"Oh," I said. I wasn't expecting Russia to be an easy place to travel, not after all the effort it took just to get a visa, but a pre-apology? That sounded ominous. She didn't look like she was joking, though. "I see. You're apologizing on behalf of your people for all the bad things that are going to happen to us when we're there?"
"Yes, you're going to have to deal with a lot of inconveniences," she clarified.
"Well thanks - I'll remember that. Maybe it will ease the moment a bit when we're starting to get frustrated about something." And in fact, I did have occasion to remind Trish, when we were on the train to Kiev, that we had already been apologized to for the inconvenience of booking a first class sleeper and receiving an ordinary, aging car with bedcushions held in place by duct tape. The closest the car attendants had come to apologizing was when we tried to figure out how to turn the seat into a lower bunk bed, which seemed to us must involve ripping off the duct tape and reconfiguring the cushion somehow. That led us to a dead end so we called Handsome over and asked him to please show us what to do... he went off to his own cabin for a moment and came back with - more duct tape. Which he used to tape the cushion back into place. As he did this he was cursing all the while "stary vagon," which means "old wagon," and that's about as close as we got to "I'm sorry your cabin isn't what you expected."
I should also say that once we got our beds made and had a few glasses of wine in us, our car was just fine. I love traveling by train rather than airplane for a number of reasons. First, there's a sense of continuity to traveling from A to B without leaving the ground. As fascinating as I find the city of Kiev, I am equally fascinated by what lies along the way to Kiev... kilometers and kilometers of wheat fields and sunflowers, tiny villages resistant to change compared to the big cities where the rise and fall of past regimes is more apparent.
I also prefer train travel, especially overnight, for the rhythmic cla-cla-clunk of the wheels that lulls me off to sleep now just as effectively as it did when I was a teenager exploring Western Europe on my own for the first time. And the third reason I like the train is a pragmatic one... now that I am a flight instructor, while I find airplanes interesting, of course, it's also nice to get a break from them.
But I digress. I included the word "enigmas" in the title for this post because we've had more than a few enigmatic encounters on this trip so far. The first was a young Kazakh woman who picked us up on our way to the Cave Monastery in Kiev. Somehow, one minute to the next, she was just there, walking along with us on our way to the caves. OK, she seemed nice enough. I won't give her name because she said she was playing hooky from work. I know... what are the chances that her boss back at her IT firm in Kazakhstan will somehow find himself reading my blog? Pretty much zilch. Just in case, though, I'll just call her our Kazakh friend.
We learned a lot about Kazakhstan in the two or three hours we all spent together. We also had a Russian translator during that time, since she spoke English, Kazakh and Russian. This was fortunate, because the Cave Monastery turned out to be an important pilgrimage site for Ukrainians. Signage was minimal in English and limited to information about where to buy tickets for a tour. We didn't want a tour. We just wanted to see the caves. Our Kazakh friend was able to figure out how to see the caves themselves, along with the pilgrims. She also had the foresight to purchase three candles before we went in. I had only read a little about the "cave monastery" and had in my mind an image of a wide mouthed cave dug deep into the mountainside along the banks of the Dnieper River, but that's not what this "cave" was all about.
The Cave Monastery of Kiev is a long, descending labyrinth full of dead saints. Once inside, you're in there for a good 30 minutes or longer, depending on how many coffins you stop to kiss. The tradition in Orthodox Christianity is to kiss relics and icons during prayer. People come to this cave from all over Ukraine to pay respect to the many, many monks whose bodies were preserved and displayed, covered with beautiful church robes and ornamental jewels, in small glass coffins placed in niches along the walk. The only sources of light are the small stained glass oil lamps that hang over every body, mosaic, fresco... and the candles that pilgrims with foresight bring with them to light their way. There is little to no room for passing. I was grateful to my Kazakh friend for bringing the extra candles, which of course tuned out to be for me and Trish. Trish, however, discovered early on that she is claustrophobic and backtracked her way out - when I later realized that the labyrinthine tunnel was full of dead bodies I was glad that she'd gotten out while she still could... assuming that claustrophobia gets worse when dead bodies are introduced into the situation.
Anyway, I thoroughly enjoyed walking through the dimly lit row of saints with the Kazakh waif, as well as our brief stop at the memorial for victims of famine on our way back. Ukrainians of the past have suffered more than their share of politically induced famines and the Ukrainians of today have not forgotten. We all stopped to take in a very moving statue of a starving young girl holding a stalk of wheat in her hands - wheat destined for central allocation under a system that starved to death the very people who toiled in the Ukrainian "breadbasket" of the Soviet Union.
We felt guilty about wanting to stop for lunch after that but we did anyway, and then our Kazakh friend disappeared as quickly as she had appeared, now on her way to find a hotel and get ready for the Red Hot Chile Pepper concert that had lured her to Kiev for a super short sanity break from her job.
Our next enigmatic encounter was with a very odd man who never spoke to us in a word of English but held a 20 minute conversation with us nonetheless, during which he offered us apples to take back to America and, when we declined those, upped the offer to a half smoked joint. "No, no!" we emphasized. I caught the eye of a policeman walking by. Great, this guy's going to get arrested for pulling out a joint in a public square and we're going to go down with him. We were lucky to waive over a young translator who found the whole situation fairly amusing and gave us a probably unwarranted sense of security. "Is he homeless?" Trish asked. "Are you homeless"? the guy translated. "No, no" we said, "you don't need to translate that question." But it was too late. The reply was already on its way back to us. "No."
He lived somewhere, this strange man, and was in town for something. We couldn't tell what but by this time we were ready to move on. "One last thing," he said. Our translator gave us the final message carefully, sentence by sentence. "We are all Ukrainian." Listening. "We speak Ukrainian." Listening. "We are all Ukrainian brothers." Listening. "Goodbye."
And then they just disappeared. Both of them. I turned my head to glance over at the other side of the square and when I turned around again the strange Ukrainian nationalist was gone, nowhere to be seen, and the translator was gone as well. "That was weird" I said, and we decided to go hang out in the next square instead.
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