Outside the Ukrainian post, the wait began. Ratty buildings displayed hastily scraped-over Soviet stars replaced by new Ukrainian flags. The air tasted hot dry, metallic, sooty, as if baked in an industrial oven. The breeze was fitful and acrid. People moved slowly to and from the border station carrying satchels and shopping bags scarce inches above the ground. They waited in lines for inspection, waited in line to have their passports checked, waited to pay, waited to complain, waited to move on to wait yet again.
There was a moment at the border when time stood still for Jeffrey. He was shuffling along in line, pressed in on all sides by reeking humanity, when suddenly the world came into sharpest focus. His mind became utterly still, caught by an unseen power as he took in all that surrounded him.
Surly border guards ignored whining pleas as they rifled bags and carry-sacks and demanded customs duties, which were simply stashed away. Other bored soldiers pushed people forward, maintained order, and kept careful watch over how much their fellow guards were pocketing.
As Jeffrey inched forward, he could sense all the wailing cries, all the dust, all the chatter and horns and blaring speakers and thousands of smoldering cigarettes all gathering together and drifting upward as a rank incense on an unclean altar.
He took another step and felt unseen vestments slip from his shoulders. His cloak of security had vanished. Jeffrey’s turn came then, and he set his bag down on the long metal bench. He shrugged a reply to the guard’s surly bark, heard Yussef reply for him, and thought there had never been a time when he had felt so exposed.
* * *
Ivona Aristonova waited beside her car within sight of the Ukrainian border station, smoldering from more than the heat.
She glanced at her watch, sighed, and swiped at a wayward strand of hair. Eight o’clock in the morning and the day was already sweltering. This was by far the hottest summer she could remember. And the driest.
In lands where summer temperatures seldom rose above the mid-eighties, and never for more than a day or so at a time, scores of days came and went where temperatures hit a hundred degrees by three hours after dawn. Weeks melted into months under blistering, cloudless skies. Crops trained to grow on little sun and regular rainfall withered and browned. First streams, then rivers, and finally lakes and seas fell below any levels known in recorded history.
And still the heat continued.
As much talk focused on the coming winter as on the present heat. Babchas told tales of other hot summers, followed by winters where unending snows fell upon an earth hard as iron. Many told stories of hunger as well. Elders argued over whether the famine winters of 1917, 1918, and 1919 had been as bad as those of 1944 through 1947. Younger people wondered if, in their own time, they would sit and argue over the winter that was to come.
Corn rose stunted, with ears the size of middle fingers. Lavender, one of the region’s major cash crops, refused to bloom at all. What should now have been seas of ripening wheat were graveyards whose dried husks whispered omens in the arid breeze. Potatoes baked in the ground a month before harvest. Vegetables sent up slender sprouts that wilted and fell in surrender. Village squares became anvils where farmers gathered to be hammered by the merciless sun. They stood and searched the empty sky for clouds. They spoke of omens, and of money and the lack of it, and of governments unable to help in this hour of great need, and of possible calamities yet to arrive.
But more than the heat was troubling Ivona this morning. Something about this whole plan unsettled her, and in a way she could not identify. This unreasoning unease troubled her immensely. She did not like such challenges. Life had trained her to distrust the unseen, for here lay the greatest threats to the established patterns of her existence. She held on to these habits with the same rigid insistence that she had applied to the task of learning languages. Ivona was nothing if not disciplined.
Ivona stiffened as she spotted Yussef’s slender form. She returned his wave and scrutinized the tall young man walking alongside her nephew.
The American called Jeffrey was everything she had feared. He was far too handsome for his own good. His face was as fair and fresh and unmarked as a newborn’s. His bearing was overly confident, utterly untested.
At that instant, it came unbidden, like a fragrance wafted upon an unseen wind. Once again, against her will, she found herself recalling the past, and the power of that memory stripped her bare.
****
The cold was indescribable that first northern winter. That she recalled much more clearly than the snow. The week before the first frost, temperatures were as high as forty degrees centigrade. Then one afternoon, the first week in October, winds came down from the north, and overnight the temperature fell to minus fifty-two degrees centigrade, a ninety-degree shift in less than twelve hours. Overnight the ground, the trees, even the grass and leaves turned to stone.
Food was very scarce that winter. To buy it, Ivona’s parents sold everything they did not absolutely need. Wives of local Communist Party leaders bought several ball gowns her mother had carried on that long train trip north. After everything was sold and the money was gone, all they had to eat was what the local canteen fed them—porridge in the mornings and in the evenings a stinking fish soup. The smell of that soup, and the rotting fish from which it was made, was so strong it stayed in their clothes and bedding and hands and skin throughout that long, endless winter.
All children were required to go to school in the wintertime. That made the polar winter seem so much longer, sitting in the room next to that stinking kitchen day after day. The sun always rose late and set very early, so they arrived in the dark and left in the dark. All they saw of the day was a line of light that traced its way across the floor. Hour after hour their teachers drilled them in Communist doctrine. Ivona found the lessons a torture as harsh as the cold.
They lived in huts of raw logs with moss stuffed in the cracks. Thankfully, there was plenty of wood, and they kept a fire burning in their little stove day and night. In their settlement were eighty Ukrainian families, over a hundred Polish families, and perhaps half that many Jewish families. Fewer than a handful of those families survived that first winter intact.
In May spring finally arrived. The river outside the village lost its covering of ice in explosions that sounded like a new war beginning. The village was there only because the river was there to float logs down to a sawmill.
Before long, berries appeared; gathering them was the children’s job. Those raspberries were their only source of vitamin C. By this time, of course, the whole camp suffered from scurvy. During the winter, they followed the local villagers’ example and brewed pine needles in water, letting the concoction soak overnight and then drinking a cup very fast. The taste had been beyond horrible, but it had provided enough vitamins for them to retain most of their teeth.
The children on their gathering trips also found mushrooms and sorrel, from which Ivona’s mother made a lovely soup. After a winter of porridge and rotten fish stew, the raspberries and her mother’s soups provided a taste of heaven.
Another winter and another spring went by before Stalin proclaimed one of his famous Friendship Treaties with local leaders in the Ukraine. For no apparent reason, Ivona’s family received a permit to leave the camp. Most of those who had been forcibly resettled, especially those in the far north, never returned home. Ivona never learned why her family was selected to leave, but they were.
In time Ivona and her family made their new home in Lvov, leaving behind the cold of Archangelsk. But never the memories. Never, no matter how hard she tried, the memories.
As she stood and watched the pair approach, Ivona became certain that the painful act of remembering was somehow tied to the arrival of this young man, this Jeffrey Sinclair. This utterly illogical notion shook her to her foundations. She pushed hard at the thought and the lingering pain that always accompanied her memories. Then she stepped forward to greet her nephew and his companion.
****
>
The car awaiting Jeffrey and Yussef as they came through the borderlands was a boxy, gray-green Lada, the driver an overly thin, gray-haired woman. She replied to Yussef’s exuberant greeting with a single word. She then turned to Jeffrey. “You are Mr. Sinclair?”
“You speak English. Great.”
“I am Ivona Aristonova. I shall act as your interpreter.” She was a prim schoolmarm sort of lady, all angles and thin features. Despite the day’s dusty heat, she remained poised and collected. She wore a simple blue skirt trimmed in hand-sewn flowers. Everything about her was old, patched, and immaculate; even her battered purse shone with shoe polish. Slate-gray hair was pulled back into a neat bun. Sky-blue eyes were encircled by deep wrinkles and bruiselike smudges. Her singsong voice, however, sounded surprisingly young. “Shall we be going? We have a long way ahead and much yet to do today.”
Jeffrey stored his bag in the trunk alongside Yussef’s battered bag, a hand-crocheted satchel which he assumed belonged to Ivona, a case of pepsi, a box of foodstuffs, and canister after canister of gasoline. He sat in the front seat, and felt the car sag upon springs so weary they barely kept his backside off the road.
Yussef grinned at Jeffrey’s expression and spoke his off-hand guttural manner. The lady translated, “These days it is best not to draw attention with too new a car or too fresh a change of clothing. Especially with the valuables we shall be carrying.”
Jeffrey shifted around to make himself as comfortable as possible. “I can’t remember ever feeling this hot before.”
“Afternoons are worse,” Yussef said through Ivona. “Clouds gather, but it does not rain. The heat is trapped to the earth. It has been like this for over two months.”
“How can you stand it?”
Yussef showed his discolored teeth. “This isn’t the West. You don’t find an answer to every pain here. We do what we have been taught to do by seventy years of Communism. We endure.”
Yussef rammed home the complaining gears and said through Ivona, “Welcome to the great Soviet empire.”
Chapter 17
Mostiska. Javorov. Nesterov.
All of his memories of that time, as they drove from village to village and did their trading and drove farther still, would be tinged by nightfall. Even the brightest day, when the heat was a weight under which their little car threatened constantly to collapse and leave them stranded, the eye of his memory was tinged by unseen darkness.
Just beyond the border zone, the road disintegrated. Cracked and pitted pavement barely two lanes wide slowed traffic to a tractor’s crawl. Without warning the pavement surrendered to holes of bone-jarring depth, slid into gravel and dust and rutted tracks, or gave way to ancient octagonal stones that caused their car to drum a frantic beat.
Ivona translated their buying transactions with precision, then maintained a silent distance at all other times. Yussef was content with his own company. Jeffrey found the car’s silence as heavy a blanket as the heat.
After their third stop, Jeffrey swiveled around in his seat so as to face her. “Your English is excellent,” he asked. “Have you ever traveled in the West?”
Ivona kept her attention fastened on the open window. “I have never left the Ukraine since my arrival.”
“Where did you live before coming here?”
“English was my escape,” Ivona continued, ignoring his question. Her voice was her finest asset, so soft and light and musical that if Jeffrey closed his eyes he could imagine its coming from twenty-year-old lips. Her only inflection was a slight singsong lilt. She spoke his name, related the best and worst of news, and translated the most mundane of conversations all in this lilting sameness.
“It was my magic carpet to other worlds. My most special moments were the days I received a new English book. Well, new for me. Old, tattered, pages missing, but still holding voices that called to me. They spoke of worlds where freedom was so normal the people could criticize the ones in power. Such stories lifted me above myself, released me from the captivity of my existence.”
Jeffrey took in the dull heat-blasted landscape, the poverty-stricken farm hovels, the concrete watchtowers. “I can imagine.”
“I love the classics especially. But I also enjoyed your modern novels. Even the trash was useful. Through their pages I watched your world hate a distant war, question God, take drugs, have free sex—make mistakes, yes, but in freedom.”
Jeffrey decided he did not understand this prim, undersized woman, with her old face and her young voice, her rigid mannerisms. “It’s incredible to think that you could learn such an English from books.”
“And radio, of course, when transmissions were not jammed. BBC and Radio Liberty and RFE. All highly illegal. Which made even the British gardening programs exciting.” She snagged a wisp of gray hair and patted it back into place. “I taught English, unofficially of course; even when the student was unable to pay still I taught. That gave me hours and hours of practice. Of escape. Of imaginary freedom. For someone imprisoned as I was, such imaginings were as real as life itself.”
****
Rava-Russkaja. Cervonograd. Sokal.
Every hour or so a tall guard tower sprouted alongside the road. When Jeffrey pointed one out, Ivona explained, “Before the fall of Communism, cars required transit papers to travel between towns or villages. All exits from main roads were blocked and guarded. Lookouts with binoculars manned the towers and timed the cars’ passage. If the drivers moved too fast they were stopped and arrested for speeding. If they moved too slowly, it was assumed that they were trading illegally, and they were stopped and strip-searched.”
The smaller villages were rows of squalid hovels lining several crumbling country lanes. Larger towns were clusters of tumble-down factories and high-rise tenements. Always there was a central square, always a squat government building with the charm of an oversized tombstone. Always a patch of parched grass proclaiming itself a park. And always a Soviet statue thrusting aggressively upward in dated fifties modernism. Jeffrey saw concrete pedestals with black iron figures ever pointing to the horizon, steel and cement rocket ships bearing proud Soviet warriors toward lofty heavens, brawny figures marching shoulder to shoulder toward a Communist future that was no more, agricultural images mocking the people’s evident hunger.
From time to time the horizon sprouted factories so large they appeared as mirages dancing in the shimmering heat. The closer their car came, the vaster the buildings grew—great monoliths looming up twenty stories and more, bristling with smokestacks, but for the most part standing idle.
“There was a huge defense industry in the Ukraine,” Ivona replied to his question. “Now it is idle because Moscow no longer buys anything. Salaries are frozen at the old rate, less than ten dollars a month. People are urged to leave, but no one does because there is no other work to be found.”
Within the homes they visited, be they spartan apartments or hovels with splintered boards for walls and newspapers for floor coverings, the hospitality never failed to humble him. The poorest of shanties still offered a standard fare of vodka reserved for guests and fresh bread obtained by waiting in line since dawn. Sometimes there were tomatoes shriveled from the heat, perhaps pickles or a plate of stunted onions. But always there was vodka.
At the first stop, Jeffrey shook his head to the invitation to drink and requested water. The stumpy, middle-aged man recovered from his surprise, went to his kitchen alcove, and returned with a battered cup filled to the brim. Through Ivona he assured Jeffrey that the water had been twice boiled. Jeffrey observed the silt making milky sworls and thanked the man solemnly. He then brought the cup to his tightly closed lips and pretended to sip.
After Jeffrey twice refused the invitation to drink, Yussef began carting in a bottle of warm pepsi at each visit. He set it down in front of Jeffrey and explained to the curious host what Ivona translated as, a vow. Jeffrey swilled the syrupy goo and did not object.
He saw no more water that first day, not eve
n bottled. At most halts, all they had to drink was Yussef’s warm pepsi, vodka, and an orange glop that children drank and Jeffrey learned to avoid after the first sip. The heat sucked so much moisture from his body that he felt a constant thirst. He took tea whenever it was offered, which was seldom, and remained bloated from pepsi.
In each village there was some antique or collectible on offer. Many were of considerable value, but a cheap trinket sometimes slipped through. Jeffrey was very concerned the first time it happened, conscious of all the warnings he had received from Gregor before traveling.
A man with a face as seamed as the fields outside his village offered all he had, a tiny pendant set with a few semiprecious stones. He croaked his plea with a voice squeaky from disuse. Jeffrey looked at the pendant dangling from a chain long stripped of all silver plating, held by hands that would never lose their own ingrained plating of grime and oil. Out of compassion, Jeffrey offered him ten dollars. He then returned to the car in shame for being taken.
But there was a new warmth to Yussef’s voice, and a strange sense of Ivona being less sure of herself than before.
“Yussef has tried to filter out the useless,” Ivona said in translation. “But these people are desperate, and sometimes they make wild promises in hopes of gaining a little something once you arrive.”
“And refuse to show the product to anyone but the buyer,” Jeffrey said, understanding perfectly. “They say it is too valuable to risk displaying to anyone but the person with the money.”
Again Ivona hesitated, as though not sure with whom she spoke. Then, “That is correct. Your ten dollars translates into a fortune for one such as him.”
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