A Ukrainian Thanksgiving

Another former interview subject got in touch with me recently, saying he'd called off his engagement to a woman from Odessa after she'd asked that their wedding be in the Russian Orthodox Church -- a place she wanted to see him as well, and on a regular basis. As a devout Mormon, Mr. Utah Rising couldn't imagine doing this. "Believe me, it was tempting," he said, "but I would have been living a lie."

What I found most fascinating about our latest communication was that he confirmed a suspicion of mine, saying he was related to William Bradford, who I consider more of a founding father than even Mr. Washington.

"Every Thanksgiving I remember him too," Utah Rising said, "right before I eat a nice meal and watch a football game. :-)"

Who woulda thunk it? From Plymouth Plantation to Kharkov -- and emoticons -- in less than four-hundred years. And with just as much religious conviction, only shaken up and stirred a little bit.

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'I wouldn't mind a bit of that'

He's a pensioner, living in Wales, who while in the Navy took part in the British H-Bomb tests in the Christmas Islands in 1958. She's a 44-year-old in China, awaiting her final immigration clearance, who speaks little English. Together, they're man and wife, bangers and mash.

'People have said to me that she's just after a visa. To which I say: "Yes, of course she wants a visa. Of course she wants a better life. And who can blame her?" But it works both ways - I get companionship, so I think it's a fair gamble.

'It's all very well everyone taking the moral high ground but as far as I'm concerned that's their own pettiness. This is my life and after all my years, I've earned the right to do as I please.'

So how does a man who's had both hips replaced, is awaiting knee and hernia surgery, and who lives in a village that is home only to those of pensionable age, find a Chinese wife?

... a friend in the nursing home told Mr Miller he had seen an advert in a local newspaper for a dating agency which specialised in matching British lonely hearts with Chinese brides. 'He had already made an appointment so I asked if I could accompany him to see what it was all about,' Mr Miller recalls.

'When we got there, the man who ran the agency was a very ordinary man, not particularly attractive at all, I must say, and he had this lovely, attentive Chinese wife. It got me thinking. I thought: "I wouldn't mind a bit of that."

If you want to read more about this man's search for a companion, including reference to the troubles that come with using hand-held translators ("One time when I typed in 'affection' it came up with 'love for an elephant' instead.") read the even-handed Daily Mail article here. It may be the best bride-hunter profile I've come across. Certainly the most well-written.

If you don't have time for that, I'll leave you with the last line: 'I'm conscious of it possibly going wrong, of course I am,' says Mr Miller. 'But look at it the other way. I've got five, maybe ten years left on the clock. Six months ago, mine was a very vacant life. Now it's full and happy.

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Locked Hearts in the Land of Plenty

There are men in Ukraine who can leave this country without getting married, proposing, or having so much fun they believed it impossible to do either of the previous two.

There are men -- and nineteen or twenty year-old men at that -- who did not busy themselves with the thought of Ukrainian blondinkas when they were flying into Borispol International.

There are men who believe marriage is essential, one of the main reasons for being on earth, but not the reason to be in Ukraine.

In Kharkov, there are maybe thirty of these men. Mormon Missionaries.

"The leaders of our church tell us to 'lock our hearts' while we're here," Elder Larson told me this evening, after I'd attended one of the seven weekly free English lessons offered to Kharkovidians at one of the church's many properties in the city.

Before locking their hearts for their two-year mission, the young men coming to Ukraine (Mormons can serve a mission between the ages of 19 and 26) attend an eleven week training session in Utah. For eight hours a day, they study the Russian language, but while their book instructs them a little bit on how to use a phone or catch a train, it primarily prepares them to preach the gospel.

"When I first came here," Elder Larson said, "I could go up to people and say, 'We're representatives of our church and I'd like to talk to you about the Book of Mormon,' but then they'd start talking and I wouldn't understand a thing."

Because most Missionaries can initially preach the gospel better than they can order a pizza, each new-comer is paired with a Missionary who has already been "in-country" for an extended period of time.

Together, they go out, door to door, all over town, their daily mission to speak to as many people as possible. But even if they are told not to date while on their Mission, that doesn't stop people from trying to penetrate their defenses.

"I've had babas (old women) say, 'I don't want to speak to you about your church, but here, meet my grandaughter.'"

Polite that these young men are, the young women are often invited to English lessons.



Today, at a Mormon Church on Chernyshevskovo Street, there were two English classes on offer, one for beginners, the other for those more advanced.

I approached one of the Elders in the classroom for advanced English speakers, saying I was looking for Elders Larson and Howard, whom I'd previously run into no less than seven times around town. I'd promised to help out one night after they'd let me jump ahead of them in line at the train station to catch the afternoon electrichyesky to Belgorod one afternoon.

"They should be back in thirty minutes," the young man said, "but why don't you stick around. This is the advanced class. It sounds like you belong here."

"I'd hope so," I said. "I'm American."

Twenty-eight people attended the hour-long session, most of them in their twenties or late teens. Two 19-year-old church elders ran the discussion group, splitting us up into groups of five or six and assigning each group a separate holiday. My group got the Fourth of July. We were asked to speak about it to the class as a whole after ten minutes of discussion.

"Excuse me very much," the man next to me said, leaning in with his cigarette breath, "but at Liberty Station, they are having fireworks?"

"The Statue of Liberty?"

"The Statue of Liberty," he said. "Yes."

I nodded. "Great displays of fireworks at the Statue of Liberty. Very impressive."

Of the four Ukrainians in my group, two knew women who'd married a foreigner. One woman knew an old college girlfriend who had been living in Manteca, California for five years now, where she had recently started working as a teacher.

"She's happily married?" I asked.

"Oh yes," she said. "She comes to Kharkov once a year, and this year, her husband also came." With a sly smile, she suggested there were some problems with this, as his last name was French. But we had reached a conversational impasse. Either she couldn't explain or I couldn't understand.

"LeConte?" I said.

She nodded. Again that sly smile.

"I see," I said.

Cigarette Breath leaned in once more, this time with a face I knew well. It was tensed up until the words came out. I know because I wear the same face everyday, before releasing the imperfect Russian words going through my head and hoping they gain a favorable response.

"I know five living in the United States," he said.

"These are women living in the states?"

This confused him. He gave me a blank stare. His teeth were uneven, the tops blackened and sharp.

I revert to yes-no questions at times like this. "Do you know women in the United States who have married an American man?"

"I have five brothers," he said. "Or no, cousins." I nodded, and we somehow got to talking about one of these brothers-cousins-women, who had married a Spaniard but then left him and taken up with a Swede, or no, married a Spaniard living in Sweden.

"They met on the newspapers," he said.

I should have understood but didn't. I repeated what he said.

"She reads his plea, and they write letters."

"On the newspapers!" I nodded. Of course. It had to be an old mail-order bride catalogue or something similar, something from the pre-internet age, because this brother-cousin-woman had married ten years ago, and was now already divorced and loving her new life Sweden.

"I do not want to go to America," Cigarette Breath said, with an apologetic bounce of his eyebrows. "I have an apartment. It is worth $100,000."

He smiled. I nodded and agreed this was a good thing. We talked some more about Independence Day. I mentioned convertibles on parade, beauty queens riding high on the back seat. "They wave like this," I said, doing my best Queen of England. "And then we have barbecues, of course. You know barbecues?"

"We have them now," one man said. "In our stores. They are round."

I agreed they were, and spoke of the many types of meats we cooked. The man familiar with the American barbecue translated the words into Russian so the others could follow along.

"Big poultry?" Cigarette Breath said. "You cook this?"

I looked at him.

He said, "Your nation's bird."

I shook my head. He regrouped.

"You will go into the forest for Independence Day?" he asked.

"No. Not so much," I said. "More a park. We're not a forest-going people like you are. Do you know what a gazebo is?"



After our session, I found Elders Larson and Howard --or Staryeishiny Larson and Howard, as they're known in Russian -- and spoke with them in the hallway near the beginner's classroom. While we spoke, one of the elders asked a passing Ukrainian man of about twenty if he knew anyone who'd married an American -- three girls, he said, before breaking off into a discussion with the two young women facing him, one of whom, before leaving with him out the front door, said she wanted to marry an American too.

But not the Mormons. In addition to the front door introductions of babushkas, they must face down those offered to them by the members of the church in Ukraine, who often want the Missionaries to marry a daughter or grand-daughter and take them home at the end of their two-year stay.

"We don't want to do that," Elder Larson said, "because then we'll be taking away the future of Ukraine -- the growth of the church here. We want to build up the church in Ukraine, and to do that there's got to be a strong youth movement."

Not everyone can do that, though. We are all of us sinners, The Good Book says, and some Missionaries unlock their hearts before getting that exit stamp at Borispol. Sometimes, a missionary is transferred to another city in order to refocus his attention. Once in thirteen years, a young man was sent home for not living up to the church's moral standards.

Then there are those who have come back, including one missionary whose two-year term concluded just four months ago. Within a month, he was on a flight back -- for a young woman. His fellows missionaries gave him a little ribbing for this, Elder Larson said.

"We say, 'If you have time for a girl, you probably weren't preaching the gospel as much as you should have been.'"
Like me, Elder Larson had seen a lot of American men in Ukraine, meeting almost all of them in the internet cafe.

"A lot of them don't come here for marriage," he said. "They come here for the girls -- lots of girls."

At the beginning of our conversation, Elder Howard was arguing the finer points of scripture with a Ukrainian who had an almost lawyerly command of English. Now he joined our talk, the three of us left alone in the hall, and the near grin he had on his face, the unblinking attention he gave me, it all suggested he either had me figured out -- a funny boy journalist here to ridicule them -- or else was half-embarrassed to say what he believed. Already he'd told me that they believed their church had prophets, and that when they sent in their request for a mission, it was these men who divined where the Lord wanted them to be. I think I'd passed a test when I'd gotten through that without a smirk. Now, as I asked him what his church would tell some of these men coming here, he gave that look again and tested me with this:

"We believe the sex act is a sacred gift that should only be shared within the bonds of marriage. It's not a toy. It's a sacred gift that God's entrusted with us -- the god-like gift of creation."

After nine months here, the Mormons were like a dish of peach sherbert between courses of a rich meal. A nice way to cleanse the palette.

I left them in the hall, thanking them for the interview, our goodbyes a little awkward, as they shared a look between them as I started away. Should we? They didn't. I walked home without even the offer of a book.

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Mr. Florida

I've read that the magic words to women seeking an American husband are, "I own my own business." But many of the men I've met are already retired. One guy, now an agency owner in Kherson, was a "dot-com guy" who took the cash buy-out weeks before the stock-option guys woke up broke; another, the one I'll profile here, was in real estate -- a guy who sold everything at the age of forty and then settled into the types of jobs, private investigator for a law office, Coast Guard, fitness trainer, that keep one occupied more than well-paid.

He was just shy of 50 when we met, a muscle-bound man who lived in a community in the South of Florida overburdened with golf courses and gates.

He came to the Former Soviet Union less than a year ago, but had already been back three times. To start, he arrived for the romance tours, but seeing them for what they are -- meat-markets that produce very few marriages -- he left them behind and went for a more personalized approach. After his dealings with numerous dating agencies between Ukraine and Russia, he'd compiled a list of interpreters and drivers, people who often knew girls interested in dating foreigners, even if they weren't signed up with an online "marriage agency."

One interpreter was so well-stocked with introductions, you have to imagine she was poaching girls from the agency that originally employed her.

"I came to town," he said, "and met her in a cafe, and she had dates for me from eleven a.m. until nine that night. One girl an hour," he said, smiling at the absurd indulgence of it all.

But Mr. Florida wasn't the type of man who could only find a woman if someone sat her down in front of him. He didn't smoke or drink ("I have no idea what a beer tastes like," he said), he was religious about working out, and he had a body that was twenty-years younger than the age on his driver's license. So when he met a couple women in the Moscow subway, it was more than just the map in his hand and the confused look on his face that drew them toward him.

One of the women he met this way was actually looking for a foreign husband, having signed up with an agency that was affiliated with the massive Anastasia Web. They went out twice, when they first met and a couple months later, when Mr. Florida returned and took her to St. Petersburg. But it was only after he came back to Florida that he got his first email from her.

"It was from her marriage agency," he said. "It said, 'I just read your profile and you look like a very nice man. I would like to learn more about you.'"

He was confused at first, and called to ask why she'd written him. But she said she'd written no such letter, leaving him to understand what many men are slow to realize -- that these marriage agencies make money on the letters they send and receive. Each missive coming in and out generates a fee, and a translating cost, and so many of these companies are nothing more than "letter writers," companies that hope to keep you sending copy when you see the picture of the beautiful woman who has just "contacted" you with her dreams of love and relocation.

Despite his attraction to the young woman in Moscow, Mr. Florida soon moved on. Like many beautiful women in Moscow, he said, the one he left behind was used to having things her way.

"We'd be walking down the street," he said, "and she'd tell me not to go in a certain direction." He smiled at the memory of her mistake and patted his chest. "I said, 'I'm the mushina'"--I'm the man--"'I'm the mushina.'"

Mr. Florida was dead-set on leaving his trip with a wife. He had his list of candidates -- three women in their twenties whom he'd already met -- and he planned to give them each a couple days to help him make his decision. Which isn't to say he didn't have time for the unexpected. When he was in Kiev, he'd met a young woman on the street -- stopped her with a quick word and then taken her out to dinner. He offered up his digital camera as proof and showed me a photo, on the LCD display, of an attractive young blonde. Later in the conversation, I absent-mindedly clicked through to another photo -- of the blonde in the bathub, covering her breasts with one arm and her face with the other.

"Oh, you got to that one," he laughed, judging from the look on my face. "Yeah, she was a good girl, but it just wasn't there."

He's still looking.

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The Hunt of Red October

Red October, who visited Ukraine last week to meet the one woman he'd contacted through a marriage agency, is not your typical American. In fact, after participating in a Duke University study on cultural identity, he's got the data to back it up. From Mongolia to Eastern Europe – this is where he's most likely to feel at home, he said. To reach this conclusion, researchers put him through a psychological exam, gave him a series of written tests, and even had him react to a fabricated language that was designed to reveal his most natural thought patterns and closest linguistic grouping.

From Mongolia to Eastern Europe. For a man of English, Dutch and Polish origins, this may seem an unlikely grouping. But then Red October, who served six years in the US Navy, including time on a nuclear submarine, had an unlikely childhood. The adopted son of a U.S. serviceman and his Korean wife, he was shuttled off to his Korean grandmother, with whom he lived until he was twelve, when he didn't prove the answer to his parents' martial woes. While other American boys and girls were developing their first crushes and maybe falling for the Girl Next Door, he was living in a mountainous village without a television or a phone.

In this village, when he was eight years of age, he first dreamt of a woman he'd see in his dreams throughout his life – a woman with dark hair and a voice just so. Nothing remarkable, but lasting and memorable all the same, as any recurring dream is bound to be.

When he met his first wife, Red October says he thought she bore a resemblance to this woman he'd see in his sleep. But the magic with her was quickly gone. They divorced after what he described as Jerry Springer-type behavior: excessive drinking, infidelity, selfishness.

"It turned out it obviously wasn't her," he said.

The Dream Girl only reappeared in his life when he visited the Anastasia website and found his current fiancée's profile. For Red October, there was no need to contact or search for anyone else. She was it.

"I didn't come here looking for a fantasy," he said. "I came here looking for the person I've been looking for since I was eight. I found the person I wanted, and that was it."

While he said he was certain from the start, his fiancée was not equally convinced. To introduce himself, Red October sent a seven page letter.

"I thought he was crazy," his fiancée said, "or very, very, very, very good."

When we met at Café Versay, across the street from the Kharkov Hotel, the couple had seen each other in person for less than a week after exchanging hundreds of text messages, emails and phone calls since August of the previous year. Already, they both seemed very comfortable with each other – touching, talking, sitting close. If she wasn't leaning into his ear to ask what I had just said (I spoke too fast, she said), he was leaning into to her to explain what he'd just told me.

Red October understands more Russian than he speaks (this after studying the language for a year at the Defense Language Institute in Monterey, California, where his teacher was a former plumber from Leningrad who'd secured his position twelve days after crossing the border to Finland and defecting at the US Embassy.) His fiancée knows less English. Both have a child from a previous relationship: Red October an 11 year-old son, his fiancée a 10-year-old daughter. At the luxury apartment they plan to share in Seattle, they will speak both languages.

"I thought speaking both languages would help both of them and both of us," he said.

An obvious lesson from his last marriage: to give as much as you want to take.

"I told my fiancée when you come to America, you're my equal," he said.

The sentiment sounded sincere, and it was certainly represented a big change from his military days, when the thirty-something, former Cold Warrior was one of five men responsible for a single nuclear warhead on their George Washington Carver class submarine. 

"I was the magic guy for that missile," he said. "I was the guy to look at the board and open the hatch."

They weren't supposed to know their target, but the coordinates never changed and it was easy enough to look it up on a map: Kharkov, Ukraine. The exact target, a nuclear power plant on the outskirts of town.

"I'd never seen it from ground level," he told me. "I'd only seen it from above."

I left Red October and his fiancee near where I'd found them: at the statue of Lenin on Svobody Square. They asked that I take a photo. It was for their file, I learned. Something needed to convince the US Embassy that their relationship was real and that they had indeed seen each other and that she was deserving of a visa.

I counted to three and took the photograph.   

 

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Utah Rising Part Three

Had lunch with Utah Rising today, whose story begins here and then continues directly beneath this post. He met on Sunday with the woman who wanted him to send her money Western Union, who never thanked him for his gift, and who on the day of his arrival, went to visit her grandparents. The verdict. She’s not a scammer. "She's a player," he told me. "But she's not a scammer." A paralegal by profession, she never lied, he said. She danced around the truth at times, but never lied. In the end, he liked her quite a bit, but he'd already called it off with her, and when they did meet, her looks convinced him not to reconsider.

"She's a Ferrari," he said. "I'm a Toyota truck."

Utah Rising, I realized, was like the majority of the men I'd met -- pretty realistic, not here looking to do what so many figure these men to be doing, getting someone out of their league. In many ways, however, any woman he meets is out of his league. As he told me before, he wanted to marry and he believes a marriage is only strengthened, truly bonding husband to wife, when there is a child involved. Women his age, late forties, are done having children, he told me. "And an American woman under thirty, she doesn't want anything to do with me. She wants Donald Trump."

Another thing he said made me reconsider some preconceived notions. It's often said that the men using these marriage agencies want a young wife so that they can mold them, so that they can groom them to their liking. I sensed there was a part of that in Utah Rising, though he seemed just as willing to do for his future wife what he wanted her to do for him (an example: he expected her to attend his church once a month and allow his children to be raised in that religion; to put up appearances, he'd been willing to attend her church once a month as well). But this is what really struck me. He wants a young wife, he said, because she's adaptable. Not just to him, but to the transition of moving to the states. It's like with a foreign language, he said. After thirty, your brain calcifies. You can learn a foreign language, but it's more difficult. He expect no fewer difficulties in moving from one culture to another. So he was looking for a younger woman, 22, 23, maybe 26, just as much as he was looking for a higher probability of success. Put that way, the lecherous notion -- I want a young wife -- doesn't sound so deplorable.

Overall, I've found Utah Rising quite intelligent. He holds a number of unconventional ideas on diet and science, and he's not unwilling to look at his own position (on religion, for example) from another point of view.

Currently, he's having difficulties that are unavoidable to his situation. Whom does he trust? The translator? The woman? The agency? With differences in culture, he's not sure what to believe. He's met a new woman, through the same agency with the woman described above, but when he wants to spend a quiet evening with her -- away from the paid-for services, away from the costly interpreter -- the agency says she's not available. Does he believe them after he's cut off the paid-for services with the first girl? Does he believe her when she says she's got to study? It is time for finals, I told him. And what about the interpreter? Isn't he an employee for the agency? I introduced him to one of my former students this afternoon. We'll see if her translating eases his mind any. I'll post more on him later.

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Utah Rising - The Western Union Edition

He was disappointed his first morning in town. After driving through the night from Kyiv, Utah Rising had expected to meet the young woman he’d been communicating with through email for several weeks. Let’s call her Natalya. But Natalya failed to call the apartment he’d rented, and her mobile phone was busy all that first day. By six o’clock, when Utah Rising finally got her on the phone, he learned, through the interpreter who spoke with her, that she wouldn’t be able to make it today, that she was leaving in an hour to visit her grandparents, but could she please call when she got back on Sunday?

Mr. Utah told his interpreter to hang up – “Just hang up,” he said. Because Natalya had known about his trip for weeks, and if she was treating him way this way now, how would it be during their marriage?

He should’ve known better, he told me the following evening. He’d sent her a dress cowboy hat in the run-up to this, his first visit to Ukraine, and she’d never even said thank you. And then too there was the incident with Western Union.

Utah Rising had been paying $6 to send this young woman an email, then another $6 to get each translated reply. All of this was done through the marriage agency that had facilitated their introduction, Anastasia Web.

Utah Rising told Natalya it’d be a lot cheaper to exchange email addresses and do this without a third party, but she resisted, saying the marriage agency provided her with a place to use the internet free of charge. If money was a factor (and in Kharkov fees run between sixty cents and $1.40 per hour at an internet café), Utah Rising said he’d be happy to send her some money. She explained Western Union would be best.

“If she was a scammer,” he said, “she was really smart, because she never asked for money.”

Whatever the case, she was smart with more than just him, as Utah Rising learned when he called up Western Union to make a $100 transfer.

“I really shouldn’t be doing this,” the operator told him, “but do you know this woman?”

The man at the call center explained that in the last two weeks, she’d received transfers from six men, each time for between $100 and $400. It was all right there on the computer screen, paid out to the same location in Ukraine, where the average monthly salary is perhaps $150 or $200 per month.

When Utah Rising reported this woman to Anastasia web (a company with offices in Maine and partner agencies throughout the Former Soviet Union) he thought the company would be quick to act. They had an "anti-scammer" policy, after all. But one day after reporting the woman's behavior, he was informed that she would remain on the website and that they didn't believe her to be a scammer.

"Did you investigate her?" he asked.

They said they didn't believe that necessary. And how did they reach that conclusion? Maybe it was the best intelligence available at the time.

"Tell me honestly," Utah Rising asked me the following evening, over dinner at a cafe near Svobody Square. "What do you think of what I'm doing? Good, bad, indifferent, I can handle it. Just tell me what you think. What are my chances?"

I should've reminded him it was a Friday night and he was having dinner with a journalist.

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Utah Rising

I met an American at the front counter of the Internet Club tonight. He was pointing to an address on a piece of paper and speaking to the young woman behind the counter in a calm, controlled voice that somehow didn’t mask his frustration. “Can you tell me where Freedom Square is?” he asked. “I'm looking for Freedom Square,” he said.

And with that, I nominated him my Mail-Order Bride Seeker of the Week, for if every American man looking for love in ten days or less isn’t actually in search of freedom – freedom from courtship, freedom from worry, freedom from rejection – what does he want?

I stuffed my print-out into my shoulder bag and turned to offer my counsel. “Svobody Square?” I said. “That’s right outside the door.”

He turned to me like an orphan, his eyes full of both awe – he speaks English! – and the sort of hope that says, "Adopt me!" He was looking for an office in this building, a marriage agency it seems. I told him to come with me.

I had gathered from the Russian spoken by the girl behind the counter that the office was just next door, so in we went and quickly found ourselves at the base of the stairs -- the trailhead, I figured. We stood there a moment exchanging who are you's and why are you here's, and though his purpose was obvious, mine was more muddled. I told him I’d come for the glory of the written word – “a creative writing fellowship,” I said.

He presumed this meant intensive study at the local academy. I told him otherwise, while allowing that I had taught at the nearby university the previous semester. So they must advise you on your writing, he said. But again, I proved uncooperative. “Actually, the grant affords me complete independence.”

He was stumped. He couldn’t fathom why it was required that I be here. So I at last acknowledged my subject matter. “I’m writing about marriages.”

And thus dawn rose with her five rosy fingers, and the man from Utah invited me to follow him upstairs. I thought you'd never ask.

I stopped on one, only to have Mr. Utah remind me that Ukrainians didn’t count the ground floor – two would be on three, he said. That was right, I remembered. So he obviously wasn’t some rube just pushed off the radish truck. He’d lived in Italy before, it turns out, spoke a little Polish. And so yes, up to three we went, where we found a frosted door on one side that was embellished with no identifying features, then the entrance to a local TV studio on the other. Nothing else but a man smoking outside the entrance to the TV station. I told this man the name of the agency we were looking for and then its number.

“253?” he said. “You want the sixth floor.”

My friend from Utah didn’t believe him, but I insisted we give it a try, if only for the exercise. So we went up, and as we did he told me he’d just arrived in Kharkov, having landed in Kyiv on Wednesday and been driven from Borispol International to this city that same night by a man hired out by another area marriage agency.

But he wasn't just here chasing after a hot, young body. This divorced 47-year-old, a five-time father formerly of the police and military, had used Chinese and western astrology to look for likely matches.

"I don't believe in all that stuff," he was quick to say, and I nodded along, "but I think there's something to the month you were born in."

By the time we got to six, he was looking around for evidence of this agency, his confidence nearly gone. "They really should have a sign outside in English." But I wouldn't let his flagging spirits dampen my efforts. I led him into a darkened hallway like a modern-day Livingstone in search of the source of the Nile.

“Two-sixty seven,” I read from the first door. “It must be here somewhere.”

“Well I’ll be,” he answered.

And then there it was, CASUAL ENCOUNTERS -- or no, CONFIDENTIAL CONNECTIONS -- the words now clear on the sign as we approached it and the door at the far end of the hall over which it was hung.

The office was the size of a studio apartment’s living room. Six computers were assembled there, three facing each side. A young blonde woman sat working at the far one. My friend from Utah introduced himself as a client.

“I’d like you to arrange a meeting with Tanya,” he said. “From Sumy.”

Confidential Connections arranged meetings with girls in Kharkov, and they offered interpretive services, $50 for a half-hour on the phone. But no, the office manager said, they didn’t arrange meetings with girls from Sumy. “You would have to go there,” she said.

Utah Rising wasn’t about to go to Sumy. He asked for them to arrange to have Tanya call him, and if possible, meet him here on Sunday. “I’ll reimburse her travel expenses,” he said, after saying he thought Sunday best, in case she has to work.

The office manager said she would do this and asked for Tanya’s ID number. Mr. Utah opened a blue folder he'd been carrying and produced and a computer print-out of Tanya's profile, the data arranged to one side of a smiling photo. Age: 24. Height: 5’5”. Weight: 110 pounds. Religion: Christian.

Before leaving, Utah Rising asked for the office manager’s name and telephone number. “Elena,” she said, repeating this – “Yelena” – when she saw his confusion, and then accepting the offered pen and writing it down.

To remove the black bar from the woman's face, you must become a member of the Confidential Connections website. This is not an endorsement. Utah Rising will be continued Sunday or Monday. To see more ladies with black bars across their eyes, visit this photo gallery for action shots of them in the park, at the bar, on Freedom Square, etcetera.

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Brazil, the next Ukraine

Ran around town with some men from the British Commonwealth the other night. Very well traveled and just as well-healed. They were uniformly unimpressed with Ukraine. "If this was Brazil," the one said, "I would've been laid twice by now and been coming back for dessert." We were in a night-club when he said this, a very nice one, ultra-modern, but there wasn't much of a crowd for a Saturday night. Those who were there were young and attractive and monied, but apparently the last of these details (there was a $10 cover for men, $6 for ladies -- in a country with an average monthly salary of $150) kept the women from falling into the laps of these men.

Prospects for these world travelers (one of whom also professed to have come to Ukraine to take in the architecture) were better in Cuba, where the women, the lover of architecture told me, didn't even have the money to afford the type of wax job made famous by the women in Brazil. He thought it possible he might have two children there, just possible. The guy was late-thirties and the father of four, well-groomed and well-dressed, tan and fit, the type of man who looks comfortable with a shaved chest.

The other was a sort of Kevin Costner in his latter years, complete with capped teeth. "Brazilian girls just love six," the Costner told me. "Six?" "They learn to have six before they even learn to walk." It was the accent. Six, sex. From somewhere Down Under. He said these marriage agencies were popping up all over, here, South America, the Far East. We spoke for a while about the wonders of the Internet.

Both men were set to return to Brazil after their three-day stop-over in Eastern Europe. "The girls in north Brazil are black," the lover of architecture told me, "in the south they're white, and in the middle they're chocolate." He pushed his nose in when telling me what he didn't like, then spoke of skin color and European features when he talked about what he liked. He'd been going to the mid-lands of Brazil for ten years, in which he'd once come across the most beautiful woman he'd ever seen, though she'd spoken no English and he and Costner were off the beaten path at the time, in a village not accustomed to tourists. Despite his talk of many conquests, including a threesome in Thailand that included one partner filing her nails, he still remembered this lost chance, this failed encounter. "She was chocolate," he said. "She was perfect."

As for his last day in Ukraine, he planned to start it by waking up and practicing a little Portuguese.

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Bangkok and The Third Date

It was a balmy 12 degress tonight in Kharkov, and everywhere I looked I found signs of spring: the kids biking and skateboarding out front of the opera house, the young and old walking through the park, sitting on the benches, and the women up and down Sumskaya in short skirts and their newest fishnet stockings. They are fishers of men, let's say, and why not? Because the "bride-hunters" are back too. They're like the podsnezhki, the first flowers up from under the snow. As soon as the sun appears for a few days in a row, out they come.

A former Fulbrighter back in town for a conference told me about one he'd met on the plane. He was an Angeleno coming into Ukraine to meet his girlfriend. Then he was going to Bangkok. Where he also had a girlfriend? The Fulbrighter didn't ask. What happens in Bangkok even Las Vegas doesn't want to know.

I had lunch with another American earlier this week. He too was from California, the Bay Area, a former military pilot in his early 40s who'd already visited Poland, Lithuania, Moldova and now Kharkov (twice). Loves the culture, he says. But if he was sleeping his way through the countries of the lapsed Warsaw Pact, an another ex-pat in Kharkov says he was doing it all wrong, at least with this latest girlfriend, a 24-year-old. He hadn't slept with her, you see, hadn't even kissed her, and already they'd been on four dates. "I'm telling you," the ex-pat said, "you don't sleep with these girls by the third date, they'll never look at you in that way again. You'll just be her American friend," he said. "Her American friend who buys her things."

Apparently, the American I met wasn't the first bride-hunter who genuinely seemed to want a romantic, old-fashioned relationship. "He's pussy-whipped," the ex-pat said, when the American took another call from his girlfriend on the cell-phone. "Look at him."

The ex-pat is an Aussie who makes me look politically conservative. While the American was chatting with his girlfriend, the ex-pat spoke to me of another bride-hunter he'd met, a man in his thirties who'd had a 19-year-old girl in his bed, topless, and he didn't make a move. Couldn't even kiss her. "I don't understand it," he said. "This girl was beautiful, she takes off her top in his bed, and what does he do? Nothing. Is he mad?"

Can't say, for sure. But it does show everyone's not necessarily going to Bangkok.

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Our Man in Odessa, an update

Here's an update on Bill Fields, the subject of a three-part series last year.

As you may remember, we met in November in Odessa. Bill had returned to Ukraine still limping from the broken leg he suffered while visiting Ukraine, in search of a bride, in February. He had hoped to re-connect with the woman he'd left at that time, but instead he found it impossible to locate her -- even her son couldn't say where she was.

Bill was very disappointed, but after picking up his rented phone and calling a wrong number, he wound up on a date with another woman -- one he'd actually planned to meet, if Oksana, the only woman he'd seen in February, wasn't available (he'd lost contact with her for several weeks). This second woman didn't speak English as well as Oksana, but she had a son who did and so the three spent the week together.

When Bill left, he was still hoping to hear from Oksana (her son said she'd be home in December, back from an extended business trip), though he was also pleased to have met this new woman, for whom he bought a set of language CDs with the hopes of reconnecting at a later date.

Here's the update, received by email this week:

The lady I was seeing while I was in Odessa did not work out due to her son was doing the translating for us and there was a misunderstanding. The lady Oksana who disappeapered has not returned home yet but occasionally I am able to talk to her son and he does not know when his mother will return. She was supposed to be back by Christmas but that did not happen.*

This email brings a lot of questions to my mind, but I'll let them idle till March, when Bill and I will meet again in Odessa. He's still determined to meet a Ukrainian woman, it seems.

I have been corresponding with another lady from Odessa. She is 45 years old and is an accountant. We write each other about every day and I will be coming to see her ... Well I will close for now and write Yulia my letter for today.*

Names changed to protect identities.

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No stress marriages

Six days ago, I was contacted by a man from America's east coast who'd stumbled upon my site at work. The story he shared with me challenged the most commonly held presumptions of an internet-brokered marriage, so, at the risk of putting forth something that sounds like it belongs in a brochure, I'll post it here. I hope he doesn't mind my posting this truncated version; I asked if I could, but five days have now passed without a response. Perhaps it's the season. Anyways, I see no reason not to, so ...

My New Year's resolution for 2003/4 was to have 5 major international vacations, with most of them being to countries where I haven't visited before. (At that time, I had been to roughly 50 countries in various capacities.) One area of the world that I hadn't been to that I really wanted to go was the FSU (Former Soviet Union). None of the friends that I travel with were interested in going to the FSU, and I speak no Russian. (Even today, I still can't roll my r's.) Since I didn't have any connections there, I thought that I would post an ad on Elena's Models. While I adhered to the standard ad, in a very early mailing, I would always mention that I was primarily interested in seeing and experiencing a new country. What did I look for in a travelling companion? Someone around 30, fluent in English, well-educated with a background or at least an interest in history, and enjoying travel.

Inna had joined Elena's Models at the urging of a friend. She felt it would be an excellent way to practice her English. If someone actually visited, she thought it would be fun to show the person her country. She was planning on becoming a professor of history/philosophy in Belarus upon completing her doctorate and really didn't have much intention of leaving.

So, I went to Belarus for a couple of weeks during the first half of 2004. I selected Inna/Belarus and not some other person in that she was the easiest and most fun to talk with, and I figured we could have an enjoyable time together. At the time of my visit, I was dating a couple of women in the US. Of course, neither one was yet serious, but when I got back from vacation, I would have to figure out which one I wanted to date seriously.

Bottom line, Inna and I had a wonderful time together, and I felt that I got to experience a little of what life under Communism must have been like. When I got back to the US, I decided who I really wanted to date. Much to my surprise, it was Inna. We had a wonderful time together about 5 weeks later in Moscow, then a month after that in Prague, then Warsaw, and finally Lithuania. We continue to have a good time in the US. Inna and I have been married for three months today.

I think the secret to my success is that I didn't go to the FSU to "meet a wife", I went to "meet a friend" and to have an enjoyable vacation. Many of the other successful couples that I've met have also met under lower stress circumstances.

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The Story of a Man from Idaho and a Woman from Kherson

ODESSA, UKRAINE -- Before Bill Fields returned to Odessa in November, his sister gave him three gifts. The first, a flat cap like the kind Ben Hogan used to wear while making the turn at Amen Corner, would help him blend in with the Ukrainian population, which he apparently hadn’t done in February, when a mugging in front of the Odessa Opera House had left him lying on the street with a broken femur. The second and third gifts were less ordinary, but then he’d only need them if the first didn’t work and he once again encountered a violent situation.

“One’s a light to blind people with,” he said, “and the other makes this screeching noise.”

When he told me this, with a little dance in his eyes and a lift to the corners of his mouth, he was standing in his rented Odesa flat, a recently refurbished apartment that had walls the colors of the Ukrainian flag, yellow and baby blue. On the window-sill were two hats, one the flat-cap from his sister, the other a more traditional American baseball hat. World’s greatest hunter, it read. Then that last word was scratched out and replaced by another: Grandfather.

Bill Fields was fifty-five, twice married and twice divorced, a middle school teacher from rural Idaho. He had lived a boring life until February 2005, he'd be the first to admit, and I had traveled from Kharkov, fourteen hours by train, to ask him one question. “Why come back?”

He answered with a name: Oksana.

“I thought we were both planning our future life together,” he said.

But not long after his plane touched down at Borispol International, he learned the woman he longed for (imagine an aged Tawny Kitane, say twenty-five years after she writhed atop a car for Whitesnake) had disappeared, along with the future he'd imagined. It was all very confusing.

Since meeting in February, when their affection for one another had been tempered by the dramatics of Bill's mugging and hospital stay, they had remained in contact, communicating at least three times a week, mostly by phone. They had cut down on email, Bill said, because Oksana, though verbally fluent, didn’t write English very well. (“She’s an E4,” he told me, when explaining the Dungeons & Dragons-like system used to rank a woman’s command of the English language. “An E1 means she doesn’t read or write any English whatsoever.”)

Also, her only free access to the internet was in the office of the marriage agency she’d signed up with -- one of the hundreds of affiliates of the Bangor, Maine-based Anastasia web that is located in the Former Soviet Union. And after meeting him, Oksana was trying to stay away from there as much as possible, Bill said.

“When she comes in,” he told me, “they make her answer all the letters from all the men (who’ve contacted her).”

This is one of the ways the agencies make their money. Men using Anastasia web must pay $15 for a woman's email address, then no less than $3.99 more for each message back and forth, more if a message requires translation. The company's partners get a percentage of this.

"She had to write back and say I'm not interested," Bill said. "She's polite, but it's very stressful for her. She'd rather stay away and not answer."

Other agencies are more resourceful. One former translator, also based in Odessa, spoke of women who entered into agreements with agency owners to get a certain amount of each fee her picture generated. Not all of these women were totally averse to meeting a foreign man and possibly getting married, but some were strictly business women -- women who had no interest in even writing their emails themselves. This they left for the agency's translators, with the understanding that, if a man booked a ticket and actually followed her fabricated sweet nothings to Ukraine, she would read all the past missives and be prepared, like an actress on opening night, to smile for the audience.

The translator I spoke with, who asked to remain anonymous and would not identify her past employers, said she had worked for three agencies, all now defunct, and only for those interested in "making a girl's destiny." A fourth agency approached her, but she refused to enter services with it.

"'If you want to work with us,'" she said, when asked to explain what was expected of her at that agency, "'you'll get a lot of money but you'll have to lie and say not sincere things.'"

But Bill was convinced his Oksana wasn't behind such sentiments. Because while their emails had stopped, they had kept in touch by phone -- at least when the lines weren't down and his call, maybe because of the weather or poor maintenance, didn't get cut off halfway through.

All of which is to say, he didn’t think it necessary to receive a solid confirmation from Oksana before flying across the Atlantic. She’d told him, in a letter she signed with her “warmest hugs and a tender kiss,” that though her boss was in "a bad temper," she thought her vacation would be the first of November, and so he’d planned accordingly and written to say he hoped to see her here when he arrived, being sure to give the date and the time. Only in the final days before his departure, without any word from her since that letter on September 11, did he worry enough to call her agency.

“They said she came in in a hurry,” he said, “and had to go on an urgent business trip (to Kyiv).”

When they met, she had worked as a secretary to a dean of a nearby university. But since then, she had been let go – she hadn’t told him why, but he suspected it was her age and declining looks. Perhaps she had been replaced at the front desk by a younger woman with a firmer body. "That's how it still is over there," he said.

So now she was working as a seamstress, a seamstress who worked on wedding dresses of all things. “They make this part,” he explained, indicating the torso of an invisible dress, “and someone else makes this part,” he said, dropping his hands to the waist, “and I guess somebody else puts it all together.”

If anyone could put his mystery together (because what kind of seamstress goes on a business trip?) Bill thought it would be Oksana’s 22-year-old son, Alexei. But when he called him, Alexei’s broken English only offered Bill so much. “Mama’s not coming," he said. And when Bill called again – and he did, four or five times a day, “just in case" – he only learned she’d be back in December.

“She may have a low-end apartment without a phone,” he said.

That could be why he couldn’t reach her. Or maybe not. Maybe it was all a scam, nothing more than an equation involving his hope and her cunning, a certain percent of business and a certain percent of love.

When I interviewed Bill, he had only one day left in Odessa, and though he insisted he was a one-woman man, he didn’t plan to spend it alone. After arriving and finding Oksana gone, he’d picked up his rented cell phone and tried to call the agency that had rented it and the apartment to him. But after scrolling down through the names already programmed into the phone, he went one too far, getting not Odessa Flats but Olya. A young man answered. There was the expected confusion, a polite exchange of names, and then a dial-tone.

But Bill looked again at his phone, last used by another agency client, and thought something strange. He’d brought with him five email addresses, the information he’d need to contact five women in case Oksana didn’t show. One of them was an Olya.

So he called back, and again got the young man. “I says, ‘George, is your mother on the dating side?' He said, 'Yeah.' And I said, 'Well what does she look like?'”

She was in her early forties, a few inches taller than five foot, not quite 130 pounds. It was all kind of familiar, he said, and so they arranged, George, and Olya and Bill, to meet at the Irish Pub in town.

“I didn’t have to go through the agency or anything,” Bill beamed, before acknowledging that introductions arranged through the agency-supplied email addresses cost $50 -- more, by $7 an hour, if you then wanted to leave the office with the woman and a translator.

As it turned out, Olya was indeed one of the five women Bill had intended to look up, so he ditched his plans to see the other four and spent his days with the one.

“She’s cooked me two meals,” he said, “two huge meals that I’ve been eating on since I’ve been here just about. She says I’m like a little boy, and that she’s got to take care of me.”

Now he doesn’t know quite what to do. He’s enjoyed his time with Olya, but she’s an E1, meaning their dates have been a troika, him and her and the son. When I left him, he said he was going to spend his last day in Odessa buying Olya a set of CDs to teach her English. But at the same, he was looking off to December and hoping to hear back from Oksana.

“I will come back to Ukraine,” he said, “and I will probably marry a Ukrainian woman. Whether I’ve found the right one or not yet, I don’t know.”

Before ending above, Bill's story started hereand continued there. All names in this series have been changed to respect the privacy of those involved.

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An Honest Woman, a Hospitalized Man: The Story of a Man from Idaho and a Woman from Kherson

Bill Fields’ second wife spent $30,000 on Beanie Babies. But it was what she bought for only a couple hundred dollars – a urinal – that all but ended their marriage. “She wanted me to hang it in the garage," he said, "so I didn’t track dirt into the house when I worked in the yard. I thought, 'Hey, I’m not a dog living here.'”

Not long after this, the lead-in to Bill's second divorce, one of the middle school teacher's friends, himself married to a Muscovite going on ten years, handed him a catalogue advertising "mail-order brides" from the Former Soviet Union. "I took it just kind of like a joke," Bill said. "But finally I decided to join."

The trip he took to Ukraine in early 2005 won’t be found in any marriage agency’s promotional literature. That he felt a strong connection between him and Oksana, the first woman he dated, is front-page copy, but his mugging outside the Odessa Opera House, a grand baroque building designed by Viennese architects in the late 19th century, that's not something shadow-boxed beside a smiling wedding photo on a testimonials page.

But despite all the trouble he experienced, the bad didn't erase the good. When Bill found himself in bed with broken femur, looking at six weeks of hospitalization at $450 a day if his insurance didn't come through and get him out of there, he “found out what kind of woman" his new girlfriend was.

His second wife, he said, would’ve “come in and said, ‘You’re breathing, I’m going shopping.’” But Oksana stayed with him the whole time, bargaining with the hospital, raising her voice when needed, getting their prices down from outrageous to maybe just bad. He was already infatuated, now he was impressed.

“She’s not a drop-dead ‘ten,’” he said when first describing her, “but she’s pretty and she’s honest.”

That honesty was such that Bill trusted her with all the money he’d brought over, and the money his family wired from the United States to cover his initial hospital bills. In all, $3,500 passed through her hands before his insurers, Blue Cross and Blue Shield, agreed to send in a Lear Jet to transport Bill to their nearest participating hospital, in Wellington, England.

“It was one of the saddest moments in my life,” he said. “They wouldn’t let her (Oksana) ride in the ambulance with me to the plane. They physically had to pull her away, she was holding on so tight.”

It continued just like a familiar movie. As Bill was driven away from the last check-point, Oksana approached from behind, a fence swinging shut between her and the ambulance.

For Bill, who now has a plate in his right side that’s held in place by two pins and four screws, this was just more evidence that there was “none of this you-have-to-chase-them-down” with Ukrainian women. “She’s with me, and I’m with her,” he said.
It was better than what he remembered with his second wife, that’s for sure, who was a bit of a “women’s libber,” as naturally aggressive as Oksana was polite. “The part I couldn’t accept,” he said, “was her always saying I couldn’t do right.”

So yes, everything about Oksana was a wonder and a revelation – even how she’d traipse around his apartment in barely anything at all, not flaunting her body, he said, but not showing it any shame either.

While Bill recovered from his injuries near his family in rural North Carolina, the phone calls and emails continued to Ukraine, so much so that he even checked with the local community college to see if it might be able to arrange for Oksana’s 18-year-old son to come to the country on a student visa, if and when he and her mother got married.

As for why she didn’t meet him in Odessa when he came back for his second visit in November 2005, that he can’t explain. But that’s not to say he didn’t enjoy himself again, in however a round-a-bout way. He’d rented a cell-phone, after all, and in Ukraine, perhaps moreso than in any other country in the world, love or something like it can start with something as simple as a misdialed call.

Bill’s story continues here.

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Love and Surgery: The Story of a Man from Idaho and a Woman from Kherson

ODESSA, UKRAINE -- On his fourth day in Odessa, Bill Fields awoke thinking of romantic gestures. Oksana, the thick-lipped forty-two year-old he’d met through the Anastasia marriage agency, was sleeping beside him in bed. They’d been together ever since his arrival to Ukraine three days earlier, a trip for which he'd gotten his first passport, and Bill was getting serious. He hadn’t come here to sleep his way through a romance tour, one of the meet-and-greets common to the "mail-order bride" industry that often has the women outnumbering the men five- or even ten-to-one. Bill saw these socials as nothing more than meat markets, and so before leaving his home in rural Idaho, the fifty-five year-old had only contacted four or five women whose profiles had attracted him online. "It gets confusing if you write to too many," he said. Yes, he wanted the chance to be a one-woman man, and it didn't take long for him to find the opportunity. He and Oksana, a native of nearby Kherson, hit it off, and so while they toured this Black Sea city of one million, all the other women advertised through the Anastasia marriage agency -- more than 8,000 active profiles across the former Soviet Union -- were left online.

On that fourth day in town, Bill left his flat at a little after nine in the morning. He’d seen a shop just a block away, near the opera house, that sold ear-rings, and he thought he’d buy a pair and place them on the pillow. The perfect gesture, he thought. She'd wake up and he'd see it in her eyes. These were the thoughts he was having: to get married, to find the woman who'd share the rest of his life. He was was fifty-five, as sensible as the sun and the moon, and after two failed marriages in the United States this didn't seem so ridiculous -- in fact it only made sense that he try "a different ballgame." Sure, they'd only first exchanged hellos and how are you's two months earlier, but things had quickly progressed to love at twenty-two cents a minute and a $500 phone bill. He thought she might be the one.

As he passed the Opera House, in the heart of Odessa’s downtown, Bill heard a question -- a young man had approached saying something Bill couldn’t make out. Bill shrugged his shoulders and made a face to show he didn’t speak Russian, didn’t understand, which was the truth and nothing more, certainly not the gesture of a man too selfish with his time. So the twenty-something receded from view and Bill walked on thinking of earrings, just a half block away now. He wasn’t a biker. He wasn’t a brawler who’d spent his years in a bar; he was a middle-school teacher from rural Idaho, math and history, it was mid-morning in this city built for Catherine the Great, and there were people all around – he had no reason to keep his head on a swivel.

He didn't see the attack. Bill landed on his side, hearing a pop and feeling the pain shoot out from his hip. He’d been leg-whipped, that was the best he could figure it, the man had come up from behind and kicked his legs out from under him, and now the guy was crouching over him and patting Bill down, moving his hands across his chest and lingering at every pocket. But he was prepared for this; Oksana had warned him. She’d told him to keep most of his cash at home, to take only a thin wallet out onto the street and hide it on his person, and most of all, she'd said, do not go out alone. She’d made him promise her that. “Don’t go out alone.” But it was nine o'clock in the morning, and he wanted to make a romantic gesture.

Bill opened his mouth and said something, not a bark, more a confused wail, but then it didn’t matter – the guy couldn’t find anything, the attack would be for naught, and so he eased off and "just sort of mingled into the crowd," leaving Bill lying there unable to get up.

He looked around for help. There must have been ten people nearby, but no one drew near, and he wasn’t going to lie there forever, not in this street. So he pulled himself across the sidewalk and up the side of the nearest building.

“I probably looked like a drunk,” he said. “I hung on, I leaned myself against the wall dragging myself back to the flat and up three flights of stairs.”

So instead of a pair of earrings, instead of that look in her eyes and the conversation it might have led to, Bill returned to Oksana as a collapsed man on the hallway floor. She got him into bed and ran back and forth between him and the kitchen, feeding her boyfriend hot soup and tea. Bill checked to make sure his legs weren’t uneven, a sure sign of a dislocated hip -- he'd heard this on TV -- and then he told Oksana that if he got confused or short of breath it means shock and she'd better call his sister Susan in North Carolina.

For forty-five minutes, Bill thought the pain might be the result of a deep bruise, nothing more, that it might go away. But he was growing colder, shaking more, and so at last the call was made and a doctor came with the ambulance to ask if he could lift his leg. Bill couldn’t. Bill’d broken something, they'd need x-rays to be sure but he'd certainly broken something, and so off they went, doctor and all, everyone in the ambulance to the hospital – a cash hospital, he learned before the trip.

“Two-hundred and fifty-dollars didn’t even get me in,” he said when me met in Odessa in November, almost nine months after his first trip to Ukraine. “And of course the price went up four or five times because I was an American. I had to pay $100 to the doctor right there,” he said, “and then $900 for the ambulance and my first two days.”

But $900 wouldn’t cover it, not when he learned he’d broken his femur, right where the bone curves in toward the hip, and that he'd have to remain in bed for six weeks. So he paid what he needed to pay and they put him in a cast from the knee down -- not a mistake, though that's what he first thought; it was simply done this way so he couldn't lift his injured leg. "Their medicine's about fifty years behind ours," he said.

It was also about fifty years ahead of him, language-wise. On his second day in the hospital, fearing a needless surgery, Bill made every effort to throw himself out of bed when two doctors, finding him alone in his room, tried to wheel him away -- not to put him under the knife, he later discovered, only for another x-ray.

This accelerated their relationship like that. Bill relied on Oksana more than he'd relied on a woman before. She was his constant interpreter, worrying her English-Russian dictionary until its spine broke into three. She helped the nurses bathe him, she sat with him through the night, she left his side only to go back to the apartment and get the things he needed. This included money, some $3,500 in all, an amount large enough, he thought, to reveal her true intentions.

If he worried about whether or not she'd leave with his money, these fears were carried away with all his others, too many worries all at once, a foreign language and an unknown city, a broken bone and so much unexplained, the power of this after fifty-five years and two failed marriages.

Bill could only lie there and hope for the best.

Bill's story continues here.

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Ukraine is "more better"

When I was a teenager, my fantasies were largely unvaried. Some days I imagined the girls from the annual USC Cheerleaders calendar, others I called upon the image of an archetypal Swede -- a blonde-haired, blue-eyed beauty who was quick to lose her top and knew all the words to "Dancing Queen." I wasn't alone in this regard -- California and Sweden, it was the Mecca to which many men turned their lust. And why not? The Beach Boys sang about California Girls (before David Lee Roth did the same to greater visual effect), and innumerable Hollywood movies brought in a bouncy blonde with a sing-song accent whenever the plot grew too dull. There was nothing more coveted.

But today at 12:35 p.m. local time I learned there had been a revolution and that men the globe over now followed a New World Order. I discovered this in Sundsvall, Sweden, a three-hour train ride up the coast from Stockholm, after being dropped here with a two-hour lay-over en route to my mother’s Norway. At the buffet restaurant inside the train station, opera music played from the speakers, and my fellow stranded passengers sat chattering in Swedish and Norwegian at their tables. The food in the metal tubs was decidedly Scandinavian: sliced roast beef, creamed salmon so soft it fell apart at the touch of your fork, and bite-sized boiled potatoes served whole and skinless. But the restaurant’s staff was not – Middle Eastern, I thought.

The guy who approached me from behind the register was in his late-twenties. He wore blue jeans and a tight black t-shirt that didn’t fully cover the tribal tattoos on both of his arms. His hair was short and black and showed signs of styling products and a good deal of personal care. He was quick with a smile, quick with a bounce of his chin. When he said something in Swedish, I asked in English for the buffet. He rang me up without hesitation, English coming freely and easily to him, and gave me the change from my hundred Kroner bill.

“Where are you from?” he asked.

“California,” I told him, though underneath this I heard something else – an echo familiar to anyone who has lived in a country trying to learn its language: Ya iz Californiyi. “But these days I’m actually living in Ukraine,” I added.

His smile grew bigger here. He bounced his chin and lifted one hand, rubbing the fingers together as if demanding money or worrying over some prayer beads. “It’s more better,” he said. “The women.”

I nodded and grinned and said something in the affirmative – always the agreeable idiot – and then took my tray and went off for my food. But as I sat down to my meal, I couldn’t help but consider this more deeply. I was a Californian, he was living in Sweden, and Ukraine was “more better?”

When he came back out with a stack of porcelain plates for the buffet, I walked up and asked how he’d heard about Ukrainian women.

“My brother,” he said, “two, three times he's brought one over. Always he thinks he’ll marry,” he said, “but always he finds another one more beautiful than before.”

They stayed a few weeks and then were gone, their visas soon to be expired anyway, and then the brother went off again to the marriage agencies of Kiev. After a little more prodding, my new friend told me he’d done the same, though only once. He loved Ukraine.

“But Swedish women,” I told him. “Some men would say they’re the most beautiful in the world.”

His face took on a new look; he recoiled as if insulted. “Swedish women are hell,” he said, “like in Afghanistan. They have money”—he slapped his hand against a back pocket—“and so they’re all”—and now he lifted his nose to the wood beams criss-crossing the ceiling.

“Maybe on the weekends,” he said, “when they have some vodka, maybe then,” he said, but then he was shaking his head as if even this weren’t redemption enough. “Where are you in Ukraine?” he asked.

I told him and explained what little I knew of the city, saying it was very large, more than a million and a half people, and just as beautiful as Kiev -- in every respect -- though certainly poorer.

“So the girls are easier,” he said, again with that smile.

I shrugged a shoulder, dropped my head to one side. Deep Throat said, "Follow the money," but he could have just as easily said, "Follow the women?" So much was economics. This guy had taken his passport, which bore Holland’s name, to Sweden on a four-year work visa, and now he was only saving up his Kroner and planning his next geographical exchange. Who was safe from all of this? Perhaps only the Swedish woman and Californian man.

“And if I”—he pantomimed typing on a keyboard.

“Plenty of sites pop up,” I said.

He asked that I write it down – Kharkov – and so I did in both English and Russian, before at last giving him my card and telling him to call should he ever find himself in town.

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Mr. Mail Order Bride Orderer

Bud Light has already honored many "Real Men of Genius": Mr. Push-Up Bra Inventor, Mr. Underwear Inspector, Mr. Nudisty Colony Activity Coordinator. Now the latest installment in the ad campaign gives us Mr. Mail Order Bride Orderer (audio clip available through the above link).

Tom Bickler, pictured above, sings in the commercials. You may remember him as the lead singer of Survivor, who gave us Duh! Duh-duh-duh! Duh-duh-duh, duh-duh-duhhhh! At which point Eye of the Tiger gets far too complicated to transliterate here. So, the commerical (with Bickler singing in parentheses):

Bud Light Presents Real Men of Genius.
(Real Men of Genius!)
Today we salute you Mr. Mail Order Bride Orderer.
(Mr. Mail Order Bride Orderer!)
Some men flip through a catalog looking for furniture, you flip through a catalog looking for someone to CLEAN the furniture.
(I don't do windows!)
Nothing says, "I will love you forever" like a quick swipe of a credit card at the altar.
(What's your payment plan?)
Women wait their whole lives for a man to say, "I do". In your case, "I do ... agree to pay the sum of 3000 American dollars."
(Let's talk annulment!)
So crack open an ice cold Bud Light O' Catalog Casanova. Your spouse may be full price, but you'll always be our better half.
(Mr. Mail Order Bride Orderer!)

Jay Patches, whose Russian Women's Guide bio says he's been to the Former Soviet Union nine times, reacts to the ad on that site's message board by saying, "Oh, I wish it was only $3,000!!"

Amanda Marcotte at the very chatty Pandagon blog, one of two feminist blogs discussing the ad, is less enthusiastic, wondering if we should "write letters now or wait for the Mr. Wife Beater spot first?"

Echidne at Echidne of the Snakes says she sees what's funny about the spot, but also thinks "the unfunny parts swamp it totally." "It should have had a crack about how the Bud Light will come handy when the guy is digging the grave for this bride while waiting to order the next one," she says.

Just to show that some people can't write comedy.

Hmm. Many interesting things are said about the "Mail Order Bride" phenomenon over at Pandagon, so I'll have to return to this subject in the next day or two. For now, thanks to Kevin M. for introducing me to Mr. Mail Order Bride Orderer.

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Another Kind of Marriage Agency: Part Two

Early in the winter of 2003, when Kevin McMahan was given the choice to spend two years in either Romania or Ukraine, the incoming Peace Corps Volunteer opted for the latter. The Beatles, he explains, sang about Ukrainian girls when they went back to the USSR, not Romanians.
Like several of his fellow Peace Corps Volunteers, Kevin also looked on the internet before he left the United States and found a sampling of web-sites advertising “mail-order brides” and introductions to beautiful women.
“We’re just interested,” he explained. “Everyone hears these stories.”
But despite such stories, those of young beauties willing to flee Ukraine with older less attractive men, Kevin never approached a marriage agency. Instead, on a camping trip sponsored by the youth center where he gave lectures on western ecological principles, he met Natalia Volodymyrivna Yurchenko.
Natasha, as the twenty-two year-old is known, is now married to Kevin, 26, and living in Davis, California. They appear the happy couple, no different than any two Americans you might find at the mall. She sits on his lap while inspecting a photo album; he tells her to tell this story or that, she gives him the occasional look that says more than any word.
But then there are moments during our two hour conversation when Natasha seems as removed from the United States as her Ukrainian accent. Her face tightens and her finger flies up before her, and she speaks in a vocal range Kevin's voice doesn’t possess.
“Even if you have job in my country, this job is so stupid,” she said. “You just work everyday, work a lot of hours, and receive zero,” she said. “Zero! My father, he worked one year in one job; they didn’t pay him – they didn’t pay him, one year he worked!”
Despite such conditions, Kevin was willing to stay in Ukraine if that meant pleasing his wife. “I’d be raising pigs or something,” he said, but he didn’t care.
In the end, the romantic gesture was filed away with the thoughts of a retirement still several decades away, because this was no longer the country Natasha had known as a child, when under Communism the streets were still clean, new buildings were going up, there was no homelessness, and prices were low and salaries, if not high, were at least higher.
“I was not going to stay in Ukraine, I was not going to stay,” she said. “I didn’t know what country I was to go, but I was going to go somewhere.”
Before meeting Kevin and leaving her hometown of Kaniv, Natasha applied for a job as a “stewardess” on AeroSvit, and earned a specialist’s degree in teaching at Pereyaslav-Chemelnytsky Pedagogical Institute, the same institute that matriculated the Brothers Klitschko. To get to her classes, she hitch-hiked once a week for two years, occasionally dealing with the unwanted advances of the motorists who ferried her.
“Our people, they can get used to any situation,” she said. “They are not afraid of anything.”
When not studying, Natasha spent forty hours per week at a nearby orphanage, where she gave English lessons to the children who’d been removed from an abusive home, seen their parents die at an early age, or been abandoned, often at birth and often due to a parent’s inability to afford the child’s most basic needs.
Natasha was paid $45 a month.
“It was difficult to leave Ukraine because there is my family,” she said, “there is all my relatives, all my friends. But I wanted to have new life, new opportunities for life, because in my country it’s hard to find a good job.”
Within a month of coming to America, Natasha was cleaning houses and then finding work as a clerk at a Rite Aid drug store. Kevin, a park ranger, said he came to view his relationship with her as an opportunity for him to share America’s wealth.
“I had this chance,” he said, “and it’s like a Golden Ticket almost. I was like, Why do I need to be selfish? I know how good America is, and we have so much in America, I want to bring Natasha to America.”
He also admits he always wanted to feel wanted and needed, a desire Natasha acknowledges she now helps him satisfy.
“I don’t know computer very good, I cannot drive, I don’t know language so perfect," she said. "But I’m still fine. I feel very good."

Part One can be found here.

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Fat Yuri and Yuri Gagarin

For much of the night, too much of the night, I've been reading the posts at Russian Women Discussion, a bulletin board for men interested in a MOB. As in, "Much of the newbies are stuck in a MOB fantasy," or: "Because of the MOB scene and the agencies it would seem on the surface that women are preparing to leave 'en masse' when actually it could be that it is all big business. If this is so then the money will keep pouring in and the women will be there whether they are real or Fat Yuri's."

MOB? MOB? Mothers Opposing Bush? Men On Benzedrine? Mail Order -- Mail Order Bride, yes. Took me forever too.

Anyways, you can find just about everything and everyone there: professors and laborers, the earnest, the desperate, the lonely, the lustful, the crazed, and even what seems to be the pure of heart. Take this one guy, Timmy K, a union carpenter who earns "$20 an hour with excellent bennies." He went to Kyiv in April when there was no work for him "back here in the middle of the USA," and on his first date arranged through a marriage agency he met Victoria, "a common worker like my self ... a survivor through tough times even by Ukraine standards. Is she interested in my wallet? Of course she is, she wants to see if I can support her and 1 or 2 future children. Did I write down my earnings and my monthly expenses and show her? Sure did and her mother and her step father and her brother and her cousin and some of their friends. Is she aware that in the winter months things can be a little tight for us guys in this business? She sure is, she has lived it herself and understands this perfectly well. Will I take care of her and buy her a car and help her improve her education and do I have a warm and cozy house for her? Yes I can and Yes I will."

Seven thousand dollars he's spent so far on travel expenses, marriage agency fees, translations services and lost work. Times have been tough too, he says, but through it all he's still sent Victoria "about $225 a month plus e- mail expenses and a very nice birthday present for her and a trip to the dentist for her and a electronic dictionary." They have plans to marry in September of October, and then finish the necessary paperwork that would allow her to enter the United States by the end of the year.

"The goal is for me to carry her through the front door of this house for Christmas. She also has 2 new female friends here who want to be friends for her ... Victoria is overwhelmed with this, she is so exited to know she has new friends here ... These two girls are also common workers here in America and this does not bother her, I even sent photos of these two girls on their own Harleys and Victoria is really excited about this. Yes these girls have their own Harley Davidson motorcycles. This is funny, when I was in Kiev, Victoria and I did a lot of walking around Idependence Square area, we would check out the little kiosk sales tents and stuff. We came across one that had Harley T shirts with the Harley logo written on the back in Ukraine and saying Kiev, Ukraine on them. A big hit here with my riding friends. Now she says Tim now I know why you got the t shirts for us. Well it looks like I'll have to sell my Triumph and get a Harley for us and now she wants her own too but that will be a year or so down the road."

But where is the struggle, you say? What good is a story without struggle?

"I am having some difficulty with the lady from the agency I used (to meet Victoria) ... I ... refused to meet about 10 women when I came to Kiev in April. I met Victoria first and we hit it off and that is that. We finally broke away from (the lady from the agency) about 15 days after I got back and started to use the services of another agency (for translation?) that my good friend from this forum referred me too, in her home town ... This guy is excellent and is helping Victoria and I with a lot of things like the passport thing, our wedding and apartments and even some work for Victoria and her mother and father if needed. Well this has made the lady in Kiev mad and also the fact that I refused to write a recommendation {testimonial] on behalf of her services which quite frankly if you ask me were very poor and like I said very questionable on a few occasions. Of course I am grateful to have met Victoria but she has been paid and Victoria and I are moving on with out her. We do not need some one in Kiev when Victoria is from Kharkov. Well this lady thinks I am mean and nasty and has tried to undermine Victoria and I when we were in Kiev, when we were in Kharkov and now after almost 2 months with out her she has suddenly appeared again raising havoc again. She called Victoria's mother and asked her mother to talk Victoria into breaking up with me, she wrote Victoria a letter saying she had work for Victoria in Kiev but she must do this for free because Victoria owed her for meeting me and then told Victoria to dump me because she could get a more hansome and wealthy man for her and that I was worthless and afew other things. Victoria wrote to me and told me this and Victoria told me not to reply and she loves me and wants this lady to leave us alone and that I am her future husband and no one else. All of this took place this last week. At the same time this lady wrote me a very nice letter saying how much she misses us and so on . I have not replied to this last incident to the lady in Kiev, I simply do not want to waste my time or energy on her any more. But I sure would like to write her a good letter telling her my views on this and it would not be nice."

But the man has faith, still our Ray Carver goes on.

I have a lady to think about now, the master bedroom is getting a face lift, some carpet is getting laid , a new floor for the kitchen and the rest of the kitchen cabinets and counter tops, a wall is comming down expanding the bath room,the garage I built is getting electricity for real instead of the dropcord I have leading out there for temporary lighting, my patio deck extension is going to be built a step down for a hot tub. I can get a free hot tub from my brother inlaw in Utah. It is used but we refinish it and put new pumps, a heater and plumbing in it. And a few more things. My home is an older one but very straight and study and it is very livable as it is and would probably be OK for Victoria. I am saving some things for her to make decisions on after all this will be her house and she wants to be part of some of the redecorating and such.

In another post, Timmy K explains how this search started:

It was about a year ago when I looked into this R/W (Russian Woman) thing. It was kind of by accident by telling you guys this you will know a little bit more about me but this is OK. I am an ex heavy drinker, 8 years no alcohol in September. So I socialize with other ex drinkers mostly. In this life style we develop very good friends real friends for life. So since I have a house I will rent a room or two to people who are trying to get their life back on track. Very cheap too. Any way there is this good female friend of mine {just a friend} who wanted to go back to school to get a degree to have a real carreer and make something good out of her life. She took on a full school schedule and more doing all of this on a fast track. She simply could not afford an apartment on the school grants and such. She is an ex paralegal and knows computers very well, I never knew how to even turn one on a year ago last March. So she taught me evry thing she knows, Well being single and not hitting the bar scene and clubs any more it was difficult to find a date let alone meet another female period. So I hit the personals and communicated with a few women all over the US and Canada. No real luck. Then one day this lady from Russia wrote to me from American Singles. WOW WHAT A KNOCK OUT SHE WAS. So needless to say I hit Russian Women on the search and was I amazed, look at all the good looking women looking for men in the west. It was elenasmodels and ofcourse she has a few thousand on her site. She also got about $700 out of me too. The persoonal listing, 100 e- mail addresses, the e- books and a few very expensive translations. I learned alot though, especially on the personal listing/ on line catalogue she has. I was on the internet and evry scammer in Russia knows this. But I was overwhelmed to say the least, every agency you could think of was sending me advertisements and hundreds of women were writing me. The first 2 weeks on the personal listing I got over 150 letters from women alone. Then I thought I found miss right actually 4 times I thought I found miss right but the last one was right before Christmas and I sent her $50 and then $100 for Christmas. Never heard from her again, bummer my heart was broke and my ego was punctured pretty good. So along come Bruno to my rescue ha ha ha and through him I met some more women through another site but as Bruno will tell you I am a liitle bit demanding on services and I made the lady mad at me on this site she said I was to hard to deal with. So along came this last agency where I met Victoria and the rest is history ... Will she stay with me? Big risk and I know it. But like I said a lot is in the heart and Victoria and I have a lot of heart for each other.

Updated August 4, 2005: After communicating with Timmy K through email, I can expect to see him in Kharkiv, where he plans to marry this October.

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Another Kind of Marriage Agency

Kevin McMahan didn’t meet his wife Natasha through a marriage agency. Or if he did, it was through one established by President John F. Kennedy.
“The Peace Corps is kind of known as a marriage agency,” McMahan said. “There were like seventy people in my group (who went to Ukraine), including about twenty-five single guys, and there were at least four of us who got married and maybe three of us who got engaged.”
After spending his first three months in Ukraine studying the language with his fellow Peace Corps Volunteers, Kevin was sent alone to Kaniv, a small village about 100 miles south of Kyiv, where he was asked to do one thing: talk garbage. Or more specifically, western ecological principles.
It was the summer of 2003, and as a recent graduate of the University of Cincinnati with a degree in environmental science, McMahan was certainly qualified to handle the subject. But the 24-year-old's lectures were not only voluntary, they were offered at the equivalent of a YMCA, where he had to compete with someone offering guitar lessons.
Guitar beats garbage every time. And so shortly into his two-year stay in Kaniv, he joined a group of townspeople on a ten-day excursion to the Black Sea.
He spotted Natalia Volodymyrivna Yurchenko before even boarding the bus. But Natasha, as she’s known, was just one of the many beautiful girls milling about that morning – and only further evidence to Kevin that eighty-percent of Ukrainian women could parlay their looks into a modeling contract.
Natasha was equally aware of Kevin, if somewhat less impressed.
“When I first met Kevin it was horrible,” she said. “His hair was not beautiful. He had this goatee, which in my country was not normal. And clothes? Wow, I was in shock really.”
But despite his baggy shorts and wild hair, Natasha, then a student in English at Pereyaslav-Chemelnytsky Pedagogical Institute, knew he presented her with an opportunity she otherwise could not find.
“I proposed Kevin: I know that you are American, Would you like to sit with me? I need to practice my English,” she said.
Natasha had fought with her boyfriend of two years the night before and left town only on the advice of her mother. When she returned from camping with Kevin, she had with her something she says she’d never imagined – an American boyfriend.
As for the Peace Corps, they had a volunteer who could no longer be discouraged by the lack of people coming to hear him talk.
“The Peace Corps, they’re afraid, Are you lonely? Are you becoming suicidal? Are you in depression?” said McMahan. “They don’t want any of that. And they actually give you condoms. They would give us like a box of condoms every month or every two weeks, because they’re like, 'Good, you’re having sex, that means you have low stress.'”
Natasha, now living with her husband in the United States, laughed nervously when she recalled the scene they’d left three months earlier.
“I can tell you the secret,” she said. “Almost all Peace Corps guys were happy, almost all Peace Corps women were unhappy.”

Part two is here.

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