L'vovin L'viva Loca!

I just returned from Ukraine last night. Specifically, Lviv. A year and a half ago Cynthia and I made a mad dash to L'viv, a midnight run bookended by a trip to Auschwitz on on end and a journey onward to Opole afterwards. At that time we had only been in Poland for a few days, and had very little idea of Poland. As things can only be accurately judged in relation to the things around them, we emerged with interesting memories of L'viv, but our conception of L'viv, what we thought of it, and by extension, Ukraine, was not very clear.

So when the opportunity arrived to make another trip there, it seemed like a grand idea. Our entry to Poland had been marked with a trip to L'viv, which had left a certain impression of what lay to our east. To make another voyage east now, a few months before leaving, would allow me to weigh my previous impressions with newer, hopefully more balanced impressions, having lived in this corner of the world for a longer period. Furthermore, this time I would be accompanied by a couple of friends, and a tour guide would show us some of the more remarkable sights, which my wife and I had certainly missed on our first trip.

Our first trip had left me with the impression that Ukraine was largely comparable to a public housing project. You could see that it had been built with great hopes, and that it still was the scene of many hopes and dreams, where a million small dramas played themselves out with all the tenderness and tragedy of a million King Lear's every day, yet the first and last and foremost impression was one of dilapidation, ruin, poverty, desperation and the persistent yet subtle waft of urine. So what would this trip bring?

The last time we crossed the border it was in the dead of night, with all the fogginess of perception that goes along with it. This time was at mid-day. Going from the Polish side, the differences were evident immediately. Directly upon leaving the border post, the fields were suddenly uneven, unkempt, very muddy, with trash strewn across them. In point of fact, there was solid, uninterrupted stream of rubbish in the ditch on either side for kilometres at a time, in addition to the frequent sprinkling of debris throughout the muddy fields. There was water standing everywhere - in the fields were large puddles, on the side of the road where people waited for busses were puddles and mud and standing water which had to be negotiated, and all across the road were puddles and potholes. It was as though the science of drainage had yet to be discovered, even in towns and villages.

I had never noticed, as the absence of something is not particularly noticeable, how clean the fields in Poland were, nor the fact that they were not uneven, muddy, and filled with water. I found this interesting - I had assumed that Polish fields were naturally as they were, but since JUST over the border this was not true, I have to now think that some sort of engineering has been going on here for some time which moves the water out of the fields. All of which makes perfect sense, now that I take the time to consider it.

I spoke of the roads - the roads in Poland never impressed me by their luxuriousness. By no means have I seen anything equivalent to our 4 lane divided highways. But just across the border these simple 2 lane highways turn into a pot-holed, broken, bumpy country lane that most US counties would be ashamed to call their own. Our bus driver literally drove half over the white line to avoid the holes along the edge, and pulled back into our lane as necessary to allow oncoming traffic past.

We were not even out of the border post when the Polish man in front of me whipped out his camera-phone and began compulsively snapping photos of everything he saw - the horse-drawn carts clip-clopping alongside the highway, the worn-down, depressed looking grandmas shuffling alongside the road laden with bags in either hand, the church smaller than my living room, the chickens roaming in people's front yards. The comments and behavior exhibited by some of the Polish people made me feel as though they were enjoying a little bit of a sense of superiority in what their country had managed to do. By all accounts Poland itself bore many resemblances to what I am describing here when communism fell, though perhaps not going to such extremes in so many areas.

A house divided

I felt dizzy, disoriented, weakened, and somewhat removed from myself. Though I stood right in a thronging mass of people, no one paid any attention to me at all. The crowd parted to the left and right of me like waters, and joined seamlessly together again on the other side.

I took a few tottering steps back toward the train station, and though I could feel my head clear a little bit I got stabbing aches in my heart and gut. I almost fell as I turned back around, and there she was, holding onto my arm.

She was the 1950's vintage Eastern European babcia. The top of her head came only to my chest, and she looked up at me without expression from a ruddy, whiskered, deeply lined face set in the middle of a floral kerchief pinned over her hair. A shapeless, non-descript blue work-smock covered her from her neck to her black rubber gum-boots.

She pulled my arm and guided me over to the side of the wayfare, where the homeless and young miscreants were sitting in rows on a short wall. When they saw her coming they moved aside. Even the young thug, who'd been yelling at his lads scurried quickly out of the way, and the group of them made off for other parts.

It wasn't as though there was something in particular about her that repulsed me. She didn't smell, as so many older, poorer people in that part of the world do. It wasn't the flat sheen, the greasy-worn texture of her house-dress that bothered me, because I was dirtier than that. 5 months on the road had seen to that. It wasn't the shabbiness, or anything I could put my finger on, but her physical proximity seemed to project a poverty, a memory of suffering that enveloped me in a sick-sweet odour the nose would never detect but that stuck to the back of my throat like a milk-scum. I would have pulled free from her stubby, thick-fingered grasp and walked away, but I was too weak to do so.

I had known I was terminal for some time. No doctor had ever told me so, so I just stopped asking them. It was pretty obvious to me. When you go from feeling as strong as a bull to having tremors in your hands and aches and pains in so many places you can hardly keep them straight anymore, when you get winded walking from room to room, when picking up your briefcase makes you want to go back to bed, when you drop 20 pound in the course of 3 months, you don't need a doctor to tell you something is wrong.

After a while the sickness just becomes a fact, which you accept. The sickness makes you tired, lethargic, and maybe this is what allows us to accept the idea that we will die. No raging against the dying of the light here. I was content to let it go. It was just a question of how much time I had left to drag myself around before it finally blinked off.

With hardly the energy to eat breakfast, how I managed to leave home is a mystery, but they say as you lose things, the drives that remain inside you become clearer. And though I was fading out in many areas, one urge kept growing stronger.

It was photos in National Geographic, I think, that started it. Photos of city streets in Belorussia, or some satellite republic, of squat boxy cars parked at the base of old grey buildings, around which milled men in black leather jackets and ridiculous fur hats. I had to go.

Part of the motivation was a memory from high school. Her name was Marianne, and she came to our little town of cows and hay from the border of Moldova and Ukraine. Her coming had caused quite a stir amongst the male population of our high school, which her habit of wearing leather boots that came nearly to the knee did nothing to quell. I suppose outsiders, the exotic, the other, is always attractive to us, but high school boys are famous for being attracted to everything vaguely reminiscent of femininity up to and including door knobs, so it is not surprising that for the first two weeks of school the most consistently flogged topic of discussion in the boys changing room was exactly what kind of lacy things might be worn by Eastern European babes under their black skirts.

I should make clear here, because it is important - every boy I knew, and most I didn't, was hopelessly a-drool over Marianne. But I wasn't. Whether it was just my natural reticence to talk about girls in the vein the other guys seemed to, or the fact that I had a girlfriend around whom my earth moved, or the fact that she was certainly out of my league, I cannot say. But for me she was simply a willowy creature who never once swung her long blond hair around the way the American girls constantly did, who seemed to own an improbable number of black turtlenecks and whose approach and ZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ was always marked by the click-click of the high heels of her knee-high boots. She was certainly beautiful, but nothing beyond that to me. I considered her little more part of my plane of existence than the poster my older brother had of Alyssa Milano.

Both she and I had study hall 5th period. I used the time to read - occasionally I did homework, but mostly I just read novels. Perhaps it was my obvious lack of interest, perhaps she knew what she was doing, I can't say, and perhaps even now I don't want to. Why she spoke to me I don't know. I found it shocking then, and even now I recall that first moment when she spoke to me as a small jewel of a moment that still makes my heart rise slightly in trembling nervousness.

What followed from that conversation was more conversation. And more. At night I could still see her eyes in front of me. She always held my gaze too long, and it made me nervous, twitchy, as though I'd had 3 cups of coffee. But I could not stop talking to her. After the very first meeting we talked through every study hall, non-stop, for months. I had never thought of myself as interesting before, but perhaps through the eyes of a foreigner I was.

In retrospect, I wonder now if I wasn't really that interesting, but rather I was the only guy who didn't seem sweaty-palmed at the thought of salivating down the front of her sweater. Marianne hadn't made a single friend amongst the girls, for obvious reasons, and between the boys hungrily watching her and the girls who unanimously hated her, she must have been very lonely.

Michelle, my girlfriend, found out within days of the first conversation. I explained to her with all the conviction that accompanies convenient truth - Marianne was a friend. We talked. That was it. And that truly was it. She might not have been happy about it, but she could hardly forbid me to talk to other people in the same room.

Maybe that was when it started. Maybe it started later. It is impossible to say exactly when the division began. I loved Michelle - we had been together for 2 years, which in high school terms is the equivalent of a 17 year marriage. She really was the glue that permeated and held together every aspect of my life. I woke in the morning thinking of her, and I saw every part of my day in relation to her. The walk to school was the part without Michelle. She would be waiting for me outside the homeroom, or occasionally inside. Homeroom she would doodle on my jeans, and then we were off together to the first two periods, which we shared. She would sit behind me, with her feet propped under my seat and I would let my hand go back behind my desk and wrap my fingers around her tan calf or ankle.

We spent every part of our days together that we could. Lunch we sat together, 3rd through 6th periods were defined in my mind by her absence. Sometimes in 4th period I would sit in a certain desk where I knew she would sit in 6th period, and I would scribble her a note on the desk. Afternoons we always spent together until her father made her take up sports so she would have some time away from me. It is fair to say that I spent the majority of my time thinking about her, and she was the prism through which I saw the world. She was my world.

As I said, it is impossible to say when the division began. It wasn't painful at all, at first. Just an odd tickle of a feeling, really. But sometime after Michelle asked me about Marianne and our conversations in study hall I became aware that while Marianne was talking to me, while she looked into my eyes, Michelle had left my mind. I realized one day as I was leaving the library that I had not thought of Michelle for the whole hour. It was a strange realization, especially when accompanied by the sudden rush of familiar longing and emotion that came when I did think of her. How could I love her so much on one side of the library door, and not have thought of her for an hour on the other?

I didn't spend a lot of time thinking about it, but after a few months I couldn't help but be aware of it. Michelle was my very life outside of 5th period. But inside that library, in between those bookshelves, I had another existence. I wasn't the same person. Inside that library, as Marianne looked at me, day after day, hour after hour, I began to see myself through her eyes. I was no longer even the same person I was with Michelle. By her viewing me, I saw myself and I was transformed by what she saw. I became something new, something I had never known, something that was me, but was not me, because it existed in her, and only in this room.

I said things I would never have said. Thoughts came to me that were not mine, but were tinged by colors from a different world. I felt the division happening, and it did not hurt. It made me feel strange, when I realized I had two hearts beating inside of me, but it was a wild strangeness that pounded a new rythm, a new strength borne of being two people, and not just one. I sat differently, I began to speak differently. The words I used changed, as did my intonation. Like any communication between two people who know each other, our conversations developed a certain ebb and tide punctuated by slow intense silences in which we would look at each other, and during which, on the last day we were together, I took her hand.

It was the last day before exam week, and strange things always happened that week. I had never touched her before then, but it didn't surprise her at all when I did. Certain things have their moment, and when it is the moment it cannot be otherwise. She continued looking in my eyes as I held her hand, and then, laying down the pencil she had been toying with, she reached across the table, and put her other hand on my chest. She waited like that for long enough that I could feel rising in me what had been there a long time. The desire, the knowledge, the feeling that from now on the person who lived in this room would be the real me. As the desire rose, I reached out and touched her face. Her beautiful face that I had looked at for so long, and as I did so my two hearts leaped and quailed and her eyes drew suddenly narrow and she took her hand off my chest, and extracted her hand from mine.

She rummaged in her bag, and emerged with a small wooden box. I thought she was going to give me something, and later she did, but at that moment I must confess my mind was quite cloudy, and fogged by her in a way it had never been before. She opened the box, and inside, cradled on one side, was an egg. It was only when she placed it in my hands that I realized it was only the egg-shell. The feathery lightness and a tiny hole drilled in each end was the only evidence of the robbery that had taken place. In every other way it seemed perfectly whole.

She cupped her hands to her mouth, and in a gesture of infatuated mimicry, I did the same. She reached over and gently adjusted the egg so one hole rested just above my lower lip. I could smell her hands, and I wanted to grab them in mine. I felt the cool eggshell softly skimming my lip, and found myself staring at her lips, across the table.

"Now, blow." She said.

And I did. Without thinking, with a heart full of love and longing, perfectly divided and totally full I blew into the egg and it felt like when Jimmy Granger had kicked me in the stomach and when Joanna had held my hand in 2nd grade and when I had caught the look in Michelle's eyes as she arched around when I kissed the back of her neck. I don't know how long I blew into that egg, or if I took another breath that hour. I saw stars, and I felt sick with hurt and a desire and a love big enough to fill two worlds and she took the egg away from my mouth and placed it back in the box.

People were leaving, packing up their books and moving toward the doors. I did the same, the force of habit more powerful than my weak knees and a sudden sense of loss came over me and a strangeness descended between us as she walked ahead of me out the library door.

I didn't see her during exam week, nor anytime thereafter. When she walked out that door I didn't realize it was the last time I would see her. Perhaps if I had, I would have done something different. Perhaps not, as I remember feeling confused and awkward. As she walked away from me, her head held squarely up, her posture erect, those boots that were so incongruous in our country clicking away from me, I felt confused. I realized later it was the first time I had walked out of the library still thinking of Marianne, and not Michelle.

Michelle and I broke up at the end of that summer. Michelle never asked about someone now gone, and of course, I never told, for what was there to tell? But when we broke up, as I felt the rising hurt and indifference carrying us toward our breakup, sometimes for a split second I would speak differently, would see myself through foreign, strange eyes, and felt that Marianne was somehow still a part of me.

So it was that when I saw the pictures in National Geographic, they spoke to something wild and foreign, long dead or dormant within me, and knowing I would soon be dead myself, I quit my job and bought my ticket across the ocean.

I had always wanted to see Europe, and the cheapest flight was into Amsterdaam. I had never been a hippy, but having shed so much of the old, and having no new, I tried the hashish and found it helped to ease my pain, though it made the tremors worse. The tremors had got so bad one evening that I couldn't keep soup on spoon, and had to leave most of the bowl behind. I tried drinking it out of the bowl, but felt embarrassed. I wasn't very hungry these days anyway.

After Amsterdaam I went to Paris, then on to Munich, then Prague and Berlin, spending some days or sometimes weeks at each spot. I knew my money would run out, but it seemed as though my time would get there first, and I was ok with that. It became fixed in my mind that I had come here to die. The place it happened didn't matter much, but I generally drifted Eastward. I hit Gdansk, and then was turned back from Belarus by the steep visa fee, which forced me to turn south and go to Krakow.

The further I went, the clearer it became to me. I was moving toward Ukraine. The where didn't matter, and the only why I could find, deep inside me, was that I wanted to see where Marianne came from. I didn't know her town or village, but to see some of the sights she had seen, some of the sights I had felt in my heart when sitting with her, would be enough. We would have, after all these years, shared one thing more.

By the time I reached L'viv I had been travelling for 5 months, and I knew it would soon be over. I hoped the end would come on a sunny day, so I could stretch myself out on a park bench, or on the grass, and my last thoughts would be of the sun on my face, and that the world was not such a bad place, in the end.

The sun was shining when I slowly emerged from the tunnel into the crowd of people going this way and that and suddenly felt a numbness in my chest and a dizzy, slow disorientation.

When the old woman took my sleeve I wanted her to leave me alone, to let me die now, but she was stronger than me, her thick fingers telling of a life of grubbing for vegetables in the slick earth, and she led me to the small wall where I could sit, next to the grass, and I sat.

She looked around for a moment and then called to a well-dressed woman passing by. She came over, and talked with the old woman. Then she turned to me and addressed me in English.

"She says she has for you this thing," and as she said it the old woman produced an old plastic grocery bag, crumpled and dirty, and began untying it.

"I don't need anything," I said. "I will be fine, thank you." The old woman wasn't listening but was searching inside the bag, where there were a number of other plastic bags crumpled up.

Our translator was just beginning to translate this when, after a bit of feeling around the old woman produced a brilliantly painted easter egg, of the sort that old women sell to tourists for a dollar. I tried not to take it, because I was long past the point where I needed to buy souvenirs from impoverished grannies, but saying something to the younger woman, she forced it into my hand and I felt my heart move in and my guts churn in a paroxysm of fear.

"You very fool to give this." The woman's face was swimming in and out of focus as my stomach heaved and I felt a light sweat prickling my skin.
"She buyed this in the market, very much times ago. Is very bad for you what people do with."

I felt so close to vomiting and passing out at the same time that I feared I might do both. The egg inside my hand felt cool, and familiar as it had the first time, but strangely alive, and filled with a strange consciousness. The old woman made a disgusted sound, and took the egg from my hand, and in a hard, swift motion smashed it against my mouth. I gasped at the force of her slap, as I tasted a small squirt of blood from my weakened and fragile gums, and felt stale air slide past my teeth, and tasted the sweaty age of her hand.

I rolled over with a sudden urgency and strength that surprised me, and vomitted like I hadn't since college. I arched my back and heaved and then thrust my arms down to push my face out of the rising tide piling up beneath my face, a thick black and orange, foul smelling liquid that was nothing I had eaten but part of me. It went on in such a continuous stream that I wondered if I would ever get to take a breath, and when it stopped I gasped and it came heaving out again so strong that my back seized into a solid mass of sinews grating against each other and my asshole literally cramped. Then something hit the back of my throat, blocking everything, leaving me silently straining, writhing, open-mouthed. I had to open my mouth wider to let it out, but at that moment the old woman grabbed my head from behind, and poking and shoving her fingers into my mouth forced the mass back in, and down my throat.

She's killing me, I thought. I can't swallow, it won't fit. But I was wrong. The body can do anything it has to when life is at stake, and suddenly I wanted to live. I couldn't die now.

I swallowed and heaved and swallowed and heaved and choked on the fist-sized mass as I worked it, swallow by painful swallow, gasping, straining, back down my over-stretched esophagus till it came to reside next to my lungs, and I felt it settle.

I was covered in sweat, and strings of drool and blood ran from my chin to a pile of blood-black effluence on the ground. I watched in clinical abstraction as a gorgeous ruby droplet slid down a filament of black and then disappeared into the mess. I became aware that granny was still standing over my back, straddling me, one large gum-boot in each of my armpits. She stepped away from me, and then helped me to roll over, away from my mess. As I lay there, my heart racing, looking up at the sky, shaky with exertion and wonder, I realized that today I wasn't going to die.

When I awoke in the middle of the night with a throat so sore I could drink my wife's moisturizer, I began to cast around in the back of my head for what could have caused this new annoyance to enter my life.

Was it the 4 shots of vodka last night, that somehow inebriated my immune system sufficiently to allow a small virus past?

Was it that eating 5 meals of hamburger and chips in 8 days has left my body deficient on vital nutrients found in, say, pasta, which are necessary to stave of these small illnesses?

Could it be that right before bed I had drunk water from an unwashed mixer cup, still bearing the smeary remnants of a yogurt and raw-egg shake from the distant past? Could that somehow have caused a sore throat?

Then I remembered. The class I had taught Monday, yesterday, - one of the boys had said he had been sick on Thursday. Headache. Fever. Vomiting. The works.

I did a quick mental inventory, checking for any of the above symptoms.

Just because I didn't find any doesn't mean it isn't entirely his fault.

I poured the remaining orange juice into the filthy, smeared mixer-cup, then gave the box a last squeeze, which caused it to huff out a last wheezy blerp of orange juice. I crumpled the box without thinking , and threw it on the floor next to the trash. Two separate thoughts sat in my head, too lazy to form themselves into actual words.

When is my wife coming back?

That little bastard. He made me sick.