Ukraine Bulletin #6

March 3, 2007

I awoke this morning to find that the tree – perhaps an ash?—out in front of our building which shades our balcony, had been stripped of its bark in the night. I’m guessing it was used for fuel in the night. Now I understand why so many trees have deep scars up to about six feet high, even when they are not near roadsides. This week I watched a woman try for a half hour to unscrew a piece of metal from a septic tank. She finally succeeded, and to fill the hole, kindly shoved a black plastic bag in place of the piece she had removed. These pieces of metal are sold at the market each day. An elderly couple sells onions, potatoes, beets and cabbage on a box at our quiet corner, all day, almost every day. They use a scale and weights. I am constantly reminded of how resourceful human beings can be. There must be a kind of intelligence (would that be the eighth?) developed in conditions of scarcity, fear and duplicity.

I decided to plant flowers in our backyard when the weather gets nicer. I mentioned this to a friend, and asked if it was ok to do so, and who owned the enclosed yard. “No one owns it.” “The city owns it.” “Don’t do that, because no one owns it.” I thought of the little triangle at the three-way stop in Maple Corner where Robin Meiklejohn cultivated a public garden years ago. Robin’s gift to the village has been repeated many times in the past 25 years, by those who live near that triangle. Who owns it? The town or county, I suppose, as it is in a right of way.

But here, I am quite silly for wanting to plant flowers in the yard. The fear is that they would be stolen the next night, and sold by 10 a.m. The entire city – really the country – has been condominium-ized. The land is publicly held, but the buildings or apartments in those buildings can be owned. The land is leased—from the city? From the district? The nation? There are two evident problems created by this system. People abandon buildings. The state loses its revenue; the buildings crumble. Second, there are no condominium fees, no provision for maintenance of commonly owned areas. People dig trenches to plant cables, lift the lids off sewers and sell them for the metal, pull down trees, and strip bark.

I have brought many books with me. In addition to books about Ukraine, and some history texts and atlases, I have brought novels or memoirs about the former USSR and its client states. Grief of my Heart: Memoir of a Chechen Surgeon; The places in between, about a solo trek across Afghanistan; Caravans by Michener; Fools Rush In, about a journalist in Bosnia; Inside the Hornet’s Nest, an anthology of Jewish American writing; Dancing Under the Red Star, the story of an American woman in a Soviet prisons and the gulag; The Memoirs of Catherine the Great; a biography of Alexander II; a history of Slovakia; an anthology of contemporary Russian writers translated into English By reading these books, I can get a sense of how USSR’s policies affected different regions and individuals.

Reading these books helps me understand the bare oozing wound on the tree. Although several non-Ukrainians have written evocatively about the recent history of Ukraine, very little of this kind of recent reflective history of Ukraine by Ukrainians has been translated into English – if it exists at all.


On a lighter note, I have discovered the difference between inexpensive vodka and the good stuff. When you lay the good vodka in your freezer, it is still there the next day. With the inexpensive bottle, if you lay it down, it dribbles out the neck of the bottle, forms congealing vodka and finally, having evaporated, vodka flavored ice crystals on the freezer floor. The bottle lost about five ounces this way though the cap was screwed on very tight. Honest.

Hope you all are well.
Linda