Cleaving

by Julie Powell

  A friend of my brother’s has occasionally worked in Ukraine as a consultant for politicians who really almost definitely had nothing to do with the mysterious decapitation of their rivals. He’s hooked me up with a young woman, Oksana, educated in the States, fluent in English, and by all accounts totally fantastic, who has agreed to do serve as my guide. The day after I fly into Kiev, she’s going to meet me and we’re going to take the train together to Kolimya, her hometown in the western part of the country. All I have to do by myself is get from the airport to the Tourist Hotel, near the Livoberezhna metro station on the left bank of the city, then manage to feed myself and get around for one day and night in Kiev without getting mugged or hit by a car, or falling down a manhole.

  The pill doesn’t seem to be working; you’d think the combination of it and a tower of Babel would do the trick, but I remain wakeful and restless. I fondle the phone in my pocket; a backlog of chatter is rising, and I have no prospect of soon easing the pressure. I wish my doctor had prescribed something stronger. Like, I don’t know, OxyContin or something. Unfortunately, he knows just enough about my various addictions to know not to bring out the big guns, drugwise. I pull out one of the notebooks I’ve brought with me. I’m going low-tech for this trip. I haven’t brought my laptop, and though I have my BlackBerry for emergencies, I’m going to endeavor not to use it—both because that phone has become so dangerous to me, a false lifeline that instead of keeping me from foundering threatens to pull me out to sea, and because I can’t bear to even imagine the phone bill. So I’m taking up a little old-fashioned letter writing.

  Dear Eric,

  Well, I’m in the air, with my Babel and a bunch of sleeping pills that aren’t working. Thinking about how sorry I am that getting to the airport was so hectic, that we didn’t get to say a proper good-bye. I mean, misremembering the flight time by two hours? This is how Julie self-destructs, not with a whimper but with a bang.

  After a while my hand cramps from all the unaccustomed writing, and I lie back. But I never do really get to sleep. Ten hours after frantically rushing down the gangway at JFK, I’m dully trudging up another one at Boryspil International Airport. It’s a slightly shabby place, difficult to navigate, or that might just be exhaustion and Cyrillic. But I manage to find a cab, convey where I want to go, and get to the hotel room. After settling in I wander the streets, taking in the people and the feel of the place, but this not-knowing-the-alphabet thing has added a whole new layer of incomprehension. I can’t even match up addresses from my guidebook to street signs. This profound, basic level of ignorance does funny things to my brain, makes me feel physically dizzy, like I’m a little drunk, and paranoid. I get on the metro, managing to buy tokens and negotiate the turnstile, but first I board a train going in the wrong direction, farther into the suburbs, before turning around and getting on another one across the river to the city center. Here, the buildings are old and the metro stations deep and magnificent, immaculately white and gently lit, with an escalator ride to the street that takes a full five minutes. People sit on the moving steps to wait out the ride. Teenage couples make out. I don’t think I can bear that—flashes to Union Square, the backseats of cabs.… I look away.

  By evening I’ve at least managed to return to my shabby Soviet-era hotel, with a bottle of water (I’m not supposed to drink the stuff out of the tap, apparently), a link of cured sausage from a babushka selling them by the train station, and a hunk of bread. I hole up in my room for the night with my pen and notebook, continue working on my letter to Eric, reporting on the grayness of the city, the stiletto boots and extravagant fur coats of the unsmiling women, until I fall asleep.

  Luckily, I find when I meet her the next day, that Oksana is not one of those women. Twenty-two years old, tiny and obviously rather brilliant, she has picked up an American way of dressing, jeans and sensible shoes. One of the first things she says to me that day is “I can’t imagine ever dressing like a Ukrainian woman now. Those heels!” But she’s a very Ukrainian twenty-two, which is to say that essentially she’s more mature and pulled together than I am.

  We see untold churches—St. Sophia’s, St. Andrei’s, St. Michael’s. They are painted gold and white and sky blue, and the oldest of them dates from the eleventh century. In front of each of the churches there are a dozen or more wedding parties, billowing white dresses and multihued bridesmaid’s gowns and tuxedos and flowers and limos and photographers. Apparently it is the last auspicious day of the season, Saint Somebody-or-Other’s Day, so all the couples are squeezing in their weddings before the winter. Behind St. Michael’s there is a small fountain under a cupola where people are crowded about. There is a superstition about the fountain that, later that night on the train to Kolimya, will prove too great a temptation for my epistle-loving soul:

  So this fountain, it has a sort of marble column coming up from the center of it, and the story goes, if you can get a coin to stick to the side of the column, your wish will come true. And I managed it, on the first try even. If I believed you would read this, I know you wouldn’t need three guesses to think what I wished for…

  We also passed this famous house, called “House of the Demons.” This baroque gray fantasia of a building with no right angles, encrusted with stone frogs, stone rhinoceroses, stone fairies and sea monsters and elephants. Oksana said there’s a sad love story attached to it, involving the architect who built it. I believe that. It looks like the work of someone who’s lost someone.

  I don’t know if it’s the movement and noise of the train—a movement comforting and sexual, like being rocked in a cradle or in a lover’s arms, with the regular clacking of the tracks that both calms with its regularity and suggests other rhythms—or if it’s just my growing conviction that D is out of my reach—that he’s blocked me from his e-mail account, that he throws away my texts—but in the letter I begin writing to him I allow myself these sentimental observations and heartbroken cries.

  I’ve never traveled in an overnight train. We are in what’s called a “coupe”—a sleeper car for four—and now I’m the only one still awake. I can’t sleep, but I’m not unhappy about it. I like this train. It makes me want to fuck. You.

  My reporting to Eric is cozier, more about the telling detail. To D, I write persuasive essays; to Eric I write like I would write in my journal, like I would write to myself:

  Oksana has the top bunk, I have the bottom, a middle-aged blond woman has the other bottom, and a dark man the opposite top. We have not spoken at all to these people—Ukrainians are rather a grim-faced lot.… The aisles of the cars are carpeted, the windows have old-fashioned, dusty curtains. Walking through them, from one car to the other, past one open compartment door after another, is a curious experience, like peeking into a series of dioramas—old men playing cards, a compartment overflowing with loud adolescent boys in blue-and-white soccer uniforms, one silent older couple staring at a young woman, who sips tea. Passing between the cars is a bit of an ordeal—one door opening into a small, deafening, pitch-black space about three feet square, nothing to hold on to, floor unsteady, cold air whooshing in and the speeding tracks below… all for a warm beer from the dining car, and the small pleasure of getting a smile from the woman behind the counter when I mangle my “dyakooya.” (Ukrainian for “thank you”—Oksana told me to use that instead of “spasibo.” Apparently Russians aren’t looked on too fondly in western Ukraine.) She smiled at me like I was a basset puppy stepping on its own ears.

  The train left Kiev at seven p.m.; we will arrive in Kolimya at seven a.m. I spend much of the night writing my letters under the solitary light over my bunk, until my hand is stained blue with ink and aching.

  … one guy with too-white teeth, seventy years old if he was a day, blatantly grabbed my ass on the way back from the dining car. Seriously, Eric, it was weird.

  … but I think that my longing for you is beginning, at last, to take on a different cast. It’s gotten more bearable, sweeter, nearly pleasant. A sor
t of peace in hopelessness, maybe.

  We get off the train in the dusky dawn in a bit of a daze, make our way by bus and then train to the House on the Corner, a pleasant bed-and-breakfast run by Vitaly, a brash blond man with excellent English, Western sensibilities, and great ambition, and his mother, Ira, a small woman with short hair, crinkly smiling eyes, and not a word of English, who foists upon me a deeply delicious omelet the moment I walk in the door.

  This place is roomy and clean and modern. Vitaly’s mother is an excellent cook. The bathroom, which I would share if there were other guests but for the time being have to myself, is a Westernized vision of white tile and modern fixtures and steaming hot water. Eric, who visited this part of the world ten years ago, warned me that I’d be beset by Turkish toilets and a grim standard of personal hygiene, but so far I’ve encountered nothing of the sort. I’m almost disappointed. Where’s the challenge here?

  Today I’ll rest, and write, and maybe get hit upon by an older Ukrainian man when I walk into town for a coffee. No, that will definitely happen.

  So, my silent darling, one thing I’ve noticed, here and in Argentina both, is that when you are a woman in early middle age, of no extraordinary good looks, traveling abroad alone, you will be hit on, repeatedly and exclusively, by fifty-five-year-old men. And their approach will always be the same:

  1) They will ask what religion I am. As if this is deeply vital to what it is they want from me. I have learned to say “I was raised Episcopalian, it’s a little like being Catholic,” so as not to risk conversion speeches or the offense that might be taken should I speak what I think, which is “I’m an atheist, which should make you happy, since I’ve heard Catholic girls can be a little hesitant to screw random old men they meet in coffee shops.”

  2) They will comment on how young I look. The median age quoted to me is twenty-five, which is just patently absurd.

  3) Once they learn my true age, they will ask me how many children I have, and when I say “none, yet” (I’ve quickly learned that the “yet” is key), they will very seriously inquire as to the reasons behind this strategy, insist that I have several, immediately, and more often than not insinuate that my problem is that I need a real man, an Argentine/Ukrainian/whatever man, to impregnate me.

  And I will laugh the laugh of a fish working her way politely off a hook and say, “Thanks so much. But men in my life is one thing I do have, more’s the pity. I think I’ll stick with what I’ve got.”

  And then tomorrow, I’ll go see some sausage.

  When I contacted Oksana about this trip, I told her I wanted to see meat, if there was meat to be seen. She didn’t blink—which frankly I thought was odd—and immediately set about finding some places, especially for me to see sausage making, western Ukrainians taking great pride in their sausages. This morning we are going to visit a plant some ways out of town, in a small village, down a crooked, potholed country road lined with cattle and sheep farms. The owners, Katerina and Myroslav, meet us at the modest front door. “Vitayu, vitayu—budlaska!” Welcome! They are both middle-aged, perhaps in their fifties, attractive, and they both have wide, hospitable smiles. They shake our hands and usher us eagerly inside. Oksana and I don white paper hats and butcher coats matching the ones Katerina and Myroslav are already wearing, and they give us the big tour. It’s much smaller than the sausage factory I saw in Argentina—more on the scale of Fleisher’s operations. Questions of size aside, it is much the same as every meat-processing facility I’ve ever visited—the same salted meat in plastic bins, the same white tiled walls and spray-washed floors, the same funky curing smell mixed with a faint hint of bleach. The same cutting bowls and sausage stuffers and smokers. Around the table, the cutters stand breaking down beef shoulders, trimming the meat off into chunks the grinder can handle. There is, though, one important difference—most of the butchers at the table are young, blond women. This is very nearly the first time outside of Fleisher’s that I’ve actually seen a woman butchering. Even there, a female at the table who was not me was a rare phenomenon. But here, it seems, butchering is not a job for men only. The fruits of communism, I guess. They smile at Oksana and me when we come up to the table to watch, but do not for a moment stop working.

  Back in the office after the tour, Myroslav opens up a bottle of cognac while Katerina lays out a mountain of food—rye bread, cheese, olives, and at least ten kinds of sausage, representing a quarter of the varieties they make at the factory. There’s headcheese, which is very popular in Ukraine, in part because it’s cheap. Cervelat is a lean sausage made primarily of high-quality beef with a bit of pork fat; it’s Myroslav’s favorite. Tsyhanska, or “gypsy sausage,” is somewhat fattier, at seventy percent beef and thirty percent pork fat. (Katerina can rattle off proportions from memory; Oksana then translates for me.) Drohobytska is a sausage that was traditionally made entirely of pork, but now often has veal mixed in. Myroslav explains that their drohobytska is in fact mostly beef, because in Ukraine pork is the more expensive meat.

  “There is a saying about Hutsuls,” Oksana translates as Katerina chats. Katerina does actually speak a bit of English. She has a daughter and grandchildren in New Jersey and is trying to learn the language. But she still feels more comfortable with Oksana in between us.

  “What’s a Hutsul?”

  “We’re Hutsuls. People from the mountains here, in western Ukraine. Real Ukrainians. People from the east part of the country are Russians, not Ukrainian.”

  “Okay. What’s the saying?”

  Katerina is looking at my face with expectation. She has a ready grin and a nimbus of reddish blond hair, and I find myself wishing I could speak to her directly. As deft a translator as Oksana is, quick and nuanced, I find I want to talk to these people without filter. It’s the international brethren of butchers, I suppose. We are of the same cloth, I can tell.

  “Hutsuls would rather have good sausage and no bread. Eastern Ukrainians want bread; they don’t care if the sausage is good.”

  “I come down on the Hutsul side of that one.”

  Myroslav and Katerina both laugh, nodding, before Oksana has the chance to translate. It’s funny—whenever we’re talking about food, we seem closer to speaking one another’s language.

  Domashnia is beef, pork, and veal. “Doctor’s sausage,” likarska, is pork with milk, eggs, and seasonings. “Children’s sausage” is finely pureed for a soft consistency and is made without any preservatives. Krovianka is blood sausage, from beef blood, which is delivered to Myroslav and Katerina directly from the slaughterhouse, along with the meat. I am beginning to get dangerously full now, and the cognac bottle is almost emptied, mostly by Katerina, Myroslav, and me, Oksana being as nearly a teetotaler as is really possible in Ukraine. Toasts have been made to each of us in turn, to the international brotherhood of sausage makers, to our two countries. I’m pleasantly buzzed and getting sentimental in the Ukrainian fashion, or the Irish one, take your pick.

  “You should come visit me in the States. I want to take you to my butcher shop. You’d love it. And they’d love you!”

  “Next time I visit I will see you too!” Katerina’s English seems to have gotten better with the cognac. She takes a picture cut from a magazine that she has tucked into the edge of a picture frame on her desk. “My granddaughter.” The photo is of a stunning teen model with long blond hair and candy-colored lipstick. “Seventeen magazine!”

  “She’s beautiful!”

  “Yes! Thank you!”

  “Please call me when you come to visit. I’ll take you to my butcher shop.” I write down my name, phone number, and e-mail address. This is all very much like some ten-year college reunion, meeting someone you’d completely forgotten about and, under the influence of finger foods and copious liquor, deciding you were obviously meant to be soul mates, and the digits are exchanged and the faces are wide with wondrous mutual recognition and there are teary hugs and laughing fare-thee-wells. And more often than not, the digits are lost and th
e soul mating never occurs. But then again, sometimes it does.

  At last it’s time for us to leave. We all embrace and kiss cheeks in the parking lot in front of their office door.

  “Thank you! Come again!”

  “Dyakuyu! I will!” Katerina sends us off with a giant bag of sausages.

  We drive slowly to avoid the truly epic holes in the road, which are filled with water that in the light of the first sunny afternoon sky I’ve seen in Ukraine vividly reflect the yellow leaves of the autumn trees lining the road. It’s rather lovely, or that might again be the cognac and sentimentality.

  When we get back to Vitaly’s, he is in the kitchen visiting with a young American woman who introduces herself as Andrea. When we unload our great sack of gifted meat, she moans, and says, “That is so wrong.” This of course doesn’t get us off on the right foot, because I myself can think of nothing more wrong than a vegetarian in Ukraine. But she’s a Peace Corps volunteer, so I guess a few misguided liberal lifestylings go with the territory. I hand the bag over to Ira, who’s much more than appropriately grateful. She pulls out some of the cervelat and slices it thin, putting it on the small kitchen table with some bread. Oksana and I both sit, and though we’ve had far too much sausage already, we each take a little nibble more.