by Theodore Griffin
The airports in Ukraine are closed. For a shoestring freelancer, this means slinking into the anonymous corners of buses and sleeper trains. It means lying in old compartments, watching the empty-eyed scrolling of insomniac soldiers in the bunks below, heading east towards the front at Kharkiv. And it means being the sole self-consciously male passenger on a bus heading west, to Poland. Often, it means sticking out and being asked unwanted questions.
“What are you doing here? Come to travel in Ukraine, or something?” ask ticket collectors, travellers and border guards.
It feels a little emasculating, being a suspected voyeur. I have my alibi:
“Journalism, essentially.”
If I had the wherewithal to arrange flak jackets and military access, camera slings and a fixer, and a little stubble, I might appear legitimate.
In Ukraine mine is a shabby, low-status position: one of the bizarre opportunists who spring up around conflict zones, searching for heroics, purpose or, in my case, a foot in the heavy door of foreign correspondence. My British passport comes to signify ‘lost weirdo’ — a contrast from the prestige it carried in West Africa, however dishevelled or incompetent I appeared there.
Journeys in and out of Ukraine reduce you to a fatalistic state of self-forgetfulness. Each voyage is a universe in itself.
Fleeing Ukraine involves bus stations, podcasts, plastic suitcases, and Ryanair flights out of Poland. Mothers go alone, plastic vapes keeping them awake, their children distracted by iPads. Travellers wear matching tracksuits and hoist their belongings into the holds of new coaches.
It takes little imagination to transpose the conditions of wartime Ukraine onto another European country. Picture Glaswegian tower blocks being struck by ballistic missiles, and foreign journalists pushing through crowds of refugees at Edinburgh Waverly on course for the front lines in Aberdeenshire. What disturbs isn’t how unnatural it feels, but how normal.
On the bus out, we spend half the night at Polish border control. Some sleep, others stare with gormless intensity at the headrests. Twitchy, energetic types pace around the bus, smoking. If there has been an air raid the previous night, the exhaustion is all the worse. On one such journey, between nodding off, I befriend a young Ukrainian woman who lives near Ely.
“Had I fallen asleep?” I jolt, alert.
“Yes,” she croaks, smiling. Like many Ukrainians, she possesses a shy warmth.
Anastasiya told me that life in Ely was agreeable. Her sister was moving there. The locals were welcoming; some had arranged community events with them. Given the high salaries and ease of life there, Anastasiya has no intention of returning to live in Ukraine. She had been visiting her mother in the front-line city of Kharkiv.
“I was shocked by the destruction. It has all changed so much. Few friends are around as they used to be. Boys are fighting or hiding. Most of my girlfriends are in Europe or Lviv. But my mother won’t leave. Nothing will make her move.”
“She grew up in the Soviet Union?”
“Yes. She misses it of course.”
For older generations, missing the Soviet Union is synonymous with possessing pro-Russian sentiments. The Kremlin’s ‘de-nazifying’ narrative convinces few outside its provinces. Soviet nostalgia, however, is Putin’s greatest propaganda asset within Ukraine.
After a while we are too tired to continue talking. Polish security checks are severe. We descend the bus with all our belongings and file through a structure not unlike a dairy farm, blinking under the artificial lights. There is no chance to walk around or sit. You’re just stuck there, wired with the anxiety of stasis.
Then the familiar baggage search: sighing like a suffering carthorse, I watch them unpack my belongings. They unroll every sock. Books are shaken out, dropping their bookmarks. Tobacco is pulled out onto the counter. I am singled out; Ukrainian travellers face fewer checks than non-Ukrainians, who are met with suspicion by the border guards. I receive sweet, pitying smiles from my fellow travellers.
Yet while I am given gentle, almost regretful instruction by the guards, the Ukrainian women are barked at by a stern chaperone. Some confusion around collecting passports is met by a humiliating resentment from Polish officials. Three years of shuttling refugees in and out has produced a wearied resignation amongst them.
I have seen unsavoury behaviour towards Ukrainians on the Polish border before. Though the country welcomes them, it has become habituated to view Ukrainians as the Unfortunate. I wonder at which point sections of the Polish population lost the cheery hospitality of Ely’s citizens. An unpleasant asymmetry between Pole and Ukrainian has become entrenched in local attitudes.
When you encounter luck in life, you convince yourself you deserve it. From what I’ve seen in these border towns, an assumption reigns that the Unfortunate deserve what came to them, too. After a while, it must be hard to shake off the instinct that the Ukrainians’ fate comes from something innate in them.
Finally we reach Warsaw Chopin airport in the early morning. It’s an anonymous orgy of steel and glass, idiosyncratically named after the son of a ragtag French teacher who settled down with a Pole. I smile a goodbye to my fellow travellers, who will diffuse to all corners of the West. Our weary ensemble is quickly diluted in a crowd of self-important people, the population of Europe who live in peace. My worn pack with its blue and yellow bow seems to draw negative attention. Perhaps this is paranoia. But it is true that nobody wants muddied boots home from war on their carpet, with their bad-luck smell.
My Wizz Air flight crosses the Alps. Ukraine is far away and I am filled with sadness. I think of those I left behind. Oleksandr is still publishing books and playing a bandura in his bookshop in Kharkiv, with air raid sirens blaring. Alisa is still donning grass crowns and dancing polka as the air defence systems boom. The Legionnaires are back on the front in Sumy, with winter approaching.
