landscapes / bodies

Emigres begin in airports, moments in transition; time spent, anxieties reduced to lifetimes in the

standing line. I watch grandmothers and grandfathers, elderly couples walk through security

(scrutiny) hopeful, going through the provided motions. Remembering my grandmother, who

was so afraid of catching a cold and compromising her already weak immune system, wouldn’t

comply with TSA, refusing to take off her shoes when going through the airport security line.

Using pure Soviet ingenuity, grandmother took two plastic bins used to place one’s belongings

into, fashioned them as slides for her feet, shuffling towards the metal detector.

An airport is an orderly place. A threshold on the edge of city / away away away. A subsidiary to

the center, the locus of place. In the airport, in the basement of customs, at gates surrounded with

Starbucks, sometimes there are prayer centers, yoga health rooms, to wakefully sleep sprawled

across chairs, the floor. Wake up, get a coffee around the corner from the barista who traveled an

hour. Limbo.

Mahmoud Darwish in prose, in prosaic absence writes of the Athens airport, traversing seas,

waiting to return to sea. In the presence of absence, a noncitizen, “at Athens airport we waited for

years,”

An elderly couple carefully, with utmost respect for the process, albeit lost, enter through lines

confronted, facing sinister unsmiling faces. There is an urgency, earnest predilection to be of use,

stand tall, emanating Old World dignitas. An elderly couple, whose life has been in Ukraine up

until recently, who, although had traveled through the USSR, are confronted with a new medium

of crossing borders. And these are, after all, new borders. Freshly defined and erased as their

lives. Recalcitrant to fear.

Something is redeeming a slightness to human in the airport, in its grandiosity. It’s above,

beyond the human. Directed and resurged by humanity in a uniform complexion.

My first such experience. I was nine:

Four figures stood in front of advertisements: Gillet and sleek-legged massages. Not all of the

panels are plastered, some lean against the sterile wall as though a second thought. A fir tree

garlanded for cheer backdrops the people as a fifth wheel. Somehow the scene feels somber.

Pressed together, an unflinching unit, I am in the center held onto like a pillar by mom and

grandmother. Grandfather stands slightly to the side. The photograph was taken in December of

1998 in the Boryspil International Airport. I look small in a brown fur coat, resembling a baby

bear in rolled up jeans and clumsy-looking snow boots; looking strangely composed. My hands

are elegantly clasped in front of my body, my face reveals no torment, no excitement. A

particular presence.

Later, through an airport wide announcement mom and I were summoned into a room. Our

checked bag on a cement floor. Waiting. Something had flashed off security, needing to be

checked, maintained. Maimed. I don’t know — I don’t remember — severity of my mother’s

stress continues to resurge intermittently. Her anxiety palpably presented itself as the uniformed

agent asked her to unzip the bag. A mechanical reindeer with a Santa riding atop, waving at the

children from the night sky, was pulled out. Something about the ultra, fat batteries set

regulations into surveillance mode. And here we were, people of the people, on our first trip

across the ocean, first trip on an airplane. Overhead, above the world and sea. Unreasonably safe.

How to trust a machine, enclosed upon a body, and hundreds more.

The airport feels like a post apocalypse endeavor. On an edge of...

Almost.

Like a variance of life contingent upon survival in enclsoure. More enclosures.

Airports. Hubs. Airplanes. Enclose upon the body, leaving the body vulnerable to whomever.

Back in Boryspil International. Waiting for Athens. S and I watched a Georgian man yell, emit

anger. He wore a white tank top, something which is also called a wifebeater. Skin bareness

lacking protection. What he was yelling about was unclear, at least it’s unclear to me now. Then,

I could have told you. Maybe he wanted to smoke a cigarette in the terminal. A cop arrived.

Another one of them clustered about The man was calmly escorted into handcuffs, walked from

the waiting area, the gate, into a windowless room. Probably similar to the room in which mom

and I were asked to unpack the mechanical reindeer with Santa upon his back.

An ancient gentleman took out his lunch. Sitting in a terminal cafe. With his son he chomped

cucumbers and tomatoes. Carried in a plastic bag. He could have bought it at a bazaar, a street

market lined up outside of subway stations. Popping up overnight in newfoundland Kiev

postsoviet, selling everything survival. This is not untrue. This, indeed, had become a common

trajectory, store. My father, minutes after the collapse of the USSSR, in a flowing free market

flooding intensity, releasing unbridled transactions free capitalismist, free, started selling

clothing, other goods at bazaars lining sidewalks Interacting with other men falling off. Such

slick little borders. Wanton, unmanageable. Father dear, he loved to run around with women. The

Russian term for this is gulat, or to run around, be out and about. Father dear loved to run

around. Buying mom bouquets of flowers whenever something didn’t go according to plan,

apologizing for his misdeeds. His friend, a merchant, a scammer sold my mom a green tank dress

with white daisies on it. It hugged her figure beautifully, as she was young with a tailing six-

year-old. My father’s friendaquitance (acquitted) took a couple of grivna off the originally

pronounced price by way of good manners. Stealthy eyes, hot breath.

In the post, the post Soviet Union, I carried a garish taste.

I was drawn to sequence embossed backpacks and Mary Janes resembling Dorthy’s magical ruby

slippers, little glossy heels lacquered to a shine, and frilly, lace-trimmed blouses to go beneath a

green blazer mandated by a school uniform. This uniform, as though a final stance of Soviet

Spartanism, lacked frivolity. Soviet joy didn’t stand out from the crowds. It was the crowd. I

desired, continuously or not, anything to stand out from the bleakness of an impoverished era

beaten up this rapidly changing landscape. Beautiful pink crop tops shredded at the end,

evocations of Mickey Mouse and One Hundred and One Dalmatians winked at me through

polypropylene tents displaying goods. I wanted to be seen.

My hopes were similar to sparkly objects attracting crows. The sparkle anointed with an

attraction mostly turned out to be plain old garbage, fool’s gold.

The crows cherish it all nonetheless.

Barahlo, my grandmother would call it.

She meant the products I wished for. And my father.

Meaning, cheaply made, useless.

Meaning all men. Although that is only my projection of the situation now.

Her hope was for S and I to get married, tie the so-called knot, as the American aphorism goes.

The only tied knot in sight was the shoelace he used as a belt when we first met. By the time we

had gone to Kiev together, returning my grandmother back to her haunted apartment of a bygone

Soviet life, S had purchased a normal belt, but preferred to run amok in beaten up shoes, which

he moaned and moaned about as I took him all over Kiev. Out of ahistorical petulance he called

these excursions death marches.

Conversely, I had anger I didn’t know how to fully untie the knot from. Body a casket of

inheritances unknown, unregulated.

I threw objects into the floor, smashing them with my

jammed little fists. Smoking cigarettes and cursing in between puffs. My love of smoking was

the only admirable gift my father had ever bestowed upon me.

Anger flowed through my veins. Fiery, horrible surges. Of a being snubbed — a loss of self

within a body tethered to bordered allegiances. My anger was like the Georgian man in the

airport not allowed to smoke — an arbitrary ruling. My anger had an echo, it had nowhere to

land.

My anger wasn’t isolated. Grandfather had been praised as a cherished man, having spent his life

within volumes of books, on the banks of Soviet rivers. Where the days were never-ending and

night didn’t exist in June. He never sold bathing suits to teenagers. Yet, he erupted. Leaving a

trail for me to pick through, try on and iron out. His fury lived inside me. His fury contended

with human narrowness when pressed too quickly. His fury implicated those uncaring of their

surroundings, graceless passers-by, using and repurposing the same object or piece of clothing

for decades. There was no reason to replace something which worked — one just had to repair it.

As his anger rushed, outpoured onto the pavement, he left for walks around the neighborhood to

reason. Our building surrounded the courtyard between once new and promising housing blocks,

which by 1998 had a sour residue. All of the buildings were identical, save for the letter

following a number to differentiate an address. Four looming 15-story buildings surrounding a

square with a playground of cement mushrooms stood next to a dirt path along a whitewashed

wall leading the walker from one such courtyard to a road allowing one to exit an intricate maze

of streetettes, dead ends, and loops bowed over by apartments stacked atop one another. Rowan

berry trees grew alongside sidewalks and rows of poplars silhouetted against at attack of gray,

blue, pink, sunless, dawn.

Everything by then had been marked by negligence. Chipped walls, faint smell of piss in most

corners, hallway lightbulbs stolen, replaced by a resident, and stolen yet again by a different

resident. Sometimes the dance paused due to a weariness of spirit, but eventually weariness of

spirit was restored by weariness of squinting in the dark. A lightbulb was again replaced, lasting

for a few weeks as if a miracle granted by a returned God post Communism.

Grandfather, in those days, tried to teach me how to swim. I wasn’t hopeless, but I think my fear

of drowning, or losing control, made me a more difficult case than imagined. One summer day

we got onto the subway heading west, getting off at the Slavutich station.

Slavutych, an old Rus name for the river Dniepr, running through what used to be Kievska Rus,

now Kiev, stems from the root slava, meaning glory. In terms of a population, the Slavs are a

people of glory, repute, honor. The metro station is located on the eastern bank of the river.

Grandfather had his special spots, secrete getaways in and around the city. we went to a shore.

Upon shore, the sandy beaches

Many use these exteriors of water.

Once our lesson was finished, I had started practicing walking on my hands while submerged in

the gloomy river A slice. It open. A fall upon a shard, a broken bottom. Half of a beer bottle

sticking out of wet sands. Grasses grasses sandgrasses. My grandfather, whose cure for most

corporeal ailments was a salty sea, natural tides of water, vodychka, was now dealing with a

blood tinged river. A crying granddaughter in shock. My hand, wounded in between the thumb

and pointer finger, in the softest part of meat and cartilage, was wrapped and tightly wound in a

sock.

I am not sure where that scar is. It is now faint, blurred into hefty skin.

My scar over time had become like the lone tattoo grandfather got while in army training as a

young man. A stick and poke of a ring around his finger.

He hated my tattoos. Called them defilements. Although, never vocalizing his disappointment so

harshly. More like stupid ideas of a young idiot in America.

That was the name used: America. United States did not exist in our vocabulary. America held a

resplendent sheen United States could only dream of, its severity and patriotism much too

honorable for the kitsch dreams America produced. Americanness was vast, covering much

ground. Anything and everything splendid and worthwhile was in America,

Departure, immigration. America.

Whisper these words as lurid incantations until no longer splendid. Curses. Interior revolts.

In the morning before leaving for the airport, to America. Chicago. With two rectangular

suitcases containing our lives, for good luck we sat silence for twenty second. As Russian

superstition (tradition) instructs.

The physicality of forced separation had led me down a tunnel of distress. Alienation from my

family, who, after years of severance, had become close to strangers. My grandmother and

grandfather in all of their love and golden light seemed far away from me. On a different plane.

Maybe it was the distance which had wrought me into a guarded operation, enfolding anything

soft, anything I presumed as weak, into bouts of rage, defensiveness.

Last time I saw my grandfather was in the Boryspil Airport. He accompanied me for my

departure flight after a visit. I did’t know it would be our final earthly exchange. This was naive

of me. Another rueful repression. Grandfather was taking mushrooms pills for a cure much too

late, too futile. Cancer. like capitalism, becomes an infestation.

He watched me go through security. He told me we will see one another again. I was quiet. I felt

indescribably sad to be leaving my grandparents, to be leaving my home, where my grandfather,

on my last full day in Kiev, poured champagne into a plastic bottle to take along into the city

center. The three weeks I was visiting, grandfather had gone to the river almost every day to

swim and float on the ancient waters of a polluted body.

He hugged me, took my hand into his. My eyes were beginning to fill up with emotion, on verge

of tears. I did not want to be witnessed crying, allowing such acts in the bathroom or the balcony.

No betrayal of sadness, no traces of feeling on my face was to be shown. In resolute anxiety I

yanked my hand away, swiftly turned around. Murmuring goodbye, concurred in a few words,

some weak, pathetic mumble of strength. Walking, walking, with bags.

And there he was. Standing in a polo shirt tucked into blue jeans, on the other side of the

stanchion belt. On a threshold, encapsulated.