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Where there is no law, but every man does what is right in his own eyes, there is the least of real liberty
Henry M. Robert

Entering a "Forest of People" with White Sandals

10 November, 1998 - 00:00

Every now and then, after spitting on my fingers, I bend down and
wipe the dust off my first pair of white sandals. What


a luxury - what I so long begged from my parents (because the color
is so impractical).

I walk down my village street and admiring my sandals which keep accumulating
the stupid dust. And I keep on wiping the straps on the verge of tears.
Was it then that the little villager started dreaming secretly of a clean
and even city asphalt pavement, on which she could walk without getting
her shoes dirty even in the rain? The closest city - the real city, the
capital is Kyiv, and the name itself makes the child's head reel. All Kyiv
children are so lucky: they have everything, like palaces of young pioneers,
playgrounds, and whatnot - in a word, it's paradise. That was why my brother
and I were so much looking forward to the long-awaited summer, when our
parents (they had promised it before!) would take us on a day trip to the
capital.

I found myself on my own in Kyiv for the first time when I was sixteen.
All I felt was fear, dismay, and total disorientation - a sea of people
who could not care less about you. I felt like I was doing everything wrong
- I walked wrong, reacted wrong, talked wrong. And riding public transportation
was so scary! You were swayed and thrown in different directions, and it
was not always possible to reach for the handrail.

Riding a streetcar, I would strain my ear to hear when was the stop
I needed. But the more I would listen, the worse I could hear. Outside
the windows there would be alien, sinister darkness. And I still needed
to get to my friend's place where I could stay overnight - and what if
I miss my stop, get lost, and disappear? I felt small and helpless in the
depth of unfriendly Kyiv. I would squeeze myself through the crowd to the
doors, rubbing my bag on everyone along the way, and people would turn
around and hiss at me. I was like a fledgling that had fallen out of its
nest into a big forest of people. Why on earth did I come to Kyiv? It would
have been much better for me to stay in my village and not go anywhere.
I wondered whether I would have felt the same if I had found myself, say,
in New York or Tokyo.

I ended up going to university in Kyiv and cautiously groping my way,
watching people (as my mother had taught me to do), and generally observing
things. I cannot remember myself seriously contemplating some kind of self-affirmation.
I simply had to get an education and make a living. I had real thirst for
knowledge, which was sated by Kyiv's choice of excellent libraries (what
a luxury!). You could get such books that your hands would start shaking!
I would order the yellowed prerevolutionary volumes by the Russian symbolists
and search newspapers for articles by our Ukrainian Pluzhnyk and Svidzinsky.
Thomas Mann, Tolstoi's diaries, and so on - my head started to reel! I
used to sit in the library until dawn and then, hungry, but happy I would
go to sleep in the dormitory or in some little rented corner. I lived in
those corners much longer than in the dorm - that way I explored all of
downtown Kyiv. The strangest thing is that without having a place of my
own for a long time, I always felt at home in Kyiv. Here, in the big city,
I am anonymous and unknown to anyone. I am dissolved in the mass of people,
I am totally invisible, and it gives me a special feeling of liberation
and free choice. Who cares if my bed linen is new or worn out, if I have
painted the ceiling in my apartment on time, or what my family has for
dinner? "What will people say?" is the eternal fear in the countryside.
God forbid that a neighbor has already had his garden plowed, and we have
not even made arrangements for it - the end of the world! "The way people
do it" means distrust of my own capabilities, reliance on something external,
outside myself - it's just not for me. After all, the myth of modern moral
superiority of the Ukrainian village over the city really is a myth. Perhaps,
back in the nineteenth century everything was different, but now I know
that my quiet individualism is alien and incomprehensible in the countryside.
There, guests can show up whenever, "Well, we were just walking by and
thought we might as well drop in." In my view, it is a sign of disrespect
for the time of the host who has to take care of the unexpected guests.
Nowadays in a village store, they will cheat you with money as a "good
old friend," looking you straight  in the eyes. You turn red, while
they are not ashamed in the least. I have always thought that it is easier
to search for truth among "strangers" than among "my own people." Generally
speaking, life in the village is more difficult than in the city. In the
countryside, one has less chance for choice and freedom. Alignment of living
standards in the country and in the city is certainly a huge problem. It
seems that nowhere in the world is there such an enormous discrepancy in
rural and urban living standards as among the East Slavic nations. I will
never forget myself searching Kyiv grocery stores for sausage, butter,
and Kyiv bread in the "happy times of stagnation " and taking all those
goodies to the village as a gift for my parents. "Socialism with an inhumane
face" did all it could to make people from the country feel ashamed and
guilty of their origin. And the first thing a country person does after
moving to the city is try to break with his "second class" origin as soon
as possible: put on "city" clothes (it was especially obvious in the '70s
and 80s) and start speaking the language of the city (not Galician, of
course), which is Russian most of the time. You know, it's easier to survive
this way.

The issue of Ukrainian self-identity is frightening - is it really our
eternal problem? Foreigners are amazed and point their fingers at us. A
Czech professor of Ukrainian studies once told me, "Czechs do not want
to learn Ukrainian - why should they if Ukrainians themselves do not speak
it." We simply have to find answers to the questions "Who am I?", "Where
am I from?", "Why?", to find our place in life, to pull ourselves together.

Stop! Seems like I have started moralizing. But, after all, I am just
trying to speak up about how difficult it can be to live in a big city.
Wherever you go, you find yourself in a forest of aggressive, angry, and
annoyed people. I feel good being anonymous in the crowd, but it is not
good for me to stay in the crowd all my life. It is here where you constantly
encounter rudeness and people littering everywhere they go because it is
not their own apartment, their yard, or their garden. All the time people
bump into one another, Maybe nobody knows anymore that we have right-side
traffic in this country? And that people first let others exit a metro
car (a store, a post office, etc.), and only then enter themselves? Or
that one is supposed to enter through the doors marked "entrance" and exit
through the doors marked "exit"? After taking a ride to and from work,
you have no energy left to do anything: you get a splitting headache and
feel so exhausted as if you have been working the fields all day. I feel
sorry for the country people who come to the city. Have you seen how perplexed
and helpless they look?

But, dear, don't you want to go back to the village? To the land, to
nature, where there is no transport and no crowd? As one villager put it,
"I do not need your Kyiv even for free. You live in cages. And in the village,
I can walk outside in the morning wearing just my night gown, and there
are bushes and trees around me, like in paradise." Everyone decides what
suits them better. The most important thing though is that the choice is
made consciously, so that one does not feel like a fish out of water throughout
life. In the village, I fully blend into nature and become a tree, a grass
leaf on the meadow, a wild lily who does not need to care about today or
tomorrow. There, I really find no impetus for work, for self-affirmation.
It may well be that in the city, the density and sometimes even the stuffiness
of space, as well as my rubbing shoulders with the crowd keep me focused
on my work and enhance my resistance to entropy. Yet, at times it can be
difficult.

And as far as standing motionless in the jostling Kyiv public transport,
you get used to it. For a long time by now, I have been holding on just
like an experienced sailor on the ship deck.

I stand before the dark glass of a metro car door, wearing my white
sandals covered with Kyiv dust. My hands are full with shopping bags, while
my purse is hanging on my neck. Yet, I am smiling and wink at my reflection
in the glass.

 

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