Yaroslaw's Treasure. Myroslav Petriw
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2003
1
THE SOUND LEVEL of the airliner’s engines had dropped by a decibel or two. Yarko opened his eyes. In his sleep, his mind had tuned into the constant rush of the powerful turbofans. The slight change in their sound was enough to wake him. He looked at his watch. Almost nine hours flying the great circle route from Canada. We’ll be starting the descent soon, he thought. Another hour and I’ll be in Lviv.
Yarko had a window seat on the left side of the plane. Through the window he could see a bright horizon lit by the rising sun’s rays. The land below was covered in dark forests, but from time to time he caught the silver reflection of light from the surface of some stream or pond. Just ahead, a large river spread among the trees and stretched far towards that glowing eastern horizon. Yarko closed his eyes.
“Polissia,” he muttered, through sleepy semi-consciousness, answering a question that his sleepy reason had yet to form. This was the great marshland on the borders of Ukraine and Belarus. Into his still fuzzy mind came a torrent of fragmented thoughts. He remembered a history lesson taught years ago, and the name of an ancient city, Iskorosten′. This was the walled city that some 1,100 years ago Princess Olha had burned to the ground in revenge for the murder of her husband, Prince Ihor. Yarko was looking in its direction, at the modern town that had been built on the ancient fort’s ruins. Squinting in the blinding light of the rising sun, Yarko thought he could see the glowing embers of the wooden fortifications of that city.
He remembered other conversations with his dad.
“Today, Ukraine is in a state of creeping revolution,” his father had said. “Without strife or bloodshed, and seemingly without conflict, this country had suddenly slipped from being a colony of the Russian Empire to national independence. As a result, this has become a land with no right or wrong. There are no truths or lies there. There are no demons and no angels. It is, in fact, a country in a state of moral anarchy. And it is this very ambivalence that is most dangerous – it is as a ship with no compass. Veterans of the Soviet Red Army are still heroes. Those who fought to conquer Finland for their masters in Muscovy are heroes. Those who invaded Afghanistan for this foreign empire are still heroes. But those who fought in the Ukrainian underground, the UPA, against German, Russian, Pole, and Communist Czechs alike have become heroes too – at least in the west of Ukraine – along with those who fought tooth and nail against them. And, as can be expected, they all claim to deserve a pension.
“The Ukrainian language is the state language, but Russian is still the unofficial ‘official language.’ The president himself had to learn Ukrainian soon after he was elected. His father died in the defence of Stalin’s empire somewhere near Leningrad, thus his loyalties have forever been to a foreign state. Both sheep and wolves live in the same flock …”
It’s like Alice in Wonderland, thought Yarko. “Everything is not quite as it seems.”
Yarko’s mother was dead set against this trip. She had once visited Ukraine, on a school trip in the seventies. But these were more dangerous times now. There had been many a long family discussion before she reluctantly agreed to let Yarko go. His father, of course, had been all for the trip – wishing to send Yarko on this journey to satisfy some patriotic fantasy. But Yarko agreed to it for the promise of adventure – for the adrenaline rush of a treasure hunt.
Adventure, that is all, thought Yarko as he continued his airborne snooze. He could picture himself now, racing through the streets of Lviv, hunting for treasure. He had dismantled and packed his favourite mountain bike for this trip, thinking it would provide him with an easy way of getting around. Shimano in the land of Sturmey-Archer – the thought made him smile. He could already picture himself riding the narrow trails far below in that forest that stretched eastward on both sides of the Prypyat River.
This reverie was interrupted by the heavily accented voice of the plane’s captain speaking English, the international language of air transport.
“On ze eastern horizon, some hundred and fifty kilometres from us, lies ancient town of Chornobyl′. In April 1986, an accident and fire in Block Two of ze Chornobyl′ nuclear power station resulted in ze largest peacetime release of radioactive contamination …”
Yarko did not hear the rest of the captain’s words. His thoughts and attention were again focused on that eastern horizon. He remembered the prophetic words of the nineteenth-century bard, Taras Shevchenko: “In flames, and plundered they will wake her.”
Somehow as he returned to a deeper sleep his mind unconsciously formed the words “Flaming Vengeance.”
In his mind, he could again see the red embers and wind-whipped flames of the burning fortifications of Iskorosten′. He could see dark figures of warriors with swords and shields, their faces blackened by soot, as they battled desperately in this fiery hell. He could even smell the smoke of this imagined conflagration. Spontaneously, he whispered the phrase, “It smells of history.”
* * *
And truly, the soils of Ukraine were soaked in the scents of ancient memories of mankind. The relics and traces of ages past had long been destroyed by countless wars. This distant past was crushed and plowed deep into the depths of its fertile land. Artifacts of the early ancestors had been plundered and scattered to the four corners of the earth. Their blood had long since soaked into the soil of this land, which drowned all their traces in an endless black sea.
But the depths of this fertile soil gave birth to generation after generation of peoples. Wave after wave, they spread to all parts of Europe and Asia. This was the prehistoric homeland of the Indo-European language group. It was the land of the master potters of the Trypillian culture that had built cities of multi-level homes some two millennia before the Egyptians even dreamt of pyramids.
It was also the land of those who had first tamed the horse. For countless generations of steppe dwellers, a horse was to the endless plains what a boat is to the sea. It was the means to conquer the otherwise unconquerable vastness of the steppes. And so the waves of peoples spread farther still. The mysterious Tocharians of the Chinese hinterlands; the Hittites with their chariots on the borders of biblical Egypt; Greeks and Latins; Celts and Germans; Balts and Slavs: all spread from these lands. It was the land of the Cimmerians, of Conan the Barbarian comic book tales. It was home for centuries to the warlike Scythians who defeated King Darius, fascinated Herodotus, and battled the great Phillip of Macedon. It was a land known by many names: the biblical land of Gomer, the Scythia of the Histories, the Sarmatia of the Romans.
It was more recently known as the historic Rus′, an empire that brought Christianity and the written Church Slavonic language to the Finnish tribes of the future Muscovy. Much later, an expanding Muscovy appropriated Rus′, in its Greek form, as its own name, in order to lay claim to the storied past of Rus′. The people of the Rus′ nation began to favour their word for country, Ukrayina, as the new name of their land and, eventually, as the name of their nation.
The constant throughout millennia had been the land and the people who worked it. But the recent manifestation of the Muscovite Empire, the Soviet Union, was to change even that. In a planned famine-genocide known as the Holodomor, it eliminated some seven million Ukrainians. Millions more were deported to Siberia, or ground to dust as cannon fodder in the great battles of the Second World War. Now only the land remained constant. Yet it still breathed with the scent of its ancient past.
* * *
Yarko woke with a start as his head flopped onto his right shoulder. His eyes opened wide when he glanced through the window. Gone was the forested terra firma. All he saw was sky. The plane had banked sharply to the right and was beginning its descent. Soon the clear sky was replaced by the grey fog of cloud as droplets streaked horizontally on the outside of the glass. Minutes later, through wisps of the grey fog, he made out individual trees, bushes, buildings, and roadways. The wet ground rose to meet them as Yarko readied for the inevitable impact of landing. He braced his feet on the floor, tightened his stomach muscles, and gripped the armrests more tightly, trying not to let any of this anxiety show on his face.
It was raining. This reminded him of his Vancouver home, where such drizzly