Sky Full of Apples, Parts I and II

Ming Lauren Holden, Ph.D. ventured into Ukraine in May 2022 to meet of the civilians there who either would or could not leave. Here are Parts I and II of that story.

Besides being an accomplished author, Ming Lauren Holden has worked extensively with refugees in 16 countries in 4 continents. She has also created the sustainable Theatre Troupe Survival Group for Congolese women in Nairobi, Kenya. Other achievements include being a Henry Luce Scholar, serving the Mongolian Writers Union for a year as their first-ever International Relations Advisor, as well as winning the Kore Press Memoir Award for her memoir Refuge.

Other works she has published with GCAS are Arrest Ritual, found in two sections: Part I and Part II and III.

Ming Holden

June 2022

Following Elena Around In The Hazy Golden Hour Before Military Curfew In The Eerily Deserted Downtown Of A Small Seaside City That Has Been Bombed By Russia Something Like Twenty Times In The Last Two Months And Killed At Least Thirty People Who Were Just Being People And Living Their Lives By The Sea In A Small City

Or, A Sky Full of Apples

Or, Let’s Go To The Sea

I.

Smack in the middle of the days I spend in Odessa in late May 2022, Elena beckons me into a corner shop that’s technically underground, but that clearly serves the function Brooklyn bodegas do. I hope she’s getting us beer, because it’s beer-o-clock, but instead she offers me an instant coffee from the machine. She loves her 4pm coffee, she tells me in Russian, and the cashier clearly knows her. When we surface, the street is still charming and still the kind of quiet of a city that misses its people and its bustle. 

The only personal proof of war I suppose I have is a shitty iPhone photo of piles of tires and sandbags—the only one of the blockades I was able to photograph. Otherwise, just more of the lovely parts of the city still intact where we were allowed to walk. I’m from Santa Barbara county, and I also got my doctorate at UCSB. Odessa is also a small seaside jewel of a city, but the people in it are a whole new order of tenacious and spirited and stubborn. I don’t know how many of us Santa Barbarians would have dug in our heels and stuck around if anyone had fired missiles at State Street.

It doesn’t immediately become clear that Elena is on a mission until she gets three coffees. She lights a cigarette and turns to greet a woman in a plush bathrobe that says i love you in English all over it. This woman has a face like leather, a face that reminds me of the nomads in Mongolia who steadfastly remained nomads even when more cosmopolitan or urban modes of living became available. This is the life they knew, and the life they loved. There wasn’t exactly anything poetic about it. Globalization left them in sucky straits, with a shitty choice. Either leave what you know, what you know how to do, what’s familiar to you, or occupy a kind of social and economic wasteland. Odessa would need to be bombed beyond recognition to register as anything but the peaceful and idyllic jewel of retirement for so many people, like Valya from Crimea or this woman from central Asia. But there is something heavy in her expression, in her breath, in her voice, that I recognize from most of the interactions Elena has allowed me to observe in our walkabouts. It is indeed a city under military curfew, where we discover to Elena’s displeasure that a civilian can’t legally make it to the sea. 

This woman with the inscrutable face is from Tajikistan, Elena tells me, and many other countries besides. She’s owned rug shops and done a lot of other stuff. The woman regards me with a rye expression, sucking deeply on the cigarette Elena proffers her. She mumbles something to Elena, and Elena disappears. She regards me with the expression of someone resigned, someone who has seen it all. We don’t speak. Elena reappears with a purple bag of cat food. 

We don't need to say, there’s a war on. We don’t need to say, there are only four people outside on this gorgeous and historic city block because most of them have fled. We don’t even need to say, Elena and her elderly friend have stayed to smoke cigarettes, drink coffee, and feed the cats. We don’t need to say that the cats largely belong to the families who fled. 

They seem to know each of the cats. They seem to know who those cats belonged to. The block and its lovely trees and stoops remind me strongly of Brooklyn. 

It’s not just that the Russian word for “car” sounds to my untrained ear like the Russian word for “men.” I don’t have jet-lag exactly, just war-lag. I’ve gone from an insistently peaceful country, the poorest in Europe, into a war zone, and it took less time than the drive my dear father would dutifully make from our house to LAX to pick me up at horrid hours throughout my college years. It’s that the Russian word for “cloud” sounds like the Russian word for “apple” to me, which lends an even more surreal effect to Elena’s and my extended wait for a bus that never comes. 

Elena and I take some great long walks, and great smoking breaks, and we think we probably broke even, health-wise. At the start of one of them, a glorious and even hot afternoon in late May, and we’re looking, Elena tells me, for the bus #23. Across from us is a small kiosk, a little green pagoda-like building where one can buy cell phone credit or a candy bar. I’m sure people have written dissertations on how Waiting For Godot is an extended metaphor for a wounded child waiting for the external validation that never comes (“tell him that..tell him that you saw me”) – in fact I know that at least one person has, my shrink in college – but now that I think of it, it’s also an extended metaphor for the eerie quiet of war. All day Saturday, and all day Sunday, Elena and I walk in Odessa. One day we end up at the top of a building. 

One day we end up at the edge of the sea – or the edge of where the yellow military tape is.

*

In Odessa, the sunlight is late and honey-colored, suggestive of a long summer night in the north. Elena, across from me, leans into the theater-esque expressiveness required for the kind of interview where we’re both perceptive and like one another, and also, I’m terrible at Russian. Behind me, a chef cooks for some comely-looking people at their table, which I’ve only ever seen in Korean restaurants. Nearby, one of the very pretty hostesses leans on the bar and chats with the handsome bartender, looking with contempt in our direction. 

I’m very impressed. I’m impressed at the beauty of everyone, really. At the chutzpah, or whatnot. That they got out of bed, at minimum, not to mention that they dressed up and went out. There is no word for it in English I can settle on. Odessa and the people in it are indescribable… precisely equidistant between the retired-blonde-trophy-wife-Disneyland of the city nearest my childhood home, Santa Barbara; and that astonishing exchange between a Ukrainian grandmother and young Russian soldiers on the very first day of this war. That they should carry seeds in their pockets so flowers will grow where they die. 

Western writers across Twitter all shake their heads in admiration. They could not have imagined a character so strong, so succinct with her words. They could not have invented an insult so effective. Somewhere in there Biden said that “the world has met the Ukrainian people,” and I daresay he was right. There’s a speech Hillary Clinton gave during her tenure as Secretary of State, which spanned the Arab Spring. She’s giving it to youth in Tunisia, and she says something like “the world ignores you at its peril!” with the kind of grandmotherly raise of the eyebrows and small smile that conveys how much affection she has for these upstart youngsters. She did that again at her purple-suited concession speech to Trump in 2016, when she addressed the young girls in her audience, calling them “wonderful and valuable.” Maybe it’s the theater person in me, but those intonations stand out. The arm affection in them. The acknowledgement that there’s no one in the world like them. That’s what Biden conveyed about the Ukrainians.

Intonations stand out with the Ukrainians I meet in Odessa, too. How recitative their intonations become when they recount what happened on February 24th. That first day of the war, when Odessa was pummeled, February 24th, is one Valya and other Ukrainians recite with the kind of rote memorization particular to addicts and those who have suffered death of any kind. They know the days, the weeks. Since it happened. Whatever “it” is. Whatever the thing is that changed it all, and is in some way unbearable but which must, nonetheless, be borne. The moment the clock started, or ended, and some other previously unimaginable life started rolling out with no regard for how little the person in question wanted this, how unbearable they found it. It keeps on, like a steamroller, dictating a new calendar entirely for a person over whose own life they used to enjoy a dictatorial kind of power, whether they used it for good or for ill. 

There aren’t accurate Americanisms for the amount of grittiness it takes to continue to act as though everything is normal when the banks don’t often open or work as they’re supposed to. When things might explode from a missile fired from the Black Sea, just a couple blocks that-a-way. We are far and away at the highest point civilians can still go in Odessa, this gorgeous small seaside jewel of a city spread out beneath us. Out on the balcony, a little girl swings in one of those “nest” swings, which is lit up by Christmas lights that wouldn’t be out of place in a university dorm room. 

When I ask Elena about her family, I mistake her at first as saying she married and had three daughters. What she meant was that her mother has three daughters. I ask if I was correct in understanding she’d gotten married, and she nods, and then she leans back, closes her eyes, and folds her forearms across her chest in the unmistakable international sign language for, “he died.” We both laugh heartily. 

Every time we laugh, or she does, or I do, or anyone does, every time Vika and I laughed on our girls-road-trip-gone-Walking-Dead – there hung in that weirdly pregnant wartime air the possibility that our robust chuckles were some sort of coping mechanism. But I think some affect theorist needs to do some work on this, because ‘gallows humor’ is certainly part of it, but also doesn’t do the Ukrainians who have stood their ground enough justice. 

(It’s entirely possible that this is a preoccupation because any justice that isn’t linguistic or descriptive, I cannot give them, and that this reality is so unbearable to me that I sift through descriptors as though picking the right one could do anything.)

When I asked her why stay, her response is so simple that not even google translate can fuck it up. Who would care for my mother? This is my home. Who would feed all the abandoned animals?

I think that’s all you need to know about Elena, though there’s plenty more to say.

I think that might also be the thing we most need to know about Ukrainians.

II.

By the time we reach Odessa after just three hours on the road from Chisinau, Veronika and I have established a robust new camaraderie. When Veronika drops me off in front of Elena’s apartment building, Elena hugs me sight unseen, and then Vika hugs me. Before letting me leave, Vika makes sure I truly believe that if I need anything, even just translation, she is there for me. “You are my friend from this moment!” she texted an hour later. It reminds me so much of Ahmad, the Syrian I interviewed in Sweden in 2015, texting “You are my syster from this moment,” that I get a little emotional. 

The emotions might be because I’ve just watched the Ukrainian entry to Eurovision in Elena’s bedroom, which she has insisted I take, after eating the snack she has laid out beautifully for me and then refused to share in. It might be because her mother reminds me so much of my own. Her mother is 81; mine is 79. It becomes clear within moments of entering Elena’s home that the main difference between my mother and hers is health care, and access to cutting-edge medical attention. 

I spent the first fifteen months of covid sheltering in place with my parents, who both had pre-existing conditions and were not of the yoga-and-wheatgrass type boomer variety. No, my parents were people born during World War II, boomers who went for a stroll or gardened for a bit every day, but nothing more strenuous than that, and who eat either pasta or casserole every night. I’d gotten my doctorate at the end of 2019, when I went in a budget-y way to Europe for ten weeks to cry on friends’ futons and take a breath before hitting the job market. I’d left my car and my cats at my parents’ and had a one-way ticket to New Mexico on March 14th, 2020.

Before I’d even landed in Albuquerque, my surgeon brother Danny texted from San Diego, saying he hated to be raining on our parade, but that it was clear I’d been who-knows-where and that what he and his colleagues were seeing at the hospital was something it was clear America was in no way ready for. 

While usually the sort of man who kept his cards close to his vest, Danny had even forwarded an email from his med school colleagues in New York, where he’d gotten his MD at Columbia. Instead of scheduling a pickup soccer game or a reunion, these emails were peers saying goodbye to one another. In case they didn’t make it through this. 

“This is your son,” Danny pled. “These are his friends.” 

We’d fallen out of touch, for the most part, but still: in our lives both as children and adults, I have not before or since heard anything remotely like that from my self-sufficient, bossy, accomplished brother. 

He further made sure to tell me that if I were to join our parents, it would be in a quarantine pod, and I’d be prisoner of the same values. We were not to fuck around until there was a vaccine and both parents had received it. 

Thus was borne the maxim that governed my parents and me for well over a year in a canyon outside of Santa Fe: “stay in the fucking canyon.” I even made a WhatsApp group with my siblings with that moniker. My elder half-sister, with whom I’m also rarely otherwise in touch, if ever, dropped off a load of groceries every week outside the garage. She wasn’t going to get the vaccine; she was raising a seven-year-old who wouldn’t either. In the early days of that war, we’d smother the groceries with Purell. 

*

When Elena hands over the smartphone that has translated her answer to my question, the gist of which is, “Why didn’t you leave,” I think of my own mother. Of the kitty of mine who recognized her as his, and appointed himself her Ladies Maid such that I could not bear to separate them when I left. Of her Estee Lauder perfume, her potato casseroles, her online AA meetings, her crossword puzzles, her garden, and the DVDs she’d rent from the library for us to watch because she wasn’t fluent in Amazon.com. My father was a film editor of many a gritty and independent films. Still, my mother wanted the same twenty-or-so DVDs, all of which ended well and all of which we’d seen before. 

In a way, I’d been the child it made most sense to have with the parents when the war of Covid hit. My brother was a surgeon on the front lines. My sister had a young child to raise. I was a free-floater having just obtained a doctorate but who hadn't even moved to a new city yet. I was planning on entering the job market somewhere on the west coast in April 2020.

My mother and I cried at the end of The Bucket List. We would have cried when Mathew died in Anne of Green Gables, but we’d seen it so many times that when the scene changed to the one of Matthew with the cows in the emerald-green grassy field and Mom said, “I don’t like this part,” I guessed the amount of time forward to speed the DVD and we avoided such pain.

Twenty minutes or so after I arrived at Elena’s, squired by the buoyant Vika, we’d left Elena’s mother as we’d found her, slowly rolling meat and vegetables into the thin dough by the door. The minute I saw her, I understood why Elena could not leave. This was not a woman in any shape to travel anywhere, least of all in a stressful and traumatizing bus ride that she deeply compromised and elderly body couldn’t handle. Bus rides like those are the only thing available to Ukrainians of little means. If they leave, they lose what little they have. They’d honestly rather die at home, and the thing about Ukrainians, I learn, is that when they say that, they mean it. 

They mean it in ways millennial Americans could never understand, no matter how many of us lost our ancestors in the war. My last name is not Hochfeld because my grandparents, German Jews who fled Cologne in 1939, wanted to assimilate. They drove west until they hit water in Portland, Oregon. They changed their surname to Holden. 

Most of what happened, no one told me. That was by design. My family is not the kind who Talks About It, for the most part.

But I do understand: you don’t leave Mom. You just don’t. 

Even if she insists you do. If the virus or the Russians are coming. You stay and do crosswords and giggle at the cat and watch 16 candles again. There’s not actually anything else, anywhere else, to live for. It’s so simple that it almost defies explanation. You stay until she is fucking vaccinated until fucking Putin is done firing rockets that shake your fucking apartment. 

Cover Photo by Kayra Sercan