Break Down the Wall

On the Road in Ukraine

In front of the Lviv opera house in 2001. Everyone was out to make a buck. (BD photo).

Sometimes a story needs to be told a few times before it finds its moral. Here’s what I’m talking about:

In 2001, my brother Sterling and I were in Ukraine, the place our family came from, generations before. The country had achieved independence a decade earlier, breaking off from the carcass of the defunct Soviet Union. A revival was underway: of culture and religion, of entrepreneurship, of hope itself that Ukraine might one day be a normal country, like its neighbours to the west.

Not that there weren’t all sorts of problems. The disparity in means was large between those who found ways to make money in the new economy and those who didn’t, and because wages were low and the price of everything was increasingly high, everyone was looking for a side hustle.

For some reason, hotels were exceedingly expensive. But no problem. You could stay in someone’s home for far fewer hryvni (the Ukrainian currency). In the cultured old city of Lviv, Sterling and I stayed in the home of relatives of my Montreal dentist. Space was tight but cozy in the apartment of my dentist’s brother-in-law. The residual Ukrainian of my childhood improved a lot during an evening of vodka drinking that followed a long day of touring the countryside with our host’s son and the son’s fiancée as guides. We were “nash,” the Ukrainian word meaning “ours,” that is, part of the family.

In Kyiv there were no relatives, but a travel agency in Montreal specializing in Ukraine had placed us in the hands of a couple of business-oriented young men. They would be our fixers. The boss of the pair (let’s call him Oleh) spoke fluent English and directed his partner (Dmitro) to take on required tasks. Oleh had arranged for us to stay in an apartment close to the centre of Kyiv. As was customary with this early version of Airbnb, the apartment’s occupant vacated the place to spend time elsewhere – his dacha, we were told.

Our home for the next few days was a Soviet-era block of about seven storeys on a major street. It was a cut above the usual dreary slabs of Communist times. Its street side, in fact, featured glassed-in balconies on each floor. Our place was five flights up. Notable about the apartment was the entrance. It featured a blank white concrete wall into which had been set a black iron door that looked medieval in vintage. Must be a problem with break-ins, I thought. The key to the door was an equally olden piece of iron about eight inches long.

I have a fear of door locks and keys, dating from when I was a child after having locked myself in the bathroom of my grandparents’ home, setting off, for a four-year-old, a not unreasonable panic. That skeleton key made me uneasy.

Not to worry, said Sterling. I’ll deal with it. And indeed, in his hands the key turned easily. The door swung open. The apartment was bright and well-appointed, the balcony looking down on the broad avenue.

We spent the next few days enjoying the attractions of an as-yet-not-much-touristed Kyiv. We saw a lot of churches and monuments, and the house where one of my favourite writers, Mikhail Bulgakov, once lived. We were on our own except for the day our minders took us to Chernihiv, a city of churches near the Russian border, Dmitry driving.

On the last evening before we were due to catch an early-morning train to Budapest, we splurged on a high-end meal. Feeling contented, we returned to our apartment. The key would not open the door. No amount of twisting and turning on Sterling’s part worked. The blank wall and the iron door stood before us unmoved. All of our stuff, our train tickets, etc., lay on the other side. We had to get in.

Those were the days before cell phones, so we couldn’t call the minders. Even if we could have found a pay phone, if such a thing existed, how many kopecks would it take? Did we have the phone number with us? I don’t remember.

“Maybe I can climb the outside of the building to the balcony,” I said.

“No! No! You’ll kill yourself,” my brother said.

I wasn’t seriously considering turning into Spiderman. I was just throwing out ideas where there seemed none.

“I’ll look around the building. Maybe I can find someone who can help.”

I left Sterling struggling with the door and I wandered the halls. One floor down I saw an unimposing-looking man, early middle age, ambling along the corridor. I explained our problem as best I could.

“Yes,” he said. “I can help. You’ll have to break down the wall. Wait here.” At least that’s what it sounded like he said, my lack of fluency in Ukrainian contributing a note of confusion.

It seemed a drastic solution, but I couldn’t think of another. He returned with a toolbox and we went to find Sterling who was still struggling with the door, his knuckles now reddened in desperation.

“This man says he can help,” I told him. “He says we have to break down the wall.”

“Break down the wall?! No way! We can’t do that! We’ll be arrested! We’ll never get out of here!”

While this conversation went on, the man took a chisel and mallet from his toolbox. Near the doorknob, he began hammering on the concrete. It turned out it was as soft as chalk, Soviet-era chalk.

Chook, chook, chook, went the hammer and chisel. In a few minutes, there was a fist-sized hole. Six inches in, our saviour broke through the wall, reached in, and unlatched the door from the inside.

The rest was anti-climactic. “The problem with the locks happens all the time,” the man said. “This is how we fix it.” We called Oleh and explained. He groaned, but said, “Okay, we’ll be there in the morning.” And they were, the junior partner carrying a spatula and box of quick-set cement.

We made it to the train, where another adventure ensued, but I’ll save that for another time.

I’ve dined out on this tale often over the years, but it is only recently, as I suggested at the beginning, that the moral of the story came into view.

In recent weeks, for the first time in a long while, there is optimism in Ukraine as thanks to ingenuity and a drone airforce, it pummels Russian energy infrastructure. There is hope once more, hope that one day Ukrainians will break through the wall keeping them from the good stuff on the other side.

Chook, chook, chook.