The Humorless Ladies of Border Control (3 page)

I didn't know dogs liked hard-boiled eggs, and anyway this
seemed conceptually inconsistent for a vegan house—but never mind. The dog wolfed down the egg.

“The country is like it's dying,” said a different Larissa, a rare American of Ukrainian heritage who had repatriated. “I come home tired and depressed and I realize it's not me, it's that I was walking all day among people who are tired and depressed and it just rubs off.”

“Why do you stay?” I asked.

“Well—it's just, like, I live here now. I've built a place for myself. And I can't just leave”—
like a tourist can
was the implication—“because, well, I come from an easier country, and good luck to the rest of you.”

“It is not a civilized country” was the judgment of a Pole I'd met a few days before, eating with Maria's aunt and her posse of aging hipster friends at a Brazilian steakhouse in Łódź. I struck up a conversation with an owl-eyed, mustachioed man who winced when he heard we were bound for Ukraine. He had tried to set up a renewable energy program there. “Everyone warned me that it was corrupt and impossible to do business there, and I never will again. I lost 50,000 euros.” He shook his head. “The people are wonderful—it is just the system is impossible.”

The show was in Malaya Opera, a pink-and-white neoclassical theater that had been a cultural center for transportation workers. It was now a dilapidated hulk with dance studios and old socialist realist murals of Ukrainian peasants along the staircase. We were in the musty basement, where a kid (whose beard almost covered the “24” tattooed on his neck) ran a studio and a rehearsal room, and, apparently, lived: he dragged a twin
mattress and pillow out of the show room when we arrived for soundcheck. The show was with local heroes Maloi—who would be flat-capped, anthemic punk stars if they lived in the United States or England—and was packed and sweaty.

The rhythm of train touring is not unlike that of bus tours. You are delivered to the station after the show, at midnight or one, get in your bunk, and let yourself be rocked to sleep by the sway of the car and the white noise of strangers' snores. You'll be picked up in the morning by the next town's promoter, drive to their—or, more often, their parents' or grandparents'—flat, shower, eat breakfast, nap if necessary, and try to see some of the town.

That's how it's supposed to work. In this case, when we rolled into Dnipropetrovs'k around six a.m., there was no one to greet us but a few sad pigeons. We called Vlod, our contact, twice before he answered, obviously still asleep, grunted, and hung up. We settled in at the station cafeteria for what promised to be a wait.

When he arrived, Vlod proved to be tall, slouchy, hungover, and dour. Maria tried some small talk, gesturing around the station and saying, “These buildings are pretty.”

“There is nothing pretty in this town.”

Off to his grandmother's apartment (his mother also lived there) on the sixth floor of a crumbling housing project, a gray skeletal torso with rotting balcony ribs. Vlod had been a journalism student and worked at a newspaper “singing songs of praise to the rich people and politicians.” Now he was a technical writer, making more money, he said, but without as much fun and travel.

We wanted to go downtown to see the museum, or maybe a fortress. Vlod was unenthused: “Maybe you want to see something more . . . unconventional? There is a huge abandoned
building ten minutes' walk from here. It is a monument to Soviet stupidity.”

We walked to another disintegrating apartment tower, this one beyond habitation. It had been built on the side of a hill and almost immediately started sliding down into the valley. It was about twenty yards from the elementary school Vlod had attended. When the floors and walls of the building started cracking, the students didn't worry too much about a collapse: “We were just happy school was canceled.” After the tower was abandoned for good, the money to tear it down never materialized. Eventually the school, which had closed to keep the kids out of the way of the demolition, simply reopened in the shadow of the gap-toothed hulk.

We scrambled over the piles of rubble, clumps of weeds, and blooms of broken bottles, up the urine-scented remains of the stairs to the soggy roof. The whole city was ringed with identical “monuments to Soviet stupidity”—a miles-wide Stonehenge of graffiti-splashed white concrete, separated by the green blooms of trees. Dnipropetrovs'k is, according to the UN, the world's fastest-shrinking city, forecast to shed 17 percent of its population in the next ten years. Vlod and his friends did “rope jumping” from the top of the ruin—a kind of amateur ziplining in which you just freefall and wind up hanging in the middle of the slack rope like abandoned laundry until your friends haul you back to the roof.

Vlod had been to the United States twice on summer work/travel visas. It is common for Ukrainian and Russian teenagers to be given a temporary visa arranged through a U.S. business looking for cheap summer labor. Nearly universal is the complaint that this often means, in practice, working grueling
hours at someplace like a Carvel in a rest stop in middle-of-nowhere New Jersey. The more resourceful quit and hit the road while the visa is still good.

Vlod was sent first to Connecticut, where he finished his job and then took a Greyhound across the country. “It was the trip of a lifetime,” he said. “I prefer traveling on bus. In Ukraine, on a train the view is always the same—station, factory, trees, station, factory, trees.” When he signed up for a second go-around, though, they sent him to Pennsylvania, where “they treated us like slaves. I said they couldn't do that. They said I'd be fired, and the next day I was and they put me on a bus to New York and a plane home.”

There was an unusual culture clash at the show, and I wondered how Vlod came to organize it at this particular venue. We usually ended up in dank, graffiti-covered “youth centers,” but this was a spotless white gallery and cultural center, funded by a single rich benefactor. The theater's director, Olya, was from Kazan' in Russian Tatarstan but had just returned from a failed marriage in California. The staff were ironic, urban, cosmopolitan. They and Vlod—who usually booked punk and metal at a bar on the other side of town—regarded each other warily, if at all. Sophisticate or no, Olya was rubber-legged drunk at the end of the night. We bunked up in the attic and hit the train station in the morning bound for Kharkov.

Stations upon stations indeed, as Vlod had complained: some piled with rusted debris, some graffiti-splashed concrete, one home to a dark-green old train car emblazoned with a red star, as if from a Cold War newsreel—what Proust called “peculiar places, railway stations, which do not . . . constitute a part of the surrounding town but contain the essence of its personality.”
Families parked their old Ladas next to the tracks and spread out picnics, the coming and goings of trains enough entertainment for the day. Young men in stonewashed jeans and ponytails, or with shaved heads and black Adidas track pants, watched an endless array of thin, busty blondes in vertiginous patent-leather heels. Next to the tracks wiggled a dual carriageway of bicycle-wheel ruts. A wall of trees shaded a shrubbery moat. Then miles of fields.

Nearly every ex-Hapsburg town in Eastern and Central Europe will tell you they have the biggest clock or bell tower and the biggest central square in Europe. In Ukraine, they will add that they have the biggest remaining statue of Lenin. Kharkov's claim is the largest square in Europe, depending on whether you count Red Square or something (Kharkov native son Eduard Limonov says in his 1990 book
Memoir of a Russian Punk
, “‘Only Tiananmen Square in Beijing is bigger than our own Dzerzhinsky Square'—Eddie-baby knows that first commandment of Kharkov patriotism well”). Writer and musician Alina Simone wrote of the city, from which her parents had emigrated, “Invariably, the two words people used to describe Kharkov were either industrial or big. Occasionally big and industrial were helpfully combined to yield the illuminating phrase ‘a big industrial city.'” I saw many more Soviet remnants in Kharkov than anywhere else I'd been: hammer and sickle facades, shiny red Lenin medallions on sides of buildings, the odd “Glory to Work” mural over a gray housing project. The apartment towers were missing the pastel-wash veil they get in Eastern Europe.

The Kharkov show was abruptly canceled, if in fact there ever was a show. The status reports went from TBA to “open-air picnic” to “I don't know, it says rain” to “You must have known
the show could get canceled.” We couldn't find our hotel, which was supposed to be near the train station. It was pouring rain. We took shelter under a liquor store awning and asked for directions from a kiosk operator, then a cabdriver, then some young dudes on the sidewalk—no one seemed to be able to agree where the street our hotel was supposed to be on was. We mule-trained up a hill that seemed right only to find a dirt road. This couldn't be it—the station hotel, within sight of the McDonald's, on a dirt path? I ran up the hill and back. Sure enough, that was it, and in fact it was a perfectly nice little place with a
banya
(steam bath) in the basement. After a pilgrimage for Georgian food (it was getting on six, we still hadn't eaten yet, and I was now sick as the proverbial dog), it was a circuitous walk home past the Constructivist gigantoliths overlooking that second-biggest-square-after-Red-Square and, for good measure, “the second-biggest Lenin.” Lenin gestured in approval of the tents that crowded the square, advertising the upcoming Euro 2012 soccer tournament. The rain had stopped.

We had a message from booking agent Dima: “You have a show tomorrow in Donetsk, no guarantee, but they'll pay your ticket to Rostov-on-Don.” We stopped at the bus station to see how painful it would be to get to Donetsk by tomorrow. There was a bus at noon, but “they don't sell that ticket in Ukraine.”

They don't sell in Ukraine a ticket for a bus . . . in Ukraine?

No. “Six a.m. or eight a.m.”

Eight a.m. it would have to be, and we hit the banya to sweat out the bad news.

The morning's cabdriver quoted us a price of fifty, Maria said forty, he hemmed for a minute, and, thinking she was my guide,
said in Russian, “How about forty-five? Tell him fifty, and you can keep the rest for yourself.” When he dropped us at the station, a man was loading boxes of live chickens into the storage bins beneath the bus. The fact that there was a space under the bus was actually a pleasant surprise, since it meant we were in a modern bus, not an old Soviet Ikarus, an exhaust-stinking, shock-free diesel monster. We asked to put our bags in the bays. “Not now,” said the driver. “There are cameras on me. You will have to pay extra.” The bus swung around the corner of the building and parked a hundred yards away. We threw the bags underneath and boarded without incident or extra charge.

The bus stopped for a bathroom break in a village (Izyum, meaning “raisin”) about halfway between Kharkov and Donetsk. A statue of a woman in a flowing dress strode confidently into the future. A dog slept in the sun in front of an ice cream cart, whose attendant yelled at me for leaving the freezer door open while I counted my cash. A young boy fingered a Rubik's Cube faster than I'd ever seen, first with both hands and then with just one. He was the “Tommy” of Rubik's Cube. Two tall, bullet-headed Georgians with sleepy eyes made gentle fun of the etchings of Georgian tourist attractions printed in their passports. My health had started to crumple under the effects of the short, sleepless nights, and there's not much worse than having a cold in the dusty summer heat. Primary-color Ladas scattered across the streets like M&M's.

Halfway through the six-hour sauna of a bus ride, we got another text from Dima: “The Rostov venue”—this was the first show in Russia, supposedly two days hence—“gave me the wrong date! It's tomorrow. Oh, by the way, there are no trains to Russia either. Please buy a bus ticket at the station when you arrive.”

Andrey, who was supposed to pick us up in Donetsk, called Maria, who'd been sleeping, for a status report. “I think . . . the bus broke down, we're still in Slovyansk.” That's what she'd heard the guy behind us saying to his friend on his phone. The guy tapped her on the shoulder and explained that he'd been lying to his friends because he was late. “Oh, we're in Donetsk!” she corrected. “Almost there.”

We pulled in. “Where's our guy?” She scanned the parking lot. “Not the hippie!”

A gangly ostrich of a man strutted across the gravel, juggling, woven bag over his shoulder, a couple of halfhearted dreadlocks, zipper pull in one earlobe, a curl of bone in the other, apron tied over corduroy cutoff shorts. He grinned, gathered his juggling balls, waved.

“Yup, it's the hippie,” I told Maria. “Are you Andrey?”

“Nope, they sent the waiter. I'm Anton!”

Anton was a cheery fellow, as are most hippies at first. He took Maria to the ticket counter to explore our options for crossing the Russian border.

“You got a ticket?” I asked when they returned.

“Yeah, but you're not gonna like it!” Anton grinned. “Leaving tonight at midnight, arrive seven a.m.”

Donetsk seemed less weighted by physical history than other eastern Ukrainian or Eastern European cities. It was founded only in 1869—by John Hughes, a Welsh mining magnate—and destroyed in World War II. It had, to me, the faint scent of Texas: new mineral wealth showing off, fresh construction, unstained pavement, a pink Hummer parked outside a coffee shop. Donetsk is home to Ukraine's richest man, the steel and coal tycoon Rinat Akhmetov, who operates the region nearly as
a personal fiefdom (when fighting broke out two years later and ground the local economy to a halt, thousands of workers stayed solvent because his factories stayed open and continued to pay their salaries). Anton came to our table in the club with plates of pasta.