Spring

A week ago Monday, I awoke to snow, fat white flakes that were relentless and depressing, speaking as they did to a post-Soviet weather cycle run amok, permanent revolution replaced by permanent winter. But then, inexplicably, a little after noon, the clouds parted and the sun appeared – the stuff of religious calendars, the stuff of May or June or July, with only the sound of a harp missing in the background – and like that the line was drawn and spring had arrived.

It’s been ten days without snow, and with the temperature now not falling below freezing, the white stuff that for so long was piled up along the sidewalks has thawed and melted and trickled away, with the pace of this process accelerated by the ladies who sweep the roads in the summer and throw sand in the winter and chip the ice to pieces in the spring. (What do they do in the fall? Sweep the leaves.)

Last Wednesday, writing as usual in the morning, I found myself pulled away from the keyboard around 10:30, drawn by the sun and the blue skies to the street outside. I walked for two hours, easily and freely, sticking to the sides of the street that got the sun all day, leaving winter for the shadows on the other side. Such a pleasure to be able to walk with sure feet, to be able to look up and around, to gaze absent-mindedly at this or that, the writer’s natural pose, without the threat of hitting a slick patch of black ice and tumbling, ass over ankles, in front of a sure-footed babushka. It had been months since I had wandered aimlessly. When it’s minus thirty, you think only in trips that start from Point A and end at Point B, the shortest distance a straight line.

But now it was different. The young ladies were already wearing short skirts and wide-gauged fish-net stockings. Outside the metro stations, people were willing to stand around and drink a slow beer, to mention Lukashenko’s name and discuss a quick point of politics. At McDonald’s, the one restaurant in town where I don’t feel uncomfortable eating alone, people sat at the tables outside, some of them enjoying the season’s first ice cream. The women no longer went about in jackets so thick with insulation they looked like walking rolls of carpet. White jackets appeared, bright scarves designed more for fashion than warmth. Spring shoes. Umbrellas (it's not summer). Men with jackets unzipped. Such optimism, such changes.

In olden times, there were celebrations that heralded the approach of spring. People got crazy on honey mead and ran into the fields, throwing clothes from their bodies, frolicking, fornicating, running to the hills and singing the death of winter. In California, the Indians may have done something like this. But I don’t think they got carried away. In Ukraine, up here away from the warming bubble of the Black Sea, I think people emptied the drinking barrel and warmed themselves en masse in ways that had nothing to do with the fireplace. They must’ve been crazy with joy – after three or four months of freezing, of staying close to hearth and home, at last they could brave the outdoors.

I see something of that in the people today. I spoke to an Australian yesterday who said he spent $200 on the internet during the coldest month of the winter, when it never got warmer than -10 below. To keep warm, he had to stay in bed, wearing three or four layers of clothes, huddled under his blankets, even the computer's warming purr a needed defense. But now he and everyone else is out and about, doing the plotting that comes with spring. Let’s go here, let’s do that, do you want to meet an American coming into town today to see about a mail-order bride?

Winter is dead. Long live spring.

Read More......

The Snowman

Hollywood has been kind to the Snowman. There is Frosty, of course, America's wisest and most famous Snowman, and then countless other more anonymous creations, the most recent of these being built, for the most part, during a romantic movie's montage. Here, you'll see scenes of great joy, young lovers and powdery white snow, the sun hanging high the sky, red cheeks and white teeth, snowball fights and out of breath kisses.

But when you actually live in the snow, you realize the Snowman is in fact a bit of an evil creature, luring you out onto the frozen tundra, there beneath the bare, leafless branches and the quickly darkening skies -- the stuff of Igmar Bergman, not movies made for Christmas Eve. When you actually live in the snow, you see yellow snow, the work of men or dogs, you can neither say nor wish to know. And so when asked to make a Snowman these past few weeks, I looked for any way out. We have to go to the philharmonic, I said, it's getting dark, we really don't know how safe it is -- today's clean looking snow only hides yesterday's lifted leg. You sure you want to go through with this?

But no more. On Sunday it happened -- completely unexpected, while we were walking between Points A and B. "This snow looks good, doesn't it?" The snow had lacked moisture the day before, that certain something that allows it to collect and roll up into a nice ball. But after a night of fresh snow, I had to admit that what lay on the ground looked promising. So we got to it and built this man you see in the picture, a guy who stands all of about one-foot two soaking wet (and frozen into snow). I can't take the credit. I provided the kopecks for the eyes and stuck a nub of a branch into his face for a nose, but other than that, this Snowman was made by Russian hands.

Read More......

My Own Little Private Botswana

It is currently 82 degrees Farenheit at Seretse Khama International Airport, which we all know serves the beautiful African nation of Botswana. More than a year ago now, when I first imagined a Fulbright Fellowship, I thought I might apply there. Not the airport, the country. You know: fewer applicants, better chance. I thought I could spend a year abroad in a pith helmet and khaki shorts, walk around in knee socks and learn to wax my mustache. I would take to using a cane, I told myself, and write an African novel in the tradition of Naipaul (Oh how I love In A Free State).

But then I came to my senses, came to the country best suited to me, artistically and personally, and now ... oh, how I long to be in Botswana, to be strolling the streets of Tshabong or Selebi-Phikwe, if only for the weekend. Because 82 degrees Farenheit, this is a magical number. 82 degrees F, 28 degrees C. In a word, warm.

In Kharkov, it is currently another word, and though that one is not fit to print in a family magazine, this one is: inhumane. If this were a gulag, the prisoners would have the day-off. The temperature used to have to drop to something like -31 degrees or something for the prisoners to win this rare reprieve, but even if today is only the forecasted low of -21, it feels like -32. Yahoo tells me so. Snow falling like we got all the snow for Kharkov and much of neighboring Belgorod too. Winds at 26 kilometers per hour, and all of it coming out of Siberia like some foreign oil minister's bad dream.

I've seen on the news how some villages in Russia have had weather that's dropped to -60. The radiators burst, the ice built up on the walls inside the homes, snowdrifts in the kitchen. They interviewed one lady in front of a bus. Even the looters aren't working, I'm sure.

Here, my radiators are humming along just fine, though I do long for a non-communal control of the heat. I'd like to crank it to eleven, turn my apartment into my own little private Botswana, eat a peach in my undershorts. But I must make do with either this city-wide or building-wide heat. Turned on in October, off in April or May, I suppose, and the temperature regulated by someone other than me the whole while. Used to be like this when I was in Germany, my birth country, but I only know such a thing from my parents, as I was barely sentient myself then, not even two years-old when we left.

I am wearing two pairs of thermal underwear, American and Norwegian. Two wool sweaters, a long-sleeve, and a wool thermal undershirt. Socks: two pair, one wool. I have never loved wool like I have loved wool this year.

I awoke this morning thinking of the birds. I'd seen them outside my window just the day before, when the first dusting of snow began to fall. Stupid birds, I thought. Why do you winter here? Botswana, I thought to tell them. Winter in the former British Protectorate of Bechuanaland. Fly out over the Kalihari Desert, see the salt plains of the Makgadakaki Pans.

But these birds couldn't be so stupid, and so I got to wondering where they spent their summers if they were wintering here. The Ice Continent? Greenland? If not very stupid, these birds were stronger than any I've known, refugees from the horrors of Deepest Antarctica or some other floating glacial island that carries on it little more than a few twigs for a small and shabby home in the arms of a bare, two-pronged tree.

This morning, the birds were gone. Saw only one black crow, who swooped down in front of my window as if directed by the hand of Ingmar Bergman. A friend in the states had emailed me about a recent trip she'd taken during winter break. After swimming in the Indian Ocean one morning, she returned to find a kangaroo sitting in front of her tent. A kangaroo, I thought. This was the symbol of a decadent life. A kangaroo wouldn't last ten minutes in Kharkov. A pouch? What do you need with a pouch? Down fur, that's what you should have. Feathers at least. Go talk to the birds.

The trams aren't working today, the snow piled up too high. More of this forecast for days, as far as the extended forecast extends. If there weren't contact with the outside world, the internet and TV, I too could believe in The End Times, that this was all a portent, a sign, that we had sinned and this was our punishment.

But in the modern world, even in coldest winter, I'm more enlightened. Somewhere, I know, somewhere ... Botswana.

Read More......

Cold Weather

After receiving a warning to wear my thermals if I went outdoors, I pulled up my abandoned SBC Yahoo page to see what the weather was like today. It wasn't so bad, I thought: Zero degrees. After half a winter here (or an autumn and a start of winter, as my girlfriend corrected me) I've grown used to the cold. Only Yahoo wasn't speaking to me in metric, it was giving me the temperature with an "F" beside it. It no longer computed. I hit the Celsius button just to see what that meant. Then I understood. Currently, it read, -18.

I clicked the extended forecast to see when relief would come, but apparently the relief was today. On Saturday, it's supposed to reach a high, repeat, a high, of -17 and a low of -23. (At this point isn't "high" the wrong word? Shouldn't there be a word for "less cold, but still freeze-your-teeth-off cold?") For you Farenheit people that means the high will be zero, the low -10.

And that's not the worst of it. Today, though it's currently "only" -18 Celsius, it "feels like" -26. That's an actual meterological number, filed away under "more current conditions," and so tell me, why say it's -18 if you're just going to later tell me it feels eight degrees colder? Isn't the temperature a reflection of the, well, temperature, which is based on, when it comes down to it, your response to the weather, a tactile sensation? And if it feels like -18, isn't it, in fact, if someone held a gun to your head, -18?

Secondly, how do they determine this number anyways? I mean, they've got all this fancy equipment to measure solar flares and thermal drifts, they've got massive computers that spit out extended forecasts and chart the pull of the moon, and then at the end of it all they say, "Yeah, but, you know, the number we gave you? It's all wrong. Feels way colder."

Do they lock the intern outdoors without his boots? "It's negative eighteen, Michael! But what does it feel like?!"

I'm off to put on my second pair of thermal underwear, one pair Norwegian, the other American, a sort of United Nations of undergarments, a UN Security Council of warmth, because I'm a Californian and I'm afraid that means everything feels another ten degrees colder to me.

Read More......

Winter Photos

Beautiful around here of late, though the sidewalks get more slippery by the day, with little patches of black ice building up here and there. The men pictured above got along just fine, slowly walking through the snow. I took their picture in the park nearest my apartment.

The second shot is a close-up of the statues in the background of the first photo. All of the busts, like this one, are Soviet-era, honoring heroes from the 1920s through the Great Patriotic War to near the end of the Krushchyov era. This guy, I thought, looked a bit like Reagan, at least his hair did.

The final shot, taken in October, shows the memorial mosaic in the far background of the first shot.

Click any of the photos to make them larger.

Read More......

Снег!

I awoke on Saturday morning to snow. Pulled open the curtains and there it was, a thick layer of it on the roofs, the sidewalks, piled up on the balcony -- everywhere, even the branches outside my living room window. Was gone by the end of the day, but it's back again today, with some of the in-between stuff now gone to ice and sleet and slush. You'll walk down one street and be perfectly sure-footed, then turn up another and be slipping and sliding and suddenly feeling the muscles on the insides of your thighs. (I pause to address all those people who do not live in California. Some of us do not know what this stuff is that falls upon the ground and stays there, piling up like so much cotton. We gaze at the Heavens in wonder when simple rain falls, but this, this is truly amazing indeed.)

It struck me, while taking short steps across an especially slippery stretch, that this is the foundation of much of Russia's literature. Because how can you look up, how can you raise your chin with confidence and pride, inflate yourself, so to speak, like Gatsby or some frilled courtier in an Austen novel, if you might fall on your ass at the next corner. Keep your eyes to the ground. Walk slowly, with short, deliberate steps. Wear a face like the angry man, the bitter man that Doestoyevsky wrote about, thrust your hands into your black overcoat like Raskolnikov; this is snow, снег, and it will be here for months.

Read More......