Country Roads

House guest
Like most news print readers and television watchers, the goings on in Kiev, Ukraine, have been viewed often and with interest. For our family it is a reminder of the year 1988 when Yaroslav Kovalenko, a young boy, spent two weeks with us during a sister city exchange between Santa Rosa and Cherkassy, Ukraine. He was 15 years old at that time, the same age as our youngest son, Tom. Yaroslav spent a few days attending high school at Healdsburg with Tom and also went with his fellow Ukrainians to Fort Ross and San Francisco on field trips. In their USA visit they were accompanied by a very amiable gentleman whom Yaroslav quietly informed us was “KGB.” (Ukraine was still part of the Soviet Union at that time.)
Yaroslav could speak both Ukrainian and Russian and was quite interested in accumulating a written list of our English euphamisms. His own English was quite good. In a few days he recovered from his homesickness and began to enjoy his American visit. One of my favorite memories of our time with him is when we watched “The Russians Are Coming…” and he laughed hilariously. To have him in our living room, translating the Russian dialogue for us was a real treat. What surprised us was his laughter from the very beginning, when he announced that the uniforms which Alan Arkin and his shipmates were wearing were all “out of World War II”
“They do not wear such uniforms now,” explained Yaroslav.
He also was amazed that they were speaking Russian with a “Georgian accent.”
It took me awhile to realize he was referring to the Russian Republic, not Alabama’s neighbor.
He was a delightful house guest and we were genuinely sad to have him leave. We wrote back and forth for a few years but I became discouraged with the postal service when a couple of boxes of gifts which we had sent him and his family were all rifled through, including letters.
“There are not honest people here in our apartment complex,” he wrote.
When I see the crowds at Maidan, the square in Kiev, I wonder if Yaroslav is one of them or knows somebody there. I think not. He was gentle and wanted to be a dentist, just like his mother and father. Yet, there could be a dentist somewhere out there laying his life on the line for his country.
I don’t recall how long it took the post office to get a letter from Healdsburg to Cherkassy but I do know how long it takes to get an envelope of a few 8X11 papers to a postal box in Healdsburg. Two days.
“Tell me that this envelope will be placed in the post box and not leave this building?” I asked the USPS clerk.
“Nope, it has to go to Oakland to be processed. We don’t have enough personnel here to have it placed directly in the post office box.”
I am not making this up, people.
I came home in absolute wonderment. I told my daughter, “If I wanted to find out whether you wanted your breakfast eggs fried or scrambled, and it meant merely stepping twenty paces down the hall to ask you directly, the post office would walk all the way to Oakland and back before they come down the hall.”
No wonder they are going broke. What on God’s just recently green earth are they doing at that post office? There are all sorts of employees going back and forth behind the front desk, while usually one, not very often two, clerks take care of the Healdsburgers who patiently wait like Russians in a bread line. Excuse me, I’m still thinking of them.
When I read that the indigenous people of the Crimea were Tatars, who had been there for centuries, I decided to consult my Encyclopaedia Britannica. My family teases me about the 24 volume set of E.B. above the Google and Wikipedia housing computer.
“How old are those Encyclopaedias, Mom?” they joke.
But, today they are as relevant as I need them to be and I learn that Tatars have been there since 1237. Five hundred years later, in 1783, Catherine II annexed Crimea to Russia and transferred the Tatar population from the coast to the Russian interior. Rather than be forcefully moved, 231,000 Tatars emigrated to Turkey.
During World War II the remaining Tatar population collaborated with the Germans because they wanted independence from Russia. For choosing the losing side they were rounded up by Stalin and sent to Siberia.
In 1954 Nikita Krushchev transferred Crimea to Ukraine as a gift for being part of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republic.
The dictionary complicates it further. Tartar and Tatar are one and the same and the name is derived from Greek mythology referring to Tartarus, “the infernal abyss below Hades” or hell. Therefore, to call someone a “Tatar or Tartar is to describe someone who is irritable, violent, intractable.
How this all gets mixed with mayonnaise and pickles into a sauce eaten with fish remains a befuddling mystery.
But of this I am clear and in constant concern: that I am going to act like a Tatar/Tartar one of these days while I wait in line at the post office, watching the mail leaving for Oakland, only to be returned from whence it came.
Renee Kiff weeds and writes at her family farm in Alexander Valley.