Mike Ryabachuk had never felt so alone in his life.
The minister had said his last prayer, and cemetery workers were preparing to lower his mother's casket into the waiting burial vault. Most people would feel grief after burying a parent, Mike thought as he walked away, head bowed, from the open grave. At 42, he was an only child who still lived - who had lived - with his parents. Some might think that he would feel somehow liberated, now that he was no longer responsible to, or for, them. Well, they would be wrong, he thought.
Cancer had claimed his father two years earlier, and now it had taken his mother as well. They had not only been his parents. He had lost his friends. His only friends.
Mike felt as though his soul, too, had departed with that of his mother. The emptiness was, as he had feared it would be, dark, cavernous and consuming. If he had been floating in space a million miles from Earth, he could not possibly have felt more utterly alone.
Financially, of course, he would be all right. He had his job as an equipment maintenance man with Canada Post, he had his parents' - now his - home in Burnaby, a Vancouver suburb, and he had money in the bank. Financially, he would be all right. He would have food and a place to sleep. It would be like being on life support while waiting for cancer to inevitably come and claim him as well, he thought, giving him his ticket to an early grave.
It shouldn't have been like this, of course. He need not have had to approach middle age alone. But that die had been cast on the day of his birth, when the doctor told his parents that they had a healthy new baby boy. But, the doctor had said, he needed to chat with the new parents before they saw their son for the first time. He needed to cushion the blow that awaited them. The boy was healthy, of course; he had all ten fingers and toes. The necessary parts were present and accounted for. But there was one small problem: Baby Mykhailo Petrovych Ryabachuk had a huge birthmark that dominated his face. It was harmless, the doctor said. It won't affect his life at all.
He called the red blotch a port wine stain. It's just a manufacturing mistake, he said, trying to reassure Mike's parents that they had done nothing to cause it. He'll carry it with him, all the same, for the rest of his days. Though it won't affect his life, the doctor said. Not one little bit.
The purple stain had, of course, affected Mike. From the cruelty of childhood to the awkward self-consciousness of adolescence to the prejudices of adulthood, the harmless port wine stain had dictated the course of his life.
His mother had experimented with cosmetics that were meant to cover the birthmark mark, but the makeup drew even more unwanted attention and derision. Then the problem was made worse after his parents had subjected him to an early test of a laser therapy that they had hoped would lighten the stain. The laser had burned him, instead, causing scarring that accentuated, rather than diminished the stain. Now he had a port wine stain and scarred, pockmarked skin as well.
He felt caught between two worlds. The birthmark distinguished - no, segregated - him from regular folks, but it wasn't officially considered any more a disability than acne. He felt he was a curiosity, a focal point for gawpers, like a two-headed calf in a carnival sideshow. See the wine-stained man. Scrub as he may, he'll never come clean.
He avoided contact with people whenever possible. He accepted the occasional insensitive comment or the innocent outburst of a child, but felt that he did society a service by staying away. He had good mechanical skills, and was well suited to working alone on the night shift at a mail sorting facility, adjusting machines and oiling parts.
Before his mother's death, the solitude hadn't really bothered him. He had, after all, his mother, whose love permitted her to overlook the stain. But now he was absolutely alone in the house, save the company of Jack, an aging housecat. Even Jack was none too sociable these days. Mike supposed that the old tomcat knew something was amiss and was concerned for his own survival.
If so, he was right to have been worried, for eventually Mike grew tired of the house and its constant reminders of days past. If he were to pull out of his depression and loneliness, he knew that he would have to sell the home that he and his parents had occupied for 30 years, and dispose of the daily reminders of his parents' passing.
He knew that he could wait to die, or drastically change his life. He had no choice. So, in one afternoon, he called in an auction house to hold an estate sale and a real estate agent to sell the home. He also called the animal shelter to pick up old Jack. That, he almost instantly regretted. He knew the cat was an unlikely adoptee, and that its days at the shelter were numbered.
Six months after his mother's death, Mike sold the house and was suddenly faced with his next decision: Should he stay in Vancouver or go elsewhere? He opted for the latter, making arrangements to travel to Ukraine.
Ukraine was not an entirely unlikely spot. His parents had been born there, and had immigrated to Canada as children. He had visited Kyiv once since independence with his parents. His father had, sometimes impatiently, taught him Ukrainian, and he still spoke the language at a barely acceptable level.
Kyiv would be a good place for a fresh start, he thought, and his cash would stretch further there than in Vancouver. He would give it a year's trial and see how life there suited him.
Learning how things got done in Ukraine was difficult, but probably not more so than for the foreigners who arrived in the city to set up businesses. And he found that his Ukrainian, while far from fluent, was useful. He rented an apartment near the center, and proceeded to settle in to a new life in a new country. Sometimes, he thought about his parents, and imagined that the family had come full-circle with his return. But he was reminded on every street corner that this was not the Ukraine that his parents' families had left. When his maternal and paternal grandparents had left Soviet Ukraine, they could not have imagined the city that existed now.
Without employment to occupy him, Mike ventured out, using public transport to explore the city and the surrounding countryside. He made trips to Odessa, L'viv and Kharkiv, and planned to spend time in the Carpathian Mountains once the snow had begun to fall. He visited the usual museums, parks and tourist sites, but also enjoyed simply walking through suburban streets.
People still stared occasionally at his port wine face, and Mike tried mightily to shrug off the attention. Oddly enough, he found that he felt more at ease, somehow less noticeable, in crowds, where people seemed more intent upon going about their business than on people-watching. And it was just that - people-watching - that he enjoyed most. He could sit on a bench, sipping a beer, and observe passers-by for hours. Sometimes, when he saw someone especially interesting, he would follow, trailing unobtrusively behind by a few meters. It was a game he didn't play well, though. People tended to notice the man with the port wine stain following, and would often become visibly nervous.
Mike lived vicariously through the people he watched. He let his imagination free to conjure facts about their lives. The only life he could not imagine being interesting was his own.
Usually the people he watched were unremarkable people engaged in unremarkable, everyday activities. But on occasion, reality reached out and replaced his imagining with something even more interesting. That was the case with the young woman Mike saw as he walked through the crowded Troyeshyna market.
She wore a black ankle-length coat, and carried an oversized shopping bag, the big plastic checked type that merchants in the market used to store their inventory. Mike watched her look through a pile of children's clothes, and thought he saw her palm a small garment and swiftly tuck it under her coat.
He stood to the side, three meters from where she stood, and watched her more closely while feigning interest in a pair of slippers. She picked up two pair of boys' underwear, using one garment as a shield as she balled the other up in her fist. Then her hand went quickly to her side and inside the coat, and the shorts were gone.
Mike followed the woman for the next 20 minutes as she worked her way through the market. Socks, underwear, a light bulb and a lemon all were quickly secreted beneath her coat. When she had made her way out of the market and was waiting for a bus, Mike approached her.
"Do you do that often?" he asked, not sure what he was getting himself into. For all he knew, she was as good with a knife as she was with her hands.
"What business is it of yours?" she answered. "Are you a cop?"
"No," he replied. "Not a cop. But I saw you take things."
"I'm a very honest person," the woman said. "I have principles. I only steal from the government and from rich people."
"The market sellers are rich?"
"The market is run by racketeers. They get what they deserve."
Mike was certain she wouldn't understand that hole in her logic, and decided not to pursue it.
"My name is Svetlana," she said. "It's cold. If you want to take my time, you could at least buy me a cup of coffee."
This was already the longest conversation with a stranger that Mike had engaged in during the two months he had been in Kyiv.
"Sure," he said, surprising himself. "Why not?"
They sat in a cheap cafe-bar in the market complex. The place was a hangout for men who drank beer and vodka while their wives shopped. Mike ordered tea, and Sveta ordered coffee, along with a meal of salad, chicken and potatoes. She was obviously hungry, Mike thought, and the whole bill came to less than Hr 20, so he didn't complain.
Sveta explained that her petty larceny was necessary, that she was the unemployed single mother of a four year-old, and had no other way to feed and clothe him adequately. From what he could determine, she had no marketable skills other than thievery, and even that she forced herself - barely - to justify under a rather elastic code of ethics.
"You're American," she said. Mike couldn't quite tell if it was an observation or an accusation.
"North American, yes. I'm Canadian," he said.
The distinction didn't seem to register. She reached out and picked a chipped plastic ashtray off the table and slid it into her bag.
"What are you doing in Kyiv?"
"Nothing," he said, realizing that there was more truth to that than he had intended. "I'm ... taking a break."
He looked at her. "Why did you do that, just now?" he asked. Why did you take that crappy ashtray?"
"Souvenir," she said, casting a gaze around the room. "It's a real nice place, Misha."
He was taken aback by her sudden familiarity. He'd been Mike most of his life. Now he used the name he was given at birth, Mykhailo. But nobody had ever called him Misha before. Except his parents.
Mike decided that Sveta was the oddest person he'd met in Kyiv. She was a compulsive thief, a shoplifter, and was most probably schizophrenic, he imaged. There was definitely something wrong with the young woman. But there was also something he liked, a trait that he couldn't put his finger on at first, but then became obvious: She couldn't have cared less about his port wine stain.
And that was why he asked to meet her again.
***
A week later, Mike's old, dark companions, loneliness and depression, visited him again. It had been a good run, like a vacation almost, to be outside and among people and having a life. But then the sky turned gray and it rained for three days straight, a cold, driving rain that taunted, "I'll be snow soon, sucker. The lousy weather is here to depress you."
And it worked. Mike stayed in his one-room flat and read and watched videos, and realized that he still had no real life, and that he was as alone in Ukraine as he had been in Canada. Though he was able to suppress the knowledge on his good days, he knew that his life was ultimately without purpose. As a cold rain poured down outside, beating against his window, the loneliness gnawed at him.
***
After three days of rain, the deluge stopped, though a cold wind continued to blow off the Dnieper and across the city. After so long in his apartment, Mike needed a walk. He called Sveta and asked her to join him.
Mike took the Metro to Hydropark. Though he enjoyed taking the subway, he was always cautious on the platform. Too many people jostled each other for position at the edge of the platform, and Mike feared that it would be far too easy to fall onto the tracks in front of an oncoming train. In his mind's eye, he could see just how it would happen, and that image kept him a good distance back until the train had stopped. He'd even read that some people had to fight a psychological compulsion to jump on to the tracks. That was a problem he didn't have, he decided.
When Mike first saw Sveta standing in Hydropark, she appeared to be carrying a large bundle. Inside, it turned out, was her son, Vasyl.
They sat for a while in a cafe, drinking tea and steeling themselves for a blustery walk when the boy fought his way out of the layers of blankets and stood, tentatively.
Vasyl was small for a four year-old, and his legs were weak. One foot turned inward at an unnatural angle. He walked with the unsure gait of a toddler.
Mike saw that Sveta's manner was different when she was in her role as a mother. She was protective of the boy, while praising his every step.
"He's doing super," she said, beaming. "He'll be on the football pitch with the other boys in no time."
Mike doubted it, but he kept his thought to himself.
"You should have seen him last year at this time," she continued, "He couldn't stand by himself. But I took him to a sanitarium in Uzhgorod, and the doctor there - she's a nerve specialist - really helped him."
"Wasn't it expensive?" he asked.
Sveta shot him a look of rebuke.
"Vasyl and I have angels that watch out for us," she said. "We were there for a month. The food was excellent and there was plenty of fresh air. An organization paid for everything - $200. The doctor wants to see him again this year, but I don't know if we can do it."
"But you said it helped..."
"I also said it cost $200, and the organization just gives money once."
Mike sat in awkward silence and watched the boy lurch from table to table in the nearly deserted cafe. He felt as though he should offer to give Sveta the $200, but he wasn't sure that he wanted to get that involved.
"I'm sure something will work out," was all he could manage to say. Vasyl missed a table leg and fell to the concrete floor. Sveta walked over and picked him up.
"Let's take that walk," she said, somewhat glumly.
It was a slow, uncomfortable walk, made worse by the chill wind. Sveta wrapped Vasyl tightly in the blankets. When Mike took a turn carrying him, he was astonished at how light the little boy was. He learned from Sveta that he had been born with nerve damage and twisted bones in his legs - something that Mike was fairly certain would have been treatable with surgery in the west. Here, they used hydrotherapy and electric stimulation to retrain the nerves. It sounded like dubious science to Mike, but he was beginning to have at least some respect for the form of naturopathic medicine widely practiced in Ukraine.
That evening, Mike thought about Vasyl, and their obvious similarities. Both were impaired by manufacturing errors, though Vasyl's disability was physical, whereas Mike's was purely social. And his, he thought, was infinitely worse.
Depression visited Mike again. For the next two days, he stayed indoors, morose and preoccupied. Moving to Ukraine had provided an interesting interlude, but hadn't solved his underlying problem. He was still alone. Children still pointed and adults still averted their gaze. And most importantly of all, his life lacked any meaning.
The only slightly bright spot the year had brought was his odd friendship with Sveta. Two peas in a pod, he thought. The freak and the thief. Weird and weirder. Outcast and outlaw. Though the friendship brought him some comfort, he found that he couldn't find anything really positive to say about Sveta and Vasyl. And that made him even sadder.
Hunger, more than anything, forced Mike to leave his apartment the next morning to take Metro into center town, where he could sit in a western style restaurant and get a real breakfast, with eggs, bacon, potatoes and toast - the works. As much as he liked traditional Ukrainian fare, kasha was a poor excuse for breakfast.
Two boys were horsing around on the platform, running and sliding along the buffed flooring. A mother and her small son were waiting for the train as well. The boy watched enviously as the older boys ran and slid. Then he broke free of his mother's grasp.
"Watch, mama!" he said excitedly. "Watch."
He took several running steps and slid, mimicking the older boys.
"Andrusha! Get back here!" she called after the boy.
He faced his mother and ran toward her, then slid. But he misjudged his speed, and before anyone could move, he sailed off the platform and landed on the tracks.
The boy wailed in pain and fear, and his mother screamed frantically. The platform attendant came running, shouting something unintelligible into her walkie-talkie.
Mike watched the scene unfold, and looked down at the boy, who seemed uninjured, but was frozen with fear. He also saw that the rails ahead were shining, a sign that the subway train was nearing the station.
He didn't think about the danger to himself or his fear of being struck by the train until he had already lowered himself onto the track bed. He reached for the boy, who resisted, swatting at him.
Mike looked down the track. The train's headlight was visible. He grabbed the child and unceremoniously threw him onto the platform and to his anxious mother.
Time seemed to slow as Mike considered what to do next. He had no idea where the electrified "third rail" was, but knew that if he stayed where he was, he'd soon be under, rather than inside, the subway train. The two boys and the platform attendant stood looking at Mike in horror. The mother was occupied, concentrating on her child.
Well, that's it, Mike thought. Perhaps that's what all this pain has been about. My life for the child's. Have fun, kid. Hope you were worth it.
Then another thought struck him, and as the approaching train sounded its horn, Mike felt a burst of adrenaline. He'd heard of people performing remarkable physical stunts when under extreme pressure, like the woman who weighed 35 kilograms lifting a car off an accident victim. But had never experienced it until now.
He reached out and grasped the edge of the platform, which was chest-high to him. With one heave, he pulled himself up and to safety.
The train came to a stop where he had stood less than a second earlier, and Mike sat on the floor, shaking, though not from the adrenaline or fear.
He'd always wanted his life to have meaning. Somehow, fate had brought him to the land of his parents and his ancestors in the hope that he'd find an answer.
He'd saved one child's life, he thought. Now maybe he could save another. He could make a difference to Vasyl and his mother. No promises, of course, but he could try, he thought as he walked up the steps and out of the station.
He could try.
B. MICTO is the pseudonym of a Kyiv writer.
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