Anyway.
I go onto the landing to check the fuse (this is fairly common), but discover it’s fine. Neighbors begin to come out of their doors to the landing and from up above and down below. Everyone is wondering how the apartments all have no power, but the landing light is on.
One of my upstairs neighbors (the uncle of one of my students who happens to live below me—all of Zhytomyr is interconnected) comes down, sees me and cries, drunkenly, “I will get a translator!” I try to explain to him that I can understand him and, baring that, I have a translator in my apartment named Diana. He doesn’t listen to me and runs upstairs, coming back down with Igor, my student. Igor’s father comes up from his apartment and soon there is nine of us on the landing, with a tenth (my neighbor’s eight year-old son) poking his head out periodically.
The No-Electricity Social. Volva is on the stairs.
This gathering prompts me to get my video camera, in order to tape this Ukrainian event: the no-electricity social. It also prompts the upstairs-neighbor-uncle-of-Igor, Volva, to go back to his apartment and come back with a one quart jar of homemade vodka and a 5 quart jar of moonshine. Borrowing a stool from my next door neighbor (who is the sister of the head of the NGO I built the wall with, Kolia; Kolia is also Volva’s co-worker), Volva turns it into an impromptu table, setting up four shot glasses and beside them putting a loaf of bread, a jar of salo and a pack of sausages.
Volva pouring the vodka. Note the jar of moonshine on the left
It is a Ukrainian holiday, he says (today is the day, hundreds of years ago, that the residents of Kyiv were—most not of their own will and at sword point—baptized in the Dnepr river) and so, he also says, without power all we can do is drink and sleep.
Igor, embarrassed at his drunken father and uncle, leaves. The wives go back into their darkened apartments as well, leaving only two of the men from my floor, Igor’s uncle and father, and me. We’re all set to drink when Volva starts spouting off on all things esoteric. He does this in broken English, asking me for a translation of this word or that word as he goes, all the other neighbors (who don’t know English) asking him to switch to Russian, but he insists on doing it in English.
Diana has the camera for this, handed to her simply to film the toast, but she will end up filming the next forty minutes. You see, with four glasses filled but before anyone has picked them up, Igor’s grandmother—Volva’s mother—suddenly comes from downstairs and begins yelling at her two sons. Volva, it should be pointed out, is 30 years old. His brother—Igor’s father—is older than he. This hunched old woman literally chases Volva upstairs to his apartment, yelling the whole way. Diana caught the whole thing on camera.
Volva getting yelled at by his mother
Then she comes back down and begins yelling at her other son, chasing him downstairs to their shared home. Just as she’s going downstairs, Volva sneaks back from upstairs. Then, the lights come back on. The other men, having never picked up the glasses, excuse themselves and go back inside save the one who lives cattycorner to me (whose mother is the Jehovah’s Witness trying to convert me). He now says he will not drink. Mostly, Ukrainians are in for a dozen toasts or none at all—and we all have to work tomorrow. Volva also has to work tomorrow, but the number of lessons he will teach (he is an economics professor at one of the universities) changes by the minute. At one point he announces he will teach five lessons. Later he declares it to be three. Ten minutes after that, he says he has to teach six.
Still, four glasses are poured and it’s a grave sin to waste vodka in Ukraine. Glancing downstairs for his mother, Volva takes one glass and I take another; we toast; we drink. Diana has been taping for twenty-five minutes to get that shot.
The drink
Volva and I each take another glass. Another old lady comes up on her way towards the landing above. Volva offers her a drink and she yells at him that it’s a holiday. “You should be drinking spirit water!” she yells.
“But of course!” says Volva. “We are!”
The second old woman to yell at poor Volva
He’s very drunk now, so it takes the better part of fifteen minutes before he’s done talking so we can have the second toast. Diana gives up taping after this quote from Volva, in Russian:
“Gail used to live in your apartment. She used to make this pig for dinner with an apple. And I had to take the apple out of her butt. The pig’s butt. Not Gail’s butt.”
Diana was laughing too hard to keep the camera up, so she just went back inside to finish the episode without me. Volva was now trying to convince me to drink coffee with him, and I was having a hard time convincing him to go home.
Finally I have carried up the huge jar of moonshine (which, thankfully, was never offered), the vodka, the sausages, the salo, and the bread to his apartment, returned the stool to my neighbor, and Volva is still following me back down to the landing to get him to drink coffee with him. I promise him another day and finally have to close the door in his face.
Just in time, too. Five minutes later, the homemade vodka hits me and I’m fucking drunk.