A Sunday afternoon stroll around historic Kyiv
The fourth in a series of ten posts about my recent short trip to Kyiv.
K (I am using her first initial because I never asked her if I could document our conversation, and much of it was personal, of course) was the first person I thought of when I finally decided to try and visit Kyiv for a few days. We had met last spring, in Lower Austria, where K was living, having arrived recently from Ukraine. K is a psychologist by training (her first degree is in law), and she had been assigned to help a family I too was trying to help. We have worked closely and stayed in touch ever since. I really liked K’s professional approach — the told me she conscientiously converses more like a friend and less like a medical professional to build a rapport and trust with those she is trying to help.
K was instrumental in helping me to try and help Natasha and Pasha, who many of you will remember. We spent a lot of time together last summer. But by the end of summer 2022, K had decided to return to Ukraine, where she got married and has continued to work, on her home turf. K was unlucky in Austria in the sense that she ended up in a provincial town where her skills weren’t valued as much as they could have been by those on the ground. She quickly came to realise that as a Ukrainian in Austria, it would take years to be seen, without fluent German, on the same level as her peers professionally. She was also not properly compensated financially for the hours and hours of work she put in. There was an expectation that as a refugee you should be ready to volunteer 24/7. After all, what else have you to do? K essentially could not live long-term in a place where she felt like a second class citizen. Something I truly, deeply understand. She later gave a frank interview to Nina Brnada of Falter who visited Kyiv last winter where they met in person.
K left for Ukraine a year ago, and there was a giant hole missing in Lower Austria. Not only K — she took her adorable, very large black lab with a white beard, Lika, back with her too. Natasha had loved babysitting Lika when K travelled back to Ukraine. K and I also share something in common: we both lost parents this past year. K lost first her mother and her father more recently. We talk a lot about this. About the grieving process. About growing older. About families and dysfunctional relationships. Whenever I have needed to try to help Natasha and Pasha (theirs remains a complicated, precarious situation for many reasons), I have always, without fail, reached out to K for advice, who has always, without fail, left me hours upon hours of reassuring voice messages, shared professional advice, given tips, told me how she views the situation. Frankly, she has been my rock as I navigate waters I have no training for.
K asked me to meet her at 2pm in front of the Golden Gate. I am late, having talked too long with Natalia in Podil. K embraces me wearing a flowy white and pink summer dress and sneakers. I tell her how wonderful she looks (years younger). She says she hopes she hasn’t put on weight. Her new marriage clearly suits her. So does being home in Ukraine. She appears happy and relaxed. K walks me through the oldest streets in Kyiv, a path I took once just before the war, then with Valentina, then having no idea what was just about to come.
It is hot and sunny and many people are out for Sunday walks. We head towards the destroyed Russian tanks. K has been helping victims of war since Maidan, since 2014. She recalls some of the people she helped. She tells me when Berkut troops ran after protestors, chasing them through the streets of downtown Kyiv, there were little old ladies in fur coats who were more than happy to show the riot police where the protestors were hiding. She talks about those who fought for Ukraine even themselves coming from the Donbas region. For K and so many others, the war began years ago. Not in 2022. Her legal education and experience working as a lawyer also give her a unique lens. She has a powerful sense of right and wrong, justice and injustice. She is a Ukrainian patriot but switches to speak Russian for my sake. She also speaks English fluently. She is well travelled and cultured and educated, yet kept her feet on the ground, often visiting her parents while they were alive in her hometown of Poltava. It has remained one of the relatively safe places in central Ukraine. Relatively.
We turn right at the wall in front of St. Michael’s monastery. Photos of Ukrainian heroes were hung here in 2014, the first of the victims from the crackdown on Maidan. Photos and names and memorials have been added ever since. We walk, very slowly, taking in the seemingly endless names, dates, photos, personal messages, the ages of the boys and men. Momentos. The cartoon is in memory of the Ukrainian composer, Yury Kerpatenko, who lived in Kherson and refused to cooperate with the occupying Russians. They murdered him in his home. It is a very solemn, and a very long pale blue wall which appears to have now run out of space. There are many people like us who have come to pay their respects, quietly. A TV camera sets up for an interview. A jeep drives by with UK plates, repainted camouflage green, repurposed and donated to Ukraine, I imagine. I see quite a few UK SUV-like vehicles like this over the next few days. You see the photos and the flags and you can’t help but ask yourself, how much more tragic loss can one country take? A question to which there are no good answers.
K suggests walking towards the beautiful baroque church of St. Andrews. We make our way slowly through the leafy green, shady streets. Kyiv is as beautiful in summer as I remember it in winter, with ice and snow on the ground next to the kiosks selling souvenirs. I am surprised to see quite a few walking tour groups around Kyiv that Sunday afternoon. I ask K about them, and she explains many are Ukrainians who are either IDPs or have come for a visit from other parts of the country. There are dozens of souvenir booths selling everything from traditional painted wooden colourful handicrafts to T-shirts with Ukrainian flags or khaki and black T’s with simple block letters: I’M UKRAINIAN (like this one).
We pause in front of a building that looks like a former apartment or office building turned event hall, and K asks what is on this weekend. A fashion show. Well, not so much a show, but rather a gathering of Ukrainian designers displaying and selling their wares. I eagerly agree. My girls have asked for hoodies. I forget about everything else for half an hour or so, and K and I talk like teenage girls, swooning over gorgeous silk slip dresses in all colors of the rainbow, and so many unique designs. I settle on two hoodies, and a jacket of sorts for myself, which I don’t need, not in the least, but I convince myself it will come in handy come fall over jeans and a plain t-shirt. The long beige linen kaftan is spray painted on the back in a sea of bright neon. I love it. The designers all have credit card terminals. I swipe a few times and join K to admire the scarves with images of historic Crimea and the Ukrainian alphabet. There is a nationalistic tone to everything, even fashion, but it is no surprise, given everything Ukraine is going through right now. It would be strange if it would be absent.
By this point I have spent far more than I budgeted ($50 for each hoodie, $100 for my kaftan). K suggests we stop at a cafe nearby. We follow the cobblestone road down a bit into a lovely shady courtyard that looks like something out of Odesa. I order a salad and K opts for a milkshake. We talk about a lot of personal stuff. This isn’t, after all, an interview. About ageing parents and then mourning their loss. About kids growing up. About setting boundaries. About Natasha and Pasha and their family. We always circle back to the same topic. We worry, feeling rather powerless, understanding there are limitations.
On our walk back towards the area of town where my hotel is, K runs into a familiar face. It is a woman of about 60 with whom K was in a refugee camp in Germany (K was first in Germany and then came to Austria). They instantly catch up on all that has transpired since. The woman came back to Kyiv only for a few weeks with her elderly mother for medical treatment. They will then return to Germany. They are lucky: a room in a dorm and the opportunity to earn some extra pocket money as a cleaner. €10-12 per hour. She cannot work full-time as she is her mother’s caretaker. This is a story I hear over and over and over again. The burden of caring for very elderly, bed-ridden relatives falls almost exclusively on the shoulders of women who themselves are around 60 and can no longer find paid work. A cruel fate.
We walk past chic restaurants and glamorous looking couples and groups of young people enjoying late Sunday afternoon cocktails on tables set up in front of each restaurant along the wide sidewalk. Almost Paris. Almost, of course, and I think to myself it is strange we have not yet heard an air-raid siren. We have been lucky. I ask K about the midnight to 5am curfew, explaining it was my impression that it is pretty well observed. Yes, she agrees. K lives with her husband in a “sleeping neighbourhood” on the left bank of Kyiv, and even they don’t take the dog out for a walk past 12.
I pause as we talk to take a photo of this building. Now host to a cafe and shops, I imagine what it once housed. It all feels like a gut punch. It looks so much like so many similar pastel two-story buildings I remember from old Moscow. I feel a nostalgia for a time we will never go back to. I mention it in passing. K nods in understanding. The streets are busy. People out walking with friends and family. Little apartment dogs being taken to do their business in the park on the corner.
I ask K to wait for my in my hotel lobby while I grab the care package I have for her from Austria. Julius Meinl coffee, juice syrups she requested from Hofer, Manner wafers and chocolates. She hands me a Ukrainian-themed cloth bag with a box of chocolates for my kids and a wooden pin with the full map of Ukraine in blue for me. I give her a huge hug and thank her for so many hours of her time. K is religious, and always says goodbye with a phrase that best translates as “God bless” or “blessings”.
By the metro, I take a photo of the cat. Vasily has told me to look out for Pantyusha. I make my way down a little side street to a beauty salon I remembered from my last trip. I have booked an eyebrow shape and color for 7pm on a Sunday. I am not alone. I did this all online with one day’s notice. I pay by card. I ask for natural. I don’t get exactly natural, but the shape is perfect, and I tell myself it will slowly wash off. It cost me at €13 a fraction of the price of the same service in Vienna. I leave a generous tip. I ask the young women about pedicures. They don’t know any salons here, in this neighbourhood, they explain, and I remind myself that was a stupid question. They don’t live in the city center. The salons will be where people live. I open my phone and book online for a pedicure the next evening. In a “sleeping region”. I still don’t know exactly where it is. I figured I had another 24 hours to figure it out.
That night I was awoken at 1am by the sound of the air raid alarm on my phone. It was the first time I had heard it, and it startled me. A few minutes later, the hotel loudspeaker was asking us all go to down, by the stairs, to the -2 floor in the underground parking garage. I quickly through on some clothes, grabbed by phone and key, and started walking. There were foreigners arriving, many of them, and a lady who immediately, perhaps instinctively, spoke Russian to me. She and I sat at the table. The foreigners looked like they had been through the drill before. They immediately got into the single beds which had been lined up one after the other, like a Soviet kindergarten, in the middle of the garage. I could not process the idea of sleeping in a hot stuffy garage, and decided to simply wait it out. I think it was about an hour until we got the all clear, and took the elevator back up to our rooms.
All the time, you don’t have much else to do other than check Telegram to see what is flying: airplanes, missiles, drones, from where have the Russians launched them, what are they targeting. At some point, the entire map is red. The whole country is under alert. The next morning I read the Russians hit buildings in Lutsk and Lviv, in the west of the country. Kyiv was quiet. We did not hear anything. Every person I meet in Kyiv assures me regarding the quality of air defence in Kyiv — safest place in Ukraine, they argue, although yes, sometimes something gets through, sometimes debris falls from the sky.
I try to get a bit more sleep. I have an early start. Ivan Subbotin has told me to be ready bright and early at 7:30am on Monday in front of my hotel. We are going grocery shopping and to make deliveries to two grannies. The store opens at 8am. The grannies will be expecting us by mid-morning. In my next post…
Strangely, the image of the blue wall flashed me back to the days in NYC after 9-11. Fences in various places popped up with pictures of people lost. No comparison in volume and numbers. The pain is just as palpital, however. I cannot wait to deliver food to grannies!! That warms my heart. 🥰