Ivan

I would like to introduce you to my future husband. His name is Ivan. Ivan is 80 years old. Do not be alarmed – Ivan is also very adorable. He wears a tweed jacket that is too big and angular on his little shriveled body, along with a bright orange tie.

You may remember that last month I freaked out and hid when I thought that Communist Grandpa was in the living room. Well, it turns out that the fake-Communist was actually –  Ivan! I can’t wait to put our “how we met” story on our wedding website. He’d find it hilarious if he understood the Internet. Or English.

See, that’s the difficulty. We can’t even speak Ukrainian together because Ivan speaks Russian. He does know some German, though. When he came for dinner recently, he asked me in German – here comes the romantic part – my age and if I’m married. When I said I wasn’t, he told me I needed to get married, and then said that he’s unmarried (!!!!) and doesn’t drink or smoke. I really hope he’s still alive in 2 years so I can bring him back to America with me.

In all seriousness, now – returning to the subject of Communist Grandpa – something really scary happened. The communist LEFT HIS ROOM. Luckily I was at school at the time. He made it as far as the kitchen, yelling at Nadja because his pension check hadn’t come yet. No one told me that he could physically walk! I thought that he was forever bedridden and could only dream of ways to kill the American living down the hall. But no, he doubtless wants the money to order new parts for the complicated bomb he’s building that will be specially designed to like, go off when I sneak more apples. A heady mixture of romance and fear here, heady indeed.

More scary things

 If you know me well, you know my weakness for sweets and beets. However, I now realize that the cosmic life-force has a Dantesque sense of humor, and that the sugar factory was designed as an ironic punishment for my various sins.

Inside the heat is stifling. Do you remember in Lord of the Rings, when Saruman the wizard rips up the countryside into an industrial, orc-powered nightmare? Right. Steam belches from machines that tremble the ground. As you walk up ladders and cross narrow walkways, the heat grows ever more unbearable, itself seeming to sweat syrup. There were huge containers of hot amber sludge, and our guide let it drip out from a faucet on her hand, for us to sample. Her hands were very small for her body, and her nails long. I shrank back, having a phobia of tiny hands and of nails in general.

Deeper in, it grew suddenly cold. White fluffy flakes flew in air. It coated the walls and the floors, gushed out from tubes. Sugar filled my mouth and nose, it frosted my hair and greased my skin. At this point I started to worry that one girl with severe diabetes was going to die. Once outside I wanted to rip off my body and bare all my insides to clean air.

Fortunately the girl with diabetes did not die. Even more fortunately, this experience did not spoil my taste for sugary confections nor beets. I suppose it doesn’t matter, though – in this country, there is no day without treats nor beets.

Surprises

Recently I came home and Ilya told me there was a surprise in the bathroom. You know if those two words, surprise and bathroom, are in one sentence, something horrifying is probably about to happen. I’ve also learned to be wary of “strashnee” (scary) surprises around here. Every day brings another strashnee surprise (meaning, Ilya wears plastic vampire teeth and jumps out of corners/ from behind doors/ behind the shower curtain when I am half-naked and about to get in).

So what was the surprise? I will tell you. The surprise was THE BIGGEST FISH I HAVE EVER SEEN. In the bathtub. Alive. If you could call it alive, as it frantically gulped out its last in a cramped pan of water.

Later in the evening, the giant fish was moved to the kitchen, so he was even harder to avoid. I was trying to make tea without looking at his gasping, swollen body when Ilya called out, “Ashley! Tsookerky!” That is Ukrainian for “candy,” so of course I turned around, and Ilya was gripping the wriggling thing by its tail, even though it was half his size, and grinning wickedly.

I believe that’s what is called “getting Ukrained.”

There’s less than a month left of training. Then we go to our respective sites, where we’ll spend the next two years. I can’t believe I’m here and I still won’t know my actual destination until next month.

When I think of how long two years actually is, my heart and guts seize up.

But I am collecting beautiful things. Went to Kiev again and saw and was seen by many old eyes. In the cathedral, on every surface climbing up to the apse, they were Christs’, almond-shaped and mournful. Everything smelling warm of wax from candles. The square outside was unbearably bright, gold domes molten and gold angels trumpeting and terrifying.

Less harsh a beauty was the old bandura player, in fur hat and drooping mustache. He plucked silver sounds into the street. We walked between narrow buildings with their crumbling balconies. I saw a pale young man in black, walking a very small black pony. A little boy with an accordion in front of the city’s medieval portcullis.

I want to press them, all of them, into the hands of my friends, like round stones.

By the Khaharlyk sign

Here the town ends, as if it has run out of itself: bright-clapboarded houses dribbling sparser into broken fences, a few unused factories gaping. The road we took, knotted and potholed, now straightened out. It cut a black line over the fields, all gray-gold their skeletal stalks. I thought it a good road. “The road to adventure!” I said as a joke. Inside I whirled and wondered.

By the Khaharlyk placard, you can see a small graveyard flapping bows. Lena (my friend’s host mother) led us down, crossing herself and bowing before she entered. The headstones are carved with likenesses of the dead. Most square and solemn, though all fringed in plastic flowers – those fleshy, stoic faces I see on these streets every day.

Beside her father’s grave, which she kissed, Lena handed us candies. Chocolate with strange gelatinous filling. Red trees lining the field, dry corn sounds.

Lena’s dogs attacked a cluster of chickens, the walk back home. There was much squawking and screaming. A man and woman with granite expressions stared from a fence. Their yard was littered in garbage. A sickening clamp of jaws from the bushes – but then the chicken escaped, waddling as fast as it could across the street!

And then somehow we were all gathered in Lena’s mother’s house, being fed (we are always being fed by someone) borscht and bread and tea. The room was full of marigolds. The food hot, thick and good, and I was growing more and more sleepy, and I didn’t know whether I wanted to stay in the bright room forever, or to walk down that dark slick of road until I forgot myself.

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.