Seven Signs of the Lion

ARRIVAL

ARRIVAL

Nicholas’s first impression of the country after he arrived by plane from Warsaw was, to be honest, that of a third-world place. The sturdy but noisy Lot Airlines propeller plane that carried him to Lviv took about an hour and a half during a mildly bumpy ride. In looking at the name of the airline, Nicholas focused on the fact that it’s strange how the same word means different things in different languages. “Lot” means “fly” in Polish, “lead weight” in Russian, “fate” in English (as in the English expression “that is my lot”), and in Ukrainian the same as in Russian. It is also the Biblical name of the single righteous man, whose family is saved by God from fiery destruction and whose wife’s curiosity ends up turning her into a pillar of salt.

The cement runway looked weatherworn and pockmarked on the cloudy day. Lviv, Nicholas was to find out, was well known for its cloudy days and rain. Nicholas remembered a Natalka Bilotserkivets poem he read in his language class with Andreya that started with the line “It always rains in the cities of Lviv and Ternopil.” Bilotserkivets, whose name means “white church,” was actually from Sumy and not from Bila Tserkva (the town of White Church – 400 kilometers away from Sumy) in Central Ukraine, though the latter is probably where her distant relatives might have been from. Your last name in Ukrainian can often reveal where you come from. Nicholas was learning that names could be quite meaningful in Ukrainian.

The plane landed and Nicholas got off with everyone else to board a dilapidated pigeon-blue and grimy white bus that took the passengers to the gray, green and dingy terminal room. Various declaration forms were strewn all about in different languages in antediluvian holders on the walls and on very short tables that were quite uncomfortable to write on. Nicholas couldn’t find a declaration form in English or Ukrainian, so he decided to do the one in Russian because he could at least understand it.

It took nearly an hour to get through the baggage check and customs at the airport. They questioned him on whether he had gifts for relatives (all his aunts and uncles had died, though he might have had some cousins left, but he didn’t know them). But his name was a common one – so he could be related to half the country. Two faculty members from Ivan Franko National University greeted him at the airport – Marta and Roman, who were linguistics and history professors respectively. Roman was a bearded man of average height with long dark hair and an expert on the ancient world of Greece and Rome, and Marta was a sweet and animated comparative linguist specializing in metaphorical constructions in English as compared to the Slavic languages. They were his good and caring hosts for the duration of his visit and helped get him settled in his apartment at 13 Nechui-Levytsky Street and in learning the ways of his new land for the next five months. Their friend Marko, a photographer for the Lviv Gazette newspaper, happened to have a trusty, not very late model maroon Volkswagen, which Marko offered for picking Nicholas up. Nicholas was to find out that Nechui-Levytsky was a realist Ukrainian writer from the 19th and early 20th centuries. For Nicholas, the city of Lviv-Leopolis turned out to be far from a third-world land and more than a cold, gray, wet and stony city. It was, rather, a place of great beauty and history, and, apparently, of mystical dimensions and implications.