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.