"Mirrors Finding Floors" |
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| …how I cried when the sky let go
what a cold and lonesome rain… I |
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| When I first put my head to rest in Ukraine, there was advice tromping through it. The piece that stuck with me the longest, in the most troubling ways, was, "Ukraine will seem not very much different from home. Eventually, you'll see the differences. Then you'll understand culture shock."
Ukraine's got houses. Ukraine's got TVs. Got internet and satellite cable. Ukraine's got houses bigger then I've ever seen in the States with every comfort that makes me uncomfortable. Everyone's got a cell phone. Hell, I've got a cell phone. I'm in Peace Corps, and I have a cell phone. And mine's a clunker compared to most of the phones my students have. But there's something else, like Nessie lurking below the water. Something lurking below the crest of the waves. In the shadows. It probably won't do you any harm. It probably won't clench your arm in its thick jaws and haul you down the alley, around the corner, and finish you off. No, it probably won't do that. But, then again, it is the shadows, and you can't really see. Or can you? |
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| II |
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| It's one of those picture-puzzles you flip to at the back of the Times Standard, The San Francisco Chronicle. Two cartoons, lined up, side by side. They've got the same man sporting the same waxed, curled-black, Dirk Dastardly ‘stache. The same dusted, charcoal bowler. The same blonde-haired girl sitting behind the desk pretending she likes working for caricatures of men her entire cartoon life. They look the same, and if you don't look too hard, they are the same.
It's the same here, only one picture is of Ukraine, one is of the States. There are the same people. The same vegetables. The same televisions. In some places, the same SUVs. The same two eyes above the same one nose. Wrinkles on the forehead. Time passed and time coming. Don't look too hard and nothing shatters. Not that perfect view you have. Not that pretty looking glass, that mirror you see yourself and everything you know in. Not the windows of that pretty, safe room you're sitting in. Only, when you've settled in, when you've finally got yourself a comfortable seat, you notice the horizon's not as straight as you would have had it. The trees aren't as true as you've know. They grow at looser angles. Like second grade teachers try to teach: not bad, not good, just different. There's a deep, purple fuzz. Something's fading in and out in the distance. Something grand, faceted, with a quiet outline. Like storm clouds crashing through the silence of another secret memory, it steps forward, toward the room you've bedded down in. The room with the forty-year-old, brown and tan and red carpet, seeping with intricacy, tacked to the wall. The sky's darkening through your windows and the lightning's come. In the flashes, moments of illumination in hours of grey waiting, they're coming closer. They're becoming clearer. These figures. These people. They're moving slowly. Gracefully. Lofting quietly up and down with each step. Then the lightning fades. The darkness slithers into every void in the house. The stage is dark. Act one is over. |
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| III |
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| But here it ain't theatre. Here it's real life. And it's cracking before your eyes. Cracking like glass. Like mirrors letting go of walls. Of mirrors finding floors. The crush of glass is all you can hear, all you can feel in your bones. The crush of glass exploding into shrapnel that'll cut you to bits if you let it. You hear the shattering, years crying out. Years stretched and broken. In a moment of appraisal, a moment of
did-that-really-oh-my-god-!!-did-that-just-? you hear the wind rushing in. Your little room, your little self-regulated bubble, with its little windows, its miniature keyhole, its rust-stained sink, kept you safe from something, and now that something's rushing around you, winding up inside of you, trying to stalk off with your heat. Before it's over, your eyes are slamming shut, the gates of your final defense grinding to rest. All thoughts cease. Here's where the choices you make comes into play. When your gates release and allow in the sun—and the sun will surely come, though it's of a different shade, more raw copper than before—you've got things to decide. There's frustration and you've got to find a place for it. Do you get angry at the wind? The wind's a natural thing, with no mind of it's own unless you believe the poets, those well paid liars sitting safe in their own rooms which overlook bitter oceans. Face on the floor, tongue hanging out, you've got a choice: lay or stand. Your windows are destroyed. The mirror hanging on the wall, the one your friend's step-dad made for you, lays in shards. The ways that you saw the world are gone. But the crossbeams still cross. The wall studs still stud. Your building still stands. That won't ever fall down. |
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| IV |
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| When I was a child, the commercials all said, "Peace Corps: The toughest job you'll ever love." And it's true, but not in ways you can understand until long after you've decided to sign up. Not completely. Of course, it's tough to walk away from your family for two years. It's tough in the giving up, in the walking off the cliff. It's also tough in the bending of cultural models, in the stretching of your understanding of what is. And it doesn't go away—at least, it hasn't yet.
A small example: the men, the boys, standing on every street corner, moving in packs. Wolves in black leather coats. Knit caps. In the States, men standing on the street corner, in the dark, drinking beer, dressed in black from head to toe, means trouble to me. And a lot of it. My model of culture tells me that men dressed this way, with nothing to do besides hit a 40 out of a plastic bottle are looking for trouble. Something to break the boredom of a small town. In the States, they're probably looking for a fight. Here, except for one instance with a bunch of kids looking to talk with the Americans, my cultural model of intoxicated men milling about on the street has not held true, and I've got 24 years of model building to renegotiate. The longer example, the first time I really looked hard at those two pictures in the back of the Times, happened on a train ride to Yayetsya, a small town somewhere close to an hour away from my training city, about three weeks after I arrived in Ukraine. |
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| V |
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| The train sways through the flat grassland, for now mercifully blanketed by green grass, not ice, and the thick, but not dense, birch forests that line the indirect path from Cymytke to Yayetsya. These birch reappear here, my first home in Ukraine. The birch with their salt and pepper skin, their strong and straight branches peopled with leaves of tan and fire and banana, hanging and falling. Hanging and falling. On the journey, there are several stops without names. There's Yayetsya. There's Cymytke. Then there's 732 Km. 742 km. These are stops along the road. The track.
At one of these stops, there is a slight road, its surface mocha flavored dirt. The path wove as a snake snapped in two might, twisting in one direction at the head, another at the tail, through a small stand of emaciated birch. Pensioners, elderly Ukrainians with their empty buckets; their shuffling feet; their worn, leather skins all head off the train, down steep, iron steps that are set into the side of the tired train cars, and point their compass towards the place where the path disappears into the wood. In the spaces between the sagging branches, against the graying pitch of the sky, there is no town that I can spot. No station in view that can sell a train ticket. Into the forest these old men and women go, probably to pick the wild fruit and ashy mushrooms that hold down the wooden tables at the bazaar in town. After this stop, there's more room to stretch. I, still standing so that a babuyca or three can settle their tired frames onto a wooden bench, spread my legs into a wide base and pull out my book—today Dragonlance—and begin to read. This vessel sways on its iron feet, but I'm bridging into another world, exploring, relaxing. Taking time for myself within a sea of people and expectations. The day passes in Yayetsya. Work, work, and more work. Learning the intricacies of Ukrainian school systems, methodological outlooks, and more on communicative language teaching. After lunch, we hop on a crowded marshrutka, stack ourselves elbow to armpit with people we don't understand but are coming to admire, and drift back toward the train station. In twelve minutes, we're on the 1:30 back to Cymytke. As we roll through the countryside, back towards those km stops, the train quickly fills up. The old ones are back, their buckets filled. Across the aisle from us are a young man and a young woman, eyes open and exhibiting that Ukrainian passivity, a drab worn only public, around strangers. At a stop, the man leaves to stand between the train cars and smoke. Immediately, another man, dressed in camo, knee high rubber boots, and an uninterrupted red nose stands in the aisle next to us, tottering enough for us to throw our hands up in preparation for a tumble, and crashes, though I still don't understand how he managed the trajectory, into the recently emptied seat next to the woman. Two more men, alike in every way to the first—no differences found between picture A and picture B—except carrying collapsed, but still long and drooping, fishing poles, buckle, with a bit more finesse, into the seats opposite the woman. That passivity, a thousand soldier's worth of defense, roars to fill her hazel irises. She tries to explain that the seats are reserved, but they merely roar back: Who are you? What is your surname? Where do you live? Where are your documents? As if this were still the Soviet Union. As if compliance was obobyaskovo. If it was required, none comes. She waves them off and sets to looking out the window. In response, they grow louder. From my seat, two feet from, I smell the horilka, that homemade heat. Once past the interrogation, the men break out into song, which I try my best to enjoy. Nece Halya Vodu, an old and beautiful Ukrainian folk song, sung in sweet harmony is a treasure; in the key of drink, it's uncertain at best. As we rock on home, Jon, friend and fellow volunteer, asks if this experience would make the journal, now infamous because I'm only one in my small training group who makes daily entries. I nod in the affirmative. I imagine sketching it out in my mind. Adding some of the sugar of the day to my jar. For the record, it looked nothing like this. |
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| VI |
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| The young man reappears on the stage. The passive look exchanged for confusion and anger. I can't understand what he is saying, but I know he wants his seat back. The fisherman, their clothes providing a poor camouflage for the situation, starts in again with the documents, with the surnames. Something's said that leads to the young man dropping a clenched fist onto the shapka-ed head of the fisherman who stole his seat. The old man flails for his noggin, as if ensuring his head was still there, and then launches into an impressive bear hug. Shouts from other people on the train, and the boy leaves, taking a seat just behind the group, directly behind the woman. Seats are a lost commodity on the train, and the woman has to keep hers or stand.
In the flurry, a blue yarn encased babucya and her granddaughter splash down next to Kay, my wife, who's sitting directly in front of me. One of the drunk men start scringing, that happy mixture of screaming and singing. Some song about the frost. Adding to the dissonance, babucya starts to bark at the old man. The fishermen—man now, his friends have died down—yells more who/huh/rawr!/where/etc. The granddaughter tries to pull babucya away, but she won't shut up. The babucya next to me is long gone; tempers are rising. The drunk fisherman stands up and lunges at babucya; the granddaughter stands between them and prevents cartloads of ugliness. The friend sharing the bench pulls his drunk friend back. Babucya books it, leaves us as the nearest target. The guy lunges at us, but his friend holds him back again. Next step, the can's opened: the drunk guy punches his friend in the face. Last straw, I suppose. Jon said the friend paused for a second, looking like, "Am I really gonna punch my friend?" and then put the lights out all over his face. The drunk guy covers his head, but it's too late; by the time he lifts his head, the blood's pouring. Blood makes me nervous, so it's time to go. We all stand up and head down the aisle. Jon's harder to coerce. He's got the hero complex, but eventually he comes. We come to rest next to a quad of old men playing cards with the oldest deck I've ever seen. They played hard, like such play was threatening to lose its style. They were playing durak, a fast-paced Ukrainian card game built upon sequences I've yet to fully grasp. Chaos was still roaring behind us, though I didn't really turn to look. I, for some reason, thought the whole car was going to turn on us because they thought we caused it all. Like we had to fix it somehow. Nope. We were safe. Come Cymytke, we're off the train and headed in the opposite direction of the fishermen. Normal. Fights and all that. What's missing are the riders on the white horses who sweep in at the last second, before the danger manifests in blood, and pull the men apart. Who admonish the men for yelling at the women. Who bring smiles for all to see and a little candy for the children too. They might have been sitting behind us, stacked in the sky-blue and navy camouflage of the police force. The four men, young and strapping in their police fatigues, fit my model of authority. In the end, they sat and watched the ruckus unfold with what might have been passive interest. Things were done a little differently in Ukraine. Not good. Not bad. Just different. |
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| VII |
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| Such things set you to swimming. You lose your foundation, get flipped upside down, and have to learn gravity all over. Given time, the gravity comes. Things right themselves. You see the people again. Their smiles.
Ukraine's still Ukraine and Ukraine's not the States, but that's not why you're here. You find comfort in sweet 9.8 m/s squared. In your new home. And you stand. You reset the picture glass into wooden frames. You redress yourself in most every sense of the word. Then the culture really comes, and the culture's a warm, beautiful thing. A catalyst for growth and change and understanding. |
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| VIII |
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| One week into our adventure in Ukraine, our host family—an amazing duo who'll find purchase, I'm sure, in another chapter of this journey—took us to a forest outside of town to hike. We met with the geography teacher from the local pedagogical college on the rickety, overfull bus that took us out of town. He would be our guide. Over three hours, we pulled berries off trees, drug water out of wells, rappelled down ravines, and played on a make-shift see-saw rigged in the low crotch of two intersecting trees. After all of this, our guide led us to a picnic area replete with benches and a BBQ pit.
While the rest of the group began to prepare the food, the guide took me aside and led me down a little path into the wood. About fifty meters in, we stopped. I quietly hoped the others could hear me if I screamed. All in Russian, of which I mostly understood through context and gestures, he told me to pull a rusty pick out of a nearby tree and dig into the earth. I couldn't dig my own grave with a pick before I drew attention to myself, so I felt safe. I did as he asked. Soon enough, he asked me to continue the task with my hands. With my fingers scraping through the dark earth, I had no idea what I was even looking for anything. And then, when my fingers clinked against glass, I knew. All of the things I had heard about Ukrainian culture came bubbling up. Ukrainians love their horilka (what the Russian language knows as vodka). They love to drink and they love their horilka. But that Ukrainians love their horilka doesn't mean that Ukrainians are always drunk. Drinking isn't so much a necessary act to get drunk like it is in the States as much as it is a sharing. Pulling that bottle out of the chilled earth that crisp October day, I had no idea what was going to happen. Would we all end up under the table? I'd heard about homemade Ukrainian horilka—as strong as the Ukrainian spirit. What I didn't know then is that no one's ever going to go under the table. Not among friends. And if you're sitting down to share a drink, or share a meal, you're doing it with friends. There's something about the table in Ukraine—sitting at it is all the ice breaking you need to make friends. At the table, eating and drinking with friends, you won't first bow your head under the weight of 100 proof yeast and sugar; you'll bow your head first under the weight of stories shared, of stories earned. And if you're learning another language at the same time, you'll bow your head first under the weight of trying to understand anything at all. Horilka is a means of sharing. Drinking is a means of explaining life. Sharing life. A ritual you feel lucky to be sitting at the table with. Here, memories aren't stored in a plastic mayonnaise jar. They're buried in the earth, ripening. So, I can say I've been drunk in Ukraine. My perception's been shifted, distorted, and rearranged. I've went to bed dehydrated and exhausted. But not from alcohol. I've been drunk from the history. From the stories. From the life lived on this black, fertile land that the world has used as a doormat for too many years. From the memories shared over 50 ml of the clear stuff—Ukrainian tequila, as my host father calls it. The life of a strong, proud, and sometimes confused people trying to find their place in a moving world. A world threatening to bust in their front windows with the force of its wind if they stare at it long enough. As we stand in Ukraine, we see the windows starting to crack. The mirrors are starting to slip from the walls. Modernization. Globalization is starting to move in, threatening with a strong storm. Over the two years that our assignment here lasts, we'll bear witness to the glass. To the mirrors finding floors. Which is only fair; we are part of the wind. |
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