Kiev

Cold air in the station hall, and streams of shawled babusyas, thick-faced policemen, teenagers in tight pants and fur trimming. Gold tiles in mosaics overhead. At Cyrillic letters shifting in the train schedules, my eyes began to blur. Budapest, Moscow, Odessa, Lviv. I saw me in iced windows, ice in black trees past the train. Station names give a lurch to the gut: Mornings over ground I’ve never seen, and my flinty bravery and boots on.

And Kiev, finally. Apartment blocks, the paint peeling like a scabbed syphilitic face – these mix with the old city, stone streets, balconies. Red trees and narrow pink buildings trimmed white. Oh to be in 1910, a little wine-buzzed, and smelling like smoke and intrigue.

Instead, all day I felt like a giant baby, swaddled in my down coat. Always toddling behind. Our language teacher Ihra is trying to make us self-sufficient. She had us ask passersby how to navigate the metro, how to find streets and stations. I do all right. At a certain point in my interactions, there are no words I know coming out of mouths, and my heart stalls.

When my face went so raw I wanted to cry, those nights in winter walking home from campus, I’d pretend I was in Prague. I had just read The Unbearable Lightness of Being and it sounded just as good as any other Eastern European city, cold and gold and gritty. By my apartment stood a spindly tree and I’d look up through it when the stars were frozen. I didn’t feel warmer but I liked thinking about accordions.

My thoughts get too selfish and silly for Peace Corps – but I don’t feel fancy enough. And my ideal vision of me is absurd. It involves a long velvet jacket, laced-up boots, lace on my gloves… So what I really want is to go to a ball. Seriously, though, women here war with beauty. The product of their labors is a hacked-out thing, cosmetic layers and boot-polish, clothes tight and sparkly. No fellow lesbian librarians.

Really what I want is to be older. I always want to be older, and I get older, but then I like, go to Ukraine and I have no idea what’s happening and it becomes difficult to maintain a stately air. Romancing travel, how it ends up (like so much else) being romance with the self.

There is a wide avenue in the center of Kiev where you can stand and see a cathedral on one end, a cathedral on the other. All gold domes in a pale light, and the sober figures of medieval Slavs. There is a picture of me in front of St. Sophia’s. I’m pleased with it, because other people will see it, and it will have the worldly authority that here, as I am, I can’t convey.