Any day that goes by without major incident is a good day. So, the day, by those standards had gone very well. Both Olya and Andry got out of bed without any serious objection. Olya had split my lip during the process, but it was in play and accidental.
We got all our cameras and drawing materials together and packed up. Vasily and Yelena showed up on time and we were on our way. We were heading to Kiev’s oldest cemetery to take photos of the beautiful statures over the graves of Kiev’s most famous sons and daughters and to take rubbings of the typography on their epitaphs. We wanted the children to be a part of this and they said ok, probably because we said the internet café was next after the cemetery.
Pippa and I had been here years ago when we were waiting to complete Olya’s adoption. We marveled at the extraordinary sculpture over the gravesites. Kiev’s poets, politicians, writers, composers, doctors, scientists, artists, dancers, and warriors were all here; they were memorialized in stone and metal in the style of art prominent at the time of their passing. So from a classical romantic ballerina stretched in an eternal bronze finale to a Soviet general wrought in massive shapes from a great slab of granite, you could see the history of Kiev and Ukraine expressed in its own archeological strata.
Unfortunately for Pippa and me, although the kids did a big “yes” with a fist and crooked arm, the sky got dark, thunder roared and rain fell just as we got to the cemetery gate. They both love rain. We drove in anyway and took just a five-minute ride through with the car windows slightly cracked.
There was nothing to do but head on to the internet café. Andry insisted I play also, which I did. Try playing “Counter Strike” (without having played it before) with all the instructions in Russian. Andry was disgusted with me. I usually got killed while trying to figure out how to load my gun. I’m a failure as a 2007 father.
After God knows how many games, we went for a quick lunch at “Potato House” (ribs are excellent) and returned to the cinema/internet café for a game or so until movie time.
We watched Harry Potter’s latest, dubbed in Russian, while I scratched my head furiously, convinced I had a bad case of head lice. (I don’t.) Pippa and Yelena said they were itchy as well.
After the movie we had Vassily drop us off at Yakatoriya, a Japanese restaurant within walking distance of our apartment. The children love this restaurant and each has their favorite dish they order every time they come. Andry ordered 12 skewers of chicken but made the big mistake of ordering four, eating that four, then ordering another four and so on. Everyone was in a good mood and joking with one another and all the way on the walk back home.
When we got back to the apartment we had a nice surprise. The TV and internet were working (they had been off when we left). Pippa examined everyone’s hair like a good mamma chimpanzee and declared us all lice free. Then, just to be on the safe side, we all washed our hair with lice treatment shampoo.
While I was waiting my turn, I decided to vacuum the sofa where Maria and Nilolai had sat when they were here just in case any lice or their eggs had fallen on the sofa. I had vacuumed for perhaps one minute when suddenly we were in total darkness; all the electricity in the apartment was gone––everything. At that precise moment, fireworks started going off from the ground just under our apartment into the air outside our window almost as if someone were shooting at us.
We thought at first that all the apartments in our building were out of power, maybe so the fireworks would show up better. But as we looked down outside, it did not seem so. We opened the front door to the hall and the lights were on; we could hear the elevator working; we must be the only apartment without lights. We had no flashlight.
Andry and I, with treatment shampoo still in my hair, went in the elevator to the first floor to ask for help.The only person to ask for help was the old woman who sits night and day in a cubicle in the lobby as a kind of security guard/candy and toilet paper salesperson for the building. Andry jabbered at her in Ukrainian, she at him in Russian and made motions like “try the circuit breakers, stupid!”
We did just that, both Andry and me, finding the breaker box from the little light we got from the hallway that glowed into the closet that allowed us to find the breaker box. Nothing happened. Nothing at all. We were still in the dark.
Pippa called Yelena to have her call the landlord, since the landlord only speaks Russian. With a lot of pressure, Yelena finally agreed to call him, reluctantly, because it was now pretty late.
We waited in the dark. The kids were fine. They were playing games on the two computers, using battery power. Pippa finished the lice treatment on my hair in the kitchen sink in the dark.
Pippa sat in the front door threshold using the hallway light to read her book that has been lasting for the whole trip, like Jesus’ loaf of bread.
I lay on the bed staring at the dark.
Yelena called to say Slava, Vassily’s son, was on the way to see how he could help; she couldn’t reach the landlord.
About ten minutes later, I heard Pippa speaking Russian, in a low gravelly voice. Then––the lights came on. The next door neighbor, a burly man who never wears anything but shorts and no shirt covering his very large belly, had seen Pippa reading in the doorway, came in our apartment¬¬, tried the breakers inside as we had done, but then went into the hall and pulled a simple little switch and pulled off a miracle. (He’s a really nice guy, by the way, always chatting with me whenever he sees me in the hall and never concerned whether I understand him or not.) Our lights, computers, TV’s, air-conditioning, internet, refrigerator, stove, oven, microwave, telephone and alarm clocks went instantaneously from dead to live. We were back in the civilized world, so to speak.
I went to the bedroom and with the lights on, found my pajamas. I lay down on the bed and realized after an hour or so that Pippa was not in the bed, nor was Olya in her pallet next to our bed.
I discovered the mother and daughter and the new son, Andry as well, in the living room. I suggested, that as it was now after midnight, perhaps they should consider going to bed. They looked at me as if I were crazy. Pippa explained, as if it were a logical explanation, that she and Olya were doing their blogs. (Olya now has a blog as well as Pippa.)
I went back to bed alone, thinking to myself, “What kind of world have I, in my old age, shuffled into?”
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