Tales of Exile and Brute Wandering

The road, they said, was a place apart, a country of its own ruled by no government but natural law, and its one characteristic was freedom.
—Charles Frazier, Cold Mountain

Waiting at another border, I got to thinking how weird all this was, these six months rambling Europe, and now this Ukraine, my last country on that continent. I have seen Norman castles, Parisian catacombs, Belgian breweries and Dutch coffee shops, the corporate plazas of Berlin and the beer halls of Munich; Austrian Alps, Hungarian bath houses, the palace of Roman Emperors in Croatia, Bosnian rubble in Sarajevo, Montenegrin fjords, and Albanian roads; I have seen Venetian fortrezzas and Turkish bastions, Greek oracles, Cretan katiki, Macedonian monasteries and Bulgarian strip clubs, Romanian squalor, Carpathian vistas, Moldovian weddings, and now the border stations of Eastern Europe.

A rap at the bus window awakened me from my reverie. The portly officer led me into another office, this Ukrainian one much nicer than the Transnistrian cell, where a young lieutenant sat by a wood desk. He asked me my name and about the specifics of my trip to Ukraine, and then about my work. I told him, hoping to make things easier and knowing he had no way to validate it, that I was still a student, and he asked me about where I went to school and what I studied. In that weary tone of judicial pity he told me I had no exit stamp for Moldovia and that every other passport on the bus would show one if he looked. He said, “This is your passport, and you must take care of it.”

Then he started asking me all sorts of questions about school: about entrance exams, standardized tests, SATs and ACTs, applying to university, and lettered grading scales. Everything I mentioned led his queries in new directions, and left largely unsatisfied his unknowlegable interest in education.

Finally I wondered about my passport stamp, but he said he just wanted to talk to me and that the bus was still there. “I ask you about school because I am curious. I am not much older than you.” I asked if he wanted to go to school in America. He said, “I would like to but I cannot because of my army job.” He spoke with wistful envy of the EU and its free borders, as if Ukrainian membership would liberate him from the tedium of the army. He told me he was going to Bedford College as part of an army exchange program, to take a class titled Peace and Conflict.

When the other passports had been processed, the lieutenant dismissed me from his office. The other passengers watched me with annoyance or good humor as I got back on the bus from my second interrogation. For the second time I alone had been called away. We rumbled off down the straight-edged highway past fields of drooping sunflowers and weat, the country so flat you could see the turn of the world.

I came into Odesa at 8. None of the ATMs worked at the bus station. Penniless, I started walking southeast towards the Black Sea, guessing that was where the city center would be. My plan was to find money, then Internet, then a hostel, then food, but soon I was lost in the dark. I would ask people, “Hi, excuse me, where is the city center?” and they would shrug and walk away, so I would have to call, “Center, center!” in an over-enunciated voice that they understood. Finally some dad told me to take bus 201.

The buses in Ukraine are large taxi-vans called marshrutkas. I took the prescribed marshrutka and stood near the front but didn’t know what to do when people started passing up hrivna scrip from the back seats. I gave them to the woman in the passenger seat, but she was only a passenger! The driver had this carpeted platform by the gear shift, and when you get on or want to get off, you throw money there and he gives you change while he is driving like a maniac and smoking. When a lot of people got out I followed, and then wandered around some better-lit streets looking for an Internet café. I ate dinner, kept walking, and — what’s this? There leaning against the wall stood someone from Varna.

I said Hi, and Rob asked me if I was there to stay at the hostel. “There’s a hostel here?” I said. This was a true miracle of salvation: In a city of one million and but three hostels, all secreted in cheap apartment suites, I had stumbled on a friend and a place to stay. So even though I lost my bag there, the fate of the Flag Hostel is unfortunate, for the connections I made in that busy place proved life-saving.

Rob showed me how to get into the unmarked hostel but did not follow me up, as he had left in a huff for being charged too much and was going to Kiev. Yet my good luck held. The Ukrainian hostel owner had lived in Oregon for a full year, in Portland and Eugene. He talked about Lake Oswego and West Linn and Milwaukie, and that road that goes down to Oregon City — what was it? Oh yes, 99 West!

For $10 I got an air mattress in a room crowded with old hospital beds, couches, and box-spring mattresses. My bed deflated steadily until it was nearly flat in the morning, when I rose, packed, and left without a word. The city looked more welcoming in the daylight, its cobblestone boulevards lined with old imperial buildings and mottled oaks, from whose boughs hung lights and streamers.

I walked to the train station, got some pastries and coffee, and took a bus, first to the beach somehow, but then to the Sobor Church in the Main Square, where I knew there was a hostel. Luckily, I saw someone else I knew, Cristian the Swede whom I met in Moldova. We got lunch at one of the Top Sandwich restaurants, which offers pizza and beer for $4, and walked around the Opera House and the Potemkin Steps, then he showed me the Front Page Hostel.

An Englander, on his way to Kazantip, which annually holds a massive music festival on the Crimean beach, was struggling to learn a little Russian so he could talk to girls, and in the kitchen recorded a language lesson onto his MP3 player. There was an older Dutch man there who had lived in Russia for several years and knew the language well. He told us it was not as difficult as English, simpler and with fewer cases, and gave us insights into the Russian custom.

The way this Hollander saw things, there are four spheres of human interaction: the public forum of the street and the market, the social sphere of workplace and pub, the private domain of the home, and the intimate one of the bed. In the West, the barrier of trust between acquaintance and friend exists between the social and private spheres. You can know someone and never be invited to their home, but if you are, and that person is otherwise compatible, you can sleep with them. In Asia, where it is easy to be invited home for dinner but not for sex, the barrier stands between the private and the intimate. In Russia, the barrier is between the public and the social. It is impossible to meet someone in the street, but once you become social, the relationship progresses very quickly.

Holland gave the following example: When he moved to Moscow, he would go regularly to a mini-market down the street from his apartment. At first the woman behind the counter there met his business with a terse manor and unsmiling face; in the second week, a hint of a smile graced her countenance; in the third, this bore its full fruits, and they started exchanging pleasantries; in the fourth, they conversed truly; and in the fifth week he asked her to dinner. With a wry smile and a libidinous memory, Holland said, ”It went fast from there. You can imagine what happened.”

I heard this same sentiment from others, and found that most Russians have the mentality of a small Southern town within the mixed clan of their family and friends that exists within a large and alien community, besieged directly by mistrusted urbanity. Strangers are not worth shit, unless you can get money out of them. They find those they can trust and make them kin.

In public and abroad, Russians behave like Americans. They imagine that they run things, that everyone should speak Russian and want to be Russian, and, being of a superior culture, that they may act on every impulse, disregarding what would be polite or in their own best interest. Appearance matters more than happiness, which they forsake for the trappings. They dub every movie into their own language and mostly listen to bad Moscow pop.

Such familiar faults! We Yanks and Ruskies are committed by pride to the same shallow grave, and we bicker over thrown dirt even as we together dig the pit.

Down by the port of Odesa, at the feet of the Potemkin Stair and alongside an autocenter, is a long hallway of marriage agencies. Each has a catalog of prospective wives of that handsome Slavic cast: high cheek-bones and flat cheeks, long legs, and hair low over the brow, darkly-hued or colored that blonde that is dark at the roots.

A middle-aged Western bachelor, balding and pallid and twice her age, having no propositions at home, comes to buy a marriage, and in one of the musty agencies by the port chooses his bride from a magazine. “She likes to clean and cook,” he says. Her English is not good, so he helps her memorize the necessary statements on the way to the terminal: “I want to go to America with my husband. Nothing to declare.” Across oceans she receives a BMW or a Porsche from her lovelessly doting groom, and she becomes herself little more than a posession, yet living through the torment. She forgets what it is to be home.

What fitting place for this business of exile, there beneath the steps named for that scene of massacre in The Battleship Potemkin where innocent mothers and their children fall dying under the tsarist troops. An infant’s stroller rolls helplessly and dispossessed to the bottom. Now the tsars are gone, and girls continue to roll down those stairs, dispensed by no definable enemy but unhappy circumstance.

Women in Russia, Ukraine, and Moldova marry young, to the richest man they can find at clubs or parties or to one who can find them through one of those agencies. After 24 years of age they are considered old maids, though some have a child anyway and few means to support it. She hopes for a modeling job which does not work out. To this unfortunate single woman a trader comes with promises of lucrative employment at a Cypriot cabaret, and soon she finds herself legally trapped in the Mediterranean world, on a boat to a brothel in Beirut or Antalya: a public woman, no longer her own.

Fate is cruel to those free women, manumitted but powerless and penniless, born under wicked boreal signs to short-lived guardianships. All say, “Marry now or die a spinster.” The bed is the only sanctuary, and a loathsome one. They ice their hearts in springtime and succumb too early to endless polar nights without gladness or joy, married and alone, empty but alive. May luck find thee, O beautiful woman of the steppe, and crush the sad condition of thy sex.

The Front Page has for owners a Polish couple, who get university credit to start the venture, and an American from San Jose. From one of the Ukrainian staffers I got directions to an open market, and there bought a pair of shoes from a gypsy — white tennis shoes that say Puma on them for $20, with a pair of 20 cent black socks. Now I was ready to go out.

Cristian the professional had left for Kiev, but Yuri, the Rough Guides writer I met in Chişinău, was still there and keen. He had lived the past eight years abroad, living in Beirut and Slovenia and visiting crazy places like Iraq just after the US invasion, and had been home only once in the last three. Slovenia, where he teaches English, is a small country in the Alpine foothills, an EU member and very wealthy, having escaped most of the Yugoslav fighting with only a Ten Day War and 18 deaths.

“We are hard working, of Saxon blood,” says the Slovene. “You stole all our savings in the Bosnian War!” cry the Serb, the Croat, the Bosnian, Montenegrin, and Macedonian. The Croat adds a spiteful spit and says, “Give me back that mile of coastline,” but the Slovene replies politely as he wipes his face with a silk handkerchief that the Croat better stop all that if he ever wants into the EU. Meanwhile the Serb eyes the Bosnian, who just might be a Muslim; the Bosnian shouts for a UN tribunal, which sends the Serb scurrying for sanctuary at the nearest military base. The Macedonian turns his ire south, and the Montenegrin goes to the beach.

Yuri and I drank in the hostel kitchen and went to a recommended place, an underground bar for university students. Our directions were to find a brown door, go down some stairs, past the guard, who might ask for money but we shouldn’t give him any, and into the bar, which looked like a garage project and very hipster.

I saw someone drink a strange concoction and ordered one. Over a glass of flaming absinthe the bartender melted a spoonful of sugar and drizzled it in, then put the fire out with his breath and handed me a straw. While I drank quickly the hot liquor, he poured in some cranberry juice, which followed the green absinthe down my gullet. Yuri drank one, too, and it set us back to a primitive state of mind and instinct.

We sat down and talked with three Russian girls from Murmansk, that cold and distant port north of Finland on a fjord of the Barents Sea, and then met some other Russians. Some girl led four of us down to an empty bar by the beach. One of the Russians got very angry at me for talking to her and let it be known that he wanted to fight. He kicked chairs and threw beer bottles and shouted a lot, but was too impotent to do anything else, so Yuri and the Russian girl and I left them there.

The next day Yuri and I were discomposed, but Yuri moreso than I. I went back to the Top Sandwich restaurant with someone from England who told me stories of the Siberian Russians, who spend all day drinking vodka at a shack of a bar, and then spill out into the snow and call their shaggy horse so that they might fall across its back and be carried home — what a primitive means against drunk driving.

I enjoyed my schwarma wrap and omelette, but then took a long nap. I woke up and was reading and feeling very good when one of the hostel staffers came in and asked me when I would check out. “Tomorrow,” I told her. “When will you check out today?” “Are you kicking me out?” “Your booking was only for one night.” The hostel was full, and I was napping in someone’s bed. I gave it up and told newly-risen Yuri I would take the night train to the Crimea, which I had planned to do the following day.

We went out to dinner anyway, to a Ukrainian restaurant where they wore traditional outfits, the colorful fashions and wide-brimmed hats apparently adopted by the Mexicans. We got soup and a plate of Cossack snacks, which the menu said were for deciding whether to drink or not, and were mostly made of pork fat. I got a cup of Cossack kvass, which is fermented rye bread. It tasted like woodsmoke and leather, like wisky without the fire, being only mildly alcoholic. At markets they often serve the cloudy brown potion in plastic cups from big tanks loaded onto carts with KBACC stenciled on the side.

After dinner I grabbed my stuff, went to the train station, and got a cheap second class ticket in the sleeper train to Simferopol in the Crimea. A mournful Russian waltz played as I crossed the long platform to my car, the third of fifteen blue steel boxes carried by the tired old engine. It was hot as a sauna inside. Second class is open, with no compartments. A green carpet ran down between partitions of four bunks around a table and two bunks lined against the window. These were up at the moment, and I sat next to a dour party of Ukrainians and sweated with nothing to do about it, which is the worst feeling.

The train started, and we clapped down the upper bunks and unrolled mattresses with down pillows, then made beds from packaged sheets. The beds were not designed for people as tall as me. Mine was an upper one, parallel to the window, and not designed for people tall as me. I slept on my back with my knees up, or on my stomach with a hand on a vertical bar to keep me from rolling out, which seemed made for that purpose.

In the morning people filtered down slowly and beds became benches. Outside sped a flat and sunburned world of yellowed fields, copses of poplar and brush, run-down houses and Soviet factories, and telephone poles strung together. The metal car became hot and there was nothing to do but to sit still and allow as much air circulation as possible, and then to sweat without recourse, which is about the worst feeling to endure.

Men played cards over the aisle. The stewardess served tea in glasses with tin handles from a great silvered samovar, and a man walked up and down the aisles of the train with a cart full of packaged pastries and bottled water, juice, and vodka. I just read. The people I sat with soundlessly made me a plate of biscuits, bread, and cheese on a paper towel, and I felt bad for having nothing to exchange.

When we got to Simferopol, the speakers played a sort of Slavonic dance and everyone got off the train and hugged waiting relatives. The whole scene felt very antiquated and anachronistic. Outside I went to a cafeteria for lunch, then found the Internet and looked up a few Crimean hostels. I took a trolleybus with a sign for Yalta, not realizing that it was the longest trolleybus in the world at 54 miles. Twice on the highway the struts got knocked off the cable and we had to wait for the driver to realign them. Who decided this was a good idea?

The Yalta hostel and beach both proved unaccommodating, so I approached one of the babushkas at the bus station and let her take me home. Eugenia Kalinina, grandmother and event coordinator for the Jewish Culture Society, lived right off the central boardwalk in an apartment. She already had four Russian girls living there, and I took the last bed.

Eugenia explained to me in her limited English how the front door worked and had me demonstrate my understanding of locks and keys. She made tea and showed me a photo album of her family, her father and brother in Red Army uniforms, and her younger self reciting a Russian poem in front of 200 people in New York City. Two of the Russian girls were straightening their hair for a night out, and the other two sat there and laughed while Eugenia tried to tell me some sort of story about herself, which I could not grok. None of them spoke enough English to translate.

Ukraine was very difficult to travel for this reason. Everyone speaks Russian, and few but Eugenia and my new flatmates made any attempt to communicate around that barrier. Most Ukrainians just stared at me and responded to my question or order in deadpan Russian that could have meant anything. I often tried to use universal words like Internet, Center, and Super, but these were usually dismissed unless pronounced in a nearly-perfect local dialect. My improvised sign language was often ignored — although it is presumptuously American of me to require Charades. Without the bilingual advisers at hostels, I would have been lost.

It should be noted that sign language is not universal and can be dangerous. The Peace Sign, for instance, means the same as the middle finger in England, where the King would cut off those two fingers to stop a bow-pull. The Rock On horns mean the same insult in Spain. The A-Ok circle signifies anus or cuckholdery in Germany, Brazil, and the Mediterranean. Even the smiling Thumbs Up means the middle finger in Latin America, West Africa, Greece, Russia, Southern Italy, and the Middle East. Why must every affirmation become synonymous with Fuck You?

Anyway, I had found lodgings and so went for a wander around the busy neighborhood around the port, an arcade of bars and cafés and stores and lights, with street performers and huge carnival rides set up for the occasion of high summer.

A towering bronze of Lenin surveys the waterfront square — and between him and his port, the Golden Arches! The hero of communism and the icon of capitalism, pitted across a hundred feet of marble and tourists! What can you be thinking, Lenin, to see this embassy of your Western victors there on ground that once belonged to the People of the Rus. In one hand you carry a rolled document, and with the other you peel back the edge of your greatcoat. Do you reach for your wallet — that dollar menu is awful appealing to the common man — or for a gun? That severe look that ever seems to drag your Mephistophelean countenance forward in a bull rush presently suggests a deep revulsion and a raging torrent of thought.

McDonalds! She exploits workers as if chattel, bullies farmers as corporate serfs for cheaper produce and more of it, and fattens the lower classes on food instinct says they need, once rare cholesterol and sugar now base and common. Here her floor is crowded by those who prove their status with a Western meal, no cheaper and far fouler than local fare, and by young men who take girls there for first dates. Yet by her obtuse profit that corporation is an agent of peace, for as any political theorist will tell you no two nations which flew the Golden Arched flag ever declared war on the other.

Speak Lenin! Does your mummified corpse turn in its glass coffin? Will you break this unsteady Free Market peace on principle?

In the morning I had tea and biscuits with Eugenia and her friend Dzuba, who spoke meticulous English. Dzuba wanted my help with a tourist proposition, and wanted her beautiful daughter to guide me around town, but when Dzuba called, the young woman was still sleeping and anyway had plans, and I was no businessman.

I did take Dzuba’s recommendation to see some old tsarist palaces along the Crimean cliffs. The marshrutka to Alupka and the end of the line careened around the hills like it was South America or Asia. I got off safely at Vorontsov’s Palace: Monstrous and conglomerate in its English design, with squared Scottish walls of beige diabase basalt, Gothic chimneystacks at the corners like minarets, and Moorish onion domes at the peaks. Under the seaward side and a great half-domed balcony were the gardens, crowdd with Russians.

The Russians take as many pictures as the Japanese, but instead of throwing up peace signs and clumsy-cute smiles they pose severely, as if for a fashion catalog or even a daguerreotype, although for young women the look becomes pornographic. Their propensity for photography made navigating the palace through all those projected lines of snapping cameras as difficult as stealing a diamond from a laser trap.

I didn’t know the name of the next castle, and there was much confusion on the marshrutka back towards Yalta until a Russian helped me tell the driver it’s name: Lastivchyne Hnizdo, or Swallow’s Nest. The Russian had lived in India for two years, Texas for seven, and my own Portland for six months, and now resided in Kiev. He said Yalta had a unique climate, created by the Black Sea and the cemicircle of Crimean Mountains, which attracted so many tourists. His friends bring their sick son there for three weeks every year to clear his lungs, and if they miss a trip, the boy is sick for the rest of the year. CCCP party leaders all had resorts there, and Livadia Palace was used for the Yalta Conference in World War Two.

The Swallow’s Nest was a toy-sized Neo-Gothic palace on the lip of a cliff. The path up to it was crowded with dozens of Russians holding either a hawk or a suited monkey. I had to duck to get under the poor animals, who hung their mouths open against the heat. I found it just as unbearable, and so after seeing the disappointing castle, now a restaurant, took a marshrutka back to Yalta and went to the crowded beach.

While eating dinner at a restaurant on the arcade, I unexpectedly saw a trireme elevated on struts out near the eastern end of the docks. I made my way there and saw strange things: a musical puppet show, a hummer with its floodlights on and rims spinning, and Jack Sparrow driving a covered moped painted like a Zebra. I told the waitress I was meeting a friend and so explored the boat, which had tables about the rails and a turntable at the quarterdeck. The sun set while I walked back. Their virtues known, I got a bag full of Crimean tomatoes from a street stand, and some salt and fries from McDonalds, and ate the lot for a snack out near the dock. Strange that once I would remove a slice of tomato from a sandwich and now I would prefer a whole one to an apple.

Saturday I took an early bus to Sevastopol. The road followed a forested slope under a beetled ridge of basalt, looking down on the seashore resorts and the Black Sea. I sat next to a Russian who cracked a beer, though it was only 9:30, and slurped it noisily, with many sighs and smacking of the lips between each sip. When he was done, he tried to crush the can and spilled beer all over himself, which I found very satisfying. Finally we arrived at that great Russian port, site of two terrible sieges: one by the British, French, and Turkish allies of the Crimean War, and the second by the Germans in the Great Patriotic War.

From the bus station I walked in a chosen direction across a cramped railroad depot and up a hill — it’s always better to chose the higher path if given an option. Soon a park opened up on the right, overlooking the wedged bay of the port and its ships and arsenals, and old buildings rose on the left. The park was full of monuments and busts, and I took a long stairway up to the top of the hill, to a church and a great bronze Lenin, with soldiers and smiths and the salt of the earth around his feet. Following his outstretched finger, I walked back down into the marina, among more monuments to the defense of the city and its patriotic commanders, and more whitewashed buildings. Here, knowing all the listed battles of the Eastern Front, I deciphered the last unknown Cyrillic character: the Ч (Che) of Керч (Kerch).

My bus got into the outskirts of Simferopol a few hours before the train left. I rode on a marshrutka up the main street, through a series of round-a-bouts surrounded by the same Soviet buildings, with long stretches of nothing between, and I had no idea where the train station was or what to look or ask for. Finally I got in a cab at one of the round-a-bouts and asked for Center. As we drove, I told the uncomprehending driver, Train, Rail, and Railroad, but none of these had an impression. I looked for tracks to point to, and finally, swallowing pride, I made a few train motions. I started saying Odesa, and he asked me a few things, but I said, “No autobus, no aeroport — Odesa!”

The driver said, “Boksal!” which I had seen but not recognized on some of the signs, and then he started doing full-on train impressions, much better than mine. I said, “Da, Boksa!” but he kept asking if I was sure, and kept doing the delightful impressions, so I had to turn it into a sort of mantra or cadence to get him to drive there. I paid him and went to the crowded ticket counter, but the train was sold out! all except first class, which was over $50. I went to a cafeteria for a big cathartic dinner of steak and soup and salad, and then found at an Internet café that there was an overnight bus. So back to the Autoboksal!