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
 

About Mrs. Val

Mrs. Val (Centre) with her wonderful daughter and Aunty Val (left)

There were gloves and a scarf in it, not to mention a woolly hat, the day Val took me to their family apartment to her mother.  Donetsk in Ukraine is a city of about two million people and four full seasons.  It has forty-plus summers and minus-twenty winters and we’d not reached the summer yet.

It took me a while to come across her name these years later.  It’s Tanya.  I suppose it’s a peculiar habit to get about renaming people quite independently of whatever arrangement of letters the rest of the world has granted them, but I often do.  It’s why her regular name didn’t come easily, because I never used it.  It may be my mother’s inheritance, because in her family several of the names in use have no correspondence to birth certificates.  As with Bengali newborns, in my mother’s family allocating names is like clothes shopping.  Names need trying out first, it takes them a while to fit and sometimes they get changed before they suit.  It’s unfortunate for it’s neither very creative nor as a title correct, but by virtue of being Val’s mother it was Mrs. Val that settled in to be her name.  There is significant doubt she knows I call her that, but none that she wouldn’t much mind.

Mrs. Val lives in the usual Soviet apartment block, tall, slightly dour and similar to all the others thereabouts.  I lived in one too, that the language centre had rented for their native-speaker English teacher.  Outside the block was the arrangement of dilapidated swings and previous seesaws amongst the still leafless trees that marked the usual generous allotment of space between the several blocks in the cluster.  Val and I followed a path of worn damp earth to the stoop of the building.

The block had eight or so floors to it, which meant inside it featured one of those gorgeous old lifts of the criss-crossed iron out door variety, doors to be pushed apart by hand, of the laminated plywood inner door variety, door to be opened by hand.  With some luck once all the doors were shut again the little light in the lift would turn on automatically and hopefully upon pressing the chunky black plastic button for the floor the little engine would whirr.  Luck and hope: they were with us on that day.

Mrs. Val seemed a little nervous when she opened the door.  I was too.  In part it was because like her daughter and I, she was an English teacher, though in her achievements Mrs. Val was on an altogether higher level.  Ukrainian English teachers: how I admire them!  To think they had studied the language for five years at university without the benefit of having had the opportunity to converse with a native-speaker.  In Soviet times there had been the occasional guest lecturer, so they said, but because of politics it’d hardly been possible to have a chat one to one.  On the very earliest occasions some of them spoke with me, there remained a slight hesitation with regards to how their language skills when confronted with a native would fare.

Just inside, we removed layers: gloves, scarf and shoes; before she led us into the sitting room.  I took it in, Mrs. Val and the room.  Isn’t it funny how new experiences can sometimes gently accidentally touch upon a childhood moment and bring to the present warmth and light?  Mrs. Val made me remember the elephants.

When I was six or seven one of my father’s work colleagues used to live on the corner down the street.  They were family friends, Mr. and Mrs. Montgomery and my parents used to take me there when they’d go to visit.  While in that house there hadn’t been much for a kid to do I used to enjoy it: it had a kind of happiness in it that used to rub off.  So while they spoke about adult things I would busy myself with the elephants, the big, medium and little black wooden ones that must’ve emigrated from Africa to settle as a herd by their fireplace.  And Mr. Montgomery would serve one of his concoctions of soda water and lemon flavouring, with a plastic drink mixer or even one of those little umbrellas in it.  ‘Be careful with the elephants,’ my father used to say.

At a basic level it was the red of Mrs. Val’s hairdo that linked her with Mrs. Montgomery, but more than that it was the ambience of her living room.  Mrs. Val spoke gently with an accent rich in that Russianness which once was East Ukraine.  She spoke about the changes in the classroom: how once teachers had been dedicated enough that if one of the students was absent they’d take it upon themselves to visit the family in person to inquire the reason.  She still had that quality.

When she spoke of that and because of the tapestry on the wall I thought of Iran.  The tapestry seemed like one Iranians might choose to decorate their apartment, and her words about teaching I’d heard from one of her Iranian colleagues, Farhonde.  Mrs. Val was calmer I suppose.  Farhonde always specialised in energy and not a day under sixty she was, when she started the snowball fight on the slopes of Damavand.  Yet how much they had in common: teachers to the bone.

After the Soviet collapse the economics of things were more than tight.  In the larger capital, Kyiv, teaching salaries might barely cover the cost of the transport to get there and home again.  In Donetsk the situation was hardly better.  Mrs. Val used to spend her free time at her small land plot on the city outskirts, digging in and digging out potatoes.  I know she enjoyed that but there were times it’d been a little more necessary than it should have been; and of course the pension system she had spent her whole working life anticipating was more or less gone.  I don’t suppose while westerners were celebrating the Soviet collapse they thought much of Mrs. Val; but on the other hand without political change I couldn’t have met her so freely.

Donetsk is a city of mines: they’re dotted about even inside suburban areas and from Mrs. Val’s balcony you could see a few slag heaps rising up from the horizon.  From my arrival in Donetsk I used to consider myself a bit of a miner, though while others went underground in search of coal the minerals I sought were new experience, new culture and new learning.  Of the other sort of mineral I cannot tell you, but in what I fossicked for Donetsk was incredibly wealthy.  From the balcony Val pointed to the slag heaps.  ‘When I was a kid,’ she said, ‘I used to think those heaps were the mountains of Georgia.’  It was the opposite from me, for I’ve always found distances reduce as we grow.

‘Well…,’ it was the silvery and the sublime, the word Mrs. Val used, drawing it out slightly and peppering it through the conversation.  It was a word she’d crafted to mean anything, dependent on the occasion.  Sometimes it was an acknowledgement we were sharing an imperfect world; sometimes it was like a solitary drum beat to mark time. But mostly that tiny word held an exact and easily comprehensible meaning: nobody brings to it the adaptability she does.

‘Well…’ she said, standing.  It was time to prepare lunch.  I don’t know, just I followed her and in the kitchen we sat making pilmeni, Russian dumplings, together.  We pushed the meat filling into the folded pastry and crafted little scalloped edge packets with our fingers.  Mrs. Val’s pilmeni were neat and exact; mine were inexperienced and shoddy.  And sitting there I was at home.

I remember too the salt.  Val had left the living room during the meal and after some minutes, returned.  ‘What have you done with it?’ she asked her mother, a little demandingly.  ‘I’ve hidden it. You’ll never find it!’ Mrs. Val said, unapologetic, and, turning to me added, ‘she eats too much salt.’  ‘Yes, she does,’ I said without thinking and we laughed.

In the classroom, it’s Mrs. Val I think of: if ever I managed to be half the teacher she is then I did well.  Even without seeing her teach I knew it, that she was the professional high-water mark.  And isn’t it nice to imagine a Mrs. Val world?  There’d be no battlefield in it, only the classroom.  In Australia, the Federal Police would not have recently completed jungle training to prepare to potentially shoot pellets at the Afghan asylum seekers who arrive by boat, many of them children, in order to force them onto a plane to Malaysia.  In a Mrs. Val world there’d be no need to refuse to help people or to expel foreignness.  ‘Well…’

After several hours we left, and walking down the stairs I said, ‘your mother is wonderful.  So I don’t know what happened to you!’  Val stopped in her tracks, shooting an arrow of a glare; but we were well passed the stage where she could not know the meaning was opposite.  With me, she had long since lost her licence to be genuinely offended.  It’s the way of things.

And in Dhaka we’re reduced to the text box.  After chatting away with Val a few months ago, as we were winding up, I typed, ‘and when you see your mother, tell her I love her.’  ‘I know,’ the message came back, ‘and she loves you too.’ ‘Well…’





Mrs. Val may teach, but did she ever face the challenge of the the skull in the classroom, or have to overcome the language barrier to explain about the buffaloes or accidentally end up as a juice-drinking golfer?  Such things can happen, believe you me...


This article is also published in Star Magazine, here: About Mrs. Val

Metro Dreaming

Now that it’s apparent that CNG drivers were only using the meter as a special tribute to the Cricket World Cup and Dhaka’s back to her usual self, it’s hardly surprising when inching through the jams that one’s thoughts are sometimes given over to the metro dreaming.  With the regularity of newspaper announcements on the subject I can’t be the only one.  But what sort of metro will it be?

The number and width of the rails, the carriage and platform dimensions, above ground, below ground: let the engineers tackle such trivialities.  More important are the cultural dimensions, for in any city the nature of the mass transit system is a window into the community’s psyche.  A metro system is far more than transport.  It’s a cultural statement.

In Switzerland trains have a habit of leaving early while Tokyo is renowned for employing ‘pushers’ whose job is to shove more people into each carriage before the doors close; and in Stockholm’s tunnelbana the stations are so imaginatively decorated they’ve become a tourist attraction.  It’s said to be the longest art gallery in the world; the Moscow Metro disputes this. 

Will Dhaka’s version resemble Sydney’s trains where businesspeople sit in neat rows ignoring each other or incline towards Kolkata’s trains where groups of commuters pass uncomfortable hours by playing cards, chatting and sometimes thumping out a drum beat on their books or briefcases while singing aloud to entertain the whole carriage?  It’s not only passengers who can sing.  There was one occasion, highly unusual, when a conductor in Sydney decided rather than simply listing the names of the coming stations over the PA system he’d sing them operatically.  It got everybody smiling; though being Sydney there’s every chance he got in trouble for not being sufficiently mechanical.  Could singing conductors work in Dhaka, perhaps with tabla and harmonium?  How about rhyming station names to promote poetry?

In the Ukrainian capital Kyiv there’s the history of the Cold War in the metro, with the Soviet-constructed stations built to double as bomb shelters in the case of nuclear attack.  The escalators are long, steep and rapid; the platforms far enough under the earth to wonder if it shouldn’t be getting a little hotter down there.  One of the deepest stations in the world is in Kyiv, Arsenalna at 105.5 metres below ground.  For a cheap set fare for which a blue plastic token is purchased, any length of journey is allowed.  Now that’s equality!

In Ukraine commuters were chivalrous.  For gentlemen to stand up for ladies was expected behaviour and any sitting male risked being publicly rebuked if they made a woman stand.  A chauvinistic practice to be sure, and I made that point on the bus with my friend Tanya, when I’d stand at the stairs as we got out and extend my hand for her to help me down, just to show it could be done the other way around.  But in actuality it was quite impressive, chauvinistic or not.

On the other hand, one of my colleagues in Kyiv, Valery, complained that on the metro people played music so loudly he couldn’t concentrate on his reading.  I thought he was being oversensitive, imagining a Sydney scenario with someone listening to their headset at high volume such that the drum beat resounded slightly in the adjacent seats.  But no, he meant a guy with a ghetto blaster, no headphones, pumping Russian rap at a deafening level, so I discovered.  In general Ukrainians had a high level of noise tolerance; and in Dhaka too I can’t imagine many music-related complaints.  People might tend to enjoy it.

Dhaka possibly doesn’t need the peak hour Kolkata train scenario: those passengers hanging out the door, hanging onto other passengers, one of whom in the inevitable chain has an actual grip on the train itself, though already here the trains feature the air-conditioned top class passengers perched on the roof.  Sydney trains meanwhile document changes in national dietary habits over the decades, in the form of the three-person seats which have somehow reduced over time to fit approximately 2.5. 

The underground metro of Kolkata is a little like Stockholm’s, a tourist attraction, be it for a very different reason.  There’s a really interesting human phenomenon which occurs at the terminus stations.  I saw it several times, what could be called the Dum Dum Phenomenon.  Along the platform at the precise points where the doors of the carriage of the new, empty train are due, people cluster like grapes on an otherwise empty platform.  For the most part they stand politely and quietly.  The train arrives.  At the split second the electric doors open the businessmen commuters transform into something of a rugby scrum, pushing and tiger-wrestling into the carriage in a seat-finding free-for-all.  The best part comes at most fifteen seconds later when the participants are sitting upright and sedate, unfolding newspapers and reading glasses, the absolute model of gentility.  There’s a kind of instantaneous collective amnesia about it: the just completed seat-scramble simply did not happen and is visible only vaguely in the resigned despair on the faces of the businessmen who didn’t push quite hard enough and have to stand. 

The Dum Dum Phenomenon may be a comment on colonialism: the scramble for resources followed by the victor suddenly behaving like an aristocrat.  I suppose it’s better to be orderly but those brief metro scrums are mildly hilarious so perhaps in Dhaka something could be organised irregularly, like a Scrum-Sunday tradition when train boarding decorum is outlawed, to keep things a little boisterous and fun.

In Kolkata they try to keep it clean, the metro, be it a kind of subtropical-clean; and it can’t be easy when you’ve got an enormous black bull taking a rest beside the ticket window.  I certainly wouldn’t like to be in charge of sweeping around him. Clean is an uncontroversial desire for any metro.

I’d like to walk under an inspiring quote from Nazrul, Rabindranath, Sufia Kamal or their fellows at every station entrance; and it’d be nice if the stations featured Bangladeshi architecture on the outside and village-style interior décor.  How about bamboo thatch decoration along the carriage ceilings?  Could there be a section with a tin roof to catch that monsoon rain sound that’s so divine?  Would it be at all convenient to have sitalpati or woven mat upholstery on the seating, which would certainly be cool on the hot days?  And if spitting is not to be banned perhaps each carriage could feature ornamental made-in-Dhamrai brass spittoons in the corner? 

Outside the station entrance it would be nice to see some permanent well-spaced tea shops, also selling fuchka and chatputi snacks, to make the metro a social place, and perhaps each station could reserve room to provide a number of real beds for Dhaka’s homeless people such that they don’t need to sleep on the ground.  Whatever the eventual model, there’s one characteristic from the Tehran metro that doesn’t need emulation.  It’s up and running now and most probably fine.  I’ve not seen it but I do recall in the mid-90s the only thing running in Tehran was the joke about the city’s metro which had been ‘under construction’ for several decades! 

In Tehran they finally got there and so one day will Dhaka.  It’s going to be a tough job trying to incorporate the enormity of Bangladeshi culture into several hundred square metres of platform and a fleet of carriages.  The engineers have it easy.  But for now there’s little to do but head out onto the roads.  For now, there’s only the metro dreaming.




Announcement: "The following metro service is an express service.  First stop is with the knitting ladies in the bowler hats, thence all stations to a promise is a promise, followed by the Russian kitchen revelation.  This metro service will terminate at the village of changing perceptions.  Please enjoy the journey."

This article also published in Star Magazine, here: Metro Dreaming

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