May #5 || Jaser and the kiss

And we go to the city once again, the memento of past Russian riches, today only dust and echo of that splendor. My company leaves me to head for some idiotic exhibition of poisonous snakes, while I'm wandering along corridors of a building where that slimy traveling gallery rents its premises. On the second floor, I go past another attraction – a collection of wax figures from Kiev. I didn't go in, but Jaser Arafat on the poster still looked more like wax mass than Jaser himself. I turn left. Long, bright corridor. Very high, like in old tenements in Warsaw. Square streaks of thick sunlight get in through tiny windows; they light up the lying dust – a symbol of Ukrainian abandonment, of the slow, noncommittal existence; the politics of non-action sealed. Our grandparents built it, therefore it is our holy right to do with it whatever we want to. And we choose not to do anything at all.

Round the corner, a dark room with a view on the staircase. Next to the windows so dirty that they start resembling matte glass, there stood a row of cinema chairs. Ragged, stained, like back in the old art cinema Hel, I guess they closed it down before I graduated from high school. Better not get closer and unfold it, you never know what the previous audience had left. But this tenement was not and could not have been a cinema. Where those chairs came from, I don't know, but they were the only furniture there. My walk ends in the restroom, with the toilet holding on together only thanks to the rope with which it is bound. At the sink, or rather its remains, a cheerful woman rinses a plastic bowl and it looks like it’s fun to her to spill all the water on the floor. On her way out, she warned me politely that it's wet all over the place. I guess I paid around two or three hryvni for the restroom.

But before we arrived to that place and before guys went to see the snakes, there had been the eagle trainers. The birds were heavy and held on tight to my arms. The trainers wanted two hundred hryvni, but at that point I already very much disliked the town's policy of looking for a likely dupe with a wallet, so they didn't get anything from me. Instead, the female trainer kissed me on my cheek and this was probably the best transaction I've made in my life, because it was an exceptionally pretty eagle trainer.

May #4 || the immense light

Daylight comes and we do the most senseless thing tourists ever do, that is, we go to the beach. If you want to get there, you have to pass rows of port cranes shining with grease, huge concrete platforms and walls of goods packed in cartons. Then there's the stall with the recycled jewellery and a pile of shrimps melting in the sun, and right there in front of your eyes there opens a gallery of Ukrainian and Russian bodies. I pass the information board; it says that air temperature equals 12,5 degrees and water temperature is 30 degrees. I think to myself that the lifeguard must have gotten sloshed the night before. But so did I so I get the message right and go into the twelve degree hot Black Sea. Ant. goes with me – she's so brave that she gets in at a run. In the water, she meets her new friend, Anya, aged eight. Anya asks her, 'A vy otkuda?' Ant. says, 'My iz Polshy.' Anya: 'Uh ty!' Ant. is thrilled.
On the pricking sand tattooed men walk with armfuls of fish corpses and fat women wander with cookies. Ukrainian women sunbathe topless and they roll their pants in thin strings. One of them has her pet snake around her neck. The sun falls on us as if it was a burst of cloud full of UV radiation. Later on, in the evening, I will discover my shoulders all burnt and M. will experience a sunstroke. My lips are salty after the swim in the sea. Ant. helps me to change my swimming costume for dry underwear while Ukrainian boys in stretch pants and shining sunglasses watch my struggle to keep the balance.

May #3 || the night

Evening. Suddenly, we've found ourselves in the middle of summer. This peculiar feeling I remember from all the Julys I spent in Warsaw when the heavy afternoon air has heated up and thickened and you can almost touch it like you can touch a wall or skin. We're walking down broad streets someone once outlined sparing no space for life, motion and Russian conversations. At the crosswalk, I take a photo of two women, both wearing long white linen dresses, with their hair black and hip long. Somebody will say later on, when watching the photos, that it was a Ukrainian bride fair, with the girls ready-to-marry. There is a gentle breeze coming from the sea which makes the swollen heat bearable. When we reach Potemkin Stairs, the salty wind grows stronger and plays with the linen sheets with the portraits of the actors from the 1920s painted on them. They look surrealistically and when we get back on the following day, the exhibition of the ghosts with dark lines around their eyes is all gone. Far away in the darkness the huge port is looming. The Port of Odessa. Just a few steps away, at the crossroads, a row of women blocks the street and a car can't pass. The driver is beeping. Wedge-heels won't move. Colorful artificial nails make the Russian argumentation more expressive. I take a few shots with the flash. The prostitutes send the international 'fuck you' sign to me. The car passes through, the driver doesn't take any of the girls with him.
Heavy evening lilacs. Ukrainian beer. Long sleep.

May # 2 || Marazli, Zhanna and Sheridan.

The airport looked like an old bus station, the marshrutka seemed hot and exhausted when we tried to talk to the driver, who didn't think it was worth the trouble to turn his face to us, so his back informed us where we can go with the number 17 – or maybe it was 117. It cost two hryvni and fifty kopiyok. In the seat in front of me there was a woman in a leopard-print blouse, next to me the wind played with a curtain slightly burnt with a cigarette, over my head there was a hornet flying circles; U. was running away from the insect. I was taking photos of it all.
Among the Ukrainians a discussion broke out about where we're supposed to get off. Ma... raz... lyev... ska... ya street. A flaxen-haired girl, way too mild for a Ukrainian, asks me in despair whether I know where that street is. It's nice to be mistaken for a Ukrainian on the first day already, but I think to myself that it's time to change clothes. We get off, on the streetcar station a monstrous woman with a mustache directs us to the streetcar number 28. A. has GPS in his mobile. It becomes our substitute of order and orientation. Then an elderly man takes us over. Students travelling alone is still a rare thing to see, so we evoke protective instincts wherever we go.
Here we are. Marazli's monument. The owner of the flat we rented is nowhere in sight. We can't get through to her either. Ant. and A. go to the address given in the emails we received. The place is being redecorated. No one living there. In the door, they find a letter of reminder from the power plant. A young man living in the neighboring flat gets interested in our case and he calls our landlady with his mobile. Our Ukrainian lawyer. Ms. Zhanna from the Internet got it all wrong. The landlady will come again to see us, but no sooner than in three hours. This is Odessa sending to us its first sign that we should not stick to the plan, to the promises or the principles of savoir-vivre. Because the people here just don't give a shit.
In the flat we find only four beds instead of the five agreed, the air conditioning mentioned in the emails does exist, but is long out of order. Also, we shouldn't leave any valuable stuff in the flat, because the Russian guys who rented it before us left without having returned the key, so if they're still in town, they might get back to the place and make themselves comfortable. Hasn't she changed the lock? No, she hasn't. My friends suggest I should take my frame rucksack with me each time we go out. The landlady leaves, we open our Sheridan we bought in the duty-free at the airport.
The question about who Sheridan was is asked for the first time.

May #1 || broke means free

M. said that should there have been any turbulences when the plane took off or landed, he wouldn't go travelling with me anymore. Over Odessa our Embraer was tossed about like a car on the Ukrainian rural roads, but it was still nothing compared with the blizzard in the middle of the Caucasian night when we landed in Tbilisi. So when I said I was still thinking about joining Ant. and him in their travel to Croatia, he seemed enthusiastic. But it looks like my first attempt to have a planned sensible life which will probably be in September, will not include another jaunt for which I have positively no money. It seems that's how one should travel, though. No money, no plans, no sense of belonging. No anchors. An open mind. Anything can happen.
In Odessa, we were free. Or at least that's what we thought. But then, what's the difference. – That's how Stasiuk wrote about his life in Grochów.