Emails from the Edge (33 page)
Read Emails from the Edge Online
Authors: Ken Haley
UKRAINE: 21 DECEMBERâ3 JANUARY
DAY 546 (21 DECEMBER): ODESSA
Ukraine recovered its independence upon the collapse of the Soviet empire, but has retained the worst aspects of that demoralised entityârampant corruption in public services rotten to the core; and a ruthless disregard for personal dignityâwithout inheriting any of its supposed strengths.
In general, the further east you go in this land the more Russified are the people, many of them of Russian settler stock who feel âstateless' in the new Ukraine. It was from their ranks that mutterings of secession were heard after the disputed first round of elections in 2004 threatened to catapult Viktor Yushchenko, no friend of Moscow, to power (which duly happened after the second round).
Odessa's glory days are long past but eight decades of pallid classlessness have not succeeded in removing the last trace of rouge from the cheeks of this civic
grande dame
. My introduction to the Black Sea port is not auspicious, however. At this time of year, the tourist almost merits classification as an endangered species (
Homo touristicus
). Add a wheelchair, and jaws drop. The concept of a guest in a wheelchair travelling solo is just so alien here that I am denied admittance to one of the few accessible and affordable hotels, with no reason given. When I disprove the receptionist's assertion that it will be impossible for me to stay there because the lift isn't workingâby actually going over to it, pushing the button and watching it rise three levelsâand ask why she has lied to me, she drawls, âI lie because I like to.'
This city has an attitude problem. Even the Hotel Arkadia, way out of town, where at 10 pm I finally find lodgings, is reluctant to open one of the double doors at the entrance so that I can actually come inside.
DAY 547 (22 DECEMBER): ODESSA
Talk about âback in the USSR'. Taking breakfast here is like going on wartime rations. The hotel's not-so-largesse consists of two slices of Russian âblack bread' and a cup of scalding hot tea straight from the samovar. After much pleading I also receive a single hard-boiled egg. Over the tea, I have what passes for an optimistic thought: today is the âshortest day' of the year. Mercy be.
The streets of Odessa are not merely potholed but cratered. Of all the cities I've passed through on this voyage, none has the capacity to do so much damage to my wheels. Evidently, Odessa City Council is not receiving taxes or not spending them on road improvements. A local resident tells me, with a shake of the head, that the truth is a bit of both. Every dollar not going on road repairs, he confides, is a dollar slipped into some bureaucrat's deep pocket.
This evening I take my seat to the 1880s opera house for a performance of the two-act ballet
Giselle
. Sadly, my weariness is no contest for the spectacle, and I âexperience' the performance as two acts of hypnosis interrupted by the odd wakeful moment. After a glissade of curtain-closing applause sweeps me back into consciousness, I make my own exit.
DAY 549 (24 DECEMBER): ODESSA
High life and low coexist in marvellous juxtaposition on Odessa's city streets, to a larger degree than almost anywhere else. But those streets have a way of banishing lofty thought, as I discover while the tank-like Volga taxi driven by Igor catapults us towards Primorsky Boulevard. When a crater in the roadway gives the mechanical beast a jolt violent enough to have dismembered a lesser make, Igor shakes his head in despair.
In sympathy I mutter âCorruption', but now Igor stares at me in mock dismay.
âThere is no corruption in Odessa,' he assures me and then, unable to sustain the pretence any longer, his impassive face is swamped by a wave of laughter.
Igor drops me near the statue of Richelieu, the French noble whose support for the Russians at the time of Napoleon's invasion earned him the gift of Odessa itself from a grateful tsar. I notice Primorsky Boulevard is exceptionally crowded this morning and a massive greystone block overlooking Richelieu's right shoulder is hidden behind a virtual hedgerow of very large wreaths. The road is bumper to bumper with Black Marias and silver BMWs with tinted windows. On the opposite pavement a sombrely clad group of perhaps 200 âsolid citizen' types has assembled.
Desperately in need of explanations, I turn round to find a couple of Ukrainians from out of town are also watching the scene. Luckily, one of them speaks enough English to unravel its meaning for me.
These people, he says, are waiting to view the open coffin of the director of a prosperous driftnet-fishing companyââLook,' he interrupts himself excitedly, âthere is the limousine of the deputy mayor!'âwho was gunned down last night while parking his car in the family garage. âDidn't you know?'
I shake my head.
âIt was all over the TV news.'
Two considerations restrain me from queueing to view the corpse myself. Not only am I reluctant to affect grief for a man I hadn't heard of until just this minute, but his body is lying up there on the second floor so there are practical objections too. My attitude is not universally shared, it appears. Five minutes later, a couple of less reticent German visitors almost skip across the street in the first flush of excitement at having seen a Mafia boss in the all-too-waxen flesh.
âHe was so well dressed,' exclaims one of them. âCan you imagine it? We've been in Odessa one day, and already we've seen a dead body!'
Journalists are meant to be hard-bitten, but I will admit this comment floors me. âPerhaps if you stay a week you'll see a thousand,' I return sardonically. Now it is her turn to look shocked.
DAY 550 (25 DECEMBER): ODESSA
Amid all the bleakness of an Odessan winter, I have made a friend. She is Janna Belousova, a doughty businesswoman whose Eugenia Travel Agency occupies a two-storey downtown address. In the upstairs apartment she lives with her husband; downstairs is graced by a piano and a tall fir that seems to have spent all its life growing indoors and is already festooned with gold-wrapped boxes and bunting almost a fortnight before Orthodox Yuletide.
When I arrive in search of a timetable for buses to the interior, I find myself being treated like a member of the family. First, Belousova, who appears to sense that I will be missing the festivities back home, dispatches a worker to the local bakery from which he returns armed with Odessa's famous seasonal bread,
medovik
, studded with poppy seeds and dripping with honey. Next, she tells me something of her own family background: how her father disappeared in the Great Purge of 1937 and was never seen again. Her mother died in 1960 believing the official story that he had been kept in prison exile until his death in 1948. Only later did Janna discover that her father never saw the inside of a Gulag camp but was shot by Stalin's men on the day of his arrest.
Her story would make a moving film, and by flashing forward Hollywood could have its obligatory happy ending. Today three generations of Belousovas work for the family firm: Janna, her adult daughter, and
her
seventeen-year-old daughter.
Janna Belousova is one of those people who have time for everyone, and to retain such an outlook in Odessa seems to me a triumph of the human spirit little short of a miracle. When she lets me use her office computer to send one of my articles home and check my emails, I feel as if all my Christmases have come at once.
DAYS 553â556 (28â31 DECEMBER): KAMYANETSâPODILSKY
This is the story of the Great Suitcase Robbery of Kamyanets-Podilsky.
It probably had its genesis in the resentment of the bus's assistant driver at my occupying the seat he normally gave to a woman from out of town (not his wife). The bus was full, and I had a ticket, but something had to giveâand that turned out to be his temper. However, there was no way I was going to sit on the floor (his second preference, his first being that I get off the bus), so I just sat tight and kept my mouth shut. The night was interminable and frosty, with scarcely any sleep in the posture I was forced to adoptâface âresting' against the cold windowpane under a starry sky.
When the old rattler pulled in to Kamyanets-Podilsky at 5.30 on Saturday morning, the bus park was still shrouded in darkness. The still tetchy assistant driver hovered out of sight around the baggage hold, while the principal driver, Pyotr, deposited my bags on the cracked concrete apron and pointed out their number: four.
As I can never move the heavy suitcase on my own it seemed harmless to leave it behind me while I wheeled all of ten metres into the bus station to phone the hotel at which I had made a reservation. Just as I headed off, a youth who appeared to be saying goodbye to his mother shook me by the hand and started chatting to me in what must have been Ukrainian. Annoyingly, he persisted in doing so for a full half minute even though it should have been obvious that I didn't understand a word he was saying.
Inside the bus terminal, the public phone wasn't working and I was trying to get the drowsy ticketing official to use her receiver to persuade someone from the hotel to pick me up when all of a sudden I felt what I suppose you could call a pang of panic. I rushed out of the double doors to check that my suitcase was still there. It wasn't.
I raised a holler. The bus that had brought me here was reversing slowly, and I'm sure to this day that the driver was looking in my direction and would have stopped to see what the matter was unless he actually knew. However, the only people who could hear my anguished cries were a couple of passengers who had disembarked with me (they were innocent bystanders, I feel sure of that) and the ticket official who had seemed to be in a daze all along.
The report I made out later in the day for Kamyanets-Podilsky's overburdened police force conveys the scale of my loss adequately enough. âThe suitcase weighs about 15â20 kilograms and would not be easy to remove for a robber on foot. It contained about 25 plastic urinals, 40 packets of polythene gloves, fifteen 60ml syringes, twenty 10ml syringes, 400 plastic bags, 60 tubes of lubricating gel and more than 100 catheters, all of them urological and medical necessities for me.
âIt also contains nineteen American Express traveller's cheques each worth US$100 [numbers supplied]. Of course they are useless to the thief also, but without that US$1900 my journey must be cut short.
âAlso in the suitcase ⦠are several books, including my travel plan for the next four months. This is a personal catastrophe for me. Please help recover my belongings.'
Remembering Albania, I knew in my frigid bones that to have any stolen goods returned in such circumstances would be almost as unlikely a prospect as winning the lottery. So my initial response was not to call the police.
âTaksi, taksi, taksi,'
I roared at the bemused knot of passengers, until eventually one of them must have talked the ticket official into letting him call from the office phone. After ten minutes that seemed an eternity, a taxidriver bearing a disturbing facial resemblance to Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn turned up. He must have sensed it was an emergency because he began demanding twice what I could calculate a reasonable fare to be for the 160-kilometre round trip from K-P to the Romanian border town of Chernivtsi and back. But this was no time to argue, so I scrambled aboard with my three surviving bags and stated my destination,
âAftobus.'
By the time we pulled into Chernivtsi bus park, the sun had risen, inasmuch as it ever rises at this time of year. On seeing the bus there I was mildly surprised, and my heart skipped a hopeful beat. With the broken-English assistance of one of the small crowd of interested observers who gathered by the bus, Pyotr and his deputy were quickly apprised of the gravity of my situation. I recall using the term
âurologica'
and pointing imaginary catheters at my lap in the hope that this would convey the urgency of the matter, but the driving duo seemed resolutely unmoved.
Pyotr jumped down from the bus and, gesturing to the empty hold, was evidently telling the translator how he had shown me all my bags assembled together. No, he replied to a translated query of mine, no one could possibly have put the suitcase back in the hold or it would have been noticed upon arrival.
A picture of the youth who had diverted my attention for that critical half minute flashed across my mind, leaving me uneasy and unconvincedâbut of course I could prove nothing. I glanced up to the bus driver's seat. His arms draped over the huge steering wheel, Pyotr's No. 2 was seated there, his face set in a broad grin. So far as the police are concerned, the Great Suitcase Robbery of Kamyanets-Podilsky remains an unsolved crime; so far as I am concerned, it's open and shut.
Back in Kamyanets-Podilsky, I filed the police report mentioned above. The police visited me at the hotel and, sick at stomach, I answered their queries that struck me as strange and embarrassingly personal, such as, âWhy do you carry plastic urinals?' and âCan you walk?'
Of course these questions had to be translated from Ukrainian into English, and I remain grateful to Natasha, the local schoolteacher whom the police had the good sense to call in. After a couple of days, when she felt it would not be too upsetting to do so, Natasha urged me not to place too much faith in police assurances that the goods would be found.
After making out my statement and answering their questions, the need to resupply the urological kit was uppermost in my mind, as I now had only one of each essential item left. That afternoon I posed a difficult bureaucratic challenge for Dr Dimitri Boiko, the chief surgeon at K-P's City Hospital. But, once he understood the implications of my plight he swung into action, and it is not his fault that it took two hours to complete the paperwork for releasing just two catheters to his Australian outpatient. He suggested making a few telephone inquiries to other hospitals across Ukraine, but the logistical nightmare of accumulating them all was just too much for me to contemplate.
DAY 546 (21 DECEMBER): ODESSA
Ukraine recovered its independence upon the collapse of the Soviet empire, but has retained the worst aspects of that demoralised entityârampant corruption in public services rotten to the core; and a ruthless disregard for personal dignityâwithout inheriting any of its supposed strengths.
In general, the further east you go in this land the more Russified are the people, many of them of Russian settler stock who feel âstateless' in the new Ukraine. It was from their ranks that mutterings of secession were heard after the disputed first round of elections in 2004 threatened to catapult Viktor Yushchenko, no friend of Moscow, to power (which duly happened after the second round).
Odessa's glory days are long past but eight decades of pallid classlessness have not succeeded in removing the last trace of rouge from the cheeks of this civic
grande dame
. My introduction to the Black Sea port is not auspicious, however. At this time of year, the tourist almost merits classification as an endangered species (
Homo touristicus
). Add a wheelchair, and jaws drop. The concept of a guest in a wheelchair travelling solo is just so alien here that I am denied admittance to one of the few accessible and affordable hotels, with no reason given. When I disprove the receptionist's assertion that it will be impossible for me to stay there because the lift isn't workingâby actually going over to it, pushing the button and watching it rise three levelsâand ask why she has lied to me, she drawls, âI lie because I like to.'
This city has an attitude problem. Even the Hotel Arkadia, way out of town, where at 10 pm I finally find lodgings, is reluctant to open one of the double doors at the entrance so that I can actually come inside.
DAY 547 (22 DECEMBER): ODESSA
Talk about âback in the USSR'. Taking breakfast here is like going on wartime rations. The hotel's not-so-largesse consists of two slices of Russian âblack bread' and a cup of scalding hot tea straight from the samovar. After much pleading I also receive a single hard-boiled egg. Over the tea, I have what passes for an optimistic thought: today is the âshortest day' of the year. Mercy be.
The streets of Odessa are not merely potholed but cratered. Of all the cities I've passed through on this voyage, none has the capacity to do so much damage to my wheels. Evidently, Odessa City Council is not receiving taxes or not spending them on road improvements. A local resident tells me, with a shake of the head, that the truth is a bit of both. Every dollar not going on road repairs, he confides, is a dollar slipped into some bureaucrat's deep pocket.
This evening I take my seat to the 1880s opera house for a performance of the two-act ballet
Giselle
. Sadly, my weariness is no contest for the spectacle, and I âexperience' the performance as two acts of hypnosis interrupted by the odd wakeful moment. After a glissade of curtain-closing applause sweeps me back into consciousness, I make my own exit.
DAY 549 (24 DECEMBER): ODESSA
High life and low coexist in marvellous juxtaposition on Odessa's city streets, to a larger degree than almost anywhere else. But those streets have a way of banishing lofty thought, as I discover while the tank-like Volga taxi driven by Igor catapults us towards Primorsky Boulevard. When a crater in the roadway gives the mechanical beast a jolt violent enough to have dismembered a lesser make, Igor shakes his head in despair.
In sympathy I mutter âCorruption', but now Igor stares at me in mock dismay.
âThere is no corruption in Odessa,' he assures me and then, unable to sustain the pretence any longer, his impassive face is swamped by a wave of laughter.
Igor drops me near the statue of Richelieu, the French noble whose support for the Russians at the time of Napoleon's invasion earned him the gift of Odessa itself from a grateful tsar. I notice Primorsky Boulevard is exceptionally crowded this morning and a massive greystone block overlooking Richelieu's right shoulder is hidden behind a virtual hedgerow of very large wreaths. The road is bumper to bumper with Black Marias and silver BMWs with tinted windows. On the opposite pavement a sombrely clad group of perhaps 200 âsolid citizen' types has assembled.
Desperately in need of explanations, I turn round to find a couple of Ukrainians from out of town are also watching the scene. Luckily, one of them speaks enough English to unravel its meaning for me.
These people, he says, are waiting to view the open coffin of the director of a prosperous driftnet-fishing companyââLook,' he interrupts himself excitedly, âthere is the limousine of the deputy mayor!'âwho was gunned down last night while parking his car in the family garage. âDidn't you know?'
I shake my head.
âIt was all over the TV news.'
Two considerations restrain me from queueing to view the corpse myself. Not only am I reluctant to affect grief for a man I hadn't heard of until just this minute, but his body is lying up there on the second floor so there are practical objections too. My attitude is not universally shared, it appears. Five minutes later, a couple of less reticent German visitors almost skip across the street in the first flush of excitement at having seen a Mafia boss in the all-too-waxen flesh.
âHe was so well dressed,' exclaims one of them. âCan you imagine it? We've been in Odessa one day, and already we've seen a dead body!'
Journalists are meant to be hard-bitten, but I will admit this comment floors me. âPerhaps if you stay a week you'll see a thousand,' I return sardonically. Now it is her turn to look shocked.
DAY 550 (25 DECEMBER): ODESSA
Amid all the bleakness of an Odessan winter, I have made a friend. She is Janna Belousova, a doughty businesswoman whose Eugenia Travel Agency occupies a two-storey downtown address. In the upstairs apartment she lives with her husband; downstairs is graced by a piano and a tall fir that seems to have spent all its life growing indoors and is already festooned with gold-wrapped boxes and bunting almost a fortnight before Orthodox Yuletide.
When I arrive in search of a timetable for buses to the interior, I find myself being treated like a member of the family. First, Belousova, who appears to sense that I will be missing the festivities back home, dispatches a worker to the local bakery from which he returns armed with Odessa's famous seasonal bread,
medovik
, studded with poppy seeds and dripping with honey. Next, she tells me something of her own family background: how her father disappeared in the Great Purge of 1937 and was never seen again. Her mother died in 1960 believing the official story that he had been kept in prison exile until his death in 1948. Only later did Janna discover that her father never saw the inside of a Gulag camp but was shot by Stalin's men on the day of his arrest.
Her story would make a moving film, and by flashing forward Hollywood could have its obligatory happy ending. Today three generations of Belousovas work for the family firm: Janna, her adult daughter, and
her
seventeen-year-old daughter.
Janna Belousova is one of those people who have time for everyone, and to retain such an outlook in Odessa seems to me a triumph of the human spirit little short of a miracle. When she lets me use her office computer to send one of my articles home and check my emails, I feel as if all my Christmases have come at once.
DAYS 553â556 (28â31 DECEMBER): KAMYANETSâPODILSKY
This is the story of the Great Suitcase Robbery of Kamyanets-Podilsky.
It probably had its genesis in the resentment of the bus's assistant driver at my occupying the seat he normally gave to a woman from out of town (not his wife). The bus was full, and I had a ticket, but something had to giveâand that turned out to be his temper. However, there was no way I was going to sit on the floor (his second preference, his first being that I get off the bus), so I just sat tight and kept my mouth shut. The night was interminable and frosty, with scarcely any sleep in the posture I was forced to adoptâface âresting' against the cold windowpane under a starry sky.
When the old rattler pulled in to Kamyanets-Podilsky at 5.30 on Saturday morning, the bus park was still shrouded in darkness. The still tetchy assistant driver hovered out of sight around the baggage hold, while the principal driver, Pyotr, deposited my bags on the cracked concrete apron and pointed out their number: four.
As I can never move the heavy suitcase on my own it seemed harmless to leave it behind me while I wheeled all of ten metres into the bus station to phone the hotel at which I had made a reservation. Just as I headed off, a youth who appeared to be saying goodbye to his mother shook me by the hand and started chatting to me in what must have been Ukrainian. Annoyingly, he persisted in doing so for a full half minute even though it should have been obvious that I didn't understand a word he was saying.
Inside the bus terminal, the public phone wasn't working and I was trying to get the drowsy ticketing official to use her receiver to persuade someone from the hotel to pick me up when all of a sudden I felt what I suppose you could call a pang of panic. I rushed out of the double doors to check that my suitcase was still there. It wasn't.
I raised a holler. The bus that had brought me here was reversing slowly, and I'm sure to this day that the driver was looking in my direction and would have stopped to see what the matter was unless he actually knew. However, the only people who could hear my anguished cries were a couple of passengers who had disembarked with me (they were innocent bystanders, I feel sure of that) and the ticket official who had seemed to be in a daze all along.
The report I made out later in the day for Kamyanets-Podilsky's overburdened police force conveys the scale of my loss adequately enough. âThe suitcase weighs about 15â20 kilograms and would not be easy to remove for a robber on foot. It contained about 25 plastic urinals, 40 packets of polythene gloves, fifteen 60ml syringes, twenty 10ml syringes, 400 plastic bags, 60 tubes of lubricating gel and more than 100 catheters, all of them urological and medical necessities for me.
âIt also contains nineteen American Express traveller's cheques each worth US$100 [numbers supplied]. Of course they are useless to the thief also, but without that US$1900 my journey must be cut short.
âAlso in the suitcase ⦠are several books, including my travel plan for the next four months. This is a personal catastrophe for me. Please help recover my belongings.'
Remembering Albania, I knew in my frigid bones that to have any stolen goods returned in such circumstances would be almost as unlikely a prospect as winning the lottery. So my initial response was not to call the police.
âTaksi, taksi, taksi,'
I roared at the bemused knot of passengers, until eventually one of them must have talked the ticket official into letting him call from the office phone. After ten minutes that seemed an eternity, a taxidriver bearing a disturbing facial resemblance to Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn turned up. He must have sensed it was an emergency because he began demanding twice what I could calculate a reasonable fare to be for the 160-kilometre round trip from K-P to the Romanian border town of Chernivtsi and back. But this was no time to argue, so I scrambled aboard with my three surviving bags and stated my destination,
âAftobus.'
By the time we pulled into Chernivtsi bus park, the sun had risen, inasmuch as it ever rises at this time of year. On seeing the bus there I was mildly surprised, and my heart skipped a hopeful beat. With the broken-English assistance of one of the small crowd of interested observers who gathered by the bus, Pyotr and his deputy were quickly apprised of the gravity of my situation. I recall using the term
âurologica'
and pointing imaginary catheters at my lap in the hope that this would convey the urgency of the matter, but the driving duo seemed resolutely unmoved.
Pyotr jumped down from the bus and, gesturing to the empty hold, was evidently telling the translator how he had shown me all my bags assembled together. No, he replied to a translated query of mine, no one could possibly have put the suitcase back in the hold or it would have been noticed upon arrival.
A picture of the youth who had diverted my attention for that critical half minute flashed across my mind, leaving me uneasy and unconvincedâbut of course I could prove nothing. I glanced up to the bus driver's seat. His arms draped over the huge steering wheel, Pyotr's No. 2 was seated there, his face set in a broad grin. So far as the police are concerned, the Great Suitcase Robbery of Kamyanets-Podilsky remains an unsolved crime; so far as I am concerned, it's open and shut.
Back in Kamyanets-Podilsky, I filed the police report mentioned above. The police visited me at the hotel and, sick at stomach, I answered their queries that struck me as strange and embarrassingly personal, such as, âWhy do you carry plastic urinals?' and âCan you walk?'
Of course these questions had to be translated from Ukrainian into English, and I remain grateful to Natasha, the local schoolteacher whom the police had the good sense to call in. After a couple of days, when she felt it would not be too upsetting to do so, Natasha urged me not to place too much faith in police assurances that the goods would be found.
After making out my statement and answering their questions, the need to resupply the urological kit was uppermost in my mind, as I now had only one of each essential item left. That afternoon I posed a difficult bureaucratic challenge for Dr Dimitri Boiko, the chief surgeon at K-P's City Hospital. But, once he understood the implications of my plight he swung into action, and it is not his fault that it took two hours to complete the paperwork for releasing just two catheters to his Australian outpatient. He suggested making a few telephone inquiries to other hospitals across Ukraine, but the logistical nightmare of accumulating them all was just too much for me to contemplate.
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