Dispatches from Ukraine

by

Julia Sushytska

I am sitting in Le Fumoir, a chic Parisian cafe, drinking a cup of terrible coffee. Pomyitsi, or pigswill, my grandmother would have called it. I should have ordered a glass of wine. A couple at the nearby table is flirting with each other. She is the same age as me, and he is not her husband. Her feet, impeccably manicured and gracefully disclosed by sandals that show no sights of wear, caress the delicate fabric of his suit pants. He does not seem to notice. The intensity of their affair is gone, but pleasant playfulness remains. Does lightness of being have to be so intimately joined with oblivion?

Since Russia’s latest phase of the war, my grandmother’s expressions are constantly popping up in my head—she always said them in Ukrainian, even if a moment before this we spoke Russian; they are usually funny, often indecent, and mostly untranslatable.

Govoryly, balakaly—sily i zaplakaly. We had a talk, we had a chat, and then we sat down and wept.

Pero tobi v dupu—i poletiv. Put a feather in your ass, you’ll be able to fly. 

Duren’ dumkoiu bagatiie. Thinking makes an idiot rich. (I guess, that’s about me; it was stupid to major in philosophy, while living in the US on a student visa, and having all of my family still in Ukraine. Next time around I will become a doctor.) Alliteration brings together stupidity and thinking: DUren’ DUmkoiu. I imagine somebody who gets excited about a new thought. Instead of derision, I sense a certain regret: thinking is not valued much. 

Spy! Vzhe vsi chorty pozasynaly! Sleep! All the devils are asleep by now. (Ukrainian chorty (chorts) are small squirmy beings on thin legs; the lower part of their bodies resembles that of a goat; they can cause harm, are a constant nuisance to humans, but are not evil in the way the (Christian) devil is. According to some Slavic myths, their number continually increases as they marry and have children. They live under the earth, and appear in our world through the openings in the ground. So I imagine a large family of disheveled cherts; it’s so late, even they are asleep by now.

Shche zharenyi indiuk tebe v dupu ne kliuvav! The cooked goose hasn’t stabbed you in the butt. Yet. 

Every year she would worry about making it through the winter—iak oto perezymuvaty? Her anxieties increased as she got older—it did not help that when the Soviet Union collapsed my grandparents lost all of their life-long savings—all 3,000 rubles, the amount that could have bought them an automobile. Soviet made, of course. My grandmother would worry whether there would be enough food to last through the winter even after supermarkets with an astounding (for a Soviet mindset) variety of products became a stable reality in independent Ukraine. Overripe bananas and tasteless tomatoes were available all winter long, but they could not relieve her fear. It went as deep as the Holodomor (the artificial famine orchestrated by Stalin to subdue the Ukrainian countryside). She lived through it as a small child in her home village near Zhytomyr. There was a boy in her class—she told my mother—about whom it was rumored that his father and he ate his mother. Nonsense, my mom would reply. Impossible. Nobody ever talked about the Great Famine in her school, and it was never mentioned in any of her books. It was not until right before Ukraine’s independence when information about the famine started appearing, and my grandmother’s words acquired an altogether different meaning.

This artificial famine that took the lives of 3 to 5 million Ukrainians is still dismissed as nonsense by some of the most progressive and most reactionary minds. In February, a colleague invited me to talk to his class, and I mentioned that as a small child my grandmother was sent at night into the fields to look for the ears of wheat left on the ground after the harvest was gathered and shipped away to Russia. Her parents were hoping that the guards would not shoot at a child. A student in the class, a perceptive young woman, asked, “Isn’t every famine artificial?”

I never lived through famine, but now I know that this famine lives in me. I also never lived through war. In March my mother and her brother, after much hesitation, crossed the border into Poland. “I have not seen anything like this, and don’t ever want to see anything like this again,” my mother told me after witnessing thousands of women with infants and small children walking for miles and waiting for days to cross this border. “I realized,” she admitted months later, “that I am following the same route that the previous generation of our family took to escape the Russians.”

My grandmother is sitting on the bed, and I see the zigzags of her feet. Oi, iak v mene nogy boliat! Oh, how my legs hurt, she intones (zhalilasia).  She feared the most to become a burden. It was her feet that betrayed her, making the final months of her life unbearable for her and my mother. 

Blessed is the one who lives and who leaves this world lightly. My grandfather died in his sleep, several months after he was diagnosed with lung cancer, but before he would have had to start taking morphine. A careless doctor prescribed him the same medicine twice, and my mother, who always checked his prescriptions, didn’t have time to catch the mistake. My grandmother, on the other hand, was saved from a quick death by paramedics, who pulled her out of diabetic coma, and she spent the next several months in pain that no amount of morphine could ease. She had atherosclerosis, but the diagnosis came too late to prevent the development of a gangrene. Oi, iak v mene nogy boliat!  Oh, how my feet are hurting! She begged the doctors to end her life, but they were too ethical, I suppose. Maybe becoming a doctor would not have been a great idea after all. 

Tilky shchob ne bulo viiny. Anything but war, my grandmother often repeated. She lived through a war – the second one. 

I am sitting in Le Fumoir, listening to jazz—the light and lightness sprung from lifetimes of oppression, and wishing for lightness of life and death; lightness without oblivion.

Barbarism, Stanisław Lem or Czesław Miłosz wrote, is the absence of memory (I am reading Highcastle and The Issa Valley simultaneously, and cannot locate the quote). Most of us, most of the time are barbarians. Some of us, I am starting to think, are always barbarians. We don’t speak, we don’t hear. We were not taught the value of remembering. It requires too much effort. Most importantly, memory is a burden, and the kind of lightness that could co-exist with it is rare.

Gospody pomyluj. Lord have mercy. I say this more and more frequently since February 24, but I probably started during Covid, among fears of famine that followed the March shutdown. I never prayed in Ukrainian, but more and more frequently I feel the urge to cross myself, repeating Gospody pomyluj.

Dispatch 1. The Sweetness of Sour Cherries

A Ukrainian flag on a balcony of the 14th district of Paris, another one in the 4th, and on the City Hall of the 5, flanked by the French flags. Flags on the Hôtel de Ville are arranged in such a way that it takes me a moment to decide whether some of them are meant to be Ukrainian, or this is a colorful composition that bears no relationship to the war.

I am by turns frustrated, outraged, and depressed. How can life continue as before? Why are there so few signs of the war fought for the values at the core of the French nation, of the European Union, of Europe? My belief in human decency and in European institutions has suffered a powerful blow since the end of February. I am more aware than ever that a decent human being is an exception. I am more inclined than ever to agree with Merab Mamardashvili, a Soviet-era Georgian philosopher, who maintained that hoping (for a bright future, goodness, etc.) is dangerous. Abandon all hope, and work while there is still light (Mamardashvili was a great admirer of Dante and Proust). I don’t spend much time in Paris. On June 7 I take a plane to Warsaw, from where my uncle and I will drive to Lviv, Ukraine.

I am terrified to imagine what Ukraine will look like and what I will feel there. Perhaps the war will reveal itself in subtle ways. Or just the opposite—it will throw itself on me; it will overwhelm and suffocate. I am flying into the unknown. 

Before boarding the plane I notice next to me a young man who is missing a leg. Then another one, and another. There are dozens of them. I would think these are Ukrainian soldiers who were receiving medical treatment in France, except they look Middle Eastern and are wearing sports uniforms. A Paralympic team flying to Warsaw? For me this is a sign, a premonition of what is to come. Life is preparing me for the horrors that I will see in Lviv. They are so young, so fit, and all of them are missing a leg. I sit next to two of them. 

My uncle, who is seventy and has been a refugee since early March, and with whom I will set off for Lviv tomorrow morning, meets me at the airport. We take a bus, and then a tram to a relative’s apartment. I speak Russian with my uncle, as I have done throughout my life. We hear a lot of Russian and Ukrainian as we move through the city. There are flags and posters everywhere. 

I cannot sleep that night. The fear of what is to come is overwhelming. In the morning, as my uncle turns on the ignition, we discover that one of the wheels does not move. An elderly neighbor, who has been eyeing us suspiciously for some time now, informs us that the lock mechanism got jammed because the car was parked for a month with a raised hand brake. “You will have to take off the wheel.” There is a hint of satisfaction in his voice. “Never use a hand brake when the car is parked,” he informs us and disappears. “That was helpful,” I say to my uncle with irritation. It is 6 a.m., and all the repair shops are closed for another two hours. 

The tools are buried under suitcases, plastic bags, blankets, photo albums, and empty plastic boxes—my family left Lviv not knowing if they will be able to return, if there will be anything to return to. It is not easy for my uncle to kneel and set up a lever. “Don’t worry, we will leave tomorrow,”—I say. Suddenly the nosy neighbor is back with a fit young man who is holding a toolbox. The inside of the wheel is rusty, but the young man strikes the metal in several places, and the wheel can spin again. My uncle exchanges phone numbers with him: “When all this ends, come to Lviv—I will take you around,” he says.

We are hundreds, and then dozens of miles from the Ukrainian border. The countryside is filled with fresh, lush greenery. The world is bursting with life, and there are absolutely no signs of war. We encounter military vehicles only once, and their sight causes me intense pain. These shrewd metal monsters mean one thing only, even if their armor is not directed against me right now. They are the opposite of the supple, fragile green around us. Well, at least now there is no need to look for road signs, we will follow the vehicles all the way to the border, but no, at the next roundabout they take a different route. Why are they not heading to Ukraine?

Many miles before the border the queue of semi-trucks begins. There are hundreds of them parked along the road. Why are they not let quickly through customs? We are in the middle of a war, and need to get supplies quickly. There will be another, seemingly endless, line of trucks waiting to cross into Poland. The drivers have to wait for 3-4 days to cross. Don’t worry, a friend tells me, they have showers and beds inside. 

When we reach the border there are only three other cars in front of us. I have crossed dozens of times this infamous border between Soviet Ukraine and Poland, and now Ukraine and the EU, and I have never seen it this empty. We were prepared to wait here for many hours, maybe even get a hotel room nearby to spend the night, and try again early in the morning, but in 15 minutes we enter the no-man’s land between the two countries. Here my uncle and I suddenly and seamlessly switch to speaking Ukrainian. We will not revert back to Russian during my stay in Lviv. 

The intense green life persists on the other side of the border. The anxiety that has been building up inside me for many months reaches its peak, and then vanishes at some unidentifiable point along this road. Did it dissolve in grass and trees that line the road? Was it held back at a checkpoint, or blokpost, as it is called in Ukrainian, by several construction trash bags with a Ukrainian flag perched on top? “Every village has one,” my uncle jokes, but I soon realize that this is not a joke. Whenever a potholed road branches off the main two-lane “highway” toward a smallest rural settlement I see a pile of these white sandbags—an obstruction for a cow, perhaps. Indeed, there is usually a languid cow nearby, and occasionally a shirtless farmer mowing tall grass with a scythe.  

“How much longer until Lviv?” I ask my uncle. “We are in Lviv,” he says, and I immediately recognize the big furniture store and then one of the main streets leading to the Opera. Several hundred sandbags and some other, more impressive, metal obstacles have been moved off to sidewalks. Ten more minutes and we arrive at my uncle’s apartment. My uncle hands me a stack of hryvnias, I grab a bag, and walk to the farmers market to buy tomatoes and cucumbers. I glide over Lviv’s unevenly paved sidewalks, yet I am so close to zemlia—the Ukrainian word that means both “earth” and “soil.”

The always overcrowded market is not even a third full: several grannies and only two or three vegetable stands are selling produce—there is a shortage of gasoline in Ukraine, and fewer farmers make it to the city. I cannot resist and buy overpriced vyshni—sour cherries. I also buy fresh, young garlic. Nothing can rival the taste of Ukrainian fruit and vegetables. My breakfast tomorrow will consist exclusively of sour cherries, and I will feel ten years old, spending the summer reading books and going with my grandparents to our dacha, a small plot of land outside the city. Vyshni have a deep, velvety taste. They are tart, and any sweetness in them is a sign of approaching decay. Sweetness to a sour cherry means death—the sweeter, the closer to the end.

Dispatch 2. On Dust and Kuriava

Lviv is obsharpanyi. This is the first thing that I notice when my uncle’s car is rattling down its cobbled streets. Paint is peeling off its art-nouveau buildings, balconies are crumbling, remnants of poles and metal wires stick up from the ground so frequently that it is surprising how one can walk here for five minutes without breaking one’s neck or having a balcony come crashing on one’s head. And there is an abundance of dust. It seems to have appeared as soon as we crossed the border. The dust huddles in the corners of sidewalks, fills the crevices of buildings, and piles up in the middle of streets. Every time a car passes though Vitovsky street, which my uncle’s apartment is facing, a cloud of thick yellow dust surges up into the air and hovers there for a long time before deciding to settle back down. It is at least two meters high. “Where does all this dust come from?”I ask, but receive no satisfactory answer. Not until the following day.

There is dust in Europe, of course. For instance, the noble white dust of the Luxembourg Garden. When I walk across it, a thin layer of fine powder covers my shoes. It is, however, nothing like the real, backward dust of Eastern Europe that merits a special term. Kuriava is a thick cloud of dirt that resides permanently on a given street and that swirls up in the wake of passing cars. In the civilized world machines devour these unseemly particles: compact bug-like contraptions with bright green brushes in Paris or roaring monstrosities with dark tentacles in LA. In Ukraine kuriava receives an altogether different treatment.  

As I walk toward the central square the following morning, I am stopped by an unexpected sight—a janitor is meticulously sweeping a sidewalk. I pull out my phone to document this historic moment: Lviv is becoming European, I think. By the time I open my camera app she has filled a large pail with dust, and is now standing in the middle of the street. I start filming just as she dumps it right in the center of the road. She carefully spreads it around with her broom, and walks over to the sidewalk to recommence the process. 

She is an attendant, a priestess of dust; her life is dedicated to ensuring that kuriava’s reign continues without major disruptions, and that the city folk do not forget their origins and final destination. She will let no machine swallow the memory of this.

Dispatch 3. Vulnerability

The stained glass windows of the Lviv Roman Catholic Cathedral are boarded up, its statues are wrapped as though they are about to be shipped away into safety, but the metal cages around them suggest otherwise. The statue of Jesus seated under the cross, one hand propping his chin—Jesus-philosopher—is missing from the Boim Chapel, whose carved facade is now entirely covered by shiny sheets of metal. Sandbags are tightly packed into the basement windows of houses, many balconies are wrapped in nets.  

How much damage will this prevent?

All cafes, restaurants, and shops are open. I even encounter several tour groups, but their guides speak Russian and Ukrainian, and not English or Polish that were mostly heard over the previous years. I do hear English, but only two or three times, and the best of Lviv cafes—Svit Kavy, Cukernia, Kupol, and Veronika—always have a table for me, which was far from being the case during my past visits. Throughout the entire trip I see two Americans—both at the train station, both leaving the country.

I have dessert for lunch, and buy a loaf of dark bread at Veronika—Borodynsky bread. It is as tasty as I remember from my childhood. “There is no such bread any more,” my uncle says. I am not sure if he is joking, but I know that this is not just a joke. The next day I buy a different kind of bread—enough of this imperial baggage, even if the Russian army lost the Battle of Borodino to Napoleon. 

My obsharpanyi, shabby, vulnerable Lviv, smelling of coffee and black bread, I am counting on your resilience.

The windows of my room are facing Vitovsky street, and each morning around 6 a.m. a violent tremor breaks through the defenses build up by my sleep, and drags me out of oblivion. I fall back asleep as soon as the brutal noise subsides, but it returns more and more frequently, and by 7 a.m. I am fully awake.

At the beginning of March, on the day when the Russian army bombed the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Plant I called my mother trying to convince her to leave for Poland. For the past few days she was staying in my uncle’s apartment, because her own is on the sixth floor and much closer to the airport, a likely target for the Russian bombers. Suddenly I heard the sounds of an explosion—of the building shaking and collapsing around her. The wifi connection faltered, and I kept repeating into the transcontinental void “Mama! Mama!” as my heart plunged down into my body. Suddenly I heard her voice: “Don’t worry, this is just a tram passing by the building.” 

My uncle explained that two years ago the city promised to repave the cobble street outside, but has not done it, and now, with this war, God knows when they will do it. The old trams made in Czechoslovakia (a country that ceased to exist in 1993) are still holding up, but only because they were made from a few basic parts that are relatively easy to repair. After so many decades these parts are only provisionally connected, so when such a tram drives on the rails surrounded by mismatched and displaced cobble stones, the foundations of the nearby buildings—laid during the Austro-Hungarian Empire—shake violently. Their tremor startles me every time. My hands, my heart, my life collapse.

So many dislodged cobblestones. I should be able to remember many things in Lviv, and I do remember something that I have been losing for a long time; something that I lost several months ago. I feel at peace during the eerie air-raid sirens, even though their sound makes me physically ill—it creeps into my body and begins to slowly wring my soul out of me. Even so, I feel free—of guilt, of fear, of all the years I spent far away from here.

Dispatch 4. From the Different Sides of the Border

There is shortage of gasoline in Ukraine (most of the oil depots were recently bombed by Russia), and Taras cannot come to Lviv from Demydivka, his home village in Volhynia, north of Lviv. “Why don’t we go see him?” suggests my uncle. We filled his car with gas before crossing into Ukraine, and this will get us there and back. As we drive north we pass several blockposts, only one of them manned. We slow down, but are not asked to pull over—they are checking a minivan. The roads are mostly empty, which is fortunate because my uncle and then I drive in the middle of the road to avoid potholes. When we approach Berestechko (a sight of a decisive battle between the Ukrainian Cossacks and the Polish army) we come to a low bridge over a small river. Both sides of a low bridge are lined with iron “hedgehogs” that were pulled from the WWII museums. The contrast between these rusted spikes of metal and calm, green fields extending all the way to the horizon is remarkable, yet there is also an uncanny harmony between them. Unlike the military vehicles that I saw in Poland, these metal rails do not unambiguously entail death and destruction. They are a warning, a punctum of the times. 

We pull over to photograph this arresting landscape, and a car that just passed us, returns and blocks our path, although we are not trying to leave. “Why are you photographing a checkpoint?” a middle-aged civilian asks us. “This will be a historic photo,”my uncle explains, but the driver is unwilling to entertain this abstract point of view. “Are you locals? What is your name?” He calls somebody who takes down the car’s license plate. They don’t seem to find the car in the database. “For how long have you owned it?” the man asks my uncle. Oles' and I sit inside with the doors open, my uncle paces back and forth outside. Later I learn that the police could have detained us, they could have asked to unlock our phones (I have been photographing unmanned checkpoints since we crossed into Ukraine), they could have issued a draft card to Oles' (his family was against our trip precisely for this reason, he tells me days later). They find my uncle and his car in their database, and the driver lets us go.

I have a similar encounter at the Museum of Ukrainian Modernism in Lviv. “Are you a local?” “I am,” I answer in flawless Ukrainian. “So how is it that you don’t know that museums are closed?” — “Not all of them are closed. Several in the city center are open.” (This is true. Yesterday I went into the favorite museum of my childhood, the Museum of Natural History, that has been closed for renovation ever since, but is now finally open.) “They evacuated all of the art from the museum. There is nothing inside,” he tells me while escorting me to the street. 

Taras will have a similar story. He was approached by a local when he was making a sketch of the river by his house. When it became clear that Taras is not a spy, his interlocutor questioned the value of art in the times of war.

For my uncle, Oles', Taras, and me these encounters with “politically conscious” citizens bring out the dangers of the war. (I think of a paragraph that the university administration suggested I include on a course syllabus: it asks students to be on the lookout for any actually or potentially offensive words or ideas that I might express during my lectures.) When I tell these stories to my relatives in Paris, I am shocked to hear that they find the inquiries commendable: Ukraine is defending itself from an enemy that for decades developed networks of spies and informants. My relatives do not see what was so clear to all of us on the other side of the border.

Taras is full of radiance and vivid gestures. He is at home here. He only owns a plot of land several times bigger than my grandparents’ dacha, but around it is his forest, his river, his wind, his sun. He knows every dent and recess in the river floor. “When I cannot sleep, I go to the river.” He stands in the water among sleepy sheatfish. They don’t move even when he points a flashlight at them. The fish are oblivious—they are in love. There are magic places in the forest—liminal places, explains Taras, and my uncle confirms this: he woke up earlier than any of us, and stumbled across such a place during his morning walk. Light is different there, they concur. “There are many kinds of wind here,” Taras says, “I tell them apart by how they move the trees.” Taras shows us a place in the forest where he has sown wild strawberries. I eat several that are ripe. There will be many more next year, he tells us with exhilaration. I try to memorize the taste. Will it remain with me?

During the second Spring of Covid when we arrived in cold and rainy Europe, I understood that it is the grass—the delicate grass of my childhood—that I miss most in my California desert. This Spring—which, I hope will not be remembered as the first Spring of WWIII—it is the wild strawberries that bring me back into a life I long since lost. These fragrant—zapashni—droplets of red used to grow in our dacha. It was my job to gather them while my grandparents were weeding the garden or shaking Colorado beetles (Leptinotarsa decemlineata) off our potato plants. These beetles, native to the Rocky Mountains, with orange and brown stripes on their backs are a real menace—they and their squishy red larvae devour the thick green leaves of potato plants. It took the beetles two hundred years to catch up with the potato plant that was introduced to the European continent from the American colonies. Potatoes are now a staple of Ukrainian cuisine, and during the long winters of my childhood it was our main food source—about fifteen hundred pounds that we bought each fall would take us through a long winter. In 2005, while inflating its citizens with the WWII nostalgia, Russia introduced the ribbon of Saint George. Its orange and black stripes got it a catchy nickname—the ”Colorado ribbon.” The infestation of these colorady came after three hundred years of another, differently gruesome colonization, and today they are destroying much more than potato plants.

I pick handfuls of wild strawberries. Some are sweet, others have a pleasant tartness to them—all have the intense flavor of life, and fill me with strength and confidence. I stand firmer on this land, from which they grow; I am at home in their forest, by their river.

Dispatch 5. The Feast

“We will celebrate once we are back in person,” I would tell my friends and students during the first Covid year, and this feast that I was promising everyone, but mostly myself, suddenly found me here, in Lviv. I feel the intense joy from meeting friends. It is mutual and undiluted by the passage of time, even though we notice the not so subtle changes that mark on our bodies the years of the pandemic and the months of war. It is not in Los Angeles or Paris, but in Lviv that I feel happy. My joy is not polluted by the war, even though it coexists with deep sorrow. The two are intertwined in me, equally intense. “My co-worker’s son and her son-in-law are at the frontline,” says my uncle (he has to raise his voice because we are in one of these rattling trams that circle the streets since my childhood). “Yesterday both were wounded. The son’s finger—he is a bassoon player—and his foot were cut off during the explosion of a cluster weapon. They found the foot and sewed it back on, but they did not find his finger. The son-in-law suffered a head injury when a bomb exploded nearby. He is still unconscious, but he might live.” 

“The usual place?” asks Marko when we arrange our meeting over the phone. I have not seen him for years; for at least three years. We meet next day in front of the Boim Chapel. We can no longer sit on its steps, or lean against its carved columns, all boarded up with new, shiny sheets of tinplate. I notice immediately that Marko’s shoulders are broader. He lifts me up a little when we embrace, and I am instantly transported into another life, in which every afternoon we meet on the worn out steps of this chapel to rehearse The Little Prince in three languages—Polish, Ukrainian, and Russian; in which the Soviet borders are starting to crack, letting us through into Poland, and then Italy, Switzerland, and France; in which every day is filled with exciting encounters and conversations. In this life we are certain that life has meaning; we know there is truth, even if it is not easy to find.   

We drink strong, flavorful coffee, and Marko tells me that as soon as the war began he went to enlist in the army. Marko is exempt from service for two separate reasons: as an Assistant Professor and as a parent of three kids. “You wouldn’t believe how long the lines at the military recruitment office were.” He took a two week preparatory course taught by a retired American officer, and during the first week they learned how to assemble and take apart a rifle. Everyone was joking around. The second week started differently: “About 30 percent of you will be wounded in the first few days, another 30 percent will be psychologically incapable to fight. You will get one set of painkillers. If you give them away to a fellow soldier, you will not have anything to anesthetize you when you are in pain.” “I realized,”—Marko tells me,—"that if I kill a human being I will never be able to teach again.” He decided not to enlist.

Joy and sorrow, anger and despair, and occasionally, but only outside Ukraine, debilitating fear. “Is it fear or angst?”—my Western friends ask me, concerned. I cannot answer. I only know that I am grateful that others depend on me for providing food, or preparing lectures. That is the only consideration that shields me from a full paralysis. Young talented people are dying while experienced politicians lounge in their leather chairs sipping whiskey and telling gullible American students how they exchanged a pair of jeans for a bottle of vodka in Soviet Kyiv, and then went swimming in the Dnipro river. I hear this during the first week of war, and I am horrified. I realize that too many people are quite comfortable and unwilling to take the slightest risks. 

How does one untangle so many contradictions? Are some of them irresolvable? I am cutting up tomatoes for the salad when an air raid alarm goes off. “What do we do?” “Nothing.” So I continue cutting tomatoes, and then we sit down to lunch. This is not yet a contradiction—it appears with the feeling of relief when I find out that “it” has landed on the nearby town of Zolochiv.

Dispatch 6. On Certainty

Every culture has its own variety of stupid questions. I have lived too long outside of Ukraine, and my tolerance for ambiguity has weakened. I keep wanting to clarify, to get a precise answer, and after a three year absence it takes me a while to realize that my desire for clarity has become excessive.

I have to leave Ukraine on Friday, and on Monday I decide to buy a bus or a train ticket. The internet sites indicate that there are buses almost every hour—some of them have only one or two empty seats, while others, among them the 11 a.m. one that would suit me best, have about a hundred available seats. None of the sites looks particularly reliable, so I ask Oles' to walk with me to the nearby railroad station, from which some of these buses leave. It takes us a moment to find one with a Soviet-era sign that says “Warsaw” behind the front window. When we approach the driver and ask about the departure times, he answers: “When do you need to leave?” “At 11,”—I say, starting to feel uneasy. “O.K. Write down my number and call me the day before to confirm.” I have some doubts, and I ask a question so that he could reassure me that there will be an 11 a.m. bus on Friday. His hands fly up in despair at the ridiculous nature of my request. He is ready to walk away, but Oles', whom I asked to come along for precisely this reason, as I now realize, manages to calm him down. From where does the bus leave? He motions vaguely to the left. “Where exactly?” I ask, and immediately realize that I just crossed a red line. The driver is outraged, and walks away, swearing. Did I just jeopardize my chances to ride with him on Friday (if there is an 11 a.m. bus, and if he is its driver)?

“Let’s look more,” I tell Oles', and furtively glance back—I do not wish to alienate him completely. We soon see another bus with another vintage “Warsaw” sign. Its driver also tells me that there will be an 11 a.m. bus on Friday, but instead of giving me his cell number, he takes down my name in a thin ruled notebook that he might have borrowed from a schoolchild. I see that he misspelled my last name, but don’t say anything. What worries me is that it is the only name under “Friday.” I try to convince myself that we made progress. As we are leaving the parking lot I see a kiosk where a young woman is issuing a ticket to a passenger. I rush to inquire whether they sell tickets to Warsaw. “Of course,”—she says, and I begin to regain my confidence. In a moment I will buy some certainty and the freedom to forget about the trip until Friday. She opens the tin door of the kiosk and calls the driver who just misspelled my name. “He will help you,” she says with a kind smile.

This situation is too ambiguous for me. I want to know that I will make it to Warsaw on Friday. I have a flight from there the following morning, but, more importantly, I am uncomfortable with not having any control over this situation. I decide to go to the main bus station near the city limit, where there are many more buses and much more chaos. 

I know this station well. Soon after Ukraine’s independence, when the economy was in shambles, when my grandparents’ lifelong savings vanished overnight because the inflation rate went up to 10, 200 percent, and my mother lost her job (she worked for the city and her office was dissolved while she was on a maternity leave), my grandmother had to take these buses to Poland, smuggling a few bottles of vodka and plastic toothbrush cases to bring back food and clothing. This story is not as funny as that of the politician who exchanged jeans for vodka. The border crossing was nerve-racking, and after that she needed to spend hours at a market near the shady Lublin bus station selling whatever she managed to transport. This train station was filled with people like my grandma, and pickpockets. I remember adults warning each other: if you see a wallet on the ground, do not pick it up; if somebody approaches you to ask a question, hold tight your bag. My grandmother was traumatized for years when two respectable looking men approached her to ask for directions, and a moment later her bag disappeared—the bag that held her passport. She did not see a thing—she who was always so careful! Receiving a new international passport is not a trivial thing even now, but in the early nineties one lost at least a year of life jumping through elaborate bureaucratic hoops. A train or a bus station could be a shady place anywhere, but such a station in Eastern Europe is shady by nature (this is an a priori truth, just like the statement that a bachelor is an unmarried man, or that 2+3=5).

Lviv bus station is meant to make your life more difficult. You cannot get anywhere without being uncomfortable, if not dirty, exhausted, and sometimes relieved of your baggage. You must realize that life is tough, and that you will have to toughen up and get better at reading more subtle signs.

We go to the official ticket counter that consists of one middle aged woman writing out tickets. There is no 11 a.m. bus, she tells us. There is a bus that leaves at 8:20, but you should get here earlier because the seats are not assigned. You can arrive as early as 7 a.m. she says. I have no choice, so I get the ticket, and resign myself to waking up early and taking a trolley bus to this miserable place. At least now I have a piece of paper with a date and the bus route on it. Except the city of origin is not Lviv. “Why is this so?” I ask the woman who has not yet started losing patience with me. “The bus route on the ticket is no longer operational,” she replies. Is this because of the war? I want to ask her, but restrain myself.

On Thursday night I am falling asleep to the sound of the air raid siren, but I sleep well. Oles' comes with me to the bus station, and we arrive at 8 a.m. when most of the seats are taken. I manage to get a decent seat. “The bus is not terribly clean,”—I tell Oles'. “Don’t worry,” says a women across the aisle.“ We are changing buses at the railroad station.” I could have slept for at least one more hour! I am starting to get irritated. 

One of the passengers is looking for something among his many plastic bags tightly wrapped with scotch tape. He cannot open one of them, and so he pulls out a huge kitchen knife to cut through the tape. Yes, we are at an Eastern European bus station. At the border he will hold up the entire bus for forty minutes while he looks for his passport in the various plastic bags around him. He speaks Russian, so he must be from the Eastern parts of Ukraine. Was his house destroyed by a bomb and all of his possessions are now scattered around these plastic bags?

We leave the bus station later than scheduled, and then slowly—as though in slow motion—drive to the city center where the railroad station and my uncle’s apartment are located. The bus stops even before the green light changes to yellow, and I am furious—it takes us an hour to cover the distance of 20 minutes. When we finally arrive we find a newer bus, which is a relief, but most of its seats are taken by those who were not stupid enough to wake up early. We wait for another hour. I realize that my frustration is freeing me from the pain that I would feel leaving this city.

Two minutes before the scheduled departure a man in shorts and flip-flops strolls up with two suitcases on wheels. An American. Nobody else would dress this way for a journey that involves a border crossing—this border crossing. He refuses to place his bags in the baggage compartment. The drivers concede, and free the two front seats for him—these are usually reserved for the second driver. How much did he pay for this customer service? Probably not much more—maybe twenty bucks. Given that the ticket costs 30 dollars, an additional twenty is a considerable sum for Ukrainians. The driver finally closes the doors, but we wait around for another quarter of an hour—we need to fill every seat. Only two of us have prepaid tickets. Everyone else pays the drivers in cash right before the departure. I suddenly realize that this bus belongs to the company that has my name down in one of its ruled notebooks. By 11 a.m. we leave the city limits.

Postscript

The bells are ringing at a nearby church on Saint-Jacques street. Their sound submerges me deep into myself, but also expands and projects me out into the world. I remember the summers of my grad school years that I spent in a small Lviv apartment. The bells from a recently build Greek-Catholic church would flood my small room on Sunday mornings with their deep, bright sound. Outside a shabby balcony the delicate branches of sour cherry trees swayed gently. I remember climbing the dusty wooden stairs of the Roman Catholic Cathedral in Lviv. They become increasingly unsteady and minimalistic as I reach the platform of thick wooden beams, over which a massive bell hangs. It is perfectly still, and I need to exert much effort to make it speak. Finally the clapper comes close enough to touch the bell’s mouth and the world fills with a powerful, beautiful sound.

I long to attain lightness of being, and Paris or Los Angeles offer many different possibilities—all clean and comfortable, and some refined or even glamorous. Ukraine cuts right through these beautiful illusions. Lightness of being, it tells me, is about certainty of a different kind—the kind that might have something to do with sour cherries and kuriava.