"Notes from a journey (2)" Mykola Riabchuk

A diary

When my son was seven, he kept a diary. Because his elder sister did too. When he noticed once that she was lavished with praise for a poem she had composed, he also took to writing poetry. As a consequence the following entry appeared in his diary: “I wrote nineteen poems today. It’s so easy!”

And that was the end of his lyrical career for, indeed, why would you do something which is so easy?
But he peppered his diary with illustrations, with a clear domination of additions to chewing gum, which was popular then – cars and motorcycles, protagonists of comic booksand cartoons, and also, or rather above all, amply built ladies, in various degrees attractive and undressed.

Perhaps I wouldn’t even notice that, for I make a point of not reading other people’s letters and diaries – at least until they are published. But my wife exhibited a natural maternal interest in everything the children were doing and submitted the boy’s diary to me in an outspread condition.

– Look at what he’s doing! – she said perturbed. My son’s comments seemed more interesting to me than the pictures themselves.

“A sportswoman!” – he wrote on one page.

“Whaaat tits!!!” – he wrote on another, deeply moved by the amount of implanted silicon.

– A normal reaction – I told my wife – It would be worse if he wasn’t interested in these things at all. Then there would be reason to worry.

And indeed, a few years later my son lost his head for computer games, then for BMX bikes and then for the drums. And this without losing a modest and wholesome interest in people of the opposite sex.

But today, when reading one of the greatest achievements of Ukrainian parliamentary thought, namely the law against pornography, I am anxiously asking myself if my son’s diary is not in breach of some clause from the penal code, and if we are not doomed to a few years behind bars for keeping it.

– Pornography begins where sense of humour ends – my wife pronounces wisely.

– True enough – I concur, and look sadly out the window, towards the Pechersk Hills, where all our principal heroes fighting against moral dissolution are seated – the government, parliament and the presidential administration.

A market

Some ten years ago I went to a conference of editors of Eastern European cultural and literary periodicals in the historical Polish town of Kazimierz Dolny. It was a Saturday, and on the main square local peasants were imitating a Medieval market, attracting tourists to the Renaissance town and making a few pennies at the same time. We were proceeding on the first floor of the town hall, outside the window sheep were bleating, horses were neighing, hens were clucking and a knife sharpener was loudly calling his clients. The problems of our “periodical” were hopelessly remote from this outside life – and indeed from every other life; so when a Ukrainian female colleague suggested moving the exhibition of our magazines from the neighbour­ing room to the main square, everybody perceived it as an expression of exceedingly black humour.

But for the participants themselves the exhibition was interesting enough. Most of the journals were published in Slav languages, meaning more or less intelligible, so during breaks we were eagerly leafing through the copies on display, sipping tea or coffee and sharing impressions with our colleagues. “At all conferences most interesting things happen behind the scenes,” said one of the initiated and he was right.

At that time I was the editor of a newly created Ukrainian magazine “Krytyka”, and obviously I was very much interested in how my colleagues from various countries perceived it. Two guys from Moscow proved to be the most inquisitive: they were going through the journal and assessing the design, illustrations, content, English resume – all indications were that they liked “Krytyka”. But something clearly troubled them, disturbed their peace of mind – and I soon realised what the problem was. One of the Moscow colleagues finally ferreted out in the editorial information, among all the other details, that “Krytyka” cooperated with the Ukrainian Research Institute of Harvard University. His joy was boundless.

“Ja tak i znal chto eto amerikanskoye!” [I knew it was American!] – he shouted happily.

The world had shaken in its foundations for him, but it swiftly recovered its poise. In his vision of reality a good quality intellectual product by definition could not be Ukrainian. A good cultural magazine could only be made in Moscow. And occasionally in America, if they strike it lucky. My place was on the market square, among the sheep and the goats.

And I was all too happy to go outside, to take some fresh air, leaving the Moscow guys with their happy illusion of intellectual superiority and belonging to something which they mistakenly, because of many historical misunderstandings, still take for “culture”.

A sect

Some dozen years ago, during an international seminar in Salzburg, I incautiously said something about our postcolonial problems. I met with strong resistance not only from Russians, which was quite predictable (our Russian brothers truly “love” us – just as Robinson loved his Friday). I was also castigated by several Africans, who shouted indignantly: “What do you know about colonialism?! You are white!”

I defended myself as fiercely as I could, responding that humiliation and oppression need not be connected with the colour of your skin, and that it is not only Blacks who can have an idea about colonialism – just as it is not only women who can be involved in feminism, not only Jews who are allowed to protest against anti­Semitism, and not only gays and lesbians who can take homophobes on. But I later realised that the Africans were to some extent right. I noticed that in the streets of Kyiv the cops stopped them much more often than the average whites, although the latter are incomparably more numerous in Kyiv. I realised that although our problems are similar, there is a significant difference: our equivalent of black skin is above all our miserable passport and our unfortunate language, regarded by the dominant Russophones as inferior. It is more difficult to change your passport but as far as the language is concerned, Ukrainians change it frequently and eagerly, which makes them instantly become “white”, almost like Michael Jackson.

A friend from Zimbabwe told me that he had recently been stopped at Heathrow Airport, because they did not want to believe him that he had come for an international festival of poetry. He showed them his last book, “Spirits’ Bride”.

– So you are a preacher? – the Brit asked him –What sect is it?

I know this sect, for I belong to it myself. I remember a Polish customs officer who once asked me in broken Russian and a similarly patronising tone:

– Shto vizyosh? [What are you bringing in?]

– Books – I said, opening my bag.

– So you are selling books? – he guessed smartly. This customs officer, just like his British colleague, knows very well that Blacks cannot read books or write poems themselves. Although the latter until recently had been a black man like that at London Heathrow – until he traded his black passport for a white European Union one.


Poetry and truth

This day was to be a day of a small celebration for my wife and me. We had just returned to Vienna, where I was working at the Institute of Humanities, from a beautiful journey to Slovenia. My wife had collected “The Crystal Vilenica” award at an important international festival.

Left behind us was a Ljubljana reminiscent of Lviv, the stalactite cave in Vilenica, where the event closing the festival took place (with poetry reading and awarding of prizes), the morning Trieste spread over the hills on the bay, the halfsomnolent Italian Udine, not particularly pampered by tourists and therefore especially charming.
In a wine shop at the Karl Lueger Ring we chose the most expensive Rioja, to celebrate the received stone, the socalled crystal, with some friends. I did not have the internet in my apartment in Würthgasse, so I went to my Institute literally for a minute – to check my correspondence. There were few e­mails, so I turned the computer off and left the room. But in the corridor I met a colleague, an Albanian, who said:

– Have you heard? Some loony in New York has blown up the World Trade Center. Hit it with a plane!

I did not believe him. It sounded like a hoax. It sounded like a Hollywood movie.

But back home, just in case, I asked my wife and friends, who had opened the wine in the meantime, to turn the TV on. They were showing the same thing on all channels: the burning tower of the World Trade Center and the plane, slowly slicing into the neighbouring building like a knife into butter.

Soon afterwards my wife wrote a poem called “Crazed Airplanes”. It was not a good poem. She probably sensed it herself because she was hesitant whether she should include it in her book.

“Nach Auschwitz ein Gedicht zu schreiben, ist barbarisch” – announced Theodor Adorno not long after the war.
There are things about which you really have to speak in the language of documentary.

For example about humanity, half of which is sitting in a giant skyscraper. And about the other half approaching in an airplane.

A lucky strike

Some time ago, me and my friends started to recall the most interesting instances of lucky strikes in our lives.
Myroslav remembered how in a Soviet labour camp he had the opportunity to smuggle out a manuscript of an article. But first he had to prepare a copy – to write everything down in miniscule letters on scraps of paper. The task seemed impossible as informants and overseers were swarming all over the barracks. But when a nice warm springtime Sunday came, all the barrack mob went out to bask in the sun. And for a few hours, when Myroslav was copying the text in the barrack, no squealing vermin bothered him.

Iza was recalling that after Martial Law was introduced in Poland and Solidarity was routed by the communists, she fled to Italy with one suitcase and 20 dollars. But she met people who gave her food and board, a job, introduced her to other people, and finally sent her to France, where she even managed to continue her education.

Before that conversation I was certain that my life had been one great lucky strike, but for some reason no specific example came to mind. But finally I recalled how in the mid­1990s, in a company of four, we were travelling across Germany with a one­day ticket, mounting one suburban train after another, until we learned near Dresden that the tracks were being repaired and we had to take a bus. No problem, except that this bus was scheduled to arrive in Dresden a few minutes later than the train – after the departure of the last evening train to the border town of Görlitz, Polish Zgorzelec.

We were faced with the prospect of spending a cold night in Dresden railway station, still quite derelict at that time. So we summoned the courage to do something extraordinary – we asked the punctual German driver to speed things up a bit. And what was even more extraordinary, the driver did it with a vengeance. That is, he did not commit himself either way but sped through the empty streets of nightly Dresden with a truly Hollywood gusto.

We descended the bus in front of an empty and dark tunnel a few minutes before the train’s departure, not knowing where to go in this labyrinth without any signs. And suddenly a man who had been on the same bus with us, waved his hand towards us and started running through the endless tunnel, with his coat wings fluttering like a giant bird. And we ollowed him in silence, ran up some stairs to the platform and jumped on the train exactly as the doors were closing. And only then did we notice that this man had stayed on the platform, it turned out that this train had been of no use to him at all, that he had been running through the tunnel and up the stairs because of us, to show us the way, without saying a word.

We did not even manage to thank him and I am still not sure if it really was a lucky strike or some much more important sign – as it usually is with our lucky strikes.

Blackthorn shore, thorn shore

Two Polish towns, Tarnobrzeg and Sandomierz, lie side by side on the Vistula. But throughout most of their history they belonged to different provinces or even empires – Austrian and Russian.

Sandomierz is better known: like Rome it is spread over seven hills, with an ominous castle, a glorious Renaissance town hall on the main square, Gothic and Baroque churches and even one Romanesque, which is relatively rare in these parts. Kings have resided here, an archbishop still does, writers, artists, tourists and vagabonds have been arriving here for decades, seeking adventure and inspiration. And re­cently the city acquired additional fame thanks to the TV series “Ojciec Mateusz” filmed here – a remake of the Italian “Don Mateo”, such a modern­day Chestertonian Father Brown, who can smartly solve even the most complicated criminal puzzles.

– In the entire history of Sandomierz there have been less murders than in a dozen episodes of this series – laughs a friend – A tiny town of murderers!…

He himself was born in Tarnobrzeg and apparently has a slightly ironic attitude towards his neighbours. His town is also very ancient, but only traces of the former glory have survived. Tarnobrzeg was best known for its sulphur mines. In recent decades they ceased to bring profits and they were flooded with a large artificial lake.

My friend’s parents worked in a sulphur factory and lived on the factory estate. He went to school housed in the Tarnowski family palace. There was a huge park around it – neglected but still impressive.

The palace has been turned into a museum and my friend is enthusiastically telling me about its former inhabitants. The last Tarnowski was killed in a fire, rescuing books from the library when the ceiling collapsed.

– Tarnowskis – he explains – were Great Crown Field Marshals. Besides Tarnobrzeg they also founded Tarnów, Tarnogród and Tarnopol.

– Ternopil – I correct him. referring to today’s Ukrainian name of the city. Although I know that since their name was Tarnowski and not Terniwski, a town founded by them could not be called Terno­pil, or Terniw, or Ternograd, or Ternobreg.

But you would like so much to have an elite capable of rescuing books from a library rather than their own skin behind a high fence or parliamentary immunity. So that you would not feel so inferior to the neighbouring, more dignified and prosperous Sandomierz.

Hamburg

There are cities which immediately reveal themselves to you, and it is better not to go back there to avoid disenchantment. But there are also cities which, on the contrary, reveal themselves gradually, like New York, like Berlin, like Kyiv.

I was in Hamburg twice – and both times in a hurry: on my way to the Groningen, and even more bizarrely from Stockholm through Lübeck to Bremen. And finally I had an opportunity to stay here a bit longer and cross the line of the traditional Corso (although somewhat longer than the “hundredmetre stretch” in Lviv) from the railway station to the town hall. I discovered the HafenCity, harbour city – the harbour district, criss­crossed with bays and canals, with countless cranes, ships, red brick storehouses, oil cisterns across the Elbe and windmills lingering on the distant horizon and trying to transform North Sea wind into electric current.

I had known that Hamburg was the second biggest German city after Berlin and the second biggest European seaport after Rotterdam. Its inhabitants – almost two million – produce more than one third of Ukrainian GDP and earn about a dozen times more than our average countrymen. It would seem that the era of prosperity ended during the Second World War, when the city was comprehensively bombed and then separated from the rest of Germany – by the Iron Curtain from the East, and the border river Elbe from the South. But the 1990s gave back this Hanseatic free city its traditional role – and traditional revenues.

It is in the HafenCity that this recovered role and rebuilt status are the most visible. Grim Packhausen were turned into popular offices and hotels; canals and bays were fringed with residential houses, which in various ways, with postmodernist inventiveness, transform the traditional Hanseatic architecture; dozens of elegant bridges span the canals – there are more of them now than in Venice and Amsterdam put together.

This process of transforming industrial districts into prestigious middle class preserves, with urban space maximally adapted to human needs, is called gentrification. Its embodiment in Hamburg is to be the 20­storey building of the Elbe Philharmonic Hall – on the very tip of Kehrwieder Island on the Elbe: a transparent and mirror­like structure with a wavy roof, almost hovering in the air, built over a large, ancient, sixstorey packhaus in red brick.

The megaproject worth half a billion euros is to be the hallmark of Hamburg – a symbol of tradition and modernity, technology and culture, simplicity and refinement. Old storehouses were turned into garages here and a few luxury suites for millionaires will be fitted inside, with fantastic views from behind a glass curtain, constructed using unique technology.

I was lucky: my friend decided to take me – on Sunday, when the building site is almost deserted – to the very top. I was issued a helmet and for some strange reason also rubber boots, and then a document in German was put in front of me and I gathered from it that it was an instruction regarding safety regulations: you never know what might happen, so the Rechtstaat wanted my signature.

And so we are looking the town from above; my friend explains:

– This here is the town hall, this is your hotel, over there is Neustadt, and here St. Nicholas Church…

– And Veddel? – I ask casually, and see that my friend is embarrassed, although there was no subtext to my question. By pure coincidence just here, in a penthouse for millionaires, I recalled that we were not far from the district inhabited by immigrants, who would probably never visit an apartment like this or even the Philharmonic.

Although, the gentrified HafenCity is of course open to everyone. And even this building will be accessible to everyone, also Ukrainians – at least up to the eighth floor.

Mykola Riabchuk – a Ukrainian author and essaist, as well as a founder of Krytyka magazine. His research and articles focus on topics of Ukrainian national identity, politics, and history through a postcolonial lens. From 2014, he is the chairman of the jury of The Angelus Central European Literature Award. The laureate of the 2022 Taras Shevchenko Prize, the most important Ukrainian award given for achievements in the field of culture.