Yeri and me, awestruck by the chaos at the Polish border.
School ended yesterday and it’s a good thing, though not for the reasons you might expect. A collection of adventures over the past week has led to the complete (and thankfully temporary) deconstruction of my vocal chords. Totally kaput. When I try to raise my voice to talk, all that comes out are buzzing, rough-edged spouts of air. I cannot speak above a whisper. It’s a wonder to behold.
You know, I really wish someone had asked me what I’d have liked my last words to be because for the past three days I’ve been stuck with these:
“We’re with you, coal miners of Donetsk!”
Now, don’t get me wrong. In no way do I regret attending the football game and cheering on a team to a 2-0 victory but the ensuing silence was unexpected and a decided inconvenience. Sure, sure, I should have known that running to the stadium in a downpour and then sitting wet and shivery in the open bleachers for 2.5 hours would have some enduring repercussions. But who ever acted sensibly among throngs of beered-up men? I think they call it mob mentality. My cheering companion, Olga, and I were grateful for our spots among the mad, boozy fans who’d come hours by bus just to secure a win for their team. The warmth of their drunk, unwavering cheers were a welcome balm against the damp chill that caught at our collar bones when things quieted on the pitch below. Punching the air with my fist, beating my feet to the sound of their drum and crying out for victory were minuscule offerings in return for the great entertainment they were providing on this Wednesday night. Only later on did I consider the damage done to my already-weakened-from-singing-too-often-and-too-loudly-with-small-children state of my larynx. Mob mentality, indeed.
So, it’s two days in and I’ve been mulling over my last words – thinking a lot about what it is that draws us to silence and to noise. I picked up an anthology of short stories and start reading a piece by Kevin Brockmeier called “A Year of Silence.” Sometimes you’ve just gotta laugh at the coincidences thrown your way. In his story, a whole city cooperates to create an artificially silent world and then marvels at their subsequent desire to return from it back into the complicated radiance of sound.
“In the abundant silence we proceeded into ourselves,” Brockmeier writes at the apex of this city’s love affair with silence. And don’t I know it. Over the past few days, I’ve simultaneously felt great relief and great frustration over the state of my malfunctioning vocal cords. The funny thing about this silence (oh, how punishing it seems!) is that my ears seem to be hearing more than ever. Sitting in the armchair in our garden, the animals behind me sound like the bird house at the Bronx Zoo projected over a loud speaker. It’s magnificent and it is irritating. As many times as I’ve been happy for an excuse to let the phone ring on to voicemail, I have also just want to talk to someone about my day.
The great thing about voluntary silence and solitude is just that – you’ve always got the chance to break in with a laugh or a response. It feels strange to have that option taken off the table. I’ve had to change the things I do to entertain myself – no more solo Mandolin jam bands or Baudelaire readings for an audience of one when I can’t sleep. It’s far more unpleasant when you’re silenced and no one is giving you the chance to speak up.
And then, as quickly as it left, my voice was back again in all of its inquisitive glory. As if it had never left at all.
* * * *
After the match, it was a while before the armed guards would let us out of the stadium. Football rivalries here are fierce and a recent game in a neighboring town left cars smashed and a fair number of spectators in pretty bad shape. We’d bought our tickets – in the rain outside the stadium and under an umbrella – from the Donetsk fans in orange and black. Once the final ceremony had ended, and in order to minimize the damage and danger for all, we were being detained. Literally, the last 300 bodies out of a crowd of 28,000. Standing in rush hour proximity to each other, inching our way closer to the stairwell exit, was frustrating at best. The elation from watching ‘our team’ win the trophy had subsided and we were feeling the damp chill come on by late night after rain. The guards, gun-clad in maroon berets, were probably younger than I but they had all the power to keep us in that stadium for as long as they wanted; a fact I found as reprehensible as the loss of my voice later on that night.
Not being a die-hard fan and having no interest in starting a rumble with the Dynamo fans from Kyiv, I thought that Olga and I should be exempt from the waiting. I considered how I could explain to the guards that I was special and should be considered outside the jurisdiction of their laws. Which is just so American, right? Feeling above the law and relying on rights to get one’s way. Olga shook her head when I suggested telling the guards we were late for a train. It was the surest sign I’d seen all night that we had grown up in different worlds and under the thumbs of strikingly different governments. Though I accepted her refusal to take up my suggestion, I couldn’t stop thinking about how to weasel our way around this inconvenience. I grew up in New York, after all. I had watched my Yiayia convince the operator of the Roosevelt Island tram I was 5 when I was really 8 just so I could ride for free. We don’t wait in lines without knowing why or who’s in charge. As I stood there, stewing in my sense of confidence and self-entitlement, I was reminded of a similar experience I had had a few months ago on the Polish border.
In retrospect, I was sad about my own willingness (in this, albeit stressful situation) to give up all elements of civility and reason. Waiting behind this automated turn-style for hours in a busy, chaotic crowd of mostly Ukrainians and few tourists was a frighteningly short vignette of what it must feel like on the other side (the outside) of a locked gate. The claustrophobic feeling of having no agency at all – no power to get yourself out of this ruthless waiting game. No one was available to take questions, let alone ask for last words.
The facilities at the Polish border are modern, a precursor to the country itself which spread out clean and open in front of us as soon as we walked out of the train station. This means there is glass and steel and concrete adorning the customs building in equal parts. This turn-style, the single point of entry into Poland from the Ukrainian border, is tall and thin like the ones in New York City; and like its sister gate across the Atlantic, it only moves in one direction, prevented from clockwise entry by a wall of parallel, horizontal bars. The uniqueness of this turn-style comes from the people who control its movement. They allow the gate to spin only in short bursts – never letting more than 10 or 12 people into the checkpoint at one time. It was not the waiting that so distressed me but the simple lack of order. No one followed the rules – no one respected age or physical capacity for waiting outside in the late March chill. It was a simple case of determining who could push and persevere – who could manage to get themselves through these sideways steel jaws into the room on the other side.
And this room is perhaps the strangest part of the experience. Because there – once inside – all is quiet, calm, jovial. Music hums and not entirely friendly but perfectly civil border guards check through luggage and stamp our passports, welcoming us into the European Union. Everyone chews gum and leans, elbows heavy, on clean, white counter tops. The room seems uniquely constructed, with this automatic turn-style and a tinted sliding door, to encourage border-crossers to forget about all the hours they spent waiting outside.
Outside and behind the bars, the three of us stood for a long time, shifting our bright American backpacks as we waited with a crowd whose sole aim for the day was the sale of a single bottle of vodka, a few packs of cigarettes. Outside was where my sense of entitlement reared its ugly head.
Let me through, I demand, Can’t you see my intentions are entirely transparent! I am not bringing in liquor for your drunks and cigarettes for your youth. I am here as a good American – to spend my dollars and to sight-see! Surely, I shouldn’t have to wait in such a line, rife as it is with disorder and petty arguments! Let me through.
And, then, I begin to realize that this is the moment I have feared: my birth of equal standing in the democratic world means nothing at all. I stare at my reflection in the locked and tinted glass door. No one will listen to a word I say and a tall, strong man is boxing me out so I can’t get through the gate. He stares disapprovingly down at me and my transparent intentions. My two travel partners have made it through and I’m standing here – gripping a gray metal pole in preparation for the moment when the gates turn again and I can push and shove my way into the turn-style. The horizontal bars cut off my reflection in the sliding glass door – showing just my eyes staring back at me between darkness. And for a few moments, I see myself: nothing but eyes, locked to a faith and a cloth in which I do not believe. How could the world be so unreasonable?
These are my last thoughts before snaking under the tall man’s arm and pushing an elderly woman, with frightening zeal, out of my quarter of the turn-style. I was ruthless and no one was there to tell me I was wrong.
The whole experience remains surreal – especially the speed with which, having gained access to the other side, it all fled from my mind. Struck from the record books as quickly as it came. No last words. No questions asked.
