Your Ad Could Go Here

by Oksana Zabuzhko

  The lieutenant called Vovchik again in the small hours of the night and told him, There are Russians standing behind us, inside the administration building, he said, like NKVD’s antiretreat forces at Stalingrad. Others had spotted them too—the Russian special forces, gloried by their “cleanups” in Chechnya—and the suburbs and the city were abuzz on the internet following the route of their arrival: from a rural military airfield, the second or third where they requested landing (or so the rumor held, saying that the main base in Vasylkiv refused them, and the commander of that base did it early enough for the government to boot him off the job), through the base in Irpin, where they stopped god knows why (they could have been issued the Ukrainian uniforms to change into just as easily back in Moscow). Old-timers immediately recalled how much this resembled the Kremlin operation in ’68 in Prague; we grabbed our cameras and rushed to where the internet reports had pinned these troops, but all we managed to catch was a string of large vans with blacked-out windows, parked in a side alley next to Mariinsky Park. Someone had incautiously leaned out the back door of one of them for a breath of air, and we took our shots of the open door and the inside of the van that looked more like a spaceship’s cockpit, dense with control panels; then a few phrases were spoken, we heard an angry command—in Russian, as it is spoken by Russians, in hard, clipped syllables—the doors slammed shut, and that was that. There were unidentifiable black vans without license plates parked in an alley, and the very sight of them aroused unease; that’s not something you can capture in a picture—the different feel you get from an empty van and a muffled van, full of people silently waiting for something. As we pointed our lenses, gaping like mouths opened in surprise, at the vans, it really felt like they pointed something back at us; they were watching us back, but only they were doing it through the optics of guns—I could feel it on my skin, and that was when, for the first time, I got really scared. Maybe it’s because I’ve always been sort of, as Sweetie puts it, knuckleheaded, but I was never really scared throughout that entire autumn—the glum, hard, half-warlike autumn of my country when we all lived in a thickening fog of rumors, threats, raids, and demonstrations; I was not scared even though I photographed the blood on the pavement next to the Central Electoral Commission on the night of October 24 (and that was the first time I’d ever seen puddles of human blood on the asphalt, its spellbinding gleam in the streetlamp’s light, silky and black like oil), and I’d seen plenty of similarly menacing caravans without license plates, brought to the city and tucked away on small streets—there were so many before the first and the second round of elections that I must’ve gotten five gigs’ worth of pictures: sand-loaded dump trucks manned by immobile shadows and intercity buses with curtains drawn on their windows. The men who sat hidden in these buses sometimes came out to the stores to stock up on vodka and beer, and carried away several bottles at once, tucked under their arms with practiced skill, while opening beer cans with their teeth as they walked—churlish, brusque men with shaved heads, all dressed in tracksuits under fake leather jackets, reeking of meanness and alcohol. They had come up from a darker underside of life, from prisons, people said, and were full of vengeful hatred of our comfortable, brightly lit city with all its cafés, young mothers, baby carriages, supermarkets, and orange ribbons tied to cars’ antennas (and sure enough, the mere sight of a lens pointed at them was enough to throw them into a rage—once I almost lost my camera!). I bet they didn’t do it just for the money, and the free drinks—I bet they enjoyed doing what they’d been brought here to do: slashing tires on those orange-beribboned cars, attacking polling stations at nights, smashing the ballot boxes and setting them on fire—I bet they got a vicious, deep pleasure from the shock they inspired in Kyiv’s law-abiding citizens, who shied from them in supermarkets, snatching children out of the way. But when the revolution began and they ventured out into the light of the Maidan—tentatively, in small groups, instantly recognizable by the way they bristled all over like a hunting animal that wandered into someone else’s territory—they were somehow instantly annihilated, disarmed like old warheads, dissolved without a trace like drops in an ocean. When people called out to them from the fires: “Hey, boys, come over, we’ll get you something warm to eat!”; when people asked, “Where are you from, boys, do you have a place to sleep?” they retreated, squinting with suspicion and showing teeth, these nocturnal animals, used to people throwing rocks at them, not offering food, used to traps waiting for them behind kind words—and vanished back into the darkness, breathing their heavy breath, not finding any spoils at someone else’s banquet. And unexpectedly a few peaceful souls emerged from their midst as well—those, who, instead of showing teeth, cracked open in the warmth, whose souls unburdened such depths of old injustices and rightlessness that I didn’t have it in me to photograph them and lowered my camera. I have only this one picture of an old man, skinny as a bug, in a blue-and-white scarf, surrounded by the Maidan folks like a patient in a knot of concerned nurses. When they poured him a cup of tea and got him a sandwich, the man broke down crying; he just stood there and wept, shaking all over and unable to stop, and kept showing us, like some kind of exonerating evidence, his hands—a pair of black, gnarled wooden things, palms up. “All my life . . . ,” he sobbed, in Russian, “all my life I worked in a mine . . . with these hands . . . and what for . . . for a piece of bread . . . The director promised a hundred hryvna . . . They brought us here, kept us in the railcar, haven’t brought any food for three days . . . ,” and kept thrusting those hands at people, with their unbending stubs of fingers, like proof of his clear background—the only thing he had to identify himself. No, not once did I get scared of anything, even when the city was full of troops, armed to the teeth (who started to take our side pretty much right away, battalion after battalion)—I only felt indignation boiling up in me, blood hammering angrily in my temples—Fuckers! They think they can do anything! But there, in the side alley next to the Mariinsky Park, for the first time, I saw death. It was there, and it was real. I couldn’t ever tell Sweetie about this, or anyone else; I’d much rather not have learned this about myself at all: that there’s something in me, deeper and larger than your basic physiological instinct of fear in the face of danger, something beyond the natural human fright that makes your mouth go dry and your muscles cramp—something else much more oppressive, a long, twisting spasm of memory. It was sickening, literally gut wrenching; it felt like I was recognizing something I had never experienced, something that had to come back to me from my Soviet childhood, back from the sight of my old man using a pencil to dial a phone number because, for some reason, he believed that’s how you blocked the “surveillance,” or from my mom’s anxious shushing whenever I blurted out some especially inappropriate question while we stood in line in a store—all those unmarked black cars, middle-of-the-night interrogations, floodlights aimed onto one’s face, fingers jammed in doors, genitals crushed under boots, everything that had gone on seventy years earlier right here, around the corner, in the palatial building on Institutska Street, which was now filled with protesters sleeping on the floor under the many warm blankets donated by kindhearted Kyivites (and Sweetie was there, too, waiting in line to give a bag of warm clothes, and was so happy that she remembered to bring her old winter boots that went to a big woman from Polesia—the woman, on the first trip to the nation’s capital in her entire life, came dressed in her very best, and after spending a day in the freezing cold shod in her fancy booties, was ready to schlep back to her village, two hundred miles away, to get her old padded coat and a pair of valenki). Seventy years ago, this was almost forty years before I was born, and yet somehow I knew it, I recognized this apprehension that was deeper than fear: like you’re strapped to an operating table watching a mad surgeon raise his knife above you (I recognize this “operating table” look in a young kid from the Donetsk branch of the pro-opposition Pora! group; he’d been kidnapped before the first round of the elections and the thugs who did it
promised him they’d rape his sister if he didn’t quit—I remembered his face), and this version of myself—an adult man who knows this—was not a version I could or wanted to love, so there was no way I could share it with my precious Sweetie, my all-seeing and all-understanding little hawk, because she wouldn’t be able to love this version of me either. Nor was there a chance I could not live with that version of myself, and so, with one leg knee deep in the snowdrift in front of that silent black convoy, I suddenly knew, clear as day, that all I had left to do—all any of us had left to do—was to stand our ground to the end, and do our men’s work: to fight a good fight, and, when needed, to die an honest man, and that’s that. I had no idea how one went about doing that, and none of us did; none of us had ever wielded anything more damaging than a camera, so we just walked from that alley to the hunting and fishing store, where they kindly told us, “You boys are a little late, we sold everything we had on the first day,” and we marveled at that, and thought ourselves total losers, shaking our heads, swinging our snow-laden hats from side to side like a bunch of demented snowmen. The snow came down berserk, ran, melting, in rivulets down our faces, and we wandered away from the store arms-less but feeling initiated into an invisible warrior brotherhood whose presence we could feel vibrating all around us in the air, making us giddy, so we kept ribbing each other—Can you believe that? Sold out, you’d never thought of that, you’re such a total nerd, it never occurred to you, did it? You fucking wimp . . .

  This triggers another unphotographed moment from my memory. I think it happened in the same twenty-four-hour interval, or maybe the next day. It all ran together because I couldn’t really tell you where and how we slept during that first week, but here it is: we’re in the brightly lit, crowded fast-food restaurant in the underground mall below the Maidan, where we had staggered in to warm up after we ran out of tape and film and were frozen solid; the waitress, also semiconscious with fatigue but still smiling, said, “Boys, I’m out of everything except green tea, I’ll pour you some, on the house, all right?” and that’s when Vovchik’s cell phone rang. It was his school buddy from SOF, calling to tell him that they—the officers—had made their decision: if they were ordered to open fire, they would turn their men around and face the Russian antiretreat troops, making themselves into a human shield to protect the people on the square—that’s what they decided, our men, our officers and commanders who would lead us and whom we would follow to wherever they said, to take over armories and depots, to take our defiled country back—and on this note, while Vovchik, on his feet, delivered the word to the entire restaurant, which exploded in triumphant cries and applause, I blacked out, face onto the table, next to my unfinished tea, for I don’t know how long, a minute, a couple of minutes. When I came back, I found that someone had slipped a folded-up woolen scarf under my cheek, my own scarf that someone had carefully taken off my neck and placed onto the hard tabletop for me, all without me knowing it; the mug of tea, still steaming, stood right there, and I stared at the gleaming Formica top, at the woolly orange blob of my scarf and the white mug reflecting the bright overhead light as if I had become, all in one instant, this mug, and the light, and the scarf, and every single soul in that restaurant, and all of us at once who were outside, and everything and everyone that was around me, and I knew in my heavy, warming body that this—all of this together—this was freedom, and I would remember this moment for the rest of my life, because, as that boy from Rivne had said, “I won’t have another one like it.”

  She: Our Dutchman is getting into it now, flashing his eyeglasses, pointing and nodding quick as a squirrel, and Sweetie’s excited, too, a little flushed even; they can’t point at the screen fast enough; they exclaim things; they jump up on the couch, a little like fans at a soccer match. They grab handfuls of nuts from the plate and then, forgetting, wipe their fingers on their trousers. They have a complete understanding, no words needed, intraverbal communication, that’s what it’s called. Like children. All men of the world are our children.

  Except during wars, of course. Or popular uprisings. Also, revolutions. Then they are different. All visible history belongs to them, to men—they know how to band together.

  I could see it: Sweetie would grab his camera and go to the Maidan every day like he was going to the front lines. They all banded together in what seemed like a single instant; they have the instinct of the pack, a boys’ gang. Men’s work. A man jumps off the bed, pulls on his pants, throws on a coat, blows you a kiss, I’ll call, Sweetie, don’t worry, and is out the door. On the very first day, when Liona’s husband called—not Liona herself, as always!—to say that the police had been ordered to prevent protesters from the regions from reaching the capital, there were roadblocks and checkpoints on the Odessa highway, and several thousand people were sitting there in their cars, unable to go forward, they sent word on the internet, my man—he, mind you, who commonly needs an hour to achieve consciousness in the mornings, with coffee and a shower, who would not be roused for any tea in China once he’d gone to bed at night—this man was at the door in three minutes, eager as a bird dog, car keys in hand: “I’m going, Sweets, get on the phone, call everyone we know with cars, we’ve got to get these people to the Maidan.” In just over three hours, they got it done, he came home happy and fell asleep almost before he pulled off his clothes and threw them all over the floor. They made their strike, they got their people, they dispersed. Done.

  There was something of the medieval chronicles in this lightning-fast banding-together, these instantly organized efforts that resembled military maneuvers, something from Samuil Velychko’s seventeenth-century “Tale of the Kozak War,” from Sarmatian tactics—something of the Haidamaks, of the Kozaks, something that belongs to our long line of rebels. Somehow, overnight, history ceased being the past, and I could see how things worked back then—exactly as they did now, except with different technologies. One no longer needed to light the fire atop the watchtower because we had satellite communications. On the second day: I hailed a cab to go to the Maidan, and dropped into the front seat with the first words that all of us had for any new person, “What do you hear?” The driver (orange flag stuck to the rearview mirror) had the radio turned to Era, and we both listened to the broadcast: they were reporting an attempt to break into the presidential administration building, and about the Russian Special Forces, and because Sweetie was also there somewhere, with his camera, I cried out, “Good god, what’s next?”

  “War is what’s next,” the driver said, sounding certain and game for it, words not so much spoken as bitten out of the air, and that’s when I really looked at him. I looked and got even more scared—he meant it. The man was probably in his midthirties; olive skin, dark hair, a sharp profile fit to be cast in bronze, a hooked nose, a stubborn chin. All he needed was a pipe in his teeth and a Kozak haircut.

  “War? God forbid, what are you saying,” I fretted, but the man wasn’t listening; he looked at the road ahead and spoke his mind—slowly, dropping words one by one like a miser who’d been saving them for three hundred years, like the words had ossified inside him and he had to chip them out—spoke hefty words of a man profoundly ill at ease with the intellectuals’ endless blabbering:

  “What’ve they got to do with us, huh? No, excuse me just a minute”—that was him preemptively shutting my peacemaking mouth that was ready to spew platitudes he didn’t want to hear—he knew his answer. “Why are they bothering us? This is my home. I decide how I want to live here. What are they to do with it? They’ll get what they deserve. All of it. We’ll go to the woods if we have to. Fight a guerilla war.”

  I wanted to say, Don’t!—but I didn’t dare. The man’s squinting Tatar eyes (his family was from the Kyiv region, he said, from Skvyra) gleamed with a menacing fire. I felt all the folk song romanticism of Kozak-Haidamak uprisings evaporate from me altogether with the quick-drying cold sweat of my fear. Of course, that’s how it’s always been: Sarmatian steppes, consecrated knive
s, woods and hideaways, the fierce, blood-chilling beauty and might that used to inspire such holy awe in our Romantic writers. Who desires to suffer for the sake of our Christian faith, who wants to be impaled, quartered, and drawn, who yearns to be martyred for the holy cross, who’s not afraid of death—join us! Good god, indeed.

  The driver’s walkie-talkie sputtered on its own frequency, and I listened to the cabbies’ chatter: “All right, Sanya, my shift’s over, you gone to the Maidan yet?” They all did free runs to the Maidan at the end of their shifts—to take people home. They were our cavalry, the city’s sleepless guard, like in the Middle Ages. You stop one of them, tell him you need help, and in fifteen minutes you’ve got half of Kyiv’s motor pool there—and who will be our Velychko to write about them, what Dutchman, flying or otherwise, could fit them into the pages of a coffee-table book, this winged cavalry of our metropolis, Kyiv’s triumphant cabbies of 2004? On the regular radio, meanwhile, the host asked a well-known poet to pick a song for them to play to help lift the tension a little, and the woman asked to please put on “Let My People Go.” Yes, please, I agreed in my mind, riding toward the rising million-throated drone of the crowd, the lights, the thickening human mass in the flickering of orange—a whirl of faces like leaves tussled and spun in the November wind, lit by a magnificent, Rembrandtesque light, and I heard a voice say in my mind, clear as a bell, These are my people, and felt my breath catch in my throat—please—and Louis Armstrong’s coarse voice on the radio was asking for the same thing, please, and the poet, and the radio show host in his studio, and the people who were walking toward the Maidan, candles in their hands, to join others in singing the national anthem, hands awkwardly placed on their heart, please, let my people go. Lead them out of Egypt. Lead them out of this darkness before the winter, the darkest time of the year. Lead them to the quiet waters, to clear skies. To the christened world, to the blessed land. A pizzicato note, a breaking voice, a sob.