The Humorless Ladies of Border Control Read Online Free PDF

would be an issue at the border. “In this part of the country, it’s barely a border,” he said.
    (Two years later, it barely was. In the wake of the annexation of Crimea by Russia, separatist provocateurs began referring to the southeastern provinces of Ukraine as Novorossiya—“New Russia”—and declared a “Donetsk People’s Republic.” Unacknowledged Russian arms, tanks, and soldiers poured across the border from the Rostov region. Bombing destroyed the Donetsk airport and much of the city, including the hospital. The train station closed. Heat and water were scarce. Those who could leave the region fled: 1.5 million of the region’s prewar population of 4.5 million are said to have gone either to Russia or to western Ukraine, depending on their political sympathies. The Russian government both represented the separatists at peace negotiations and denied any control over them. The American government considered sending arms to the Ukrainians.)
    â€œI don’t like U.S.A., but I like you!” said an audience member after the show. The cab we were supposed to take to the bus station sped away in a huff because his trunk was full and we had too many bags. We packed into the next one, and a drunkjumped in the front seat. I thought he was with the driver until he got out at an intersection, gave us a double thumbs-up to confirm that we had the money, and split.
    We passed the new stadium, built to hold Euro 2012 matches. The old one had been tiny and on the outskirts of town. The new one was lit up in blue like Giants Stadium and was almost as big. A massive statue of Winged Victory, also lit, stood out front. The cabdriver gestured to the hotel across the way: “That, too, has been there forever. And now in the last month they’re calling it a four-star hotel.” (The stadium was damaged by artillery shelling in 2014, and the Donetsk team now plays on the other side of the country, in L’viv.)
    The station was dark, but the security guard, smoking cigs and drinking beer, assured us that the bus to Rostov was coming. He told the driver that it was a four hryvnia charge to continue into the parking lot. We got out on the curb instead. The bus pulled up some time later.
    It was an hour’s wait to board, and a two-year-old girl had the best idea of anyone for making use of her time: jump on the curb, jump off the curb, shake your ass, kick the aluminum wall, get daddy to swing you around like an airplane. Cabdrivers offered to take us the six hours straight to Rostov-on-Don. We all boarded, crammed into every seat. Truly, as Dr. Pangloss never said, this was the worst of all possible worlds.
    It was three a.m. when we reached the border crossing. The horizon brightened even as the near-full moon was still in the sky. The Russian authorities filed on, tight-lipped and tight-haired, and I had an idea for a worst-selling pinup calendar: “The Humorless Ladies of Border Control.” A guard mumbled his way through some boilerplate. As he left, someone said, “Use yourstreet voice!” The guy sitting next to us joked, “He was asking ‘Everyone all right? Need a drink? Not too cold?’”
    We sat for three hours at the border, from three a.m. to six a.m. Legions of pigeons were nesting and hatching in the eaves under the tin roof of the Ukrainian exit station, and the cacophony of coos, chirps, and warbles was maddening. We were given two cigarette breaks. A dozen giggling women ran into the field and hoisted their skirts to pee.
    Of nineteenth-century Russian customs and border agents, the Marquis de Custine wrote, “The sight of these voluntary automata inspires me with a kind of fear . . . every stranger is treated as culpable upon arriving on the Russian frontier.”
    The paranoia and vindictively selective enforcement had begun thousands of miles to the west, at the Russian consulate on the Upper East Side of Manhattan.