I’ve always wondered, on an orthodox cross what is the top plank, and what is the bottom diagonal plank? A Renault Duster creeps by as I sit next to my bicycle, speckled in mud, near a dried-up well across from a roughed-up plastic stork and beside a three-metre orthodox cross. Before we left Canada, people told me to stay safe: they’d seen videos of undercover recruiters pushing people off of their bicycles, throwing them in the backs of vans, forcing them to the frontlines. None of them confirmed as real. Meanwhile the colonizer forces a disproportionate number of Indigenous people into the meat grinder, and lies to other racialized foreigners and/or force them to enlist. Would they take my bike with us? Would I resist, throw punches? Would I be able to call my wife? I’d try to convince them we have something in common because I have a thrifted Renault trucker vest. Instead, the Duster dusts its way to Zarvantsi / Зарванці. Is the top plank like the INRI sign? Is the bottom plank where his feet were?
What is the deal with this stork. Who broke its legs? Two men in fatigues step out of a police cruiser. There’s no one else anywhere close. He says what I assume is “documents please” although I know how to say that and he didn’t say that. I pull the Canadian passport immunity-card from my bike bag. He doesn’t open it and says have a good day with an expressionless face (I crossed into Mexico like that once. Privilege don’t stop at borders, baby). I give my brand-new temporary residency card to the cop. He punches my digits into a tablet and says have a good day with an expressionless face, the type you see in old-timey photos.
There’s a small tree planted behind the well with names of the dead but I don’t go look at it. Last week, a guy with his wife in Ternopil smiled at me as we walked past on the sidewalk, sun setting in the background of Love Island. A mixture of ‘pleasant greeting’ and ‘what’s his fucking deal?’ zap my neurons simultaneously like two ways of understanding the world trying to fit through the door at the same time and get stuck, all shoulders and elbows. He musta been a new foreigner. People otherwise look at me with general confusion, indifference, or soft multigenerational anger.
The women at the sewing group and the women at the net-weaving group say it’s great to have a man, a foreigner in their ranks. I volunteer for the ‘war effort’ and iron with an iron (прасую праскою) adaptive cyber-shorts for my peers who now have fewer limbs than they used to have, than I have. Human psychology isn’t designed to understand such complexity so I tell myself that spending my meagre earnings here on deep-fried dough and steel bicycles is solidarity.
Friend serving in Kyiv says last week was the worst week in the past three years. I bike through green pastures and blossoming orchards past cows and their tenders. Доброго дня. Добрі. I don’t even consider landmines until the time of writing.
Balls of Rice 