A (different) quiet before...

In response to Alex Gödde’s “A quiet before…” as posted at
http://openit.com.ua/reportage.php?id=110#1


5:30 am (ok, maybe 6:30am)

It is surprising how quiet the streets are in the pre- and early-dawn hours--I’ll give him that. But birdsongs? Thoroughfares and string quartets?--As for the rest of my colleague’s poetic vignette, I’m not so sure we’re living the same city. I’ve walked this same path many times and let’s just say it doesn’t inspire in me the same kinds of Wordsworthian preambles.
So how about another look? Something less like the English Romantic poets, and something more like Ginsberg, admittedly an exaggeration, but only inversely proportional to the way Alex exaggerated his, and maybe something closer to the true picture.

Maybe it’s all the snow that seeps into microscopic cracks then freezes and expands thus splintering the cement. Maybe it’s the drill-like heels of so many Ukrainian women driving down as they walking purposefully to their destinations. And maybe the city just can’t afford regular maintenance. Whatever it is, the sidewalk of Komsomolskaya street is cratered everywhere like the surface of some moon. Its pits collect dirt, leaves, water and snow in treacherous hollows. I keep a conscious eye downward as I exit my apartment and step onto Komsomolskaya. I want to keep my boots clean today. A group of stray dogs, small but by no means emaciated, pass by completely indifferent to me.

I take the first left into Globa park. The entrance here is elevated and I can see the expanse of the park. The winter skeletons of the park’s trees etch into the gray sky and give suggestions of the yellow-green spring. Unfortunately their beauty is marred by what lies sitting in the western part of the park. I can see a steel pirate ship, a strongman’s hammer and bell stand, a yellow-roofed games hall, all parts of the park’s carnival area of soviet-era entertainments. It could be that because I was raised in Seattle, a city that understands how seamlessly it’s natural spaces should be integrated with construction, but the machines here seem to me to cut a jarring and hideous contrast to park’s true nature. Save for the weekend and holiday times, when crowds of parents and grandparents bring their kids, the entertainments sit frozen and abandoned, and painted in a garrulous mix of kid-favored primary colors they never fail to make me think of the cliché opening montage of a bad Stephan King novel adapted to television.

Turning my back to the carnival area, I walk along the side of the park’s swan pond. I walk under the pedestrian bridge and remember that this is the place that, for some reason I can’t ascertain, a drainage pipe drips a small, but not negligible amount of noxious pond scum. At the edge of the pond area an old woman heavily bundled slowly and mechanically sweeps the yesterday’s trash. There’s a lot of it, beer cans and the screw tops of vodka bottles and the ketchup stained paper of hot dog wraps. Drinking on park benches is a favorite past time of Ukrainians young and old (as it is for many peoples), and the aftermath is always too-small concrete garbage receptacles overflowed. So with the garbage vessels filled, and perhaps because of a lack of civic pride and/or loss of inhibition, all trash finds it home on the earth.

As I pass the old woman momentarily stops sweeping. She’s swinging the kind of broom, that could only make a Westerner think of the Wicked Witch of the West--it’s all bramble and twig spun together. I think I could say good morning to her, but for some reason I don’t think she liked the interruption. I could be wrong, but she kept starring at the broom, waiting to resume.

A security guard walks by. After his night shift? On the way to his day shift? Anyway, he carries a plastic beer bottle, screw-top, halfway drunk. From what I’ve seen, it’s not a true stereotype that there are more heavy drinkers than normal in the ranks of the Slavic population. But for the ones that are, they don’t hide their alcoholism behind doors, and I’m willing to venture that therein lies part of that stereotype’s creation.

Finally out of Globa I turn onto Karla Marxa. The T.G.I Friday’s on Serova is not yet streaming the Red Hot Chili Peppers from its speakers. Between Privat Bank and some other bank there’s a statue a monument in alcove of someone. Maybe he’s a Soviet hero, maybe he’s a Ukrainian poet. Whoever he is, I’ve never heard of him.