Sky Full of Apples III - VII - by Ming Lauren Holden

The second half of Ming Lauren Holden’s essay Sky Full of Apples

III. 

When Viktoria (or Vika, or Viki) waves me down outside the apartment building where “American volunteers” stay in Chisinau, she is nicely made up and in a long patterned dress. 

All I know about her is her name, and her generous emoji use. All I know about our trip together is what her “Disney prince handsome” (according to Vika) partner Dima said on WhatsApp: Vika would be driving from Chisinau to Odessa to bring baby formula to a family in need. She have good English, and I’d have a ride into Ukraine.

I’ll spend the day sweating through the black cotton ninja clothes I picked out uncertainly in the morning, and receiving with genuine gratitude Vika’s imperious and sisterly questions and advice.

First off, Vika wants to know why I want to go into a war zone. I know why we are there, she reasons, diving nervously through Chisinau’s traffic: our mothers are there, our families, our homes.

She’s not the only Ukrainian to wonder this, but she’s the only one like me enough to just ask outright.

I look over at her, driving a trendy car in a trendy dress on a warm day in late spring, a year my junior, her eyebrows crafted with fashionable skill. In a different world, we’d just be two new friends on a road trip.  

The Buffalo, New York shooting happened shortly after my arrival in eastern europe. The United States Supreme Court decision draft effectively banning abortion leaked next. When I step off the bus back from Odessa, nineteen children have been killed in Texas by another angry young man with an AR-15. 

“Americans live in a war zone, too,” I say simply.  

*

The roads turn to dirt close to the Palanca border crossing from Moldova to Ukraine, and spring blooms and fields peppered with cows give way to a tent-town of the displaced.

Vika is very pleasant to the border guards, infectiously so, like Pollyanna or Anne Shirley, and she hops out to show them the baby formula. “Dobre Den!” she sing-songs. Good afternoon!

We have to wait two hours for them to return our passports and I worry that my American one is what’s causing the holdup. But when the guard returns he simply says in English, “Welcome to Ukraine.”

Once in Ukraine, we keep an eye out for gas stations that don’t have zeros on the price signs.

“Today, I’m going to be an asshole,” she says, and I take it as some sort of sign.

“Left, Right, right, right, left,” she says aloud, gesturing to each car in the queue. I cast about for what she means and guess it’s the way people’s tires are turned as they sit in the hot dirt, but that doesn’t make any sense. In my memory, I’m fairly sure, she chalks my inability to understand up to her bad English (her English is not bad; it’s the best of anyone I’ve met out here) and not my bad imagination and ability to contextualize. It’s about which side the gas cap is on, and most people, I admonish myself, would have gotten there.

She doesn’t get to be the asshole. No one’s about to let her jump the line. Still, she’s cheerful. We have enough fuel to get to Odessa, and then Dima will help her figure it out.

The problem is we didn’t get gas in Moldova, where it is comparatively plentiful and affordable. We will do this because I won’t realize it was on our to-do list until she tells me, close to the border crossing, and suddenly there aren’t gas stations. We passed what felt like dozens on the way here. Looking for a gas station on the Moldova side is a roundabout way to see the tent-town that has cropped up. Clary was here at some point recently, writing about the tent-town on the border and specifically about the policeman/guard who came to do whatever he was supposed to do there and instead just stayed, now for months, taking care of people with nowhere to go. 

There was a tent-town in Syria, too, when we crossed over the Turkish border. That border crossing was way more sketch than this one. 

I wait for something to be obviously different when we cross the border. If I’m being honest, it’s a similar mechanism to when I kissed my first high school boyfriend at the edge of the girls’ cabin dorms and went into the bathroom to inspect my lips under the harsh fluorescent light. Were they different? I wish I could say I stopped there but when Lucy first had sex with Aaron that year and we all descended on her during brushing our teeth, I also watched her carefully, because that, if anything, would leave some kind of energetic mark, right?

When I began work with the first refugee I got to know, a man born in China of ethnic Mongolian background who was awaiting the UNHCR’s decision on asylum for the third year running in Ulaanbaatar, the largest refugee camp was almost certainly Dadaab, on the Kenya-Somalia border. I didn’t work there, in part because it is such a logistical hell that one needed clearance from the State Department to work there and such an emotional hell that one was required a week of R&R per six weeks to work there as well. But colleagues of mine did work there, and the image I got from the stories they told was of an open-air prison of dusty tents literally as far as the eye can see. Women would have to drop to their knees with trays of tea in their hands and shuffle forward that way to serve their husbands in those tents. Some killed themselves because they couldn’t leave Dadaab. Others killed themselves because they couldn’t get in.

This is probably a roundabout way of addressing one of the tensions between host societies and the newcomers who flee to them. 

But like Syria, the main change to the air is the tension between unusual amounts of quiet, where cities used to bustle, and the ever-present hanging threat of sudden, unimaginably loud noise. 

After I have changed hands as cargo – after Vika has delivered me to Elena’s doorstep – and after Elena walks me around Odessa during pre-curfew early-summer-sunset; after she’s bidden me goodnight: 

I text her, because I realize I’ve forgotten to ask what we do or where we go if there’s an attack during the night. She just opens the door, her mother, who so reminds me of my own, presumably asleep in the warm dark behind her. Elena grins at me in her nightshirt, shrugs, and says something I can’t technically understand but that I do get in our human bodies, in my human heart: there’s nothing much to do. If the missiles are close enough to be close, we’re fucked. But drop to the floor under the bed; that will at least give you the chance to avoid the glass shards. 

We both laugh, heartily, because it’s the only thing to do. 

But I don’t think either of us laugh because we’ve figured out why. 

It’s just funny.  

IV.

At the bar on top of the end of the world, in Odessa, Elena insists on styling me in front of angel wings and I reward her by subjecting her to a long interview conducted via translation apps and general human gesticulations at the top of a building overlooking the Black Sea, where currently dwell Putin’s subs, strangling grain export to poor nations.

It’s not the sonic part I think of, when I’m in Odessa proper and Elena has taken me to the swanky rooftop restaurant after I beg her through my google translate app to let me get us a beer privately, away from the woman in elder middle age who glommed onto her when a soldier would not let us past the sandbag barricade to see Odessa’s gorgeous opera house. Elena had been so pleasant and familiar with her that I finally figured she must have known the woman, but it turns out she was just being nicer than I would have been and for longer to one of the town’s cuckoo clocks. I’d been craning to see what I could of the opera house over the wall of sandbags and heard a man politely and firmly bid goodbye to the cuckoo clock as he walked away. I waited for Elena to do the same as I silently walked alongside her and the cuckoo clock on her other side for block after block, even after Elena stopped to say hello to a handsomely dressed couple her age who clearly were her friends.

Perhaps because we are up so high, or because we can see the black sea and I know Putin’s subs are in there, or because the self-styled experts on Twitter keep blathering on about Odessa as a key strategic win for Putin, I do imagine a missile barrelling toward us, though the best approximation my mind has is of the kind of weapon a DC/Marvel crossover movie might use with extremely cutting edge CGI. I imagine it the next day, too, when we happen upon an impromptu fashion show thrown by a group of artsy middle-aged women in honor of a friend of theirs in a Nikolaev hospital. Not at first, there in the sun nursing a frappuccino Elena has gotten for me in a pair of sunglasses she’s lent me for our day trip, but when the alarms go off and no one so much as flinches, and the models keep strutting. It’s like one of those kitchen smoke alarms that goes off immediately if one piece of sausage or bacon is even a little burnt, so you just maybe crack a window and keep on.

I mean, it’s not at all like that, from the perspective of the threat, but it’s also exactly like that. Like a car alarm going off in a neighborhood where the streets are narrow and the parking spaces prime real estate.

*

Elena holds up her phone, which is on google translate. 

“Let’s go to the sea,” it says. 

We do not make it to the sea, of course. 

First the yellow tape, then barricades with guards who had guns and stood under signs forbidding photography. The military won’t let us get anywhere close to the actual water. 

Elena waves to a few friends who happen to be sitting nearby at an outdoor cafe in the sun, who quickly became my friends, because that’s how people from Odessa roll. 

Suddenly we are watching a fashion show fundraiser replete with an announcer on a microphone to collect funds for a woman in the hospital in neighboring Nikolaev. 

When the bomb alert / alarm sounds for minute after minute, I am the only one who reacts with worry or startle or fear. No one else flinches or looks around, let alone moves into a bunker or even indoors. Like I am the only one who can hear it. The announcer announces, the models strut. 

Ukranians know more than anyone: the show must go on.

V.

Dima and Vika host me for my last night in Odessa. I am not displacing anyone by sleeping on their couch, and this comforts me. Their shaky little dog Timothy, described accurately by Vika as a “drama queen,” sleeps on my feet. Their sweet 11-month-old kitty Pasha (which simply means, kitty) sleeps on my face. 

I don’t sleep. Whenever I’m about to drift off, my body scares my brain awake, or vice versa. I think I hear something weird but the fact is I have hearing loss and earplugs in, the silicone swimming kind, less because I need them than that they are familiar from boarding school and help my body know it’s sleep time. 

I don’t give my impressions that much shrift until Vika asks if I heard the alarm. There actually was a missile attack alarm, like the one at the fashion show with Elena. Only now, I’ve seen the footage Vika and Dima have captured on their security footage and shown me with a little bit of undeniable excitement. 

“It was 500 meters from here!” they exclaim.

Dima and Vika are consummate comedians and clearly in genuine love. They describe the melee of the bomb alert and the explosion so close to the clean new home that Dima paid $400,000 USD for after two decades of working as a geologist on an oil rig. 

That’s how Vika met him. She worked in the office. They moved in together after Dima divorced, a year ago, and now their freezer is filled with meat in case something happens. There’s not even any room for an ice tray. 

Dima jokes to me about how Vika insisted on getting some tea and finding the animals when the explosions sounded close enough to rumble in ways they could feel. “Vika didn’t want to be bored,” he says, rolling his eyes.

They take me to their immaculate, suburban backyard. They point to where the smoke plume was. They’ve already shown me the bombed-out suburban shopping mall, on our drive in. They’ve already shown me the bomb shelter they mae out of their Harry Potter under-stair space. It’s tricked out with little pads for sleeping, plush blankets, and those college-dorm christmas lights. The little dog follows us in. I joke with them that they have extra points if they have sex in here. 

The truth is, when I ask them on the record why they stay, it’s initially the same reasons Elena gives: 

Mom is here. Home is here. Our animals are here.

But then it becomes something else, and Dima is quite clear about it: it’s hatred. 

That is what Dima calls it, in this voice memo, the night before he and Vika drive me to the bus station. He fucking hates these assholes.

He’s got two children with his ex-wife, and he is the one who insisted on and funded their departure at the war’s onset. His 15-year-old daughter is disabled and needs a wheelchair, and he made sure they had passage to Germany. He is quite clear that he never expects them to return to Ukraine. 

“But I could not leave,” he says simply. “Vika is here. Her mother is here.”

I don’t want to misrepresent these people. These amazing people who give me gifts, thoughtful ones, like a Beanie Baby that matches my kitties at home–these people who care for me like a child and are my friends. They don’t mince words, and I won’t do so for them. 

Hatred is quite productive, especially in small doses justly given. They hate these assholes. They are so fucking pissed off that this retarded old man with a god complex and a power trip addiction, the worst kind of malicious fucking sociopath, would just up and bully and rape and pillage into their country one day, tormented by this deluded certainty that he has some imperial right to do that. That they owed him anything. 

They are deeply hurt by those family members and friends who initially texted them from Russia, from Transnistria, to offer solidarity and support and a shoulder to cry on, relatives who love them…and then something happened. 

It was murderously quick, and it was irreversible. They were there for their Ukrainian relatives, their nieces and nephews and loved ones, and then, suddenly, they weren’t. Dima and Vika struggle for the words to tell me: their loved ones were brainwashed. They were gone. 

And we were so hurt and we missed them and we could not believe it had happened so quickly. 

What could brainwash perfectly reasonable people like this? How could it happen in the blink of an eye?

VI.

I get back from Odessa a matter of hours before leading a trauma therapy circle with mothers who are all from Odessa; and that circle takes place a matter of hours before I get on a plane to Istanbul and then to Frankfurt. Frankfurt is where I start hearing guy bro-ing it up in scattered English. One of them shared an outlet with me near our gate. I have the shirt Vika gave me, the one that says “Good evening, we are from Ukraine.” 

It turns out to be the phrase uttered every day by the mayor of Nikolaev in his daily war news podcast. In the Istanbul airport, I got mixed reactions. In this one, I don’t.  There’s a whole gob of them, both nebbish / ruggedly handsome silver fox journalist types, sitting around the neighboring table with beers. 

The paunchy war journalist readjusts his tripod unnecessarily. I bumped into him on accident in the line at the cafe, and I apologize again for having done so.

“I like your sheert,” he says shyly. 

“Thank you,” I say, smiling.

I am typing this all on the plane before my laptop runs out of juice and so do I. I can’t think how I will do anything when I open the door to my studio apartment in Portland but sink to the floor and murmur sweet nothings to my kittens, who were born a month before Putin attacked Ukraine; and whose markings, I know from the catsitter’s photos, are more clearly caramel now, their tails more tiggerishly striped, and finally cry out the tightness in my chest that has been settling there ever since I read Elena’s first answer to my google-translate question, up there where the missiles could have barreled through the glass but happened not to in the late afternoon honey light:

When a ragtag team of us writers/journalists/photographers from Austria and the US toured the makeshift refugee distribution center in Balti, Moldova, which–like all timely and effective responses the the Ukrainian refugee crisis–had been hastily set up on an ad hoc basis by NGos already operative there, we stopped at the corner of the stacks and stacks and boxes and boxes and packages and packages of goods. Bartozs, the creator of the NGO “Friends of Moldova,” a friendly, sober Polish-by-birth guy who had also recently served in the Peace Corps in Moldova, gestured toward the hefty stock of dog and cat food. “We used to think of pet food as an additional thing, like a plus,” he said. “Then we realized that Ukranians see their pets as family members. It was essential to their well being for their pets to be provided for, too.”

I look at my google translate app’s history, and guffaw anew at the shit show that Elena and I chortled over again and again as we walked around Odessa.

“play shiner post hello this is the Grand”

Real useful, google translate. 

Meeting up in the eerie quiet at the corner for a late afternoon coffee, specifically to shoot the shit and to feed the cats whose families had to flee and leave them behind.

We try again:

Dima says, on the record, sitting at the marble topped kitchen counter of the home he has shared with Vika (– a good thing, too! Because her sister’s family lived in Mariupol until Mariupol wasn’t, so Vika didn’t sell the apartment –) for just a year: 

“It’s not just that I would lose this house. And the years I spent saving in order to buy it. 

“It’s not just that Russian soldiers would take everything, and then take more.

“It’s that I fucking hate them for it. 

“I’m here because I have hate in me. I’m here because I am angry, and I hate them. Why should they take everything that’s mine? My country and my home? Why the fuck should they win?”

Who is going to take care of my mother? Who is going to take care of the homeless cats?

VII.

If any of us truly knew where home was, would we ever leave?

Photo Credit is the same as from parts one and two (It is a sky full of apples)