In the Countryside

Valentina and I left her apartment in time to catch the 9:30 bus to Suzdal. My host mother had laden me down with bags full of pie and chicken. We walked to the bus station, passing the spot where a former Russian Olympian had been killed by a drunk driver a few years back. With the summer solstice not long past, the morning sun was high already. Inside the bus the temperature was already mounting. We sped past old women selling cups of berries on the side of the road, wide open fields like the ones I’ve seen in pictures of the Midwest. Tall grass and wildflowers blanketed the smooth waves of earth with only the occasional grove of fir trees to break up the vast stretches of land. Bright bulbous church domes cropped up on the horizon and Valentina was trying to recall which centuries they were built in. In front of a couple of trailers a cluster of proletarians stood waiting for buses. Here we met Valentina’s friend, Marina, and Marina’s daughter’s boyfriend, Dima. Marina had been a coworker in the factory back in Soviet times. The factory had employed several thousand people before the collapse of the USSR, but now only a few hundred employees remain. Marina’s father was waiting on us in his old Lada. As we approached the car his face lit up in a metallic smile, gold upper incisors and canines shining out between a few greyed natural teeth, the less prestigious lower incisors mostly done in silver. The old man, Yuri Ivanovich, laughed and sang playfully as he drove down the rutted roads farther and father away from the town. Marina kept asking me whether I understood what everyone was saying. Even though I kept nodding in the affirmative, she demanded that her daughter’s boyfriend translate things into English. He spoke almost no English. They told me that Yuri Ivanovich had worked for the KGB in Soviet days. We had walked past the former KGB headquarters that morning, an imposing red and yellow building with a hammer-and-sickle crest on the main street in Vladimir. Across the street is a monastery, which had also been KGB offices. On the grounds there is a large cross, dedicated to the victims of anti-religious repression committed in the 1930’s. There are around 30 names listed, all executed near the spot. Yuri Ivanovich was born in 1933, which means that he was only 20 years old at the time of Stalin’s death. The KGB of the post-Stalin era was still surveilling the population heavily, but the late night arrests, interrogations facilitated by rubber truncheons and thumbscrews, and basement executions—one round to the cerebral cortex— were mostly coming to an end. The dacha, or summer cottage, sits half way down a dirt road. It is not much from the front, just a vinyl sided house with farm-style gables. Entering through the gate, cherries dangled down just a bit too red to be eaten. A few roughly milled planks supported an overburdened apple tree. Behind the house an enormous garden was being tended by a central-Asian man. Beets, potatoes, onions, garlic, tomatoes, peppers, peas, dill, basil, cucumbers, radishes, horseradish, cabbages, strawberries, blueberries, raspberries, all growing in neatly tilled rows. Dima told me that the forecast called for rain. We all looked up to the sky, but the clouds were puffy and white and didn’t seem in the mood to rain on us. Pairs took turns playing table tennis beneath a veranda built in a log cabin style. Hanging in the rafters of the roof was a portrait of Lenin, on the wall a kitschy souvenir from Cuba with Che gazing out above some cartoonish palm trees. The two teenagers, Marina’s daughter and her boyfriend, were glued to one another and kept their conversation to private whispers. After the table tennis we went to swim. I waded out into the gently flowing river while everyone else watched from the beach. Thick aquatic grass grabbed my wrists as I swam. One of our host’s friends picked us up in his car along the path and drove us through the fields to a spot where two rivers met, creating a gentle whirlpool. Our new friend showed me a spot to jump from and I climbed up the steep embankment through a patch of stinging nettle (which, when you touch it, feels like a bee sting and leaves a rash). With a running start I jumped down into the river, 15 feet below. Back at the house, I laid down in a hammock and was taking a little nap when a little girl, Sonja, Yuri Ivanovich’s granddaughter, came up and started talking to me. The eight year old told me about how many times she had been to Turkey and Egypt (seven and four, respectively) and how she was learning English in first grade. She recited the numbers 1-5, dog, yes, no, mom, dad. After a while she went and fetched her pet rabbit and dangled the scared critter over me. I was drifting off a bit when I started hearing the sound of one of those small sparkling cone fireworks that comes in the big value packs and is never very impressive. I opened my eyes and saw Sonja looking off into the field. I stood up and saw a fire blazing at the foot of the neighbor’s property, the neighbors running to and from the house with buckets of water. Something about being in a foreign place dulls one’s responses. There is the feeling of being a spectator watching a bunch of actors playing out “Russia.” It is a combination of language barriers, cultural differences, and an unwillingness to stand out or do something foolish that creates this detachment. Anyway, I evidently succumbed to this as I stood rooted to the spot watching the neighbors scrambling to put the fire out. Sonja was much more decisive and ran to get her father who emerged a minute later with a fire extinguisher and a look of total indifference. The gardener came running behind him with a shovel. At this I snapped back into reality, grabbing a shovel and chasing after them. Sonja’s father sprayed the blaze down with the cloudy discharge and the rest of us took to stomping out the little licks of flame with shovels. The flaxen wild grass had been burned into a charcoaled mess. Yuri Ivanovich started laughing with the neighbors and told them that they “didn’t need to be smoking.” After fighting the blaze, Marina decided it was time for a bike ride. I was handed a clattery Soviet model from the 1950’s and we took off down a rutted path into the forest. Marina dismounted beside a grove of pines and started surveying the undergrowth. Before long she found what she was looking for and dug her hand into a patch of thick undergrowth. She surfaced with three small red berries and handed them to me. They were like strawberry miniatures and much sweeter, the kind of strawberry flavor in a lollipop except not artificial. We hunted around for the baby strawberries (they call them zemlyanika, which translates into something like “earth berry”) with mosquitoes swarming every step of the way. The trouble with these tiny berries was that they were so delicate that digging them out through the thick grass with one hand while smushing mosquitoes with the other often left nothing more than smashed pulp and juice. I picked a few handfuls of berries and killed a few handfuls of mosquitoes before we moved on to another patch of forest. Along the way Marina pointed out wild raspberries and some poisonous red berries. An asphalt road bisected the forest and led to a derelict campground with cabins and a dining hall. Marina explained that this had been a children’s camp during Soviet times and had recently been abandoned for lack of funds. She lamented the fact and began telling me that things in the country had really fallen apart after the collapse of the Soviet Union. At the house Yuri Ivanovich had been cooking and he was happy as a lark when he saw us coming back through the gate. He ran inside and emerged a minute later with a handful of Soviet-throwback ice cream bars. In the kitchen he danced around, talking about the tomatoes that were going into the borsch and telling us why potatoes in the city were lacking in vitamin content. Over dinner we talked light politics and Yuri Ivanovich insisted that I would become president, and that once I had done so I must not forget him! With time to kill before heading back to Suzdal to catch the bus, I sat drinking tea and watching Marina’s daughter do the dishes. Yuri Ivanovich drove us back to the bus station but we were a few minutes late and would have to wait for the next one. I took a walk with Dima around the old bus station complex and asked him what he thought about the Soviet Union, since he had been born after its fall. He told me that there were good things about the USSR, things he had heard from his parents, but that things weren’t so bad now. The last bus of the day pulled into the lot and everyone started loading on. By the time we got on all of the seats were taken and there were about fifteen other people behind us. Everyone crammed in with just enough room to stand in the aisle, lined up back to back. We stopped along the way to pick up more people who wedged themselves into the space between the steps and the door. I was encircled by people, all 98.6 degrees of their body heat radiating and all sorts of interesting personal odors issuing forth. The last rays of the day’s sun were beating through the un-tinted windows of the bus. The temperature inside was rising and sweat was already pouring down my lower back. Up front, the driver was lighting a cigarette. Russians have this really bizarre fear of being cold and it extends even into the summer months. Rolling down the road in this oven the Russians sat stonefaced with sweat beading at their brows. Finally, some guy next to me reaches up and opens the roof hatch to let some air in—I almost turn to thank him— but no sooner does it open than the whole bus has an absolute fit. An older man stands up and slams the hatch shut, yelling “if you wanted to open the windows, you should have taken a taxi not a bus.” There was a toddler on board and apparently they were all concerned that the breeze would be the death of him. The kid’s mother was visibly angry that someone would be so reckless with her child’s health. Of course, no one said a word to the bus driver whose cigarette smoke was wafting back over the heads of the passengers. Walking home from the bus station it started raining, and then it started pouring. Valentina’s leg was hurting so we had to walk slowly through the torrents that filled the streets as the water came rushing down the gradient towards our house.

Transnistria

Within a few seconds of pulling my camera out of its bag a suited man came out and walked swiftly towards us. He flashed an I.D. saying that he was presidential security, and that we could not film here. The presidential office is the most imposing building in Tiraspol, the capital of the breakaway state of Transdnistria, and a huge statue of Lenin in front is an obvious monument for tourists and journalists to take pictures of. “Ne nado,” we don’t need it, said all of the security people. We were confronted another five times in the next 4 days. Fleur and I had come into the break-away region that morning on a bus from Moldova. I had spilled juice in my seat, which made the ride a bit uncomfortable as it leaked through the towel and right through the hole in my pants (see former post). The border crossing was uneventful except for the fact that it existed. We had to get off the bus and go to the immigration office where the Transdnistrian officials rifled through our passports before deciding that we were all right. Men with AK-47’s manned a road block a hundred meters back, looking pretty bored as they watched buses and cars trickle in all day. We passed through the border town of Benderi, which is part of Transdnistria though it lies on the Moldovan side of the Dniester River. The river forms a natural border and basically demarcates the de-facto state. Coming in, I saw “Russia brings peace and stability” painted on an overpass. Russian ‘peace keeping troops’ stood in a grassy median at the foot of the bridge on the eastern bank of the river, assault rifles slung over their backs and a tank barely concealed beneath camouflage netting. In Moldova, they referred to these soldiers as “Russian occupiers.” From the bus station in Tiraspol we walked from street to street asking for an address that I had written on some scrap paper. In the shadow of the main hotel, whose rusting sign was waving violently in the wind, we found the building where our hostel was supposed to be. I rang the bell to apartment 47, 4th floor, and a small woman named Olia answered the door. She handed us a key and explained how to get to another apartment where we would be staying. It turns out that this was not a traditional hostel. Our apartment was one room with a small kitchen on the 5th floor of a building with no elevator. The toilet and bathtub were in separate rooms and the gas stove had to be lit with matches. We didn’t linger in the apartment, but grabbed our cameras and headed back down Pravda (Truth) street until it connected with 25 Oktyabrya (October) street, which led to the center of the city. The streets were spotless and free of garbage, and compared to Moldova the place was downright tidy. There was no graffiti on the walls (or it had been painted over). The street was quiet and mostly empty, with only the occasional Lada or trolley car bumbling rustily down the wide avenue. The beer kiosks that dot the landscape of Ukraine and Moldova were noticeably absent on the streets of Tiraspol as were the enormous advertisements for Western companies. Instead of commercial advertising there were patriotic slogans and symbols hanging from buildings or plastered up on billboards. Blazoned across the front of one was “Tiraspol is our favorite city!” The only thing decidedly western in the country is a chain of restaurants called Andy’s Pizza, which is an American style pizzeria. I never found out who owns it, but they must have spent a lot of time in the States. In the main square is a colossal statue of a man straddling a rearing horse, the founder of the city. To his right is an enormous sign with the national emblem of the PMR, Prednestrovian Moldavian Republic, in its center: a hammer and sickle surrounded by ears of grain and a bounty of fruits and vegetables, a red star emblazed above it all. Across the street is an Orthodox chapel with a WWII tank situated right outside so that it almost blocks out the golden dome, Za Rodinu (for the motherland) painted on its side. A cemetery for the soldiers who died during the conflict with Moldova, an eternal flame and a couple of life-size bronze statues occupies the area next to the chapel. Transdnistria, or Prednestrovia (Приднестровье) in Russian, broke away from the disintegrating Moldovan SR in 1990 and declared itself an independent Soviet Republic. Gorbachev struck this move down, but the area remained independent in practice, and remained so after the dissolution of the Soviet Union. There was a short war with Moldova in 1992 that ended in a stalemate after Russian troops, left over from Soviet days, took the side of the Transdnistrians. The country is internationally unrecognized though it maintains a de-facto independence, issuing its own currency, maintaining its own police force, postal service, and military. Presumably, it also has its own foreign service, which is active only in Abkhazia and South Ossetia, two break away regions of Georgia and fellow unrecognized de-facto states. There is an Abkhazian and South Ossetian embassy in Tiraspol which Fleur and I visited. I sat down with a few of the employees there and explained that I would soon be going to Georgia and would like to see their countries, but that it was complicated because I am an American. They were very friendly and tried their best to be helpful, advising me to talk to the foreign minister about getting permission. Of course, I knew it would be impossible for me to go to either of these “countries,” particularly since South Ossetia is still a war zone. Fleur and I met with a local guy named Andrei who co-authored a book about Transdnistria and who works at the state-run radio station, Radio Prednestrovia. He took us around on a tour of the city, which consisted of all of the war monuments and was on the whole not especially interesting. When we passed the Russian peacekeepers Andrei insisted that we not film them. He explained that we would have to have a long talk with “some serious guys” if we were caught. Andrei told us that he was interrogated for 5 hours by the KGB after a journalist who he was showing around took pictures of the wrong things. The KGB, which still goes by that name, is still very active in Transdnistria. I asked Andrei whether there was any opposition to Transdnistrian independence in the country. He said that there was none and told us about a 2006 referendum where voters were asked whether they wanted independence “with free association with Russia,” or wanted to rejoin with Moldova. 97.7% voted to remain independent, though the European Union and other Western bodies did not accept this figure. The population of Transnistria is around 32% Moldovan/Romanian, so the 97.7% figure seems outrageously high. When we asked why Transdnistrian independence was unrecognized, Andrei said it was because the West was “stupid.” When pressed harder, he explained that America and the EU had succumbed to Moldovan “fascist” propaganda. A new president, Evegeni Shevchuk, was elected in Transdnistria this year in an unexpected victory for a candidate who Moscow did not support. Close to our apartment there was a banner with his face printed next to the slogan Poryadok budet (There will be order)! I asked Andrei what he thought of the new president and he told me that he was a good guy and was doing a lot. He said that Shevchuk had negotiated an agreement with Moldova for railway cooperation. Shevchuk had also fired the former head of the KGB, who had held the position for the last 20 years. The next day we took a marshrutka, or mini-bus, to the city of Dubassari, which had seen the first casualties of the 1992 conflict. The road between Tiraspol and Dubassari cut through wide expanses of farmland, with only the occasional old-world farm hut or rusting Soviet grain silo interrupting the rolling green fields. We came to the center of Dubassari where another soldier’s cemetery sat next to another WWII monument and another eternal flame. Another big government building and another memorial to the war for independence stood on either side of another wide empty street. I had heard that there were some buildings in Dubassri where you can still see bullet holes in the façade from the 1992 conflict. Not knowing where else to start, I went up to some guys in camouflage and asked them what they knew about this and how to find it. They turned out to be Russian peacekeepers, who have a strong presence in this city, and after struggling a bit trying to explain what we wanted, they just offered to give us a ride. We hopped in the back of the car next to one of the soldiers, with the other two in front, and sped off through this town. All but one of the guys were from Russia and they were excited that I had been there and knew about their cities. We became fast friends and when they dropped us off we all shook hands, glad to have met one another. The memorial didn’t turn out to be much, so we made our way back downtown. I had heard about a hydro-electric plant operating in the city, so I asked a police officer how to get there. He was a young guy and seemed really excited that a Western foreigner was in his town and speaking to him in Russian. Walking along, he asked me what kind of Russian profanity I knew before showing us how to get to the plant. We took a taxi down to the river where the hydro-electric plant straddled the bridge with Transdnistria on one side and Moldova on the other. We got out of the taxi in front of a little police hut, where I asked if we could film. The officer didn’t answer but asked for our passports and registration instead. After we showed it to him, he said that we could go down to the station, but couldn’t film it. We walked past another roadblock that was guarded by a Russian peacekeeper holding an AK-47. A few meters ahead was another trailer with about 15 more peacekeepers and some kind of heavily armored vehicle with a big machine gun on front. I spoke with another peacekeeper and asked if we could film. He directed us to a part of the bridge that looked out onto the Dniester River and said that we could film there. Of course, we were not allowed to film the Hydro-electric station or the peacekeepers. The one peacekeeper who I was talking to kept watch over us as we filmed, though he wasn’t being aggressive or trying to hurry us. I asked him a few more times if we could film him and the guns, but he said no. However, he offered to take a picture of Fleur and me together. Slinging his AK-47 over his back, he held her camera up and got a few shots of us. The official currency used in Transdnistria is the Transdnistrian ruble. There are only two ATMs in the country and they only spit out American dollars and Russian rubles, which you then have to exchange at a bank. I was trying to demonstrate this on camera outside of the bank when a man in a suit came out, flashed an I.D. and asked what we were doing filming. I told him it was a student project about traveling and I was just trying to explain the currency situation. He got on the phone and told us to wait. We stood there silently, the security guy with his arms crossed over his tie, not unfriendly just dutiful. A minute later the guy from the phone call, also in a suit, shows up and I explain to him again what we are doing. “Ne Nado,” he said, and then in English “we have problem!” He demanded we delete the footage. At the main market in Tiraspol a blind man was playing the accordion at the bottom of the steps, singing Russian love songs, cloudy blue eyeballs emerging from beneath his closed eyelids when he hit the high notes. Browned and wrinkled women with headscarves came out from another century for the day to sell. They hunched on the ground with their wares lying out on blankets. No one was yelling. The sellers were friendly and mostly excited to have foreigners. One man seemed angry with me for not speaking Ukrainian, or for being foreign, I couldn’t tell. We asked some women who were selling nuts how life in the country was. With a tincture of sarcasm they said it was fabulous. I was filming some market scenes when some guy comes up and tells me he’s security and that I am not allowed to film here. The nut ladies hassled him a bit, but he just shrugged in a way that said, “I’m just doing my job.” Walking around town looking for interview with locals, I met one young guy named Alexander who told me that the new president was a good guy and was doing a lot. He said that Shevchuk had negotiated an agreement with Moldova for railway cooperation and had fired the former head of the KGB. He also told me that Transdnistria was the victim of Moldovan propaganda and was internationally unrecognized as a result. When I asked about internal opposition and calls to rejoin with Moldova, he said that there were none and that 97.7% of Transdnistrians supported independence. We met another young guy named Oleg in the main square who talked to us about his country. He told us that things had lightened up under President Shevchuk, particularly since the former head of the KGB had been fired. He said that up until a few months ago the KGB had been really paranoid about spying and had committed human rights abuses against suspected foreign spies. Oleg said that the KGB has grossly exaggerated the spying problem since in his own estimation “only about 2-3% of the foreign tourists were actually spying.” I had been corresponding with a girl named Velena who lives in Tiraspol. She and two of her friends came to our apartment. We sat on the floor and talked about their country. They explained to us that the West, which was just responding to Moldovan propaganda, was persecuting their country by not recognizing it. I asked about internal opposition in the country and why ethnic Moldovans, who make up 32% of the population in Transdnistria, don’t support reunification with Moldova. One of the guys, Roma, explained to me that the Moldovans had also fought in the civil war and that they too supported its independence. In fact, 97.7% supported Transdnistria’s independent status. The other guy, Dima, told me about Shevchuk’s firing of the former head of the KGB, who was wanted for crimes against humanity committed while working for the KGB in Lithuania during Soviet times. Fleur asked how this kind of guy could have held this position for 20 years if he was so bad? Dima explained that “all politicians are criminals.” One of them mentioned Shevchuk’s success in negotiating a deal with Moldova that would open up railway connections between the two countries. The other two chimed in at this, saying that it was a great accomplishment. I asked whether, if given the choice, they would rather Transdnistria be absorbed into Russia—like a kind of exclave, another Kaliningrad— or reunited with Romania? Roma and Velena immediately said “join with Russia.” Dima said Moldova. The other two gave him sharp looks. Roma, with an edge in his voice, asked “why?!” Dima was quiet. The next day at the train station we were waiting for our bus to arrive to take us to Odessa. Fleur had gone off to get something to eat and so I was sitting on the curb and decided to take a picture of a brick smokestack and some ugly Soviet building. I took a quick shot. A man came up and told me not to photograph here. Crossing the border back into Ukraine, I was called off of the bus by the Transdnistrian border guards who proceeded to tell me that my crossing into Ukraine was not legal since I did not have an exit stamp from Moldova. Of course, when crossing into Transdnistria you do not get an exit stamp from Moldova, since it is considered their territory. I told him that I was now exiting Moldova but he said that Moldova was 80 kilometers in the other direction. I had read about this kind intimidation at the borders, which is just an attempt to get a bribe, so I told the guard that I knew for sure that I was exiting legally. After repeating that it was illegal once again, he dismissed me. That morning we had returned the apartment key to Olia. She stood in the doorway still in her nightgown as we thanked her and told her what a good time we’d had. I started telling her that I had been making a short film about the country and that Fleur would be writing a travel piece. A worried look flashed momentarily across Olia’s face. Regaining her smile, she told us just not to say anything bad about the country because we were registered here under her name and in her apartment. She said that she didn’t want anyone to come knocking on her door.

Moldova: A Poor Country With a Fun Gypsy Feel

The train ride to Moldova took 15 hours, from 8:30 a.m. until 11:30 p.m., most of the time being spent sitting at border crossings waiting on slow moving border guards and customs officials to check the whole train. Hours passed slowly. The countryside was pretty, though littered with plastic bags and bottles of beer. The bag of snacks was dwindling, not enough pretzels, not enough beer, not enough grapefruit juice. The Moscow-to-Chisinau had mostly emptied in Kiev, and most of the remaining passengers were getting off well before reaching Moldova. By the time we hit the border, my friend Fleur and I were almost the only people in our wagon. Rolling into Chisinau, I was immediately struck by the lack of capital flair. The main train station was a dull affair (in contrast to the stations in Kiev, Moscow, St. Petersburg, Odessa, and other big Soviet cities), and the feeling of provinciality hung over the dull buildings built in the later Soviet style—cheap 1970’s eyesores. We managed to get a hold of our host over Skype on the McDonalds Wi-Fi. Lena, a 20 year old German, picked us up and brought us back to her apartment in a high-rise Khrushchevka (build under Khrushchev, of poor quality). She was a volunteer with the European Voluntary Service, which is a bit like the American Peace Corps. She lived with a few other Germans and one Belgian guy. Fleur, who is from the Netherlands and lived in Berlin for a while, was right at home speaking German and Dutch with our new friends. Chisinau was an interesting mix of Soviet and Romanian. Moldovans are really just Romanians who were separated when Stalin decided to incorporate the Bessarabia region of Moldova into the Soviet Union after it was taken by the Red Army. The Moldovan Soviet Socialist Republic was created and a policy promoting Moldovan national heritage was put in place as a means to stifle pro-Romanian sentiments. They started writing Romanian in the Cyrillic alphabet and calling it the Moldovan language. In 1990, as the Soviet Union was falling apart, the Moldovan Soviet changed the language policy and brought back the Latin alphabet. Strong nationalist parties took control and there were cries for reunification with Romania. Radical elements wanted to expel all of the Slavic peoples (Russians and Ukrainians mostly), who made up a majority in some regions. I’ll deal with that history separately. For whatever reason, Moldova remained its own nation and will probably continue to be its own nation since Romania has now joined the EU, and the EU doesn’t want to take on the poorest country in Europe. Downtown Chisinau is basically just one street with a few big government buildings and some Western high-end stores that have come in to cater to the ever-present small group of super rich in every post-Soviet country. Most of the old buildings are crumbling ruins. Lena took us to an abandoned theatre. We had to climb through what used to be a window to get inside, and I ripped my pants in the process. The building used to be beautiful and opulent. Intricate Corinthian columns and ornate moldings were now covered with graffiti. The floor was rubble, bits of plaster and stone chipped or torn from the walls and ceiling. Trash filled the corners. In one of the stairwells was a dirty cot where someone had obviously slept the night before. The ceiling had fallen away in parts, leaving the rooms completely exposed to the elements. This had probably once been the most beautiful building in the city. The Soviet buildings aren’t fairing much better, particularly the housing blocks on the outskirts of town. The main government building in the center has a big pedestal in front where an enormous Lenin used to stand. He fell quickly after the Soviet Union. On both sides of the building were semi-permanent protests, one about discrimination against blacks in Moldova and the other set up by a veteran of the Transdnistria war who wanted government benefits. I knocked on the door of the little shack where the veteran and his wife were living. His wife emerged from the smelly room with a toddler by her side. She agreed to an interview the next day. Pavel, a 19 year old Moldovan and a friend of Lena’s came along with us to the interview to translate. Inside the shack it was hot and smelled strongly of body odor. The place was heated by a small woodstove and there were no signs of a water hose or spot to cook. A few socks were drying on a piece of string strung across one wall. The woman sat on the dirty sleeping pallet with the toddler, while Fleur, Pavel, and I squeezed in on the cardboard floor. The interview was conducted in Romanian. The lady told us that her husband had been wounded in the war and was now an invalid, unable to work. They were hoping to get some kind of benefits from the Moldovan government so that they could buy an apartment. She told us that when Joe Biden came to Moldova, she and her husband had been chased out. She went on describing their life in the shack, a vacant expression on her face, speaking at an abnormally timid pace. She said that she was 44 years old, though I would have guessed 62 judging by the wrinkles and her generally tattered aura. I was too distracted by the surroundings to pay much attention to the interview, which started to sound like a bunch of rambling to me. The toddler, Gabriella, didn’t smile once, even when Fleur tickled her cheeks in a girly maternal way. While interviewing her, we met a young guy named Maksim Nidelku who was a self-proclaimed Moldovan-Romanian nationalist. We went with him to the park for another interview in which he detailed Moldova’s historical connection with Romania and how the Soviet “occupation” had created an artificial division. He claimed that it was the fault of a weak former president that Moldova had not been reabsorbed into greater Romania. On his jacket he wore a ribbon with the colors of the Moldovan flag. He rubbed his knuckles nervously during interview and balled his hands into fists. He talked a bit about the break away state of Transdnistria and said that it was being “occupied” by Russians and was just an arm of Moscow. He suspected that it would reunify with Moldova at some point. When asked if he would fight to regain the territory he answered with an emphatic affirmative, saying that he would take up arms with the hope of Romanian and NATO backing. Not likely. Moldovan culture is like one big wine-fuelled street festival with a strong gypsy feel. The markets in Chisinau were lively and chaotic, with people yelling back and forth over crates of pomegranates and madcap arrangements of tacky electric picture frames that make noise and have a moving light that simulates flowing water—the kind they always have in Chinese restaurants. On the sidewalk old ladies sell fatty cuts of beef and whole chickens with the heads and gizzards stuffed inside. There is no refrigeration and the meat just sits on newspaper all day in the sun. I bought a pair of handmade fur-lined slippers. I asked the lady what kind of fur it was, she answered proudly: dog. Moldovan food is quite a bit better than the bland Slavic cuisine. Wine is always the centerpiece, and it comes in the liters. Because of its more Southerly position, fresh vegetables play a much larger role in the food, though they are still very heavy on the cheese and meat. Most interesting for me was a dish that was really just grits, like what we eat in the south, though without the cheddar cheese. We sampled the local cuisine, particularly the wine, over a few parties with our new German expat friends. We also went to a salsa club in Chisinau, which was tremendously boring for me, though the salsa dancers were surprisingly good. Two days was too short a time for Moldova, but Fleur and I had to be on our way. We said goodbye and hopped on a bus bound for the breakaway region of Transdnistria.

Artist's Commune

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.

The Blind Leading the Blind

Two blind men with canes were waiting to cross the zebra stripe that bisects the busy street. They flailed their canes about, feeling for cars, trees, people, and snow banks. A man with an acne-scarred face and an off-kilter beanie hat held close to his friend in a dark leather jacket with sheep-skin lining. They both gazed absently at some undeterminable point in space, concentrating on the sounds around them. As it swung about, one of the canes nearly hit a young girl in the face. She recoiled and stared at the men as if they had done something quite unseemly. Standing at the crosswalk, I put my hands on their shoulders, applying a bit of pressure— telling them to wait. They could hear the cars going past, but could not gauge the distance between them. When a small lull in the traffic came I helped them across the street.
We made it to the other side, though the two men had been hesitant to cross since they could still hear the engines and the sound of the tires rolling over the snow. A driver had stopped to let pedestrians go, but they couldn’t see that and I didn’t know how to explain it in Russian. One of the men asked me “can we cross?” “Da,” I said.
I left them in the park, assuming they were capable of feeling their way through. It was a pathetic sight watching them step into filthy unseen puddles and stagger into piles of melting slush. The melting icicles drip down onto the sidewalk now that the thaw has begun. The blind men may have thought it was raining.
A big tree grows through the middle of the sidewalk, and the two blind men stopped short in front of it, feeling it with their canes. What was this obstacle in front of them? Not a person because it doesn’t grunt or squeal when the cane hits it. Not alive because it doesn’t jump out of the way. The muffled thwack as the cane hits probably suggested that it was a tree, or perhaps a signpost.
They stepped to the right to pass but the man with the acne-scarred face found himself reeling in deep snow. They stepped back, together. In front of the tree again they felt around for the presence of empty space with their canes, drawing a mental map with this intimate cartography. After a few seconds of surveying and plotting, the two men decided to make a pass on the left side. They made it.
Physical disability in this country is incapacitating. There is very little support for invalids or the disabled, neither social nor infrastructural. This leaves many of them as beggars. The other day a man with a horribly disfigured face stood at the bottom of the stairs in the metro with a sign that read, “Help me please.” One of his eyes had severe discoloration, a striking opalescent white where there should have been coffee colored iris. His lips were frozen into a scowl, an expression of agony, disfigured by some nerve damage or maybe a stroke. I dropped a few loose bills into his bag. I wasn’t sure whether he registered it or not.
A young gypsy-faced girl hobbled down the length of the trains on crutches, stopping every few feet to recite some spiel in Ukrainian. Her legs were twisted, as if by rickets, into grotesque contortions and paralyzed in a living rigor mortis. She would have been delicate and pretty in another life.
Grizzled geriatrics stand in the corners with mittened hands or cardboard coffee cups extended to collect change. Some of them mutter prayers under their breath. They seem absent, chewed by dementia maybe.
People help most of the time. On every pass there is always someone who drops a few Kopecks or a few Griven into the collection bags, cups, or hands- equivalent to about $0.50. Is it enough to live? Not by a standard that we know.
I watched the two blind men for a while after I left them in the park. The sympathetic impulse to shepherd them through the thicket of cigarette-and-beer kiosks and snowed under ornamental landscaping left me pinned to the spot pondering the moral implications. Surely, I thought, they wouldn’t be strolling about if they weren’t confident in their navigational capabilities. Would it be patronizing to stand behind them and lead them along by the shoulders? Ultimately, I decided against it.
As I turned the corner to the Zoloti Vorota metro entrance, I saw them walk to a dead end, a park bench placed against a snow mound. They could not walk through the park, but had to hug the perimeter in a trajectory of right angles, using the landscaped border as a guide. They would soon come up against the steps, covered in ice and snow and treacherous whether one is blind or not. Would there be someone to help them make their way down the stairs? They held one another close, whipping their canes around like a pair of feelers, tugging left to avoid trees. The blind leading the blind.
Alongside the beauty of this country there is a foulness that emerges unexpectedly from time to time to sting you. Beautiful girls in fur and delicate hosiery juxtaposed against the maimed men huddling in the entrance to the metro for warmth. Young men in the middle of the day sliding along the walls for support, a liter of cheap vodka vandalizing kidney and liver, stripping them of cognizance, and perpetuating the demographic trend of 60-year male life expectancy. The latest model Porsche Cayenne speeding past the crosswalk where two blind men wait to cross the street.

Pickle

I bought a pickle in the metro station on my way home today. The pizza I had at lunch had been small and I inadvertently paid about double what I owed, so by mid afternoon I was feeling rather foolish and rather hungry. The pickle only cost $0.15 and was much more satisfying. I bit off the end of it with my front teeth and crunched it with my molars. The vinegar so acidic it must have eaten away the thinnest outer layer of cells on my tongue.
Wearing the customary face of total indifference, verging on a misanthropic scowl, I passed the little card table where this woman was selling homemade produce. She had a type of sauerkraut and a tray full cabbage leaves stuffed with rice and meat. The pickles were in the center of the table. They were swimming in a milky bath of acid in a clear plastic drawer that would have been better suited for storing old pay-stubs and tax returns.
Next to her was a younger girl selling currants in big glass jars that she had sat on the dirty stone floors. People had been tracking filth through this corridor all day. The grey slush sticks in the tread of boots and melts in the relative warmth of the underground passage. Muddy slop covers the whole floor, and puddles form if the workers don’t squeegee it every few minutes. The granite blocks that pave the floor are completely for this climate. Rain and melted snow makes them impossibly slick. How many hips are broken on the steps leading down to the corridor, I can only guess.
These sellers had pitched their little stands just in time for the rush hour swarms that would come rushing out of the station. Maybe a few would stop to buy something. Men without wives to cook for them; wives without time to cook; young professionals who left the village and miss folksy fare. However, most of the horde would just flow past with blinders on.
There is a word in Russian to describe a traffic jam of people. They say tolpa, which is distinct from the word for a traffic jam of cars (probka). As nearly everyone relies on public transportation in this part of the world, the congestion can be horrendous. Like tens of thousands of bees in an immense underground hive adorned with icons in the style of socialist realism, they undulate and oscillate moving to and from the exits. A screeching drone fills the subterranean metro chamber as the train rolls in. A great mass of souls files out of the newly arrived train, and another mass squeezes itself in. Everyone rushes for the escalators.
The metro station is a hub for economic life. Semi-permanent vendor stalls cram together both underground in the station and up on the street. Each stall tries to corner some market. There is a stall for meat, a stall for central-Asian bread, for candy, for school supplies, tea and coffee, DVDs, and one for slippers. Sometimes old women sit at card tables and sell individual cigarettes for 20 kopek, or around $0.04. There are newspaper stands, where I buy my Komsomolskaya Pravda, and snack stands where I buy my pretzels.
I had passed by the woman selling pickles. My stomach felt sorely empty. I hesitated and then stopped, interrupting the flow of the mass behind me. I made an about-face and went back to the little woman, all wrapped up in a thick coat and a fluffy knit hat. I asked her how much her pickles were.
“Fifteen Hriven per kilo,” she said.
“How much for one?” I asked. She thought for a moment. People usually buy in bulk here, and I understand why. Often times I will go to the store and they will have none of the products that I want to buy. When they are stocked it is exciting and I feel the strong urge to buy their whole inventory and bring it home to store in my own little cache.
“One Hriven,” she said. She put a plastic bag over her hand, fished one of the pickles out of the acid bath and handed it to me. I paid her the money and munched on my pickle as I climbed the stairs out onto the street.

Ukrainian Food: meat, grease, and sour cream

One major way in which the United States differs from the rest of the world is in its lack of a national cuisine. There are a few patently American dishes, like hotdogs, boiled peanuts and corn bread, but nearly every other dish is a hybridized form of some other nation’s culinary fare. French fries are Belgian, pizza is Italian, fried chicken is West African, and hamburgers are [allegedly] German- from Hamburg. Not to mention Mexican, Chinese, Indian, and Thai, which have also found their way into our national culinary culture. Of course, we are a nation of immigrants, so it’s perfectly sensible to be this way
In Eastern Europe, however, national cuisine is still a defining characteristic, as defining even as language. Ukrainians eat Ukrainian food every day, for every meal, and have little desire to broaden their tastes. Ethnic food has hardly taken off. You can find an odd assortment of Italian and Japanese restaurants in the cities, but there is little beyond that. In Moscow, a city of over 10 million people (larger than New York), there were only 2 or 3 Indian restaurants. I have only seen one in Kiev (a city of around 6 million).
I have been living here for nearly a month and have eaten nothing but Ukrainian food. Every day I wake up to a Ukrainian breakfast, go to a Ukrainian cafeteria for lunch, and come home to a Ukrainian dinner. If I go out to dinner, it is to a Ukrainian restaurant.
There is no real breakfast food here, so the morning meals vary from day to day. Some days breakfast is fatty sliced sausage or cheese laid over thickly buttered bread. Fried eggs are popular, though they never fully cook the egg white so it is a bit like eating cold snot. Some days it will be thick sausages that taste like bologna, other days it will be hot-dogs and pickles. One morning I was given salmon patties and gretchka, or buckwheat. The safest dish is kasha, which is basically just slightly sweetened oatmeal.
If breakfast did not pack on enough calories from fat, then lunch certainly does the trick. The first course is usually a salad, but do not let that confuse you. Salad here means a few vegetables to go with the mayonnaise. Borsch, a bright pink soup made from beets and cabbage, is a staple and is delicious with a dollop of sour cream. Then come potatoes and stroganoff or maybe fried cutlet. Finally, a serving of vereneki, or dumplings, with more sour cream on top. I usually wash it all down with a glass of chilled berry tea, or compote.
Dinners are a somewhat lighter affair, consisting of soup and some kind of meat entrée. Potato patties stuffed with ground beef, ground pork cutlets with onion, ground fish patties, or dumplings are typical. If eating at a restaurant, I wash all of this down with a liter of beer.
The other day I walked into the kitchen to find my host mother preparing food. She had a big bowl of slimy dark meat that she was about to fry with onions. Fearing for the worse, I asked her what kind of meat it was. She smiled and said “pechonka,” or liver! I flatly refused to eat it in spite of her protests and insistence that it was “vkusno,” or tasty.
Even though it is usually over-salted, bland, greasy, fattening, starchy, and reheated in the microwave, I have been enjoying the food. The extra calories are absolutely necessary in the extreme cold, even if you can feel your blood running thicker.