlie" type of publication for my own reading pleasure. I smiled politely and explained that the papers were for me. As I was walking away from their stall, they yelled after me in a friendly unison: "Miss, are you a Congressman or what?!"

And boy, did it make me happy!

Evil Trains

May 2002
3 A.M. Magazine


March 1999: At work in a makeshift office on the Uzhgorod-Kyiv train.

My friend and a former colleague was once asked to do a skit on our typical working day at one American NGO in Ukraine. She began by describing a typical morning, when a woman in railway uniform wakes us up at 7 a.m., barging into our compartment and blaring, "Get up, we're approaching the sanitary zone, I'm locking the restrooms in 15 minutes, hurry!"

This thunder-woman is called “provodnitsa” in Russian and may be described as a grotesque imitation of a flight attendant. Aggressive, intrusive, unkempt, she inhabits most Ukrainian trains. Their second-class cars, at least. For all I know, some of my former American and Ukrainian colleagues working on an exchange program funded by the U.S. government, bear a closer resemblance to flight attendants, with their upright wheeler suitcases and with all the class they manage to maintain despite feeling kind of groggy at times, as their travel schedules grow too intense.

In the first six months on this job, I spent 32 nights in a four-passenger train compartment and got used to thinking about it as a job within a job. Then I lost count for a while. When I decided to move on after two years, I updated my glorious statistics and learned that I had been on 60 trips to 26 locations all over Ukraine.

Not all of these trips required trains. Moreover, at some point, our management looked into what one of our directors had called "life quality issues" and let us travel first class for a while. Nevertheless, a second-class, or kupe, car is like second home to me, a pathetic and unfriendly place where you'd never put on those cozy slippers and would be forever grateful to one of your American colleagues for having supplied you with multiple little bottles of Instant Antibacterial Hand Sanitizer that "kills germs without water" and contains moisturizers and Vitamin E.

An American journalist who used to live in Ukraine once wrote me: "I hope you don't have to take any overnight trains. I did that from Kyiv to Lviv and it was pretty hair-raising. I kept thinking the train would jerk and I'd fall out of bed."

Ukraine is a relatively big country, usually compared to France in size, and all the trains we took were overnight. Most trains leave after 6 p.m. and arrive early in the morning, which allowed us to have unimpaired work days despite arrivals and departures. To counteract staff exhaustion, we used to have a "frequent rider" system: for every 5,000 kilometers that we covered, we were getting one day off. Before I marked my first anniversary with the organization, I had traversed 22,500 kilometers, or 14,000 miles. According to my calculations, it was enough to commute just about 70 times between New York City and Washington, D.C., to accumulate such mileage.


Summer 1999: Relaxing after work, in Lviv.

I've seen seasons change outside the train windows. I've heard dozens of foolish Russian pop songs about failed love affairs, broken hearts and drunken days and nights, songs I'd never listen to voluntarily but couldn't escape on Ukrainian trains. I've seen people who didn't have the equivalent of 70 cents to pay for the train bedding and had to sleep on filthy mattresses. I've missed at least a dozen football games that our team played and that I really wanted to watch but couldn't because I was on a train. I've participated in a number of useless conversations with my compartment-mates who all seemed to be amateur philosophers with gloomy and unpractical yet unromantic views of life.

Being on a train was like diving: I took a deep breath and held it until I emerged from under the water. Life was getting suspended when I was on a train. I could read a book or try to take a nap, but this didn't count as conscious existence. Only in the morning, when I arrived at my destination and took a shower, everything around me revived and regained motion, and the sound of the train wheels stopped echoing in my head.

Later, my mind would gradually blend the memories of this parallel nightmarish life into a room where it stored my less significant memories. But a few of the train memories are outstanding and supply some flesh for the skeleton of the train segment of my life.

CLOISTERED ENCOUNTERS

The first trip in mid-March of 1999 made me realize how spoiled I was, living in the center of a crowded capital city. The weather was gloomy, no spring was in sight yet, and the train stopped at a town called Novograd-Volynskiy. I counted eight stray dogs at the station. I also noticed a few men and women who were neither leaving nor waiting for anyone to arrive. They looked as if this train station was the only and the best place in town to hang out.

By the time I went on my second and third trips, everything was green. I could hear birds and crickets as we were rushing along a narrow line of trees separating the railroad from the fields. I felt like getting off the train at some small deserted station, pretending that I was going to buy cigarettes or water, and never coming back. Let it go with all my bags and heroic colleagues. I could survive on my own for a while. When I got too lonely, hungry or dirty, I could always hitchhike back home to Kyiv.


Summer 2000: A train in Yaremche, Western Ukraine.

The experience with cockroaches on an Uzhgorod train was the most dramatic. Uzhgorod is a town I am in love with, but it is approximately 19 hours away from Kyiv. Once, I was sent there on my own. I shared a compartment with a young woman instead of the usual three people, of whom at least one needs company to have a drink, talks you to death and snores during the night. The young woman took out her contact lenses and quietly went to sleep right after the train began to move, giving me enough space and silence to write letters to my friends. It was 11 a.m.

An hour later I decided to eat my sandwiches. I took a bite, turned to look at the scenery outside the window and saw a big shiny cockroach staring at my food from across the table.

I spent the next nine or ten hours first with napkins in my hand, then with pieces of toilet paper, then with pages from my notebook, and finally, when I ran out of all that, with a train towel. My compartment-mate didn't bother to put her lenses back in when she woke up from her midday nap and just sat there on her bunk, whimpering at the sight of huge cockroaches that were visible to her. I saw dozens of small ones, too, and was killing them all.

The best weapons for hunting cockroaches in the road conditions are soft napkins and toilet paper. Shoes are too cumbersome for this task, and certain types of sole may not be appropriate, giving cockroaches a chance to escape. Notebook paper and towels cause the same problem.

I've always been afraid of cockroaches but on that train, close to midnight, I realized that my fear and squeamishness were gone: I suddenly saw myself holding a banana in my left hand as my right hand set about killing a huge cockroach with a napkin.

I've turned into a sniper, and though I didn't count, a good estimate would be 500 dead cockroaches. The whole experience reminded me of a computer game where you kill three, and five more are coming at you, you kill them, and ten more are coming from three different directions simultaneously.

I finally went to sleep after midnight, dreaming claustrophobic dreams and hoping that the surviving cockroaches wouldn't try to hold a wake on my head during the night.

We arrived in Uzhgorod around 7 a.m. the next morning, and I went to a hotel to take a shower. I had a breakfast consisting of an omelet and four cups of coffee, and at 9 a.m. I was working.

SPY STORIES

Sometimes I wondered if people we worked with were aware of what our lives were like. Did they ever realize that we had just stepped out of a lousy train and checked into a lousy hotel? There were times when we did not even have time to go to a hotel.

The Donetsk train, for example, leaves Kyiv at 7:30 p.m. and is supposed to reach its final destination 14 hours later. But it is often late. Once, my colleague and I had to change and eat right where we were supposed to work an hour after the train finally arrived in Donetsk. We ate cheese and canned rice dolma with our fingers, and the participants of our program who came early were knocking on the door every two minutes until we let them in. We worked for five hours, went out for a nice dinner and then went back to the train station and spent 14 hours more on a train back to Kyiv.

On the "Donetsk, Part Two: Kherson" trip, the scenario was just slightly different: the train was late, but we had an hour to have brunch, change into professional-looking clothes and brush our teeth in a restaurant's bathroom. I rejoiced our agility and wondered what the bored small-town waitresses could possibly think about this masquerade. They might have imagined that my colleague was an American spy on a mission and I was his local aide, a traitor, and that we were dropped off in Kherson by a submarine. I didn't have time to polish this story because we had to rush to work.

Four hours later, though, whoever might have been watching us had more reasons to believe we were spies. We returned to the same restaurant, ate hastily, jumped into a cab eight minutes before the train's departure, made the driver nervous by cursing local streetlights, somehow reached the train station without killing any pedestrains, found our train and climbed into the nearest car. We walked through the train to our car and as soon as we stepped into our compartment, the train set off on its return 15-hour journey to Kyiv.

"WATER" CLOSET

Someone had once shared an avant-garde bathroom design idea with me: wouldn't it be cool to purchase an old written-off train toilet and sink, wash them, paint them into a nicer color and install them at your home! I liked the idea in theory but couldn't imagine having something in my home that I had spent so much time fearing to touch.


Summer 2000: A bus in Yaremche, Western Ukraine.

For two years, I avoided using train restrooms in the morning. I don't think I'll ever get rid of this habit, even when I can travel by trains less frequently, having quit my job. It feels better to let your bladder come close to bursting and not have freshness in your mouth until you reach the hotel. In the evening, when the train departs, a tiny room containing a metal toilet and a sink with a construction resembling a tap, is dry and locked. But within an hour, after the train exits the "sanitary zone" surrounding the urban area, the bathroom gets unlocked and the first passengers use it. Soon the floor is all wet, an old useless rag is soaked and unable to absorb any more of the liquid, and it only gets worse.

A typical visit to a train bathroom includes the train's violent shaking, your attempts to simultaneously keep balance and keep your clothes away from that liquid on the floor, fear of touching anything and the necessity to do so, and sometimes the danger of being hit by an aluminum pail precariously hanging right above your head.

A sign on the wall reminds you that in order to flush the toilet you should "push the pedal below." When you push it, you realize how fast the train is going. It gets louder in the bathroom, and you see the tracks through an opening in the toilet that lets the water out and the fresh evening air in.

There is a small hole in the bathroom floor that also allows passengers to see how fast the train is. Once, when I was little, I was going to Crimea with my mother's friend, and she accompanied me to the bathroom and told me to pee into this hole because the toilet was too high for me. I guess this explains why there is always so much liquid on the floor, what kind of liquid it is and why there is never enough of it to get the bathroom flooded.

METAMORPHOSIS

In Kyiv, there is a building that, according to legend, has a room designed as a 19th-century train compartment because its first owner met his future wife on a train. I used to think that this was such a romantic way to commemorate a happy event. Now, however, I just find it very eccentric.

I also thought that one of my co-workers was eccentric when I found out that he would be returning from a trip two hours before his wedding. It took me some time to convince him to lobby for a substitute for that trip. I insisted that he would be tired and stressed out, and would annoy his bride, and that the train might be late and his own wedding was too important to miss.

For my wedding, I would like to rent a car and drive myself to the place where they register new couples. I miss driving, I cannot afford to buy a car and I would be too timid to drive it in this part of the world. By renting a car, I could make myself a nice present and have a unique and thrilling experience, enough to remember the wedding for the rest of my life. But I'd never choose to spend my last night as a single woman on a Ukrainian train. And I wouldn't want to commemorate the eventful two years with an American NGO by investing into a trailer and embellishing it with bunk beds.

Trains have changed me. I used to think that eccentricity was a precious gift given to a very limited number of individuals. But now I also know that there are instances when it's better to be boring, mainstream, conservative and conventional, and keep away from trains.