The Humorless Ladies of Border Control

by Franz Nicolay

  “Here is multicultural square,” he said. “Here is Catholic Church, service in German; there is Serbian; and on the other square is Romanian cathedral.”

  “Don’t bring your beer in church!” Noemi scolded him, and he left the can on the steps as we peeked in the door.

  Tibi was in the army during the revolution, doing mandatory service “just guarding a building.” He and Casian go to the Czech Republic for festivals. “They are the most relaxed country in Eastern Europe. Everyone is smoking marijuana. The laws there now are more relaxed than the Netherlands.” And, he added, it’s less hassle than going to Western Europe. “Romanians have a problem in Europe: the gypsies go there, and they murder and steal, and they have Romanian passports, not because they are Romanian, but then the news says ‘Romanians are criminals.’”

  We met up with Casian and headed to the local brewery for eggs and beers. “A lot of Italians are coming here,” Tibi added. “Because the language is similar, and because the women are beautiful, and Italian men are”—he mimicked a Tex Avery tongue hanging out—“about women. I think the biggest centers in the world for beautiful women are Romania-Hungary-Ukraine region. Maybe Brazil-Venezuela-Colombia.”

  The young Hungarian border guards had some civilian friends in sweat suits hanging out with them at the border station.

  “You were in Bulgaria?” a guard asked me, studying my sweat-wrinkled temporary passport. “Why?”

  “Playing concerts.”

  “You are musician? What kind? . . . You have a CD we can have?”

  I keep one in the door pocket for situations just like this and handed it through the window.

  “Do the Struggle, what does it mean?”

  I tried to explain.

  “It’s the kind of music you can listen to in the gym?”

  It took hours to wash the sour, stale cigarette smoke out of my clothes after I left the Balkans. The smell had permeated my suitcase, and the washing proved to be in vain. I spent the night with my friend Thomas, a graphic designer and indie publisher, who has always lived in the same neighborhood on the outskirts of Vienna (he inherited his apartment from his mother). He even met his wife, then a student from Bucharest, across the street. Hungover on a Friday morning, he went to the supermarket and she complimented his T-shirt, a homemade Black Flag parody that read “Black Coffee.” He replied (“and I never do anything like this”), “‘I have black coffee in my apartment across the street.’ And she stayed until Monday.”

  I entered the German-speaking world feeling relief at the smoke-free bars and the wide, fast, unutterably dull, robotically policed highways but chafing at the merciless enforcement, flashing speed cameras, and iron parking regime. Today Europe is divided not on the east–west axis internalized by those of us raised in the twentieth century, but on an older north–south divide: on one side, the prosperous and legalistic Scandinavian, German, Lowlands, and Polish social democracies, with their high culture and ostentatious self-control; on the other, the South Slavs, Romanians, and Bulgars, but also the Mediterraneans, Spanish, and maybe the French—heterogeneous, anarchic, troubled, and vital.

  “’Til recently,” George Orwell once wrote, “it was thought proper to pretend that all human beings are very much alike, but in fact anyone able to use his eyes knows that the average of human behavior differs enormously from country to country. Things that could happen in one country could not happen in another.” The idea of a national personality has become unfashionable, and the idea that one might prefer one national personality to another archaic, even taboo. (So too, writers like West and philosophical historians like Gibbon comfortable with offering their opinions and judgment have come to seem outdated.) Yet somehow I prefer, when traveling, the company of the Slavs and their neighbors, their pessimistic humor and their tribal pride and defensiveness, their preference for the possible over the permitted: that it is only natural and rational to cross the street if it’s empty, to park on the sidewalk or median, to have a drink if having one will not adversely affect your neighbor, to pull the car into a river for a bath instead of wasting water from a hose or an artificial car wash, to free domestic animals to graze and fornicate and excrete in the commons, all of us being children of nature, and nature famously harder to tame than to indulge. (I won’t get too romantic about it: poverty and necessity, of course, play the major role in these attitudes.) Perhaps Americans, committed in theory to an ideology of reinvention—Americans have no shortage of myths about themselves—reject the idea that a sensibility can be inherent, that you can’t just pack off to the city or to another country and become a fundamentally different human. Perhaps some Americans raised with this ideology, believing in the essential disposability of things like family ties, religious tradition, and shared community experience, nonetheless feel the lack of a deep-rooted identity—unable or unwilling to register the inescapable hegemony of their actual American culture because of its sheer ubiquity. They may, West suggested, adopt a pet or favorite in the Old World, regardless of sense or genetic attachment or moral worth but out of an emotional and irrational reaction. I can’t help but choose the places where I’m vulnerable, responsible, and engaged over the ones where I’m corralled and protected.

  “Travel writing is a minor form of autobiography,” Theroux wrote. After two years of nearly constant travel to and beyond the edges of the established touring map, I was heading home, packing up my Brooklyn apartment, and waiting for my first child, leaving the life of months-long touring behind. I didn’t know exactly how to define myself if the answer was no longer “traveling musician.” The caesura, when we lose the plot of the narrative we tell about ourselves, can be protracted and distressing, and linger. On the one hand, if these were my last major tours and the end of a fifteen-year chapter of my life, then to write about it was to validate and fix its memory in the evanescent world of popular music and live performance.

  On the other hand, if I were to continue, how could I, as a husband and father, rationalize a low-paying, unstable, sometimes dangerous job that takes me thousands of miles away from my family on a regular basis? The justification must lie less in the petty vacillations of the ego and the pocketbook that come with playing the shows and more in bearing witness to the big characters and the little communities that dot the punk rock archipelago and the wider, wickeder world that surrounds it.

  I remembered a conversation I had with Ed Hamell, a bull-necked and gentle-hearted bouncer of a man who tours as Hamell on Trial. Since Ed got divorced, his twelve-year-old son Detroit travels with him on tour. Hamell told me about a conversation he had with his label boss, Ani DiFranco. He was worried about what kind of an example the life of a marginal songwriter and performer sets for a child.

  “What’s it going to look like,” asked Hamell, “when I’m sixty years old and changing for the show in a beer cooler in the back of a shitty bar?”

  She gave him a scornful look and laughed. “It’s gonna look fucking cool.”

  PART III

  I.

  Changing the Country, We Apologize for the Inconvenience (Ukraine After the Flood)

  “Don’t watch something inappropriate,” the small boy in front of me on the plane to Kyiv counseled his mother, with the pedantic moralism of the prepubescent. He dialed up Despicable Me for himself.1 Two severe old women in black hijabs sat impassively in the front row, wearing laminated signs around their necks: “My name is *******. I want to go to Erbil Airport in Iraq. I only speak Arabic. I do not speak English.”

  Airplane viewing can indeed be tricky, as I found once when I decided a transcontinental seat-back might be the right time to check out the concupiscent cable TV show Californication.

  “I wonder what their story is,” said Maria.

  “Probably nothing good.”

  We were returning—Maria to follow up on her research, I to concertize—to a Ukraine at war, a strange new kind of war of unmarked soldiers and undeclared objectives. In the months prior, Ukraine had s
een a harmless-seeming student protest and a ham-handed government crackdown spiral into its second popular revolution in ten years. The euphoria quickly curdled as a stung Vladimir Putin launched a sub rosa invasion that the new Ukrainian government and the remains of the popular movement were in no position to rebuff. It was the dumbest and most pointless war in recent memory, one that it sometimes seemed Russia only started out of embarrassment after their man in Kyiv, Viktor Yanukovych, was run out of town with a dog, a cat, his mistress, a parrot, and, with the disingenuous or affected piety of a mafia don, a few well-worn religious icons.

  We had already postponed the trip once, calculating that after the Ukrainian presidential election in late May we would have a better sense of whether the tensions with Russia would escalate. “Are you sure you want to go to Ukraine right now?” asked anxious, not to say disapproving, friends and family. “And with a one-year-old?”

  “We’re not going any farther east than Kyiv,” I would say. “At most, it’ll be like being in New York if there was a war on in Cleveland.”

  Lesia was born two months after I’d returned from Bulgaria the previous summer. We were living in a small apartment in the back of Maria’s mother’s house in suburban Virginia. Maria was applying for academic jobs. I was realizing that after seven years on the road, the hole in my résumé was growing unbridgeable. I learned how to tune pianos. Maria got a one-year fellowship in Toronto, a de facto maternity leave. We moved to Canada, where going to city hall to get a parking permit was like visiting a Montessori school. I tuned the dusty, rusted, and half-wrecked spinets of the spinsters and schoolchildren of Toronto, and I apprenticed with a genially irascible accordion repairman of Scotch descent in his storefront shop. I took long walks on the waterfront with the baby strapped to my chest and adjusted to a nine o’clock bedtime. I followed the news from Ukraine: thousands had taken to the subfreezing streets to protest the government’s turn away from a European trade deal toward closer dependence on Russia. There were inspiring moments, and then ugly moments, and then more and more helpless moments, and then I had to stop reading the news from Ukraine.

  I wrote a handful of new songs. The thought of making a new record and all that entailed—humiliating fund-raising, rejection e-mails from labels, paying a publicist to solicit half-literate blog reviews, months-long haggling over artwork—made me depressed. I’d been off the road for almost a year, and the world didn’t seem to have missed me. Still, I had these songs, and it seemed a shame to leave them in a drawer. I made the record as quickly and cheaply as I could and called it To Us, the Beautiful! after a Ukrainian toast I’d heard: “To us the beautiful—and to those who disagree, may their eyes fall out.” If this was going to be my last record—and I wasn’t going to grind myself down to make sure it wasn’t—that felt like a suitable valediction.

  Maria got a job at a small liberal arts college in the Hudson Valley, and we bought a small house in the adjoining town, a one-crossroads hamlet that was a delicate mix of grouchy townies, oblivious college kids, and a handful of multimillionaires sequestered in mansions on the riverfront. I got a couple of shifts bartending at the local upscale hotel, stirring martinis for weekending gallerists. My commute was a ninety-second walk. We got to know the neighbors. It was comfortable. Then we left for Ukraine.

  Kyiv in July was, on the face of it, a city going about its summer business, if somewhat depopulated by vacationers headed to country dachas or the beaches of Odessa. A young brass band by the Golden Gate played Herb Alpert–style arrangements of Abba, “Can’t Buy Me Love,” “Smoke on the Water,” “Guantanamera,” and other international classics. If I didn’t hear “Hotel California” or the Godfather theme, I’m sure it was just because I missed that part of their set. The coffee trucks set up alongside the park for the men in anonymous-brand polo shirts or short-sleeved button-downs tucked into tight jeans, with, often, a kind of armpit-purse.

  A city going about its summer business, but with a creepy sore at its heart. The Maidan Nezalezhnosti, Kyiv’s central square, and the surrounding streets remained blocked off by a dirty tent city, makeshift memorials to the “Heavenly Hundred” shot by government snipers at the climax of the protests, and the rotting remains of the barricades. What had begun, just a year before, as an Occupy-style student protest against the scrapping of a vague agreement of “cooperation” with the European Union had curdled into a quasi-military camp for lean, dirty men in camouflage pants, shady and borderline homeless. (And a man in a Darth Vader costume, possibly the same one who had attempted to run for the presidency.) Bums and drunks were part of the Maidan from the beginning, one member of the self-appointed “Maidan Self-Defense” militia told me, riffraff brought in by the government to discredit the protests. But those protesters who had homes and jobs to return to had done so by now. The rump stayed, with nowhere or nowhere better to go, living a paramilitary fantasy surrounded by the relics of the winter’s heroics, neat piles of cobblestones and tires, pop-up cafés for beer, and souvenir stands hawking anti-Putin propaganda: the Russian leader with a Hitler moustache (“Putler”), doormats and toilet paper printed with his face or that of ousted Ukrainian president Yanukovych. “EuroMaidan turns into a shady place,” reported a headline in the English-language Kyiv Post, the site of “robberies, assaults, and beatings,” as the remaining occupants ignored Mayor Vitali Klitschko’s increasingly direct hints that it was time for them to leave.

  On our first night there, I picked up pizzas. A half hour later and about two hundred yards away, a group of men in balaclavas and brass knuckles attacked the Maidan tents, reportedly looking for people “who didn’t look Slavic.” A gun battle ensued and they were driven off, with three believed killed. After the initial report the next day, the story disappeared from the news.

  The Kraina Mriy (“Land of Dreams”) Festival was taking place that weekend in a park on Kyiv’s outskirts, and, befitting a festival conceived as a celebration of “ethnic music,” national spirit ran high. The festival’s bands adhered largely to the sunglasses-and-funny-hats version of “cool” and sounded like franchises of the Manu Chao/Gogol Bordello “ethno rock” empires. The band Koralli—at whose hostel in the Carpathians we’d stayed a few years before—accessorized its sopilka (a simple wood flute) with a headset mic. A Crimean hard-rock band joined forces with a traditional Tatar ensemble, and during their set someone in the crowd hoisted a Crimean flag. A young man hawked rides on off-brand Segways next to the amateur archery booth (an attraction that would never pass muster with the insurance underwriters at Bonnaroo). A few people passed out flyers with instructions on how to identify and boycott Russian goods: look for “46” at the beginning of the UPC code.

  The Ukrainian version of festival wear for women was a floral head wreath and an embroidered blouse or dress. This managed to come across as simultaneously village virginal and, because not a few of the dresses were translucent, urban slutty. Meanwhile, the local variant of “barefoot hippie in a filthy sleeping bag” was “shirtless faux-Cossack in baggy pants with a shaved head and a topknot.” For example, the cook at the food tent run by the Kyiv restaurant Cult Ra, who accessorized his bare chest with a swastika necklace.

  This was not the statement it might seem. Cult Ra Rusyn Club was a New Age–y theme restaurant, proclaiming itself “the most original ethnic restaurant in Kyiv . . . where you can feel the world of Arya culture [and] pagan symbols re-create the sunny magic of the Cosmos.” It was the local outpost of a trendy neopaganism centered on the prehistoric Trypillian culture, which flourished on the territory of western Ukraine, Moldova, and Romania five thousand to seven thousand years ago. Among the decorative elements adorning the archaeological fragments of the Trypillians (and several other ancient Indo-European societies) was the swastika, and some adherents of the “Native Faith” movement have adopted it.

  In a liminal country like Ukraine, national identity has been, in the 750 years between the Mongol invasion of Kyiv and the fall of the Soviet Union,
alternately erased, denied, elided, and divided. Its historical zenith, the Kievan Rus’, has been colonized by Russian revisionists claiming the Rus as proto-Russians, not Ukrainian forefathers. It was perhaps not unexpected, then, that young Ukrainians in search of a “true” native identity would reach toward prehistory for nationalist inspiration, going beyond the competing claims of still-extant politics or religion toward pastoral, Neolithic goddess fetishism and cosplay dabbling in archery and weaving. They seemed harmless, if preachy—the menu at Cult Ra lectured about the health effects of alcohol, excepting the natural and healthy honey wine and wine from the “temporarily occupied Crimea region” that they offer. But the “traditional” swastikas that decorate the napkin holders were, given Russian propaganda claiming that Ukraine is run by fascist putschists, unfortunate visuals at best.

  We took the overnight train to the western city of L’viv. The old folks in the courtyard outside our apartment (where apartment numbers were chalked on the doors, as if the building, and presumably the same doors, hadn’t been there for a hundred years) hollered between balconies about the end of the world. “It feels like it’s already started,” one said. But this was merely the kvetching of pensioners and daytime drunks who sit on folding chairs in the shade. Meanwhile, the rest of the city was out on the cobblestone promenade. L’viv felt like any small former Hapsburg city in high tourist season, though most of the tourists seemed to be from elsewhere in Ukraine. Cafés were open and spilling into the streets, their tables de facto common property. Teenagers held an impromptu jam session on an upright piano, painted the cyan and yellow of the Ukrainian flag, as a crowd clapped along. A gang of crusty punks with, improbably, a mariachi bass, attempted a klezmer song on accordion. An eight-year-old girl in a skinned-Muppet vest sawed on a violin. From a distance, she sounded like a prodigy. Up close, I realized she had simply been handed an instrument and told, “Just move your fingers as fast as you can.” In the market, vendors hawked the ubiquitous Putin doormats, and boxer briefs printed to look like jean shorts with a $100 bill stuffed in the pocket. Women in short skirts and vertiginous, architectural heels were out on peacocking parade. The pops I heard at midnight were fireworks, not gunshots.