Flaws: Vedmykiv

[4] Nothing Better Than Ukrainian Men

DURING THE NEXT few days, Oxana showed me the village and I memorized the neighborhood's layout. I would get groceries or get lost at some point, so might as well. She also introduced me to her friends. Natalya was the first. Oxana was so excited to see her, she almost left me with the babushka in the train. She was dying to see Natalya's round face, her plump cheeks, and even skin that was so pale it blended with the ice. She was a stark contrast to the walls that were dark as coal. Natalya had picked us up from the train station and that was the first thing I noticed. The second thing I noticed that day was her long black hair because it mirrored Oxana's so closely, from the back I couldn't tell them apart. Oxana fit in. Natalya, not so much. Like many, she was a Ukrainian-born Russian, but she had hips so wide, she almost looked tropical. She had a full rack too, and conspiratorial eyes that looked at me as if they held a secret that caused her irreparable laughter. Natalya was cute-- despite her chipped front tooth.

I was in the heart of the Ukrainian mining region, and mining was a big deal in Donbas. Everyone seemed to work for some mine directly or indirectly. I assumed most men in Vedmykiv were miners. They looked like miners with their thick boots and empty looks. Wives had to be administrative clerks, cleaning ladies, or something along the lines of what keeps the industrial machinery fuming up. If anybody wanted a job, there were plenty of mines.

Oxana told me privileged people moved to Kyiv or Donetsk's capital to get higher education, but were often expected to return. Had it not been for the Swiss guard, the English teacher would have been back with her master's degree in literature tucked under her academic armpit of progressive ideals, and joined a mine. Returning? Choosing to stay? No way. I could understand that sense of pride, though. It surpassed nationalism. It was a sense of belonging I might have never felt. I wondered if that was a path to a sense of purpose too. Maybe. Maybe not. Either way, the love for that black soil covered in frost was strong.

Not that it was too consequential. Oxana lived among the worker class, likely the only class. Her apartment was in one of the many state-owned projects that looked like they had been built in an impulse of Soviet expansion and then swiftly abandoned. And yet the housing blocks in the industrial village Oxana called a town looked like they had been planted to stand for as long as they had citizens to put to work extra shifts to win the Cold War. I didn't even ask Oxana what her Ivy League classmates thought of her for living like this. That was the most amazing thing about her. She didn't care. Oxana didn't give a rat's ass about anyone's opinion, except her mother perhaps.

It was my first time walking alone back to the apartment through Oxana's neighborhood that had been beaten by decades of cold winters. Three or four headscarfed women wrapped in layers of wool cleared rubble with buckets. One of them seemed to be priming a wall. Love might survive the winter, but nothing survives abandonment and neglect. Oxana was right. Ukrainians survive.

I entered the building and came to the door. It took considerable effort to open it but when I did, the bone-cracking air seeped through the edge of the heavy metal gate made from indestructible Soviet iron along with my shivering body. Oxana's unit was small. So small, if one door opened, the others couldn't open at all.

I shoved the iron gate closed and pulled the bedroom door open. I undressed, got myself comfortable, perhaps too comfortable, and with the bag of bread and milk under my arm, I closed the bedroom door and opened the kitchen's. A heat wave engulfed me. It was unexpected, like a tight embrace that forgives, like sadness on a train, like butterflies, or moths, like the way Oxana looked at her voluptuous friend.

"Privet, devushka," I said to Natalya who was there.

"Hello Joaquin," responded Natalya from the kitchen table, carefully enunciating the syllables trying not to let her accent betray her. She had already called me Fuckin' once.