Easter in the Catholic calendar, I spent in Cornwall and Easter in the Orthodox calendar I spent in prison… ok, well not Really a prison, it was in fact a hospital but you could hardly tell the difference. Until this year I never even realized that they were two different dates for this one holiday. This year Orthodox Easter also coincided with International Labor Day so there was even more reason to celebrate (not that they need more reasons here). But back to the prison/hospital. You may be wondering why I was there? I wasn’t ill, thank God, but actually visiting the other American native speaker here, John.
When I first arrived in Kharkov I was thrown in the deep end, having to take over one class from another teacher who was leaving and then substituting John who had contracted hepatitis. (Yes, it’s alive and thriving here in Ukraine. DON’T DRINK THE WATER!) Refusing to go to a hospital for the first few weeks, he finally succumbed to peer pressure and the fact that he was as yellow as a sunflower. So John was in one of the better hospitals in Kharkov and some of his students were going to visit him on Easter weekend to cheer him up and make sure he was all right. N.B. John doesn’t speak more than 10 words of Russian and he doesn’t intend to learn now. Therefore communicating with hospital staff must have been quite interesting.
I met with…Julia (!) from his class that I was substituting and her mom at a metro station from where we then had to take a trolleybus up to the hospital. Now picture this – a broad street with little traffic (and no lines on the road, they don’t believe in road rules here). One side of the street has tall 10-12 storey apartment buildings in true Soviet fashion (grey, imposing, depressing) with shops on the first floor of every building – food stores, pharmacists, etc. and kiosks selling everything else you could need in front of them. On the opposite side of the road there it stands – the hospital. A series of 4-5 storey buildings looking rather worn-down and abandoned, positioned a little ways back from the road. Between the sidewalk and the hospital is an old school wire fence, probably as old as my father – not to name names here (or ages rather) we’ll say dating from post WWII.
The three of us make our way past the “guard post” watched over by stray dogs and a random babushka (told you they’re everywhere, the former as well as the latter). After quite a bit of confusion as to which building and entrance to go into – many buildings here have separate entrances and stairwells, called podyezd, so that if you enter into podyezd 1 you can’t make your way through to the section of building in podyezd 2 – eventually we found John’s ward. Walking cautiously through the large steal door, Julia and I then walk briskly past the open door of the nurse’s lounge. The nurses, or medsistryi (medical sisters), were in all white traditional looking candy-striper uniforms, including fun little hat. They were not the friendly sort of hospital staff however, as they yelled at us in Russian for not announcing our presence. I let Julia handle this conversation as of course my Russian isn’t quite up to par for confrontational situations and frankly – the nurses scared me. We walk down a deserted corridor, lit only by the barred windows in the small ‘lounge’ area. The hall is all white with doors lining both sides, mostly closed at this time. There is a silence so deep and intense I feel like I’m in a Steven King novel, and am waiting for the next big bad to come and do its business. However nothing untoward happens, we find the one door that is open and hear a small voice calling from inside. “Hello, in here.” In English.
Finally we had made it to John! N.B. John is from Wisconsin so already has the misfortune of not speaking properly accented English (sorry Stacy and all of my other Wisconsonian readers). Added to this he has a speech impediment of some sort as well. A lisp or a misplaced crown, as one of my students who is a dentist proposes, either way he’s hard to understand even for another native speaker! Plus, the way he speaks, words and phrases is very colloquial and sometimes I don’t get it, no scratch that, most times. Luckily he had managed to get a private room, with a bed again dating from the liberation of Ukraine from German forces in 194?, and a small bathroom with tub and toilet. Everything in the hospital fells like an old black and white film, possibly the set of some prison ward or insane asylum. Well after a few minutes of unintelligible chit-chat, Julia and I went to buy him some more food from the market across the street. We bring it back, chat some more and then leave John to his medsistryi and laptop computer, the one modern convenience.
Julia, mama and I take another trolley to a different metro station and they point me the way home, first leaving me with some homemade Easter cake called paska. It’s very much like Easter bread back home, but with the added joy of sugar frosting and sprinkles on top. Saying our farewells with the traditional «Христос Воскрес!» (“Christ has risen!”), we part company and I head back to Babushka’s where I met another friend, this time named Masha for a nice change-up, and we watched all four glorious hours of Lord of the Rings: Return of the King, Extended Edition.
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