The Humorless Ladies of Border Control (34 page)

Western Ukrainians plausibly blamed the potholes on the just-ousted government, run by Russophile men of the east who steered infrastructure spending away from the nationalist west. To the degree of driving difficulty we now added a long series of switchbacks as we ascended the Carpathians, through the kind of pine whose needles hang from branches like a medieval noblewoman's sleeve, past roadside sellers squatting behind baskets of dried mushrooms and mason jars of berries. The sheer mountains themselves were largely deforested, an impressive display of human ingenuity directed at living, herding, and farming at a forty-five degree—or greater—angle.

The Cheremosh River, which ties the region together like a tense ribbon, cut through not the regal canyon of a dignified international waterway like the Dniester but a squared-off notch chiseled, roughly but effectively, ten feet below the village floor-lines. The bridge into Verkhovyna had a new paint job, in both the blue and yellow of the Ukrainian flag and the red and black of the militant nationalists, and sported the patriotic slogan “Slava Ukraina, Slava Heroim” (“Glory to Ukraine, Glory to the Heroes”) across its breadth. Maria's old friend Oksana had organized the repainting with a group of schoolchildren, not without local controversy. Notwithstanding the strong national feeling in the area—there is a large memorial in the town square to the
Heavenly Hundred, and a carful of Verkhovyntsi were on their way to Donetsk with food, guns, and cash—Oksana had been abused and threatened on the town's message board. She hadn't gone to the trouble of getting permission from the town council, the Ukrainian flag's colors were upside down, and the red and black were just too radical. She should be hung from the bridge, one commenter said.

A slim and boyish woman in her forties, forthright and motormouthed, Oksana was used to being a controversial figure in her village; being single and childless at her age was unusual enough. Born in Verkhovyna to a single mother, she had moved to Kyiv in her youth and lived the life of an urban hipster: music, art, parties. She had returned home to take care of her aging mother. When her mother died, just a few months before our visit, Oksana inherited a small enclosure and three buildings, two of which she had repurposed, built out, and decorated as a kind of bed and breakfast.

She was sitting on the porch when we arrived, wearing a bikini, flip-flops, and a baseball cap advertising Bitburger beer. She was cleaning potatoes with a knife. It was laundry day. Her close-cropped hair was dyed blonde and looked blonder against her sun-bronzed skin.

“These stairs are pretty steep,” Maria said as we hauled a suitcase up a glorified ladder to the sun-baked second floor.

“Pff!” Oksana said dismissively. “
Americanskii protest!
”—what an American complaint.

Within her gates were a half-dozen cats, two goats, a small patch of grass for clover hay, a vegetable garden, countless flowers, raspberries, wild strawberries, broken glass and shards of pottery pressed decoratively into the cement walkways and exterior walls,
a bench swing made from shellacked branches, a covered but wall-less teahouse, laundry drying on parallel lines.

Oksana had one tenant, a German in his ninth year of traveling the world. After a close friend died, he had quit his job and gone in search of spiritual contemplation. He had one set of loose-fitting, synthetic hiking clothes and wore those shoes with individual pockets for each toe. He fasts twice a year for thirty-five days at a time, he told us, and eats only once a day. When he feels hungry, he goes for a walk in the mountains. He has a twenty-five-year-old daughter but hasn't seen her in three years.

Oksana had her laptop out and was struggling with a dilemma: how to list her establishment on Airbnb in a way that wouldn't attract Russians. She's sick of dealing with Russians, she said. “They just want their
sto hram
”—100 grams of vodka—“and fried meat.” In the end, she decided the solution was to run the listing in English.

She was a card-carrying member of the nationalist Svoboda party, and we asked how she felt about the recent presidential election, won by the billionaire businessman Petro Poroshenko.

She shrugged. “He's not so bad. Lyashko”—the radical nationalist member of Parliament who was in the middle of conducting a vigilante campaign in the eastern war zone at the head of a private militia—“would've been great, but Europe never would have accepted him. We need a manager, not a revolutionary.”

Verkhovyna was clustered at the bottom of a wide river valley. Unlike American villages, where each house is separated by a buffer of trees, its houses were packed together as if they had slid down the valley walls and run up against each other. You could hear the cries of babies and shouts of fathers across the whole
town. Dozens of roosters and hundreds of dogs sang in chorus over the square miles.

It was haying season, and whole families, including small children, pitched in. The yards and fields were left to grow tall, then scythed, left to dry in the sun, turned once a day with a rake or pitchfork, and eventually gathered, once the grass had browned, into one of the twenty-foot haystacks that each fell from their own central pole. Oksana's neighbors, Jehovah's Witnesses with five young children, had taken over their shared driveway to cut bark lath into kindling. The husband was shirtless and, though young, nearly toothless. He had a menagerie of bad tattoos: fantasy dragons fading across his back; a bust of Lenin over his left breast; and, in English Gothic capitals on the mound below his belly button, “Only Fur [
sic
] Lady,” with an arrow pointing toward his crotch.

“He must have been in prison,” I said. He had, it turned out: eleven years, for rape.

The high mountain lanes, rutted and exposed on the treeless slopes, were cut as deep as five feet below the ground level in the surrounding fields: the roads have followed the same paths, under more or less the same conditions, for a very long time. It's hard to credit the evidence that many motor vehicles use them, though I do see a dirt bike, an old Soviet army jeep, and a Lada with a jacked-up suspension pass by. One farmer tossed his drying hay with a preindustrial horse-drawn contraption whose two iron wheels turned rods that, as they rotated, waved four pitchfork ends up and down in pairs.

We were visiting a legendary local instrument maker, Tafiychuk, a squat old man with white hair and black eyebrows. He and his wife lived in the hills with their twelve-year-old granddaughter.
Their daughter used to live there, too, but ran off last year with a drunk and left the child. Their house, like the bridge, was newly painted in patriotic blue and yellow. Maria asked him about the election.

“I'm a simple man,” he said. “I don't think about these things.” But he, like Oksana, had settled for Poroshenko.

We were buying instruments: a tsimbaly (hammered dulcimer), a selection of sopilky, and a duda—a bagpipe made from the skin of a whole goat. To keep the goat skin soft and supple, Tafiychuk said, toss fifty grams of vodka into the instrument every month or so. The tsimbaly had been built for another man, but he had been called up into the army. Maria could have it; the original owner had said: “If I come back, I can order another one.”

We left and headed to Kosiv, where our friend Roman had set up an interview with a member of the Hutsuls, one of the region's first rock bands, begun in the 1960s. Lubko was a tired-eyed man in double denim and a khaki fishing vest, with one tooth in the middle of his upper gum like a Muppet. The Hutsuls' hit was a cover of Black Sabbath's “Paranoid” with lyrics rewritten in Ukrainian to refer to local topics. Their bearded singer, Slavko, could still be seen riding around town on his bike, playing trumpet at funerals and dances: “It's the rock and roll life,” he said, “you want to play for people. Even dead people.”

Roman was a photographer and a member of the local parliament (“the local mental hospital,” Lubko added). “It gives me headaches and makes me enemies.” He had arranged for the reunited Hutsuls to play the Maidan stage over the winter, though it had taken some convincing. “Why do I need to drive all the way to Maidan?” Slavko had asked Roman.

“Listen, Slavko,” Roman told him. “You've been playing forty years in a jail. Even in free Ukraine, you're in a jail. Now you can come to Maidan and play in a
really
independent Ukraine.”

It was time to start playing my own shows. I left Maria and Lesia in Ivano-Frankivs'k, in the hands of the mayor's wife, who was busy organizing fund-raising efforts for the army (“The boys need socks and thermal underwear”), and drove west to Kalush. “We call that road the chessboard,” Roman said, “all patches of black and white”—i.e., potholed and patched. It was no small improvement on the mountain roads, though. In forty-five minutes I pulled up at a freestanding Irish pub incongruously plopped in the middle of a cluster of bedroom-community apartment towers.

“I am Max,” said the schlubby, jovial proprietor, who wore a T-shirt that read “Music Is My Religion.” “This is Maxwell Pub.” The interior was hung with all manner of Irish knickknacks and “Proud to Be a Celt” football scarves. Max even had a clover tattoo. “I like Irish music, Irish football, Irish beer, Irish everything!”

He introduced me to his small crew of friends. Alex, from Odessa, wore a trendy but short haircut, a red-checked button-down, and black-rimmed glasses: a preppy hipster or a hip preppy. His greatest ambition, it turned out, was to live out a Carlos Castaneda fantasy and do peyote with a cult in Mexico. He loved Kalush, he said, though he couldn't explain why. He said it was an eco-disaster waiting to happen: a deep mining pit filled with chemical waste from a fabrication plant was just waiting to overflow.

The crusties from the festival had a week off, and I'd tried to
get them to join this show. The game of telephone hadn't connected and it hadn't worked out, but another American showed up looking for them, a chatty hippie girl with a nine-month-old baby. She overheard me tell Alex that I didn't think you could just go to Mexico and get peyote these days. “Sure you can!” she interjected, and as she gave him the details, I slipped away.

I'd brought only my banjo on this tour. You can find an acoustic guitar anywhere, I figured, and if they could scrounge up an accordion too, so much the better. Max could. Not only that, he'd cooked a surprisingly credible falafel dinner. While eating dinner and scrolling through Twitter, I began to see unsettling reports that a civilian airliner had been shot down in eastern Ukraine. Early indications said that the Malaysia Airlines flight had been destroyed by the Russian-backed rebels. I excused myself to the patio and called Maria. “Did you hear what happened?”

She hadn't. She was scared. “Should we drive to the Polish border?”

“Let's give it a few days, see how it shakes out.”

It seemed like a game-changer: hundreds of dead Europeans would surely be the spark that broadened this bloody, but so far regional, conflict. I returned to the bar and sat down next to Max. “Did you hear what happened?” I asked. He hadn't, and made a scornful noise when I told him.

“Donetsk and Luhansk, let them go,” he said. “They are not Ukrainian. They think they are Russian, but if they join the Russian Federation, the Russians will call them Ukrainians. They are stupid and aggressive: drink, drank, drunk! In Soviet Union they had factory jobs, but in independent Ukraine the factory closed down. It is all criminal gangs.”

Surely, I asked him, there are Ukrainian loyalists in the eastern regions?

“It is too bad,” he agreed. “Maybe some percent of people there want to be in Ukraine, but their family is there. . . . Like the [Crimean] Tatars. But they have Turkey looking out for them, they will be OK.”

Did you vote in the election?

“No. I have a friend who just came back from Slovyansk. He was in the army. He said it's all just a political game.”

He dismissed my concerns about the plane and changed the subject. “You know Sasha Boole?” he asked, indicating a poster for the show. Sasha, from the border town of Chernivtsi, was the opening act. “Everyone thinks he looks just like you. We made up a myth that you were brothers, that you fell in love with a girl but she chose Sasha, and so you went to America.”

When Sasha arrived, I saw what they meant—he did resemble a version of me from a few years earlier. He wore a handlebar moustache and a bowler hat and sported a tattoo of a skeleton playing a banjo. He had dark hair and light blue eyes, wore a sweater tied around his neck like a golf pro, and sang the kind of romanticized Americana that was increasingly popular in Eastern Europe: a bandolier of harmonicas, a stomp box, a version of “Down by the Riverside.”

“I love gypsy music,” he told me, and sang mock-theatrically to demonstrate. “In every song, a gypsy horse thief is falling in love with the daughter of the”—we debated the translation—“mob enforcer.” Earlier in the year, he had done a forty-day tour in Moldova and Belarus. The former was harder, he said, because the number of permissions required to hold or advertise a show was prohibitive.

Unusually, Sasha mixed the unionist/progressive leftism common to most folk-punk Woody Guthrie fetishists with a radical militancy. “I played in Kyiv, at the Maidan,” he said. “It was an honor. . . . [Maidan] was worth it not so much for the results but because it turned a tumbler in the minds of Ukrainians.” He mimed a key turning beside his temple. “That we have to work together. The people from the medical school coming out under fire to help the injured. Like the American Communists, like Upton Sinclair—there is a history in America of organizing and popular uprising that we don't have.”

I commented on the irony of a former Communist state looking to American communism—which had, after all, been even less successful in practical terms than the Soviet version—as a future for Ukraine. He made a gesture of acknowledgment. But pacifist, Occupy-style activism was too weak to force change, he said.