"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!
No comments:
Post a Comment