Every day when it’s sunny, and also when it’s not, the old men gather to play chess in the heart of old Kyiv, amongst the lush grandfather trees of Shevchenko Park. They’ll mingle there for hours, hunched over scuffed boards, debating strategy and swapping good-natured trash talk.
You may stop to watch them play, these lords of a humble checkered kingdom, but you must be careful. If they spot a new face in the casual crowd, they’ll first hone in with a sharp sort of curiosity, like a shark; a challenge to play a game will arrive soon after. I have yet to find the courage to take them up on their offer; they are warm and friendly, yes, but you must know that old men who spend all day playing chess in parks will be nothing short of stone-cold lethal. I don’t quite have the heart to be checkmated in 10 moves, especially for an audience.
Luckily, I have an easy out.
“Sorry,” I say in Ukrainian, whenever they ask. “I only speak a little.”
Usually, they just nod pleasantly at this and turn their attention back to the game. But on this day, the old man beside me perks up; his eyes catch a spark. In English, he asks where I’m from. “Canada!” he exclaims, delighted. “Canada is a very big country. Very beautiful. You are from east or, or, or… or west? Ahh, middle. Middle of Canada.”
He furrows his brow as he searches for the next words.
“I am sorry for my English,” he says, speaking in a hush so as not to distract the men hunched over the chessboard nearby.
I reassure him with a smile, and offer my hand.
“Yak vas zvati?” What’s your name?
My new friend chuckles. “I will tell why I’m called Viktor.”
He was born, he explains, in a city in Western Ukraine, close to the Hungarian border, a few years after the war. The other war, of course, the one he grew up knowing only as The Great Patriotic, the one that tore Europe to shreds and devoured as many as seven million lives from Ukraine alone. In those years, he says, everything was about victory: peremoha, in Ukrainian, which is why near every city here has a Peremohy Street, or a Peremohy Square — or rather, why many had them until recently, when the politics of remembering an old war were made bitter by the trauma of the new.
Point being: at the time my new friend was born, victory was the story that the Soviet Union wanted to tell itself, and victory was the word by which those who had survived emerged from the long shadow of war, and carried on.
“So all the babies then, name Viktor,” the old man declares, and taps my arm with his finger, seized by a follow-up thought. “Do you know who was the first man in space?”
Of course. Yuri Gagarin.
“After Gagarin, it was a scandal,” he says. “Do you understand this word? Scandal? Yes, good. It was a scandal. You go to hospital and ask, ‘what is your baby’s name?’ ‘Yurii.’ Next one. ‘What is your baby’s name?’ ‘Yurii.’”
He laughs. “Every baby: Yurii.”
Viktor speaks slowly, in simple but crystal-clear English, which took me by surprise the moment he asked where I was from. I didn’t expect it. Not many Ukrainians his age can speak English, outside a few basic words: yes, no, okay, very good. I ask where he learned: in school, he replies, when he was a boy.
“Then, the Soviet Union was like a prison,” he adds. “We knew in America, in Canada, in Great Britain, they speak English. But it was like a wall. So we did not hear much of English. We only learn a little. We did not think to need.”
I want to tell him that I remember it the same. Not as vividly as he does, of course, my being born near the tail end of the Cold War; but enough to have had that same sense, polished by smug American movies, of worlds forever divided. I imagine telling young Viktor, learning English, that someday he’d be sitting at a park in Kyiv, chatting easily with a visitor from Canada; I imagine telling five-year-old me the mirrored version of the same. Once, we were told the same story about the world, by different powers but for very similar reasons; it didn’t tell us the truth. Not about each other.
Which stories shape our perceptions now, that will also one day lie in tatters?
Viktor is enjoying our conversation. He wants to know what I think about Ukraine, and about its capital. It’s a common question, so I give a rehearsed answer: I love it here, I say, and Kyiv is one of my favourite cities in the world. It’s beautiful, and it’s big, but in places like this park it still feels cozy, like a village. Like a home.
“You are right, about Kyiv,” he says, sadly. “But it was more beautiful in Soviet times.”
It was smaller then, he continues, and there were more trees. Yes, there are many now, but there were even more before, neat rows of thriving green trees lining both sides of the bustling central artery of Khreshchatyk Street. And on Saturdays — he asks me to help him find the word by reciting the days of the week — yes, Saturdays, they used to all go out walking, or to fish in the river. It was very special, those days, when it felt as if the whole city shared them together.
Now, he thinks, Kyiv is too big, and yet they keep building it out farther; he gestures toward the left bank of the Dnipro River, where clusters of modern apartment towers loom like gleaming monoliths, overlooking the water. And they cut down many trees, he says, punctuating the thought with an emphatic shake of his head. Those trees…
He stops. “I am sorry for my English,” he says again.
Then he pauses for a moment, hands resting on his knees, gazing up at the trees that cover Shevchenko Park in dappled emerald splendour. Beside us, the chess game is at its climax. Birds serenade its finale from their branches; a handful of men huddle over the board, watching each move intently.
Viktor clears his throat softly.
“Now,” he says, “I think there are some young people in Ukraine who speak English with no mistakes.”
Just small talk, I think. My attention now fixated on the chess, I make a quiet grunt of agreement — mmhmm — but Viktor turns to look at me, and by his eyes I realize what he was really saying. Not an observation; a question. Most old folks in Kyiv don’t meet many foreigners, I suspect; I’m his rare chance for expert confirmation.
“Is it true?” he adds, with slight hesitation.
Yes, I assure him, it’s true. Many young people in Kyiv speak very good English. No mistakes.
To this, Viktor says nothing, only smiles a satisfied smile, and I realize that, for him, this fact is as hopeful as anything he could read in the news, as hopeful as a new aid package from the West, as hopeful as a word called victory.
Once, he was a boy, learning a bit of a language spoken on the other side of a wall, beyond which lay a world which, he was told, would forever be closed to him. That wall determined the paths his life could take, in both hardships and pleasures; that wall marked the boundary of how far he could dream.
We all have some sort of wall, of course. All of our paths are confined by where we are born, and when, and to who; some walls just close in much tighter than others. And to a man whose wall looked like Viktor’s, of course the idea of a generation of Ukrainian youth having the tools to connect to the world must unfurl fresh as a spring breeze.
That marks the end of our conversation. We lean forward to watch the last moves of the game. A black pawn steps to the end of the board and is replaced by a queen; the loser stretches out his hand to concede, and steps away. Viktor stands up, settles into the vacated chair, and begins to arrange his pieces on their starting squares, making a neat line of troops ready to march into battle.
I can’t stay to watch his game. As I walk away, I wonder whether there will again come a day when all the sons of Ukraine will be named Viktor.
— — —
Last week I promised an issue with a recipe, but I got sidelined by a few things here I needed to handle and didn’t have time to finish transcribing some tape. Next one will have it for sure.
— — —
On Sunday night, I curled up in bed with a bowl of microwave popcorn and an illegal video stream of the Winnipeg Jets’ fourth playoff game. (Disclaimer: I do not endorse illegal streaming. I am just a waylaid Canadian, making do with the options available. Though it does remind me of my entertaining dream to someday open a Canadian bar in Kyiv; if nothing else, we need somewhere to watch hockey. And curling.)
It was the only Jets game I was able to watch all year; most NHL games start around 3 a.m. in Ukraine, and while I did wake up in the wee hours to watch Jennifer Jones play in her final Scotties, I wasn’t sufficiently motivated to go sleepless for the Jets.
By the end of the second period, as the Jets sputtered to another loss, I wished I’d had that time zone excuse not to watch. Still, for a little while, at least, I remembered what it was like to be home. I wished I’d been there, to soak in the street parties. I hope you all found a chance to share the games with someone, if you watched.
‘Til next season, then. Cheers to the victors, though.