Sugar









"Lick an Lock-up Done Wid, Hurray fuh Jin-Jin (Queen Victoria).
De Queen come from England to set we free
Now Lick an Lock-up Done Wid, Hurray fuh Jin-Jin"

- Barbadian folk song sung on the day in 1838 that full emancipation for the island’s former-slave majority was achieved.[i]










In repetition and without assumption the Caribbean waves fold and sea-whisper, as they slide across the white Barbadian sands.  Like a life for but a short while they linger, before retreat.  And what do they say?

The tides bring the waves higher and send them lower at lunar interval, through azure sky day and pink sunset, through the calamity of each hurricane and Atlantic brewed storm, through the time of slavery and into the enlightenment of independence.  It’s the Bar-bajan story, it is.  Thirty-four by twenty-three, the island nation of three lacs people is a creature of the waves.

They flock in to soak up a few sun rays, they do, as their work leave permits and you wonder at the Europeans and North Americans, what they make of the carefree palm fronds swaying in the breeze.  With careful hands the resort-tourists spread out their beach towels across the sand.  They reach for the sunscreen.  The sea is their recreation for but a short while.  Barbados only lasts a week.

It wasn’t always leisure, it once was wealth that brought them in, the British incidentally, who followed the waves to shore with the desire to add sugar to their Indian tea.  They created their own seas in sugar cane green and at first compelled fellow Britons to work them, indentured labourers bound by their debts; and there were Amerindian slaves to tend the household.  It was later the African slaves were brought and bought, at least the ones that survived the horrific Middle Passage across the Atlantic.  About 360,000 Africans were forced to Barbados to tend the plantations in the course of two hundred years.  They became the majority; their descendants are today’s Afro-Bajan community.


But before even the British the Portuguese had spied her, and they had called the island ‘Os Barbudos’, the bearded ones, in reference to the shaggy hanging roots of the coastal Bajan fig trees. (ii)

You wonder at the Scottish-inspired Bajan accent and the old man, that Euro-Bajan who sits about on the veranda at the guest house.  He’s neither guest nor employee, just an islander who won’t stop talking.  Barbados is the world’s most developed developing country he says with pride, and there’s no wishing it developed as being developing has advantages, although he’s not sure what they are. 

In petite Bridgetown the cruise ships dock and the cruise-tourists find their way along Broad Street, they do, swinging into the various shops and locating an upstairs terrace for lunch.  They mingle with some of the locals who also stroll about in summery fashion.  After lunching, out on the street the cruise-tourists fiddle, with money belts and camera lenses, pausing, stepping to find an angle, focusing and snapping.

There’ll be a picture of the petite thirty-seat Parliament Buildings that were built in the 1870s, but how many could say that Barbadian independence arrived in 1966 or that its first assembly met in 1639?  There’ll be a picture of the Chamberlain Bridge that crosses the Careenage where the yachts shelter, but how many could say that the first bridge was probably made by the Taíno people who called the island Ichirouganaim, the ‘Red Land with White Teeth?’  There’ll need to be a souvenir too, to impress the friends back home; it should be something that screams ‘Island in the Sun’ and it’s all a bit rushed since Barbados only lasts a few hours.

You wonder at the Zed-R shared taxi stand with a few petite buses in the mix, at the top of the Bridgetown centre.  There’s reggae music pumping and locals bustling about in bright clothes and casual voices.  They’ve come in from Speightstown, Holetown, Bathsheba and Oistins, from the Parish of St. Lucy and the Parish of St. George.  From all across the island they’ve come and you’re amongst them; you came squashed inside one of the Zed-Rs too, facing the Barbadian jams that aren’t exactly the image of the island.  But it’s a densely populated place.  You wish you could make contact to talk to someone seriously about their history and their ideas of life but everybody’s got something to do, so instead you make your own way to see the Nidhe Israel Synagogue at least from the outside, since it’s one of the oldest in the western hemisphere.  You see the churches too.  There are a handful of small minorities in Barbados: Chinese Bajans, Gujarati-Muslim Bajans and people from other Caribbean islands.  You suppose the most developed developing country is something like the Zed-R stand, the promise of activity pulling the people in.  

The old man at the guest house, you wonder if his ancestors rode chestnut geldings and wore broad-brimmed white hats, if they lived in one of the manor houses surrounded by the sugar-seas that can still be seen in the island’s interior.  Or perhaps they were like the majority of Britons in Barbados, indentured labourers, his forebears.  Whatever his precise heritage he won’t stop talking and is it the history in the waves he fears, what he might hear when the silence comes?

One of the newer arrivals is Brenda, the guest house guest, who has hopes of finding a job serving tourists in a restaurant or a hotel.  She packed up her life in Jamaica to come, bringing her own sunbaked accent, the one from among the archipelago of accents that happened to settle upon Jamaican shores but sounds altogether foreign in Barbados.  Barbados can mean a wage and a future; and she’s worried for her children’s futures.  She frets for them.  

You wonder at the abolitionists and the end of slavery across the British Empire in 1834, at the foresight and statesmanship and at the liberating not only of the slaves but of their masters, who might once again comprehend the idea of human dignity and expunge the stain of slave-owning from their souls.

You wonder how it was, that greatest Bar-bajan day in 1838 when full emancipation of the then 70,000 Afro-Bajans was realised, after four additional years of harsh, indentured service.  They took to the streets and sang they did.


And when you’re from a country of human rights poverty like Australia, which practices mandatory detention for asylum seekers including children and unlimited detention based on clandestine bureaucratic decisions for some refugees, mainly Sri Lankans, you wonder at how almost two centuries ago the Bar-bajans implemented the benefits of minimum standards in how we treat our fellow human beings.  How so long ago they achieved emancipation for one and all.  It’s impressive, it is.  Perhaps one day Australia could learn the Bar-bajan story, it could.  


It’s already evening and at the beach the resort-tourists are packing their things.  They’ll be heading off to the laid back restaurants for pasta or pizza while the waves of the Caribbean carry on.  And in the silence, what is it they sea-whisper, the waves?  Is it ssslavery?  No, wait.  I think they say: liberttty…







With only sugar there's not much to do.  You need a cup of tea or coffee or forget about the beverages altogether and go wandering in the mountains of the Philippines. 


This article is also published in Star Magazine, here: Sugar



[i] From www.barbados.org/history1.htm
(ii) some say it was the Spanish who found 'Los Barbudos'.  I'm not sure which is correct.

The Adventure Gene



The Bread Knife in the Warrumbungle Mountains


The six-year-old was crying.  He was sitting on the tan carpet with the cow-pattern texture to it, in the shadowy room at the end of the hallway.  It’s not that there wasn’t a window, there was, but the mulberry tree outside and the roof of the neighbours’ metallic carport took away most of the sun.  His bedroom was long and rectangular; and the curtains were brown with pictures of African animals on them.  There was no mystery or suspicion to the darkness of the room.  The shadow made it cooler than the rest of the house and he was used to it.

In front of him was a black suitcase with a cheap aluminium band around it where its lid met the base and two aluminium latches to spring open with a click or push down to grip the case shut.  There was a key hole but no key.  The six-year-old cried because he was going away and in what had been his school bag there were not now books and stationery but the bare essential supplies he’d thought he’d need.  There was no despair in the plan.  It was not because there was anything wrong with his life; there’d been no argument or untoward incident of any description.  He was crying from pre-missing his family, knowing that he’d not see them again, for he’d decided it was time to move into the dry grasslands and eucalypt forests of the extinct volcanic Warrumbungle Mountains at the zero point of the Castlereagh River, to live with the kangaroos. 

It was usual after setting up the campsite that Dad would be busy with collecting scraps of wood to stoke a fire and boil a billy for tea, or would be unpacking the esky, piling bread and a tub of butter on the boot of the Kingswood in order to make sandwiches.  His brothers and sisters would be helping Dad, lying in the tent or maybe climbing the hill across the small rocky stream that was lined with casuarina trees.

Dad never paid much attention to where his children were.  He must’ve been worried as he waited for the six-year-old to find his way back to the campsite from a nearby walk but he never said anything.  He never stifled his children’s sense of adventure because he always wanted them to be independent and confident and so, as the older brother had once climbed a quite high volcanic rock without ropes, a splendid outcrop arched as a dinosaur’s spine, the most Dad would say was, ‘You be careful.’  He liked to see his children trust themselves and believe in their abilities; and secretly he liked it better to see his eldest son come down again from the dinosaur rock safely.  

For the children there was magic in it, especially for the youngest.  On the hill across the casuarina creek the older ones had found a small cave and there were many six-year-old questions about it:  how deep it was, how big its entrance was and what it was like inside.  It was quite high on the hill the middle brother said and the six-year-old alone wouldn’t be able to get there, but his brother offered to take him, later, assuming he could find it again as the entrance was small.  Dad didn’t hear news about the cave.  Such things were strictly children’s matters.

But it wasn’t usually the hill that craved attention but the nearer grasslands.  Through the grasses there was a whole network of tracks leading off from the campsite.  Some of them were wide enough for a four-wheel drive and together they made a kind of cow-pattern across the landscape, diverging, re-emerging and joining, dipping down to meet the mostly dry stream beds where the stinging nettles often grew.  It was in that terrain, particularly in the cooler evenings that he would wander off.  It was there he would see the kangaroos.

In truth he never went very far but when measured in six-year-old steps distances are a good deal further and there were always animals to see.  It wasn’t only the kangaroo mobs that’d usually be resting under a tree, only getting up slowly and hopping lightly away as he got close, despite him having trodden as quietly as possible so as not to alarm them.  There were emus, often in pairs and sometimes with a clutch of brown striped chicks at their feet.  The emus had eyes like his teachers when they scanned the classroom from their desks to see who it was that was talking out of turn.  Emu eyes seem to look over the rims of glasses even though there are none.  They are intellectual birds except for when they run and their grass skirts of feathers sway about like a car wash machine, giving away their stupidity. 

View of the Warrumbungles
The country was full of rabbits and many a burrow entrance was inspected with the hope one would come out, and it was common to see them as they darted away or raced back into the burrow to escape that very visibility.  More occasionally it’d be their enemy, the fox, with his bushy reddish tail scurrying away from sight; and there were rarer animals: wombats with their bigger burrows and stories of tiger quolls and once, though it was up into the mountains and not by the campsite, high in a gum tree there’d been a koala.  Meanwhile the kookaburras would be laughing at him and at the scenery.

That trail network never seemed to finish and finding out exactly where each leg diverged, re-emerged and joined was exacting work.  And the further the six-year-old went the more he’d discover there was to discover, like the secret valley far down on the left side where there was the greenery of a few ferns to keep things looking cooler.  Being alone never worried him because he never was alone.  There were the roos, emus, rabbits and foxes at the least.  They all seemed friendly enough, albeit shy.  He knew there were snakes: red-bellies, yellow-bellies and king browns, and he’d heard the story of how his oldest brother had once stepped on a red-belly while on a picnic in the city and had to be rushed to hospital in an ambulance.  But he never actually saw a snake and he suspected that they were probably more misunderstood than vicious.  Why would a snake bite him when he meant it no harm? 

It was indeed not the animals but the plants that it seemed important to be wary of, less because of the spiky thistles and more because of the nettles.  It’d happened that he’d been stung and it was painful.  Despite the nettles being pointed out to him by his brother so that he’d learnt to recognise them, they grew in many places and sometimes from thinking about the roos and their society he’d forget.  But after he’d been stung a few times he didn’t forget; and he knew, his second brother had done it for a bee sting once, that if he could find some bracken fern it was possible to pull it out of the ground and rub its roots on the sting site.  His second brother had made that up of course but the six-year-old had felt slightly better once the newly discovered remedy had been applied.

It wasn’t a plan without practicality.  He’d thought it all through and knew it wouldn’t be easy.  For a start, the roos were rather shy and it’d take time to properly make acquaintance with them; and he’d have to learn their language and routines.  But once they trusted him he could pat them and feel the softness of kangaroo fur.  Even as they slept under the tree in the mob he could be there with his head on one for a pillow.  They wouldn’t mind.  They’d get used to him in the end.

And it’d happen, after some time, that he’d know how to communicate in emu, rabbit and fox too.  He’d know where to go to visit them at their homes and have accurate knowledge of where each trail and small valley led.  The nettles would be no problem then and if ever there was an accidental encounter he’d know precisely where the bracken ferns grew.  He’d know too where that cave was that his brothers had found on the hill.  Perhaps there were bats that lived inside it to become friends with.

He’d thought of water.  He’d have to learn to drink from the streams and truth is it’d happened anyway.  His oldest brother had taught him to cup his hands and hold them under a part of the stream that had a flow to it, where the water was wedged between two small rocks or such.  The water that flowed was cleaner his brother said.  He’d thought of food.  He knew it’d take time to adjust but the roos would teach him which grasses and leaves to eat and his stomach would get used to it after a while; but in light of the adjustment period for the new diet he’d asked Mum to put together a few sandwiches in a brown paper sandwich bag that was now one of the items in his suitcase.  She didn’t imagine those sandwiches were for the transition before he ate only leaves and grass.  She thought the six-year-old was hungry and didn’t know the packet she’d put together had been stored for later.

Most of the rest of the space in the suitcase had been allotted to his stuffed toys.  In particular there’d be no leaving the dog called Boowy that’d been a present for his third Christmas behind.  Boowy wouldn’t like staying in the house without him and he was sure to get along equally well with the roos.  He cared so much about his stuffed toys, not only Boowy but Zebra, Pink Spots, Keemore and the white horse called Blanco that he’d once taken sheets of white paper and painted in turn each of their portraits.  The portraits were stuck to wooden boards for display, but got piled up behind the red cupboard in the end.  And although they were all coming along he cried thinking of how he’d miss Mum and Dad and his brothers and sister.  Boowy would miss them too.  Yet when he thought about his life ahead with the roos he felt happy and excited.  It was a dilemma.

The Bread Knife

That was to be the last day with the human family.  Mum and Dad were already busy packing their own bags and loading the car for the six hour, five hundred kilometre drive from Sydney to Coonabarabran where his grandmother lived.  They would stay the first night there and in the morning Dad would leave early to drive down to the service station for fuel, perhaps to make sure the gas bottle for the stove was full, and to fill the esky with ice so that at least for the first day there could be cold drinks, butter for the bread and liquid milk for the tea.  He’d come back with the final provisions having been bought and the children would say goodbye to Mum who wasn’t as keen on camping as the rest of the family.  She preferred to stay in town mostly, to talk to her mother and her own brothers and sisters who used to randomly wander into the kitchen and sit down for a cup of tea.

The six-year-old knew not to say anything.  He wouldn’t be allowed to stay living with the kangaroos, it was certain.  So he was ready to dry his eyes and pretend everything was normal when he was called to the Kingswood he had secretly named Tigger, the white family sedan in the driveway out the back of his Sydney house, for the drive to Coonabarabran.  He only wondered if he would leave for his new life before or after the family hiked the Bread Knife trail that stretched and wound its way up into the peaks of the extinct volcanoes.  It would take the whole day and make everybody tired and probably he’d ride on Dad’s shoulders in the higher parts of the trail.  Maybe he’d wait until that’d been done.

As it turned out the six-year-old was a little too consumed with thoughts.  He’d been called several times but in his bedroom at the end of the hall he hadn’t heard.  They searched him out and of course his bedroom was an obvious place to look.  It’d been sudden that his sister had walked into the room and seen him sitting on the floor in front of his suitcase.  There’d been no chance to dry his eyes.

‘What are you crying for?’ she asked.

Well, the emotions were a bit overwhelming for the six-year-old, so as much as he didn’t mean to, he just blurted out the plan.  ‘I’m running away,’ he sobbed, ‘I’m going to live with the kangaroos!’

‘Don’t be stupid,’ his sister said.

Roo with Joey





Memories are found in many things, not only in kangaroos. Memories are in waterfalls, dance steps and even in the winter.

This article also published in Star Magazine, here: The Adventure Gene

The Buffalo Matter




Buffaloes ought surely to be remembered

 

Travel grants time for introspection, valuable opportunity to learn new things about oneself.  For example, it was on my first trip to Thailand I learnt that I’d once been a buffalo farmer.  The revelation surfaced on the day I’d gone with Pa to Suphanburi and it was curious because, to be frank, I have no recollection of ever having partaken in buffalo husbandry, not in any manner, not at any time.

And of all agricultural endeavours one might assume that an activity involving heavy beasts like the buffalo would be one of the more difficult to forget.  I mean, while it might be understandable were one to overlook a strawberry-growing past or even a short stint tending potatoes, buffaloes ought surely to be remembered.

I was twenty and everything was new.  Thailand was the first sojourn in the ‘third world’, although these years later I’m no more enlightened as to what that term really means.  Back then it seemed mildly frightening.  There’d been the advice of Australians of the non-travelling variety, who equated stepping off a plane in Bangkok with contracting an unpronounceable tropical disease, probably spread by mosquitoes.  There were warnings of people hiding drugs in your luggage which would inevitably lead to the death penalty.  ‘But millions of people live in Thailand,’ I’d reasoned, ‘and such events don’t befall all of them, surely, at least not all the time.’  Nonetheless, with a resolution not to be bitten by a single mosquito during my stay, I was cautious.
15 metre Buddha in Suphanburi

I was fortunate enough to have not only a Pa but also a Maa waiting in Thailand, and I should mention that transcribing these titles into western script as they are actually pronounced in Thai is no easy feat.  Maa and Pa actually belonged to my Thai friend Gaew who’d lived in the same Norwegian town as I had for a year, and the three of them were waiting at the Don Muang terminal on the evening I arrived.

I didn’t know how to greet them.  I’d read about the Thai greeting system, the wai and how it was that Thais don’t favour physical contact such as shaking hands in greetings.  Perhaps it was best to just say hello?

Crouched alongside Gaew in the boot of their wagon we rumbled home along bumpy, massive freeways of up to three levels, while from Thai into Norwegian Gaew translated the conversation concerning my western bulkiness in relation to the potential for my head to meet the vehicle roof in response to the bumps of the road.  Gaew and I always spoke in Norwegian.  It was the language that had settled in as standard between us; and it was before she spent about a million years in the States becoming the world’s most educated person, or something similar.  Her English was less fluent then.

The first stop when we reached the home town, Ayutthaya, was a night market beside the river for some food.  Unfortunately the scattering of mosquitoes there didn’t agree to my not being bitten, so within hours my health plan was foiled.  Fortunately, sometimes mosquitoes keep their unpronounceable tropical diseases to themselves.

Suphanburi temple building
The Thai house was modest in those days.  A downstairs portion of a larger house, the singular main room had green vinyl flooring with piles of books populating the corners and a whiteboard and a chart of the periodic table on the wall, primary exhibits that Maa and Pa were schoolteachers.  The bedrooms had floor mats to sleep on and the bathroom plumbing consisted of a large earthen pot and a hand bucket in pink plastic shaped vaguely like a frying pan.  It was all new to me.

Gaew's place, back then!
 The first days covered the sites of Ayutthaya, an ancient capital of Thailand, and of Bangkok, and a little shopping.  In Australia everybody said Thailand was full of bargains.  With a few clothes in hand and a fake Tag Heuyer watch that my sister had ordered, Gaew asked if there was anything else to buy.  I was about to say no but out of my mouth came instead, ‘oh, there is one more thing, I really need a new kjøleskap.’  ‘A kjøleskap?’ she said, surprised, and she knew that in Norwegian it means refrigerator, and what a nightmare that’d be to take home on the plane!  As Norwegian was a first language for neither of us, in such circumstances, when I repeated the word while giving my most sincere face, it was only natural that instead of doubting me she began scouring her brain to see if kjøleskap really meant fridge, or if it had some other meaning she’d forgotten.  After some moments, still puzzled, she attacked the problem head on.  ‘But kjøleskap means refrigerator,’ she challenged, using English for the final word.  I started to laugh!

Meanwhile Maa and Pa had been facing their own communication hurdles.  Sometimes Maa started teaching Thai.  ‘Tang moh’ is watermelon and ‘nam’ means ‘water.’  Sometimes there were scribbles on the whiteboard.  Still, at times when Gaew was at university class we’d sit around the table staring blankly at each other, Maa, Pa and I.  It was an activity that was sufficiently ridiculous that on one occasion several minutes of silence were broken by Maa bursting into sudden laughter, followed by Pa and then me.  It was hysterical, side-splitting, falling-of-the-chair laughter at the utter futility of our communication predicament.  And when Gaew was there, they’d still be frustrated.  ‘Speak English!’ they were always telling us, on the off-chance they’d catch a word.  But after a few minutes, instinctively, there’d be a switch back to Norwegian.
Suphanburi streets, back in the day...

Suphanburi is a typical regional town, hardly a tourism magnet, but with all the nearer sites seen and Gaew in class… Pa had some business to do in Suphanburi and the night before our trip there’d been a bit of jest and wonder at how the two of us might communicate on our own.  If I spoke English really, really slowly, was the advice…
Suphanburi streets

The drive was completed in silence, unsurprisingly, and we seemed to get around the few sites: a fifteen metre Buddha in a temple and a tower from where you could survey the entire town, without adding anything to the sounds of traffic and life in Suphanburi.  Then it was time for Pa’s lunch meeting, not that I knew it.  I just followed him into the restaurant where he’d parked the car.

It turned out he was meeting someone from the army, although in Thailand teachers seemed to sometimes wear military-style uniforms so it might’ve been someone from the education department.  Wherever his associate was from they talked for a very long time.  Lunch came and went and I sat at the table with nothing to do but sip water from the glass in front of me.  And with the conversation in Thai there was no telling if it was wrapping up or just getting started. 

Even the water drinking became a strange and foreign experience.  Pa’s associate had an associate who stood beside the table and whenever I took a mouthful of ‘nam’, from the ‘nam’ jug he’d promptly re-fill the glass.  I thought to leave the glass empty.  I wanted to be polite. So after he’d refill I’d drink a bit more. It was refill, drink, refill, drink.  Pa’s associate’s associate was very efficient and I was too slow in trying to tell him not to refill it again, plus I had no words for it.  In Australia I’d never seen a water glass refilling guy.  It became a challenge.  I kept drinking and by the time Pa finally indicated it was time to leave, I felt rather like a fish.  My stomach ached and I’d wager that when we left the restaurant that glass remained full.

Pa at temple gate
It was on the way home to Ayutthaya the matter of the buffaloes came up.  We’d stopped at a ring of large wooden poles called the elephant kraal, where Thai kings presumably once hosted elephant tournaments.  Still thinking to make conversation rather than complete the whole day in silence, and with nothing particular to say about the kraal, my attention turned to a buffalo in a nearby field.  ‘That’s the first buffalo I’ve ever seen,’ I said to Pa, slowly, very, very slowly.  It was true, for while Australia has buffalo in its north, I’d never been there.

Pa was smiling and nodding and he might’ve attempted a reply, and I arrived home with the satisfaction that we’d made at least one small linguistic connection.  It was after Gaew came home that she said to me, slightly puzzled, ‘Pa says you used to have a buffalo farm?’







But as nice as the buffalo is, a life cannot only be about livestock, surely.  There also should be an ink black sea, wild lemon trees and a bit of Chinese.

This article also published in Star Magazine, here: The Buffalo Matter


Maa, ironing and smiling and wishing I wasn't taking this photo


Temple bell
With Gaew, Maa and Pa

National Secrets



St. Michael's

Like the city she was busy making her life anew when I arrived.  She’d been there longer but it didn’t mean she knew it well.  She was a friend of a friend, Sveta, and the day I called her on the old phone set in the Soviet built apartment in Sviatoshyn it was the first time we’d ever spoken to each other.  If I’d seen her picture it was only briefly, but she knew I was coming.  Her voice was a little nervous, because of the English I suppose, and yet it seemed to have a little dance step to it, a welcoming pirouette in her tone as she suggested we could meet for the first time on Kyiv’s busy main boulevard, Khreschatyk. 

‘How will I recognise you?’ I asked, ‘What will you wear?  Maybe you could wear something special, like a red rose pinned to your chest?’  She suggested perhaps I could wear the rose but I said that unfortunately I didn’t have one.

‘Then you’ll wear a big smile,’ she said, ‘I’ll find you.’  It seemed a little precarious to be meeting on the basis of only a smile.  There was nothing about my appearance or locally bought clothes that would stand out in Ukraine.  And yet, even from the short phone call it felt as if we were like a pair of old socks, parted in the wash by the whims of circumstance but easily recognisable to the other as the match.  With my smile at the ready, I headed for the metro.

There is something about Kyiv that reminds me of Dhaka, although to look at there’s little of similarity between the two.  And I’m only telling it to you, since it involves national secrets and we shouldn’t be spreading such things around. 

Building design detail, Kyiv
The Dhaka part of the equation happened in fact before Dhaka, on a flight in from Bangkok years ago.  I was allocated a seat next to a Bangladeshi businessman and although for most of the distance we silently did our own thing there was a brief conversation by the time the plane was tilting downwards again.  He asked the reason for my journey and I said it was a holiday.  It’s the simplest way to explain the village.  Then he looked me over, as though he was deciding whether I was trustworthy, whether he could divulge his national secret.

‘Bangladesh is a poor country,’ he said in almost a whisper, ‘but I think you’ll find Bangladeshi people are really open-hearted.’  There was a short tense pause as he examined my face to see if what he’d said had properly registered and how I would take this information.  ‘I know,’ I was able to say, quietly, seriously, entirely sincerely, ‘I’ve been to Bangladesh before.’  I couldn’t help but give a half-smile at the understanding that had arisen between us, but I didn’t want to give the game away to the rest of the cabin so I kept it low-key.  My fellow passenger however was not so cautious.  His smile was broad and loud; it’d been entirely unexpected that I might already know.  There were few further words between us.  There didn’t need to be.

A similar thing happened in Donetsk in Eastern Ukraine, before I travelled to Kyiv.  This time the national secret was Ukrainian, and it came from Maria-of-the-school, my boss.  Always immaculately dressed, with perfectly styled blond hair, she was attractive, as were all the ladies at the school.  On the day she said what she did we were in her office at the language institute, talking of the month I’d spend in the capital.  ‘I think you will like Kyiv,’ she said and then, lowering her voice and with an eye to my reaction she continued, ‘Because for us Ukrainians, Kyiv is a sacred city.’  She waited.  I smiled and with it she had the confidence to continue.  ‘Maybe you’ll feel that,’ she said, ‘I always feel it when I’m there.  Kyiv is spiritual.  It’s not like other cities.’


A city of around two and half million people, Kyiv was founded at least 1400 years ago by four siblings, the three brothers Kyi, Scheck and Koryv and their sister Lybed.  The city’s name comes from the eldest of the brothers.  There’s a statue of the four of them in Maidan Nezalezhnosti, Independence Square.  Legend says the city was prophesized by St. Andrew in the first century A.D.  One of the oldest cities in Eastern Europe, Kyiv was the first capital of the Rus’, and gave rise so they say to three countries: Ukraine, Belarus and Russia.
Well she was late, Sveta, which is more or less to be expected in Ukraine.  I stood beside the metro station entrance on Kreschatyk amongst the crowd of passers by, waiting in the crispness of the coming spring.  I was laughing to myself at the thought of adopting some cheesy grin and aiming it at various women coming and going.  It’s hard to sustain a grin over an extended period and besides, I might’ve gotten myself arrested for disturbing them.

Just when I was considering giving up, thinking how foolish it’d been to rely only on a smile when wearing a rose would’ve been a much more marked symbol, a young woman cautiously approached.  She had such life in her eyes, a freshness to her face.  She was beautiful.  ‘Excuse me, are you Andrew?’ she asked.  ‘How do you know?’ I said, astonished, ‘I wasn’t even smiling!  Should I smile now?’  It was altogether too late to smile.

With a meeting like that there were no polite formalities to be bothered with and as we walked down Kreshchatyk although the words of the questions belonged to strangers the talk was of old friends.  But Kyiv is a city that will open its soul to newcomers, revealing its shortcuts and artistry to any who take the time to admire it.  So I suppose the whole meeting was in that sense unsurprising.  It was of the city and nothing more.

There’s so much to celebrate about Kyiv.  It’s a city of statues and I loved their statues which depicted culture more than war: in place of generals and battles familiar to some cities were scenes from fairytales, the sibling founders and the female spirit Berehynia, protector of the City.  It’s a city of churches, in particular the divine blue St. Michael’s and the dreamy St. Andrew’s which sits atop Andriyivs’kyi uzviz, a narrow and unlikely zigzag of a road that falls into the fashionable Podil neighbourhood below, by the Dnipro River.  That road is an art market crowded with art lovers and painters of varying skill trying to make a living.  There’s the hills nearest the river, parkland, to wander through, amongst the chestnut trees that flower white in summer, the trees that are the symbol of the city; and the Dnipro River doesn’t only divide the city but the whole country, with citizens of the right bank traditionally speaking Ukrainian while the left bank was mostly home to Russian speakers. 

The Great Lavra Bell tower
In those days, 2002, left-bank Ukrainians in particular were eager to re-learn their national language as Russian was out of favour with some, not least for them to use at job interviews: it could be embarrassing turning up at an interview with the interviewer speaking Ukrainian, quite possibly struggling with it, and not be able to answer properly, or to get the grammar wrong.  Kyiv was still reinventing itself as a national capital, not least linguistically.

Khreschatyk, the main boulevard, is in itself an attraction, particularly on the weekends when it’s closed to traffic and becomes a fair of street stalls and entertainers finding place along its length in order to please the throngs of people out to relax.

And there are the remnants of Soviet times in the city, with previously patriotic statues of workers and partisans under a rainbow metallic arch; and further south the enormous silver woman holding a sword aloft to recall victory in the Second World War.  It’s true that all these elements, fable, churches, the layers of history and the art in the architecture of many centuries lend a mystical element to Kyiv; but nowhere is it truer than at Kyiv Perchesk Lavra, the Kyiv Monastery of the Caves.

Motherland monument seen from the walls of the Lavra
Founded in the eleventh century, the extensive monastery complex includes the Great Lavra Belltower, innumerable orthodox churches from grand to miniscule chapels, and the riddle of caves and underground passages.  With the light of candles we went down there, where the coffins of monks are hidden in grottos and along the narrow passageways, where Ukrainian women kneel in prayer in the smallest chapels of all, and where in a glass coffin the mummified hand, a sacred relic of Saint Ilya Muromets protrudes from under his shroud.

For many centuries pilgrims made their way to the Lavra of Kyiv, sometimes walking hundreds of kilometres to get there, and in communist times when religion was discouraged and the site was officially a museum they came still, examining the museum ‘exhibits’ and discretely offering a prayer there.  And in communist times the sword held aloft by the great metallic woman on the horizon was marginally taller than the Lavra Belltower, perhaps a symbol that communism was greater than religion; but post-independence her sword was shortened so that once again the tip of the belltower is nearer to the heavens.  And orthodox priests lead services of chants and incense; icons of saints again draw open crowds who bring with them their fears and regrets to leave with new hope and inspiration, such as religions can bring.

We saw all that, Sveta and I, not in the one day but over several; and it got to the point where Sveta was surprised at my ability to negotiate the city.  She said I was constantly revealing to her short-cuts along streets where she’d never walked before.  But the city liked me: that’s all it took to turn the guided into the guide.  On the first day however it was in a Spartan café in Podil that we ended up, introducing ourselves to each other’s lives and I recall she was asking about my mixed career of several strands.  ‘What is it you really wish to be?’ she said.  ‘I want to be a writer,’ I told her.  And so I did.

Kyiv.  Is it a sacred city?  Yes: but don’t tell anybody.

At the Lavra



Photos by Val Voronkova



Kyiv might be sacred, it's true, but there are other cities, such as the funky city, the mysterious city and the one with the snake and the frog.

This article is also published in Star Magazine, here: National Secrets
 
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