The Humorless Ladies of Border Control (33 page)

The danger, of course, of a war plan based in part on volunteer initiative is that the DIY soldiers coalesce into independent militias outside direct government control. Then, if the official government strategy is perceived to be ineffective, the obvious alternative for frustrated patriots is tough-talking paramilitaries—at which point Russian propaganda about a Ukraine controlled by an armed right wing indirectly fulfills itself. Indeed, the summer of 2015 saw skirmishes in western Ukraine between government forces and nationalist Pravy Sektor units. The latter had been allegedly funding their activities by smuggling cheap cigarettes into the EU with remote-controlled drones.

We passed the university town of Ivano-Frankivs'k, and the land widened into farming villages and then low, forested hills. The walls around a schoolyard were embedded with old wagon wheels. A policeman waved us down, but only to ask if we could give his buddy ten miles down the road a ride.

We stopped for dinner at a Bavarian-style roadside tavern. The blonde barmaid and waitress were silent. “These people are creepy,” said Maria.

“They run an empty restaurant in the middle of nowhere,” I said. “I'd get creepy too.”

She looked me over. “I believe that.”

“The bridge over the Dniester is in a catastrophic state,” announced a sign. It proved accurate. The bridge's roadbed was made of loose wood planks that rattled and creaked as we drove over them into the town of Luka, a mix of hulking wrecks of old buildings and fresh construction, chickens and cornfields. A gigantic harvesting tractor, painted in bright colors, sat parked halfway through a gate. The road forked.

“Excuse me, which way to Unizh?” Maria asked a farmer. He waved to the right.

The road faded into dirt, then narrowed to a single lane, then disintegrated into potholes so deep we might as well have been driving down a dry riverbed. We slowed to a crawl and battered the rental car's undercarriage. The fields disappeared behind a kind of fence of Queen Anne's lace and tall pines, followed by a dense forest broken only by an occasional logging trail.

“Are we still on the map?” asked Maria.

After about a half hour, a jeep appeared from the opposite direction and waved us down. Four men, young and festival-bound, were equally lost. A Hitchcockian cloud of mosquitos swarmed the open windows. We decided to caravan a bit farther on. The forest cleared, and eventually we came to the depopulated festival gates.

The grounds were spectacular: a sprawling farm on a river canyon, the cliff walls a backdrop for the main stage. “It's the Grand Canyon of the Dniester,” said our friend Ostap, whose group, Baj, had just played. A campground had sprung up behind the stage, and village women set out tarps covered with fried bread and fruit in between the mushrooming tents.

The attendees, though, were underwhelming and underwhelmed. There was a grouchiness in the air, that kind of sour-faced solipsism that can affect nouveau hippies and travelers (or hipsters of any persuasion) when, after days and weeks of anticipation of an obscure pleasure, they arrive and find only more of their own kind, everyone looking around, waiting for someone else to manifest the extraordinary happening they all came to experience.

The festival had been kept deliberately small; the organizers
felt that during wartime it was appropriate to prioritize community over raucous concerts. People from the east, where a corresponding festival had been held earlier in the summer, were admitted free. But you need people for a community, however small, and music for a festival, and the two hundred or so who had found their way to the remote location were wet and tired, and they needed someone (someone else, that is), to kick off the community-building—or, at least, the fun.

And yet. The crusties I'd seen in L'viv showed up and turned out to be Americans who went by the name Rail Yard Ghosts
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(the owner of the mariachi bass an acquaintance from years before, when he was in the New York gypsy-punk trio Luminescent Orchestrii), and they took it upon themselves to lift the collective torpor. They began to play under the bar pavilion. They were out of tune and pleased with themselves, and the pockets of crowd began to gather and to cheer. The band closed with a rousing rendition of a song called “Shoplift from Tesco.”

Across the dirt path, a Hutsul (a Carpathian mountain people) ensemble in embroidered shirts began to play a frantic, four-on-the-floor, fiddle and flute stomp, and the crowd, energized and chattering, flowed to the plank benches.

Not two songs into their set, the band and crowd were driven indoors by rain, into the cement-floored barn that had been serving as a makeshift camera obscura, but they simply picked up, mid-song, where they had left off. The rainy humidity mixed with the sweat of a hundred people, now concentrated under a
low ceiling instead of dissipating in the river valley, and a circle dance broke out. A local
baba
stepped up to the band and sang along, then grabbed Lesia and brought her to join the circle. It had become a proper basement-show party.

Outside, the rain cleared and the moon rose. A Crimean Tatar trio set up on a low stage in the foundation of a collapsed barn. A bank of fog rolled down the river, and someone fixed a spotlight on it. Dancers climbed the roofless parapets of the barn in the moonlight, and a pair in the crowd raised the Tatar flag.
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The band played to the hipster nationalist crowd—Ukrainian trident tattoos and horn-rimmed glasses, red-and-black nationalist flag patches—closing with an impassioned sing-along of the Ukrainian national anthem
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(“Ukraine is not dead yet,” goes the rousing chorus). The organizer of the festival, a young woman sitting cross-legged on a speaker, wept.

It is a lie that the rooster crows at sunrise. The rooster crows when he pleases—in this case four a.m., which woke me in time to hear the telltale trickle of a man urinating against the side of the building beneath my window.

Feeling ourselves a bit too old and weighed down for festival camping, we had arranged to stay in the village of Unizh proper, a hamlet with a church and a small slab of a war memorial whose population numbered in the low dozens. The few houses had snub-nosed gables, the endpoints of their roofs chopped off at
forty-five degrees for some obscure architectural purpose. Rotting picket fences flanked ornate and freshly painted metal gates. The houses huddled along a rutted lane hugged by the riverside greenery, lush with an unbounded, over-full fertility.

Our muddy compound—two houses, a pigsty, a shed for the cows, a roost for the chickens, shoebox-sized rabbit cages, an outhouse—was ruled by a toothless old woman in wool stockings and a kerchief who wielded power with a long wooden stick. Everyone called her
babusya
—“Grandma”—as if it were an honorific, which it was. Rural Ukraine, where men are ranked more by degree of alcoholism than by relative distance from the poles of sobriety and drunkenness, is truly a matriarchy. The baba stomped around the compound in purple slippers, scattering cornmeal for the chickens, bent at the waist grating green apples for the pigs, or gathering a wheelbarrow full of beet greens for the chickens and guinea hens. Her bottom jaw was a meaty ribbon of unbroken gumline, and she stuffed a ball of fried dough in her cheek like a chaw. She grabbed the cat by its jawbone in her wide, rough paw, swatting it as she threw it out of the house. Her husband, grizzled and skeletal, was terminally ill and confined to the house.

Lesia took to her like calf to cow and ran to her, arms stretched wide. “A gypsy girl,” the baba boomed, “she'll go to anyone!” She smacked the rooster out of the way with her stick and grabbed a fat rabbit by the ears to show the fascinated toddler.

The baba's daughter-in-law Olya was our hostess. She, her husband, and their nine-year-old son were staying in the village for the summer. The dark-featured man I'd taken for a Romanian farmhand was the baba's other son—“a disappointment,” she said, loud and firm—a drunk who slept in a makeshift bed
outdoors under a beer garden tent. Olya, who called me “Ferencz” (a Hungarianized version of my name), had a sun-ravaged back and a neutral, sexless fleshiness; she wore rubber shoes and a housedress. Her parents, only in their fifties, had been crippled in a car accident after a young man tried to pass three cars and a bus simultaneously. He was left with only an elbow injury; they would never walk again. Olya told me she had been struck dumb for three months afterward.

This village has everything, said Maria: the ebullient baba; the dying grandfather; the sullen drunk; the hot young thing—a cousin—in incongruously fashionable and revealing outfits, who spent most of her time on her phone. Our room was hers, with bubblegum-pink walls and a choking smell of mold. Next to a noseless stuffed dog, someone else's wedding picture, blown up to poster dimensions, leaned against the wall.

Slumming young Westerners assume uncleanliness must be a marker of poverty, and thus represent some kind of authentic existence. But the poor, in the absence of generative conditions such as mental illness or congenital drunkenness, are reliably neat and meticulous, sweeping loose dirt from a packed-dirt floor or painting a corrugated tin roof in geometric, quilted patterns. So here the outhouse, the last stop past the pigpen on the way uphill to the fields, locked with hammered iron hooks; was lined with vinyl wallpaper; had a clean, cushioned seat; and was as ventilated and odorless as any such building whose central receptacle was a white, thirty-gallon bucket full of human waste could reasonably be expected to be.

A filthy white duck, its feathers soggy and fouled with muck, squeaked its frustration as the gate closed before it and squirted a stream from its cloaca like tobacco juice. One of its feet
was deformed, and the baba had wrapped a rag around it to soften its limp. The river was tropically ponderous with effluent runoff after the previous day's storm. Maria and Lesia had gone to bed, but I was stopped on the steps by Olya's husband, the baba's less-disappointing son. He was my age and installed radiators in Ivano-Frankivs'k. He seemed to be the one who had been struck dumb, in contrast to his wife's fluty chatter. After the women went to bed, though, he felt comfortable enough to approach, brandishing a liter of beer and an unmarked flask of
samohon
: moonshine.

“Are you good?” Maria asked through the door, in English, after the husband and I had spent some time compensating for our lack of a shared language with shared drinks. “Or do you need me to rescue you?”

“Rescue, please,” I said. The steps had begun to spin. She played the spoilsport wife and called me to bed.

“It's nice,” she said when I was safely tucked in. “He finally cornered you to do man stuff”—drink heavily—“with him.”

It was a full moon. The village dogs didn't bark.

I woke early, choking on the moldy air, and went to sit outside and read as the sun, and the drunk son, rose. He stumbled over and leaned in, closer and closer, repeating a word I didn't know. (I later learned it was for “cigarette.”) Lesia woke up grouchy, rubbing her ears. The baba prescribed oil of onion for earache: shaved raw onion, squeezed through a bolus of cheesecloth, warmed in a bowl of hot water, then soaked in cotton batting and shoved in the ear canal. The asphalt yard soon smelled of onion.

The road out of town climbed the cliff to the field of cornflower
on the heights of the river's west bank. A nearly blind old woman, dressed in layers of dark gray and black wool despite the heat, cornered passing festivalgoers and harangued them with a megaphone squawk. As three German-looking men in sandals freed themselves from her attention, she turned her monologue and her stick toward the birds circling the cliff across the river.

As we drove back through Luka that morning, we saw most of the town walking to church, in headscarves and shiny suits and, on the young women, skirts just long enough to be respectable. We turned south and west toward Kolomyia: thirty-six kilometers of unpaved road. (“It's a terrible road,” an old lady trying to hitch a ride assured us.) We passed a bus shelter accessorized with stylized wheat stalks and half a mock-Grecian urn. Across the road, someone had cut a ten-foot circular moat, creating a grass-covered artificial island. In the center of town (first mentioned in “the chronicles” in 1395, said a helpful sign), a concrete Jesus stood atop a socialist realist war memorial, flanked by platonically heroic soldiers.

“I'm gonna guess that Jesus wasn't part of the original design,” said Maria.

A woman on the outskirts of Kolomyia wore a white tank top that read, mysteriously, “Bjorn Borg.” Men in Speedos were taking advantage of the sun to drive their cars down into the river for a bath. Silver roofs of aluminum sheeting were hammered into patterns and gleamed alongside shaggy Cousin Itt haystacks. The Hutsuls have a skill for the decorative: wool-lined vests, every inch embroidered in every imaginable color; house facades completely tiled (or plastered, or carved, or clapboarded) in pastel and purple, or lined with hammered metal trim; iron
gates with brass and silver filigree; felt rugs that hang heavy, like plywood or wet laundry; crossed lath, flowers, and glass over the bucket crank servicing dug household wells; and private shrines in which the Virgin Mary faces the road through a gilded glass fish tank. It's a self-conscious urge: as in many picturesque rural minority communities, there is a performative consciousness of regional color with an eye toward tourism.