In a land before time, if present time is all that I know, and this time is a carpet and shower of war… In a land before this time, Jenny Mussett (Євгенія Клочко) and I ran the half marathon in Kyiv on Ukraine’s Independence Day of 2001, celebrating Ukraine’s 10th year of Independence. Jhenya was my student in School Number 9. Female students at that time could “opt out” of physical education classes at school. In my opinion, students gravitated to gendered exercise- female-oriented exercises and male-oriented exercises. Running was not really considered a female-oriented exercise. But, I love the feeling of running, so I would run in Ukraine, even though people would look at me strangely, and often wonder what they were seeing.
Jhenya and I ran the half-marathon the summer that she graduated from high school. She had never run before. We started training that spring and worked our way up from little runs to longer and longer runs. It was a beautiful way to see the Ukrainian land. I could go out and say, “I am going to keep any building on the left of me, and the right will be clear, open space.” And so I would do large, swooping runs, circling the city of Oleksandria. I had to start very early in the morning, because spring quickly morphed into thick, heavy heat. I would start before sunrise, and the only other beings up were morning animals, farmers, and babushki. The babushki knelt over their plots of land as the sun rose, tending the rows, pulling water from their wells to give morning drinks to their growing plants. As the sun crept higher and became sharper, the babushki would shout out to me and offer me a drink from their wells. I would gratefully accept. Sometimes, a woman would offer me a piece of watermelon that she grew. That was a pure luxury.
When Jhenya and I trained together, we would be able to run at sunset, because we were safer together. One of our routes would go near the river, over the rolling hills that were covered with plants I had never seen and could not name. I asked Jhenya to teach me the names of the flora and fauna of the Ukrainian countryside. We would run and I would ask the names of plants. I would practice my pronunciation between breaths and Jhenya would correct me. One rosy evening, as we were running and I was having difficulty with particular vowel pronunciations, I said, “Jhenya, are you teaching me the names in Russian or in Ukrainian!?!” She laughed and said, “Ms. Vanderberg, I am teaching you Ukrainian!!!” Ukraine has different vowel pronunciations than Russian, and my creeping awareness had finally crystallized to see that she was training me on Ukrainian pronunciation. Our city in Oleksandria was primarily Russian-speaking. Of all of the schools (schools are combined primary and secondary), there was only one Ukrainian Language school, the rest of the schools were instructed in Russian Language. Once I was slotted to a station in Oleksandria for the Peace Corps, I had to learn Russian language. Russian was primarily spoken on the streets, and also a dialect called суржык (Surzhyk), which is a combination of Russian and Ukrainian. I studied “literary Russian” and continued lessons in literary Russian, but had to learn Surzhyk and Ukrainian in order to “survive”. And by survive, I mean to have the capacity to communicate enough to do basic things. I had to read Ukrainian because the national curriculum was printed in Ukrainian. I had to be able to read this in order to develop my lessons and instruction for my classes (I often asked Svetlana Gromovaya for help with this). I had to speak Russian to function in my school. I had to understand and speak Surzhyk to be a member of my local society. I had to understand and speak some pure Ukrainian to travel in Ukraine.
And in this discussion of language lies the perseverance of the Ukrainian people. They have learned and preserved multiple languages in order to continue to flourish as a culture. Though I perceive messages in our Western media of “Ukrainian good” and “Russian bad”, there was not a dichotomy of this or that, good or bad, rather, Ukrainians adjusted to the political and social requirements of the ruling government to include multiple languages, develop dialects, and preserve their own native language. This is not simple; the layering of history, oppression, and independence is not a simple striation. I asked Jhenya to teach me Russian names for plants and flowers, so that I could build my most robust second language. She kindly refused and told me that I must learn them in Ukrainian. She persevered.
We trained through the summer and I learned some pure Ukrainian language, including солнічні бліни, which I won’t translate here. I’ll leave it to you to try to figure out what they could actually be.
We set our target on the half marathon in Kyiv and went there for Independence Day. We managed to register, which was an adventure in and of itself in navigating another culture. We were some of the few women at the starting line. And we ran 7 laps up and down вулиця Хрещатик (Khreschiatik Street), the main street in the capital. We finished. It took us so long to finish that the “race” was technically over. They opened the street and removed the tape that defined the course. We kept running, dodging the pedestrians who were celebrating their country’s independence. A race official dismissively said, “Девчонки, марафон закріваетц” as he moved a cement barrier to open the street. There is so much in that language- He called us “girls”, which comes across as pejorative. He used the reflexive verb form of close. The marathon closes itself, as if there was nothing to be done. It was done. It was out of his hands. It was out of our hands. We kept running.
The Ukrainian spirit is perseverance. They know pain. They know inclusion. They know adaptation. They know subjugation and independence. I believe that Ukrainians will persevere.
