A Post-Soviet Coney Island (and Farewell)

“To learn which questions are unanswerable, and not to answer them: this skill is most needful in times of stress and darkness.”

                                           
I woke up early again on the last day. I was in the grip of a strange obsession to wash my jeans. There was no dryer, but there was a kind of hot pipe you could plug in and hang your wet things from. There's really no end to the inventiveness found in these small places. People talk about the elegance of Scandinavian design, but give me the utilitarian weirdness of Eastern Europe every time.

Well, maybe not every time. But certainly often. Or at least now and then.

However, this hot-pipe wouldn't really dry the jeans quickly enough for me to wear them, AND it was too cold to wear wet jeans and just dry them through the natural hot-pipe of my being. As well, the washing process was going to take two and a half hours, because that was the only setting on the machine.

They didn't really need washing, but my brain wouldn't let it go. I'm pretty sure it was Chernobyl. I had this sort of nagging backthought that some Cesium Fairy was curled up in my coin pocket and a couple of Tide Pods would send her back to her bone-melting half-life in Neverland.

                                                     

But! There was no time! Sara went out for coffee, (the barista at Aroma Kava was becoming a friend), while I wrote, and then with our warm cups we went out for our last adventureday. A mysterious note on the google map said "House with cats on it," so I pinned it and we made that our first order of business.

It wasn't far but it was down a street we hadn't gone down yet. I tried to work out a theory about Kyiv being a "small town that felt big" because of the hills and the way things were spread out. And that was cool, but then I tried to expand the theory to say that Berlin was a big town that felt small. Because it was so easy to get anywhere and because it was flat, but mostly because the neighborhoods have such distinct character that each one feels like it could be Berlin all on its own.

It needs work, this theory.

We found the cat-house, which wasn't quite smothered with cats but did have two very nice stone relief cats on the facade. It fit right in with the sort of faded, proud refinement of the city. The whole town is sort of like Lola from the last verse of Copacabana.

                                                           
We had planned to go to something called The Museum of Miniatures (which I kept calling the Micromachines Museum), but it was taking a mini-holiday, so no luck there. There WAS, however, a sad little thing called Kyiv in Miniature which purported to have little scale models of all of the monuments. Same same.

It was on an island in the middle of the Dnieper, so we went for it! 

On a seat on the train, some old dude put his hand on Sara's leg. She had to stand up. It was the first example of that sort of thing she'd encountered on the whole trip. No stares or catcalls for a week until Vasily broke the streak.

She told me when we detrained. I had been reading a scandalous tell-all about Errol Flynn and his 15-year old girlfriend and missed the whole thing. It made me want to wash her jeans with mine.

It may have been the first sign that things are different on this side of the Dnieper.

The island station was the exact sort of Post-Soviet tragedy we had been hoping for. Abstract sculptures above crumbling staircases. Weeds coming up through cracked concrete. It was like a Chernobyl people still lived in.

It was like Coney Island if the Cyclone had been partially dismantled for firewood and if some of the carriages on the Wonder Wheel had been rented out as apartments.

There were some sad little carnival games scattered around. The only one that seemed to be in operation was a punching bag that measured the force of your blows. A couple of drunks batted it around. We couldn't see their scores. I'm not sure they could read them either.

                                                                     
We walked along the river wondering if the mini-Kyiv was real. Across the bank was a little spit of beach where red bowling-ball men fished and drank. We both cracked up a little at the bleakness of it.

Found the thing. An old man charged us a hundred hryvnia. He asked where we were from, and when I said Washington, he said: "Washington! I heff Alabama. I heff Florida, but never heff I hed Washington. A first! This first time in Ukraine? Yes? It will not be your last, because you are young!"

Then, he let us in and, just as we entered, we saw a cardigan crow flying off with a piece of meat. The gatekeeper jumped up and down like Rumpelstiltskin and shook his fist! "Dem you! I giff that to cat!" There was a cat.

He addressed the cat and said, "You are lazy! You let this heppen! Your food goes to crow!"

It was a magnificent performance for which I was very grateful.

The park was really sweet and it was exceedingly peaceful to wander around the tiny models and recognize the places we'd been. St. Andrews, The Lavra, Reactor Four, and... The House of Chimeras! It was absolutely a perfect last-day activity.

The Lazy Cat found me, rolled over on her back and demanded I pay attention to her. We both stretched out in the sun and took full advantage of one another's company.

                                                            

The next order of business was to get those meat lipsticks. Back once more to the dwarven halls of stone, the Arsenalna station (deepest in the world!) and up, up again into the light! Oh, how the afternoon light broke on our hot dogs! We placed the order and goofed around taking selfies that we thought looked like we were painting our lips with them.

They tasted just like hot dogs but with nicer buns. Like, the quality of the bread was better, and the goofy little pouch was fun to hold. Mission accomplished. While we ate, we watched people spill in and out of the station. Two women were giving out a free newspaper and we observed that only old people took it.

It was great fun to watch a group of people exit the train and then guess which ones would take the paper. We were right almost every time. Paper was about a dude named Biktop, which is Victor, but I willfully mispronounced it so I could call him Biktop Pee Wee.

Then we ate soft-serve ice cream! They don't have vanilla here. Every place you might expect vanilla, you get lemon. The dairy aisle is a goddamn funhouse mirror. Yogurt is sour cream. vanilla is lemon, butter is brown cheese.

                                                     

Longish hike to The Motherland Monument, which is an enormous metal lady who represents the victory over the Germans in The Great Patriotic War. You can get up in her and look out her head.

They make you wear a weird safety belt when you climb the stairs inside the body, because people keep falling. because the staircases were made by Soviets who didn't really care what happened if you tried to climb them.

I think there isn't a banister.

It takes over thirty minutes for a healthy person to ascend. She holds a sword and a shield. The sword was originally a lot longer, but some Lavra-loving do-gooder pointed out that the blade was higher than the cross on the highest cathedral in town, so there was a big city debate about the message that sent.

So, they had to cut the sword way down and kind of make it a stubby short sword.

The plaza it was in was glorious with some of the best (and best preserved) Soviet figure groupings I've seen. Amazing, large crowds of blocky resolute stonefolks loading canons and hucking potato mashers with the honor of peasants and the strength of the well-fed.



It's super-important, I think, to remember that the Soviets have so many of the same patriotic mythology that we do. Like, despite the whole "Religion is the opiate of the masses" thing, they really celebrate themselves as being the saviors and keepers of "pure Christianity" (they kept the fire burning after Rome fell) and they'll go on and on about how they beat the Nazis.

Which is a lot like us, right? We're basically the same, except we had the good manners to commit our genocides before radios could report on it.

But, there's a little bit of a complication in Ukraine in that the Soviets have always treated this place like shit, so when the Nazis rolled in during WWII, they were kind of treated like liberators, because anyone shooting rockets at the Russians was OK by UK(raine).

So... these big "We beat the Germans!" displays are kind of seen as a statement like, "Those Nazis tried to take over, but you're ours to starve and exploit, not theirs!"

Anyway, we didn't go inside the lady. Sara kind of didn't want to fuck with the stairs-harness, and I was kind of wiped out from my unhealthy diet of lipstick and lemon.



She read some Chekhov in the shadow of a monument, and I gathered up my hot dogs for a long exploratory walk around the grounds. Found some creepy stone steps in an unexpected place, so I went down them. Which was cool. They led to more stone steps. So I followed them down. They led to some more stone steps and, eventually, a little park near the highway.

Which was all very nice. But then I had to climb back up. And that took a lot of goddamn energy, I can tell you. My body was raiding its stores of fat and RNA by the end of it. So we waved goodbye to the Silver Maiden and took an Uber home. There was almost a goofy issue involving the coincidence of our street sharing the name of a street in a place 100km away, but we straightened it out.

Then... that was it. I tossed my jeans in the washer and I was out of commission.

Sara took herself out to dinner, I read more about the wicked, wicked Errol Flynn while my jeans crisped on the pipe.

I couldn't get out of taking the trash out, so I sort of crab-walked outside in my sleeping shorts (to the imagined delight of the locals on the porch of the Turkish coffee house), and that was it. The plus end.

Long flight home with bad movies. I read The Left Hand of Darkness and dozed. Sara polished off the Chekhov, so it was a total Mission Accomplished. Kyiv was rewarding, lively, and deserves a better world for its domes to glitter in.

Thanks for reading, foooooools. See you at the bottom of the Dnieper.

                                               

A Biker Gang in Podil

"You write what's said, you don't lie. Or say it didn't happen, when it did all the time."

                                     
When I woke up, Sara was standing in the doorway with a glass of water in her hand. "Good morning," I said. "Happy Smigus-Dingus!" she said and splashed me with the water. It was Wet Monday.

It's a peasant tradition where, on the day after Easter, men claim women by dumping buckets of water on them. I was afraid of it one year in Poland, but nothing happened. THEN, I saw it in Lviv, but it was mostly teenagers in an area fenced in for just that purpose. They were all in bathing suits.

And now it's happened to me. While I cleaned up, she went out for coffee. I wrote a little and read a little. She came back and we planned the day. We were going to spend it separately.

                                                   
There was some talk of my talking a long train ride to Berdychiv, which is the birthplace of Joseph Conrad (!!!) and where Balzac got married (!?!), but it is more famous as the site of a WWII-era massacre where you can probably guess who were killed by whom.

I was more looking forward to three uninterrupted hours to read than the destination, really.

The times didn't really line up, though. I could have gotten there but not gotten back. They need to make these massacre sites more tourist friendly!

I mention this only to explain how we found ourselves at the enormous train station on the edge of town. Which is where we were and which is where we split up to find Individual Adventures.

                                                    
The day after Easter isn't just Smigus Dingus, it's also a National Holiday here, so the metro was paaacked with all manner of männer. And my nightmare came true -- the fastcalator STOPPED while I was on it, lurched to a halt.

Nobody fell, but... there was always a vertiginous sense on these things that one hundred people are all a misstep away from looking like the collapsed shelving system in a Chernobyl pre-school. Folks weren't walking down, they were just waiting. Which was strange to me.

But maybe they weren't allowed? In any case, it came violently back to shuddering life, and nobody fell. A Wet Monday Miracle.

Pushed my way into a train car and roared my way to Podil, which is a little Dnieper-side nabe that lives, loves, and laughs in the shadow of St. Andrew's.

                                                  
Walked along the side of a highway to something called The Friendship Between Nations Arch, which was very pretty against the deep blue sky but also looked like something that was turned in a few hours before it was due. Not a lot of... dynamic thought went into this design.

Underneath it was a Soviet-era statue of two dudes holding a banner aloft; They looked like they had just won the WWE tag-team championship belt.

There was a very pretty observation deck with a view of the river. This is a super-hilly city, and there are a great many of these views. They don't get old. I got the sense, though, that this little park with the arch was, like, Kyiv's eleventh-favorite picnic place. I climbed back down to the highway and headed to Podil.

Some graffiti on a guard rail read "Fuck TO Police" in English, and I laughed so much I almost fell into an open manhole. Lord, what an end that would have been. Funny to think about a demon in a cop costume forking me into the flames and murmuring, "Fuck to YOU, my friend. Fuck to you."

                                                            
Down, down to Podil Town where an enormous biker gang had taken over an oval-shaped park. There had been an article in the Kyiv Post about a feared group called The Russian Wolves expected to roar through town. Was this they? Were these the wolves?

Hilariously, they were taking selfies and making dramatic poses in their leather capes and hoods. They looked like they had just won the WWE tag-team championship belt. It felt like some kind of spring-break for stepdads.

I wanted to see their belly tattoos and jacket patches, but I chose not to get too close. Ducked into an African coffee shop where I enjoyed a coffee with cardamom. That's the way to do it. Read about thirty pages of a book called Black Teeth and a Brilliant Smile. It's about a British playwright who drank herself to death in the Thatcher era.

When I emerged from my cardamom cloud, the Wolves (had it been the Wolves?) were gone.
As quickly as they came, they were gone.

                                                      
Wandered up St. Andrew's ascent and poked through some books of old postcards and shoeboxes full of coins. Vendors sold books and dolls and tablecloths. There were trays of old Soviet medals and pins with Stalin's face on them. I used to think that sort of thing was funny and cool, but those people were murderers. It's, like, not funny and not cool.

It feels morally inconsistent to be moved to tears at the Holodomor Memorial and then pin a kitschy Stalin medal on my backpack. But! I am very cool with buying nesting dolls painted by children in a mountain sweatshop, so I picked up a few "native" souvenirs!

Sara and I were due to reunite for a late lunch, so I sat on the wall surrounding the statue of Bulgakov and read about that boozer playwright some more. It felt cool to read next to a bronze writer. Between chapters, I watched families shopping, locals fondling wooden eggs and novelty cooking spoons.

                                                           

Sara showed up, and we had an hilarious lunch at a subterranean diner where two old dudes sang Ukranian folk tunes on a ridiculous vaudeville-style stage. They were charming and ridiculous. The place was musty and overpriced and exactly perfect for this stage in the trip.

Outside, we finished our shopping. I was very bad at bargaining with one of the vendors and ended up somehow paying more than the asked price for something. I don't want to talk about how it happened. I just want to acknowledge that the poor woman who ripped me off has a difficult life and needs it more than I do.

There was an amazing Chewbacca matryoshka with a tiny C3P0 inside. I squealed when I saw it. I don't like Star Wars anymore, or I might have made a bad bargain for it.

At home, the plan was to take a nap and wake up in search of dinner. But we ended up sleeping for twelve hours! Twelve hours! It felt like winning the WWE tag-team championship belt. 

Easter Baskets Full of Wine

"You should earn enough as a writer to be able to drink one or two bottles of decent Champagne per day once you're within eight or nine weeks of finishing a novel."

Easter morning, thanks to the Julian calendar, and the day was perfect for it. Bright and cool, almost enough for you to stop hating organized religion for a few hours. While I looked around for my lenses, Sara told me the tradition here is to stop drinking for seven weeks before Easter, to give it up, as it were, to... abstain.

Easter, then, is the first day you can drink again after those dry, dry months, and the parks are filled with revelry. I found my lenses more quickly upon hearing that. We were eager to run out and join them.

Coffee first, however. We are not savages.

Plan was to take a sort of corkscrewy little walk to the University Metro station and find The Lavra, a holy monastic complex of churches with caverns and catacombs beneath them.

And so we did. The walk was intensely pleasant, and we passed many families with baskets, and those baskets definitely had the necks of wine bottles poking out of them. The mothers and fathers held large baskets, and the kids had their little baby baskets. It was all out of a coloring book.

We joked the kids' baskets had juice boxes in them instead of wine, but it was probably a joke with a true punchline. I mean, they had to drink something.

Sara was like, "You know how it is when you go a couple of months without any alcohol, and then you have your first drink? This whole city is going to be feeling that way in a few hours." And I was like, "I do not. I do not know what that is like."

The University stop took us back to Arsenalna, the deepest metro station in the entire world!, and we were devastated to find the Hot Dog Lipstick stand once again closed.

Wrongway walk behind a park where creeps had recently crept. It led us to an enormous obelisk commemorating what we call WWII but this part of the world calls The Great Patriotic War. It was pretty standard fare as far as these things go. A few families sat around it and dug through their baskets.

More impressive was the Holodomor Memorial which brings honor to the millions who were systematically starved to death by Stalin. It's one of the biggest genocides of the 20th century, but it happened in slow-motion and to people with less of a voice, so.... it's not really a topic in "the West."

There's a lot of controversy over it, but the prevailing history is that Stalin was afraid of Ukrainian independence and kept ordering all the grain it grew to be shipped elsewhere, and used the military to enforce this order. Imagine being an agrarian culture, proud farmers on good land with a good crop and having to watch your family starve because the food you grew was taken miles away to Moscow.

The monument was very beautiful, a tall column with golden storks rising up but with their wings trapped in the stone. As well, there was a section of what looked like grain in a cage. We were moved by the symbolism of it.

We were also moved to see further on, families drinking out of their Easter baskets.

Soon rising above us was the vast and holy Lavra. It's normally a bunch of money to get into, but on Easter it's all free. We pushed past a line of begging old ladies and prepared to behold it!

Hilariously, the first thing you see is this enormous mirrored Easter egg. It looked like it had been lain by Disco Duck. "This disco egg looks like Disco Duck laid it!" I told her, "Disco Duck!" I says. "My friend Mike Katz would love that joke," I says. She said I would have to tell him. "Look at this disco egg!" I said, "It should be hanging from the ceiling at Studio 54!" I said. "Ok," she said.

The place was laid out like a castle but where all the buildings are various species of church. I don't think I've ever been in anything like it. Most of the monasteries I've been in have some kind of defensive fortress attached or are tiny. This thing was huge and all the way holy.

And what could be holier than some George R.R. Martin-lookin' dude in a black robe flicking water on folks with a hand sponge? He had four beach pails of "blessed water" and just kept dipping the sponge in and soaking folks. Was it some kind of car wash to raise money for vestments?

The line for getting sprinkled was super long, and people crossed themselves while they waited. They were taking this shit seriously. I wonder how they did it before someone thought about the buckets. Some efficient Henry Ford priest was like, "Just assembly line this shit. Tell them the buckets are blessed, they won't know the difference. If anyone argues, send Disco Duck over to sort them out."

(Disco) Ducked into a little chamber where they were doing a brisk trade in beeswax candles. An ornate golden altar stood inside. Seemed like a fire hazard, so I left. Sara put on a headscarf and checked it out too.

We sat in the shadow of an enormous stone and ate almonds. 

There was a pretty glorious observation deck with sweeping views of Kyiv. The mighty damn Dnieper was its Dniepery best. As they say, "it is a delight then for the hot sun to look down from on high and plunge its rays into the chill of the glassy waters and for the coastal forests to be brightly reflected in them. Green-curled!"

The caves cost money! On Easter! Those cheap fucks! Miserly monks! Avaricious abbots! Penny-pinching priests! So, we went to the vestry store and tried on some wool stuff. Then we'd had enough of this place, so we tried to leave. But we got lost!

Then we used the bathroom, and the men's room was free, but the lady's room was, like, two hryvnia! Sara said the attendant kissed her hand when she paid it.

Then we were still lost, but we were happy to be, because around the cobblestone corner was a gang of sexy young monks all walking together in their black outfits. A gorgeous murder of crows! Hot Lavra!

They looked like they'd jumped out of a Byzantine mosaic, like a scene from some sort of Greek Orthodox Xanadu.

We also saw a bishop (or something) in a huge, black pillbox hat leading a group of twenty or so women in red headscarves. He was like a goth Jackie O. So, it was cool getting lost. My grandfather loved to be lost. He would throw his head back and laugh.

Eventually, the seas of confusion parted and we found the way out, and we got some lemon-chocolate ice cream, and we made our way to this hilarious diner where we did some serious overeating. Borscht, dumplings, potatoes, chicken Kiev. grilled vegetables. It was peak "traditional feast."

And then, the joke was on us! When we got back to the metro, the goddamn Lipstick Hot Dog cart was open! We could have had it! We could have painted our lips with it!

That gold-durn Easter Bunny done tricked us again! We'll get you next year, you son of a bitch! And we got two chances, too! 'Cause we know where there's another Easter!

It's Morning in Chimerica

"Wondrous is the Dnieper, too, on a warm summer night, when everything falls asleep, (man, beast, and bird), and God alone grandly surveys heaven and earth and grandly shakes his robes. Stars pour from his robes. Stars burn and shine over the world, and all are reflected at once in the Dnieper."

Crashed hard after the Chernobyl trip and, thusly, woke up at 3am or so. To avoid disturbing Sara I went to the kitchen and ate some dry salt-cheese and some powdery olives. With equal parts desperation and ingenuity I, at last, discovered how to open the Impenetrable Yogurt. It took a knife. I won't say any more about it, other than to say it took a knife.

It tasted like Cool Whip. Our first trip to the Ukrainian yogurt aisle resulted in sour cream and dessert topping. So, not a very satisfying breakfast, but things would be open soon. Things were open now, in fact.

We're both reading Bulgakov on this trip. I chose The Master and Margarita, because I love cats, but she is reading The White Guard, which is a novel about the history of Kyiv. There's a bit in there where it says many families from St. Petersburg and Moscow fled here after the Oktober Revolution. Since there were so many new folks crammed into too-few apartments, folks needed space, so the late-night trades thrived.

It's tempting to think the 24-hour diners and coffee shops we see around here stem from that tradition.

I sat on a little second-floor balcony and read a book called Ostend. It's about a gang of German authors and celebrities hiding out in Belgium at the dawn of WWII. Most of them are completely forgotten, but they were big deals in their time. I was particularly interested in an author named Irmgard Kuen.

A sad, inspiring little read on an uncomfortable bean bag that threatened to slide me onto the floor at any moment.

Sara woke up, and we went out for coffee. The streets were quiet. It was the Saturday before Easter, and it felt like most folks were taking it easy. This is a large city in both size and population. Very clean, though a little rough around the edges. It feels a like a big Sofia to me or an off-brand Budapest.

The goal today was to ride the Metro to the Arsenalna station, which is the deepest in the world! The deepest subway station on the planet! None deeper! We got the large coffee at the place with the colorful lids, since we didn't know how long we would be on the escalator.

Said escalators are very fast, as I've mentioned. We bought our plastic blue tokens at the Golden Gate station and fooled around in the tunnels until a blue and yellow train dumped us down in Arsenalna. It took two fastcaltors to get us out. Up and up we went. People slept on them. People read books on them. People fell in love, dated, and broke up on them.

We rose ever higher, I could feel my beard growing. I thought about work, I thought about a play I have in pre-production at home. I thought about relationships, books, records. My mother. The stars wheeled in the heavens. Tulips opened their petals. Moths bred and died. And then, we were halfway up.

Outside, a cart promised hot dogs. They're all the rage here, these hot dogs, but they're not like hot dogs at home. Half is encased in a sort of bread sheath, by which it is held, and the other half is the exposed half of God's own hot dog. They look a lot like meat lipsticks.

Anyway, the cart was closed. We'll have one eventually. I so swear it.

Long, pleasant walk down wide, quiet boulevards and through quiet parks. It's all very sweetly lain out. The goal here was simply to wander and explore with maybe the destination point of something called The House of Chimeras.

The President lives there, and entertains there. Crazy old Art Deco building supposed to be covered in monsters on the exterior and hunting trophies inside. We stopped first at Mariyinski Palace, a massive teal and white palace seemingly auditioning itself as a location for a Wes Anderson film. Very pretty to see the teal against the bright blue sky.

We paused for a rest, so Sara could eat some walnuts. They are her vitamins. Then onward to the House of Chimeras! Which proved... elusive. The map suggested it was in one place, but we were in that place, and... no house.

We walked in a circle around a little buttonhook park. Held the map upside down... one thing about Kyiv is the street signs are not at all prominent. No names on the sides of buildings, no hanging placards near traffic signals, no posts. You just kind of need to know.  And we didn't.

Eventually, I just asked a lady who was sweeping the sidewalk with some branches. She didn't speak any English, but her friend did! So I went into a little pub where her friend was, and he didn't speak much either, but I whined out "Chimeras?" enough to where he eventually got it. They pronounce it "him-eras."

He could tell I would never find the streets, so he just kind of waved in three directions to indicate we should go this way, then this wave, then this wave. I was very grateful. We followed the hand a way we hadn't gone, and sure enough...

But the street was sealed off by soldiers.

I saw some civilians pass by them, though, so we headed that way trying to look as inoffensive as possible, and the lead soldier turned his body just enough to indicate we were going to be questioned.

Internally, at this point, I was cracking up at the idea that there WAS NO House of Chimeras. That the whole thing was a Ukrainian snipe hunt designed to prank tourists. Like, lets describe an amazing, impossible place and name it after a word that means "illusion" and see how many goofy Americans come looking for it.

But I mewed 'him-era' to the guard, and since I said it the way they say it, he nodded and let us through. Down a long, blocked off row of official buildings and parked military buses. We were surprised to see soldiers sleeping in them. They looked exhausted.

Sober steps to a locked gate where we beheld.... one side of.... The House of Chimeras!

It lived up to the hype, smothered in bearded fish and rhinoceroses. Strange and stark. I wanted to see it from the front, but I didn't want to wake the Army. So we backed out of there to see if it were possible to approach it from another side.

It was not. BUT, we saw a different building with large-breasted dragon-mermaids, and Sara drank coffee out of the back of a van. They call it "boot coffee" here, since it's espresso prepared from a machine stuffed into the trunk of a car.

Sat in a little Soviet-era square and let the sun wash over us and bleach out our chimerical plans. Headed back to "town" where the plazas teamed with children and the elderly. There's a massive public art project with hundreds of painted bunnies on pedestals, and some folks seemed to want to photograph each one.

In the shadow of St. Something or Other, we split up to see different things. I drank coffee in the sun and finished that Ostend book. Oh, Irmgard Kuen!

When we met back up, we walked through a low archway with wooden eggs suspended from the roof and listened to the locals strike them and make them clatter. We ate sausage and grilled zucchini at an Easter Market and listened to hilarious Russian pop songs.

Then home for sleep! The plan was to take a nap, then get up for dinner, but we ended up oversleeping. But! It's a late-night town, me lads. It's a late-night town. And plans are illusions.

The Name of the Star is Wormwood

“The third angel sounded his trumpet, and a great star, blazing like a torch, fell from the sky on a third of the rivers and on the springs of water—the name of the star is Wormwood."

                                                  

We had to book the trip to Chernobyl a few weeks in advance, and I was in charge of that, so on a lunch break at work I researched our options. The tours have every search keyword covered, so if you enter "Is Chernobyl safe," for example, you get a page saying, like, "Hell, yes. Safe as houses. Safe as milk. And I can take you there for a very safe price."

Every one of them, every last page, had some variation of this phrase: "You get more radiation on a transatlantic flight than you do in an afternoon at Chernobyl Town."

A month ago, when my mother was visiting, and I told her where we were going, she was like, "Why would you do that? The radiation!" and like a good parrot, I was like, "Yeah, but you get more radiation on a transatlantic flight!" and she was like, "You are ALSO taking a transatlantic flight to get there!" I think she won that point.

I wanted to see it. I remember the news and how strange and scary it was back in the '80s, and I've read since that nature has reclaimed the place, and I'm into ghost towns. I'd also read that very sad book and wanted to sort of pay homage to the brave souls described within, and it seemed like an opportunity to have some context when or if there's a conversation about the trade-offs of living in a nuclear-powered world.

It would also be a kind of sick thrill, which I mustn't deny. That element is in there.

We got up super-early, grabbed some coffee at a colorful 24-hour place, and made our way to the pickup point. It was next to a McDonald's, so we got some breakfast. I figured the patriotic preservatives would keep us safe. We found our mini van and joined the dozen or so other folks who had the same curiosity we did.

The logo for the tour company showed a winding road leading to the symbol for "radiation."

The guide was a Ukrainian Barbie we called Cher (for Cher Nobyl) and she made bad jokes about how we shouldn't expect to get superpowers from the radiation and shouldn't expect to grow an extra hand. "I go into the Exclusion Zone every day, and I still don't have a third eye."

The van took off, and we were outside of Kyiv very quickly. Cher apologized in advance for "Ukrainian roads." There were some potholes caused by snowmelt. My practiced eye scanned the roadside for weird old Soviet bus stops, and I was rewarded. Angular, colorful, and strange.

Cher went through the rules. Don't go into any buildings. Don't touch anything. Don't sit on the ground. "If you sit down," she said, "you will contaminate your pants." She held up her dosimeter and showed us what a "normal" radiation level was. She was giving us a baseline.

Through the countryside we tore, the driver taking us ever northward. Cher started a video. It concerned the efforts to cover the exploded nuclear reactor with something called a "Mega Tomb."

While the video played, Cher softly read to the driver. We found this remarkably endearing.

The video gave a quick history but focused mostly on the international team of engineers tasked with covering up the rad-spewing hole in the ground. When the reactor first blew, it took them a few days to just pour concrete over the thing, a big old Soviet block they called The Sarcophagus. But it started sucking after a few decades, so they built this big old airplane-hanger-lookin' thing on top.

What will they put on top of this one in twenty years, one wonders.

The logistics behind both endeavors were sad and fascinating. Sometimes, the workers could only be on site for a few minutes at a time. You run up, fill a bucket with sand, and then you run back because your Roentgen ray count is too high. Call it a day! Hit the showers.

Cesium is a hell of a drug.

For a while, they tried to use robots to get things done, but the radiation was too much and even the robots got scrambled, their circuits couldn't take it. So... back to people; they bused in thousands of miners from remote parts of the Soviet Union.

These people were referred to at the time as "Bio-Robots." Most of the bio-robots are dead now. Deactivated.

At some point, the tv switched from color to black and white. One of the guys in the back started hollering about it and Cher told him there was nothing she could do about it and to try not to contaminate his pants every time something went wrong.

We got to the Thirty-Kilometer Exclusion Zone and had to exit the van. Our passports were checked by a stern dude with a Kalashnikov strapped to his back. It's not all theater. There's still a ton of plutonium under the reactors, and some bad-actors may try to steal it one day. Would be a hell of a heist film.

A souvenir truck sold patches with the radiation symbol and "I survived Chernobyl" t-shirts. A grey kitty came slinking out of the guard tower and curled around our legs while we waited. Little Chernobyl kitty.

Another tour group showed up and got in line in front of us. Once our passports were checked, we had to duck around them to get to the turnstile leading back to the van. The new line of people blocked the view of one of the guards, and Sara got yelled at as she crossed over. He couldn't tell if she was cutting the line or not.

We were off and rolling again, but now we were on the other side. In The Exclusion Zone. I scanned again for Soviet bus stops and found one... with a tree growing inside it. Shudder. Long, gray stretch of road until we pulled over to visit an Abandoned Kindergarten. We were allowed inside, and like proper ghouls we all took pictures of the storybooks on the floor and the stripped dolls on the wire nap-beds.

It's been over thirty years and some of the shelves have collapsed, the roof leaks, dust is everywhere, a sad place. I was particularly affected by a row of cubby holes with animal faces above each individual cubby. Like, at some point a little girl had the hedgehog designated to her, a little boy the goose.

It was sort of set up like a haunted house tour but the ghost was Radiation. Cher whipped out her dosimeter to show a "hot spot" in the soil near the entrance. People gathered round to see, but we went back to the van.

We drove through Chernobyl Town, up and down abandoned streets. It could have been any '80s suburb, but the brick and wood homes were all sagging and fallen. This is what happens when you don't weatherproof the deck every few years.

In the distance, down a road we were forbidden to travel on, rusted ships listed and sank. I dearly wanted a photo of them. A river full of abandoned boats returning to the deep.

The people here had left in a hurry all right. The whole population went out for cigarettes and never came back.

There was a second checkpoint at the Ten Mile Exclusion Zone, but it went quickly. I reckon they figured any plutonium thieves would have figured out a way around them by now and only law-abiding suckers would stop here to show off their papers.

We saw the Mega Tomb, star of the video. There it was covering up Naughty Reactor No. 4. It was news to us that the other reactors had still been in use up to around 2000. Folks in Kyiv want their power. It took an international team of persuaders to be like, "how about everyone chips in to help you find a solution here."

It's "safe-ish" again now, and when we pulled up to the damn thing we saw dozens of workers swinging their lunchpails and working on... something without wearing any masks or gear. In appearance, it could have been any Seattle construction site.

There was a monument to the first responders. A giant stone fist holding a tiny stone factory.

We rolled on to Pripyat, stopping to take selfies in front of the awesome "Welcome to Pripyat" sign. This was the factory town set up to keep the whole thing running back in the '70s. It was once like any other factory town, but the factory made nuclear power. Soccer stadium, hotels, restaurants, swimming pools, movie stars. A city of the future.

The sign was very cool on its own merits. A Latvian dude started hitting on Cher at this point, and it became a theme of the trip. He helped her take a selfie, something she said she'd never done.

It was a brisk, clear day. I kept my eyes on the roadside hoping to see a wolfpack or fox or moose.

Down a dirt path surrounded by trees and brush. It used to be clear. It used to be the main road into town. Thirty years of untended nature is a hell of a drug. We entered the main square. A stark and quiet place.

It was slightly familiar to me from a video game set here. Call of Duty. I had killed and been killed here. I had been sniped from the top of that hotel, I has shot someone through the window of that restaurant. I was too shy to tell Sara this.

It was sad and strange and still and beautiful. Rusted Cyrillic letters falling off of buildings, crumbling staircases, cracked plazas, words like silent raindrops fell and echoed in the wells of silence.

Our group scattered and poked around reverently in an abandoned supermarket and down the halls of a ruined office building. It was the promised experience, and we were given a lot more freedom than I had expected.

We moved on to the Unopened Amusement Park. It had been scheduled to open two days after the accident. But nothing opened after the accident. The big rusty Ferris wheel was never ridden in. The bumper cars never bumped no one. It was very cool to see and probably the most famous symbol of the abandoned town.

                                      

Through the woods where "crazy ants" scrambled in the dirt and strange red beetles surfed on the leaves. We saw the stadium with its splintered bleachers. Sara told me a funny story about being a little girl and her class being bused in to clean the university stadium after Lady Razorback games.

After that, we both thought of the miners who had been bused in to sop up the cesium.

Around then to the back of town and back to the van. Slow, sober ramble out of town and toward an enormous radar called The Russian Woodpecker. It's one of the biggest in the world, you know, and back in the Cold War it's "tak tak tak tak tak" interfered with radio all over the globe.

It was supposed to spy on US missiles, but its signal couldn't "see" through the Aurora Borealis. Take that, Commies! Uncle Sam has weaponized the rainbow! Green clovers and blue diamonds in your fa ace, Ivan!

                                            
 
It started to rain. The Latvian dude clowned around in his poncho and wondered aloud if the driver was Cher's boyfriend. She said he was not. Clumsy as hell, but Latvia got the info he was looking for.

There was a mosquito in the van, and I became suddenly irrational about its desire to put its plutonium proboscis in me. I killed it with my hand, and it must have just fed, because blood went everywhere. It was like a scene from a Dario Argento movie. Napkined it up but still saw blood flecks in creases in my finger skin.

We both got kind of paranoid and weird about it. We'd been reverent and calm throughout the visit, but I think the sustained exposure to this sad region was beginning to get to us. We felt itches in places no mosquito could have penetrated. So, the stop for lunch came just in time.

Soup and pork chops. Sweet rolls and dry bread. One of the other tourists requested a gluten-free meal, so they gave her an apple.

The driver, who had heretofore, been silent made sure we knew the food had all come from outside the Exclusion zone, because "In Chernobyl, you have to shoot the mushrooms."

                                                        

We stopped at a statue of a trumpeting angel. There's a bit in Revelations about "the star Wormwood falling to Earth and making the water bitter" and Chernobyl means "wormwood" (if you translate it a certain way). I vividly remember people talking about this in the '80s, that the Chernobyl disaster was a precursor of Revelations!

But it was the same people who said Reagan was the Devil, because the names Ronald Wilson Reagan each had six letters in them.

One last stop at the "Welcome to Chernobyl!" sign, which had a concrete atom on it. Another very cool design. And that was it.

They played another video, this one with a pop song with chorus that went "Radioactive! Radioactive!" played over footage of Pripyat in its prime

We went through some sort of "clean machine" to see if any particles had fallen on us and to see if we had somehow absorbed too much radiation. If those machines were real, then so is the trumpeting angel.

                                         

I fell asleep pretty much right after that, which I later called "Firing up the dozeimeter." At some point, I woke up with a gasp and imagined I had sucked in a particle of radiation, like Peter Pan swallowing Tinker Bell.

Heavy traffic, but we got back to Kyiv in one piece. We bid farewell to Cher and wonder even now if she had a drink with the Latvian.

We walked the long way home and passed through an Easter celebration at St. Michael's cathedral. The streets were full of children. The trees strewn with painted eggs. Thousands of people cheering and happy. Smiling and kissing. The sun bursting through the windows of the church towers.

The contrast could have been more pronounced.

A Walk in Pee Pee Park

"Into the middle of the Dnieper they dare not look: no one except the sun and the blue sky looks there. Rare is the bird that flies to the middle of the Dnieper! Magnificent! No river in the world can equal him."

An early morning. I woke up before Sara and crept to the kitchen. I was unable to open the apricot yogurt. It was sealed tightly in some sort of canopic jar, a plastic prison. I applied a great deal of pressure to it, and snapped off the handle, but there was no accessing this yogurt. I chose to seek my fortune elsewhere. 

Delightful little solo morning photowalk, the late-night town had transformed into a worker's paradise with busy folks in suits navigating the slender pot-holed sidewalks with great agility. Blue suits and skinny ties. Marvelous overcoats and high heels. Briefcases and enviable handbags. 

A coffee shop owner made an X with his hands when I walked in. The universal symbol for "closed!" I was like, "coffee?" and he was like, "Tic tac toe, motherfucker. Do you speak it?"

Endangered myself slightly on a skinny little roadway trying to capture the mural of a tiger. It was stylized in a most Eastern European way. Angular and strange. He was raising his paw to the answering raised hand of a professor. Tile had fallen from the wall on which he was painted, and it made a beautiful and forlorn scene. I stood in some construction material, ducked when a truck roared by, and got the shot. 

Further on was a sweet little park with statues of various birds designed to appear as gentlemen. They wore top hats and had walking sticks tucked underwing. Charming. The trees were hung with Easter eggs, and a cleaning crew swept the paths with branch brooms. A thin little wind tugged at my sweatshirt. 

I wound my way around past a Soviet-era hospital, almost Brutalist with its blocky columns, and found myself in a cold little plaza. Poked around in an underpass for art and discovered a great miracle. The trailer-hitch snail from last night was, in fact, a coffee cart. It's shell opened to reveal an espresso machine. 

I bought some for very few hryvnia.   

Thus fortified, I returned home to see if Sara was ready. I found her clean and struggling with the Impenetrable Yogurt. Neither our combined strength nor brain power could extricate it. We imagined ourselves as skeletons in the street, the unopened yogurt pristine 'mongst our blanched and fallen ribs.

She dressed and we got coffee at a proper cafe. I read the Kyiv Post. We made our way to where the action was. A little art park tucked away behind an imposing wall of buildings. Such a place this was. Such a place it is. Massive works of functional whimsy.

A huge Alice in Wonderland climbing structure with a caterpillar slide and an enormous hat to climb in. Children climbed into the Cheshire Cat's head and waved from inside his smile. Benches shaped like large-mouthed creatures lay further on. In the distance, the domes of St. Andrew's beckoned.

Parents smoked while their children scrambled around on tiled snakes and donuts. Further on, a statue-group depicting four toddlers peeing, with the pee represented by solid metal arches, each a different color, gave us unending delight. We had gone there to find this specifically, and it did not disappoint. We took turns walking under the arcs. 

In a field strewn with discarded Tarot cards, we sat on a bench shaped like a watermelon and planned our next few moves. It was to be a walk to St. Andrews, a slide down Souvenir Alley, a peek at the Bulgakov museum, lunch, and a Metro ride.

Stray dogs, very healthy seeming, cavorted as we headed off. I turned a card over with my toe, revealed the Two of Swords and got superstitious. We hurried away and took a circuitous path down busy boulevards and through a canyon of painters to find the winding path around St. Andrews, a teal and gold church which made a striking portrait against the blue sky.

Old women and charismatic dad-bods sold nesting dolls here, and necklaces, and cooking spoons. Most looked shipped directly from the Tourist Warehouse or were part of a So You Want to Sell in the Street starter kit, but there were a few treasures.

A few flint-faced Russians got a little pushy, reaching across our bodies to ring bells and shake dolls. It felt aggressive, so we moved on

I helped two young lovers take a photo in front of the statue of Bulgakov. Vendors sold old coins and Soviet medals. Men played backgammon and sold books. We had traveled very far by this point, and somewhere near the tracks of a dusty tram we stopped for lunch.

Cute little diner with a streak of subversiveness. The servers wore bright yellow uniforms and signs on the wall read things like People Suck and I Kissed a Girl And I Liked It. Sara had the perch, and I had the carrot juice.

Down a mottled sidewalk, a quick crunch across the gravel, and we were at the Metro station. Very understated and efficient. No frills, but not run down. Past the turnstile, a blue and yellow train roared up, and we took it toward the Maidan.

It was deep, this station, and the escalator out was a vertiginous trial. The handrail moved at a different rate than the stairs, so your arm would drag past your body and threaten to pull you down. A cool experience, but a little sick-making. I was happy to find Independence Square at the top.

Dude ground through "Let it Be" on the bagpipes, which filled the air with a kind of melancholy battle-whine. Women in fox and Minnie Mouse costumes trawled for tourists. Bustling public space opening to a large square with enormous monuments and the site of much recent history.

It was here the people gathered in 2014 to protest corruption in the government and demand reform and a path to joining the EU. They were shot by snipers, the leader was driven out, and Russia took advantage of the chaos to invade Crimea. Much of this had an effect on the US election in 2016. More on this later. 

Boys with hawks and pigeons tied to their arms pestered us for photo-ops. We blanked them, but the long day and the stress of their harassment made us long for home. We left without really covering the place. Will return. We'll return.

The way home was a master-class in caryatids, and we took many photos, our sleepy eyes lifted to the viewfinder. 

We passed the Golden Gate, a majestic former entrance to Ancient Walled Kyiv. Isolated from the wall and buttressed with new wood reinforcements, it looked a little like a spa or park toilet. Corkscrewy walk home where a nap awaited. Sara read while I slept.

She had bought some yogurt capable of being opened, and we shared it. It was creamy with a sour taste, and we're now quite sure it was, in fact, sour cream. We sat on the couch and ate a container of sour cream. Is what happened.

I wrote a little, she read some more, and we went back out for dinner. It's a late-night town and finding salmon steaks proved simple. After a quick meal, it was back to the 24-Hour grocery.

We needed picnic supplies for Chernobyl.