Seven Signs of the Lion

THE LVIV-KYIV EXPRESS

THE LVIV-KYIV EXPRESS

Nicholas woke up at 4 a.m. – an hour before he had set his alarm clock. Premonition of an impending trip always made him super sensitive to time. He was on his way to a Fulbright orientation meeting in Kyiv, which was little more than six hours away on the express train. After he called the taxi at 5 a.m., he stepped out into the entryway of Building 13 on Hyphenated Writer Street as he called it, Nechui-Levytsky Street, and waited there for ten minutes till it arrived. That was one guy with two names. Nicholas’s apartment was #11 in Building 13. Although he knew that fact, he had never focused on the number of the building before. Sleep depravation makes you conscious of different things. Not that it bothered him that it was building #13. He wasn’t superstitious. But he was glad his apartment wasn’t #13. That would have been a double-whammy. The cobblestone streets with tramcar tracks in both directions were wet with snow falling at the just below freezing air temperature and melting right as the snowflakes hit the rust-colored and black cobblestones. The streets were empty with an unearthly light cast by the haphazardly lit street lamps, one or two of which would flicker from time to time. There were only two or three people waiting at track #4 in the pre-dawn light – probably because he had arrived a little earlier than he expected. The cab took him only five minutes to get there and cost him ten hryvnas – about two dollars.

The train ride started off as a boring one – rocking, rocking, but not enough to lull you to sleep. As it rocked to and fro and occasionally screeched, and as he glanced to the right at the woman right next to him in seat number six in wagon number six, all he could think about in his sleep deprived state (he got up at 4 a.m. to catch the 6:20 a.m. train) was the way the beautiful unknown woman’s stretch pants both showcased and covered her womanly shape. He could see that often enough as she leaned forward to talk to two girlfriends in the two seats in front of her. He developed a new appreciation for spandex or polyester – whatever material it was made of. Her top showed off her trim figure. A tight, ribbed sweater, hunter green in the upper third that accentuated that part of her torso, black below to match the slacks. A glittery black plastic bag with gold highlights sat in front of her on the floor. And her black leather handbag with brass zipper handles lay on her lap. Her henna-colored hair was the typical color found on every other woman in this part of the world, young or old. But on her somehow it was fashionable and not tacky. The green top of her sweater accentuated her wide shoulders. An embroidered x-pattern on the outer sides of her slacks that showed bare skin underneath drew attention to the shapeliness of her leg. A tantalizing touch of an accent. She wore two gold-colored rings on her right hand with small coral-colored stones and a dull gold-colored loose bracelet. While her physical beauty was just that – external beauty, the woman’s hyperawareness of her own attractiveness somehow considerably irritated Nicholas. She constantly pulled out a small pocket mirror to check her mauve lipstick and eye shadow. She also kept looking at her short-cropped nails that suggested someone who worked a lot with her hands and not a prima donna. The nails were colored in a lustrous opalescent tan shade. He could see the beauty was fatal, but he knew it wasn’t for him. Too much glitz. Right then she gave him a sly, inviting smile in a quick glance to her left. And that changed everything….

Nicholas certainly would be remiss if he didn’t assure you here that nothing happened, that it was just his imagination gone a bit wild. Yet only two people can say for sure one way or another what did or didn’t happen, and he was one of them.

In Kyiv, Nicholas stayed at the centrally located Soviet-style high-rise Kozatsky Hotel that was just off of Kyiv’s Independence Square (Ploshcha nezalezhnosty). It was two metro stops away from the train station and a five-minute walk from Hrushevsky Street where the Fulbright offices were located.

The informational meetings at the Fulbright offices were largely uneventful except for the live performance of seven of the members of the a cappella Drevo Folk Ensemble. The name of the group was the old Ukrainian word for “tree.” It was also the same root for the word “drevniy,” meaning ancient. So whether they were ancient or a tree, or an ancient tree, the voices were exquisite in their disharmonic harmonies learned in villages from the babtsi, the grannies, who always wore sun- and time-faded scarves of many colors. Those elderly women, whose faces were wrinkled like the whorls on the bark of an ancient majestic oak, were the keepers of culture and wisdom and transmitters of knowledge from generation to generation. There were songs of lament, over the loss of a son or husband or child. There were songs of joy: wedding songs, songs of love and lust, songs of life. He got to meet the twenty or so other Fulbright scholars at a reception after the performance. A feminist writer there by the name of Lydia in a short-short black and white miniskirt with knee-height black leather boots and jet-black hair zoomed in on Nicholas for an inordinate amount of time. She, he would say, suggestively, invited him to come over to visit her place during his stay in Kyiv. She was so overbearing that Nicholas felt overwhelmed by her presence. So he looked for a pretext to escape her cloying orbit. At his first opportunity and gasping for air from the one-sided conversation, Nicholas shifted his attention to a reticent but attractive female singer from the Drevo group who turned out not to be very talkative. So he chatted with a few of the other singers at the reception as well as with the group’s leader.

Just one other event became embedded in Nicholas’s mind from that brief winter trip to the capital. As he was walking past the two uniformed hotel employees toward the elevator, they greeted him in Russian after he showed them his room key and hotel-provided ID-receipt. He answered them in Ukrainian. After going up to his sixth floor room, he made his way to the dezhurnaya, the older woman keeper of the hotel keys for each floor. His hotel room was spartan by any standards with just an old single bed, a dull brown and chipped formica-covered desk, an equally decrepit bland-looking chair, and, fortunately for him, a separate bathroom, but with towels that were so nearly paper thin they were more like dishcloths. As he was unpacking the one small duffel bag that he had taken with him for the trip, the antediluvian monstrously large old rotary phone began to ring loud enough to wake the dead in the lobby five floors below him. It was clattering like a lumbering Soviet tank stuck in the mud. He picked up the receiver off the rattling tank.

“Do you speak English?” A young and quite enticing female voice asked him from the other end of the line in ever so mildly accented English.

“Yes… I do…,” Nicholas stuttered, unsure why someone would call him in a city where no one knew his number.

“Would you like a beautiful girl for the night?” She asked.

“That’d be great!” Nicholas laughed as he answered in a kind of afterthought, “I just don’t want to pay for it!” (“Or catch any venerable diseases,” he thought to himself but ended up not saying it.)

There was dead silence on the other end of the line. His phone rang two more times at fifteen-minute intervals until the maiden of the night with nearly impeccable English skills gave up the ghost with him, off to find another partner more willing to part with his Euros or dollars. That certainly was the highlight of his first stay in Kyiv.

Nicholas’s trip back to Leopolis-Lviv the next day on the evening express train was mostly sleepy and uneventful.