Online Exclusive

01.28.09
Augustino
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 

“With many hundreds of credits I’m beyond what I hoped to do as an independent writer. The only thing I’ve ever taught is swimming, I’ve never studied writing, and I didn’t even major in English. I’ve never had a pedestrian job since college, and never published anything I’m not proud of.” —D. E. Steward