The Humorless Ladies of Border Control

by Franz Nicolay

  “These stairs are pretty steep,” Maria said as we hauled a suitcase up a glorified ladder to the sun-baked second floor.

  “Pff!” Oksana said dismissively. “Americanskii protest!”—what an American complaint.

  Within her gates were a half-dozen cats, two goats, a small patch of grass for clover hay, a vegetable garden, countless flowers, raspberries, wild strawberries, broken glass and shards of pottery pressed decoratively into the cement walkways and exterior walls, a bench swing made from shellacked branches, a covered but wall-less teahouse, laundry drying on parallel lines.

  Oksana had one tenant, a German in his ninth year of traveling the world. After a close friend died, he had quit his job and gone in search of spiritual contemplation. He had one set of loose-fitting, synthetic hiking clothes and wore those shoes with individual pockets for each toe. He fasts twice a year for thirty-five days at a time, he told us, and eats only once a day. When he feels hungry, he goes for a walk in the mountains. He has a twenty-five-year-old daughter but hasn’t seen her in three years.

  Oksana had her laptop out and was struggling with a dilemma: how to list her establishment on Airbnb in a way that wouldn’t attract Russians. She’s sick of dealing with Russians, she said. “They just want their sto hram”—100 grams of vodka—“and fried meat.” In the end, she decided the solution was to run the listing in English.

  She was a card-carrying member of the nationalist Svoboda party, and we asked how she felt about the recent presidential election, won by the billionaire businessman Petro Poroshenko.

  She shrugged. “He’s not so bad. Lyashko”—the radical nationalist member of Parliament who was in the middle of conducting a vigilante campaign in the eastern war zone at the head of a private militia—“would’ve been great, but Europe never would have accepted him. We need a manager, not a revolutionary.”

  Verkhovyna was clustered at the bottom of a wide river valley. Unlike American villages, where each house is separated by a buffer of trees, its houses were packed together as if they had slid down the valley walls and run up against each other. You could hear the cries of babies and shouts of fathers across the whole town. Dozens of roosters and hundreds of dogs sang in chorus over the square miles.

  It was haying season, and whole families, including small children, pitched in. The yards and fields were left to grow tall, then scythed, left to dry in the sun, turned once a day with a rake or pitchfork, and eventually gathered, once the grass had browned, into one of the twenty-foot haystacks that each fell from their own central pole. Oksana’s neighbors, Jehovah’s Witnesses with five young children, had taken over their shared driveway to cut bark lath into kindling. The husband was shirtless and, though young, nearly toothless. He had a menagerie of bad tattoos: fantasy dragons fading across his back; a bust of Lenin over his left breast; and, in English Gothic capitals on the mound below his belly button, “Only Fur [sic] Lady,” with an arrow pointing toward his crotch.

  “He must have been in prison,” I said. He had, it turned out: eleven years, for rape.

  The high mountain lanes, rutted and exposed on the treeless slopes, were cut as deep as five feet below the ground level in the surrounding fields: the roads have followed the same paths, under more or less the same conditions, for a very long time. It’s hard to credit the evidence that many motor vehicles use them, though I do see a dirt bike, an old Soviet army jeep, and a Lada with a jacked-up suspension pass by. One farmer tossed his drying hay with a preindustrial horse-drawn contraption whose two iron wheels turned rods that, as they rotated, waved four pitchfork ends up and down in pairs.

  We were visiting a legendary local instrument maker, Tafiychuk, a squat old man with white hair and black eyebrows. He and his wife lived in the hills with their twelve-year-old granddaughter. Their daughter used to live there, too, but ran off last year with a drunk and left the child. Their house, like the bridge, was newly painted in patriotic blue and yellow. Maria asked him about the election.

  “I’m a simple man,” he said. “I don’t think about these things.” But he, like Oksana, had settled for Poroshenko.

  We were buying instruments: a tsimbaly (hammered dulcimer), a selection of sopilky, and a duda—a bagpipe made from the skin of a whole goat. To keep the goat skin soft and supple, Tafiychuk said, toss fifty grams of vodka into the instrument every month or so. The tsimbaly had been built for another man, but he had been called up into the army. Maria could have it; the original owner had said: “If I come back, I can order another one.”

  We left and headed to Kosiv, where our friend Roman had set up an interview with a member of the Hutsuls, one of the region’s first rock bands, begun in the 1960s. Lubko was a tired-eyed man in double denim and a khaki fishing vest, with one tooth in the middle of his upper gum like a Muppet. The Hutsuls’ hit was a cover of Black Sabbath’s “Paranoid” with lyrics rewritten in Ukrainian to refer to local topics. Their bearded singer, Slavko, could still be seen riding around town on his bike, playing trumpet at funerals and dances: “It’s the rock and roll life,” he said, “you want to play for people. Even dead people.”

  Roman was a photographer and a member of the local parliament (“the local mental hospital,” Lubko added). “It gives me headaches and makes me enemies.” He had arranged for the reunited Hutsuls to play the Maidan stage over the winter, though it had taken some convincing. “Why do I need to drive all the way to Maidan?” Slavko had asked Roman.

  “Listen, Slavko,” Roman told him. “You’ve been playing forty years in a jail. Even in free Ukraine, you’re in a jail. Now you can come to Maidan and play in a really independent Ukraine.”

  It was time to start playing my own shows. I left Maria and Lesia in Ivano-Frankivs’k, in the hands of the mayor’s wife, who was busy organizing fund-raising efforts for the army (“The boys need socks and thermal underwear”), and drove west to Kalush. “We call that road the chessboard,” Roman said, “all patches of black and white”—i.e., potholed and patched. It was no small improvement on the mountain roads, though. In forty-five minutes I pulled up at a freestanding Irish pub incongruously plopped in the middle of a cluster of bedroom-community apartment towers.

  “I am Max,” said the schlubby, jovial proprietor, who wore a T-shirt that read “Music Is My Religion.” “This is Maxwell Pub.” The interior was hung with all manner of Irish knickknacks and “Proud to Be a Celt” football scarves. Max even had a clover tattoo. “I like Irish music, Irish football, Irish beer, Irish everything!”

  He introduced me to his small crew of friends. Alex, from Odessa, wore a trendy but short haircut, a red-checked button-down, and black-rimmed glasses: a preppy hipster or a hip preppy. His greatest ambition, it turned out, was to live out a Carlos Castaneda fantasy and do peyote with a cult in Mexico. He loved Kalush, he said, though he couldn’t explain why. He said it was an eco-disaster waiting to happen: a deep mining pit filled with chemical waste from a fabrication plant was just waiting to overflow.

  The crusties from the festival had a week off, and I’d tried to get them to join this show. The game of telephone hadn’t connected and it hadn’t worked out, but another American showed up looking for them, a chatty hippie girl with a nine-month-old baby. She overheard me tell Alex that I didn’t think you could just go to Mexico and get peyote these days. “Sure you can!” she interjected, and as she gave him the details, I slipped away.

  I’d brought only my banjo on this tour. You can find an acoustic guitar anywhere, I figured, and if they could scrounge up an accordion too, so much the better. Max could. Not only that, he’d cooked a surprisingly credible falafel dinner. While eating dinner and scrolling through Twitter, I began to see unsettling reports that a civilian airliner had been shot down in eastern Ukraine. Early indications said that the Malaysia Airlines flight had been destroyed by the Russian-backed rebels. I excused myself to the patio and called Maria. “Did you hear what happened?”

  She hadn’t. She was scared. “Should we drive to th
e Polish border?”

  “Let’s give it a few days, see how it shakes out.”

  It seemed like a game-changer: hundreds of dead Europeans would surely be the spark that broadened this bloody, but so far regional, conflict. I returned to the bar and sat down next to Max. “Did you hear what happened?” I asked. He hadn’t, and made a scornful noise when I told him.

  “Donetsk and Luhansk, let them go,” he said. “They are not Ukrainian. They think they are Russian, but if they join the Russian Federation, the Russians will call them Ukrainians. They are stupid and aggressive: drink, drank, drunk! In Soviet Union they had factory jobs, but in independent Ukraine the factory closed down. It is all criminal gangs.”

  Surely, I asked him, there are Ukrainian loyalists in the eastern regions?

  “It is too bad,” he agreed. “Maybe some percent of people there want to be in Ukraine, but their family is there. . . . Like the [Crimean] Tatars. But they have Turkey looking out for them, they will be OK.”

  Did you vote in the election?

  “No. I have a friend who just came back from Slovyansk. He was in the army. He said it’s all just a political game.”

  He dismissed my concerns about the plane and changed the subject. “You know Sasha Boole?” he asked, indicating a poster for the show. Sasha, from the border town of Chernivtsi, was the opening act. “Everyone thinks he looks just like you. We made up a myth that you were brothers, that you fell in love with a girl but she chose Sasha, and so you went to America.”

  When Sasha arrived, I saw what they meant—he did resemble a version of me from a few years earlier. He wore a handlebar moustache and a bowler hat and sported a tattoo of a skeleton playing a banjo. He had dark hair and light blue eyes, wore a sweater tied around his neck like a golf pro, and sang the kind of romanticized Americana that was increasingly popular in Eastern Europe: a bandolier of harmonicas, a stomp box, a version of “Down by the Riverside.”

  “I love gypsy music,” he told me, and sang mock-theatrically to demonstrate. “In every song, a gypsy horse thief is falling in love with the daughter of the”—we debated the translation—“mob enforcer.” Earlier in the year, he had done a forty-day tour in Moldova and Belarus. The former was harder, he said, because the number of permissions required to hold or advertise a show was prohibitive.

  Unusually, Sasha mixed the unionist/progressive leftism common to most folk-punk Woody Guthrie fetishists with a radical militancy. “I played in Kyiv, at the Maidan,” he said. “It was an honor. . . . [Maidan] was worth it not so much for the results but because it turned a tumbler in the minds of Ukrainians.” He mimed a key turning beside his temple. “That we have to work together. The people from the medical school coming out under fire to help the injured. Like the American Communists, like Upton Sinclair—there is a history in America of organizing and popular uprising that we don’t have.”

  I commented on the irony of a former Communist state looking to American communism—which had, after all, been even less successful in practical terms than the Soviet version—as a future for Ukraine. He made a gesture of acknowledgment. But pacifist, Occupy-style activism was too weak to force change, he said.

  “People learned that the government only respects force. The first people in Maidan, they were doing art actions, flash mobs—the government came and beat them up. But the next time the government came, they were burning cars and setting fires, and the government said, ‘OK, we will negotiate!’ . . . I voted for Yarosh”—the leader of the Pravy (Right) Sektor, the militant nationalist faction. “Yarosh, in the election, they gave him money, he did other things like a regular politician, but . . .” He shrugged. “I think it will be better, whether you have strong arms from Europe saying, ‘You have to do it this way,’ or strong arms from the government. . . . I think there will be a second revolution, and it will be tougher, like Germany in the 1930s. You have these men coming back from the Russian war in the east, with guns, knowing how to kill people, saying to the government, ‘What are you doing?’ And there will be a leader, an Adolf Hitler type. Because the police are demoralized: one day [they] are fighting for the government, for the laws, and the next, you don’t know. It will be a long process and a long struggle.”

  It was an all-too-plausible scenario, especially disturbing to hear from a member of the young cultural alternative (and echoing the appeal of Limonov’s National Bolsheviks to the aimless counterculture of the Russian provinces). It was easy to see how the seductive power of revolution porn—the barricades, the Molotov cocktails, the “All Cops Are Bastards” rhetoric—could be co-opted by the rhetoric of militant populism, looking for a muscular defense against a powerful, aggressive, and unpredictable neighbor. At what point does the “castle doctrine”—that you have the right to protect what’s yours—expand into dangerous aggression? Defending borders? Defending co-religionists, or, as Putin was arguing, co-linguists, regardless of nationality? At what phase of that expansion does “nationalism” shade from patriotism into something more menacing?

  Sasha told me he had written a song about the separatists, specifically the Russian and Dagestani mercenaries crossing the border and “killing Ukrainian people and making money.” Later, he sent me the recording, a duet with an accordionist from Kalush credited to “Sasha Boole & Zydeco Fam.” It’s “the first Ukrainian zydeco,” they declare at the top of the track (though despite the accordion, the music has nothing to do with zydeco).

  If you were to ask him: what is more important, a carefree life or cash?

  He lived in the mountains, herded his sheep on a horse, drank wine, ate shashlik

  Now he’s here lying in a Kamaz car

  He could have lived a few days—at least to there and back and forth—

  This when that same Kamaz car can carry more dead separatists than those who are alive

  He wrote me:

  “There was one battle when our army destroy a big group of separatists. They were riding Kamazes [the most popular car of separatists at the beginning of the conflict]. Just few days before they was boasted, posting photoes of how they are riding Kamaz with guns in their hand. And then there was a photoes of the same cars, but full with the bodyes of separatists.”

  While Sasha began his set, I jotted down my notes from our conversation in the bathroom, the floor of which was constructed from the sanded and finished sides of wooden wine crates. As I returned to my table, the representative of a local television station approached me and asked if I would do an on-camera interview outside—give the perspective of an American on the events of the day.

  “I am on my own today,” the reporter said, setting up his camera on a tripod and plugging in the microphone. “Everyone is busy with all the news.” Did I have, he asked, any words of support for Ukraine in their time of crisis?

  I paused, wanting to speak carefully. It’s rare that one is called upon to speak as a representative of one’s own country to one engaged in a high-stakes military and political struggle—with another country, Russia, known for its attention, and vitriolic response, to its critics. I had married into a Ukrainian family, I said, which makes my daughter part Ukrainian, so I have some kind of a stake in the game. But, simply, I would want for Ukraine what I would want for any country: rule of law, freedom from corruption, and self-determination and a dignified independence.

  The club’s cleaning lady, Pany Lesia, left a vase of fresh flowers at the front of the stage for my set: a blue vase, of course, with yellow blooms. Max and his friends were ready to get rowdy, and I ended my set a capella, atop the bar, clutching my banjo.

  “Your folk singers,” the bartender told Max, shaking his head. “They always want to get up on the bar.”

  But the locals weren’t ready to let the show end. Sasha grabbed his guitar, and I my accordion, and we sat at the bar for another hour, hootenanny-style. They wanted to hear the iconic Johnny Cash bad-boy hits: “Folsom Prison Blues,” “Cocaine Blues”—a vicarious thrill, like white Americans who lov
e gangsta rap or narcocorridos. The hippie girl’s baby was asleep on a bar table, sprawled on his back in pajamas printed with little monkeys. The war in the country’s east had suddenly escalated, but there was samohon to drink and rebel songs to cheer, and what had the east to do with them? I understood: scary events in real time take time to process. On 9/11, I was on tour in Germany and tried to play the sympathy card to hit on a girl. (The next day I had to explain communism to our guitarist.) Stuff happens, but you can’t let a big thing like history ruin your day.

  Tempting as it may be, there’s no point in lolling around in bed when you’re hungover. You just end up obsessively cataloging and wallowing in the individual areas that hurt. Better just to jump up and start the hard work of recovery. Anyway, this wasn’t one of the bad ones. When the problem was the liters of weak beer, not the samohon shots at the end of the night, I had at least, despite myself, done some preliminary hydration.

  I took the train up to Chernivtsi—or down; it was almost due south, by the Romanian and Moldovan borders, on the route to Odessa. I have never been able to fully assimilate the idea that one can go south into mountains, any more than that rivers can run north to the sea. The filthy bathroom at the end of the train car was, despite the stench, the only place on the train to catch a gulp of fresh air. The old women, leery of the dreaded “draft,” prohibited the opening of windows with fearful glares.

  I was meeting a redheaded young man with the unlikely name of Artem Ketchup who—it was news to me—was the mastermind behind my Ukrainian shows, as well as Sasha Boole’s Moldovan and Belarusian adventures. As it turned out, I’d met him once before: he was working at Kvartira Art Center in Dnipropetrovs’k when Maria and I played there two years (and about two hundred pages) ago. As a teenager in Chernivtsi, he opened a design studio, silkscreening bags and T-shirts. He first booked a show by a local band as a vehicle to sell some of his merchandise and found that he liked putting on shows more than making bags: “It’s like a shitty tattoo—you get one, then you just want to get more.”