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Published: October 31st 2007
Saturday after midnight, on a street in the Vinohradar...
The first rule of keeping safe in Ukraine is never share a taxi with people you don't know - but tonight the mistake was made for us; we missed the last trolleybus from Nivki metro, found a taxi instead, but two men climbed in after us. One was tall, in his late twenties, wearing a leather jacket and a black cap. He looked Central Asian, with narrow eyes and darker skin. The second was older, thin, unshaven, in a tracksuit and so overtaken by cheap vodka that he couldn't stop shivering. I crossed my arms in the middle seat, said nothing that would betray my accent, and scowled for the sake of it.
We stopped at some traffic lights, opposite the metal fences with pro-Kuchma graffiti scrawled on them in dark red letters. An old woman was still patiently sitting inside her chocolate-and-cigarette kiosk; a few people were drinking bottles of beer on the street corner. The pavement was just lit by the weak yellow beam of the street lights, and leaves were scurrying across the concrete. Quiet but uncomfortable; Ukraine at night.
While we weren't moving we took
the chance to pay our half of the fare - but the shaking man had no money left in his pockets.
"We'll sort this out between ourselves" he explained to the driver, with more than a hint of anxiety in his voice. I took my wallet out of my jacket to find the extra four hryvnya, but before I could hand them over the driver had hissed at the man to get out of his car. He did - stumbling beyond the street lights and toward the darkness, arms shaking - but before we could drive off the man in the cap followed him out of the car.
He caught up with the man in the tracksuit, grabbed his collar, and punched him three times in the face and forehead. All for the two extra hryvnya which he had to pay. Ana's gasp from the seat next to me should have been a sign to the driver to leave them both behind and take us home - but instead he left the car too and crossed the street to join the fight, taking with him a crowbar from underneath his seat. Before he arrived at the place where the
'Don't look back in anger'.
Prospekt Radyanskoi Ukrainy. Kyiv.two men were fighting the drunk had staggered away, with a hard kick to the back of his knees to send him into the dark.
The man in the leather jacket and the driver then got back into front of the car, and we drove the rest of the way in silence, as if nothing had happened or, more likely, as if the occurrence was normal for a Vinohradar late shift.
We stepped out of the taxi outside Eko Market and rushed home. When we opened the door to the flat we found another vodka-soaked stranger dribbling in our kitchen, an acquaintance of Nataliya Petrovna. The more he swigged the more abusive he became until his sentences were so overrun with swear-words that they stopped meaning anything. Each time he swore there was a painful
"yaa-aa" between the
'бл..' and the
'..дь', like the breath rushing out of your lungs after being hit in the chest by a heavy metro door on a cold day. But not even their smoking and swearing could keep us awake. The stench of their eleven hryvnya cigarettes that flowed into our room from the kitchen early the next morning, and the mess
Jared.
"Sure I'll sew the holes in my jeans up - I'll sew them up right after I throw them away". Kyiv. we found when we went in for breakfast, were the final straws. We were leaving.
Moving on
Ana found a small flat straight away, and we went to have a look at it one evening after work. It was in the Obolon' area which Kievans are very fond of, just to the north of the centre, on the second floor of a small grey building in the corner of a square courtyard. There was an old-fashioned atmosphere to the neighbourhood even after dark; creepers climbed up over the walls of the building, which had a wide, echoey whitewashed entrance and rusting bannisters. In the street outside a lady was almost silently sweeping leaves into small heaps. It felt modest but not poor.
I liked the apartment a lot at first glance - the bedroom was bigger than the one we have been stuck in, and the balcony looked out on to the courtyard. I could have spent hours perching on the windowsill with a cup of tea, writing notes for my diary or reading the Russian literature which I buy and then never have time to open. As soon as the snow starts to fall it would
look as I imagine Ukraine to have done a hundred years ago. But the kitchen was grubby, and the owner had begun to decorate the bathroom but then simply thrown his paintbrush on the floor and given up. Worse, as soon as I introduced myself with a foreign name the rent, magically, became $150 per month higher. The landlady (a dull, grey old woman in a faded blue shawl) seemed too indifferent and tired to haggle, so we let ourselves out.
We couldn't even step inside the second place that Ana found. This landlady stood us up once we had taken a marshrutka back to Obolon', and phoned instead with an ultimatum: move in at the end of next week but give me two months' rent now and an extra $250, or go away. So we went away, scam avoided; if I can't buy a ticket out of Ukraine and escape before the end of the year then I wasn't going to give her the money to.
The third flat sounded much better: just at my budget, in the classy Lukyanivska area with a cinema and market nearby, and only ten minutes' walk from the metro. We walked
past an attractive park on the way to the building, another place that is perfect for diary-writing and Solzhenitsyn. When we arrived there was a couple looking at it before us, a glamourous blonde girl in a sexy blue coat and her husband; my heart sank when I saw the look on the girl's face as she stormed past us in the corridor not ten seconds after entering the flat.
We lasted only a couple of minutes ourselves. The bedroom was the size of a horse's stable, empty apart from a cheap sofa and small cracked table, without even a bed to hide some of the bright green painted wall. The kitchen was so tiny that I could touch all four walls without moving. It was hollow and disgusting; the kind of room in which one might keep a hostage, not dedicate half one's salary to. As we buttoned up our coats again and walked past the Nazi graffiti on the wall outside, we cursed at having both had to leave work early only to get our hopes up again. Each of the dozen apartments which Ana found came to nothing, and our mood fell.
We're both emotional,
but me not being able to think clearly this week has been the only thing that has given Ana a reason to laugh. According to my tired Russian I was "looking forward to watching the
peaceful rugby championship", and spent one lunchtime
"sitting in the park, feeding the cabbage parcels". She also smiled when I told her how, while my colleague Zhanna was working as a Russian teacher in Kyiv, an American student of hers confused the words
ponimayu and
ponedel'nik, so instead of saying "I don't understand" in the middle of a conversation he wailed
"PLEASE TALK SLOWER, I'M NOT MONDAY! "Can we play you every week?"
This particular Monday was a super night amid the chaos. We met up with Jared, an American friend of mine who has been in Ukraine for two years working as a missionary, and his Ukrainian friend Lyuda. We had shashlyk, beer and coffee at another buffet just behind Khreshchatik, then went for a long, cold walk from Independence Square to
Arsenal'na metro while most of the town was already asleep. The conversation - and the freedom to speak English on the street in the first place - did me a
lot of good. I could act my age again, and walk without having to get anywhere.
Last Tuesday was another football night. Manchester United came to Kyiv, and all day at work I could think of nothing else. Four of us - Sasha, Volodya, Maksym and myself - stayed near Respublikanskii Stadion after 6, and bought another 'Ukrainian picnic' of bread, sausage and
salo, which we layed out on the desk in Volodya's office. We gave toasts with each plastic cup of
Khortytsya vodka, then took a mouthful of juice from a jar of pickled cucumbers to calm the stinging in our chests. We were in the mood for a special night even before the bottle was drained and the sausage gone. I diplomatically tied my match-day scarf so that it was half blue and half red: although I live in Kyiv, my mum's side of my family is from Manchester.
When 45,000 other fans joined us on the streets at 9, our tidy and stylish area of town became a noisy 'Dinamagrad' once more. It was obvious that the game against Lisbon a fortnight ago was just a dress-rehearsal, and that this was the match that the
Beauty and the beast.
Classical baroque architecture in front of a Soviet monster. Kyiv. city was excited about.
We barged our way to the stadium entrance among a moving, chanting wall of people, only to be stopped by the Militsiya at the foot of the steps to our
sektor. A row of soldiers with batons and fur hats told us to turn back. I panicked - I had looked forward to tonight for months, had I got close enough to hear the Champions League music only to be rejected? It was ok. We just needed to join another loud, jostling crowd, so tightly packed that there was barely any air to breath, to get in. Having to walk all the way around the stadium meant that we almost missed the start, but made it to our seats just in time. We were in the highest tier, so high up that the cold wind took our breath away. The atmosphere was beautiful; the pitch glowed under the floodlights; chants, horns and whistles filled the air. You could almost touch the excitement.
By kick-off I still hadn't made my mind up who to cheer for, so - dictated by a very friendly crowd of people around us and the quarter of a bottle of
vodka inside me - I decided to relax, enjoy every kick, and leap into the air after every goal. There were six of them in the end, but only two for Dynamo. It was one of my favourite nights in all my travels.
Thinking aloud
Perhaps it has been speaking in my second and fourth languages most of the time that has made me feel as if something has been missing. More likely it's the fact that my MP3-player has broken, and I can't listen to music any more. When I travelled around Russia I could relate songs (by
Zemfira, Yuliya Savicheva, Zveri...) to each town that I stayed in. Life is quieter here somehow.
Whenever I have been in Ukraine it has always been the rock group
Okean El'zy that has captured my imagination, because their music sounds as being here feels. Views of the Donbass countryside through the window of a slowly-moving train remind me of
Vidpusti.
Maizhe Vesna and
Kavachai stand for Ukraine's energy, and thousands of frustrations. Whenever I see those dark streets lit by a weak yellow lamp, and cigarette kiosks, and rows of neglected grey 'Khrushchёvka' housing blocks, I think of eery
Vulitsya but can't hear it.
I wrote my dissertation on Ukrainian national identity with their new album playing in the background, but have barely heard them since. I hoped I'd be able to write my diary late at night with
Poyasni,
Fiyalki,
Ledi,
Etyud and dozens of others for inspiration. It just hasn't worked out that way.
I miss travelling. Although I'm away from home I'm standing still, and I miss meeting new people and first impressions of new, far-away towns. It is partly because searching for a decent place to live from November is making me so tired and nervous, but a deeply unhappy, empty feeling creeps into me when I think that I will probably never again sit in
Chai Yurt in Kazan with a good friend and a small mug of black coffee, or walk on my own through the snow on top of the frozen River Volga in Tver, or read a Esenin poem aloud in class at Yartek in Yaroslavl.
Next diary: The Lie-in, the Witch and the Bathtub.
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Cat
non-member comment
hi
Hey mate, hope you have some luck finding somewhere nice to live sometime soon. Sounds like everything is so much more complicated out there- I really admire you for sticking at it. Hope everything is okay with you. I miss you! xx