#mariupol vortex

[metallurgia]

“Приснился сон. Умолял, директора гостиницы "Морская"(директор - красивая женщина) продать мне комнатку на пятом этаже. Говорил, что сделаю ремонт, а про себя думал: что это я делаю, у меня ведь за душой ни гроша. Купить не купил, но проснулся счастливым. Разбогатею, куплю весь этаж) На фото вид с балкона. Автор фото Volodymyr Kuznetsov“

https://www.facebook.com/barbudaz/posts/2045146472199854

[metallurgia]

sasha: anya i’m sorry, but what you are doing here is the fetishization of working class men

sasha: btw i had this project to date a guy from every factory of mariupol

sasha: but it didn’t work out, as azovmash was privatized and closed down

me: ....

[metallurgia]

homesickness

back in the metallurgy paradise. from another metallurgy paradise, that is less magical and more liveable than this one. when i landed in hungary, suddenly i couldn’t imagine how can anyone live in mariupol, but when the train approached mariupol this morning, i knew i was lost again. who can understand these things??

i came back to a dirty apartment and a blocked sink, my first thought was that after 24 hours of traveling and the exhaustion of last week i can’t deal with this, but my new temporary flatmate, a queer artist girl solved the problems in a second. when i asked how she did it, she just said: “i lived in the ukrainian dormitories, i know the tricks!” i was in love immediately!

so now we live in an (almost) all-girls, 3 cats artist apartment on the 9th floor of a rundown concrete building, the kitchen window looking straight to ilych steel plant in the distance. i couldn’t wish for anything else but of course i do. i feel lost after hungary, and i feel i never want to do the fights of everyday life alone again, from bureaucratic struggles to marshrutka drivers to the point of making scrambled eggs. i want to rejoin the warm embrace of other people, even if it means compromises and a babushka giving unsolicited life advice sometimes.

i came to mariupol the first time on 8 july 2015, almost exactly three years ago. since then, the city became my second (sometimes first) home and the longest love relationship i ever had. it still inspires and tortures me to the boundaries of my own self only a man could, and i am proud that we made it so far. yesterday it felt like dying to tear myself out of hungary again, but i did it, and made it back to the day of metallurgists in time. sometimes i accidentally make some good decisions.

[metallurgia]

metamorphosis

despite growing up in a socialist housing block, i never encountered a real cockroach until my 21st birthday (not actually on the birthday, bless the lord). the first one (then ten, then maybe a hundred) was in the theater café i worked in (and afterwards quickly quit) during the last year of my ba studies.

i remember ants and even a strange scorpion like creature in our housing estate apartment, and i remember my mom screaming one time about a cockroach in the bathroom, but the event fades into the mythical twilight of childhood, and according to my father, it wasn’t even a cockroach in the end.

i internalized revulsion as a semiotic prophecy, so when the moment arrived, i was standing prepared to be taken by the horror of it.

some people say that the horrifying insect that gregor samsa transforms into by that sinister morning is actually a cockroach. i always imagined some sort of worm instead, probably because of the hungarian translation. in any case, my mother is always reminiscing that she took a collection of kafka short stories to the delivery room when i was born. while that could explain a lot of other things about how my life turned out, it doesn’t explain why i had to wake up this morning to my cat chasing a cockroach in the middle of the apartment, after i filled every corner with poison in the last days.

i came to ukraine the first time in 2012. it was on a road trip back to estonia from hungary, only one day, for the euro championship, in lviv. i fell in love immediately. it is easy with lviv, i know, but my love was more real than the usual enthusiasm i see about this city. it stayed with me for years, and eventually led me to the complete opposite end of ukraine where i live and share my home with a cat and a group of cockroaches now. we drank a lot of beer, watched the ukraine-england game on the main square, ate in some varenichnaya, and walked the streets until dawn. i couldn’t believe that such city exists, it was like the cities i imagined when my parents read me fairy tales before bedtime, perfect proportions frozen in an undefined mythical time. when we got back to the hostel (a former gothic palace of course), i went to the bathroom and made a vow in my midnight delirium with the most natural certainty: i will definitely move here one day. that moment i noticed the cockroaches running around the toilet, and my drunk, more lenient self added: there will be cockroaches for sure, but i am ready to take the whole package.

in 2015 i got married and traveled to india for honeymoon. we spent the first night in agra, as a result of some misunderstandings, tourists scamming schemes and the endless series of vis maiors which constitute the daily life of delhi. we had a luxury marital bed from mahogany, conveniently sized for a honeymoon threesome or foursome, not only a couple. soon it turned out we shared it with a hundred cockroaches. the marriage didn’t last long.

living in ukraine, i saw exactly 1 cockroach in every apartment i stayed. each time they were in the bathroom. each time i had a flatmate braver then me who dealt with the issue. when, after a series of wandering through the different corners of ukraine, i finally took the train to settle down in mariupol for a while, and the platzkart was full of cockroaches, i took it as an omen. as a therapeutic measure and an ethnographic inquiry, i delicately smuggled the topic into my local conversations, i learnt interesting things: most of the people said they didn’t see cockroaches since the 90s. the cockroach was relegated to the realm of soviet life. “my father said they disappeared because of euroremont - they didn’t like that new building material which was used for the renovations.”

then i started to hear stories that cockroaches returned to mariupol. in the year i move here, just my luck!, i thought. all that said, the info turned out to be true. they are here. i am outdoing myself every day by dealing with them, as i can’t run away this time (at least not so fast). my cat is my little comrade, pointing out each of them even if i would just close my eyes, and making me address the problem before she addresses it herself. as an etic (non-local) observation, i consider their reappearance as a sign of the seismic movements that are shaking the lands of eastern ukraine at the moment, and welcome them as the evangelists of pryazovian renaissance.

[metallurgia]

[metallurgia]

the cryptic channels of telegram dealers

[metallurgia]

behind every non-plastic window in Mariupol there might still be someone reading deficitnye knigi from the Soviet times!

sasha

[metallurgia]

Russian for Lovers: The Poetics of Post-Soviet Man

living in ukraine has changed my taste in men: for example, i started to like muscles, instead of the Intellectual Type Number One who has a beer belly and a lot of bullshit, or Intellectual Type Number Two who doesn’t have muscles himself but A LOT of bullshit about how women better have some.

for months, i’ve been looking at my ukrainian male friends’ beautiful upper bodies that they never bother to cover in the summertime, embodying some of the best slavic stereotypes. i looked at their muscles and tattoos, their raw, unpretentious, beautiful souls, men who compliment my dress and carry my suitcase and turn to me with openness but never, ever cross the line, which i cannot say about many enlightened, well-groomed budapest fuckboys, and slowly i got to love kindness and a particular type of simplicity which doesn’t equal petite bourgeois boredom, but the ability to experience life in its uncomplicated, warm reality.

during my daily routes, i also encountered many locals who embodied the Perfect Idea of The Soviet Man: while these men were never exactly part of my universe, i could not stay unaffected by their aura, the smell of belarusian aftershave and polyester shirts and premium ukrainian vodka, the cheap cigarettes in the bus stop after the afternoon shift in the factory, dirty uniforms and white ladas and huge watermelons carried under their arms, slight freudian undertones if we take the image of my father in the 90s (car mechanic in dirty green uniform, good man, driving a trabant then a skoda), but let’s not be delusional, hungary was never the real soviet union.

i became mesmerized. in my dreams i started to make pickles in hundreds of mason jars, cucumbers and onions and mushrooms, but also seaweed and watermelons, the strange variations of the pryazovian mythological cuisine, an attempt to understand the local gender dynamics with my brand new ethnographic method, dreaming. the lesson i learnt was really needed in the times of me too movement, western feminist discourse, and my own bad experiences - it is definitely not about the idealization of men here, as sexism is still overwhelming and disappointing in ukraine (i could tell about that too). but living here helped me to unlearn the empty, self-absorbed discourse of “men are trash”, and see more nuanced patterns of oppression, empathy and dedication in the world of fake leather jackets, mustaches and 0-24 flower shops*.

(*a friend explained the astonishing abundance of always open flower shops in the country, especially in a city where you can’t even get a bottle of coke after 10pm: “when a guy fucks up, he can still get a bouquet of roses and try to sneak home at 2am!”)