Advertisement
Pok - pok - pok - pok - pok - pok - pok! - the sounds drifting through the chestnut trees outside my new building from games of tennis on the clay courts nearby are a soft Saturday morning wake-up call. The new neighbourhood is a refined one: sometimes a red squirrel appears in the tree opposite our balcony, or a husband and wife step into the courtyard below and help their toddler to practice walking. More often than not the bells of the Kievo-Pecherska Lavra chime loudly; the place is a calm village in the centre of a thrusting city.
The flat is cosy, too. Creaky chairs and a table sit in the narrow, mint green kitchen. It has a wide windowsill, on which I spent sleepless spring nights reading Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's 'One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich' and Rudyard Kipling's 'Kim'. The living room has new cupboards along one wall and two old sofas along another. The bathroom is about the same size as the coat closet. All rooms have Russian Orthodox icons above their doors.
After a nomadic winter and spring, staying in the same district for weeks on end sacrificed the adrenaline that
exploring a city brings for a feeling of belonging. It had been a whole year since I had last felt at home in Ukraine; the routine of rushing home to catch
Kadety or
Schastlivy Vmeste can do wonderful things to a tired mind. Watching eye-watering performances on
Ukrayina Mae Talant (Ukraine’s Got Talent) stirred feelings of pride as well as awe, as gymnasts both
impressive and
adorable,
admirable breakdancers,
extraordinary artists and
charismatic young performers represented the country’s creative side that has too little attention paid to it.
Around Kyiv, an hour hardly ever goes by without someone or something provoking my curiosity: the young man waiting for a train at Lukyanivska metro wearing a t-shirt with “Ferret Music!” written on the back; the man strolling opposite the Opera Theatre in a suave pair of shoes, a smart grey suit - and a shiny silver metal warrior’s helmet covering his face; a boy of about four on a push-bike near the Rodina-Mat’ war memorial skids away from his mother and over the first of ten concrete steps head first before Ana plucks him out of the air.
Chances to speak my own language were fewer and further between
than washed armpits on the metro, but I spent enough time with English-speaking friends. Ray, an American working at an IT firm in Odessa, visited for long enough for us to sip beers together at Bar Babai, and I braved rush hour on a wonky
marshrutka bus a few times to see friends from Kenya, Holland and Zimbabwe at the Church in Lybidska.
Of the few foreigners that I have spent time with in Kyiv, I have got to know Richard best of all, a Scotsman in his forties who arrived in Ukraine from Moscow five years ago and now tutors the children of a senior politician. He has eyes that hint at hundreds of scrapes with the malignant ‘underworld’ that lies beneath the surface of all cities in the CIS, and an eloquent, confident voice that suggests that he has become wiser from every one of them. We spent two evenings at the Lobanovsky football stadium watching Dynamo Kyiv, first as they beat Arsenal Kyiv 3-0, and a month later as they won the championship with a 3-2 win against Tavriya Simferopol.
In February - having looked for a new job for three months (and with
hryvnya tumbling out of my wallet like sand through an egg timer) - I went back to work for the law firm where I had been a translator ever since I arrived in Ukraine.
It’s an eclectic way to use my Russian degree: since the winter I have spent days translating articles about the annual increase in output at paper factories in Zhidachevsk, Poninkovsk and Rubezhansk, the price of shares in the Slavutych brewery and developments in drilling technology at the Mekhedivsko-Golotovshchinskoe and Sviridovskoe oil fields, editing a mass of miscellaneous, meticulous memorandums, and proofreading correspondence for investigations about Brazilian chickens and Korean refrigerators.
At the start of summer the company moved to a new office, between Zoloti Vorota (The Golden Gates - the 11th Century fortress of Prince Yaroslav the Wise) and Podil, Kyiv’s oldest and prettiest quarter. Now that my commute doesn’t involve the sweaty scrum at Maidan Nezalezhnosti metro, and the balcony outside my office looks out on to the gorgeous St. Sophia’s Cathedral - and with colleagues that are as varied and unorthodox as my work - it’s a harmless enough way to spend my weekdays.
------------------------
You can find more of my
writing and photography on my journal,
Short stories and photographs from across Europe.
Advertisement
Tot: 0.096s; Tpl: 0.014s; cc: 13; qc: 38; dbt: 0.0411s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.2mb
3>@
non-member comment
What? You can't be serious about watching Kadety!