The opening stanza of the waltz echoed off the walls of the underground passage. Partners joined wrinkled and spotted hands and began their slow dances of small steps.
It was the start of spring in the capital and, as the enemy had retreated to the north, the elderly couples had returned to their regular Thursday evening dance session at the Teatralna station of the city’s Metro.
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The station was in the center of the city but not as busy with commuters as some of the other Metro stops. The passageway had: an overflowing “everything” shop selling umbrellas, batteries, Covid masks and other sundry goods; a hole-in-the-wall bakery with greasy rolls and a sullen emo-girl working the counter; and the bountiful shop of Babushka Valya, the aproned florist with her white plastic buckets brimming with bouquets. Bursts of red roses, pink dahlias, and yellow lilacs against the somber grays and weary browns of the station’s post-World War II stone and concrete.
Leonid, a man in his early 70s wearing a Soviet-era fur hat regardless of Kyiv’s warming weather, carried the melody on his squeezebox accordion. It had a red velvet bellows which sank and swelled as he pushed out the tunes. The tunes ranged from Pioneer youth camp songs to Shostakovich to ’60s ballads made famous by pomaded baritones. His favorites to play were the folk songs about hard drinking of home brew and beating of mischievous brides — as inappropriate as his grand-daughter said they were.
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Since his retirement from his road crew job at City Hall, Leonid had been providing these same tunes to the dancers for nearly 12 years, but neither he or they minded the repetition; in fact, they all seemed to relish this ritual of regularity and reassurance. For Leonid, reviving the ritual was “my front” against the enemy and, for the first time in his life, he had started wearing a blue-and-gold lapel pin.
Leonid winked at Taras, a second-year violin student at the conservatorium. When the oldies had come back, the kid had turned up with his instrument and asked if he could play along. Leonid didn’t really understand the why, but he surely appreciated the what. The kid played beautifully, if not too formally for the setting and the seniors. “He’ll loosen up,” Leonid reckoned.
Over the last month of Thursdays, Taras had become better at catching the older man’s queues and how he could complement the harmoshka. Now, he added to the waltz with a series of soaring flourishes and melancholic minors. The punk studs on the sleeves of his second-hand leather jacket moved back and forth with the music.
Taras wasn’t quite sure why he was there either. He told himself it was the excellent echo of his violin off the Metro tunnel’s stone walls – the way the sound of the playing sailed around and swirled back to his ears. It was part of making it perfect, he believed. From childhood, an inner voice had kept willing him to perfection through practice.
But Taras knew that, since the invasion, being perfect seemed less important to him. Being with people – even as they were totally imperfect – had become more important to him. After living through the bombings and the nights in the bathtub of the flat he shared with his sister, some other voice was whispering to him. Not his normal cautious voice of commitment and concentration; not the voice that used the music like solitary confinement. Rather, a voice that spoke of how honorable these elderly people were and how being connected to them mattered.
Their dancing had ceased during the first two months of the invasion from the north. During that time, the winter city became as eerie as a night-time switching yard; the majority of its residents had fled to family in the western provinces. Those that remained in the city, like Taras and his older sister, Tereza, lived like stray cats, eating from tins and barely leaving their make-shift cardboard cots in the cellars of their buildings. They listened to and learned the difference of whistling missiles and thudding artillery; they hoped that the increasingly familiar sounds stayed distant.
He hadn’t wanted to practice during the peak of the invasion; there didn’t seem any point. But Tereza had forced him.
“We win by being normal, bro,” she had said.
A couple moved toward where Leonid and Taras were set up across from the station’s ticketing area and entry turnstiles. The man held his wife’s hands nearly as high as her head and they both kept their backs firmly straight as they box-stepped.
“Leonid, the young fellow’s really picking it up. He’s making you look bad,” the man said.
“Stop it, Vasya,” his full-figured wife scolded. “It’s all absolutely beautiful. It makes me want to cry it’s so beautiful. Choodovo.”
Leonid nodded at Taras and began to slow the rhythm of the waltz piece. Together, they held complementary chords for a full bar and brought the tune to an end. The oldies, some still in their winter parkas, turned to face them and politely applauded. Off to the side, a few who had been on a rest break from dancing raised small paper cups filled with fizzy warm champagne and toasted to their country’s victory.
“Beautiful. Choodovo,” repeated Vasya’s wife. Taras saw that now she really was crying. Her husband reached into his vest pocket and lent her his handkerchief. Taras recalled that he’d never seen tears in a concert hall – other than those of nervous debutante performers.
“Now we give them polka, molodetz,” Leonid instructed the younger man and launched them into up-tempo. The oldies laughed and swung their sturdy legs into action. As some chided others to get moving, Taras saw his sister coming down the stairs of the station with a man. He hadn’t seen the man before, but it wasn’t the first time he had seen Tereza around town with one of her “sponsors” as she called them. Men from Birmingham in the UK or Birmingham in Alabama whose money she would not accept, but who took her shopping for “gifts.” She had been doing it since she was 18 when their father had passed, leaving them on their own.
At the bottom step, Tereza pulled her denim jacket closed to cover her cleavage. It was usually being around her nerdy brother that made her more modest, but it was more respectful of the oldies too, she thought now. A pair of widows dancing together – heavy brown coats and knitted beanies – checked her out.
There was less she could do about her short red miniskirt or the matching high heels and lipstick. Since the invasion, she’d noticed a lot of the city’s girls had toned it down or opted for the olive drab of military chic – like their President – but Tereza still liked red and ready.
Bold and beautiful, she thought, beats drab and dirty every time. A little flamboyant fashion took her away from the crumbling Soviet-era high-rise on the “wrong” side of the Dnipro where they lived. Where the lifts were usually broken but it was for the best because they so often stank of drunks’ piss. Being proud and loud was Tereza’s way of not only conquering regret but now confronting the stark severity that had now descended on her city.
“Fuck that asshole in the Kremlin. No war is going to hold me or our boys back,” she had said to herself in the mirror when applying red lipstick that morning.
The oldies gently spun and swayed through the polka like sunflowers leaning in a gentle breeze. Tereza put down the cardboard box she was carrying and grabbed the camouflaged sleeve of the man’s hunting jacket. She tugged him toward the dancers, but felt him freeze and pull back.
“Come on. Come dance with me, Brian,” Tereza said in accented English to the man.
“When there’s a slow one, Tereza. I’m not much of a dancer,” Brian replied from beneath his National Rifle Association baseball cap.
He noticed her make a small wave to the fiddle player and realized that was the younger brother that Tereza had talked about. She was easy to listen to, he thought.
Tereza had first started to talk to him at the imitation Irish pub where the foreigners had taken to drinking imported Budweisers and shots of Jack Daniels. He couldn’t believe his luck, especially him getting picked by her in a crowd.
Every night, a growing mob of rowdy American, British and various European men was gathering there. Many in military greens; many with large guts and larger views about soldiering, weaponry and world politics. They would raise toasts to “liberty” and exchange gossip about which militia units might be worth approaching. So far, most were being told by the locals to go home because hunting for deer or video gaming wasn’t actual military experience. There was rumor circulating about the start of basic training for a foreign legion.
Back home in western Pennsylvania, Brian had watched every video he could find since the war had started. He had an acquaintance at the 24-hour diner near the interstate who had found a bride from the country so he felt a connection to its cause. Other than online trading in crypto, there was little to keep him from going over and “joining the freedom fight,” as some in his Reddit group were calling it.
But as he went around with Tereza to the city’s sites – the ancient churches with golden domes or the square where students had stood against a dictator’s thugs, Brian didn’t tell Tereza what his real reason was. Truth be told the war could be his way of proving something. Proving that he had actually lived and made a mark.
Watching the crowd at the pub, and listening to their made-up stories of service in Iraq or Afghanistan, he had though started to wonder whether this really was their fight. There was something more important here, there was something special about these people, he was thinking, that was bigger than bullshitting in a bar or living large in nice AirBnBs on the currency exchange or playing at being a hero. There was something bigger than him, he realized.
Taras slightly lowered his instrument from his chin – the distance from being a violinist to being a fiddler. He began to hit up-tempo notes of the polka. He dared close his eyes and, as the music flowed and flew, he imagined twisters and tumbleweeds like in the old cowboy movies with subtitles that Tereza watched. Taras noticed his sister pick up the box at her feet and excuse herself from her date.
She walked over to where Leonid and Taras were playing and took a piece of paper and a Scotch tape dispenser from her frilly-leathered purse. She taped the paper to the box and placed it at the musicians’ feet.
“Support the 101st Territorial Defense Battalion. From your pocket to the front lines,” it said. There was a bank account number listed as well. Tereza knew the oldies were watching her so she took a 100 hryvnia note from her purse and put it in the box.
Vasya and his crying wife circled toward the donation box. A little out of breath, they stopped and he searched his pockets. He found a 20 hryvnia note, some loose change and a token for the Metro.
“Put all of it, Vasya. What are we going to do with it,” the wife told her husband.
Other couples also began to circle toward the box to contribute from their meager old-age pensions. The pair of widows – solid as barns – smiled at Tereza as they took their turn to donate.
“For our boys,” the champagne drinkers cheered. “Heroyam slava.”
Brian took out the clip of bills he had in his front pocket. There was enough there, he knew, to buy Tereza the battery-powered scooter she had admired in the window of the flashy electronics store on the Khreshchatyk.
He clumsily weaved through the circling couples and dropped the full clip into the box. Brian nodded to Taras who slightly bowed down with his violin. Tereza’s mind flashed with the memory of their deceased father who had for years fed table scraps to the stray dogs in the alley behind their building.
Leonid smiled and changed the melody. He started the first bars of the country’s fight song – about finding and reviving a mystical flower in the forest. The oldies began to sing as they stepped.
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