This is the last postcard in the packet. Frankly I am glad to have done with it. Here were three months in the living, many more in the writing. Too much re-living takes away from the present to be lived. It was a venture, an adventure, a misadventure, all. I venture on.
A postlude will follow.
Out
I had decided that that was enough. In a clap I knew my Ukrainian journey was concluded. In hack phraseology, I had "got my story", and what with the first mission and this last I could not have gotten closer. I had come to gain the view of the street and the field and to expose these unedited scenes to whatever audience was willing to look, and both these vantages I was given in full. One venture had come to an end, and presently a new one began—that of getting back.
So ended one of the queerest escapades of my career. Having felt the snell wind blown in from the East, it was now time to wend my way back on westlin winds.
There began my anabasis.
Logged distances:
Walked it (2 hrs) to HQ.
Automobiled it (35 min) to central Mykolaiv.
Bussed it (3.30 hrs) to Odessa.
Trained it (11 hrs) to Lviv.
Bussed it (9 hrs) to Warsaw.
It was a pleasure to discard all the weighty soldier's impedimenta that no longer had use: the sleeping bag, the havresack of canned food, the rifle, the constricting vest and the tortoise-shell helmet. I reverted to the accustomed hobo state of mobility; loose, flexible, a jaunty swagman with stick and bedroll.
I left Korea to be cared for by the paramedics, and tarried some hours in the trench with Australia. The second hour after high noon I began my 7 mile trek to Mykolaiv, grateful to hitch the last mile or so in the cargo hold of a passing military lorry.
Entering that familiar bunker of so many long hours before, grabbing my essentials and donating the rest, I obtained a car-ride from one of a helpful team of soldiers who were temporarily appropriating our base. (Transportation was notoriously difficult, the more difficult the more east one travelled, and that Adam had not been able to order me a cab to these parts should have been foreseeable.) During the half-hour drive I befriended this Ukrainian soldier and makeshift chauffeur, and to mutual thanks and well-wishes I was dropped off by the Mykolaiv bus terminal, where I boarded a cramped and humid minibus for Odessa train terminal.
Overnight train tickets require purchase in advance and I arrived without a ticket. I got to the Odessa station just as the train for Lviv began boarding, and I would not be waiting all night for the next day's departure. I tried explaining to an attendant, in a mixture of pidgin English and not very good Ukraino-Russian, my situation; and the attendant explained back to me, in a mixture of pidgin Ukrainian and no English at all, what I gathered was a bureaucratic impasse above a humble attendant's status and beyond his control.
I was in a fever to get back to Warsaw. Descrying an attractive Ukrainian woman (not the first), around my age, modernly attired, and appearing as though she might speak English—she did, and fluently—I nearly jumped directly before her path and thereupon hastily explained my status as a volunteer and the current impasse...could she possibly act as translator? She could, and did, and did the job wonderfully. Explaining in words I didn't quite understand, but in tones of pathos all too evident, every so often she gestured alternately with a pitying finger in my direction or a softly rebuking one in the conductor's, concluding her brief monologue with an expectant glare.
"Show him your documentation." I did so.
Admirably performed, the conductor finally nodded his assent, muttering what I took to be assent, and what sounded like a but followed by a condition.
"He says since there's no room left on the train you'll have to sleep in the worker's cabin and share it with another—"
"Deal." I was prepared to sleep in the coal shed, if there were one.
She apprised me of the rule that foreign volunteers were to be given free carriage, of which she also reminded the train attendant. Issuing my sincerest дякую, with much feeling I thanked her, and with much relief I boarded the train, but not before extracting one more grace from her. I regret to say that I since lost the number.
*
I shared the front car with a grumbling train worker, no doubt unhappy about having unexpectedly to share his private coup (mama Mary icon on the wall, some undistinguished reading material on a tiny desk by the window, train worker's uniform hung proudly by a peg beside the sliding door) with an intruding American. I have seldom been so indifferent, and as he saw I was an undemanding, quiet, and neat bunkmate who kept privately to his corner, my passing niceties were slowly acknowledged, and by trip's end even returned.
Some three hours into the ride, all darkness and wind outside, I received an unnerving message. Volunteers, as the name suggests, are under no long-term obligation to serve, and do not sign binding contracts. However, the commander of my battalion, out of generosity and with due feeling for all his soldiers, advised me to register in the system with the people finances, so I would at least get paid for the month I was giving. It was in any case prudent to register so as to have insurance, and for the family to receive some recompense in case of decease of signer. So long as I cancelled the form before three months elapsed, I would not be contractually obligated to the standard three-year term of service.
The "big mission" took all our minds off of everything but; and I had consequently never signed out. And there was Mexico informing me in a voicenote, in his sarcastic way, while I was 16 hours traveling time distant: “You were in such a rush to get out of here that I didn't get a chance to tell you that, since you signed in, you needed to sign out of your contract. So if you get stopped at the border they’re gonna register you as a deserter...They may not find out about it and that's fine; but if they do, you’re gonna have a long [here he made the enunciation of the 'long' quite long], interesting time at the border.”
It appeared I needed now to abscond from the very country I came to aid.
Then I remembered something that gave me hope. By some fortuitous impulse, I had signed the contract using my American passport, though I had given my other passport when entering Ukraine. I would need to exit with this latter passport anyway, and hope there was no connection to be found between my dual identifications.
*
I made some of those 11 hours by rail productive. I wrote a letter to the editor I respect of a certain magazine I sometimes respect, requesting an interview upon my arrival in New York:
Dear RL,
Pardon if the rhythm of this letter adopts something of the rickety haste of this train...
it began.
*
The frowst in the cabin hung thickly, and I had a good soak in my own sweat during the night. In fact the whole carriage fairly reeked of unbathed human bodies to whose skins clung the scents of terminals and anterooms and streets—a compost derived from bouts of movement and waiting, waiting and movement. A spicy, pungent, feral smell. It smelled officially of 3rd class. I myself must have been one of the class's worst nasal offenders. I would have given a tooth for a bath. But as long as I felt the rails' vibration underneath and the whip of hot wind from the open window overhead which meant we were advancing in the direction of the border, the weather suited me fine, and I passed a sleep fitful but grateful.
*
Naturally I was apprehensive of what exactly awaited me at that approaching border, but my temperament was such that so long as I am moving I feel right and can put up with any challenge. I was one of those who, in immovable traffic, would be merrier to hop out and take the rest of the way walking, though it meant arriving later. It is stillness my kind find intolerable.
The future would just have to make up its mind when I got there.
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