CONJUNCTIONS: A Web Exclusive

Augustino D. E. Steward

Merely three stops out Kiev’s Green Line Metro To Dorohozhycli And Babi Yar The wooded ravine sinister and extremely unsettling Deep, steep-sided, it drains off a mild ridge in new-growth Ukrainian hardwoods The German killers would have called it die Schlucht “No monument stands over Babi Yar,” Yevtushenko Now a single menorah-topped masonry remembrance on the ridge Vandalized with crowbar and sledgehammer on a summer night in 2006 Partly restored now A few pebbles on its stepped plinth Urge to kick at the sandstone ground to find something, shell casing, knuckle bone Hard, dry soil, difficult to unearth even a stone or pebble for the monument’s scanty cairn The thump of Wehrmacht Karabiner 98k rounds impacting bodies The extended rattle of Waffen-SS’s Schmeisser machine pistols Those thirty-four thousand Kiev cosmopolitans killed here through two consecutive days driven and pushed into the ravine Marched out in their suits, elegant shoes and hats, their urban miens, starched shirts, glasses, smudged makeup, desperate pleas Murdered en masse by small arms fire Common soldiers stood there at the edge of the ravine and killed for two days And route-marched back to their casern to sit on their bunks cleaning their rifles for more Of course they were ordered, and their orderers were ordered Some feel that German chain of command and doctrine of discipline explains it all Others presume that the evil of the ethical collapse will never be understood Many don’t care at all now And remarkable numbers of people have never heard of Babi Yar However it happened, awareness of the tangibles, the lay of the land, the reality of such sites is an increment of moving us away from more On a weekday August afternoon, one other visitor, a German with a Ukrainian guide, both earnest men in their forties In another generation maybe no one but historians will come No glory for anyone here, it is not Antietam or Verdun Sixty-six years on squint to feel the sound of the rifles and machine pistols Wehrmacht hobnails grinding the sandstone track up to the ravine The orders screamed Ugly, ugly German imperatives Martinet language that it so easily is The clink of sling swivels as weapons were brought from shoulder arms to the ready Prodding the shuffling doomed with the Karabiner’s muzzles, nudging with the barrels, butting with the stocks George Steiner wondered in Language and Silence how the basic substantive Ofen could ever be used again in the context of Backofen or any other harmlessness Babi Yar Now trees and summer leaves and brush and duff on the sides of the yar, the ravine “I fly Lufthansa, how nice the stewardess is, all of them are so civilized that it would be tactless to remember who they were.” Milosz in 1995 Back down through the park to the Dorohozhycli Metro and a bochka A yellow steel-tank kvas cart Slavic libatory cleansing from the vicious German pall Plastic cup after cup Gulp it down There is sun and there are shadows There are sharp rents in reality here Close by a small and convoluted cast-bronze monument to the children killed at Babi Yar Remove trash from its plinth Stare out across the park toward the sandstone hill and ravine a kilometer away Feel tired to be so deep within this Milosz-witnessed world Would rather be off in Wyoming, or on Kauai looking west, than here at Babi Yar pondering last century’s mass immolations But then on the metro back to the center the topical adventure of riding through the huge foreign city kicks in with the sway and rhythm Now the city of Yushchenko of the pox and westernizing ambitions vs. sashaying blonde-plaited Tymoshenko in perpetual white Orange Kiev Ukrainian Kyiv Orthodox Kiev The Slavic faces and Ukrainian women Who look as if they go out each day dressed as though that was the day they would meet their future All bare summer legs, loose hair, interesting faces Mirada fuerte Metro gawk iPod cell phone strap-hanging swinging sizzle Out in the sun in the center, walk the squares to a rooftop terrace with golden domes to the north, St. Michael’s, to the south, the Lavra Pious Kiev of both the Moscow Patriarchate and the Kyiv Patriarchate The great river-stretched city’s clarity Under the high-wonder Dnieper skies The Pontic Steppe in all directions What was eight hundred miles of grass from the foothills of the Carpathians to the Volga Summer golden, almost oceanic wonder Already felt on the lifting travel rush of the Lufthansa flight, Frankfurt to Kiev Out over Oberfranken, Bohemia, and off over southern Poland, Katowice, Krakow, skirting the Carpathians themselves On south of the Pripet Marshes to the Dnieper The run off of the marshes across Belarus from northeast of Smolensk and Safonovo Konstantin Siminov’s refrain in Day and Nights (1944), “Alyusha, do you remember the roads of the Smolensk region?” A Russian river, then Belarus, then the Ukraine’s chain of river-scheme hydroelectric reservoirs Chernobyl-linked Twenty-two hundred kilometers on out to the Black Sea Only the Volga and the Danube here are longer Draining this grand Slavic platform before the Asian steppes East off from the Carpathians, off from Europe, that western cape jutting into the Atlantic from Asia Long horizontal Ukraine, from Lviv east nearly to the Don Huge, ancient Kiev, almost six million On its river hills Overlooking the Dnieper’s East Bank plain stretching as though to Volgograd Eastern European rivers often welcome the eastern steppe, east banks flat and open to the plain, west banks with escarpment hills facilitating defense As with the steep hills on which the Lavra lies A thousand years old, seventy acres of ancient monastic stone, yellow and white stuccoed walls, marvelous carpentry, burial caves, mummified monks, gilded domes The great Dnieper splotched with cloud-shadow sailing bolls of cumulus is almost a thousand feet below the Lavra’s gates Broad Soviet-era esplanades, sweeping stairways and terraces above the river toward the National Museum of History of the Great Patriotic War of 1941–1945 Years nearby The trash of total war with dioramas depicting the full gray-green-black camouflage-net red flag bunkered horror of it all Battle maps, the documentation, photographs Displayed materiel Heavy-tired blast-deflector rifled barrels caisson-heavy ammo-belt hung steel and rubber and splintered wood chaos No faces, no humanity at all, no corporality except in the photographs The millions who were there Empty uniforms, boots and personal effects, long lists and rosters in German and Cyrillic typed by clerks on old field-desk manual machines under leaking sandbags packed within the bunker’s logs and beams above “Alyusha, do you remember the roads of the Smolensk region?” Twenty-seven million Russians died in those early 1940s years And finally the Germans went home Stay in Kiev’s Podil just off Postova Square at the bottom of the funicular to St. Michael’s On the first morning early, the Blue Line Metro from Postova in Podil to the upriver Heroyiv Dnipra end-station Heroyiv Dnipra, a wide, sunken bowl inside the traffic ring, a large rynok (bizarre) radiating out underground from the center An early-morning crowd pushing into and around a cell-phone kiosk The refreshing intensity of summer Europeans purposefully out and about And a decade ago these people were Soviets still in that mute societal isolation of skeptical enthusiasm normal for them then Now they’re normal members of the unregulated, unconstrained, frightening universal consumer world calculating time-money-greed-possibility factors in their private lives Young women sashaying in toward the metro end-station as though on fashion runways The book market by metro stop Petrivka, three stops downriver from Heroyiv Dnipra, three stops before Postova Heroyiv Dnipra Str. 20, The International Medical Rehabilitation Center for the Victims of Wars and Totalitarian Regimes (MRC) (04209 Kiev) A hundred kilometers from Heroyiv Dnipra to Chernobyl, Chornobyl in Ukrainian Nearer to ninth century Chernihiv, one of the three great cities of eleventh century Rus along with Kiev and Novgorod, than to fifth or sixth century Kiev In Slavic Europe history piles up in century-long increments enforcing continuity Almost in the manner of the dinners every night while in Kiev in river-fronted Podil Tenth century Vikings swaggered around Podil on their way down river to the sea and Constantinople No doubt gawking at the leggy Ukrainian women Coming and going Hip and flounce In ways the centuries here are all the same In 1240, the Mongols destroyed Kiev that then, at over a hundred thousand, may well have been the largest city in the world “French novels in yellow covers were read on the Danube and the Vistula on the Dnieper and the Volga. McCormick harvesters were working in the fields of the Ukraine.” Milosz in Le Belle Époque St. Sophia St. Michael’s dogged faithful, many more young than old The Byzantine Historic, riverine, Orthodox, splendid, westernizing Kiev And all the while, century after century, magnificent Ukrainian women Off on a smooth, broad-gauge night train to Lviv Its horn in the fresh August night with the eighteenth-century clarity of a cornetto □