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Published: April 3rd 2008
Pot-bellied pig.
Ludvinivka village, Kyivska oblast'.It was a humble setting for an impromptu day trip.
The countryside - far from the bright yellow corn fields and blue summer sky as it appears on Ukraine's flag - reminded me more of the clothes I was wearing: the sky from which cold rain was falling was the same dull grey as my jumper, and the fields as dark, muddy and worn as my jeans. We passed filthy cargo lorries from all corners of Europe travelling in the other direction, on the last stretch of motorway before arriving in the city. Small factories unattractively fill the no man's land between city and countryside.
I was sitting with Ana and our friend Lyuda, in comfy seats at the back of a minibus travelling north-west from Kyiv in the direction of Zhytomir and Rivne, towards the village where Lyuda's family lives.
Further into the province, little stone bus stops with colourful, Communist-era mosaics appear every couple of kilometres. Their names conjure up images of Cossacks, the settlements that they serve hidden beyond the mist. Thousands of dark, wet, leafless trees line the motorway and are home to tens of thousands of crow's nests.
The scenery was dismal,
A turkey.
Ludvinivka village, Kyivska oblast'. but after five months in the city the sight of even the most uninspiring nature untied the knots in my shoulders. We jumped out of the minibus at one of the bus stops and hitchhiked the remaining four kilometres until Fasova village.
Fasova But for a few hardy
babushki slowly making their way along the uneven, puddle-filled road, and dozens of chickens, the village was empty. Since Fasova's collective farm (kollektivnoe khozyaistvo or ‘kolkhoz’) was closed down in 1991 almost all of Fasova's younger generation has left to look for jobs in Zhytomir or Kyiv. The village is no longer able to provide any future for them; the ankle-length grass and rusty goalposts of the football pitch next to the school are a legacy of the exodus. Lyuda only returns a handful of times a year. Her brother Andrei is the lead guitarist in a Christian rock group and he and his wife now live in Finland. People are being enticed back - property is extremely cheap - but it will never recover from
Perestroika.
The
kolkhoz itself is a large paddock, which to this day is encircled by a mesh fence, with tractors painted a dark,
patriotic Ukrainian blue lying dormant outside an empty grain silo. Lyuda told us of the days when it used to be the centre of the village, productive and sociable, and how unhappy it makes her to see it empty. When I studied Communist collective farms - the livestock and grain from which were all taken by the State in return for starvation rations - I never imagined my friends playing inside them. Ukraine has a habit of challenging your perspectives.
Later we went to visit her grandmother, a small, white-haired lady a few months short of eighty, who lives alone in a cottage tucked behind a blue metal gate. Her pink headscarf is the brightest thing in the village.
Her crackly, low voice a reflection of the hard life that she has lived. The dialect which she speaks takes its name from a traditional type of bread:
surzhyk is either a blend of dark and light flour or of Russian and Ukrainian words; they have both been passed around kitchen tables in Ukrainian homes for hundreds of years - their recipe varies from province to province.
To either side of the cottage’s front door stand two pillars
A Chicken.
Fasova, Kyivska oblast'. of attractive blue, black and red mosaics, much like those that decorate the countryside bus stops. Inside the dwelling smelled warm and musty - I had read Gorkii's
Mother five years ago, and now felt as if I was sitting in the revolutionary's house. The best view of Fasova’s fields was from the toilet, a wooden cabin a hundred paces from the cottage.
We placed ourselves on creaking chairs in the corner of one of the two rooms while Lyuda chatted with her grandmother on the bed, sometimes getting up to capture some of the family portraits on the walls with a digital camera. Unsure of our place in the reunion, Ana and I exchanged smiles with the old lady and leafed through two photograph albums that Lyuda took down from a shelf.
Some of the older pictures, again, reminded me of the European history textbooks from which I used to form my ideas about the Soviet Union: there were crisp black and white portraits of a handsome family - husband, wife and many children - eyes smiling but mouths proudly shut. In one of the photographs is a grandfather who died during the Second World War but
about whom Lyuda knows almost nothing.
Lyudvinivka Not everything in the region is old: Lyuda's parents have been building a new house for ten years, which is only just beginning to take shape. When we waded through the debris for a ten-minute tour, Lyuda's mother Tamara was using some discarded cardboard boxes to light a fire in the skeleton of a hearth.
Lyuda's uncle and his family live across a stone bridge from the soon-to-be cottage, and we went to meet them before we returned to Kyiv. The Litvin's farm is home to dozens of animals: two grey Vietnamese pot-bellied pigs urgently scamper across the muddy yard; chickens keep themselves busy; two turkeys exchange raucous, throaty greetings; rabbits sniff around their cages; a lapdog surveys proceedings; a cat with a bloody wound across its throat relaxes on a windowsill by the front door, the cottage's sleepy sentry.
Moral and logistical barriers notwithstanding, it was tempting to try to steal one of the pigs - an armful of nature to take back with me to the artificial city. But as my new work shoes became covered in mud, even taking photographs of them was a problem.
Tamara, Lyuda and Mark.
Lyudvinivka village, Kyivska oblast'. Not only were the pair unsociable, they were also faster than I gave their pink, stubby little hairy legs credit for. As I squatted down in the middle of the yard - my camera zoom trained on the corner of the shed where they had hidden from me, my left knee almost touching the mud - they suddenly charged towards me and I had to leap sideways to avoid a brace of offended snouts.
As the drizzle continued and I took shelter indoors, I wasn't the only one grateful for some fish soup, hot from the stove, and three refills of Nescafé coffee with cream as we dried off in their large, modern farmhouse kitchen.
Lyuda's uncle Sergei sat comfortably at the end of the table and chatted with his daughter, Nastya. The family also speak a mixture of Russian and Ukrainian, words from both lexicons popping into their heads and understood by all. Keeping up with the conversation confused me into asking for a
vilka instead of a
lozhka to eat my soup with; in fact, eating soup with a fork is a fitting metaphor for trying to understand
surzhyk, when your Ukrainian vocabulary has been nurtured
Fasova village.
Kyivska oblast'. only by legal documents and shampoo adverts on television.
While we sipped our coffee, Lyuda's other cousin Mark provided entertainment. An Andriy Shevchenko look-alike of eighteen months, he managed to stumble nose first into a kitchen cupboard, lock himself in the bathroom and shin up the twenty wooden steps that lead to the farmhouse's attic in the time it took his father to boil the kettle.
Having climbed back into a minibus at dusk and returned to Kyiv it didn't take long for the fresh air to wear off and for our urban habits to return. An afternoon wasn't enough time away from the claustrophobic, troubled city to truly freshen up. In the centre of town the three of us had dinner at a Puzata Hata buffet, the mock farmhouse with a buffet of traditional Ukrainian food. My plate was already full with chicken cutlets and pork
shashlyki before I gave a second thought to the inhabitants of the Litvin's yard. The coffee didn't taste as good from a machine.
Next diary: From Hell on Earth to the Moon of Dreams.
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Cat
non-member comment
There's nothing like the country to get you in a better frame of mind is there. It makes a huge difference to get away from all the noise and pressure. Maybe you could go for longer next time though, make a little holiday out of it. Hope all is ok with you. Try not to be stressed. xx