Advertisement
Published: November 15th 2007
Those kicks to the forehead and face, which shook me into a concussion while lying on a cold Vinohradar street, happened in slow motion, and will stay with me forever.
We had been evicted earlier that day. Ana had phoned Nataliya Petrovna from work, to explain that she wouldn't be paying November's rent as we had been invited to stay with our American friend while we look for a new flat. Nataliya Petrovna screamed at Ana to get our belongings out by midnight - not the next morning as we planned - and cursed that it left her paying for the whole flat, not just her half. We honestly thought that she would pay the same rent no matter what.
When we arrived back to Prospekt Radyanskoi Ukrainy we threw everything into our bags and suitcases and left to take a trolleybus to Syrets metro.
The street was almost pitch black by then. I was walking twenty paces ahead, struggling under the weight of six bags in my hands and over my shoulders, when a man in a black leather jacket walked out of the shadows and into my path. Strangers whisper in your face for some money for a bottle of vodka every day in Ukraine, and the
only thing you should do is try not to look at them and push past. But this man wouldn't let me move, holding me back with a hand on my chest. He knew who I was.
He muttered something and I began to realise what was happening. Another man appeared from the gloom. My chest tightened, as if I had been holding my breath for two minutes. Perhaps I had. All I could think to do was try to push past them again and say
"I'm in a hurry", praying that I was talking quietly enough for them not to hear my accent. Ana caught up with me and held on to my arm. We're now all standing on a dark, empty street, between two housing blocks; two Ukrainian men in their mid-twenties, a foreigner, a girl, and all their belongings.
I remember that the conversation took three turns. The men - one with black hair and a squint, the other with a pale cap and nasty grin - asked Ana questions. Where is she going? Does she believe in fairness in this world? Ana stayed calm and answered in as few words as possible. She is many,
many times braver than I am.
Where is she from?
"Eastern Ukraine". One of the thugs hissed
"I know. You're Anastasiya. We know what town you lived in". Ana's town is small, and fifteen hours away from the capital. But she wasn't the only person on the block who grew up there. The men had too, and had been sent by Nataliya Petrovna. They must have been waiting for her to call them, as soon as we left the flat. We hadn't made it fifty paces away from the entrance.
They began to talk about me. I didn't understand what they said; all that I could make out was abuse against England, but I was tormented by how soon they were going to throw the first punch and what they would do with Ana once I was on the floor, not skinhead rhetoric. The pupils of my eyes were heavy and couldn't focus, so intense was the adrenaline in my shouders and chest.
When it came I didn't even see the fist. My neck jarred back, then the left side of my face went numb. The next hit came before I could open my eyes, and the heavy bags over my back pulled me to the ground. I couldn't get up, and all I could do before the boots came was cover my face with my forearms, as in a rugby ruck.
Kicks landed over my kidneys, the collar of my coat and side of my neck, and more over my left eye, but the worst never happened. I thought that the first picture of
Working for a cash machine' would be the last thing that I would ever see, but the light never went out. I should be grateful that they were both heavily drunk, and swaying.
I got to my feet.
"What do you want?" "Give us our money". I said I would give them my wallet if they let Ana run to the trolleybus stop, but they wouldn't even allow that. I opened it, and tried to give them half of Octobers' salary, but I couldn't control my hands and handed over all of the twenty five
hryvnya 100 notes inside.
"If there won't be another problem you won't see us again. But we can find you". My mobile phone tells me that I phoned Maksym, a lawyer and colleague, as soon as the men ran behind the building and into the night. Everything afterwards is unclear, but I gave a statement to the local
Militsiya, in a dirty office nearby. Doubtless the thugs would have thought that the foreigner and the girl would pick their belongings off the pavement, put them back in their bags and be on their way without saying anything. By going to the
Militsiya and saying who did this to me and where they live, we left the two who organised this nightmare with another reason to harm us.
Jared and Joel
My first impressions of Jared's flat, and his flatmate Joel, were an echoey blur also. The kitchen is similar to the one which we had just left, but warmer, and there is a living room next door. The bookshelf against one wall contains books belonging to their landlady, from the complete works of Lenin to cookery books, to a Russian translation of some Sherlock Holmes mysteries. A comfy sofa has been folded into a comfy bed, from which there is a view onto a tree-lined street. Our new flatmates are missionaries in ther mid-twenties, who have been living in Ukraine for two years. As well as setting up a church they do a lot of work helping street children.
Therapy
The morning after the fight Ana phoned for an ambulance, which took me to the hospital. I didn't feel much pain after the punches because of adrenaline and shock, but I awoke after just an hour of sleep feeling very ill.
The hospital that serves the people on the left bank of the River Dnieper is an awful place; an indictment of how little Ukrainians care about people they don't know, and how little of the government budget escapes the clutches of corrupt officials and can be spent on the public. The halls are made of stone, with cracks and holes in the floor that are being left to grow wider. The corridors are dim and echoey. Both patients and nurses look vaguely at the walls, with sick stares, and wait with not so much as a single chair.
It is an abbatoir with humans instead of carcasses.
When I was finally let inside a room for an appointment I wasn't the only patient there: a middle-aged woman was laying on a stretcher in the corner, absolutely unable to move. The only way I knew she was alive was by her occasional blinks. No-one was even looking at her. In the other corner, the basin where the doctors wash their hands had no soap and no towel.
I said to the doctor that my head was just sore, but that I had heard that there can be a delayed reaction to head injuries and that I was worried that I might pass out in a few days. His response was
"Where did you hear rubbish like that?" Later another woman drifted in, her face, hair and shoulders covered in bright green paint as if a canister had exploded in her hands. A chubby, dirty man walked in and sat next to me. He had a bandage wrapped around his head, from which a red dot of blood was leaking over his left temple. He was more polite to me than the doctor, reaching out his hand when he found out where I was from to say
"Was ist das?" instead of
"How are you?".
My choice was to be a day patient there for ten days, or to sign a 'refusal of care' form that explained that the hospital was not responsible for any worsening of my health. It took me thirty seconds to sign my name. None of the doctor's pens worked.
My head began to feel weak a few seconds after I left the hospital, a mixture of concussion (no-one had yet told me that that was in fact what was wrong with me), the cold air, and the shock of being inside such a disturbing place. Ana led me to the train station to buy tickets to her home where I could rest with her family, but there were no spaces for the next two days. After ten minutes on a busy metro train my body by then was in as bad a state as it ever would be. My pupils had become heavy again and my eyes would not focus. My skull felt empty rather than in pain as I tottered through the station. When I sat down in the waiting room while Ana looked for tickets at another
kasa I even thought that I had wet myself, until I realised that the smell was of the man next to me.
It was very hard to talk; I would say three or four words and then the rest of what I was trying to say would vanish from my mind.
I wasn't allowed to go back to the flat, as I had to give two more statements to the
Militsiya, in two more dirty offices, with two more disinterested stubborn
militsionery. By four o'clock I was exhausted.
At the end of the day my colleagues saved me from crying. Mr. Volkov paid for me to have a check up at the best clinic in the country. The firm's driver took me through rush hour to get to the place in time, and Volodya helped both of us at the hospital. Only then, in a brand new, clean surgery on a soft leather stretcher, did I find out what was wrong with me.
Next diary: The Four Chills.
Advertisement
Tot: 0.086s; Tpl: 0.013s; cc: 10; qc: 31; dbt: 0.0412s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.1mb
Cat
non-member comment
Come home Jon. I'll pay for your ticket if you're short on money after what happened but come home. It's too dangerous out there.