(1) DZHANKOY
Today the Ukrainian Air Force destroyed a Russian military base in a city called Dzhankoy and many occupiers were killed, some of them perhaps the mysterious “Green Men” who arrived years earlier during the initial stages of Putin’s plan to overtake the country. There’s never been much to Dzhankoy, a city of roughly 35,000 according to recent figures, but it’s geographically important—a gateway city on the northern end of the Crimean Peninsula situated between the Donbass and those summer resort towns on the Black Sea coast farther south, Yalta, Alushta, and Alupka.
During a part of my life so distant it no longer seems real, I lived in Dzhankoy. I arrived there on a frigid January evening in 1997 to see Masha, a woman I’d met the previous summer when I was in Simferopol (the regional capital of Crimea) on business. Just like Cleveland, where I grew up, summer and winter—especially in eastern Ukraine—contrast harshly. That summer previous had been terribly hot, so hot that the air conditioner in my hotel room sputtered. I couldn’t sleep owing to the heat, and strolled the nearby streets of Simferopol past midnight, stopping for an occasional bottle of Baltika and a plate of fried potatoes at one of the local bars. Landing at Kyiv’s Borispol Airport six months later offered a distinctly new experience. It was cold, and the long suede coat I wore did little to keep it away—a penetrating and insistent cold. During the ten-hour drive from Kyiv to Dzhankoy, Masha’s father, seemingly twice an hour (for I was in a jet-lag daze) stopped the car, hopped out, and checked the highway for ice. All I remember were wheat fields in every direction and the occasional shuttered restaurant. I mostly remember being cold and very tired, but I was in love and love tends to conquer the body’s disagreements with the weather.
We arrived at their flat in Dzhankoy in the early evening. It was dark, and I don’t remember much except the sense I felt at finally being there. I unloaded my suitcases of the gifts I’d brought for Masha and her family, then we sat down at the table to eat. There was borscht, I’m sure, mashed potatoes, and those meatballs the Ukrainians call kotleta, and Masha and I were probably in bed my nine, too tired to make love. I watched her, remembering why I’d fallen in love with her in the first place: she possessed some ethereal brightness even in sleep, some brightness like a palimpsest that rose from the letters she’d sent me over the past six months. Love is hard to explain. She made me want to sing. The next day, after breakfast, I went out and met Dzhankoy. Alone. Masha wasn’t feeling up to par after the long drive, and needed to help her mother who, when she wasn’t working around the house—scrubbing floors, ironing sheets, and washing windows—was cooking. I gained five pounds during the first few weeks I spent in Dzhankoy.
It was an ugly city, and there wasn’t much to see. Everything was gray: the snow on the ground, the concrete of the apartment buildings, the schools and storefronts. Even the residents seemed to have a gray tinge to their skin, foreboding and a bit fearful. It was exactly the way my parents, having come of age during the height of the Cold War, would’ve imagined a Soviet town: colorless, lacking life and fervor. To the side of Masha’s building—all the buildings looked the same—was a sanitation reservoir, its icy surface studded with vodka bottles and all kinds of trash: diapers and newspapers, tires and old shoes. (In the summer it teemed with mosquitoes.) A few blocks beyond it, down a street that was nothing except mud and snow, was the city’s outdoor bazaar, empty on that Tuesday morning except for a few souls selling candy and toilet paper. I walked through it, and a few minutes later reached Dzhankoy’s Main Street, called “Heroes of Labor,” and was instantly attracted by a bodega advertising Heineken. The green paint winked at me, but they had none, only the usual Baltika, so I bought four cans and a bottle of vodka labeled with the profile of a black bear, secured them in my backpack, and kept walking.
Perhaps you’ve had a dream in which the world is dismal and will always be, but you can’t wake up. That was me that Tuesday in Dzhankoy. Block after block of nothing. The same gray buildings, the same streets criss-crossing oddly. In a park named after a famous Ukrainian poet, I sat on a bench and lit a cigarette. It was only two p.m., and already the sun was beginning to fall when a little girl approached me, her mother nowhere in sight. She spoke to me in Russian, of which I knew very little back then, but it was clear she wanted something. I had no candy in my backpack, but I did have a banana (a rarity for winter in Crimea) and a few Swiss francs left over from my stop in Zurich the previous day. I handed her the money and the banana, and to this day I wonder what’s become of her, that little girl who bowed to me like a ballerina and, gifts in hand, presumably went off to find her mother. She will always be Dzhankoy to me. In my mind she’s Liza.
That night Masha and I made love, and afterwards in the dim light of the room I studied the wallpaper. Green rainforest scenes, but I was thinking about the little girl, could see her little fingers and gray eyes that counted the francs as she walked away.
Twenty-seven years have passed. She’s probably a mother now, lost in the furious haze of war, doing her best to make breakfast for her children before they enter a grayer Dzhankoy than the one I knew. The bombs have fallen and more will fall. Many windows have shattered and many more will. War’s a story on the news unless you’ve been there, a headline unless you know the things that are truly lost. I was there when there were only lines for bread. I was lucky.
(2) THE PUPPET OPERA
June 1st, 1996 began with promise. From our sixth-floor flat in the Saltivka district of Kharkiv that morning, Masha and I could hear the schoolchildren gathering and could see from the balcony their bright uniforms and balloons. Although it was a Saturday, it was the ceremonial last day of school, and the children would bid their teachers farewell for the summer with small gifts before heading out for a day of fun. Most would be going to Shevchenko Park where a temporary carnival had been prepared by the municipality. We arrived just after noon, and the scene reminded me of the annual Cherry Blossom Festival held each May in my hometown of Barberton, Ohio. There were rides, some spinning and ferocious, some gentle, like the carousel. There was an old man twisting balloons into animal shapes for a few hryvnia, a booth offering cotton candy, and some older women who’d set up a table from which they’d sell homemade bracelets, traditional dolls, and makeshift games for the children.
Masha, who was more adventurous than I, offered me a ride on what appeared to be akin to the old Witches’ Wheel at Cedar Point, a terrible machine that took riders spinning fiercely around and then upside-down until the very notions of gravity and being earth-bound vanished. I hated it. I do not like to spin. After a few hours at Shevchenko Park among those blond and wondrous Ukrainian children, we decided to find something to eat before heading back to Saltivka to rest up for the day’s grand finale, Kharkiv’s famous Puppet Opera, which was to be held in one of the old theaters downtown. I wasn’t exactly excited about puppets, but Masha was, and assured me it would be a lot of fun. I trusted her. I trusted her because that ethereal light was there in what she spoke of.
We’d met the previous summer when I was on business in the regional capital of Crimea, a city called Simferopol. Six months later I flew back to Ukraine to find out what the budding romance might bring, and that winter we lived together in her family’s flat in Dzhankoy, a small city in the northern part of the Peninsula. Before heading south for the summer to a small fishing village called Rybache on the Black Sea where her mother and father owned a pansiyon, we’d decided to take a train up to Kharkiv where her aunt lived. I was unable to obtain a visa to enter Russia proper, but Masha had told me Kharkiv was the next best thing, in all aspects a Russian city. She’d spent time there as a girl, and I, the young lover, was intrigued at the prospect of she and I having our own flat for a few weeks. Her father, a man of means in the post-Soviet world, had a way of getting things done, and the flat, which smelled of enamel and fresh paint, was too enticing to pass up. I should also mention the fact that Evgeny—that was her father—had stocked the refrigerator with enough meat, cheese, beer, and vodka to hold a whole Soviet batallion in abeyance for a while. I loved it.
As for lunch that Saturday, Masha recommended one of her favorites when she was a child, the popular Ukrainian street food called rebenok. It's a concept not easy to explain to Americans, but you might get the picture if I say a thin layer of folded dough with ground beef, onions, and assorted spices. It’s popular among the Tatars, who still populate much of Crimea, and also with the Turks and certain eastern Europeans. It tasted good. It hit the proverbial spot. After eating two of them served on a paper plate by an old woman who was the prototypical Ukrainian aunt, Masha and I went back to the flat in Saltivka. It was going to be a long evening, with the Puppet Opera and all, so we napped. Perhaps I explored her breasts for a bit, but mostly we napped, and I remember dreaming of an old man who hadn’t eaten for days. He was barefoot, his bulging feet were ugly, and when I invited him to my mother’s house in Barberton he leapt at the dish of dog food my mother kept on the porch for Baxter, our long-dead Cocker Spaniel. He scooped up the food with relish, grinning wildly. Then I woke up.
At first I thought I was still on that damn Witches’ Wheel ride in Shevchenko Park, but then I realized it was me who was spinning, or something inside of me. Masha was in the shower preparing for the Puppet Opera—that much I could understand. I could hear the water running. I could hear the little CD player she kept there, which was playing the ever-popular “When Your Girlfriend’s Sick” by Kino. I could hear the sounds of the summer evening from the streets outside. I consciously processed those things before I was able to process the fact that I was sick unto death, and I couldn’t find the toilet fast enough.
Food poisoning was a fact of life in the former Soviet Union in the 1990s, especially for visitors. I knew the basic precautions regarding tap water (don’t swallow it) and unsanitary-looking restaurants. I’d even heard stories of poor Ukrainians manufacturing bottled water and the dreaded Fanta in their basements. I knew to shop at reputable places. Then I remembered the rebenok, which had tasted so good. But Masha wasn’t sick; she was splashing around and looking forward to the puppets. How could it have affected me and not her? It was then that I, moaning in bed and truly wanting to die after that first wave of vomiting and diarrhea, remembered something my mother—a nurse—had mentioned the previous Christmas about the Ukrainians having a tolerance to certain strands of bacteria (given to them in small doses over time) that might make me sick. I’d disregarded her advice at the time, focusing instead on the upcoming meal and the Chimay Red I was enjoying.
My illness, according to Masha, had lasted seventy-two hours, most of which I don’t remember. I do remember certain odd details, but I can’t say if they were dreamed or real: being on a blue couch, the smell of tuna, Evgeny talking about blankets, and the sounds of a soccer match on some distant radio. Five days later, when I was well enough to venture outside for a walk and some fried potatoes at a very reputable restaurant in Kharkiv, Masha told me that on that first night my temperature had risen to an ungodly 105 degrees, enough to kill some men. She was considering taking me to the hospital, but as she explained, “in Ukraine you go to the hospital to die. In fact, we have a saying here: the shortest road to any hospital leads directly to the cemetery, and most of those roads are named after Stalin.” I couldn’t eat my French fries after hearing that. Instead I just gazed at her in that gray and washed-out time that follows illness.
It goes without saying that we never made it to the Puppet Opera. I felt bad about that, but I was lucky to be alive, there on the bright side of earth. Next summer, I promised her, and as we sipped black coffee in that Saltivka restaurant I thought about puppets. What a strange concept, after all, the puppet. It’s not something you think about very often, its meaning these days having become more metaphorical than literal. Puppets in love, perhaps Masha and I were, stringed figures proceeding through youth toward the inevitable end of cultural difference and breakup and alienation. To be in love, I suppose, means being a puppet of a sort: one’s sense of self dissolves into another’s; one’s path becomes encroached by trees both dark and passionate. In a sense, we were puppets, Masha and I, strangers in love against history’s changing grain, woman and man accidental. But it had to be that way. There always exist forces greater than the ones we can see, dark forces moving backstage, raging and laughing incalculably.
Kharkiv, of course, has mostly faded from my memory. When I was there I was in love, and I was also sick. But what matters more is the city today—one of the frontlines of Putin’s mad desire to make Ukraine his own. I see the pictures on the news and weep. That the building in which Masha and I lived for those two weeks in 1996 is likely a mass of rubble now is almost incomprehensible. But we were there; we were in it. We lived and made love. We ate and danced in the living room. We survived a storm of hail and wind one midnight, slept, and awoke the next day to sausage and scrambled eggs, tomatoes, cheese, and cucumbers. We were there, and the city was on its way to becoming something special.
