Blessings - Ukraine - poem

Literary Review, Wntr, 1999 by Steven Boyd Saum

Late on the first Saturday in May, a week after Orthodox Easter, on a plaza across the street from Independence Square, nee Great October Revolution Square, when the sun has already set and the stars are just coming into view, a group of old women and men dance in a circle. Their music -- accordion and drum. The steps are slow, simple: hand in hand, trot forward, pivot away from one another, then back. Several terraces above them, overlooking the dancers and the square and the fountains, is a billboard of a liberating soldier. Smiling. 1945-1997. With Victory Day the sign declares. What doesn't need to be written, because the grammar of the words already implies it, and because a variation of it begins every holiday greeting in Ukraine: Congratulations ... A few of the men dancing wear medals on their chests, but it's a warm evening, a night for short sleeves, not a night for jackets bearing a kilo of ribbons and stars and medallions from the Great Patriotic War. May 9th, Victory Day, is still a week away. What strikes me, though, is the pairing of the dancers: all the women are with men. I have come to expect to see couples of women dancing together alongside the male-female pairs. The women together has nothing to do with making a conscious statement about sexual liberation, nothing to do with all the girls like to dance but only some of the boys. It has to do with companionship and necessity. It is something they learned to do during the war and something that a generation never unlearned. The men fought. They died. That didn't stop the dance.

All things seem possible tonight: a man for every woman, a father for every child. Happiness and health and love -- the trinity to wish in a toast when you can't think of anything else to say. The fountains in Independence Square shoot skyward, blue and red and green lights illuminating them against the intimidating facades of the government buildings and apartment blocks surrounding the square.

Next to the main fountain, a quintet of toddlers, bundled up in winter caps and windbreakers, hold hands and laugh and dance in a circle. They break away from one another, run, wave their arms. Too much energy to know what to do with it all. I know the feeling.

Tonight the boys and girls closer to adulthood move much more carefully. Teenage girls in short skirts sit cross-legged on the benches and on the edges of the fountains and smoke cigarettes, drink beers and rum colas. If they walk, it's in slow motion -- the better to be seen. It's been a long winter. The girls want to show some skin. The boys want to see it. And tonight the answer to every question is yes.

Winter has been dead just over a week, a stake of chestnut wood driven through its cold heart. The Tuesday before Easter it was snowing. Blink once. Bare arms, bare legs. The whole country in bloom. Easter is a baroque tangle of Christian traditions woven into the much older pagan rituals. If it is supposed to be celebrating the oncoming of spring, the rebirth of the land, then Ukraine had better stick to the Orthodox calendar. There's no way spring can be guaranteed of making it here any earlier than that.

Horowitz

My friend Chris and I stroll to the square fresh from an evening of Rachmaninov, Beethoven, and Prokofiev as part of the international Horowitz piano competition at the National Philharmonic's Hall of Columns, just a couple blocks away from Independence Square. Tickets two hryvnia each -- about a dollar. The boys playing tonight are from Russia and Ukraine. The Russian has a light touch, a Horowitz bow tie. Very professional. The Ukrainian boy, from L'viv, is heavy, solid, but not quite as centered. At intermission we gulp down glasses of wine in the buffet. We don't plan on gulping. At the beginning of intermission, we are near the front of the line, but the line doesn't quite work like a line. If people want to walk straight up to the bar and cut ahead of the rest of us obedient souls waiting our turn, they do. It takes us a couple minutes to realize the rule of the bar: survival of the most brash. No, that's not quite right. What the rules are isn't exactly clear. It's a sort of hybrid of order and chaos. At the opera house, a red violet rope enforces something resembling single file in the buffet. Not here. By the time we get our wine the first bell has already rung.

But the music is brilliant, the warm evening says all things are possible, and when the concert is over we stroll the block to Independence Square grinning, laughing. Chris is just finishing two years of work as a Peace Corps volunteer, teaching at a business school in Poltava. He's looking to stay in Kiev, and this is a good evening to entertain thoughts like that. It's nine o'clock and still light out. In a month the sun will be rising at half past four.

A white-haired man with a younger Ukrainian sidekick hears our English and asks, "Where are y'all from?" He's from Virginia, it turns out. He strikes up a conversation with Chris. Doesn't really say what he does here, which can mean only one thing: Missionary. I'm in too good a mood to let it be spoiled by that tonight. Have other thoughts on my mind than the one I once heard through the walls of my train compartment, when a missionary asked a Ukrainian man who had the misfortune of speaking English: If you died tonight, where would you go?