The Humorless Ladies of Border Control (35 page)

“People learned that the government only respects force. The first people in Maidan, they were doing art actions, flash mobs—the government came and beat them up. But the next time the government came, they were burning cars and setting fires, and the government said, ‘OK, we will negotiate!' . . . I voted for Yarosh”—the leader of the Pravy (Right) Sektor, the militant nationalist faction. “Yarosh, in the election, they gave him money, he did other things like a regular politician, but . . .” He shrugged. “I think it will be better, whether you have strong arms from Europe saying, ‘You have to do it this way,' or strong arms from the government. . . . I think there will be a second revolution, and it will be tougher, like Germany in the 1930s. You have these men coming back from the Russian war in the east, with guns, knowing how to kill people, saying to the government, ‘What are you
doing?' And there will be a leader, an Adolf Hitler type. Because the police are demoralized: one day [they] are fighting for the government, for the laws, and the next, you don't know. It will be a long process and a long struggle.”

It was an all-too-plausible scenario, especially disturbing to hear from a member of the young cultural alternative (and echoing the appeal of Limonov's National Bolsheviks to the aimless counterculture of the Russian provinces). It was easy to see how the seductive power of revolution porn—the barricades, the Molotov cocktails, the “All Cops Are Bastards” rhetoric—could be co-opted by the rhetoric of militant populism, looking for a muscular defense against a powerful, aggressive, and unpredictable neighbor. At what point does the “castle doctrine”—that you have the right to protect what's yours—expand into dangerous aggression? Defending borders? Defending co-religionists, or, as Putin was arguing, co-linguists, regardless of nationality? At what phase of that expansion does “nationalism” shade from patriotism into something more menacing?

Sasha told me he had written a song about the separatists, specifically the Russian and Dagestani mercenaries crossing the border and “killing Ukrainian people and making money.” Later, he sent me the recording, a duet with an accordionist from Kalush credited to “Sasha Boole & Zydeco Fam.” It's “the first Ukrainian zydeco,” they declare at the top of the track (though despite the accordion, the music has nothing to do with zydeco).

        
If you were to ask him: what is more important, a carefree life or cash?

        
He lived in the mountains, herded his sheep on a horse, drank wine, ate shashlik

        
Now he's here lying in a Kamaz car

        
He could have lived a few days—at least to there and back and forth—

        
This when that same Kamaz car can carry more dead separatists than those who are alive

He wrote me:

“There was one battle when our army destroy a big group of separatists. They were riding Kamazes
[the most popular car of separatists at the beginning of the conflict].
Just few days before they was boasted, posting photoes of how they are riding Kamaz with guns in their hand. And then there was a photoes of the same cars, but full with the bodyes of separatists.”

While Sasha began his set, I jotted down my notes from our conversation in the bathroom, the floor of which was constructed from the sanded and finished sides of wooden wine crates. As I returned to my table, the representative of a local television station approached me and asked if I would do an on-camera interview outside—give the perspective of an American on the events of the day.

“I am on my own today,” the reporter said, setting up his camera on a tripod and plugging in the microphone. “Everyone is busy with all the news.” Did I have, he asked, any words of support for Ukraine in their time of crisis?

I paused, wanting to speak carefully. It's rare that one is called upon to speak as a representative of one's own country to one engaged in a high-stakes military and political struggle—with another country, Russia, known for its attention, and vitriolic response, to its critics. I had married into a Ukrainian family, I said, which makes my daughter part Ukrainian, so I have some kind of a stake in the game. But, simply, I would want for Ukraine what I would want for any country: rule of law, freedom from corruption, and self-determination and a dignified independence.

The club's cleaning lady, Pany Lesia, left a vase of fresh flowers at the front of the stage for my set: a blue vase, of course, with yellow blooms. Max and his friends were ready to get rowdy, and I ended my set a capella, atop the bar, clutching my banjo.

“Your folk singers,” the bartender told Max, shaking his head. “They always want to get up on the bar.”

But the locals weren't ready to let the show end. Sasha grabbed his guitar, and I my accordion, and we sat at the bar for another hour, hootenanny-style. They wanted to hear the iconic Johnny Cash bad-boy hits: “Folsom Prison Blues,” “Cocaine Blues”—a vicarious thrill, like white Americans who love gangsta rap or
narcocorridos
. The hippie girl's baby was asleep on a bar table, sprawled on his back in pajamas printed with little monkeys. The war in the country's east had suddenly escalated, but there was
samohon
to drink and rebel songs to cheer, and what had the east to do with them? I understood: scary events in real time take
time to process. On 9/11, I was on tour in Germany and tried to play the sympathy card to hit on a girl. (The next day I had to explain communism to our guitarist.) Stuff happens, but you can't let a big thing like history ruin your day.

Tempting as it may be, there's no point in lolling around in bed when you're hungover. You just end up obsessively cataloging and wallowing in the individual areas that hurt. Better just to jump up and start the hard work of recovery. Anyway, this wasn't one of the bad ones. When the problem was the liters of weak beer, not the
samohon
shots at the end of the night, I had at least, despite myself, done some preliminary hydration.

I took the train up to Chernivtsi—or down; it was almost due south, by the Romanian and Moldovan borders, on the route to Odessa. I have never been able to fully assimilate the idea that one can go south into mountains, any more than that rivers can run north to the sea. The filthy bathroom at the end of the train car was, despite the stench, the only place on the train to catch a gulp of fresh air. The old women, leery of the dreaded “draft,” prohibited the opening of windows with fearful glares.

I was meeting a redheaded young man with the unlikely name of Artem Ketchup who—it was news to me—was the mastermind behind my Ukrainian shows, as well as Sasha Boole's Moldovan and Belarusian adventures. As it turned out, I'd met him once before: he was working at Kvartira Art Center in Dnipropetrovs'k when Maria and I played there two years (and about two hundred pages) ago. As a teenager in Chernivtsi, he opened a design studio, silkscreening bags and T-shirts. He first booked a show by a local band as a vehicle to sell some of his merchandise and found that he liked putting on shows more
than making bags: “It's like a shitty tattoo—you get one, then you just want to get more.”

So he became a booking agent, organizing tours for Ukrainian and foreign bands—a lot of Italian hardcore, for some reason (“I don't know why. I think they want to have sex with Ukrainian women”), not so much Romanian or Moldovan, despite their proximity. “They're all guys smoking weed and”—he mimed playing bongos. He routed several of his tours through Kvartira in Dnipropetrovs'k. He was impressed with their operation and e-mailed Olya asking for a job. She agreed. He got on the train the next day and stayed there for two years. Since returning to his hometown, he had been booking shows and working as a producer for the local TV station.

“Ketchup” was a relic from his teenage years as well. In middle school, like for Erden in Mongolia, English classes had been contracted out to missionaries (in this case, American Baptists) as a Trojan horse for religious after-school programs. Artem was assigned, or chose, the nickname “Ketchup” in a getting-to-know-you game at the Baptists' summer camp. Though the religious training didn't stick, he said, it was a good experience for him: “I thought it would be a joke, but that summer, all my friends got in trouble, and I got off to a good start.”

We walked to the “Musico-Dramatic Theatre,” a gorgeous opera house decorated with chandeliers, maroon velvet, and gold leaf, to film a segment for a local TV program he produced. Like many of the driven young men who are the engines of their local scenes, Artem propelled himself down the sidewalks with racehorse strides, twitchy with energy. I wanted to grab him by the shoulder and harness him to my slower pace.

Chernivtsi was a beautiful town in the Hapsburg style, but
unlike, say, Ruse, it was freshly repainted, on the occasion of its six-hundredth anniversary. And unlike L'viv, it wasn't overrun with tourists—just a few cars with Italian or Russian plates, the latter ostentatiously displaying Ukrainian flags. A trio of crew cuts in Adidas tracksuits glowered at an ATM. The language usage here was, Artem said, about evenly split between Ukrainian and Russian speakers (“and maybe twenty percent Romanian,” he added). He himself was raised speaking Russian, but “I like speaking Ukrainian. You don't have here, like in L'viv or Ternopil, people saying, ‘Oh man, why you speaking Russian?' It is more democratic, young people wanting to make art.” He paused. “I hate borders.”

Did he, I asked, think that this was a common sentiment, that there was a generation of young people who wanted to move past the bifurcations of the past?

He was unwilling to generalize or predict. All of his friends from Luhansk and Donetsk were in Kyiv now, which was good for the concentration of like-minded people (and causing a rent explosion in Kyiv) but not for the cultural future of the east. Poroshenko was, he said, “I don't know the word in English—not good, not bad.” Far-right activist Dmytro Yarosh's Pravy Sektor?
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“It's weird, two years ago the same people were just UPA”—the World War II–era western Ukrainian partisan guerrillas led by Stepan Bandera, whose legacy is revered in much of the west but extremely controversial—“nationalists, you know, not good, and now they are heroes because they made revolution.”

Do you think it was all worth it, I asked—the chaos, the loss of Crimea, the war in the East—to overthrow the government and awaken the national consciousness?

“I don't know yet,” he said. “It's like I'm reading a book of history, and I don't know how it ends.”

The PA at the coffeehouse alternated between James Taylor covers and the Stooges, which was as good an introduction as any for my show. The crowd was made up of young Europeanized bohemians, who seemed rather affluent by Ukrainian standards: I counted at least a half-dozen iPad minis. One guy scrolled through the headlines, looked up, and said, “Today Verkhovna Rada [the Ukrainian parliament] banned Communist Party.”

Plenty of technology, but not much reaction to my set. “That's just how Chernivtsi is,” said Artem. I took the two a.m. train back to L'viv. It was too hot to sleep.

The show in L'viv was a last-minute affair in a crowded bar in a stone basement. Ljana, a journalist, put on shows “for a hobby. People say L'viv is the cultural center of Ukraine, but it's not true. There is no club to have loud music, like punk rock or grindcore like I want to put on. People only want cover bands that can play while they eat. So for now I am only doing acoustic shows.” Anyway, she said, it was inappropriate to put on big shows with wounded soldiers coming back to L'viv hospital from the east. People would rather, she hoped, give blood and money to the war effort than pay for an expensive rock show.

Appropriately for a venue that looked like something out of Greenwich Village in the 1960s, the crowd consisted of hipsters in the beatnik sense, not the contemporary one: quiet, attentive, serious listeners. Maria, Lesia, and I caught the night train back
to Kyiv: the Bulgaria Express, Sofia to Moscow. The usual shirtless, potbellied drunk harassed the hallway, alternately grumbling, belligerent, and supplicant.

Often when I tour a country for the first time, a person—almost always a young man—will come up to me and say, “Next time you come, let me organize the shows.” Two years ago, in Kyiv, it had been the voluble, scruffy Sasha Grinevich, and I had indeed reached out to him this time around (though as it turned out he delegated most of the shows to Artem). We met up for lunch at Cult Ra. He was the picture of an Anglo scenester punk, in a Propagandhi T-shirt and pink Ray-Ban knockoffs; his friends play bike polo on Saturdays. He was from a circus family on his mother's side—a strongman, an illusionist—though, he conceded, “there are no pictures of them. They could have just been some alcoholics.” He worked for a website run by Ukrainians but based in San Francisco (an “automated proofreader and personal grammar coach”) and so had a much-coveted U.S. visa, though he hadn't made use of it. He booked a few shows a year for foreign bands—the Brooklyn-based group Obits, someone from Austria. Malaya Opera, where we played last time, had shut down shortly after our show, and the scene had moved to a big hangar, which also didn't last. Now it centered on a garage run by a small collective, who had recently put on a successful festival called “DIYstvo” (a pun on
dyjstvo
, or “happening”).