I Will Die in a Foreign Land, page 9
“You know, when the plant blew up, I thought that was the worst of it. A terrible tragedy that affected our community—but we’d rebuild. It wasn’t like that. The disease of it was in our bodies, in the land, in the air. It didn’t just kill the people I loved, it festered inside of them. It grew. I wasn’t even sure what it meant, still, when I was a kid and I found out my dog was sick, my dad was sick. I thought, ‘When you get sick, you get better.’ But my dog didn’t get better, and neither did my dad. And then years later, Vera became sick.
“I didn’t think people could live there anymore, but I heard stories about some old women whose husbands died, the samosely. I tried to convince my mother not to return. She said that it was the only place she ever felt at home. A couple hundred babushkas had returned and she went with them. Women in their seventies, eighties having survived Stalin, genocide. My mother was the youngest of them when she went back, after Vera passed—she was in her sixties. She said that’s where she wants to die. Who am I to tell her no?
“It sounds crazy, but when I was kid, I worried about everything my mother ate and drank after my father died. I imagined the water was poison, the food was poison, and it probably all was, but I was afraid I would wake up one day and she’d be asleep still, and she wouldn’t wake up.
“Now, she and the babushkas farm the land, she works day in, day out. She looks the best she has ever looked. She’s stronger than she’s ever been. I don’t worry for her anymore. Now she just worries for me.”
Misha stops.
“I haven’t told anyone that,” he says. “At least not all of it.”
Katya pulls her knees into her chest, her socked feet on the chair. Both look at the table, the cups of tea.
“Neither have I,” she says.
Reaching out for her, he takes her hand. She feels her own heart in her throat, in her ears, in her chest. As a doctor she feels touch often, but this is different. She feels the warmth of touch, the kind of touch that circles back. The kind of touch made hungry, the kind of touch that fills.
Katya doesn’t remember the last time she’s been touched.
She wants, without thinking, More.
She watches her hand, like a bird in his palm, as he traces the fine bones of her wrist. She leans into him. She can feel his breath on her, they’re so close.
He wants to kiss her palm, the crook inside her elbow, the shallow of her clavicle. He holds her hand and the wedding ring is gone, and he wants to swallow her finger whole. He feels himself rise, the energy of God, the energy of fruit. He wants to lick her palm and taste her heat. He wants to keep her warm, keep her here.
Ah, ah—my friend:
What do we do when the world ends?
What do we do when the war begins?
What do we do, buried in a bunker?
We love.
UKRAINIAN JOURNALIST ASSAULTED, BEATEN
DECEMBER 25, 2013
Tetiana Chornovol—journalist, wife, and mother—was driving home from Maidan near Boryspil Airport, followed by two cars. Hours before, Tetiana had published an article exposing corruption within the Ukrainian Minister of Internal Affairs.
A Porsche Cayenne rammed her off the road. Two men dragged her onto the asphalt, beat her, threw her in a roadside ditch, left her for dead.
She should have been dead, the way she looked—face puffed and red, red the color of her sweater, her lips purple-bruised so she couldn’t speak. One eye closed shut, the nose draining blood down her cheek.
Tetiana lies on the white sheet of a hospital bed, her black hair tucked under her battered head. At Maidan, we carry photos of her disfigured face into the street.
Meanwhile, the number of missing journalists and protestors continues to grow.
SLAVA’S APARTMENT
SHOVKOVYCHNA STREET
FEBRUARY 17–18, 2014
“Take off your clothes,” Slava says, picking up a pencil, heavy paper.
“Just like the Titanic,” Dascha says, lifting her shirt over her head.
She has a bruise on her ribs, on her left thigh from Maidan. Slava has kissed them profusely, but they refuse to heal.
“Heal,” she whispered into the bruises. “Heal.”
“Now,” she says to Dascha, “untie your hair.”
Dascha pulls her dark hair free, and it’s kinked from the braid.
“I’ll sketch first,” Slava says, “to practice. And next time, we’ll paint.”
Slava draws the bend of her lover’s forehead, the drape of her hair, the fur of her sex, the rough follicles of her unshaven calves. She meditates on her bruises, dark and heavy like her areolae, and the scar from her youth across the knee. When she finishes, she kisses the portrait, and Dascha laughs. Then, she kisses her lover, lies beside her, and draws her with her mouth.
When they finish, Dascha says to her, “I thought you would paint me—like the other women.”
Slava, joyful and surprised, turns to her. “Now?”
“Yes. And I want to dye my hair,” Dascha says. “A color like yours.”
Slava takes a lock of Dascha’s dark hair and says, “We’ll have to bleach it.”
In her apartment, Slava keeps dyes of every color, so she can change her mind. Purple, green, blue, pink, red. She takes out the boxes to show Dascha.
“Pink,” Dascha says.
Dascha sits in a chair in the kitchen, a towel wrapped around her. Slava brushes her hair, pulls it back from the scalp, and, wearing gloves, fills her palm with the lightening bleach.
“Are you sure?” she asks, and Dascha nods, saying, “Yes.”
“Okay,” Slava says. She combs the bleach through her lover’s thick hair.
“It might burn,” she says, and Slava dabs her fingers along the fine hairs of Dascha’s scalp.
Dascha’s eyes water but she asks Slava, “How does it look?”
Slava takes off her gloves, starts making them cups of coffee. “I think you might love it,” she says. They sit together at the kitchen table with coffee and wait.
Slava watches Dascha write on her laptop. No matter how tired she returns from Maidan, Dascha makes love to Slava, and then she reviews the footage she’s shot, and she writes long after Slava has fallen asleep. Slava is fascinated by her devotion, by the ritual of it.
Slava asks her, “Why did you become a journalist here? When you know it’s so dangerous? You can go anywhere. You can make more money.”
Dascha keeps working, doesn’t look up. She says, “Why did you join FEMEN? It’s the same.”
“FEMEN left,” Slava says. “You’re here. You stayed. I want to hear you tell it.”
“I am a filmmaker,” Dascha says. “I am a lesbian filmmaker—a Ukrainian? A Crimean? A Russian? I am not the only one who feels this way. You can see it—at Maidan. People are willing to die in protest for their beliefs. For a better life. Today, we fight against Putin. Tomorrow, we fight against hate.
“This won’t be over for a long time, Slava. Something is coming. I have a colleague who wants to meet because it’s too dangerous to write in an email. The Kremlin’s reach is wide. But we have to fight, Slava. You didn’t go to France. You stayed because there is more that needs to be done, personal safety be damned. I stay and work because I have to believe there is a reason worth staying. Not just Ukraine’s story—but my story. Your story. Our story. I do this because I believe in us—all of Ukraine.”
While Dascha is in the shower rinsing the bleach, Slava takes out a box of paint, and a box of wreaths. She chooses a wreath with faux blue and gold flowers, one of the last she made. She takes ribbons from the box and cuts them long, tying them at the back of the wreath, like a train on a veil.
She thinks about the women in FEMEN, the ones she knows in France. She remembers, without a pang of guilt, of her decision to stay.
Slava has a faint smile on her lips as Dascha returns to the bedroom, her hair a yellow-blond, burned in parts with orange. Her lover looks shy, but her eyes are bright from the sex, the bleach, the blond.
“It worked,” Dascha says, and she puts on her underwear, lounge pants. She leaves her chest bare, and Slava motions for her to sit in a chair across from her.
She chooses golden yellow, blue, and black. She dabs the brush in blue, and the cold paint causes Dascha to shiver. Slava paints across the clavicle, shoulder to shoulder, the breasts and the sternum. In yellow, she paints over a mole on Dascha’s belly, the tender bruise on her ribs, causing Dascha to close her eyes. On the Ukrainian flag, she paints in black the word, slava—Ukrainian for glory.
“And now it dries,” she says, and Dascha follows her into the kitchen, where they trim the dead ends of her blond hair and dye it pink.
She watches Dascha, leaning over the sink in the kitchen, her hair rinsing, turning the stream a carnation. Slava sweeps, pulling up tufts of Dascha’s blond hair brushed from the tile. Dascha dries her soaking hair with a towel, the pink strands framing her face. Her hair is shorter, now only to her shoulders. Seeing Slava watching her, Dascha smiles. The rest of the night, Dascha wears the kalyna crown.
Slava finds a note in the kitchen, the same place she has always left it, saying Dascha has gone to Maidan. Slava looks at her phone and there are messages from Adam and Misha.
The text from Adam: I saw the news, are you okay?
The text from Misha: Avoid HQ. Huge fire.
Both: Text when you see this so I know you’re safe.
Slava dresses, readies herself to go to Maidan. She feels her stomach knot, and she sits on the bed, summoning courage. Then she sees the pillowcase, the prints Dascha’s hair has made, the stain like a watercolor in the fabric, blossoming.
The ends faded but reaching, staining fiber by fiber, like blood.
IGOR STRAVINSKY
ON MEMORY
My earliest memory is of the sound of the ice breaking on the River Neva in St. Petersburg near where I was born. It was the sound that marked the beginning of a new year, a new spring.
My other memory is of the church.
But perhaps the strongest memory of my childhood is of the country fairs I was taken to in the Ukraine. The songs which I heard and the dances which I saw have stayed in my imagination all my whole life.
EXTERMINATION OF THE KOBZARI BY STALIN
SUNG BY KOBZARI
We were asked by Stalin to come to a Congress of Folk Singers in Moscow—all the kobzari in Ukraine, together.
Many of us blind, we found one another, each from small villages, as guides helped us find our way to the train car.
We carried within our bodies vibrations of all kobzari before us—songs that were sang to us that we learned to sing. While the government burned our books, we continued to sing.
No written lyric, no written note—
Each song a memory, each song a revolution.
Stalin said, Let life be better, let life be merrier. Come to Moscow, let us build a unified future!
And so we traveled to the congress for Kobzari, Lirniki and Banduristy. We brought the bandura, we brought melody, we brought with us memory.
We sang in the train car, joyfully we played—all of us far from home, all of us together. We sang until the car stopped in the dead of night.
The trenches had been dug before we had arrived.
The NKVD soldiers led us and our guides to the edge, the soil slipping beneath our feet.
They shot us in the dark and covered us in earth and lime.
Let this song be an excavation. Let this hallowed ground be known.
ГРУШЕВСЬКОГО
HRUSHEVSKY
You become more interested in death
when you bury friends.
—Serhiy Zhadan
PROTESTORS MASSACRED BY
BERKUT PARAMILITARY
POLICE FORCE
FEBRUARY 19, 2014
ADAM VOADEN, EASTERN EUROPE CORRESPONDENT
More deaths were reported on Tuesday, February 18, on the streets of Kyiv. Protestors have been gathering in the city center, Independence Square, since November of last year. Approximately 20,000 protestors marched Tuesday morning on Verkhovna Rada, the Ukrainian Parliament.
Police began to attack protestors with stun grenades around 10:00 on Shovkovychna and Lypska Streets, and by 11:00 witnesses reported snipers shooting on demonstrators. Video footage and photographs of the scene showed the police armed with AK-74 assault rifles near the Party of Regions on Lypska Street. Demonstrators attempted to ward off the police with Molotov cocktails, bricks, and other projectiles.
At 17:04, protestors were caught off-guard by a Berkut assault. As protestors surveyed a drone hovering near the area, the police ambushed the crowd from the rear by penetrating a barricade on Hrushevsky Street near Dynamo Stadium. The police threw grenades and shot civilians as they fled down Khreshchatyk Street toward Maidan, where demonstrators stacked burning debris to fortify a wall protecting them from the police forces.
The death toll by the end of the early morning of February 19 was estimated at 28, including 10 police deaths.
After attempts for peace-keeping negotiations with President Yanukovych failed, it is estimated that another 70–100 protestors have been fatally shot by the police force, with medical and forensic services working to identify the bodies.
SHOVKOVYCHNA STREET
FEBRUARY 18, 2014
MORNING
Misha receives a text message back from Slava: There is a march outside my apartment this morning. Will you be there?
Misha takes his construction helmet, painted with the Ukrainian flag—Slava made the design—and his shield, stolen from a Berkut, and makes his way to Shovkovychna Street.
I’ll meet you outside, he texts back.
Misha sees her, wearing a green coat, blue hair trailing from under a beanie. She smiles at him as he walks up to her, but the sound of gunfire makes her duck, makes her cry out, and Misha covers her with the shield.
The protesters, hands in the air, are saying to the police who shoot them, “Defend your people! Defend your people! Stand with us!” Some men and women lie in the street. Some men are dressed from Maidan, wearing makeshift military gear, but mostly people are wearing suits and dresses—people who, while on their way to work decided to stop, decided to peacefully march.
The people cry, pleading for mercy on Hrushevsky Street. The Berkut police hear the people cry, and they shoot until the crying stops.
Slava and Misha don’t want to die, so they run. Misha is struck by a Berkut dressed in black, by his iron baton. Misha falls to the pavement, the Berkut goes for Slava.
Two large protestors wearing balaclavas see the Berkut and go after him. The Berkut swings at them, pushes them back with his metal shield. The protestors overcome the Berkut, taking away his baton, beating him with it. They take the shield. They beat the Berkut man until he stops moving.
Misha yells at them to stop. Slava is crying, shaking. Both screaming at the men to stop, stop.
Bang. Bang. The men run off. One of them falls next to the Berkut. Slava is crying, and she holds onto Misha’s hand.
“Let’s go,” she says. “Come, Misha.”
Slava leads Misha to St. Michael’s.
ST. MICHAEL’S GOLDEN-DOMED MONASTERY
FEBRUARY 18, 2014
LATE MORNING
All of Maidan is there. The church and the monastery are made into a full hospital. When Slava and Misha enter, they see bodies covered in white sheets. Slava looks away.
Katya is there. Slava remembers the pretty doctor and she calls out to her. Katya sees her, sees Misha, and leads them to a spot beside the Captain. Misha sits on the floor on a sleeping bag, and a medic brings him a blanket. Katya kneels beside him, begins to examine the wounds on his shoulder.
“Slava,” he says, head aching, “this is Katya.” When she spies the doctor shake her head at him, a tired smile, Slava knows they are in love.
She watches the doctor as she works, asking Misha where the pain is, and as he guides her, Slava watches the doctor’s moves, following his voice like a map. She, a cartographer of the body, tells him she needs him to take off his coat. Slava steps aside. She takes her phone out and calls Dascha, but there is no answer. Just Dascha’s recorded voice.
Dascha says, Zalyshte meni povidomlennya—
Leave me a message—
After the doctor finishes inspecting Misha, Slava asks her, “Will he be okay?”
“We will check for broken ribs,” Katya says. “I will see if we can run the X-rays here. As a last result he will need to go to the hospital.”
Turning to Slava, Katya asks, “Are you okay? Have you been hurt?”
“No, I am okay,” Slava says, shaking. “I have to go. I need to find someone.”
“You should stay, Slava,” Katya says, worried. “It’s not safe. Please.”
Slava is trembling and she feels as if she can’t breathe. Everything feels shallow and heavy and like it’s moving too fast. She feels her heart beating in her throat, and she feels hot and cold at once. She sees the doctors and the medics and the hurt people in Kyiv and she combs her fingers through her fine hair and tries to breathe, but it feels as if she’s drowning in the church, under water, under snow, submerged beneath all that pain.
“I have to find her,” Slava says, dizzy with fear. “I love her and she could be dead.”
