Not long afterwards, the KGB harassed Yaroslav’s friend, our office landlady. They interrogated her because she rented the office to Yaroslav and me. She collapsed and ended up in hospital. I felt terrible and was not even allowed to visit her in case my presence made matters worse. In the end we managed to retain the office, but everything seemed so precarious now.
Anxious about the fact that I still had no long-term visa or accreditation papers and that the Foreign Ministry still held my passport, I made an appointment at the Foreign Ministry press office with Mr. I. to discuss my situation. He assured me that I would receive my passport and visa soon and that he hoped accreditation would follow in the New Year.
“I applied for my visa months ago,” I half shouted and half pleaded. “I have to get my passport back now.” Mr. I. sympathized with my predicament.
“It’s with the police solnyshko, there’s nothing I can do,” he said. He claimed not to know which police station held my passport, but I found out. When I showed up, the police officer in charge slammed the door in my face.
Christmas approached. I remained trapped in Kiev. Yaroslav left for New York and would not return. Student protest leaders worried that they might be arrested. Yaroslav did too. He was more vulnerable than me. I understood why he went and was relieved he could leave, though jealous that I could not.
By the time January 1991 arrived, I felt engulfed by gloom. Ira’s mother had moved to the dacha. Ira remained in Kiev. I appreciated her company, though I occasionally worried that she might be connected to the KGB. I had long ago reasoned that even if that were true, it didn’t matter because I had nothing to hide. Besides she did all the chatting. Language constraints meant that like a family pet, I listened but couldn’t really communicate what I thought. I mostly worried, though, that I was a burden. My short-term stay had now dragged on for six months. It could not be easy to have a house guest for so long. One evening mid-month we sat in the kitchen.
“I’m meant to be getting accreditation soon,” I told Ira.
“We’ll see,” she said.
“I’ll be able to find a place of my own then,” I added. She was kind enough to tell me not to worry about this. We sat for a while longer in her kitchen and drank tea. Then I went to bed. Rukh, as determined as ever to push for Ukrainian independence, was holding a demonstration the next day. I looked forward to it. Activity helped brighten my mood.
A cold wind blew as I made my way toward the demonstration in St. Sophia’s Square. I walked quickly and soon saw that people had already gathered there. I noticed a woman who whirled her way through the crowd. So many people knew her. When we passed, she stopped to say hello. Her exuberance won me over on the spot.
“How nice to meet you! I’m Marta,” she said and stuck out her hand. Marta had just arrived from New York and would stay for several months. She would establish a bureau for her paper. I had a new friend.
“I was at the Foreign Ministry press office and I think we’ll get accreditation soon,” she said. “This is important for Ukraine. It’s a way to show Moscow that Ukraine has some autonomy.”
I did not know what to think. Politics had see-sawed so dramatically throughout the fall and early winter that I could not tell where the power lay — with hard-liners who opposed any move toward independence or with a more moderate faction that seemed to include the Foreign Ministry. I had waited so long for accreditation that I did not even dare to believe that Marta could be right, but a few days later the Foreign Ministry called. Marta and I met Mr. I. and Mr. C. at the press office. Mr. C. smiled when he announced the good news. He handed me my accreditation first.
“Number one for you,” he said. Then he handed Marta hers, “Number two for you.”
Being number one had never meant so much to me. All those months of anxiety disappeared into the past. I stared down at my laminated card and saw “press” in Cyrillic letters written down the side. I felt free, or as close to it as I could be in Ukraine. Mr. C. congratulated Marta and me. I sensed someone had fought battles behind the scenes to reach this day but doubted I would ever know the details. We chatted a while and then left the office. Marta rushed away to finish a feature. Now that I had official status, I ambled through the neighbourhood and eyed buildings where I would like to live.
A week later I asked Marta, “What if we put apartment wanted ads up in all the buildings that we like?” She laughed and said, “They’ll think we’re crazy capitalists.”
“So? The worst possible outcome is that we’ll be ignored.” Marta agreed. The next morning I went to her room in the Dnipro Hotel and we drafted ads. Then we drove up to our favourite neighbourhood and posted the ads in the lobbies of the buildings we liked.
Weeks went by with no response. Then a man left a message on my answering machine. Marta and I had already found apartments through her contacts, but I arranged to meet the man anyway. He showed me a large apartment in the centre, diagonally across from where I would live. I thought I would introduce the man to Bill, a British journalist who had visited in the fall and had recently driven back from London to work here. He was staying in a flat owned by Yaroslav’s uncle. I walked over and knocked on the door. Bill opened it and peered intently through his wire-rimmed glasses.
“How was the trip back?” I asked. Bill held a thick book in one hand and a bar of deodorant in the other.
“I stocked up on petrol in Poland,” he explained. “I filled tins in the back but didn’t shut the lid properly on one. Petrol sloshed all over a box of books.” I watched as he rubbed deodorant over a page of his book and then flipped it and rubbed more on the next one.
“Best thing to counteract the smell,” Bill said. I saw boxes full of tinned food in the hallway. Bill invited me nearly every night afterwards for dinner and always let me choose a tin to open. When the food ran out, we ate porridge and persimmons, the only fruit available in the Bessarabskyi Market. Occasionally we found an Azeri pomegranate.
I began to dream about food. I called an American friend in Moscow. I had visited hard-currency grocery stores there and remembered rows of fresh produce.
“I’m dying for an orange,” I told him. “I’ve actually started to dream about salmon and snow peas. I wonder if that means I’m malnourished. All you can get here is pickled garlic, shredded pickled carrots and pickled tomatoes.”
I asked my friend whether he would shop for a small group in Kiev and send the food down by train. He agreed and wise to Russian ways, bribed the female wagon attendant in one car. She kept the groceries in her cabin. Everything was there when I collected the shipment.
I finally felt settled in Kiev. Even work went well. In Hungary I had chased news. Here, at least until now, little competition meant that I only had to sit still and news arrived. It came through visits from strangers, phone calls, envelopes stuffed full of documents surreptitiously shoved under a door, or from some opposition members during a walk in the park, where they escaped bugs (the electronic kind). Even the chairman of Parliament, Leonid Kravchuk, left his office door open. Ukrainian journalists wandered in, so I did as well, though that door soon closed. With a formal foreign press corps, the rules changed.
Now we sat together in a press gallery that overlooked the chamber of Parliament. A white Lenin statue stood in a nook behind the high table where Mr. Kravchuk and his associates sat. That winter Marta, Bill and I followed manoeuvring between Moscow and Kiev over a referendum planned for March. The referendum, if passed, would confirm the continued existence of the Soviet Union but would decentralize some powers to the republics like Ukraine.