Yuliya had created her Theatre of Bad Dreams in the wake of the Maidan protests. She’d decided to form her own company after she had been barred from two local amateur dramatics groups for being too outspoken. In Dnipro she turned adversity to advantage and found no lack of takers. In the first month alone she recruited injured veterans from both the Afghan war and civil clashes, two Yuzhmash workers maimed by industrial accidents, even another Chernobyl survivor. At the Theatre of Bad Dreams she made them confront their demons.
In the same spirit of inclusion, players and audiences alike provided material. Their performances dealt with armed conflict, disabled lives, loss of identity and racism. The company made no money of course; costumes, lights, even the sheets had had to be begged or borrowed. Yuliya herself lived with friends in an abandoned rail freight station. Penury was an everyday reality.
We huddled together around the steaming samovar, drinking tea before the final play. ‘Our theatre is about politics and dreams, good and bad,’ she blurted, nestling the chipped glass in her hand, shivering with cold.
‘And about nightmares,’ I said.
To Yuliya the world was splintering, and the largest crack cut through Ukraine. In the 1990s industrious Dnipro had crumbled. Yuzhmash lost all its missile orders and many of its engineers. Its managers asked the remaining liquid-propulsion specialists and aerospace boffins (including Yuliya’s father) to turn their expertise to the manufacture of trolley buses. Inflation rocketed as the country’s gross domestic product halved. At the same time Moscow began to lavish thousands of passports on ethnic Russians, promising them study grants, generous pensions and the rest. Then it made the protection of their rights a pretext for invasion, sending in the tanks and little green men.[16]
‘We have always lived with the dark, with war, deceit and ruin,’ she went on at speed. ‘This is part of Europe’s essence, part of the nightmare. It doesn’t vanish after one generation of peace.’
Our exchange unfolded in short bursts, Yuliya speaking with the same intensity as her plays, talking suddenly about Dnipro and her disillusioned parents, about the dire uncertainty of their lives, about a city built to destroy other cities.
‘Now the brightest Soviet minds make tractors and don’t get paid. They never wanted to do bad things but do they have any choice?’
The cold shook Yuliya onto her feet and back to the stage. Across its length the sheets now zigzagged in two parallel lines, their sides propped up by metal poles, creating the impression of opposing trenches. Into them limped and rolled the broken actors, playing the part of rival soldiers. At the start of the third play, they manned their posts, aimed cut-out weapons and took potshots at each other across no-man’s-land.
‘Donetsk! Popasna!’ they called out, one by one, relating real stories from real front-line towns in eastern Ukraine. One player recalled weeping like a child as volleys of rockets pulverised his trench. Another read aloud text messages, sent to his phone by Russian electronic warfare systems. He was nothing but ‘meat for his commanders’. His mangled body wouldn’t be found ‘until the snow melts’.
‘Mariupol! Luhansk! Torez!’
In the audience two local men translated for me then stepped down onto the stage to join the performance. They walked between the lines, passing back and forth a handheld microphone, telling of children walking to school under fire, of old men fishing alongside minefields, of the young couple who kissed outside a Mariinka disco as it was hit by a stray shell.
‘Do you know why soldiers in the army have to wake up at six in the morning?’ asked the player beside me. ‘Because at that hour you feel like killing everybody.’
By now everyone was on the stage. In the freezing circus house, actors and audience alike imagined themselves to be on – or back on – the war’s front line, among the 10,000 soldiers and civilians who had lost their lives there in the last decade. Three women gripped each other, crying without stopping, their grief stuck like a cracked record. Rebels lobbed imaginary grenades over their heads and guerrilla fighters made imaginary advances on enemy positions. A part-paralysed player relived the moment that he had been hit by shrapnel. Their pain began to transcend time and place as Yuliya clutched her poor malformed head and wailed.
‘Repetition of agony is important. By facing it, problems may be truly resolved,’ she said in a kind of rage, at the end of the night. ‘Political theatre asks difficult questions: Who are we? Why did my sister die and I live? We face the truth.’
Outside, an icy wind howled into my bones. Twisted, skeletal cranes glistened in their icy coats under a sliver of moon. Beneath the still and frozen landscape, the earth was barren and hard. On the walk to my hotel I was unable to control my shivering.
I had a cold coming on, of that there was no doubt. When travelling I always try to keep well. Illness numbs the senses and clouds judgement. Objectivity goes for a burton, as does any sense of urgency. Time is always precious, of course, but it seems especially so when on the road: catching trains and planes, discovering new towns and cities, gathering stories and making notes. Yet even if I’d loved the place, I didn’t want to spend too long in Dnipro, nursing myself back to health, within range of Russian-backed rebel (rocket-assisted) artillery.
At least I’d had the forethought to spring for a good hotel, and to slip the desk clerk a folded note to ensure my room had a bath. But I must have over-tipped him for, as I lowered myself into the steaming water, I beheld a treetop view across the city. Beyond the wide window, dawn broke over the Orthodox cathedral, its foundation stone laid by Catherine the Great and Austrian Emperor Joseph II. The yellow fumes of distant Prydniprovsk power station rose like spun gold into the lightening sky.
Once the shivering began to abate, I took another garlic pill and reflected on crippled Ukraine. Resistance to authority was its national idea, the consequence of the centuries of subjugation. Wily Ukrainians of yore defied their rulers, looked after themselves and so survived occupation, pogroms, famines and holocaust. Russia worked to wound the fledgling democracy but it was the Ukrainians themselves – propelled by their own myths – who did the most damage. Kiev’s own officials, parliamentarians and businessmen plundered the state budget and stole or sold national assets (including an RD-250 ICBM engine – or at least its technology – that found its way from Dnipro to Pyongyang to power North Korea’s long-range ballistic missile system). Ukrainians have made their country so ungovernable that Transparency International – which monitors corruption worldwide – rates it as 142nd in the world, alongside Uganda.
I gazed out across the broken city and wondered if I was seeing the real end of Europe – fragile, fragmented and lost in a maze. Then the hot water ran out and I sneezed again.
24
All That Glitters
I was looking for a church, although not because I felt like death. My car rose off the steppe and into the Carpathians, the arc of mountains that stretched from Ukraine through Hungary and the Czech Republic to form a natural barrier between the Slavic and Romanised worlds. It was a remote, meaningless fragment of territory cut off from everywhere, according to the historian A. J. P. Taylor.
I’d rented the car in Chernivtsi, once home to ‘Jews in kaftans… spur-jingling Romanian soldiers… colourfully dressed peasant women with baskets of eggs on their heads and solid ethnic German burghers in wide knickerbockers and Tyrolean hats’, recalled the Austrian author Gregor von Rezzori in The Snows of Yesteryear. To Jews the city had been טשערנאָוויץ. Its Romanian rulers had called it Cernăuţi. Under the Austrians it had been Czernowitz. To Poles it was Czerniowce and to Russians Chernovtsy. Once it had been dubbed ‘Little Vienna’ and ‘Jerusalem upon the Prut’. But in the fury of the Second World War, its diverse culture had been ravaged and expunged. In its absence, the modern and homogeneous city didn’t move me, unlike its car rental firms. I hired a not-too-ancient Skoda and, like so many before me, headed out of town.
16
Little green men –