5 1/2 hours from dark woods to apartment

5 ½ hours, dark woods to apartment

Stalin and Svetlana in peasant hut
You might recognize this number if you have been following my blog. It took me 5 ½ hours one day to get from the airport in London to my hotel. As soon as I said 5 ½ hours again to my husband, he remembered and said, Oh the number comes up again. Yesterday it took 5 ½ hours to leave the dark Ukrainian woods and make it back to Kharkov to my apartment and this is after my full day of touring.
We had finished with the Sharovka estates and were working our way over to the last stop on our route or the Natalivka estates. They were built by a rich man wanting to have fine estates for his daughters. This one was built for Natalivka. Vlad is speeding down a bouncy country road when Mikail hollers and Vlad stands on the brakes. We back up to the huge gate set beside the road. It is the entrance to Natalivka estates. We sit and look at it for a minute while Mikail explains that it was designed and built by the man who designed Lenin's tomb in Moscow’s Red Square. Personally, he thinks this gate is a much better design.
At a little after 4 p.m. we are crossing the road to head up this dirt drive into the estates which I cannot see anywhere but only see woods on both sides and in front of me. We bump over a large hump and the bottom of the car hits it. Vlad is driving slowly down this dirt path and trying to keep the car out of the worst of the ruts. We bounce the undercarriage off the path a couple of more times and then suddenly the air is filled with the smell of gasoline and Vlad stops the car and turns it off. Doesn’t seem like a good thing to me.
He opens the car door and leans out to look underneath the car and shortly he is out of the car and circling it and looking underneath the car. In just a few minutes he is trying to move the car by pushing it over to one side so that it is at least level again. At this point, I get out of the car as does Svetlana, his business partner, and Mikail, the Ukrainian speaking guide.
I had thought several times during the day that this car is on it’s last legs as at various stops the car hood would steam and it would smell like very hot car and possibly burnt rubber but it kept taking us places. Now it seems to be a dead car totally. Vlad is not totally unprepared for car disaster as he does have a big rag to throw on the ground so he can lie down on something besides dirt and also a tool box of sorts and a huge jug of water. He lifts the lid and sees that there is something loose that shouldn’t be loose. He lies down and soon he is pulling this long thin stick out from underneath the car. I thought at first that it was a stick and must have punched into something to stop us but as he gets it all the way out I see that it is a long thin tubing, a part of the fuel line that goes from the tank to the engine. The floppy part under the hood that he was flipping around is the other end of this line. Something cracked and broke our fuel line which also accounted for the exceedingly strong smell of gasoline.
This indeed does not look good at all. Vlad is all over the car, up and down and under and in the trunk and in the hood. Mikail is apparently not a car person because he just stands and looks rather helpless. Vlad says we can go walk down the road and see the estate and he’ll explain later what it is that Mikail has shown me but Mikail doesn’t move and neither do I. Luckily for Vlad, I have brought along a flashlight so I hold it for him to see under the car. He pulls out the attached end of the fuel line and has to hold it carefully or fuel will gush out of it since it is still the part attached to a fairly full gas tank. There is a lot of discussion between the three which is not translated. My husband later asks why they didn’t call a taxi and have me driven back to town. I think in this part of the world, it is not an option nor do I think a taxi would have ever found us. Vlad and Mikail had a hard enough time finding the place and they supposedly knew where they were going.
So Svetlana and I stand and offer moral support until Vlad finally decides he and Mikail must go for help. They walk off down the dirt road towards some hut in the far distance and Svetlana and I are left in the deepening twilight until it finally turns into dark. I must admit that the stars were beautiful but that was about the only good thing about staying there. Svetlana talked a lot about her life in very broken English but I think I got the gist and ended up being a social worker again for a short time as I counseled and listened to her problems.
I am getting colder and colder and there is no sign of them returning. Finally a light shines in the distance and Svetlana jokes about the "light at the end of the tunnel". I think she is more nervous than me. Why is that? Does she know something about these woods that I do not? She has called the local people strange. Are they Deliverance strange or just strange to a city girl? She also jokes about wolves in the wood and I have to admit I do give an ever so slightly start when a night bird starts calling in a weird sort of wolfish way. I too have read the stories of wolves pulling people out of troikas. But we see a small LED that is definitely coming closer so Svetlana flashes her cell phone at them and Vlad shouts to us.
He has come back with a pair of pliers and wire cutters, a couple of screwdrivers, and a couple of pieces of rubber hose and some tie wraps. With this he hopes to repair the fuel line so we can drive back to Kharkov tonight, some 100 kilometers over rough roads without shocks. A couple of local boys are walking down the path towards the car in complete darkness. They have no flashlight or anything. I don’t see how they can find their way. Vlad asks them for something and one of the boys runs up the path. In a few minutes you hear him running back at full speed and then he is in our flashlights and has several more screwdrivers and a knife.
Vlad tries to couple to broken piece of fuel line to the attached piece with one of the rubber hoses but it leaks every time. Finally he cuts off a piece of the good and true fuel line hose and is able to cable it together with the broken pieces and no leak. He reattaches the shorter fuel hose to the fuel line that he had patched together and voila! The car starts and there is no shooting fuel out of any of the three junctions. He stops the engine and gets back under the car to tie the fuel line to the undercarriage so that it won’t drag on the ground or road and break again. In a few minutes he is up and putting everything away and sorting out the borrowed screwdrivers and knife to give back to the boys who have been standing in the shadows the entire time watching the drama unfold. Svetlana long since gave up and got in the car to stay warm if possible. I’m holding a flashlight and Mikail is holding his LED light and we are the only light around.
Vlad says we are ready to leave and I say to him that we will all walk until the car is off the path and out of the undercarriage bump area. He says he is going forward as the road is better. So he gets in the car and slowly drives away, the boys have disappeared, Svetlana and Mikail take off following the car in the dark and I have my flashlight which I shine upon the ground to make sure I don’t fall into a fuel line eating hole or trip over a bump. I go a few yards and look up and I am the only thing on the road and the only light for about a kilometer. How the heck did Svetlana and Mikail disappear so quickly.
Well, I am the client and therefore worth money and I haven’t paid for this portion of the trip yet so I am fairly sure they will not let me get lost or if so, they will come back to find me. I trudge on and eventually get closer to some of the distant lights and suddenly Mikail has turned on his small LED and is showing me that I must make a turn and follow the side road. Good that he did that or I would have kept going. Then he disappears again but we are closer to habitation now and I am able to find my way to the car which is parked in a yard and the fuel line has been pulled off again.
Svetlana is waiting for me and beckons me to follow her. I’m thinking she’s found a nice toilet which would be absurd because there are no nice toilets in the villages. They all have outhouses. No, she’s found something even better to her point of view, a heater. We walk into a large barn area where there is a trough and a man is washing up at the trough. Svetlana and the man exchange a few words and he beckons to another door. We open it and we are in a one room peasant hut. There is really no other way to describe it. It has two very soiled cots in it, a very old desk that is falling apart, a cupboard that has no doors and just has several articles of clothing either hanging or laying in the bottom, a small faux leather chair where the stuffing is bursting out of the seams, and a row of three fold up chairs that are attached to each other. There is very little room in this hut to move around. But there are two wonders in it that make the whole experience fascinating. One is the heater. It is a coil that is wrapped around a clay ceramic pipe and wires trailing from it have attached it to an electrical outlet somewhere. The coils are glowing red making the room almost cozy. I was able to get warm and take off my gloves and unzip my jacket but I had to stop short of actually taking off my layers of two jackets.
The final item in the room was something I had not expected to find anywhere. It was an old poster of Stalin. Wow, how bizarre is that! I have already experienced a general underlying hatred of Stalin from different people in the museums and from my guide in Kiev as he had been the purveyor of the engineered famine that killed many Ukrainians through starvation. So to see this poster in a peasant hut where obviously he is liked or even loved was quite a shock. As Svetlana and I were the only ones in there, I whipped out my camera for a photo immediately. Later Mikail came in and he was as surprised as me and whips out his camera too.
The Stalin poster is attached to a door that is locked with a padlock larger than size of my fist. Two men must live there because while we are waiting two men came in at different times and walked around us to thread their way to the locked Stalin door. Finally I realized that everything they have of value is behind this locked door because the hut cannot be locked and probably the barn can’t be either. They brought out tools to help Vlad work on the car and always locked the door carefully behind then.
The black and white TV blares some movie and when it ends, Svetlana changes to a news station and reports that they are telling a story about some old elevator in an old building. Since I am currently staying in an old building with an old elevator I am not real eager to watch this even without understanding anything so I just close my eyes to take a nap.
Around 8:30 p.m. Vlad finally enters the hut and announces that the car is fixed and we are ready to leave. Svetlana and he exchange a volley of super fast Ukrainian before she stands up ready to walk outside. We thank our hosts profusely. I ask Svetlana if I can again sit in the backseat rather than the front. She is a bit confused but agrees. My asking this is two fold. One - I don’t want to be anywhere near the engine in case it catches on fire so I figure the left passenger seat behind the driver if probably the safest spot, if there can be a safe spot. Two – I don’t want to see the road as Vlad drives as I have had enough of the wild ride.
So we are in the car, it starts, and we are moving out of the yard and back to Kharkov. And it is a wild ride. Again, Vlad can’t drive that fast because the car just won’t do it but it sure seems like it when he is swerving to miss a pot hole or bouncing out of one that he didn’t miss.
I sit in the back and hold onto the chicken handle and chant a mantra the entire way. I did get blessed by a priest three times this morning. I do hope I am not using them all up in one car ride. I can tell when we get off the country roads and onto the highway and the bouncing isn’t quite as constant and the pothole swerves are a little farther apart. Finally I figure it is about time to get close to town and I open my eyes and can see lights on the horizon and in a little bit we are on the outskirts. Yea! We pull into a bus station and Mikail leaves us. Vlad is back in the car and I make him take me to a super market. It is 9:30 and I am not going to wander about the streets looking for a restaurant. He takes me to Billa and Svetlana and Vlad wander around behind me as I make the fastest choices I can. I love other country supermarkets and always go through them but this was a hurry up and get home time so I just grabbed and ran.
Vlad pulls into the driveway of my apartment and it is about 9:30 p.m., five and one half hours since the car broke down in the woods. He is profusely apologizing for the day and the missed sights. I tell him it was a great day. How often do I get blessed by a priest, have a breakdown in the deep woods, and see a Stalin poster in a peasant hut. You just don’t get experiences like this most of the time. As I was always sure I was never in any danger, (except for the car rides) I loved it. It was just a bit inconvenient but the experience made up for that.