New Normal

By Molly


Matt and I took the train from Poland to Ukraine on a Thursday night. It was a nice train, with bunk beds and fluffy white comforters in a tiny private compartment. We fell into a restless sleep as the train bumped along towards the border and we arrived in L’viv, a large city on Ukraine’s western edge, before 6am the next morning.

We lugged our large backpacks into the station’s main hall, groggy after the short night that had been punctuated by unfamiliar noises and multiple passport checks. The sky was still dark and the air, frozen. The station was empty but for a handful of gray-haired men standing by the door, sipping coffee from tiny plastic cups. Matt put coins into the large automatic espresso machine for us while I waited, bleary-eyed, scruffy-haired, and totally confused.


I looked around. All the signs in the station were written in Cyrillic—that strange, symbolic alphabet first used in the 9th century Bulgarian Empire. Matt, who had memorized the pronunciation of each symbol when he first traveled to Russia years before, could at least sound out the words, even if he often didn’t know what they meant. I, however, was completely lost.

We stood outside the station for a few minutes, stamping our feet on the frozen ground. Our breath billowed out in cold white puffs as we tried to figure out the next step. We watched commuters walk by in heavy coats and thick fur hats. Sputtering taxis and trolleys caked in dust ran up and down the street. We listened to the swirls of language around us, what sounded like a back-of-the-throat garble. Crumbling buildings lined a muddy street littered with trash.

Matt and I had purchased a sub-par city map from a confused-looking woman at a kiosk inside, which we peered at in the dark, unable to tell if the city center was too far to walk. It looked like it. Not wanting to be ripped off by a pernicious cab driver, we figured we could take the tram.

We walked over to what appeared to be the bus station and pantomimed with a clerk selling mineral water and cheap cigarettes inside. We thought she understood our question when she smiled and picked up a pen. On a scrap of paper she wrote “57 40” and handed it to us.

“What does this mean?” I asked Matt on our way out. The numbers didn’t seem to correspond to any specific buses or trolleys or times.

“No idea,” he said.


We walked along the road next to the trolley track, asking a chain of commuters, one by one, where to go. Matt used simple English and his rudimentary Russian. I gave moral support. Eventually we found ourselves in a steamy trolley car heading in what we hoped was the right direction. The streets were empty as we rolled past, the sun just beginning to rise. Neither Matt nor I had ever been to Ukraine before. Everything seemed new.

We found our hotel, an imposing building just off the old Town Square with an elegant but weary marble staircase cascading into the foyer. A thuggish-looking bellhop with no neck and humorless eyes took our bags. Then we went on a walk.


The city was still quiet despite the hour. The ground was covered in frost. I thought that the buildings—big classic stone constructions, beautiful and grand in the distance—looked old and neglected up close. We stood in front of the Opera House for a few minutes. Pigeons flocked around a woman wielding bread. Bright yellow buses careened on the curving roads around us. And then, as the streets began to fill with men and women on their way to work, I noticed the masks. Almost everyone in L’viv, it seemed, was wearing a surgical mask. Noses and mouths hid behind light blue cloth, dark eyes peering above. I felt unnerved by the eerie glow they cast upon the city. Is this the Twilight Zone? I wondered.


But then we understood: Swine flu. Unlike other countries that have recently experienced elevated but not alarming levels of the virus, Ukraine was in a crisis. Matt and I had read about it from an English language paper in Poland a few days before. We hadn’t taken it too seriously. Swine flu is everywhere, we thought. No use changing our plans. But we soon realized that in Ukraine everyone was afraid. The opera, we learned, had been shuttered. Half of the restaurants were closed. And the streets were full of masks.

We asked about it in our hotel later that morning. We had just eaten breakfast in an empty dining room, served omelets by a young man whose face was obscured by the light blue of his mask.

“Ukraine hasn’t seen the flu in 300 or 400 years!” said the hotel receptionist, a hyper-bubbly blond woman. “That’s why we are so nervous!”

Matt and I traded glances. Ok, I thought.



That night we entered a sign-less, basement restaurant by knocking on the door and saying the password—Slava Ukraina, or “Glory to Ukraine”—to a masked man behind the peephole. He opened the door laughing and let us in with a wave. Before we descended the stairs, he handed Matt and me each a single raw clove of garlic. He gestured to his mouth. I smiled, confused, and held it in the palm of my hand for a moment while Matt popped his into his mouth and chewed. We walked down into the smoky, crowded dining room.

“Is this normal?” I asked.

Matt shrugged.

“Who knows,” he said.




***

Before I left the U.S. to meet Matt in Warsaw, I wrote about his upcoming leave. I wrote that I was nervous. “My life here, alone, has become normal,” I wrote. “I’m used to sleeping alone, to waking alone. I’m used to setting my own schedule, no longer in possession of anyone else’s needs.” I wrote that the loneliness had become normal, the guilt and the anger had become normal. I no longer remembered the normal that came before this normal, the one where Matt was a presence and not an absence, the one where I wasn’t afraid all the time.

I had been thinking a lot about normalcy. What is it? Where did it go?

I was afraid that seeing Matt again would bring our lack of normalcy into clear focus. I was afraid that being together again in the midst of his deployment to Afghanistan and my year of writing a book in New York would be hard because our perspectives have changed, and our new normals are nothing alike. I was afraid it would be too much.

But we hugged in the Warsaw airport on that last Saturday afternoon in October. And then we laughed when we got on a bus going in the wrong direction. Suddenly, it felt as if we had never been away.

In part, this is because nothing was normal on this trip. That was the beauty of it all. Over the course of two weeks we used four different currencies. We struggled with four incomprehensible languages. The cities were confusing and the local customs at times mysterious. We rode a crowded train filled with the stench of feet and feces through rural Ukraine and tried soup made from the lining of a cow’s stomach in Bucovina, Romania. We stayed in a plush hotel near Warsaw’s Stare Miasto and walked along the Danube River in Budapest one evening close to midnight, watching the lights of the Parliament building shimmering in the water below.

Eating pickles and borscht in an underground restaurant of flu-wracked Ukraine, raw garlic perfuming our breath, the only normal thing for me was Matt. It was wonderful.

***


Early on a Sunday morning Matt and I took a bus over the border into Romania. It was a rickety bus with faded red curtains covering the windows. It smelled stale and musty. The two drivers—one Ukrainian, and the other Romanian—sat us in the very front of the bus. “Amerikansky,” they said, gesturing to our seats. Soon the back of the bus was full of a dozen other passengers, men and women, all carrying large plastic shopping bags filled to the brim. They all seemed to know each other, Matt and I thought. We heard whispering and laughter. The drivers addressed people by their first names.

We were in Chernowitz, a small city in southern Ukraine, and only fifty miles or so from the Romanian border. We drove down narrow roads coated in a thick fog. Matt and I shared some rye bread and yogurt that I had stashed in my bag.

We sat silent as the bus picked up other passengers along the way, all carrying similar shopping bags, all handing over a few bills to the drivers. At the border we watched the nervous shuffle of our fellow riders as the uniformed border officials collected passports. Our drivers followed them inside, bringing loaves of bread along. Back on the bus, we wondered what was happening, smiling at our naiveté.

“Do you think they’re smugglers?” Matt asked.

“Maybe,” I said.

After an hour at the border, the drivers reboarded us passengers and we carried on. After a brief moment of excitement when we passed a police checkpoint on the road in Romania, we pulled over and everyone but us quickly disembarked. They ran to waiting escorts and three cars parked nearby. Once their merchandise was loaded, we watched from the window as they were quickly whisked away.

“Weird,” I said.

For the next 20 miles or so—the final leg of the journey to Suceava, Romania—Matt and I were alone on the bus.

“Do you think that’s normal?” I asked.

Matt shrugged. Probably.