Invisible Bridges: On Ukraine, Russia, and friendships

Abstract

Invisible BridgesOn Ukraine, Russia, and friendships Marci Shore (bio) in early march, ten days after Vladimir Putin sent his army into Ukraine to begin a mass slaughter, I got a message on an encrypted application from my friend Inessa in Moscow. We had known each other for nearly thirty years. But it had been seven years since we last spoke. By then Inessa and I both knew that Putin's anticipated blitzkrieg had failed: Kyiv had not fallen in three days. But the slaughter continued. It was a rare historical moment in its absence of ambiguity—an unprovoked invasion, for nothing. We were watching it all, live-streamed on the internet. Or rather, I was watching it [End Page 39] all. Information in Russia was censored. Yet it was impossible that Inessa, so well educated, would not—did not—know. "I had thought that the very worst in my life had already happened—I lost my parents," Inessa wrote. "I could not have imagined something like this.…" Then a second message: "I am afraid that in Russia a civil war is about to begin, and then—terror." galina i am not a neutral observer of this war—I have been living it from afar, through my friends who are in it. My attachment to Ukraine has its origins neither in Ukraine nor in Russia, nor in America, but rather in a provincial part of the Czech Republic, where I arrived some twenty-eight years ago, during the last days of summer in 1994, to work as an English teacher. I was the only American in a small town with a market square freshly painted in shades of lime and tangerine, and I wanted to be liked. The people in the town, by and large, did not like me. Other women my age were very much liked. Milena worked at a vaguely Italian café that served pizza and wine. The café was young and bright, like Milena, and other young, bright people gathered there. When the café was not busy, she would open her shopping bag from behind the bar and show her girlfriends her new purchases: black stockings, auburn hair dye, violet nail polish. In sparkling eye shadow, heavy mascara, tight jeans, and the clingy tops of a dancer, Milena always looked beautiful, and at home. She seemed content to mix drinks, happy to be in the world that could be touched like the spoon she twirled between her fingers. I was jealous of Milena and her ability to enjoy the present moment. Men admired her. No one harassed her. Of course, she had a boyfriend to protect her. I was nearly always by myself. My own makeup was not so heavy, my clothes not quite so revealing, my brown hair undyed. Even so, men called to me, taunted me, followed me around the painted square, as if it were understood that this was okay, that the usual rules did not apply to foreigners. [End Page 40] I was unprotected by social conventions. The other women in the town saw everything, but none reached out a hand. Except Galina, a Ukrainian woman about fifteen years older than I was, who taught at the school with me. She did reach out—one of those moments that alters the arc of one's life. She made tea, translated for me, told me who in the town had good will, if misplaced, and who could not be trusted. Today, near thirty years later, as a historian of Eastern Europe, as I find myself unable to turn away from a country turning to embers in a ghastly war, I understand that my connection to Ukraine came into being through this unexpected friendship, against the backdrop of those men and their catcalls. Perhaps it was natural that we, two English teachers, the only two foreigners working at this school, were drawn together, despite our differences. I was an agnostic Jew; Galina was searching for faith in that passionate, desperate way captured in the Russian word bogoiskatel'stvo, "God-seeking." Galina and her thirteen-year-old daughter, Mara, had arrived shortly after Czechoslovakia's Velvet Revolution of 1989; the Iron Curtain had just fallen; everyone...