Over Your Cities Grass Will Grow

I just can’t find it.

Somewhere – I’ve seen it quite recently – is a drawing I did on the edge of St Helen’s Woods.

It was a lovely spring day so I’d taken a less-committed art class away from school, carrying boards and paper across an old trackway to the edge of the valley. On my drawing I made a few notes: that a Nightingale was singing down in below and that a radioactive cloud was drifting across Europe from a fire at a nuclear power station in Russia.

I’d like to find that drawing again to check the date – late April, early May 1986 – to confirm where it  fits in the disastrous timeline.

It wasn’t in Russia, but on the Ukraine/Belarus border in a place that everyone now knows.

A few years ago there began to be published haunting winter images of the abandoned support town, Pripyat. And then, we were standing on a bleak hillside at Abyaneh in Iran, with one of our group telling how he’d recently visited the Exclusion Zone; it was quite simple: Easyjet to Kiev, Novotel, then pick up a tour from Solo East outside McDonald’s.

Discussion of the accident came to a halt when another member of the group interjected, “I was there!” Though now a New Yorker, he’d grown up in Kiev. Aged eighteen, he was waiting one morning for the bus to work but the bus didn’t arrive. In fact all the city’s buses had vanished; no-one knew why.

Neither the citizens of Kiev nor the inhabitants of Pripyat nor those of nearby Chernobyl nor of two hundred little villages in the area were told anything. Nor were the firemen who rushed to the scene, many of whom, by the time I’d done my drawing in the sunshine, were already dying of radiation sickness.

Probably, depending on the date of that drawing, but probably by that time thousands of people had been evacuated from the area – in those missing buses.

There were those who’d come from all over the Soviet Union to work at the forward-looking power plant – four reactors already generating electricity and another in construction – and there were those who’d been born and bred in the villages but now faced permanent exile.

When, last year, I finally arrived in Pripyat it was oddly familiar – partly from the many eerie photographs and drone films disseminated in recent years but also from Science Not-Quite-Fiction post-apocalyptic scenarios in films and novels.

This wrecked department store resembled a scene from J G Ballard’s “Kingdom Come”. And then there’s Tarkovsky’s uncannily prescient “Stalker” – filmed in 1979. I’ve referred to it in other posts.

And “In Ruins” by Colin Woodward, which traces the role of crumbling, abandoned dwellings and monuments in the European imagination. From childhood I’ve enjoyed exploring such places, the more overgrown the better.

Now it’s a favourite with photographers, who want to exploit the ready-made poignancy, especially when it’s overloaded with references to childhood.

In Pripyat, on that cool, still autumn afternoon, there was no sound and no movement save for the tap of dry leaves as they dropped to the floor. A bit like when you’re high in the mountains or out in the desert where nothing much has happened for centuries till one rock rolls down, comes to a stop, silence resumes.

Some of the housing blocks don’t look in much worse shape than those still inhabited in city suburbs, though they sport no post-Soviet satellite antennae or aircon units.

Bit by bit, the poplars planted in bygone avenues have drifted their offspring into tarmac joints and paving cracks, while moss and leaf litter have crept across the streets.

The football pitch, starting as grass, has presented colonising trees with no obstacles.

Cinema entrance

I’ve tended to think of Pripyat as being a modern-day Pompeii  – and began to wonder whether the mysterious Concrete Corpse sprawled, so like one of  Vesuvius’ victims,across the shingle at Dengemarsh,  might be angled at the Dungeness power plant in response to the Chernobyl disaster.

    

People ask me whether I find some consolation in the city’s return to  a vegetational embrace.

   

Deserted village

Once through the check-point, the road is free from traffic but is kept clear for access to the reactor site where 1500 engineers still work on short shifts. For miles the forest skyline is regular and uninterrupted. It should be easy to spot wheeling raptors but there aren’t any.

Those typical East European gas pipes still arch across obstacles.

A forest track diverges at right angles but beneath the moss and leaf mould is tarmac where it was once a road. It is still and silent but for small sounds of typical birds – Robins, Blackbirds, tits, sometimes a distant Hooded Crow, while from the bright and unblemished blue come sparse flight-calls of Chaffinches & Bramblings departing the cooling north.

Reclaimed by gardens more than forest, the cottages and small civic buildings stand silent with doors and windows hanging open. Bits are falling off. A tree has smashed one roof. The experience is not unfamiliar, for any reader of this blog will know the RXland woods contain ivy-swamped cottages while lonely farms, bereft of chickens and children, are collapsing out on the arable levels

But not whole villages. There are 200 out in the combined Exclusion Zone across the Ukraine/Belarus border, unrespected by the southerly wind of late April 1986.

Beware! Danger of Photographers!

They cannot resist artful arrangements: a bit of curtain pinned to a doorway for A FramingTexture.

Hastily abandoned toys for Added Poignancy.

Clapped-out Tin Trucks to emphasise  The Futile Goals of Technology.

Familiarity comes too from post-apocalyptic film scenarios, most powerfully of all in the uncanny prefiguration of “Stalker”.

In parts of Britain too there are Plague Villages, depopulated, rotted, evident by now only in soil marks and nettles.

Death In Ukraine

Walking out along the avenue from the city centre, you pass between bigger gardens, with calling Robins & Blackbirds, until you reach the hill of the beautiful Lychakiv Cemetery, earlier but similar in purpose to the necropolises  of London and, like them, arboreal through neglect. Unlike then, though, in that the site was abandoned or vandalised for ideological rather than financial reasons as successive occupying powers sought to selectively celebrate or erase reminders of Ukrainian identity.

Through gaps between the tall trees there appeared a few Steppe Buzzards & a Lesser Spotted Eagle circling south towards Crimea.

Like Highgate there are poignant memorials to lost sons & daughters…

…parents…

…and national heroes, none of them known to me and Cyrillic inscriptions revealing nothing more. Woodland birds – tits, woodpeckers and Jays – call in the yellowing foliage. Emergent tree roots and Japanese Knotweed are elbowing monuments aside.

There are themes of exile, recalling the mass deportations which have marked Ukraine’s history.

In the green hilltop silence, away from the city traffic, with sunlight slanting through the autumn leaves, we pause by a field of steel crosses bedecked with red & white ribbons, commemorating the Polish-Ukrainian War of 1918. A Middle Spotted Woodpecker creeps up a nearby Ash.

Another warm walk past a pleasant park and a right fork then a left into Bryullov Street brings us to the undistinguished brown door of the Lontskoho detention centre, now the National Museum-Memorial of Victims of the Occupation Regimes. Inside, a guard waves us through a much heavier door into corridors painted a chipped institutional green. In the first room, a custodian is delivering a very lengthy lecture to a group of police cadets in big hats.

Inspection hatches – patriotic red berries of Guelder Rose have been left on this one – give a view of cells lit by one small high window. There’s an interrogation room furnished with one table bearing a lamp, a typewriter, a stack of papers, an ink-stand and a telephone. there’s a chair on one side and a stool on the other. Another room is equipped with a camera on a tripod and developing equipment.

The condemned cell has no window.

In 1941 the NKVD were caught out by the rapidity of the German advance and had to decide what to do with the 4,000 political prisoners in Lwów, as it then was. They killed them all. the 1,600 in this centre were shot in the small adjoining yard and buried in shallow graves. Once the Nazis arrived they publicized the atrocity, blaming it on Jews who they required to disinter and lay out the corpses for identification by family members.

The new administration then, with the eager assistance of the Ukrainian Auxiliary Police set about the extermination of the 150,000 Jewish population, in massacres and at the camps of Janowska & Belzec. Of 30 pre-war synagogues just one survives. The site of the Golden Rose synagogue is preserved as a memorial.

Across the street, people eat and drink as always. Little children play among the slabs and two teenage girls swig wine from a bottle.

It doesn’t stop there. Back in Lychakiv Cemetery, we’d noticed down the hill, through the sunlit leaves, some bigger crosses.

War graves in Britain tend to be discreet, bearing only a name & regiment and, with painful exceptions, relate to a previous era. Here we found ourselves looking into the shockingly fresh faces of the dead from the recent Russian incursion into E Ukraine, some of the boys younger than our own…

…while in the furthest corner giant teardrop wreaths marked the graves of this year’s victims.

When I’ve told friends about all this, they respond that it must have been a pretty depressing trip. While that’s true – and there’s much, much worse – my response is that it’s “thought-provoking”. One of those thoughts is that I’ve been supremely lucky to have lived in a relatively peaceful and democratic country ( I know, “at whose expense?” and “so far so good”) and another is that this happy state is extremely fragile. Yet another is that such a life has made us cosily complacent. Last night, as I watched “The Death of Stalin”, I was speculating that its wit and irony was only possible in a country that had not, in living memory, suffered such levels of oppression.

Life & Trams in Lviv

My strongest motivation for visiting Ukraine was reading “East WestStreet” by Philippe Sands.

      

Fascinating Bus Shelters of Western Ukraine

You have to be quick – or slow – so I regret that I missed so many good ones, even the best. For such a basic structure, the variety is enormous in form, materials and decoration.

Those with the greatest pathos are marooned way out in the vast black-soil grain prairies.

Besides local liveries there are those adopted by village schools. While some are soiled with the tags familiar from our own depersonalised environment, others are the recipients of loving civic pride.

I am not the first person to take a typological interest in these humble yet ubiquitous buildings: there is a book!

“Soviet Bus Stops” by Christopher Herwig. The ideal Christmas present, not only for lovers of vernacular architecture but also for those who misspent their teenage years in one.

Lada Land

There weren’t a lot of opportunities to see birds during this trip, and Casual Observations consisted primarily of Hooded Crows but we did make one boat trip in the Lower Dniester National Park, SW of Odessa. Though the park logo appetisingly depicts Demoiselle Cranes & Otter, I guessed that such specialities would not be on offer and indeed much of the trip followed a deep-water channel with steep banks occupied by anglers.

With just a few Whiskered Terns & Marsh Harriers – and very large numbers of Starlings – alongside us, I turned my attention to the variety of improvised shelters.

The captain had a radar which indicated large numbers of fish beneath us (no doubt steering clear of the lines).

While on the subject of fish, I saw this extraordinary specimen, so strange that for a few seconds I couldn’t work out what kind of creature it was  the fins and lack of legs give it away as an American Paddlefish, a species, since closely related to Sturgeon, imported into the former USSR for caviar.

And this strange fish was not in the Dniester but in an ornamental pond in the monstrously opulent estate of the wildly corrupt former president Yanukovych at Mezhyhirya, north of Kiev, where his state dacha was bloated into a vulgar palace set in manicured grounds contained within a security fence set 2m into the ground. (Mr Yanukovych is curently at an unknown address in Russia.)

In different circumstances we lured these massive Wels Catfish from the depths of the Chernobyl cooling pond with a skilful deployment of Custard Creams.

Back on the Dniester, we finally turned in to a shallow lake packed mainly with Coot but also Whiskered Terns, Great & Pygmy Cormorants, Great Egrets, Ferruginous Ducks, Mute Swans, GC & RN Grebes and of course cruising Marsh Harriers. I was looking ahead at some Caspian Gulls when I suddenly a much larger gull with a hefty black bill right beside – a juvenile Pallas’ Gull – but no sooner had I seen it than it was left behind, receding into the light….

So that was the birding excitement after which, apart from one Osprey, I turned back to home-from-home delights like this converted railway carriage…

…and the Human Interest of this group of ladies we guessed were Angling Widows. Unlike their contemplative husbands they were having a high old time with singing and dancing, picnic and, one suspects, The Consumption of Alcohol.

Apart From The Steps…

I must have been aware of Odessa beforehand but for so many people of my generation the name signifies a celebrated sequence in Eisenstein’s “Battleship Potemkin” during which tumbling panic ensues as innocent protestors are massacred by Czarist soldiers.

Now, they are named Potemkin Steps and are a popular place to be photographed against a view of the bay marred by a tall hotel built in mysterious circumstances and never occupied.

More recently, in Edmund de Waal’s “The Hare With Amber Eyes” I read of the fabulous wealth accrued by 19th century traders in grain from Ukraine’s fertile black soil, invested in magnificent palaces here, in Vienna and Paris

Following decades of neglect some of these splendours have been restored…

…while others are crumbling.

The streets and parks are shaded with tall trees.

 

Fertile

Dusk in Odessa

Beneath the street light of an intersection I’m once more like a five-year-old, peering at the jumble of shapes on the sign, referring back to the bit of paper I keep folded in my pocket. I’m like all those children with whom I’ve sat over decades of teaching as they attempt to decode the squiggles, trying to distinguish one from another, trying to remember the sound each is supposed to represent. Except that for me there’s already a contrary alphabet firmly installed in which some letters sound the same, some look similar but say something else and others are alien. The sounds too are sometimes new. The pupils with whom I now feel so much in sympathy are those for whom those squiggles remained mute.

One strategy is just to remember the entire shape of the word and match it to the tiny lettering on the grid of streets on our folded-out map, but the words are so long… Then a breakthrough – the same I heard from our own children during their first year of primary school as we’d be driving along and one would suddenly exclaim, “That says STOP.” With me it’s “P…U…S-H-K-I-N.. It says PUSHKIN! And that’s Ekaterina!”

For six blocks we’ve marched through alternations of light and deep pools of shadow along avenues where the tall trees lean against ornate crumbling facades, providing multiple trip hazards in the form of their erupting roots, remaining  stumps and hollows along with drains and displaced cobbles and, sweating, have just about given up our search for Roz Marin, when I spot black hats silhouetted in the distance. There was a Jewish restaurant much closer to the hotel but this is supposed to bethe best. Inside, it’s boiling hot and devoid of diners, closed; the figures  I saw are crowding instead into the tiny adjacent baker’s, where trays of sweet-smelling bread are being unloaded from the ovens.

What next? Head for those lights. But it’s a fairground, with just shawarma stalls, and beyond it a dark park.

Dark is not threatening though. The figures moving through the shadows are just strolling: old people, young couples, families with young children out in the warm night.

If we walk to the end of the park we should come to the sea.

Indeed we do, but between us and the water is a nocturne of hulls, superstructures and gantries.

Time to turn a right angle and once more enlist my crumpled bit of paper, passport to the word-world of Cyril, in the search of the lights of Deribasivska Street with its restaurants, giant illuminated fruits, horses decorated as giraffes and crowds strolling confidently along repaired pavements (but most girls wear flat shoes all the same).

In passing #2