Our People Abroad
However interesting, a trip abroad with its unusual beautiful landscapes and meetings with compatriots leaves one with very special impressions. Perhaps this is because for most Soviet citizens visiting, let alone living abroad, was for decades something as unreal as the fourth dimension or science fiction land of antipodes. Even now, meeting people from your country in a strange land, you feel like Gulliver on finding himself in the giant’s mouth and seeing another man calmly sowing cabbage.
In my case the first such meeting took place in Valencia, a province of Spain with fertile soils and scenic environs looking especially beautiful in early April, before the scorching sun sets in. The small verdant mountains appear very much like the Crimean range (which made them even more charming), with towns and villages scattered on the slopes and in the valleys below, and every home snow white as though from a fairy tale (painted white, it turned out, to have additional protection from the ruthless sun. The land was reddish and tended with loving care (crops are harvested four times a year), and endless plantations of fruit-laden tangerine trees line the highway on both sides. I thought the place looked like the gardens of the Hesperides where Hercules got the golden apples.
MINER FROM FRANCE
Our bus made another stop in the mountains. I was on the station’s terrace, marveling at the landscape and remembering the Crimea, when I heard the Russian passengers talk to a stranger in Russian. He spoke with an accent that sounded very familiar, and then I heard him use several Ukrainian words. I walked up and addressed him in Ukrainian. He was overjoyed and answered in the same language. He was a resident of France, touring Spain in his car. Who was that 55-year-old Ukrainian living in France?
Mr. N. was born abroad where his parents (from Lviv oblast) had found themselves after World War II. Settling in the West had not been easy, there was constant lack of money, and they could not give their son an adequate education. “But I inherited something far more precious from them, the mother tongue,” he told me. Eventually, he had settled in the east of France, worked as coal miner and had recently retired on a $2,000 pension. He and his wife had decided to see all of Europe (“We’ll travel while we still have gas,” he joked, meaning either the cost of gasoline or physical strength).
He visited Ukraine in the early 1990s, as soon as independence was proclaimed; it was his first visit, he wanted to see his parents’ land and perhaps even find relatives. He was not married at the time and was horrified to see his parents’ village, the misery, archaic lifestyle, impassable dirt roads, women bent by backbreaking labor and standing in endless lines for food. He found no close relatives; some had emigrated after the war, others moved to the Donbas, fleeing deportations, others been deported somewhere beyond the Urals and never returned. Despite these sad discoveries, his trip to Ukraine ended happily. He met his future wife, a girl from Zaporizhzhia. The two were now traveling. Both were fond of singing and knew dozens of songs, often spending evenings not in front of the television but sitting in the kitchen and singing, or doing household chores.
I wanted to ask Mr. N. about his life in France, other Ukrainians he knew there, but our conversation quickly turned into a political discussion (it was shortly after the parliamentary elections). Now we were talking Kuchma, Yushchenko, Lytvyn, the tax code, speaker, and so on. Without noticing it, we were talking at once and gesticulating. Although somewhat differently on certain topics, I could see that he enjoyed every moment of the exchange; he had a unique opportunity to discuss important things with a fellow Ukrainian.
As the bus continued on its way, on one of Valencia’s flawless highways, I saw the man and his wife on the side of the road, waving. A middle-aged but well-built and handsome man, with a young, attractive, and cheerful woman.
SCHOOL OF SURVIVAL
I saw with regret that Spanish women care little about the way they dress, following the latest fashion. Most wore dark and shapeless clothes, as though determined to wear something that did no justice to their looks and figures, with footwear looking very much like old-fashioned Alpine shoes (the way the women looked, I thought all the local electric iron manufactures must have gone bankrupt, and the same was true of their makeup). Elderly women were the only exception gladdening the eye: neatly dressed and coifed, with pink cheeks and in spike heels. All this was regarded as atavistic, hopelessly out of fashion, something only the very old could allow themselves. I can just imagine what these young people will look like forty years from now with their retro.
Actually, that was why I noticed a young pretty woman sitting in the lobby of a large Mediterranean resort hotel. She was a rental clerk dispensing various kinds of vehicles, bicycles, motorcycles, and other contrivances, the likes of which I had never seen in Ukraine, designed to make steep climbs and descents safe, allowing one to negotiate ravines, beaches, and impassable roads. The woman was elegance incarnate. Her clothes and makeup were immaculately inconspicuous, stressing every natural attraction.
The tourist season was still ahead, she did not have many customers, so she spent most of the time reading a book (I would find out later that she was fond of gothic novels and was well read in ancient history; that, in addition to Ukrainian, she knew English, Spanish, and Russian). I walked over one morning to ask the way to nearby town (I wanted to walk there, across the mountain). First we spoke our varying degrees of English, then, on an impulse, lapsed into Ukrainian. It was thus I met Zoriana L., a physician from Western Ukraine who had lived and worked in Spain for the past several years. She told me about her immigration, which she hoped would not last long.
Back home, she and her husband (call him Bohdan) had been unable to earn an adequate living for several years, due to either unemployment or unpaid wages. Their parents were eager to help, but the young couple was ashamed to live at their expense. They decided to try to find jobs in Spain. Bohdan, after much spending and red tape, and owing to the fact that he was leaving his wife and daughter behind, got a tourist visa to Spain. He had no money, could speak no Spanish, and had nobody he knew there. He spent several months like a vagrant, going to and fro, sleeping outside, eating what God might send his way, and eager to take any job. He had no legal papers and few would trust him to do the hardest menial labor. He still remembers with gratitude the charitable shelters provided by the Caritas Catholic organization where everyone was given food, a place to sleep, and a free call home, any country, without asking about one’s nationality or religion. It was thanks to the Caritas that Zoriana, who had considered herself a straw widow after several months of her husband’s silence, learned that he was alive and not bedridden.
After several hard and hopeless months, Bohdan decided he would never find a job and cursed himself for having embarked on the crazy adventure. Meanwhile, constant travel, casual acquaintances, and interviews when trying to get a job had improved his Spanish. Now he could understand and be understood, and then something happened that he and Zoriana still consider a miracle. One day, outwardly perfectly just like all the days before, Bohdan stepped into a church and stayed there for a long time, praying (he and Zoriana are Greek Catholics, so they pray in Catholic temples for want of Greek Catholic ones). Walking out, he was approached by stranger (he may have watched him pray with ardor). They spoke, then the man invited him to a cafe and listened to his story carefully. In the end he invited Bohdan to stay at his place awhile. He had a big home, there was enough room and food for everybody, he said. His wife did not mind, either. And so that perfect stranger (a small businessman, as it turned out) kept Bohdan at his place for quite some time. Moreover, he helped him find his first decent job and then, using his legal training, got him legalized as an immigrant and with a permanent resident status.
Eventually, Bohdan could afford to rent an apartment and legally invite Zoriana to join him in Spain. At present, he is a manager at a firm selling mobile phones and earns the same living as an average Spanish citizen. They rent an apartment in a Spanish resort town. Bohdan is considering two options: a promotion within his firm or starting a small business of his own. I asked how about starting a business in Ukraine, now that he had some savings. Bohdan said no. “You can’t imagine how simple it is to get a small business registered in Spain and receive a loan. Especially compared to the humiliating red tape in Ukraine where you have to bow and scrape before every bureaucrat, even of the lowest rank.”
One evening all the local Ukrainians gathered at the hotel’s cafe to talk about life in Ukraine and Spain with a Ukrainian journalist. They were all young and vigorous, purposeful and courageous people who had been unable to a find a place in the sun at home. Now they were construction workers, gardeners, managers, etc., studying Spanish (proud that it is the world’s most widespread language), helping each other, planning careers. All were totally dissatisfied by the conditions, under which one had to do anything of the kind in Ukraine. “Who would have even thought of leaving and suffering abroad if we could work normally and be adequately paid at home? But back home we had no chance, for everything was closed to us, sold out, with all kinds of stupid illogical barriers around us. Yet we are reproached, even by the president, for not staying home and sitting on our hands. You tell them all this!” And so I do and cannot stop marveling all those talented and brave young men and women who managed to survive and have a fresh start in a strange land in what can only be described as extreme conditions after suffering total defeat at home.
OUR ASSESSMENT
It is, of course, interesting to know what Ukrainians living in Spain think of the Spaniards. On the one hand, they are friendly and kind-hearted. In Spain, unlike Italy or Greece, there is almost no discrimination against foreign laborers and the latter are usually paid the same. Nor are the foreigners given the hardest menial jobs. Ukrainians are also amazed at Spanish honesty and their assumption that all the other fellow humans are as honest as they are. Spanish storekeepers are not overly anxious about shoplifting, contrary to most other countries.
There is, however, another direction of assessment, which I found invariably astonishing. Consider yourself. People that cannot find a decent living at home travel abroad and eventually settle in a country allowing them to live far better, simply because everything is much better organized in that country, secured not only by the law, but also by public morals, educational standards, and labor quality. And what do we think of all those people that built a society so attractive to us and which is still unthinkable in Ukraine? We think that “the Spaniards are rather intellectually limited, with a narrow education and rudimentary cultural interests. They have neither the talent nor desire to study foreign languages; they do not like to work and one half of the year consists of various celebrations, while the siesta is the most important element of every workday.” All this addresses the people that created a historical wonder, a country with a Moorish-Judaic-Christian history and Spanish culture, with thousands of fortified castles still towering on mountain tops (in fact, one of the largest Spanish provinces is called Castile, the Land of Castles). They built unique cathedrals and ancient bridges that are still perfectly functional. This people has sired singular writers and brilliant artists. Finally, this people took a decade to transform a backward and poverty-stricken country, a European backwater, into a full-fledged EU members (albeit not the most prosperous one) and one of the continent’s most attractive tourist centers and resorts.
How marvelously well our integral helplessness and personal snobbery can coexist!
