“Renewal” contributor

(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.

(3) MORSKAYA STREET

I’ll never forget the pier, at that time a broken-down affair of columns and planks withered and naked. Sometime in November, months after the vacationers have returned to Moscow and Poltava, Kharkiv and Kyiv, the winds begin bearing down on the Black Sea coast. The pier, Masha’s brother Oleg told me, had succumbed a few years before. We sat under its skeleton smoking cigarettes and drinking homemade Madeira on a Saturday morning as the beachgoers filled the coast to our left and right.

Following the two weeks Masha and I had spent in Kharkiv, nearly a week of which I struggled to overcome a severe bout of food poisoning, we’d taken the train south to Crimea’s regional capital, Simferopol, where just before dawn her father picked us up and drove us to Rybache in his beat-up beige Lada. He and his wife Irina owned and operated a pansiyon there, and I was excited to finally see it. He stopped the Lada, Irina opened the great green metal gate, and we were in. It was only nine a.m., but it was already very warm. On a picnic table set up in one corner of the courtyard, a man and woman sat before their breakfast. I was later to learn that they were man and mistress, not man and wife, and that the man, Igor, was a wealthy importer from Poltava. If the mistress didn’t prove it (a woman of whom his wife up north was likely aware), his paunch did. He had fondnesses for blueberry vodka and grilled pork, both of which I’d later acquire myself.

After Masha’s mother situated us into our room—the only one in the pansiyon with air conditioning, and I was damn thankful for that—we sat down for breakfast along with Oleg and his wife Nastya. It was the typical Crimean summer breakfast: boiled eggs, cheese, sliced tomatoes and cucumbers, and that good white bread the Ukrainians call baton. Masha was tired after the long ride from Kharkiv, but I, being both the boyfriend and the ardent tourist, set out with Oleg to discover this place called Rybache. We’d be spending the summer there, and I was eager to explore.

In 1996, Rybache was—and most likely remains to this day (aside from Putin’s warplanes flying occasionally above)—a fishing village that during the summer transformed into a coastal getaway. Like Masha’s, a number of families ran pansiyons that catered to vacationers. The prices back then were cheap; a room cost only four or five dollars a night, but guests had to supply their own food and drink. Oleg took me down to the beach, which was only a two-minute walk down Morskaya Street, and the scenes were beautiful. The houses that lined the street were well-kept, with flowers in great plastic containers and scrubbed walkways. The people who lived inside them, however, possessed suspicious eyes, and somehow knew at once that I was an American and had some connection to the Budanovs. Perhaps it was my Ohio State cap that gave it away; perhaps it was simply the way I walked, with Oleg steering me this way and that.

I was struck by how neat everything was. There was no trash to be seen, no watermelon rinds or newspapers strewn about, and the beach itself was lovely. I would’ve preferred sand to the smooth stones, but the water was crystal-blue, more lake than sea, and the people who waded in—waving back to their companions as if they were embarking on some great journey—could’ve been Americans at Nags Head. The children had their buckets and floats, the adults their coolers full of Baltika and sandwiches, and all wore skimpy trunks, no matter how obese they were. (Later on, Masha would tease me for wearing long board-shorts in the American style.) Down the way a bit was a small cafe that offered drinks and snacks; it was called Paradise, and there Oleg and I sat down for glasses of cherry juice. He was a serious man, a few years older than me, and later would insist on my marrying Masha, but that day we were simply friends enjoying the scenery.

Following a short rest in Paradise, we ventured into Rybache proper. Like most such destinations, once you’re blocks removed from the coast things change. The village didn’t have a downtown, per se, but it did have the semblance of a business district, with a small grocery, a butcher’s, a post office, and a school. Even Eden, perhaps, had its realities. And there the Soviet-style apartment buildings were the same as those in Dzhankoy, gray, drab, and rundown. But it’s in those drab corners where you really get to know a place, and Rybache, though lovely and summer-swept that June day, possessed a winter soul, as well, an old Soviet soul that was readily apparent in 1996, just a few years removed from Ukrainian independence. Moreover, I sensed—just like I had in Dzhankoy and Kharkiv—that Rybache was a Russian city. Igor of the blueberry vodka and pork called himself a Russian, as did most of the people I met there. As such, it was no surprise to me when Putin sent the “Green Men” in a few years ago and annexed Crimea. No one resisted. No one seemed to care, and I should’ve known it the day Oleg and I sat under the pier. Our conversation had briefly moved to politics and world events—the war in Yugoslavia, the pending re-election of Bill Clinton, and all those former Soviet satellite states attempting to rise from ruin, corruption, and poverty. He considered himself Russian, and for reasons I didn’t completely understand at the time, hated and distrusted the Ukrainian authorities, especially President Kuchma. I supposed he feared them, believing they’d try to erase all traces of Russian influence from Ukraine, particularly the language. Perhaps he had a point, but it’s one that’s been shattered by the events of the last two years. It’s Putin who’s the ethnic cleanser, but even now I believe Oleg would disagree, even as his world turns to rubble, just like the pier. We know not what fruits the fears of our youth might bear when we are older.

Nonetheless, I surmise that Rybache and the villages like it across the Black Sea have been, and will continue to be, largely unaffected by the war. Without industry and manufacturing, they don’t seem to be targets for either side these terrible days.

(4) EVGENY

One Sunday morning a week or two into my stay in Rybache that summer, Masha’s father Evgeny and I hit the road in his beige Lada. Sunday was bazaar day in Simferopol, and he wanted to get there early. His wife Irina had prepared a shopping list (I can still see her stern Cyrillic script in blue ink), and Masha had prepared a list for me, as well. She wanted pop music CDs, a diversion her father annoyingly agreed to. Her love of music, I was afraid, would one day surpass her love of me. A fraction of that ethereal light I spoke of earlier came from the fact that she was an accomplished pianist. She played beautifully, and to watch such an artist at work is to witness hints of that light. Six months prior to my winter journey to Dzhankoy, she sat down to the piano in the lobby of the Simferopol hotel where I was staying and played Brahms’s “Lullaby.” I suppose I fell in love with her then.

Out of Rybache, the roads in that part of Crimea begin to twist. The hills rise to veritable mountains on the approach to Simferopol, curling asphalt lanes often snow-covered in winter. I’m prone to carsickness, but Evgeny turned the radio on loud and urged me to take deep breaths and focus on the feast we’d be having the next night. Igor would be returning to Poltava the following Monday, and Evgeny wanted to send him away with a bang. (I realized later that he’d paid the Budanovs well, and had for a number of years. Was it the mistress factor? Maybe. Was he a shady character? Definitely.) That bang would be blueberry vodka and grilled pork among other delicacies, Igor’s favorites, and this time I’d be partaking of the feast. So Evgeny and I went shopping.

The outdoor bazaar in downtown Simferopol was a grander affair than I’d expected. Everything was for sale inside those gates: clothes and shoes, cosmetics and purses, fruits and vegetables, meats and fish, toiletries and baskets, linens and towels, calculators and soccer balls, honey and liquor, I mean everything. And Evgeny had contacts there, just as he did all over eastern Ukraine. He had to get the pork first, and I followed him to a tented area in the corner of the bazaar where he introduced me to a man called Ruslan, an imposing, bearded fellow who was sitting on the tailgate of one of his pair of vans. The deal done, we then proceeded toward the fruits and vegetables, and while he selected enough onions, potatoes, carrots, and lettuce to feed a Soviet batallion, he tasked me to buy the tomatoes and cucumbers. I bought big bags of each, then peaches for Masha and me (which were terribly expensive) along with bananas for Oleg’s toddler. After securing those exotic fruits (for most Ukrainians in 1996), I met Evgeny where the alcohol was sold. He bought two flats of Baltika (forty-eight cans) and six bottles of vodka (three plain and three blueberry). All that stuff was a shitload to carry around, but we weren’t finished, not yet. He still had to get Nescafe and cigarettes for Irina, and I had to find Masha’s CDs. Ninety minutes later, we were back in Rybache.

It was a yawning Sunday afternoon, too cool and cloudy for the beach, and while Masha and her mother did laundry and cleaned the bathrooms (Oleg’s little Dachshund, Beamer, following their every step), I accompanied Evgeny, whose afternoon task—aside from his ceaseless pounding of nails for a new wing of the pansiyon—was to prepare the meat for the next day. I knew a little about marinades, having watched those cooking shows on cable TV from time to time, but I didn’t know much. The pork itself looked as imposing as its seller, Ruslan: mangled chunks and strips in a plastic sack marked with green and yellow lettering from some Moscow conglomerate. Evgeny took them out, stacked them on a tray that depicted the Brazilian rainforest, then started in on the marinade. It’s a pleasure to watch a man cook, almost as good as it was exploring Masha’s body, and the man knew what he was doing. He quartered several onions and lemons, mashed cloves of garlic, went to the cupboard for a dark brown spice I didn’t know, and sealed the deal with oil in a large bowl that he shoved toward the back of the refrigerator. “Twenty-four hours,” he announced to me in broken English.

Twenty-four hours seemed to me a long time back then. If I wasn’t at the beach or assisting with the chores that kept the Budanov pansiyon running, I was in the bedroom I shared with Masha trying to figure out what the hell I was doing in Ukraine. I should’ve been in graduate school back in Ohio reading Foucault and tossing down beers with odd Shakespearean scholars. Or I should’ve been the responsible businessman I’d been before I met Masha, examining spreadsheets and marking with neon yellow those bottom lines. I should’ve been something, but instead I ate secret peaches and napped, thinking how strange it was that I was actually in Ukraine while my comrades from college were doing meaningful things involving American law, geology, and basically getting down to business. I’d sit there for hours at a time staring at the tapestries. Once in a while I’d open a novel, only to lose track of those distant characters navigating their own times and spaces.

I enjoyed my time in Ukraine, but I knew I wouldn’t be there forever—gliding through those afternoons like a schoolboy at summer camp. I suppose at the time I thought of it as an adventure, but little more. It was an odd feeling. As the Budanovs worked hard, building toward their success one dollar at a time, I, alien-like, watched.

The feast for Igor was a success. The pork had absorbed the marinade well, and I watched Evgeny grill it over a wooden fire on the roof of the pansiyon. As with everything he did, he grilled with painstaking discipline while Masha and her mother down below prepared the sides and salads. He was a fine man, and it’s hard to believe that today I’m fifty, which was his age back then. We seem to play with numbers as we age, counting back through the years the way a child turns over playing cards in a game of Solitaire. Aging’s perhaps the most difficult human labor: to keep its reality at bay or to simply ignore it are both impossible.

The Ukrainians call the grilled pork we ate that night shashlik, and to risk hyperbole it was the best meal I’ve ever had: tender, smoky, and terribly delicious. It helped, of course, that we were all tipsy from the beer and vodka. Before Oleg’s wife Nastya brought out the chocolate cake and the steaming samovar, those Ukrainians sung the Soviet national anthem and talked of having one last visit to the beach before Igor departed. I watched them, and in one last moment of half-sobriety jotted down Igor’s email address on a napkin. I had the feeling I’d be seeing him again.

(5) POLTAVA

Like so many Ukrainian cities, Poltava’s been bombarded nearly to ruin by Putin’s missiles and artillery over the last couple of years. It’s situated in the north of the country between Kharkiv and Kyiv, and one of its primary claims to fame is its World War II museum. Another of its claims to fame is that it was Igor’s hometown, he of the shashlik, blueberry vodka, and seasonal Rybache mistress.

Masha, her father, and I decided to pay Igor and his family a visit later that summer. Evgeny had business to attend in the Poltava district, so we decided to kill two birds with one stone and spend some time with Igor, a long-time family friend of the Budanovs. The beige Lada had been acting funny, so we decided to take the train up there, the three of us encamped for the overnight journey in a private cabin consisting of a narrow table and a pair of pull-out cots. By that time I knew the Ukrainian rail system fairly well, and looked forward to the tea and the sacks of sausage and cheese sandwiches Irina had packed for us. In 1996 the train was the cheapest way to travel in Ukraine; they were old and cramped, yes, but to me they were romantic—those midnight stops at cities like Kherson and Mykolayiv with the women on the platforms selling flowers and the teenaged boys nudging you toward black-market stashes of pornography. Inside the cabin there wasn’t much to do but watch the country go by—wheat field after wheat field—or drink tea and play cards. I’d purchased a bottle of vodka at a bodega in Simferopol before we boarded, which Evgeny and I occasionally nipped at between naps.

It was mid-morning when we finally arrived in Poltava, and we had several hours to kill before meeting Igor at one of his places of business. He was an importer (of what, I still remain unclear), and following a long lunch at one of the downtown cafes and a stroll through one of the squares, we met him at a nondescript office flanked on one side by a florist’s and on the other by a grocery store which, alas, advertised Heineken but had none of the shelves. Igor was also flanked when he emerged from his office in the back: a secretary at each elbow, each sporting incredibly high heels. As he sat down, the secretaries disappeared; they had better things to do, I supposed, than tend to a pair of suntanned Crimeans and their American companion. But Igor was his usual boisterous self, the same as I’d known in Rybache, and within ten minutes trays of dried fish and multiple beers arrived from somewhere. Those Ukrainians had a way of producing things out of nowhere.

The dried fish must’ve been herring, and it was salted to the point where you needed a beer to wash it down. The four of us ate and drank well until dark, at which point we climbed into his Mercedes and he whisked us away to his apartment. That’s when things got interesting.

Igor’s wife was nothing like his mistress. The woman I’d known back in Rybache was plump, slow of foot, and wore fake nails and eyelashes. His wife was blonde, lithe—and as I learned over supper—had qualified for the Soviet gymnastics squad in 1976 as an alternate. Her name was Nadia, and she was one of the most beautiful women I’ve ever seen. How graceful—how endearing—she was when she brought out the salo (cured pork fat for crackers, it’s better than it sounds)—along with the other dishes she’d prepared for the meal: meatballs, mashed potatoes, a summer salad, and even some caviar we ate on toasted bread with melted butter. There was also vodka, a lot of vodka, the bottles of which Igor continually retrieved from the freezer.

Sated by the food and drink and terribly exhausted, I wanted to lie down on the bearskin rug (it was real) in Igor’s living room, but something had to come first: his gun collection. Drunken Ukrainians and guns don’t mix, but he was eager to show them to me. After all, Americans and guns have always been synonymous, and he probably thought I belonged to the NRA. So he, Masha’s father, and I stumbled into a little room with a locked cabinet, which he (after several failed attempts with different keys) finally got open. He had shotguns, rifles, a pair of handguns, and a pistol that looked old enough to be housed inside the World War II museum we visited the next day. That was his favorite. He handled and inspected it, then suddenly—with more an icy ping than a loud boom—the thing fired. I could hear the bullet ricochet off several walls before it landed, somehow, in the ceiling, breaking loose a chunk of plaster as large as Igor’s hammy fist. I might’ve died that night in Poltava. Perhaps I should’ve died that night in Poltava. Many have since. And like the Budanovs’ building in Dzhankoy and the enamel-smelling one up Kharkiv where I wrestled for days with poisoned street fare, I often wonder whether Igor’s luxurious building in Poltava has survived Putin’s evil fantasy.

I lost touch with most of the characters sketched in these pages years ago. I still exchange emails with Masha from time to time, but we have little to say to each other. Years after we broke up, she married an American fellow—a military man, I believe—but soon afterward they divorced. Last I heard, she and her mother and father were living in Virginia. Fact is, I don’t really want to reconnect with them. They were Ukrainian by passport only and Russian where it matters, and I don’t surmise they care that their homeland’s being ruined by war—as long as a Russian flag one day’s risen above those ruins. By then, of course, it will be too late for any of them to enjoy it.

(6) BACKGAMMON

Josef Stalin deported the Tatars from Crimea in 1944, roughly 200,000 of them, mostly to the Siberian wilderness. He believed the ethnic Muslims were Nazi collaborators, a claim historians have long since proven untrue. Following Stalin’s death in 1953, some of those Tatars returned to Crimea, and Shamil’s family must’ve been among them. With his flame-colored hair, tattooes, and motorcycle, he was one of my favorites. We drank beer and played backgammon many hot nights in Rybache during the summer of 1996.

Because the Ukrainian authorities had a hard time paying the bills, most of those nights the power was out, and with it running water, so we played before candlelight on one of the Budanovs’ picnic tables and drank Baltika. I knew how to play backgammon, though my father and sister were much better players than I. During our vacations at the Outer Banks of North Carolina they played for hours on rainy days, their single matches often lengthening into series, and those series into tournaments. I watched them, only skipping down to the beach to try to catch a flounder when the weather momentarily cleared. They were good players.

Shamil was a better player. Backgammon must be etched into the minds of the Tatars, or so I thought as I watched him do things on the board I never would’ve done. He took chances with the stones I never would’ve taken, and most of the time they paid off. At times he was ultra-defensive; at other times he flew with his doubles down unexpected and obscene paths. I liked Shamil. He and his wife Galina lived in drab Rybache proper, blocks away from the coast in an apartment building much too small for the couple and their two little daughters. They shared a cramped space, but seemed to be happy, at least when I visited one cloudy afternoon in July. I sensed at once they were poor: the couch and table in the living room possessed that unhappy look of neglect, and the kitchen hindered Galina, whose narrow hips brushed against the stove and countertop. They had no refrigerator, only a space where one might’ve been in which Galina kept onions and potatoes. She rolled dough to feed the family, and Shamil motorcycled into the farthest corners of Crimea looking to sell his woodworked curios: fruit trays and serving spoons, welcome signs and carved soldiers wielding swords and shields.

Discrimination against the Tatars persisted long after Stalin’s death, and even though Crimea was Shamil’s homeland, most ethnic Russians (and most Crimeans considered themselves so) had little use for them. As such, Shamil found it difficult to obtain steady work and had to bike great distances to make ends meet. I didn’t know any of this back in 1996. To me, he was just a little different, a free-spirited sort of fellow who liked to drink beer and play backgammon. But he took to me—perhaps because I was an alien, too. He and Galina and his daughters treated me kindly, and in turn I used to bring the girls treats from Rybache’s weekly summer bazaar: imported chocolates, the occasional cantaloupe, and toys and trinkets. They called me brat—the Russian word for brother—and it felt good. I wish I could remember their names, but alas, time—the true master of our earthly affairs—has rendered such recall beyond me.

By the middle of August as I was preparing to leave Ukraine (on a whim I’d applied to graduate school at Ohio University and had somehow been accepted), Shamil roared up to the Budanovs’ gate just before nine p.m. on his motorbike. This time, the beige knapsack in which he usually carried a couple of Baltikas bulged. It was a muggy night, and to the southwest over the Black Sea lightning flashed. As the last of the beach-goers sauntered up Morskaya Street back to their pansiyons and late suppers and murmured of the coming storm, Shamil offered me a proposition. His English was passable, and my broken Russian filled in the gaps. “We play one backgammon match, and if you win, American Carl, you can have this.” He gestured toward his knapsack. I lost, as usual. The guy had a penchant for rolling doubles in precarious situations. Nevertheless, I offered him a shot of vodka and asked for double or nothing. I lost again. Then I lost for a third time, and he roared away. I would never see him again. A few years ago Masha informed me that he’d died after a battle with cancer.

That night thunderstorms raged over Rybache, and Evgeny and I sat on the dark terrace watching the lightning and listening to the rain slam against the awning’s tin roof. It got late, and when I finally got to the bedroom Masha was sitting up playing Solitaire. “You have a gift,” she said, and pointed to an object wrapped in brown paper atop the hamper. I opened it. It was a backgammon set, and Shamil must’ve spent weeks making it. On one side of the board he’d painted an American flag and on the other the old Soviet flag. Even the stones were painted accordingly. I’m not the crying type, but that night I did. I cried for Shamil and Galina and their poverty. I cried for their girls, who by now are no doubt inching toward forty, likely lost in Putin’s absurd war. Above all, I cried because I knew I’d be leaving Ukraine in a few weeks and all these good souls behind. There are too many to name, of course, too many to remember, but they all were kind to me.

Shamil’s backgammon set remains among my most valued possessions. It sits atop my bookcase here in Ohio between my father’s Harry Chapin albums and a heavy red Buddha I purchased in New York’s Chinatown as a teenager. I don’t play much backgammon anymore, but I dutifully wipe the dust from it once a week.

Carl Boon is the author of the full-length collection Places & Names: Poems (The Nasiona Press, 2019). His writing has appeared in many journals and magazines, including Prairie Schooner, Posit, and The Adroit Journal. He received his Ph.D. in Twentieth-Century American Literature from Ohio University in 2007, and currently lives in Izmir, Turkey, where he teaches courses in American literature at Dokuz Eylül University.