Maria had blond pigtails and big lips, and she always looked put together. She sat in the front row of our third grade classroom in Kharkiv, Ukraine, took careful notes, and always handed in her homework on time. Teachers loved her. I think that’s what hooked me: the perceived social approval. Or whatever else third graders think about. Anyways, I liked her. I think I barely spoke three words to her, even though I was flirting with other girls and even had a girlfriend with whom I sometimes held hands on the school yard playground.
In fifth grade, I changed schools, and in sixth grade, my dad, who remarried, moved to the States. He brought me with him and his new family. Mom moved away, I lost touch with all my childhood friends, and it took a long time to build a new life in Chicago. I spent a lot of years wondering what it would be like to grow up in Kharkiv. What did kids even do there? Did they go to the mall? Did they get drunk in alleys during long cold winters like we did, overwhelmed with loneliness and afraid of the future? How did they date? Did they make out at house parties? What kinds of moves did Ukrainian dudes pull to get laid? Did they also use the argument that it was too late not to have sex because the condom was already on, like one of my Chicago friends infamously did? How did they choose careers? What did they read? and watch?
One day, knee-deep in memories and longing, I tried looking up Maria. I typed her name into Facebook and out came a picture of an elegant woman suntanning on a beach. She looked like one of those girls that Russian businessmen take to Egypt with them for fun and games in the sun—I really don’t know many Russian businessmen, and the ones I do don’t tell me who they fly to Egypt, but this is what I assumed. I was sure that she wasn’t going to talk to me, but in the spirit of reconnecting with my roots I said hello, and she answered! We went back and forth in Russian, and after a few exchanges I figured out she wasn’t the Maria I was looking for. Same name and place, but a few years older. She definitely did not go to third grade at the same school.
Still I asked for pictures of the city and asked about her life. She worked as a travel agent and had seen some of the world. We talked about her possibly coming to Canada next summer. Or maybe in two summers. She had to see how things would go. I was googling the distance to Toronto from Chicago and trying to figure out if I was crazy enough to make the drive.
She was talkative in texts and messages and we stayed in touch. She congratulated me when I graduated nursing school and was impressed when I fought my Mixed Martial Arts fight. I liked her posts and asked questions, and she liked that a guy from the States was leaving marks on her IG. Made her worldly, I guess. Her Canada plans never materialized, but we kept talking. I moved around a bunch, working short contracts, and taking long trips overseas in between. I thought a lot about Kharkiv. What did my grandmother’s house look like now? Was it still the refuge it was for me, amidst the chaos of newfound post-Soviet freedom and my family’s personal perestroika? Was the Lenin statue still there, in front of the university, where my parents both proudly graduated from and where I went every Saturday for math club? I tried to envision walking down old cobblestone streets, but my memories drowned in darkness: My brain clasped shut. The doors that were so hard to close when I was leaving twenty-two years ago were even harder to reopen now. But I had to. I had to go back and face the ghosts and the memories. Had to shine a light into all corners of the old dark closet. I was planning a trip to visit my mother in Russia, and as the trip got closer, I decided I was ready to go home. I tacked on a few days in Kharkiv.
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The teacup clattered in the oversized cup holder, as I looked out the window of the train, out into the early Russian spring. I was heading to Moscow from St. Petersburg to start my journey to Ukraine. After the invasion of 2014, Russia and Ukraine were fighting a vague war in the eastern cities. I heard Kharkiv was OK. I wondered if I would have trouble getting in. Will people hate me for being from the States? Or for speaking Russian and not Ukrainian? Will I like it? Are the places I lived still there?
I decided I was going to write to Maria. Our communication had died down, but here was our chance to meet up.
“Hey! I’m coming to Kharkiv soon,” I wrote to her. “And by soon, I mean tomorrow.” She answered right away, wanting to know who I was visiting and how long I was going to stay. I told her that I wasevisiting my childhood and would only be there for a couple days. Told her that I’d be there alone and asked if she had any plans. “Not really,” she said. “Was maybe going to go out of town, but I probably won’t. So I can be your guide around town if you want.”
I wanted.
The final leg of the trip was uneventful. I sat in the dark airplane for two hours and landed softly in the middle of the night in my hometown. The customs official was a skinny, red-haired guy, slightly older than me. He looked at my U.S. passport
“What is the purpose of your visit?” he asked in Russian with a small-town Ukrainian accent.
“This is where I was born,” I answered, as if that explained everything.
“When was your last visit?”
“1997.”
His disappointment in me was palpable. He groaned, “Ehhh,” a Russian sound for regret, and slapped the air in a gesture of missed opportunity. “Almost twenty-five years,” he said, shaking his head. “Where have you been?” He handed me my passport, and I took it. I stepped through the gate, and I was home!
The first Kharkivian I spoke to ripped me off. On my way out of the airport a man came up to me offering a ride for ten euros. I scoffed and waved him off, sure that I could catch an Uber for a fifth of that. But when I pulled the app up, no drivers were in the vicinity for thousands of kilometers. I walked back to the man. He knew that ten euros was a bullshit price, but he also knew that I had the ten and that I honestly didn’t care about it, and there wasn’t any negotiating. I agreed, and we got in. He was young, a little older than me, tall, with a beer belly and a goatee and a loud laugh. He was friendly, and I grimly listened to his stories, mad that I got played by the airport car mafia. I usually got past them without a problem but this round I lost.
We pulled out of the airport, and I looked out of the window trying to see if I recognized my home city. The road was dark. Streetlights and the rare cars only lit up the bushes and trees lining the side of the street.
“We’ll be there in twenty minutes,” the driver said and laughed for some reason. “Where are you coming in from so late?”
“Moscow,” I grumbled from the back.
“Moscow!” he repeated and raised a finger from the steering wheel. “I lived there! For years. Got a job right out of the university. Man, they paid a shit ton of money.” He lifted his hand off the steering wheel and let it rest in the air, with his palm down, about the level of his shoulder, as if to show me how tall the shit tons were. To his neck, about. “It was a good life. We would travel all the time, just decide one day ‘Hey, let’s rent an apartment in Dubai for the weekend’ and off we went.”
The car entered the city, and I kept staring out of the window, trying to pick familiar glimpses from the darkness. Bridge, river, steeple of a church…did I remember this? Or did I dream it up? Or is this your standard Eastern European city package, like the gas station and diner of Middle America?
The driver kept droning on. “And then we moved back. That kind of life is tiring. We wanted a small-town feel.”
He said he got tired. “Of course,” I thought skeptically. “That’s why you are up at 3 a.m. on a Thursday driving me around for ten euro.” It was hard to hold back my bitterness. He wanted me to take his number down, so he could rip me off every day, I guessed. I took it half-heartedly as I got out into the dark, quiet street where Maria’s apartment was. The warm Ukrainian summer breeze made the leaves rustle, and a few streetlamps cast slow-moving shadows on the sidewalk. I messaged the owner and she came out to meet me at a side door.
“Welcome!” she said, and even managed a smile.
“I’m sorry for the late arrival.” I had told her that my plane got in at midnight, which doesn’t sound too late on paper, but the clock showed 3:30 in the morning. She was an older bleached blond woman. Very polite and proper, she looked tired but showed no irritation. The place looked modern. Flat screen TVs and Wi-Fi combined with cheap plywood furniture that could have been sold at IKEA. New washing machine, big bathtub.
It was almost 3 a.m., my eyes were closing of their own accord, and everything was blurring: My feet were still feeling the roll of the train I took this morning, two countries ago— my flight had a layover in Belarus. The church steeples in the window were rocking, and I couldn’t tell anymore if I was really checking into my own Airbnb in Kharkiv, or if I was having a dream, like I’ve had so many times over the past decades. Do I have to wake up right now and convince myself that this is not real? Or should I convince myself that it is real, and go to bed? I dumped all my stuff in the hallway and passed out on the living room couch without even making it to the IKEA bed.
In the morning, I woke up to a sun-filled room. I could see the street from the window: brown, red, and orange wide-brick buildings, with a grocery store right across the street. Luscious green trees rustled quietly as they slowly rocked back and forth in the soft, warm wind, whispering about the good old days. Not sure which were the good old days. I doubt that the time of the Khruschev regime, or World War II, or the Bolshevik Revolution, or the Tzarist days were that good, but these buildings always felt solid, reliable, and comfortable. I messaged Maria, and she agreed to pick me up later, and I walked out of the Airbnb apartment for my first day in Kharkiv. I was going to walk around and find all my childhood places: my homes, my schools, the university where I went to math club, my grandma’s home. But first I had to get food.
I stood in line very nervously, sure that I somehow selected the wrong kind of bologna or that the way I was holding the carton of eggs in my hands was the wrong way, not the Ukrainian way. Only an idiot would hold the eggs that way. But the line moved, and the clerk barely glanced at me and my eggs, only to smile and give me change. “Everything is different here,” I thought. “I don’t remember these ladies smiling at anybody.”
The small street I was staying on dead-ended into a park I remembered from childhood. Groups of young people sat on the benches, smiling and laughing. I never realized how many young people the big university attracted to the city. The street was wide, clean, and peacefully quiet. The hordes of window washers that I remembered assaulting cars at streetlights were gone. I also didn’t see any homeless people. Whether they were gone on their own or evicted by the government was hard to tell, but the fact was that I didn’t see a single one my whole stay in Kharkiv.
I walked for an hour down a street I thought I used to live on, trying to find the building until I remembered that wasn’t it at all. Embarrassed, I called my mother. “So, um, where the hell did we live? And how do I get there?”
She barely remembered either, but together we reconstructed the route. I jumped on the metro, and then the trolleybus, thrilled to feel a part of my hometown. The ride was unbearably long. I couldn’t believe I rode it to school every day with my mother. The high-rises flew by, and finally I recognized the open-air market where my stepfather and my mom would secretly buy each other flowers on birthday mornings. I got out and crossed the street. Some things hadn’t changed at all: The nine-story high-rise next to our building was still under construction. I remembered the booming sounds of the piles being driven into the ground in ‘92 when we moved in. I remembered finding discarded lead from the construction site and melting it down to a boiling pulp and making molds in the ground in the form of a skull and casting decorative skulls for ourselves. Construction would start and stop over the years, probably for lack of money, and when we left in ‘97 it was still unfinished. In 2019, I could tell that people were living in the high rise, but some parts were still undone: Some walls had gaping holes in them covered up with cardboard.
I walked around the yard I played in, trying to see it all as I saw it then. I looked at the low-level garages with trees hanging over the roofs. We climbed them as kids, and would swing ourselves down the with soft, ropey willow branches. The makeshift soccer field, where I felt like a hero goalie diving for poorly kicked balls. The building looked like it kept its original coat of paint and the dull gray walls kept all the memories of past rains in dirt lines running down to the ground. All the entrances looked the same, and I struggled to remember which one was mine.
The phone dinged with an incoming text message alert. Maria was checking in. “Where are you at? I’ll pick you up. I am going to be in a red car.”
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Streetlights illuminated long alleys in the city park as the hot summer day was coming to an end. Couples were hiding in the shadows, mosquitoes were buzzing around, and the sounds of guitar filled the air. Maria and I were walking and talking.
“It’s been a hard year,” she said. “My dad got killed in the spring. Got hit by a drunk driver. She turned out to be a cop. They buried all the evidence. There’s no way to get justice here.”
“Wow. I’m sorry to hear that.”
“Yeah. So it’s been tough. I’ve been very sad. Gained a bunch of weight.” She looked at me to gauge my reaction. I had no problems with her weight: All the curves were in the right places. I smiled at her.
“You look great!” We kept walking.
“So what about you? What brings you around here?”
“Just wanted to visit home. I haven’t been here in twenty-two years”
“And? How is it?”
“I love it! Everything is so nice now. And cheap! I think I might buy an apartment here, rent it out on Airbnb. I think Ukraine is the undiscovered gem of Europe.”
A group of teenagers walked around us laughing and yelling, one of them pushed another right past Maria. I grabbed her arm and pulled her in. She giggled and stayed there, her breasts touching my chest, looking me right in the eyes. “Thanks,” she said, grabbed my hand and pulled me forward. “Let’s go to the Ferris wheel.”
We sat across from each other in the slowly spinning cabin, looking over the city I spent so many years trying to envision, wrapped in darkness. Yellow rectangles of light hung in the distance where apartment buildings disappeared in the night. I switched seats, sitting next to her. Our bodies were fully touching as I put my arm around her. She looked at me.
“Can you see your house from here?” I asked her, just to say something. Our faces were almost touching. I could smell the strawberry bubblegum she’d been chewing. She slowly pulled her eyes away from mine, maybe expecting a kiss.
“Hmm,” she said. “Maybe.” She was having a hard time concentrating. “I don’t know.” The ride finished up, and we got out.
Late that night she drove me home. She parked, and we sat in silence for a moment.
“So, what kind of stuff do you guys watch in America?” She sat back in her seat and looked at me.
“Like, what do you mean?”
“Do you watch any of the Ukrainian comedy stuff? You know, our president was a comedian before. Have you seen him?”
“Some,” I said. The smell of her perfume was filling up the car, mixing in with the smell of blooming flowers seeping in through the open window. I wanted to touch her so bad I clenched my teeth. She pulled out her phone and leaned in, and I leaned forward, our cheeks grazing each other. We sat there, watching. I was paralyzed, my body tingling with excitement and disbelief: Was this real? Was I in Kharkiv, breathing the air of a Ukrainian summer night, in these streets that I ran in as a kid? Am I a man, now, returning like Odysseus from my journey back to this Ukrainian Ithaca? I turned my head and kissed her, half expecting her to push me off, to yell at me, to tell me that I’m not Ukrainian enough, or not man enough, or not old enough, still the same age I was when I left here decades ago. But she didn’t. She kissed back, soft, and welcoming, accepting me as one of her own.
We hooked up that night. It was fun and easy, no pretense or complications. “Welcome home,” she said as she threw her head back on the pillow in the wee hours of the morning. The sun was coming up. I laughed hard as I got out of bed to make coffee. It was time to get to the train: I was going to Kiev today, to catch the flight back to Chicago.
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When bombs started flying over Kharkiv in February of 2022, I was mesmerized. Every morning, I woke up and reached for my phone immediately to check the progress of the Russian troops. I watched as the little red lines on newspaper maps of war would get closer and closer to the surrounding villages I remembered from childhood. I wrote to Maria.
“How is it?”
“It’s great. They’re going to level us here soon. But otherwise, fucking phenomenal.”
“I guess it’s good that you can joke still. Are you guys all OK?”
“It’s not much for joking around here. It’s my turn to keep watch tonight. My mom and brother are sleeping. When the air sirens go off, I have to wake everyone and we have to run through the explosions to the underground parking lot. Maybe I’ll get to sleep there, in the car. My brother was driving our relatives to the border, gotta let him rest. And Mom…Mom doesn’t want to leave. I tell her, let’s run, but she says no. I am dying here. So here we are: watching it all burn down to hell. So yeah … you should come.”
It was hard talking to her: There wasn’t anything I could do to help. I would check in once in a while, but there was nothing to say: She was getting bombed, and I wasn’t. She escaped eventually, on one of those “grab two plastic bags of things and run” trains that were hauling women and children out of Ukraine to Poland. Men had to stay back and fight. Even though there were shelters and bus passes for the Ukrainians, these women and kids were stranded on foreign land.
After she didn’t post for a while, I sent her a message, “Do you need anything?”
A few weeks went by until I heard back: “I’m OK now. It was crazy at first. I didn’t bring a charger, and my phone was dead. Poland has shelters in towns up and down the border. We stayed in one at first, but then it got full, so they made us move further along. But everyone is very nice! A lot of volunteers here set up cots for us at the train stations. It took weeks to settle in but I’m in Germany now, this family took me in.”
Slowly, we drifted apart. She is still in Germany, I think. I am happily married now, with a child on the way. I see many people going back to Ukraine. People want to get back to their lives, to move forward in these crazy times. The bombings in Kharkiv slowed down, and then picked back up. It is hard to imagine Kharkiv as a travel gem anymore. I am forever grateful for the light, sunny days I spent there in the intermission between wars.
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Oleg Shilkrut is a Chicago-based writer, photographer, and adventurer. He writes about experiences of immigration and travel exploring world cultures.
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