On the floor of Anna’s room in the artist’s commune empty cans of spray paint sit in the corner. A Styrofoam mattress obstructing the doorway had steel netting nailed onto it, molded into what looked like flowing lava. Little bits of paper flew up in brief flight as the wind from my footsteps woke them. Colorful fingers made of plaster stood on the cluttered coffee table along with other knickknacks, a miniature kaleidoscope, a homemade pipe with wings and a propeller, and some incense holders.
A broken TV had been painted completely white save for a stenciled men’s bathroom figure over the screen, which lit up with static black and white ants when the TV was on. Skeletal wire forms like hollow clouds hung from the ceiling on copper thread. They glowed in the dark when the lights went out.
We had just been to the market in Shevchenko Square on the very outskirts of Kiev. There, grandmothers had come in for the day to sell potatoes, cabbage, carrots and onions from their gardens, $0.50 a pound. Fish from the thawing ponds and rivers were on display next to buckets of pickles and loose cigarettes. Anna led me around as we haggled with the women on the price of cottage cheese, sauerkraut or marinated eggplant. With each new purchase the bag I was carrying got heavier and heavier as it was filled with onions and cheese, wine and salo (salted pork fat).
I had taken the marshutka, a small private bus, out to the Northern tip of Kiev. Anna said she had a gun that we could shoot in the woods near her house. These woods mark the official end of Kiev and extend all the way into Belarus, though the Belarusian and Northern Ukrainian section of the woods were heavily contaminated by radiation from the Chernobyl meltdown in 1987.
The house sits on a hill just past a scrap-metal yard. It is secluded, a real escape from the city. From its high vantage point you can see the smokestacks and onion domed steeples of Kiev in the distance.
Disintegrating concrete steps crumble a bit as you step up onto the porch. In the entrance corridor the wall is bare in dirty and the floor is missing tiles. Artwork is strewn around the downstairs and discarded in corners after gallery appearances. Two bronze statues of some-or-another Soviet notable stood facing one another next to a shapeless wire sculpture. On the wall hung a proletarian scene of some cheerful workers taking a break, a grey factory in the background in what would otherwise be a country landscape.
Anna explained to me that this house had been requisitioned by the state from some high-level military commander. The house was converted into studio space and given to the National Academy of Arts, in whose possession it has remained. It was occupied by Soviet artists for decades, busy churning out “masterpieces” of Socialist Realism to grace civic centers across the Ukrainian Soviet Republic. Today, selected artists are given the space free of charge.
On the upstairs landing I met one of the other residents of the house, a tall Ukrainian girl named Ira with jet-black hair, cut into a bowl. A tall watercolor of a wrinkly gnome was drying by the window in her room. She told me later that she did illustrations for books.
There was a couple with a young daughter who lived in the small house on the property. The Dad did airbrush painting and the Mom made batik fabric like they do in Ghana. Their daughter was rambunctious and loved the attention of all of the adults gave her (not that I’m an adult, really).
I helped Anna fish out the rifle case from behind an oversized yoga pad that was wedged behind an antique mirror and some other miscellaneous junk. We walked down into the front yard to meet everyone, me with the rifle case and a bottle of my favorite unfiltered Belgian style beer. I slung the rifle case over my back and we walked down the hill and across the street where we entered the first little neck of woods. A few hundred yards on we climbed an overpass that stretched across a busy highway leading into the city, and then through another neck of woods that was eventually dissected by a trolley car that ran right through the trees.
Our merry group trudged along through the snow, which was still thick on the ground in spite of the recent thaws. The snow in the forest stays around long after the snow on the sidewalks because it is never cleared.
The little girl, Marta, was leading the group and would lie in the snow and roll down every hill we came to. She was learning English in school and told me about ten or eleven times that “I’m seven years old, my name is Marta!” In Russian, she told me that she was actually six, but had forgotten how to say that number in English.
In an empty field that interrupted the forest we decided to shoot. I unpacked the gun and was disappointed to see that it was actually only a pellet gun. I was under the impression that it would be a real rifle, and it certainly weighed as much as one with a wooden stock, full metal casing and an expensive scope too. It was probably better that it wasn’t a real gun though, as none of us had ear protection and Marta was running all over the place. We shot at a penciled cross on a piece of paper, but no one hit it because the scope wasn’t calibrated.
Over on the path someone pointed out a tiny mouse on top of the snow. It began to scrabble away but Marta was immediately on it and had it in her hands. The little critter was flustered after being dropped and scooped back up after trying to scurry away. This game went on for a few minutes until the mouse finally fell into deep snow and burrowed itself away from capture. Marta dug frantically and when she couldn’t find the mouse, she stomped on the hole in frustration.
It surprised me to see this little girl do that, to be cruel. Her Dad pulled her away angrily and chastised her. She ran off to pout. Luckily, the mouse reemerged a few minutes later unscathed, and we made sure not to point it out to Marta.
The leather of my boots was darkening with moisture and my socks were already soggy, so we made our way back to the house. This time one of the other guys carried the rifle.
Back in Anna’s room we unpacked the food from the market and started to boil some potatoes on a little hot-plate in the “kitchen,” which really amounts to a shelf with some spices on it and just enough room for a cutting board. I transferred the pickles, sweet celery root and eggplant salad into separate bowls while Anna made tea and heated up some gretchka, or buckwheat.
While Anna was making tea I scrolled through the music on her computer and was amazed to find a big collection of Bonnie “Prince” Billy, who is a folk singer from Kentucky, not well known in the States and virtually unheard of in Ukraine. I put on one of his familiarly weird songs with its eerie Appalachian sound, Southern vocal inflection, and grim lyrics.
After a while some of the others began to file in and one of them brought a bottle of Ukrainian samogond, or moonshine. This same guy who brought it also recognized the Bonnie “Prince” Billy song and I discovered the source of Anna’s collection!
We poured a few shots of the homemade spirits and then a few more. A hot plate appeared and we began to slow cook onions and celery root and pork fat directly on the griddle. There were handled pans that we filled with potatoes and cooked fixings, and then covered with chives, dill, cottage cheese and yellow sharp cheese. These dishes went under the hot plate to melt into a mini casserole. It was a Ukrainian fondue, but with more oils and fat.
A few more shots of samogond and a glass of wine or two (brought from France by Anna’s Ukrainian expat friend), and I was nearly falling asleep on the Styrofoam mattress that had been moved to the floor.
We got up together and everyone walked back down to the square where I missed the last marshutka of the night by a few seconds. We walked over to a bus stop where a couple of other late night revelers were trying to hitch rides with passing cars. Anna hailed an unmarked car and negotiated for him to take me home. As my unofficial taxi sped off, I saw my friends wandering off to find more wine.
