I was in the Obhiev post office, trying to send home Christmas gifts to my family. For my sister and my soon-to-be-born niece, I was sending matroichka dolls. For my grandmother, it was a shawl handmade by a woman named Tamara. For my mom’s fiancée, Jerry, I was sending a AK-47 tee-shirt (he had asked me to find him an AK-47 in Ukraine), and a Soviet army belt with the hammer and sickle on the buckle. For my mother, I was sending sent the mug handmade out of Obhiev clay with the town’s name and crest on it, given to me by the mayor of Obhiev when I moved here.
For my grandfather, and here is where the problem started, I it was a Ukrainian Penthouse.
The mail clerk asked to see every item in the package before it could be sent, but she barely even glanced at the Penthouse when I held it up. Admittedly, I purposefully held it up with the back of the magazine to her, so all she saw was a full-sized ad for a watch. I knew it was illegal to mail pornography across Ukraine’s borders, but it’s also illegal to mail food across the borders, and Peace Corps volunteers, including myself, receive food care packages all the time. All packed into the box, the gifts weighed just a hair of the two kilogram limit, and I was asked to remove something. The Penthouse was on top, so I took it out. The package weighed exactly two kilograms.
I paid for an envelope to put the Penthouse into, put it inside and mailed everything.
As I was walking back to my apartment, I had a sudden case of the fear. You see, the Ukrainian postal service likes to open packages. Most of my mail comes to me already opened. A magazine in a box, I felt, could be overlooked. A Ukrainian mailman opening that envelope and a Penthouse sliding out, though…
I figured there could be three possibilities. One would involve him letting it go. Another would involve him taking it home. The third… I didn’t know what the fine was for illegally sending pornography, but I was sure it was something I couldn’t afford. I was also sure that I didn’t want Peace Corps getting involved.
Possibly I was just being paranoid, but I decided to err on the side of caution. I turned around and walked back to the post office. The envelope with the Penthouse was just on the other side of the glass partition between me and the three clerks, all of them women in their forties.
“I need that package back,” I said to them in Ukrainian, pointing.
“We can’t give it back to you,” one said. “Once you send it, it can’t be returned.”
“But it’s right there.”
“Sorry, we can’t.”
“I really need it back.”
That received a raised eyebrow, but one of them picked up the phone and made a call. “A man wants his package back,” the lady said into the phone. There was some more conversation, the end of which was an apparent order to call someone else. She did, but there was no answer.
“Sorry, we can’t give you the package back.”
“There may be something wrong with this package,” I tried to explain.
“Is there something wrong with the address?” one of them asked.
“No, the magazine inside, it may be not good.” (Note that I did not know the words for “law”, “rules”, or “regulations” and instead used “not good.”) “I don’t think I can send this magazine.”
“Why?” one of the clerks asked.
“This magazine, maybe it is not allowed,” I said, once again stringing words together as best I could.
At this point, I had the attention of all three of them, as well as the dozen other patrons in the post office, all watching the American speaking in Ukrainian.
“What is the magazine?” asked a clerk.
I sighed.
“Penthouse,” I said.
I received blank stares. They had never heard of it.
I was marshalling the words in my head, figuring that since I didn’t know “pornography”, the closest I could get to it was “women with no clothes.”
I was just about to say this when one of the clerks offered: “erotika?”
“Tak. Erotika,” I said.
The whole post office burst out laughing.
Not hesitating, one of the clerks grabbed the envelope and handed it to me.
“You will have to pay for the envelope since you wrote on it,” she said, counting back
money to me.
“Yes, of course,” I said, willing to forgo the whole refund just to get out of there.
She counted out the last money of the money to me, barely suppressing a smile.
Head hung low, I left.