It’s a bright spring morning. The air is cool, the sky a smooth azure.
Puzata Khata, Podil’s premium quality budget eatery, commands a prominent position on the corner of Kontraktova Ploshcha and Hetman Sahaydachny Avenue. Its heavy glass doors are flung open to the humble, the hungry, those weary of the dust, the noise, the animalistic machines that prevail in inner-city Kyiv.
And so Stephan, recently arrived from Los Angeles, California, where he’d been engaged in incredible but strangely significant conversations with modern Hollywood icon Nicolas Cage, but also in hardnosed contract negotiations with someone called Goldstein, enters the establishment and immediately confronts its grand staircase, an unavoidable and formidable barrier to accessing the lamp-lit food lines and generous seating areas located on the floors above.
Reaching the first landing, a broad section of bare floor space that is open in its upper reaches to any that would look down from the wooden railings and artificial greenery overhead, Stephan stops, turns and with uplifted eyes begins to assess his surroundings, still sparsely populated as they are compared to the hours between lunch and supper when throngs of earthy Ukrainians press in here to feed.
His face reveals reluctance, reflection, and a passing hint of fatigue. Climb this last set of stairs and make communion with the morning masses gathered to breakfast… or stand your ground, here and now to speak your mind, say your piece, reveal that which lies so heavily on your heart, Stephan! Are you a Ukrainian or an American, a man or a mouse, just another gray and timid soul serving its time uneventfully on this earth, or a spirit in search of grace and not afraid, not saddled, tethered and beaten into submission by those who would deem themselves your masters?
“Ukrainians,” Stephan just then shouts, not loudly but not in a normal speaking voice either. “People of the city of Kyiv,” he continues with greater vigor, confidence bordering on authority over a yet-unseen audience, presumably enjoying their meals beyond these steps and handrails.
An old squat woman in a cleaning smock looks down on him from the banister above, then continues with her sweeping, unconvinced that the security guard should be alerted.
“My name is Stephan and I am recently arrived from Los Angeles, California, where I have made the acquaintance and actually socialized with silver screen notable Nicolas Cage.”
Stephan pauses.
The sound of rattling dishes, clinking glasses and other assorted kitchen sounds can be heard overhead.
“Cage has heard of Ukraine, its hopes for peace, its dreams of prosperity,” continues Stephan, who’s standing almost erect but not quite leaning forward as a professional orator would.
“We talked at great length… drank coffee together at the same table… and there were these ‘Lossers’ walking about all the while, seemingly everywhere, you know, ubiquitous… and really aggressive, or at least unpleasant, meaning no good, that’s for sure…”
The security guard, in white shirt and black pants, has now approached the banister. He looks down, listens to Stephan for several seconds and nods his head dismissively to someone unseen from where Stephan is standing.
“What about Goldstein,” shouts a pensioner standing at the foot of the broad staircase below Stephan.
“I met with him, too, with great hope of publishing my seminal work that parodies foreigners in Ukraine, shows them to be the mean-spirited, low, lascivious assholes that they are and always will be…”
“But why did you do that, Stephan?” asks a middle-aged woman in a headscarf and coat at the top of the stairs above Stephan. “I mean: What do you have against foreigners?”
“Well, because I wanted to explore the essence of evil, why these people just show up here and impose themselves on everything, hijack the narrative if not the spotlight for naked self-aggrandizement, adding no value, doing no good…”
“What people,” asks the cleaning woman, who has again appeared near the banister above and apparently posed the question to whomever might be listening to her or Stephan, to whomever might make sense of the unfolding scene; this man making a spectacle of himself, a spectacle not all that uncommon at Puzata Khata, much less Kyiv, except that this man doesn’t look drunk or deranged, and he’s clearly not trying to sell anything.
“And what did Goldstein tell you, Stephan? You didn’t get any contract, did you? There won’t be a movie or a book about Ukraine. Did he send you packing and that’s why you are here, standing on the stairwell of this pleasant but unmistakably economy-class eatery in Podil?”
“Goldstein tried to cheat me, that is to say, to get my story idea for nothing…”
“But what does any of this have to do with evil foreigners, for heaven’s sake,” says the woman. My daughter lives in Italy and says it’s just great, better than here, civilized, with clean streets and pensions paid on time.”
“He got taken by that Goldstein is all, as if that’s a surprise to anyone,” says the pensioner below, and then makes a gesture of spitting on the floor of the vestibule but doesn’t actually release any saliva from his mouth.
The guard in black pants and a white shirt then approaches Stephan from the side, carefully reaching his arm around Stephan’s upper back as a prelude to leading him out and onto the street, without causing a stir, hopefully avoiding any aggression on the part of this oddball, this uninvited spokesperson of the Ukrainian people.
Few seem to take any particular notice as Stephan, at once confused and on the verge of an indignation that never quite rises to outright outrage, verbal, much less physical, resistance, descends the grand staircase of Puzata Khata on Podil, through the heavy glass doors of its otherwise welcoming entrance onto the noisy, dust-filled streets, beneath the smooth azure sky of a bright spring morning filled with otherwise cool fresh air.
Filed by Dirk Dickerson, April 3, 2017
* One way of understanding Stephan’s sudden reappearance in Kyiv, Ukraine, from where he had so demonstratively, passionately and, it would seem, irreversibly escaped, is as an instance of pure Camp, very much in the spirit of Susan Sontag’s ‘Notes on “Camp”’, especially Nos. 41-44, inclusive, in her seminal collection of critical essays, “Against Interpretation”.