The Road to Kyiv

The ticket I purchased said that the bus would be a 60-seat coach, outfitted with wifi, outlets, reclining seats, and a range of other modern features.

What awaited me at the station in Lviv was a Soviet-era panel van with rusted bumpers and partially deflated tires. I showed the driver my ticket. He muttered something to me in Ukrainian. I gave him a blank stare.

“English?” I asked him.

He shook his head. I showed him my ticket again. I looked around at the other travelers, hoping that one of them would translate. None of them did.

After an irritated inspection, the driver shrugged his shoulders and let me on.

There were seven or eight of us. I was the youngest by a decade.

Maybe I wasn’t. It was hard to tell. I think they aged faster than I did.

Lviv to Kyiv is just over 300 miles. If I were driving alone, it would have been a five-hour trip……….

because if I were driving alone, I wouldn’t have stopped for smoke breaks. Our driver stopped for six: Demydivka, Rivne, Pishchiv, Zhytomyr, Korostyshiv, and Yuriv. Everyone smoked except for me. We were on the road for nearly eight hours.

The scenery was nice at times, and not so nice at other times.

The stretches between cities provided a real sense of Ukraine’s relative poverty. On the streets of Lviv, it’s possible to imagine that you’re in Poland, the Czech Republic, or even Germany. In the countryside, where men can be seen transporting their wares in horse-drawn carts, it’s not.

At Zhytomor, we picked up a soldier. He was a stolid, severe-looking man. His left eye was glassy and dark. His right eye — or rather, the place where his right eye would have been — was covered by a black patch.

I sat next to him, watching the canola fields fly by in the window. Now and then we passed flags and cemeteries. I squinted and tried to tell myself that I was seeing what he was seeing…. which was dumb, of course. Vision doesn’t have nearly as much to do with input as it does with integration.

We were seeing completely different things. We were going to Kyiv for completely different reasons. He was going for biblical justice, and to smoke….

I was going to watch.