Syndromes of Return

But let me pay tribute to the international problems. The session, as customary for such gatherings, was mainly about the burdensome consequences of the past, about mutual stereotypes in perceiving the neighboring people, about Shevchenko's Haidamaky, Sienkiewicz's With Fire and Sword, vandalized graves in Kharkiv and Przemysl. Most of the attempts made to guide the discussion into the vein designated by the program failed, because old yet still unsolved problems proved most interesting. Yet today I am absolutely uninterested in writing about this, because perhaps intuitively I feel that precisely these problems, far removed from today's life, will not be of interest to the reader. Instead, I would like to describe, using several syndromes of returning to Ukraine, this inconceivable country, or rather the structure which exists, seemingly, only owing to its being surrounded by other territories. I will perhaps be not original in my efforts; moreover, when I read materials by my colleagues, written after lengthy stays abroad, I always feel a little embarrassed - the good life somehow always spoils people, they fall prey to snobbism and spend longer periods telling stories about life "there." For me one month was enough to once again contract these ills.

This is perhaps the first syndrome: one's desire to get it off one's chest, thus lifting the comeback stress.

Syndrome No. 2 consists in the fact that the Fatherland does not always start with the border. For me, the Fatherland usually begins on the Warsaw-Kalush bus, with my fellow countrymen tugging huge packed wheeled shopping bags, discrete offers made by drivers looking very Mafia-like, and with the good old Soviet prison camp song "The Knife Flashes and Down Goes Maryna."

Syndrome No. 3: Slow ophthalmologic adaptation; after brightly lit towns and highways one finds oneself in total darkness, not a flash or street light visible. Ours is a country with energy resources compared to which those of Poland are laughable, yet it has chosen to stay in the dark, maybe trying to reproduce Koestler's Darkness at Noon.

Syndrome No. 4: Several days of psychological adaptation to the theater of the absurd. Endless and well-paid-for gladiator fights staged at the Verkhovna Rada coliseum. The President with downcast eyes, as though he were a concierge caught in the act of pocketing a tenant's toothbrush. Aggressiveness. The air is thick with it. And my futile attempts to recollect the official reason for which people have not been paid wages and salaries for over six months, while transferring the amounts due to the budget by clearing transactions, presumably as payment for municipal services. And the latter are manifest in daily six-hour-long electricity cutoffs occurring at the most inappropriate moment, sporadic water supplies, usually to be found in sun-scorched African backwater localities; central heating about as warm to the touch as a corpse discovered by a patrolman in a backyard, and a lot of other curious details that have no place in newspaper coverage.

Syndrome No. 5. The unconquerable desire to walk out in the street and hit the nearest passer-by square in the face, simply because those like him put up with such constant humiliation, getting a kind of masochistic satisfaction of being used as a doormat, buying all that crap offered them by the bureaucrats just because they would be happy to take their own partners for a ride, because they watch public property being stolen and sold left and right and will not hesitate to take as big a piece of the cake as they can carry. Also because they could not care less about national independence and freedom, for none of them had to fight or even pay for it. Because things like decency and fair play mean nothing to them and their basic rule is grab whatever you can lay your hands on and get while the getting is good, wishing your neighbor the worst, just because he thinks he is smart and seems to be doing things way above your best imagining. Finally, just because you are of Ukrainian parentage.

Syndrome No. 6: It is just that the number of such syndromes is on a steadily upward curve and that most should be described in psychiatry textbooks, rather than given media coverage. A sound mind cannot stay sound for long in such never-ending absurdity, so it seeks refuge in nervous breakdowns, depression, and other such diversions.

To return to our subject of the cultural ties between Poland and Ukraine, perhaps yet another Polish-Ukrainian intellectual will have ended by the time this issue comes of the presses, followed by endless phraseology about historical claims and current perversions, about Shevchenko and Sienkiewicz or whether Polish workers are more hardworking than their Ukrainian counterparts. Ivan Franko was right when he wrote, "Funny, this world."