BUCKWHEAT AND RYE

In September 2008, after receiving a grant from the U.S. government, I moved to Kiev to study Russian and collect oral histories about women’s rights and AIDS activism in Ukraine.

I was renting the apartment from an elderly Ukrainian brother and sister, classical musicians who had emigrated to Canada decades earlier. Rather than having the place renovated, they’d left it just as it had been circa 1975, complete with mass-produced armoires and credenzas in ersatz wood, scratchy Ukrainian rugs covering the walls and floors, and curling posters advertising performances at the Opera. The apartment was a time capsule. Soviet-produced classical music records sat near a baby grand piano that was terribly out of tune, its keys yellow and cracked. The kitchen had the white-and-orange-polka-dotted tea set found in every Soviet apartment, matching white and orange plastic furniture, forks and knives stamped with their price in kopecks (legacy of a planned economy), a line for drying laundry, and an old blue and white plastic radio with only one knob, for adjusting the volume. When the radio was made, there hadn’t been much reason to change the station.

My elderly neighbor, too, was a relic of the past. She’d lurk at the door of her apartment across the hall, ready for attack, her thin hair in disarray and a look of wild disgruntlement in her eyes. She knew my landlords and seemed to feel responsible for me. When she saw me going out, she berated me if I wasn’t wearing a hat and scarf—a typical preoccupation of old Slavic women.

My neighbor spoke only Ukrainian, simply increasing her volume when I answered her in Russian. When she came to my door one day to impart some dire warning, it took a while for me to understand that she was telling me to fill up bottles of water, because the water would be shut off the next day. (Water shut-offs were a regular feature of Kiev life; in the summer, the hot water was shut off for weeks at a time, neighborhood by neighborhood. If you didn’t like cold showers and were too decadent to heat water on the stove for a bath, you had to make appointments to shower at the apartment of a friend who lived in another area.)

“YOU WON’T BE ABLE TO DRINK TEA!” my neighbor howled. She was red in the face, like the Queen of Hearts.

OUTSIDE MY BUILDING, another epoch reigned. The city was full of sushi bars, strip clubs, casinos, and advertisements for “dating” agencies. As I sat at my kitchen table late at night, drinking tea from a polka-dotted cup or Crimean wine from a Soviet wineglass, I listened to the sound of cars pulling up and leaving, high heels clicking on the pavement, men barking and women laughing. Across the street was a club called Avalon, popular among foreigners trolling for Ukrainian women, and just below my apartment was a Hard Rock Cafe knockoff, a favorite haunt of moneyed men and their female companions. I’d been there once, before I moved to Kiev, with an Italian I knew through work. Claudio was pleasant and amusing but was also, as I came to understand, a classic “sexpat,” among the most common species of foreigner in Kiev.

One of many people who’d left Berlusconi’s Italy in search of opportunity, Claudio was making the most of his position as an attractive, well-paid single man in Kiev.

Though he’d lived in Kiev for years, like many expats Claudio still knew hardly a word of Russian or Ukrainian, mustering just enough to give a taxi driver an address or order a meal in a restaurant. His predilections were betrayed by his language: he spoke the diminutive-riddled Russian of flirty young women. This had a grotesque and comical effect, as if he were ordering dinner in baby talk.

Female expats like me were a rarity in Ukraine, which had little to offer a foreign woman. Until very recently it had been hard to buy Western groceries or clothes or get a good Internet connection in Kiev, and Ukraine had still been in the throes of postindependence violence. Most 1990s expats had been businessmen (often very shady ones) trying to profit from the transition, buy something up, sell something off, get rich quick, and have plenty of sex along the way. Sometimes Ukrainian women were not only a diversion, but a source of income. Ukraine is one of the world’s most important hair markets, a rare country full of desperately poor blondes. A Ukrainian friend (not a blonde) once told me about going to the party of an Indian expat hair dealer. He took her into his bedroom and opened his drawers: they were full of piles and piles of beautiful blond hair.

Local attitudes, too, were off-putting for Western women. At twenty-six, by Ukrainian standards I was already well on my way to spinsterhood. A friend in her late twenties went to the gynecologist and asked for an IUD; the gynecologist refused, telling her she ought to get pregnant instead.

“How old are you?” the gynecologist asked my feverish, exhausted friend. “Are you married? Have you had a baby yet?” She said no, but he kept asking, as if hoping that eventually he’d receive a different response. The nurse explained that having children was the only reason to live.

And yet Ukrainian marriage seemed less than appealing. In many cases, women were the ones supporting the family as well as raising the children and doing the housework; they often seemed to be punished rather than rewarded for their efforts. If a woman reported being abused by her husband, the police might ask if she’d forgotten to make dinner that night.

DURING MY FIRST MONTHS in Kiev, I took Russian classes at a small private language school a few blocks from my apartment, near the Golden Gates, which had failed to hold back the Mongol Horde in the thirteenth century but were rebuilt in 1982, to commemorate Kiev’s fifteen hundredth anniversary. The director of the school, Andrei, was fond of war and obscenities, and partial to the many baby-faced U.S. Air Force cadets who were sent to his school to learn Russian. He liked to teach new students the word nedoperepitsya, a miracle of prefixes (the word contains three) that means “to drink more than you should, but less than you’d planned.”

My Russian teacher, Lena, was a small, plump woman with fluffy blond hair. She always whispered, for some reason, and opened her eyes very wide as she spoke. Extraordinarily kind, she was more like an eccentric aunt than a teacher: she once brought in a recording of birdcalls and told me we could practice Russian by identifying them.

A doting mother to her young son, Lena was obsessed with home remedies. She told me about the virtues of cupping and mustard wraps and hot potato inhalers and compresses made from cottage cheese, though she warned me that the cottage cheese cure hadn’t been tested on children and ought only to be used on adults, for safety reasons.

Lena took me on excursions, showing me the city. On Theophany, January 6, she took me to watch Orthodox believers carry a cross onto the frozen Dnieper; the really brave ones jumped through a hole in the ice. Lena whispered that the water from the river was holy now, and that we’d better take some. In the nineteenth century, Kievans carved crosses from river ice dyed red with beets. A priest would bless the water, and the people would pray to exorcise the devil from the Dnieper, hanging crucifixes on their doors and windows so that the devil, driven out of the river, wouldn’t try to move in.

We went to Petrivka, a market in the northern part of the city. It had a huge section of used books and magazines, as well as a flea market where old women sold their silverware, pots and pans, knickknacks, even old bras—whatever they had. Lena haggled over an edition of Shakespeare for her son and perused a table of year-old periodicals.

“New news is nice,” she said sagely, “but old news is good enough for me.”

Lena wasn’t a babushka, but she understood the babushka soul, honoring its ancient wisdom. (Babushka means “grandmother” but is used in Russian, as in English, to describe any elderly woman with a certain folksy look.) Babushkas hated it when you ate too fast, when you ate too little, when you looked too thin. Babushkas loved romance novels, puzzle books, and women’s magazines. Babushkas knew about cannibalism; as children, during the famines, some of them had barely escaped being eaten by their neighbors.

Babushkas knew how to grow things, and they sold fruit and vegetables and raw chickens and little plastic cups of forest nuts and berries on every street corner. They foraged when they had to: a friend told me that in the spring, harvesters sometimes found “snowdrops,” the corpses of people, usually babushkas, who’d come to the fields to steal corn for their pigs and had frozen to death or been killed by wild boars. The boars were the worst, because they’d start to eat you before you were dead.

Every Monday night, Kiev’s babushkas gathered with their few remaining male counterparts and danced to old waltzes played on the accordion. When the weather was warm, they danced on the island between the right and left banks of the city; when it was colder, they gathered in the metro station down the street from my apartment, and I often saw them. I wondered when a babushka stopped being a woman and became a babushka, and whether babushkas were an endangered species. Would they die out, products of a lost way of life? Or would Lena, too, become sturdy and square, with a flowered kerchief over coarse gray hair, swollen ankles dripping with flesh-colored stockings?

Babushkas had plenty of free time and a shared outrage over their miserable pensions, high food prices, and bad medical care and housing; they were an important political force. Leonid Chernovetsky, a lawyer who made his fortune in banking, had been elected mayor of Kiev in 2006, in part because of his tremendous appeal to the babushka bloc. He serenaded the babushkas with Soviet tearjerkers, gazing soulfully into their eyes. He offered to auction off kisses; already in his fifties, he still had plump pink lips. He knew how to tell babushkas what they wanted to hear: that they were the true heroes of Ukraine, that the citizens of Kiev should kiss the hems of their garments, that he loved them almost as much as he loved Jesus Christ. (He was an evangelical Christian.) Before the election he gave every babushka in the city rice, buckwheat, and sugar in plastic bags printed with his face. He promised that next time it would be pineapples and caviar, that he would buy their apartments and send them to live in beautiful new homes where they would never be alone. (Apartments in central Kiev were very valuable, so people were always trying to trick babushkas into moving out of them.)

Chernovetsky was nicknamed Cosmos; cosmonaut is a slang term for someone fond of dissociative drugs like ketamine and PCP. On one occasion, the mayor crawled under his desk in the middle of a television interview. When he emerged, he explained that he’d been asking God for advice, and that God had said the interview was over. His increasingly erratic and authoritarian behavior prompted calls for a psychiatric examination. In response, he jogged and did pull-ups and laps for news cameras, posing in his little bathing suit, puffing up his chest and flexing his muscles. He was like Putin on acid. The babushkas loved him.

ONE DAY IN LATE WINTER, Alik took me to visit his eighty-nine-year-old grandmother, Lyudmila, in her apartment near the Botanical Garden, not far from where I lived. She had prepared a big spread of pickles and little cakes, along with tea. As we ate, she told us that on her birthday, two weeks earlier, a friend had called and sung her an old love song over the phone. He was the last man alive from her class at the medical institute. As a young man, he’d won prizes for singing; at ninety, his voice was still true. He died that night, on her birthday. She smiled serenely and sang us the song, in a sweet, wavering soprano.

Technically, Lyudmila was a babushka. But she had none of the stubborn folkways of the classic babushka, no scent of the village. She never would have fallen for Cosmos’s romancing. Lyudmila was the product of the revolutionary intelligentsia—of a world that seemed, in some ways, even more distant than the world of cottage cheese cures and the evil eye.

Lyudmila was born in 1920, the child of two idealists from families of modest means. They had moved to a small town southeast of Kiev to become village teachers, enlightening the people. Some of Lyudmila’s ancestors were peasants; her family was part of the gradual movement, in the second half of the nineteenth century, of common people into the intelligentsia. Her mother came from a big Jewish family in Podil, and Lyudmila made frequent visits to the capital city.

Taking advantage of the Soviet Union’s emancipatory policies toward women, Lyudmila went to medical school. When war broke out, she and her fellow medical students dug trenches around Kiev. After the medical school was evacuated, teachers and students marched to Kharkiv, in eastern Ukraine. Lyudmila finished her studies early and was sent to the western front to serve as a doctor in a rifle regiment. Her new husband, a Jewish man from Krasnoyarsk, in Russia, was assigned to the same regiment.

Lyudmila’s first official duty was to act as medical supervisor at the execution of two deserters. As Alik put it, “They didn’t know who the fuck Hitler was—they just wanted to go home.” But most of her time was spent rescuing the wounded. Over the course of the war, she saved the lives of about a hundred soldiers and officers.

Lyudmila’s husband was killed in 1943, just a few months after Lyudmila gave birth to a son who was sent to live in a village with her parents, outside the combat zone. In Kiev, most of Lyudmila’s large Jewish family had been killed at the Babi Yar ravine, along with 150,000 other Jews, Roma, Ukrainian nationalists, and Soviet prisoners of war. Posters had been plastered around Kiev ordering all of Kiev’s Jews to Babi Yar with their documents, money, valuables, warm clothing, and linen. When they’d finished shooting, the Germans blew up the walls of the ravine, burying the corpses along with any wounded.

Before he died, Lyudmila’s husband gave her a Walther, a little German gun, telling her, “If anything happens—you know who we are.” He meant that they were Jews, and that it would be better to commit suicide than to be captured by the Germans. Lyudmila carried her Walther with her through the war and after, when she moved into a tiny, dirty room on ruined Khreshchatyk Street, which would soon be rebuilt by German prisoners of war.

There wasn’t much to eat in the city, so Lyudmila’s son stayed with her parents and their kitchen garden, in the country. Only twenty-three, Lyudmila went on with her life, working as a surgeon. She dressed in fashionable foreign clothes, brought by soldiers, that she found at the Jewish bazaar, and she made new friends, going to dances and the theater. With an acute shortage of men and much anxiety about the responsibilities women had assumed during the war, female veterans were often treated viciously. Lyudmila was accused of being a PPZh—a pokhodno-polevaya zhena, a camp wife, a comfort woman, a whore. She brushed off the accusations and, according to Alik, acquired not one but two lovers, one of them a Party official with a limousine and an apartment with five rooms.

One day a beautiful man named Georgiy came into Lyudmila’s ward with his pregnant wife, who died in childbirth. Georgiy came from a long line of engineers, architects, and artistic types. He and Lyudmila fell in love, got married, and had a daughter, Alik’s mother. Lyudmila outlived her husband and her son, who drank himself to death. She survived the transition from Communism, and she helped raise Alik. She lived to be ninety-three, but she never became a babushka.

LENA WAS A BETTER GUIDE to Kiev than a Russian tutor. Alik suggested a new teacher: Vakhtang, a Georgian-Ukrainian philosophy professor and his friend of many years.

Vakhtang was darkly handsome, with taste that ran to purple fedoras and velvet jackets. In addition to German philosophy, his interests included his band, in which he sang and played the guitar, and frequent trips to Spain. (He came from an affluent family.) His wife, Marta, was equally good-looking; it was said that in their prime they had been the most beautiful couple in Podil.

Several times a week, I went to Vakhtang’s office in Podil for my lesson. I don’t know what Alik had told him about me, but Vakhtang had decided to teach me Russian by having me read short stories that were almost always about sex, death, or drugs. The first one we read, I think, was Bulgakov’s “Morphine,” about a doctor who becomes addicted to morphine during a winter posting in a remote village, missing the 1917 Revolution entirely. (“If I hadn’t been spoiled by a medical education, I would say that a person can only work properly after a shot of morphine.”)

After I’d read a story, I’d paraphrase it to Vakhtang in Russian as he sat in silence, fixing me with his stern gaze. I don’t remember him smiling even once. His was a terrifying and therefore highly effective pedagogical method. I will never forget trying to paraphrase Ivan Bunin’s story “Antigone,” blushing as I searched for the words to explain that the master of the house had seduced his maid in the drawing room. Bunin had implied it with subtle artistry; I had to rely on simple verbs.

“And then—and then—they sleep together,” I stammered.

“Do they sleep together?” Vakhtang said coldly. “Do they lie down? Do they go to bed?”

“No,” I said. Vakhtang introduced me to several words that, while equally inoffensive, were more technically correct.

We read some of Isaac Babel’s stories about the Jewish criminals of Odessa, and Vakhtang told me to try to find the parts that were in incorrect Russian—the Jewish thieves had their own way of speaking. I was delighted by these irregularities, which I found miraculously familiar, their syntax more comprehensible than that of Russian literary language; Yiddish-inflected Russian followed some of the same patterns as Yiddish-inflected English, familiar to a child of New York City. I discovered the joy of reading in Russian (correct or otherwise) for the first time. Every narrative surprise was thrilling, because it was so hard won.

By the time summer arrived, I had learned to speak Russian, though my Russian was speckled with Ukrainian words I’d picked up from signs and from the speech of those around me. Many Ukrainians mixed the Russian and Ukrainian languages, whether unwittingly or on purpose. This mix was called surzhyk, which is the name for a low-grade blend of wheat and rye flour. Since prerevolutionary times, surzhyk had been associated with Ukrainian-speaking peasants trying to make their way in the Russian-speaking city, and with poorly educated people who spoke the language of the streets rather than the language of books. Surzhyk therefore carried a stigma, as it does today.

In White Guard, Bulgakov writes about a wolfish bandit who speaks “a frightening and incorrect language, a mix of Russian and Ukrainian words—a language familiar to inhabitants of the City who had spent time in Podil, on the banks of the Dnieper, where in summertime the wharf’s winches whistle and spin, and shabby men unload watermelons from barges.” Some of Bulgakov’s characters speak surzhyk when they are trying to accommodate the Ukrainian speakers who are seizing political power; in this context, surzhyk is a language of compromise, or cowardice. When Nikolka Turbin, in White Guard, sees his brother-in-law, Talberg, studying a Ukrainian grammar book, he knows for certain that Talberg is a man without principles. Sure enough, Talberg abandons Turbin’s sister and flees with the Germans. In post-Soviet Ukraine, surzhyk—especially in the media—was seen by some patriots as a betrayal of the purity of the Ukrainian language, and therefore of Ukraine itself. Meanwhile, Russians considered surzhyk the risible half-language of southern hicks. Even speaking good Russian with a Ukrainian accent marked a person as provincial in Moscow or St. Petersburg. Soon enough I would be scolded by Russian acquaintances for speaking with a Ukrainian accent, or for using Ukrainian words by accident.

Some Ukrainians scolded me for studying Russian rather than Ukrainian—we were in Ukraine, after all. Language policy was one of Ukraine’s most fraught political issues. In 1989 Ukraine passed a law making Ukrainian the only official state language. Government institutions suddenly switched to Ukrainian, which caused problems: many Ukrainian citizens weren’t even fluent in everyday Ukrainian, let alone familiar with the Ukrainian versions of the specialized terms of their fields. Sergei, a doctor I knew at the Ukrainian Network of People Living with HIV/AIDS, told me about scrambling to learn Ukrainian medical terminology after spending years learning it in Russian. Street signs were changed to Ukrainian. To save money, this was often done by simply altering the existing signs, since many place names differed only by a couple of letters; in some of Kiev’s metro stations, you can still see the places where the Russian letters used to be. As an act of resistance, especially in Russian-speaking regions, people defaced the signs so that the spelling was Russian again. Some Russian speakers—especially in the predominantly Russian-speaking east and south and in Crimea—were angry at the sudden change of language. They felt, not without reason, that they were being pushed out of the new Ukraine.

In the 1990s and 2000s there were multiple attempts to “Ukrainize” the media and advertising. Some of the angriest popular debates took place around the dubbing of imported shows like the American soap opera Santa Barbara, which was hugely popular in the former Soviet Union. People in Russian-speaking Crimea, in particular, were furious when the show was dubbed into Ukrainian, which they couldn’t understand. Eventually the Crimean parliament decided to switch Santa Barbara back to Russian, in hopes of “avoiding the kindling of anti-Ukrainian actions.” At the same time, Ukrainian television dubbing became famous for its high quality, with clever insertion of Ukrainian cultural references. One of my Ukrainian friends, raised in a Russian-speaking household, told me that he learned Ukrainian by watching Alf.

Partly in response to the new Ukrainization rules, television shows started practicing “nonreciprocal bilingualism.” A talk show host might speak Ukrainian, as mandated, while guests would speak whichever language they preferred. Some talk shows had one host who spoke only Ukrainian and another who spoke only Russian. This reflected common practice in Ukraine’s public sphere and on the street. People would switch between Russian and Ukrainian depending on the circumstances. For instance, Russian speakers might switch to Ukrainian in markets, hoping to get better prices by emphasizing their kinship with the Ukrainian-speaking country people who’d come to sell produce and meat there.

I myself often engaged in nonreciprocal bilingualism in shops. A salesperson would speak to me in Ukrainian; I would answer in Russian, because my knowledge of Ukrainian was only passive; the person would continue speaking Ukrainian. Many Russian visitors to Ukraine considered this a form of rudeness, an uncouth nationalism; in fact, it was a compromise that worked well for most of the population. My friend Yulia M.’s father spoke Russian as his primary language, while her mother spoke Ukrainian; through decades of happy marriage, they mixed the two languages, as many Ukrainians did.

Though political debates about language policy could be explosive, in daily practice most Ukrainians were easygoing and practical about language choice. Ukraine’s bilingualism made it an easier place to learn Russian than Russia itself. Russians are more prescriptive about language use, less tolerant of mistakes, and less able—or, I think, willing—to understand the Russian of a nonnative speaker. Ukrainians, being accustomed to a mixture of languages and a range of dialects, pay less attention to mistakes, and figure out what you mean much more quickly. This was something I loved about Ukraine; to me, it seemed a mark of pluralism, of cosmopolitanism.

Occasionally, I’d encounter a nationalist zealot who would refuse even to listen to Russian. I met very few of these, but every encounter was memorable. One guy in a bar demanded that we speak English rather than Russian, and then lectured me about how the only way to stop Russia was to blow it up. In a hotel in Lviv, in nationally minded western Ukraine, a hotel receptionist refused to speak to me until Alik intervened and explained that I was speaking Russian because I was American. Suddenly the receptionist smiled sweetly, and we finished our conversation in Russian. She didn’t speak English.

At the same time, I knew that I was missing out on a certain side of Kiev life. My friend Orysia, a Cleveland-born child of the Ukrainian diaspora, was another grant-funded student in Kiev. She had her very own Ukrainian babushkas, who had taught her to eat honeycomb and to drink birch juice for her health—but with caution, because too much birch juice would make your liver angry. Orysia had grown up speaking Ukrainian and learned Russian only as an adult. She was quiet when we hung out with my friends, who spoke mostly Russian; but she was embraced (often literally) by Ukrainian speakers, who saw her as a long-lost daughter who’d finally come home. One summer in Podil, we went to buy fruit from her favorite corner babushka. Orysia’s conversation with the babushka in Ukrainian about which berries were the tastiest had the tenderness and intimacy of a conversation between an actual grandmother and granddaughter. Russian was the language of urban life, of industry, of empire; Ukrainian was the language of grandmothers, of home.