A Writer’s Notebook
No. 47, February2014
James Watson
Friends and contributors
KIEV
EDITION: Not…
Having spent several months researching
Ukraine’s Orange Revolution of 2004 in preparation for a teen novel set in Kiev
and other Ukrainian cities I felt the pull to put my oar in to what originally
looked a simple tale of human rights protest. Then the orange turned to red.
Complexity ruled; an elected, albeit authoritarian president was sent packing.
Europe and the US dipped in their own oars, pontificating as usual about
matters of which they had questionable knowledge. Russia was not amused; nor
were Russia-leaning citizens south and east of the capital.
Then we are informed out of the blue that
Ukraine is teetering on the abyss of bankruptcy: why has nobody in the European
community mentioned this before? It’s all too complex for a blog which will be out
of date the moment it is posted. Amazing, though, how the protestors stood the
bitter cold all night, and night after night, fought off police and snipers,
many dying as they did so. Shades of Occupy?
So in KIEV EDITION – NOT something that did happen and something that didn’t but
surely might have…
A real-life journalist martyr
Little known in the West and long forgotten
is the story of the journalist and outspoken critic of the government of the
Ukraine, Georgiy (or Giya) Gongadze, editor of the online newspaper Ukrainskaya Pravda. In those days the
country was ranked by Reporters Without Borders as one of the most dangerous
countries in the world for journalists to pursue their trade. It still is.
Giya disappeared on 16th September 2000. On 2nd
November a farmer discovered a headless body on the outskirts of Tarashcha some
80 miles south of Kiev. The corpse was identified as being that of the 31
year-old Gongadze, murdered, many have claimed, with the approval of the then
President.
Only in 2008 did
the trial of three policeman, Mykola Protasov, Oleksandr Popovich and Valeri
Kostenko, reach a verdict. Protasov was jailed for 13 years, Popovitch and
Kostenko each for 12 years. The instigators of the crime remained, at the time
of writing, unidentified.
Kiev: The body in the
woods
Early
morning, and to the north-west of the city, a man is calling to his dog. Yuri
Semko has work to go to as an estate labourer, but every day without fail he
walks the dog through the woods near his cottage. ‘Hey, Valeri – come on now.’
Valeri,
his son, had been killed in the same week that Yuri’s black Labrador had
appeared in his kitchen garden. It was starving, scarcely more than a skeleton
on flimsy legs. ‘Strays,’ Yuri had decided, thinking of the kids who had
recently walked into his lonely existence, ‘are my speciality.’
Dogs, cats, birds with broken wings or missing
tails, even a wounded fox once, they all seem to have tuned into a message
carried on the wind: Try old Semko’s place. He never turns anyone, or anything,
away.
And
so it was a delight and a relief to him when three children appeared at his
front door one afternoon recently, asked him for food and offered to do jobs in
return for shelter for the night.
He
had taken them in, out of the snow. Beggars. At first he had thought they were
one of those gangs of kids that roam the city, stealing, breaking in to places,
mugging folks. They’d slept in the loft for the first night. No parents, no friends.
They’d run away from some institution. But then, he guessed, these three had
been running away all their lives.
‘I’ll
have to report it to the authorities. Or I’ll be in trouble.’
The
bright one, the leader, called Katiya, had pleaded with him to give them a
chance. ‘We can ’elp you round the house, Mister. Olga is ill sometimes, but
Dmitri, well, he’s little, but he’s good at some things.’
Yuri
had been persuaded. His only son had been called up for the Russian army only
weeks before Ukraine had become independent. He’d been sent to the war in
Chechnya. On his first day he had been shot dead by a sniper.
So
Yuri had felt compassion for the Three Strays, befriended them and felt
bitterly about a world that could treat its children so neglectfully.
‘I
guess it’s either me saying yes, or you lot being sold into slavery. But if
there’s any thieving – you’re out.’
Katya,
Dmitri and Olga clean, chop wood, fetch water, help cook meals. In return, Yuri
feeds them, shelters them, has bought second-hand clothes and shoes for them
from the open-air market on the edge of town. Most importantly, in his view, he
has begun to teach the younger ones to read, and Katiya to write.
‘If
you read, you learn. If you learn, you advance. No one can make slaves of you.’
Yuri
is standing now in the woods, calling once more for Valeri; and feeling upset
and badly let-down. ‘Young wasters,’ he is saying to the trees. ‘Them skipping
off like that, without a word. At least they didn’t steal anything, not that
I’ve anything worth stealing. We were making out. Smart kids. Good company.’ He
shakes his head. Melted snow is still dropping from the trees.
He
had come home from work last night, in the dusk as usual. The fire had been lit
but had gone out. The table was laid, but of the Strays there was no sign. That
leaves just the two of us again, Valeri.
‘Come
on, Boy! Come on!’
Whatever
explanation Yuri has given himself for his young companions’ disappearance is
wrong: it isn’t that he didn’t feed them enough; or that they were unhappy
bunked down beside the fire; or that he bored them sick with his tales of the
past. They had gone because they had been witnesses to an event. They had been chased
away, and the explanation, at least in part, is about to be made clear to him.
‘Valeri,
come on away from there.’ The dog’s barking is enough to wake the dead. Or
rather, not enough. Yuri steps off the
narrow path through the trees. He notices the buds. How early they are this
year. All the snow has melted, but snowdrops are sprinkled everywhere; and
among them, here and there, are the first glowing heads of crocus.
At
this point the woodland thickens. There are enough fallen branches to keep Yuri’s
fire cheerful through any winter. He stops. Valeri races to him, then
about-turns, charges back into a thicket of brushwood. ‘What’ve you got there,
then – rabbit?’
There
used to be wolves in these woods.
Yuri
pulls back the bush, steps into undergrowth, and halts. ‘Oh my God!’ He reaches
forward, pulls away loose branches from a naked corpse. ‘No!’ He wrenches away
his gaze, shuts his eyes, for a moment never wishes to open them again: the
body lying before him, its limbs tangled like the undergrowth, is headless.
Yuri
steps back, jamming his hands to his face, almost trips over the branches he
has removed. He opens his eyes. He wants it all to have been a mad vision.
Valeri
seems to share the trauma of this discovery. He has gone silent, pants, mouth
open, staring at his master.
In
the early light, the skin of the male corpse resembles the flesh of mushroom,
and like mushrooms it is flecked with streaks of earth.
Yuri
gags, turns, clutches a tree for balance. Horrified at the sight at his feet,
he retches, though only saliva gushes from his lips. His hand beats his
forehead. He backs away, hears the pounding of his breath, sees it rise through
the cold morning air.
Valeri
watches his master, seeks a signal to retreat, to go on with the walk; perhaps
continue as if nothing had happened, as if nothing this morning were different
from every morning. He begins to bark.
‘Shsh, shsh, Valeri.’ Yuri gazes about him,
nods. ‘Dumped.’ He gathers together his nerves. It won’t bite. He is standing
over the corpse, reaches down, then decisively rolls the body over on to its
chest. The victim’s wrists are tied behind his back with cord.
‘An
execution. Here I was thinking the bad old days were over.’
What’s
for sure, this body was not here yesterday morning; otherwise Valeri, on their
usual walk through the woods, would have found it.
But
what to do now? Of course, in a civilised country, you call the police.
Yuri hesitates, for his first thought is –
they could arrest me for this. I’m the only witness to my innocence. What’s it
to them if they accuse me of murder, bang me up, execute me, if they end up with
a clean sheet; crime solved?
Got
to think about all this. Not got to rush. Keep a cool head, for I’m in trouble,
no question. Which is worse, though, reporting it or not reporting it? Yuri
steps out from the corpse’s brushwood grave. He tidies up the site so that from
the path nothing can be seen.
He
pauses, sorry for the dead man, racked by the callousness of his execution.
‘Poor sod, whoever he is, whatever he’d done, there’s no way he could have
deserved such a dying!’
Extract from Fair Game: The Steps of Odessa
(Spire Publishing and Kindle e-reader).
Regretfully the Ned Baslow
correspondence has been held over for another month, but readers can follow
Ned’s campaign to put the Wickerstaff-cum-Fernhaven Grand Festival of the Arts
on to the world map of cultural excellence in previous editions the WRITER’S
NOTEBOOK. Here are a few gems from Ned’s tireless pen: Florence Nightingale (December
2013), Inspector
Morse (November), Marcel Marceaux (October), Vincent v G (September), Agamemnon
(May), King
Harold (April) and Capability Brown (March).
THANKS ALL!
