Transit

From Ukraine, on the road to Romania, where my scout troop and I went for a camp in the second half of August.

Candy wrappings with writing in the Cyrillic alphabet, scattered somewhere around Grandpa’s house, in the vast storages of my memory. That’s about as much as I had seen of Ukraine prior to my first, albeit only passing, visit to the country this year. On retrospect, Ukraine is very much like that candy wrapping – the shops and restaurants and trains are all almost home-made in that they lack the uniformity of mass production, but they are dulled and grayed about the edges with poverty. I find it all very picturesque, even when I realize that I’m thrilled by all the same things that bother me so in Poland – the old, dilapidated cottages or ladies, each and every one built in a different style or wearing different-colored shawls and flower-patterned skirts, contrasting so sharply with the pseudoWestern and modernistic villas or girls with overdone make-up and provocative mini-skirts they border on. Yes, all this fascinates me here, whereas in Poland, present on a much smaller scale, it’s already too much. The paradox of open-mindedness: I want you all to stay in your backward cultures for years on end, so that I can enjoy experiencing them, but as for myself – culture is just a convention, and let’s not get too caught up in one particular one; to Freedom and the West with me. But don’t you dare follow in my footsteps!

The candy wrapping can give us no hint as to the nature of the Ukrainian population. We have to get past the wrapping, into the gooey candy inside – ah, so sweet, so sweet, except when it gives you an unimaginable stomachache. Ukrainians are the best of people, and they are the worst of people.

The ladies in the various little stores around Lvov are surely of the best kind. Had they been born in England, they would’ve said “here you go, dear” while handing you your receipt; but because they hadn’t been, they say something in Ukrainian with the same gentle smile and give you a scrap of paper with hand-written figures instead. That’s if you specifically ask for a receipt; otherwise, adding up your dues on a pocket calculator or sometimes even on an abacus (droplets of color from a world long gone in the black and white candy wrapping photograph... we gasp in amazement at this treasure), they can’t imagine you could need proof of anything.

There’s an immigration card that needs to be filled out on the Polish-Ukrainian border. There’s also a lady that comes with it, explaining exactly what we need to write.

Or what she thinks we need to write. But not, apparently, what the immigration officers in the train from Lvov to the Romanian border think.

“Why is it filled out in the Latin alphabet?! That’s not allowed.”

“But there are instructions in English here, in the Latin alphabet! Surely if the instructions don’t have to be in Cyrillic, then neither does the part we fill in?”

“Oh... Right, we’ll let you get away with it this once. But... Ah, you didn’t fill in the ‘receiving company’ part!”

“The lady at the border said we didn’t have to...”

“She was wrong then. You should have written ‘Romania’ in there. And now we have no choice but to deport you back to Poland.”

Sinking hearts and powerless indignation. This can’t be, isn’t happening.

“Isn’t there anything we can do? We’ll pay a fine, anything, just don’t send us back to Poland...!”

“Ah, a fine.” A glow of unhealthy contentment lights up their faces. What else could this have been about, if not money?... They motion for us to enter a secluded room... A few minutes later, hryvnias in hand, they disappear with a whispered “we didn’t see you, you didn’t see us”, not even bothering to check if we filled in “Romania” in the immigration cards like they told us to.

But all in all, the Plackartna (the Ukrainian night train) is a terrific thing. Seats that fold into beds; your own clean (or semi-clean) sheets, pillow, and even towel; boiling water in each wagon and tea for a small fee (needless to say, each cup is different, often decorated with pictures of the train line). People wandering about half-clothed, clad in pajama bottoms and the like; a casual, if sleepy and unbearably humid atmosphere all round . Windows that if you’re lucky open after the combined effort of the strongest members of your party, and which half the ladies of the train staff feel it is their duty to close. The other half is stupendously nice, smiling in a grandmotherly sort of way, always asking you if you need anything.

Darkness, blissful darkness, the gentle rocking of the train. “We’re getting up, fold your sheets and bring them to the front of the wagon!” Of all the torturous ways of disturbing one’s sleep, this “we’re getting up” is possibly the evilest. “We’re getting up”?! You bloody well aren’t. You’ve already gotten up at least a full ten minutes previously, and can no longer envision the agony of lifting your eyelids, the despair of sitting up, the resignation of putting on your socks...

But this particular awakening was even viler than the usual “we’re getting up” ones. It was a whole hour before the train was to reach its destination, so I shall never understand why we were already awoken. And the man who woke us up – well, shouldn’t he treat us like humans, like customers? To wake up with the feeling that you are a little child who has done something wrong, who didn’t get out of bed fast enough and bring her sheets to the right place – that’s not something that happens very often in the West.

This child-like feeling is perhaps the key to understanding the mentality of Ukrainian staff and clerks. Unlike the West, where they are in a position slightly subservient to yours, here the servant is always the master. Or rather the parent, who has the right and the duty to stand guard over prime moral values – for bringing your sheets to the front of the wagon and writing “Romania” in appropriate columns are such important things! This paternal (or maternal) quality is also what allows some Ukrainians to be so supremely nice – they are, remember, of the type that calls you “dear”, not the type that says “how ya doin’?” or “thank you, madam”.

On the bus from Lvov back to Poland, a lady comes up to Krzyś and me and asks if we could let her sit in our seats for five minutes to allow her to pack her bag. Puzzled, we nonetheless let her do so. At this, instead of sitting down, which is surely the most reasonable position for packing, she dives down under the seats and lies down on her back...

We later realize that she’s smuggling cigarettes across the border. Hiding some of them around the bus (mostly under seats...; the bus was so old and had so many holes it wasn’t difficult to find a good hiding place), sticking others with tape to her body under her clothes – and all this so, so openly! It soon became apparent that one of the bus drivers is also mixed up in the business...

Not surprisingly, we were stopped at the border for some two hours, missing our planned train from Przemyśl in the process... “You should change the picture in your passport, you don’t look similar,” said the customs officer to Paweł, and though she didn’t call him “dear”, she said it with the air of one who is giving good advice to a child.

Going through customs was rather fun. No X-ray machines here, obviously. They put their hands into our backpacks and felt for bombs and such. “Is it a helmet or bread?” the officer asked when encountering a mess tin. “A spare pair of shoes, right?” another one ascertained after touching a bottle of gasoline we used for cooking our dinners on in Romania (technically, we shouldn’t have been taking it across the border...). I wouldn’t be surprised if after these two hours of searching they hadn’t discovered the smuggled cigarettes at all; but we never actually found that out.

In a little bar in Lvov, where you could stuff yourself with pierogies for the equivalent of a single pound, a smiling lady bid us farewell with the words “come back again when you visit Lvov next time”. Farewell then, beautiful, crazy Lvov, remarkable Ukraine. Maybe I’ll return some day; for now let me remember the smiling faces of your kind matrons and laugh at your over-zealous clerks.