with such a bright smile of welcome that now Yarko felt totally embarrassed. Well and truly red-faced, he quickly entered the building.
Now that, he thought to himself as the doors closed behind him, that was surely a sheep in wolf’s clothing!
And again that crooked sarcastic smile creased his face as he hurried to the baggage collection area. The passengers were packed into a small area, waiting for any sign that their baggage would be arriving. The wait became a little uncomfortable for Yarko. Something was surely not right. Yet the locals seemed quite content to wait patiently for what seemed like an eternity.
Patience is a virtue, thought Yarko, but this country no longer has time for such patience. The world is passing it by, he knew. In fact, the world seemed quite prepared to forget about Ukraine completely.
Yarko knew that in seven days he would be leaving this flock of sheep and taking the train through Hungary to Austria. He was bored already. After several more minutes of waiting, he saw airport staff carrying the baggage, one suitcase at a time, to the waiting room. It was after watching nearly everybody’s luggage get carried in that he finally spotted his suitcase, then his duffel bag, and finally his dismantled mountain bike wrapped in a dozen layers of cellophane.
Knapsack on one shoulder, duffel bag on the other, his bike under his right arm, and dragging the suitcase with his left, he felt like a biblical donkey as he made his way through to customs.
To his surprise, he cleared customs with ease, answering the official’s questions in a mixture of both English and Ukrainian. His next task was organizing some inexpensive transport to the Hotel Ukrayina, near the centre of Lviv. Taxi pimps, opportunists who brokered taxi transport, jumped him, offering him a ride in a choice of ancient Skoda or dilapidated Lada for a mere $40 – American dollars, of course. Almost tempted to accept, he thought better of it after learning that bus fare was under a dollar. The buses were tall Mercedes vans called marshrootka, from the French term marche-route. Two hryvnias, or about fifty cents, was the going price, but the driver balked at Yarko’s extra luggage. Prepared for such eventualities, Yarko slipped his chauffeur five dollars to assist with his load. This was more than enough to secure enthusiastic assistance. Yarko didn’t realize it at the time, but the tip amounted to a half-day’s pay for the driver.
“Hotel Ukrayina, if you please,” said Yarko in studied Ukrainian.
“I’ll stop right in front of it.”
Sitting comfortably in the marshrootka, Yarko complimented himself on his newfound ability to negotiate in this foreign land. The wad of American dollars in his pocket appeared to be an effective social lubricant for getting over those rough spots. The rain was still falling, so the view through the van’s window fell short of that promised in travel brochures. Pot-holed roads and grey concrete apartment buildings looked even more sombre when streaked with wet stains in the rain. Metal surfaces that had been painted over a dozen times still bled rust. Military trucks repainted in garish colours appeared to have been recently pressed into performing civilian duties. The automotive landscape in this part of the country appeared, for the most part, to be a throwback to the seventies. There were very few recognizable models. He recognized Ladas and the old four-wheel-drive Nevas – once known as Cossaks in Canada – but it would take him a few days to learn to spot Ukrainian Tavrias, Russian Volgas, Czech Skodas, and the Korean Daewoos that populated the roads. Yarko closed his eyes and caught another snooze.
The driver woke him as the marshrootka pulled in front of the Hotel Ukrayina. Again Yarko found himself outside in the rain, burdened like a mule, looking at a yellowish four-storey building that clearly had seen better times. Run-down areas of Vancouver also had hotels such as these; only there, they’d be surrounded by drunks and addicts. Here the sidewalk was empty. On the street level of this building was a store, the Smerichka, or Fir Tree. The store window display was sparse. The room windows above displayed the occasional crack, and one was boarded up. It attracted attention like a black eye on a passer-by’s face. Yarko shivered both from the cold rain and the thought of actually staying in this building. He entered the lobby and after paying by credit card, was directed to the second floor.
The second-floor hallway was presided over by a seriously overweight middle-aged matron at a desk station by the elevator. She babbled something in Russian about his passport. Yarko had been warned about the leftover Soviet practice of holding passports hostage, and absolutely refused to comply. After several minutes of argument, where he learned to use English as a trump card, he registered himself in her book and went to his room.
There was no water in his washroom. Instead of a refreshing stream, the taps issued an ominous hiss. There was no point contacting the front desk. Yarko had been warned that Lviv, having been founded as a fortress on high ground, was located on a divide; as a result, water supply was a constant problem. Yarko knew that in an hour or two, certainly by the next day, the water would be turned back on.
To cheer himself, he busied himself assembling his bike. He had no doubt that an aluminum-framed, fully suspended, twenty-four-speed mountain bike was just what he would need to explore his grandparents’ hometown. Designed for forest trails and mountain slopes, such bikes were also ideal for traversing city landscapes. In Vancouver, they had long become the favourite of its business-area couriers. Such couriers delivered packages from one office building to another, traversing parks, sidewalks, roads, alleys, and entryway stairs with unequalled ease. Judging from the state of Lviv’s roads, bringing a mountain bike here was a stroke of genius.
As Yarko studied a map, kneeling on the floor and using his bed as a table, he was pleasantly surprised to feel the warm touch of sunlight on his shoulder. Even the limited view from his window now seemed to promise him a tour more akin to that displayed in travel brochures. Lviv was a city founded in the thirteenth century as a bulwark against Mongol intrusion. Like other parts of Ukraine, it had been ruled by various empires; however, it was the Austrian period that left the most beautiful architectural legacy. Often compared to Prague, it certainly matched it in beauty, but fortunately it still had some way to go before matching it in price.
Yarko changed into his shorts and his bicycle jersey. He threw a knapsack over one shoulder, while lifting the bike by the frame with his free arm.
“Idu na Vy,” he said, quoting the warlike challenge of tenth-century Prince Svyatoslav the Conqueror. “I go (to war) on you!” was the news feared most by the foes of Rus′. Now Lviv was about to meet its bike-mounted match, thought Yarko. But the first order of business would be a coffee, and a nice light snack.
Across from the hotel, at the beginning of a very wide boulevard, stood a monument. A bronze figure, long covered in a green patina, with some equally green winged creature descending upon it, occupied the very end of this grassy boulevard. It was the memorial to the Polish writer Adam Mieckewicz. Next to this monument stood a structure that must have been a fountain, but this being Lviv, it was silent. Rather than spraying water, the fountain, having been wetted by the rain, was surrounded in a haze of evaporating moisture.
Riding north along the Prospekt Svobody, or Liberty Boulevard, Yarko stopped at a cobble-stoned square. His attention had been captured by another monument, much smaller than the previous, yet much more accessible. Atop a rock pedestal was a black-metal, cylindrical cartoonish head of a moustachioed kozak with a long scalp-lock hanging before his left ear. On a level below it was an equally cartoonish cannon or mortar next to a pile of cannonballs. The sign on the rock had the name “Ivan” above a horseshoe. This was the monument to a kozak warrior by the name of Ivan Pidkova, or, translated into English, Johnny Horseshoe. Yarko smiled as he thought of this literal translation.
Ukrainians knew that their kozaks were the fierce frontiersmen of the steppes, living as free men on the no-man’s land beyond the reach of three empires. It was centuries later that the Russian Empire would draft such frontiersmen into serving
