Better Than Fiction 2 (18 page)

W
e started out from Kiev on the morning of a fine autumn day; the sky was a perfect blue dome pierced by the gilded crosses of the Lavra monastery, the trees a golden-leaved cascade tumbling down the steep banks towards the silver Dnieper River. Most visitors to Ukraine never get beyond Kiev with its lovely onion-domed churches, or the picturesque formerly Polish town of Lvov in the west. But our destination was Luhansk in the industrial rust-lands of eastern Ukraine, where tourists never go, and our road trip was also a journey through the past, through the heart of the country’s vast little-known rural hinterland, and through our family’s history. This is a journey that would be impossible today; this pastoral region has become a war zone and my cousin Volodya, who was my driver and companion on this trip, has become a refugee. Recalling our road trip together has a particular poignancy now.

Volodya was in a pessimistic mood as we set out; his Cossack-style moustache drooped as he informed me that the starter motor of his seventeen-year-old BMW was playing up and we had 800 kilometres to go. But at least the CD player was working, and Stella Zubkova was warbling songs of yearning as we crawled bumper to bumper on the traffic-choked Poltava Highway.

At last we left behind the dismal suburbs and the turn-off to Borispol Airport. ‘Bye-bye, Kiev! How do you do, Luhansk!’ cried Volodya, putting his foot to the floor. The ancient motor leaped like a stallion over the potholes in the road. Thumb on horn, foot on gas, he kept up a running commentary, waving one hand in the air to illustrate his points. Sometimes, for a particularly complicated point, he had to use both hands. Each time we overtook another vehicle, Volodya triumphed, ‘There they go, those fool Belorussians in their stinky Lada – Lukashenko! Ha ha ha! There go the insolent Russians in their mafia Volga – Putin Schmutin! Bye-bye! There go those Franczooski in their showy Peugot 406 – au revoir! See! Seventeen-year-old Beyemvey beats all!’

Through the open roof, the sun poured in and the songs poured out. Stella Zubkova’s voice was throbbing with passion. ‘Ha! Now who is this idiot trying to overtake us?’ A tank-like land cruiser with darkened windows glided by. Volodya accelerated briefly, then pulled back and shook his head. ‘Go, fool! Go! Biznessmyen!’ I smiled weakly and hung on to my seatbelt. Volodya thought seatbelts were for cowards.

Despite the mechanized terror on the road, the countryside we drove through was lush, drowsy, stuck in a time warp. Locals with time on their hands sat behind roadside stalls selling apples, pears, berries and cherries, freshwater fish, plastic buckets, bits of dead Ladas, and mysterious cloudy fluids in plastic bottles. As we
sped by, Volodya greeted them all.
Beep! Beep! Beep!
We passed wooden cottages surrounded by hollyhocks, and willow-fringed streams where sun-burned kids splashed about in their knickers. We passed dozy cows sleeping off their lunch in the long grass, a hay wain straight out of Constable, and a child wobbling behind it on a bike.
Beebeeep!

At Kurenka the road forked and we headed south towards the city of Poltava, which was close to the village that our grandparents came from. It was time to think about lunch. We stopped in a village with a market, where people from the surrounding countryside had brought their produce to sell. I had gotten so used to uniform pre-packed supermarket apples and tomatoes that at first these seemed misshapen and too full of life – literally. A small maggot poked its head out of a blush-red apple, looked around, then disappeared again. Volodya bought a kilo. ‘Better taste,’ he said.

Volodya was a connoisseur of Ukrainian fast food and made a beeline for an open-air food stall where salads, boiled eggs, sour cream dumplings, meatballs in tomato sauce, curd cheese, red cabbage, and an abundance of beetroot in various guises were on display in plastic boxes that would probably have failed a hygiene test. But it tasted like home, fresh from the garden and delicious. And for dessert there was another of Volodya’s favourites:
Napoleonka
, a stack of thin pancakes held together with cream, jam, berries, and custard. Delicious. Volodya flirted shamelessly with the pretty stallholder, and got an extra portion for free. I was hoping he wouldn’t be tempted by the liquor stall – his driving was already giving me the jitters – and happily he had only one shot. Then we were off again.

After a few kilometres we turned down an unmarked side road. I don’t know how Volodya knew where to go, but he wove
confidently between wide flat fields, a chequerboard of blue linseed flowers and golden wheat. This was the heart of the black earth country – the blood-soaked loam that armies marched through, that once fed a vast empire, where our family had survived Stalin’s famine in 1932 when corn and seed-corn were commandeered to feed the workers in the cities; it still seemed eerily unpopulated.

Khutr Mikhailevka was little more than a scatter of thatch-roofed cottages along a dirt road, which had been commandeered by a cockerel strutting with his harem of chickens. Nearby was a pretty blue-washed Orthodox church. Once upon a time, long before the civil war that followed the Russian revolution, before the famine that depopulated this countryside, before our grandfather was murdered in prison, before the Nazi armies marched through here on their way to Stalingrad, long before all that, two little sisters, who became our mothers, must have knelt here side by side and prayed for whatever little girls pray for, along with our grandfather, Mitrofan, once a handsome army officer with twirled moustaches that were Volodya’s envy, and our grandmother Marina. As we stood in the incense-scented silence, I noticed a tear leaking from Volodya’s eye, and truth to tell, I was feeling quite sniffly, too.

There was no trace of our former family home, which we believed had been rather grand, in the village, but we met an old lady in her nineties called Evgenya who remembered the family, and even had a drawing done by my artist great-uncle hanging alongside the icons on her walls. Her two-roomed thatched cottage was damp but surprisingly warm – she showed us the gas pipe that ran through her garden, above ground between the sunflowers, dahlias, rows of beans, and maize, bringing cheap
domestic gas all the way from Russia. She plied us with sugary black tea and talked about her childhood, the candlelit parties, fishing on the lake, the feasts of carp, the country dancing, the cattle, the vodka. ‘Ah!’ she clasped her gnarled hands together. ‘Those were the happy days!’

It was late afternoon by the time we got back on the road. We had a nervous moment when the starter motor, which had obeyed at first command after lunch, took three or four tries to get going. Dark storm clouds were rolling in over the horizon, and by the time we were back on the main road raindrops were splatting on the windscreen. There was another nervous moment when the wipers took a few attempts to start, but soon they were conducting a frenzied tempo as Stella Zubkova sang of love and war and we cruised at full speed into a treacherous spray of blurred car lights and streaming water, overtaking everything, drenching cyclists and pedestrians. Volodya confided, ‘Imported tyres for Beyemvey cost sixty dollars each. But I got two front tyres for sixty hryvni [about £4 at the time]. Ha ha!’ I hung on to the seatbelt and closed my eyes.

Poltava, when we got there, was a dismal rain-grey town, and the huge hotel where we were booked for the night, though classed as a tourist hotel, seemed to be a bleak relic of a pre-tourist era with dingy rooms, broken bathroom fittings, thin lumpy mattresses, and sporadic hot water. We were the only guests in its one-hundred-plus rooms, and frankly, if we had known what it was like, we too might have chosen to stay somewhere else. However, Volodya unerringly tracked down an excellent fast food eatery, and after a couple of vodkas even the thin lumpy mattress didn’t seem too bad.

The next day, we got up early in order to visit the Korolenko National Pedagogic Institute, where one of our ancestors had
been a teacher. It is a fine Art Nouveau edifice in the style of the famous Glasgow School of Art, and Vladimir Korolenko, after whom the Institute was named, was a writer who must have been known to our great-grandparents. A Populist exiled to the Siberian wilderness in 1881 by the tsar, he wrote vivid accounts of nature and climate in the ice-bound regions. We were thrilled to find our family name painted in gilt on one of the oak panels in the Institute, and we toasted him with an extra glass of celebratory vodka over lunch.

Then it was time to move on. The car started at first go, and Volodya put its earlier tantrums down to empathy and emotional blackmail. Our next stop was to be Kharkiv, halfway between Poltava and Luhansk, the second largest city in Ukraine, an important city of the Russian Empire and a major industrial centre even today. My parents lived here in Soviet times; my father wrote poetry and my mother learned to operate a crane. There were some lovely churches dating back to its 17th-century origins, but it was mostly built up in the Soviet constructivist style. The traffic was horrendous, and we didn’t deviate for sightseeing. Besides, Volodya was keen to show me a ‘miracle’ before we reached our destination.

Some miles west of Luhansk, following a hand-painted wooden sign, we veered off the main road again and took a track that meandered between wide fields of sunflowers and wheat, past groves of chestnut trees, suddenly opening out into a makeshift parking area where a collection of antique Ladas were parked alongside a vintage tourist bus bedecked with faded plastic flowers, Ukrainian flags, Orthodox crosses, and images of saints. Volodya pulled up proudly between a rusty Zaporozhets and a camouflage-green-painted motorbike with a sidecar, possibly a war relic: his BMW definitely put all the other vehicles to shame.

A footpath led along the edge of the field down into a woody hollow where a crowd of people were gathered beside a stream with their heads bowed. There was a low murmuring sound halfway between humming and chanting.

‘They are praying for a miracle,’ he said.

A moment later a black-robed priest stepped into view, carrying a blue plastic bucket and a washing-up brush. As we watched, he dipped the brush into the bucket and splashed water over the onlookers, including us.

‘Holy water,’ whispered Volodya as I backed away. ‘Look, the water comes out of the rocks. It never goes dry.’

I looked where he was pointing. Below the trees was a cave where water burst out between the rocks and trickled down into a clear stream that wound away into the wood. As I glanced at the people beside us, I noticed a man on our left with a horribly weeping eye; the emaciated old lady beside him had hands twisted with arthritis; another man had a stump for a leg and several people were on crutches. A little boy with Down’s syndrome held the hands of his parents. A girl in a wheelchair was pushed forward to receive an extra drenching. My secular heart contracted with pity. In a country without a functional health service, they had to make do with a priest with a plastic bucket and a washing-up brush.

The ground underfoot was boggy, we were standing on slippery wooden planks, and mosquitoes were whining around our ankles. Volodya pointed to a wooden hut a few metres away that housed a bath where the more seriously afflicted could immerse themselves totally.

‘Would you like to try it?’

‘No. NO. Thank you. Really, I feel fine.’

I felt a moment of gratitude remembering my clean, efficient,
if somewhat over-crowded local hospital back home. This display of hopelessness and credulity made me depressed, but my cousin filled a plastic bottle at the source to take home some holy water for his mother, my aunty, who was in her eighty-ninth year, and feeling all the usual aches and pains of old age.

We made our way back to the car and Volodya turned the ignition key. Nothing happened. Uh oh! He tried again, and again, and again. Still nothing. A kindly Lada driver tried to help us out with jump leads, but to no avail. The war-relic motorcyclist saluted us with a gauntleted hand and roared away, a pair of crutches poking out from his side car. Dusk was drawing in and the car park around us was gradually emptying, as the faithful, healed or not, were heading home for their beetroot soup and sour cream dumplings. Feeling hungry and emotional, we munched on wormy apples as we contemplated our possibilities. At last, only the Zaporozhets and our BMW were left in the car park.

‘We need a miracle,’ said Volodya.

I was all for tipping the whole bottle of holy water into the radiator, but Volodya demurred. While we were arguing, a whiskery young man wearing a leather jacket and carrying a holdall and a blue bucket climbed the footpath from the spring and made his way over to the Zaporozhets. As we greeted him, we recognized the priest who an hour ago had splashed us with holy water.

‘Can you help us?’ Volodya asked.

The priest rolled up his sleeves and got under the bonnet. His face was shiny and optimistic, but the German-made BMW was too complex. Still, there was a time-tested fix for all such problems. He opened up his boot and pulled out a coil of heavy-duty rope with which he attached the bumper of the BMW to the Zaporozhets. Volodya took the wheel of the BMW, I sat beside
the young man in the Zaporozhets, and we took off with a lurch. It seemed incredible, but the battered two-stroke Soviet car was actually pulling the BMW along a track between the sunflowers.