“Are you finished sweeping up there, Stephan?”
“Yeah… just trying to get at a few stubborn cobwebs.”
“Well, you’re pretty stubborn yourself, son,” says the older but still well-built man.
“It’s my way… uh… the only way I’ve been able to get myself back on track in life.”
“And is this where your ‘track’ ends, is it – sweeping up at a church-run children’s home on the outskirts of Kyiv?”
“I’m not complaining. I’ve got a place to stay, get fed regularly and have time in the evening to do what I really like…”
“And what’s that, son?”
“Writing… uh, writing and reading… literature and books.”
“If you want to write – that is, write anything worth reading – you have to live, to experience the world firsthand, not from the other end of a broom.”
“Oh, I’ve got some experience… most of it’s bad. But I’ve already told you about that.”
“Yes, you have,” says the still well-built man, “and it could make for a good book in itself – a prayer book,” he adds, now laughing good naturedly.
That evening, Stephan kneels down to pray beside the collection of crossed planks and knobby posts he calls a bed. It’s covered with a camel-skin blanket, and there’s a jar of locusts (honey-covered and sold by the Uzbeks at the local bazaar for dirt-cheap on Tuesday evenings) in case he gets hungry between the modest meals he’s served by the church.
Then he falls asleep and dreams: first of his not unhappy boyhood as a rank-and-file member of the Ukrainian Diaspora; then… well then… of a most unpleasant youth, besmirched, defiled, twisted, tortured and made lame in a series of events set off by a fateful if not predatory encounter with a figure whose full dimensions are impossible to portray in a dream, much less a single Commix episode.
Then he’s on the road, a lonely road with few signposts and virtually no rest stops. Barefoot and friendless, he learns to take things slow, one step at a time. But the hills of Carpathia are always too high, and the shores of the Black Sea ever so distant. So where goeth our hero?
Well, somewhere during his journey he’s accosted by a creature, whose actual existence Stephan sometimes doubts to this day. Tadpole-legged and turtle-shell-backed, the Dionysian-like character tempts Stephan with tales of redemption through death.
“I’m the son of a god, you see,” says The Ferret (for that’s what the creature calls himself). “And that god was a Ukrainian nationalist… heh, heh… I mean, he was a Cossack… yeah, that’s right… A hetman, no less… Not an ordinary mortal or an all too ordinary Jew, if that’s what you’re thinking,” says The Ferret to Stephan. “But I didn’t tell you that… Heh, heh.”
After numerous and lengthy such discussions initiated by The Ferret, who appears on Stephan’s path time and again, at night, in the morning, even during moments when our hero has chanced upon a particularly inviting cluster of bushes with the hope of relieving himself, the Dionysian-like creature proposes that Stephan ‘die’ to be born again.
“I croaked myself,” says The Ferret, “at the hands of evil Poles and Germans, whom I still hate, heh, heh. But I was redeemed through a USAID-funded project… heh, heh.”
Finally, The Ferret persuades Stephan to take a shortcut through a cave that turns out to be a fast track into Hell. There, Stephan sees a circus of lies, with each performer convinced what he is saying is indeed the truth.
“Step right up, ladies and germs and bald-headed worms, and see the greatest show on Earth, Nyuh, nyuh, nyuh,” says a one-eyed Cyclops dressed as the ringmaster. “It’s big, huge, humungous, enormous, gargantuan… and DEATH DEFYING!”
Then, there’s the bearded lady, who doesn’t wear a beard at all, but rather a rubber chicken outfit replete with a red rooster comb hood. Every time she clucks, an egg is laid and another lie is hatched.
A strongman with tinsel hair and a cheesy mustache, dressed in three-cornered shorts, grits his teeth and squats to lift a barbell that appears strained to the breaking point by heavy weights labeled “TRUTH.” Each time he’s almost got it up, the strongman lets rip a resounding fart, drops the weights in a deafening thump and then scurries off to a table full of beer to drown his shame.
Somewhere during this unintended tour of the underworld, The Ferret himself leaps up and onto a unicycle and begins backpedaling across a high wire, center ring. “See what I’m doing, heh, heh?” and then, “No, I’m doing nothing at all,” he shouts to a dumbfounded Stephan below.
When Stephan awakens, he’s still lying on his bed of crossed planks, wrapped in that camel skin blanket.
“You look like you’ve been through Hell, son,” says the older still well-built man.
“Yes, I have. But I’ve already told you all about it.”
“Well, then let me tell you something for a change. You see, Stephan, I haven’t always been at this place, either. I ended up here on my way to somewhere else – just like you, only earlier. You might even call me a writer, of sorts, but I prefer to see myself as a detective, or someone who digs up the facts and lays them out as they are… bare, with no embellishment, much less my personal bias.”
“I see.”
“Then see this: There’s a new pastor in town, and he’s taking over this joint, whether you or I like it or not.”
“So what am I supposed to do?”
“Scram, son, and don’t look back.”
From the courtyard of the church-run children’s school on the outskirts of Kyiv, someone is whistling.
“I wish I were in the land of Cossacks, good times there are not forgotten, look away, look away, look away back East.”
Filed by Dirk Dickerson, June 30, 2013