Channel 5 has just had a story about the Ukrainian Mobile Hospital whose doctors worked in Pakistan after the earthquake.

Among other things, they helped the locals with seven births - and one newborn Kashmiri boy received the most Ukrainian name in the world - Taras!

The air here is too dry and it was really hard to breathe during the night. I felt as if I were back in the airless Moscow, almost. A scary feeling,

But at least I woke up early thanks to that. Couldn't wait to get outside for some fresh air, but with all the ultrasounds and IVs I only managed to take a short walk around noon - 15 photos.

This neighborhood is called Otradnoye (I guess), and even though there's something about joy in its name, the area I walked in today is pretty joyless. Lots of medical institutions around - Medgorodok.







***

As I was taking yet another picture of something ugly, a man called out to me from behind a broken-down fence; he looked like someone who rides around in an ambulance all day. At first, I didn't hear all that he said. But I thought I heard the word 'morgue.' The building behind him, which I had just photographed, could've been a morgue, I thought. He repeated: "Devushka [miss, girl], is that a hobby of yours to take pictures of morgues?"

I erased the picture immediately, without thinking.

A little further on, I saw a chimney. They probably cremate bodies here, I thought.

And this is where I bounced back up from the shock of the encounter with the morgue employee and was able to see it as if through someone else's eyes: a pregnant girl with a camera and a tired man with a difficult job and a weird sense of humor, totally consistent with his occupation; he's enjoying himself immensely as he is scaring the shit out of the very pregnant girl. Hilarious.

***

Some three minutes before the morgue conversation, I had been sms-ing Mishah about something very pleasant: all of a sudden, in the middle of this depressing neighborhood, I smelled New York City. A sweet smell of something being baked in the street, pretzels or something, mixed with some mild stench, totally bearable, coming from a nearby subway station. Made me feel so nostalgic.

There's probably a bakery somewhere close, I'd been thinking. But then I saw the chimney, and for the next two hours, until Mishah wrote me back, I worried about the possibly different nature of the NYC smell. Mishah, however, wrote that there was only one crematory in Kyiv, at Baikove Cemetery, far from here.

***

There're tiny plastic bottles with shampoo and shower gel here, hotel-style. After the morning shower today, I smelled very unfamiliar, and the only place I could locate myself at with this hotel smell all over me was Istanbul, where we do stay at the hotel. This was the first time I felt nostalgic today, and a little bit too hopeful, for some reason - but then I looked out of the window, at the gloomy buildings of Medgorodok and the leaden sky, and knew again that I was in Kyiv, not Istanbul.

The weather this whole past week has been depressing. Somehow, it's the weather I've been imagining we'd have on the day I deliver, and I kept forcing myself to imagine something else, something happier: lots of sun, lots of fresh snow, frost and wind - and me having the baby...

Someone hacked PravdaBeslana.ru today, according to Marina Litvinovich, the site's creator (links in Russian). It's back online now, or at least a big part of it, thanks to several people who, miraculously, have kept backups. The provider's backup was dated Jan. 30, 2005, the time when the site did not exist yet.

Weird.

Maybe this is unrelated to the first-anniversary hysteria - but if it is, I really don't understand why.

The site's main content is the transcripts of Nurpasha Kulaev's trial - not Marina Litvinovich's or anyone else's opinions on what happened in Beslan last year. (And even if there're personal views on the site, what's wrong with it?)

The transcripts may, of course, prove dangerous: they aren't verdicts and anyone reading them is free to form their own opinions.

I wonder how many people have the heart to read the transcripts, though. I also wonder if there's still a single soul out there that hasn't yet formed an opinion on Beslan and the personalities involved.

I'm at the hospital now, for the next five days or so, not exactly sure what for. Had an IV for the first time in my life today, not scary at all. Glucose and some other stuff to feed the baby, they say.

The place is wonderful - I can even blog from my room! Everyone's very sweet, everything's clean, and in general, it feels more like a nice hotel than a hospital, especially in the bathroom. If only there were more places as good as this one in this country...

The windows don't open (perhaps to prevent women suffering from post-partum depression from doing something awful), and it's a bit too hot for me here - and that's a minus. But I could hear the heartbeat of a neighbor's unborn baby in the room next to mine (very quiet, but it's impossible to mistake it for anything else), and that was so moving - which is definitely a plus. (They did attach this heartbeat monitor thing to me, too, today, for about 20 minutes, and all of a sudden I realized that this busy little pump has been working inside me, alongside my own heart, all these months...)

***

They were shooting something Orange Revolution-related on Khreshchatyk today, near Prorezna - a commercial, a video, a promo for the Nov. 22 celebration, I don't know. It looked pretty authentic from afar - and they even made a fire, so the smell was authentic, too... Many people stood around, staring; a guy next to me said, 'Oh, fuck it all,' (V p.... vse tse) and walked off.

This photo is all over the Russian LiveJournal-sphere. The original is here.



It's St. Pete, 1994, and the man reading a newspaper in the background is Vladimir Putin.

My favorite caption to this photo is by Marina Litvinovich: Lyuda chose this suit for him, yes.

Lyuda is Lyudmila Putina, Putin's wife, Russia's first lady with a truly horrible taste. She's not in the picture. The man in the foreground is Anatoly Sobchak, St. Pete's governor (or mayor: I'm not sure what they called themselves then) and also the one who jumpstarted Putin's career.

Finally, I've got the energy to watch Ukrainian TV - if you can call Savik Shuster's Svoboda Slova on ICTV a Ukrainian show.

(Shuster moved to Kyiv after they cancelled his Svoboda Slova on the Russian NTV; he devotes the Ukrainian program to issues relevant to Ukraine - and yet, there's some sense of foreignness to it, a strange feeling, as if someone invisible is watching you. Just takes some time getting used to, I guess: Shuster and Ukrainian politics - in the purely Ukrainian context...)

Today's topic was federalism, separatism and the threat of Ukraine's break-up. They drew on last year's events: the get-together in Severodonetsk, during which a number of folks decided to proclaim the South-Eastern Republic (was that the name?) with the capital in Kharkiv.

Yevhen Kushnaryov, former governor of the Kharkiv region, whose hopes to become head of a new state were crashed a year ago, was speaking when I turned on the TV. It was strange to see him, not pleasant, and I didn't care about what he had to say, especially when I realized that he led a party called 'New Democracy' and his every word was part of his campaign.

I don't think I consciously paid attention to the language he spoke in, Russian. But then someone - editor of the Literary Ukraine newspaper, I think - asked Kushnaryov a question in Ukrainian, and I couldn't ignore that because of the weirdness of looking at Shuster and hearing someone's beautiful Ukrainian. And Kushnaryov replied to this guy in Ukrainian, believe it or not - not as beautiful as the guy's Ukrainian, but totally okay, as neutral as his Russian a minute ago. Again, I wouldn't have paid any attention - if it hadn't been for Shuster's presence.

I am used to our linguistic schizophrenia - but what about poor Savik Shuster, how is he taking it? They don't give you any warning as to when they are intending to speak which of the languages (reminds me of an Armenian-Iranian man I used to know in Iowa - his American wife was in a constant state of panic becuase their 4-year-old son kept switching from English to Armenian to Farsi, and of those three she could only understand English...). Moreover, you'd expect someone like Kushnaryov to speak Russian and nothing else - you'd expect it if you were in Russia, with enough distance to be able to simplify all things Ukrainian, that is. And what is Taras Chornovil doing among these "pro-Russian" guys, speaking nothing but Ukrainian, a little-shit son of the great father, Vyacheslav Chornovil?..

And you'd think the language issue has been dealt with at last, and everyone's more or less bilingual and happy about it - but no, another election is coming up and the language issue, movne pytannya, is as overused as it always is in times like this. Overused mainly by those who have been overusing it for the past fourteen years - thirteen of which they had been running the country and could have done something to solve the problem, if there ever was one...

***

I liked Anatoly Matvienko, former Crimean prime minister, a soft-spoken, intelligent man, who was trying throughout the show to say how important it was to avoid locking yourself up in a ghetto, an enclave, linguistic or geo-political.

***

Leonid Kravchuk, first president of Ukraine, is 100 percent a politician, and it's sickening. He spoke of how Ukrainians hate the idea of joining NATO - as if the prospect of it is as real for each one of us as, say, going out to a store and not finding enough money in our pocket, or going over to a hospital to deliver a baby and realizing that the conditions there are so horrid we'd better violate the law and have that poor baby at home...

We were depressed, pissed, confused and exhausted, and then we decided to stop torturing ourselves and the baby, and went over to a private maternity clinic. It's clean and cozy there, and not overcrowded - which, hopefully, means that doctors and nurses can afford to pay enough attention to every patient, without it being a real torture to them. Inshaallah, everything will go smoothly for us from now on, with no major adventures and little to write about.

***

This clinic is located right next to the kids' music school - 18 photos - in which Mishah's mother has been working for the past 30 years or so: after we were done with all the paperwork today, we walked there to say hi to her.





***

This kid is a student of Mishah's mother: Marusya, 11 years old, a violinist, has four siblings, all play some instrument, but she's the most gifted of them.

The roddom situation is getting more and more complicated and stressful.

We weren't completely happy with yesterday's place, so today we decided to follow up on another recommendation and visit roddom #6. It's closed for washing now, till Nov. 27, and we knew that it wouldn't make sense for us to have any plans for it, as I may go into labor sooner than it re-opens. But we wanted to talk to a doctor there and see what she had to say about other options available.

Funny, but she said we should check out roddom #7, the one we went to yesterday. We told her we'd already been there and gave her the name of the doctor we'd seen: she said that was a very good doctor.

And then she said something that yesterday's doctor should've told us herself - but didn't, for some reason: that the #7 place would close down for washing on Nov. 28 (#7 right after #6), till Dec. 15.

My approximate due date is Dec. 5. If we decided to stick with #7 (and it was very likely that we would) and nothing happened till Nov. 27, I'd be homeless - roddomless - and our yesterday's doctor would go without her money... She told me to come over for ultrasound on Nov. 22 - they have some really cool, new equipment, she said, donated by Yushchenko himself, showing half the stuff in color, etc. My theory is she'd try to convince me to have the baby early, by giving me fake ultrasound results or something. Very risky for her, yeah, but she does need to make money to feed her family... Why else would she not warn us that we'd better look for some back-up options?

This must be too confusing - and yes, we're confused. And I'm really, really pissed now.

***

Since #6 closed down yesterday and only a few women with newborns were still there, the doctor was able to show us what one of the post-delivery floors looked like.

Regular rooms (free or almost free, at least officially, I assume):

Two adjacent rooms, for one woman and a baby each, separated by the wall with a large window in the middle of it: if one of the women suddenly felt sick, her neighbor might notice and call the nurse, we've been told. There's one nurse on each floor, we've also been told, for it's a state hospital, not a private one. (I can't say exactly, but it looks like 20 to 50 women may fit on one floor with their babies, and one nurse for them all is definitely not enough.)

Each room has a bed (three types, all pathetic), a regular table and a table to wrap the baby on. There are no curtains or rugs, nothing to make the room just a tiny little bit cozier.

There's a shower and a toilet for every two adjacent rooms; the toilets don't have seats attached to them - instead, stored in big plastic bags attached to the door, are some round things cut out of thick, heavy, brick-colored rubber cloth, which you lay on the toilet before sitting down. There's no toilet paper, of course.

(Pretty miserable - but still way better than staying in one room with 15 other women and seeing your baby only when it's time for breastfeeding. That was how my mama had me - and those were considered totally normal conditions then.)

Rooms you pay $200 for and stay for as long as you have to (five days or so seems to be the norm):

Six rooms - two singles, in which the shower and the toilet are all yours, and four doubles, where you share the shower and the toilet with the neighbor. All look exactly like the free rooms, except there's a fridge in each one and no windows in the walls. A really important distinction is that husband and other relatives may visit you there in the afternoon - but the nurse is still the same one, serving the whole floor on her own...

***

Two of my friends had babies at roddom #6 ten years ago. One got yelled at at the reception - because her waters broke and some of the stuff got on their precious chairs - but otherwise that was a very uneventful and nice delivery - and a wonderful daughter... Another had her husband present at birth - they must've been one of the first couples in Kyiv to do it, the pioneers; Hillary Clinton stopped by at this roddom that week, and the husband even tried to say something in English to her...

***

There's a lot more I could write about - but I'm so exhausted now, and some of it is so weird that I need to digest it first.

***

I haven't been photographing #6 a lot because I felt that I might still have plenty of time for that when I end up having the baby there - now I'm not so sure, though, so I sort of regret it (19 photos):





***

I have to post this: it says "Baby I love you" and is an example of the written surjik.

'Baby' (malysh) is written in Ukrainian, the rest is in Russian (ya tebya lyublyu instead of ya tebe lyublyu):



Surjik is a crazy mix of Russian and Ukrainian spoken by many people here; very ugly until you realize it's a language in itself and it's impossible to be fluent in it without some practice... Neither Russian, nor Ukrainian, could be thought of as a special type of illiteracy...

On the way back home from the hospital, we made a detour and walked through the Republican Stadium and the tennis courts above it - I spent a good part of my childhood over there (9 photos):



It all looks very neglected, but more so to Mishah, who doesn't have an almost physical memory of, say, the broken-down concrete stairs that have been there for as long as I remember myself.

An almost physical memory of everything that's still there from my childhood: a mirror on the wall; a bench with a soft seat made of brown artificial leather; an 85-year-old nurse, Valentina Alekseevna, a woman of amazing energy, who used to swim in the freezing Black Sea in Yalta in early March and who seems not to have changed a bit - she just grew smaller, as old people do, and she still works at the tennis courts, sitting indoors, drawing numbers on the little thingies that they later attach to the locker keys.

The lockers are all new, and many other things there have also changed, of course.

Now we are trying to decide where to have the baby in Kyiv.

Roddom #7 - 23 photos - is a likely choice, if only because someone has recommended a doctor here (though Kyiv is such a small place, comparatively, that it seems each one of the city's few maternity hospitals has been recommended to us by now).

The doctor's okay (sounds and acts like Yulia Tymoshenko, only she's at least ten years older). The place seems as depressing as those three that I saw in Moscow, but I'm so tired I don't really care anymore.

One thing we felt terrible about today was having to be on the floor full of very pregnant, hospital-clad women - while we were wearing our street clothes, with all the germs on us and all - but this is how things work here. At least, I haven't seen a single cockroach running by. We assumed this was the floor for those who were having their babies free of charge; it'd be nice if the floors where they keep the patients who pay aren't as easily accessible, though I wouldn't expect too much.

The writings on the asphalt below the hospital's windows didn't really excite me as much as they did back in Moscow - maybe because I was taking pictures and, at once, trying to get used to the thought that this was, most likely, the place... One thing I noticed, though, was that roughly half the writings were in Ukrainian, not Russian.

There were so many cops at our playground today, waiting for the orders that never came, I guess. Very surreal...







There were plenty of young Communists on Khreshchatyk, too; Mishah saw them, but by the time I went out, they were gone. When Mishah was describing them, he mentioned that they looked a little like those we saw in Istanbul, and it occurred to me that, in my perception, Russian and Ukrainian Communists differ quite drastically from their Turkish or American comrades, their age being the main distinction. Unlike their old-fart mentors, the young ones may possibly change something for the better - like, organize trade unions that are of some use to anyone other than those who run them: good luck, is all I can say. But horrible history is not going away, never, and it would've been so much nicer if there were a force capable of accomplishing something - but free of all those historical sins and carrying a different name.

Woke up from Katyusha, a WWII song, blaring on Khreshchatyk, around 10 am. Reminded me of childhood.

Today's the anniversary of Kyiv's liberation in WWII.

It's always been celebrated, rather quietly, especially compared to tomorrow's date, but now people like Natalia Vitrenko (Progressive Socialist Party) are using the day for their election campaign purposes -and after a few more songs, we heard Vitrenko's voice, telling us something about "our motherland the Soviet Union." There were people with red banners down there in the street, not too many of them, and soon they began moving over toward Maidan.



Now, an hour later, Khreshchatyk is what it's always like on weekend mornings, quiet and carless, with occasional strollers walking by slowly. Nice.

We walked down Lyuteranska to Khreshchatyk today (yesterday) and saw something we really wished weren't there: the tall, ornate, wrought-iron fence preventing vehicles and pedestrians from passing through Bankova, the street housing the presidential administration.

I went over to the police checkpoint on one side of the fence and asked the cops if it was possible to walk through to Instytutska (no) and whether the fence was there for good (yes).

This is very disappointing. Unspeakingly disappointing. And maddening.

We'd read about the fence, but hoped it'd be temporary: after all, it was making the lives of the people living nearby a nightmare, forcing those who had to use the subway to walk a few extra miles, to bypass the fenced off street.

It has also made the Chimeras House, one of Kyiv's nicest landmarks, off-limits to everyone.

In summer 1996, it was still possible to walk freely on Bankova - and not just on the sidewalk, for I remember photographing a friend of mine next to the huge 'President of Ukraine' sign at the administration's main entrance: no one said a word to us then. Later, they put up a relatively low fence along the sidewalk, making the walking area really narrow, though a bigger problem was that one could no longer admire the Chimeras House adequately: because of the fence, there was no way to make a few steps back, off the sidewalk, for a better perspective.

When the protests at Maidan began last year, it took Kuchma's people a few days to come up with an idea to block off Bankova completely and install dozens of riot police there. And that backfired, of course - for only the tyrants are erecting walls; the truly good guys are tearing them down.

Good guys like Yushchenko. Right.

After Yushchenko's victory, Bankova lasted a few months without a fence, and people used to come over to rally, or to catch a glimpse of their heroes as they were leaving the administration building.

It must've been pretty noisy, not unlike the Orange Revolution, so Yushchenko's people decided it was time to replace the asphalt on Bankova - which couldn't have been damaged in any major or minor way, since very few cars had driven over it during Kuchma's second term.

If nothing else, the repairs were a wonderful excuse for restoring the fence on Bankova.

***

It was too dark to take pictures of the fence today, but I will soon - both from Lyuteranska and Instytutska.

***

Here's part of my Nov. 23, 2004, entry - so weird to read it now...

At some point, I walked up from Maidan to the Kuchma Administration building tonight. It's located within a five-minute walk from Maidan, and yet, it feels like a different world there. Quiet - as if the neighborhood is soundproof. You wouldn't guess anything's going on at Maidan if you're based there, not even when something of this scale is taking place - a few hundred thousand people rallying, in addition to a concert...

So I decided to take a picture of the administration building - it's fenced off (always, not just now), and there was some guy standing next to the entrance, and when I pointed the camera toward him, he ordered - yes, ordered - me not to photograph there. I got a blurry picture, regardless - but that's not the point. The point is, who the fuck is he to tell me, in Russian, what to do. I'm wearing some orange, of course, so there was some logic to his behavior, considering who he's with, but still...

Very close to the administration, there were two buses with commando-looking men in them, all dressed the same, in dark-blue jackets, brand new, with neat black collars made of artificial black fur, and in black military boots. They looked quite menacing, even though they didn't say a word to me, as I passed by, on my own and wearing orange. Those guys definitely represented some kind of special forces, but they didn't carry any distinguishing marks on their clothes, nor did they have any weapons visible. They just looked weirdly out of place so close to where hundreds of thousands peaceful people were demanding a fair election and listening to cool music. They weren't some thugs brought here to riot, they were probably there to guard Kuchma from the crowd, in case something went wrong - but the look of them was still disconcerting. And that guy's obnoxious order not to take pictures just reinforced this feeling.

Here's the picture of the obnoxious guy:

A year ago, I posted this entry, about how amazingly obscure Ukraine was, a reaction to a New York Times story on the U.S. allies in the war in Iraq: everyone seemed to have been mentioned but us, even Moldova with their 12 soldiers (while we had 1,650 deployed down there at the time).

I still feel it was something of a landmark entry: some three weeks later, Ukraine was all over the news; Kyiv was awash in foreign journalists; this blog suddenly had plenty of visitors; and I had an op-ed in the New York Times and a reprint in the Guardian.

All this publicity was as stunning as the recent obscurity.

***

I do feel somewhat nostalgic for that time, a year ago, though I try to keep myself in check, to avoid turning into one of those pathetic individuals who are bent on spending the rest of their lives missing the Soviet Union...

***

I'm leaving for Kyiv tonight - packing makes me nervous, and I'm sure I'll miss Moscow a lot, despite everything.

But I hope I won't go into labor too early and will have a chance to take pictures on the first anniversary of the beginning of the Kyiv protests. We'll see.

***

For now, here are the links to my last year's Kyiv photos:

Oct. 31 (1) ... Oct. 31 (2) ... Oct. 31 (3) ... Oct. 31 (4) ... Nov. 2 ... Nov. 4 ... Nov. 6 ... Nov. 21 ... Nov. 22 ... Nov. 23 ... Nov. 25 ... Nov. 26 ... Nov. 28 ... Nov. 30 ... Dec. 22 (1) ... Dec. 22 (2) ... Dec. 22 (3) ... Dec. 25 ... Dec. 26 ... Dec. 27 (1) ... Dec. 27 (2)