Flaws: Vedmykiv

[5] Acrobatics of the Hands

A VAN AND A DRIVER had been arranged to take me to Donetsk. Sasha, the police officer clearly infatuated with my girlfriend, helped. He introduced me to his neighbor, an old man who drove a green Barkas wagon that must have been fifty or sixty years older than him. It looked like an old Volkswagen van, except more proletarian and less hippie stoner. The old man coughed diesel like the engine dripped good intentions on the coal-tainted road. Neither the machine nor the old man looked like they could survive the run.

But, by the time I saw him again, I had memorized Oxana's phone number and taken the copilot seat on his loud van.

We left the village and zigzagged through cracks and holes on the single straight asphalt road that connected us to Donetsk's capital. I stared at the wet dirt, imagining the faces of the people the old man must have run over, and feeling the type of embarrassment and humiliation that ugly truths reveal: Her body felt it. My body did too. She will discover something is wrong. I will break her heart. I would break mine. She will hate me. I will hate myself more.

The road led us to the epicenter of a growing separatist movement spreading through the eastern provinces. I was told Donetsk was some sort of base camp for the dissatisfied. The aching machine hit ruts and crests. The impact reverberated through my stiff body. The old man, both hands on the wheel, spun it left and right far more times than the van swirled. He smiled at me from time to time with his crooked Stalin mustache and the elongated wrinkles of his face. No other man had smiled at me. The flat cap on his head and his chirpy eyes matched his odd friendliness. When we entered the city, he looked at me and repeated, "pea-dar ee-noh-stran-nyy." The old man was a cartoon.

I didn't know what I was looking for. Still, if I was going to be a reporter, I had to search for a lead, and Vedmykiv was uncomfortable for the time being. It was what Lillian would have wanted me to do. I had been messaging her every day. Lillian was no fool. She knew about Oxana. She knew even before I wept in her arms. She found out about her, as any woman would, through the instinct that never fails: That lag on the replies, the sudden change in patterns, the one unsuspecting social media post that snuck up on me. Lillian revealed to me that she knew about her all along, and in turn, I confessed I had screwed up. I spent the next several days answering her questions. Responding for all my deceptions one text message at a time, and undoing the fantasies I had created in my head. Lillian thought Oxana was a sexy, mysterious, philanthropic volunteer who spoke five languages. She also discovered she was a singer, which I had recently discovered myself. She must have found an old online profile of hers. I responded with lukewarm answers, hardly giving her whole truths, keeping it blurry with the mud that now was stuck on my boots. Yet she didn't buy it when I said that Oxana was nothing more than a ticket to my story. How could she? It didn't help that I never burst the hyped-up image Lillian had created of my mysterious girlfriend in her head. Doing that would have been admitting I had dumped my college sweetheart for a fantasy I knew nothing about. I imagined that was worse. So, I limited myself to replying to her messages and tried to keep our communication as frequent as possible. Until she told me to beat it.

Oxana, on the other hand, was at the school teaching and negotiating a job position for me. Maybe I could be productive while I waited for a battle to start. It seemed imminent. Being a teacher would be great camouflage. I would join that teacher's association as quickly as I could. I knew it was cruel to wish for it, but I needed something to photograph, and nothing sells better than other people's suffering. I wasn't suffering enough. I needed a tank to bust into an elementary school, bloodshed or a revolt, or a bullet to the leg to take me back home. I didn't know who I was deceiving the most, her or me.

Donetsk had many more evergreens than Oxana's mining village. The city was so different from Kyiv and a world away from Vedmykiv. The heart of the industrial belt had an edgy kind of charm. It was full of restaurants, museums, and sports venues. The sidewalks were well-kept, and the cobblestone streets added a rustic touch to the urban head of perhaps Ukraine's wealthiest province. Instead of headscarves, women strolled wrapped in fur. Despite the ice and snow and some bare tree bark, it was evident that Donetsk was run with purposeful grit. There were parks and gardens in every direction. Most of them had a range of colors that fluctuated from autumn orange to salmon and pink. The city must have been green most of the year. Donetsk was the emerald crowning the hundreds of kilometers of tunnels that fed it, including where Oxana lived. I was in an ant colony, and I had arrived at the queen's seat.