Ukraine: A Real Knockout
By Jack Helbig

The first time I saw Luba she was sitting at a baby piano, a small, blonde, blue-eyed girl in a ruffly, bright yellow dress. Right behind her, kneeling, imprisoning her with her arms, was a nurse, barking Russian and banging furiously on a toy piano. The only word I understood in the torrent of Russian was her name, which the nurse barked loudly.

Luba just sat there, watching blankly, weaving to the left and right to avoid the nurse’s arms, jumping up every time her name was shouted. I couldn’t tell if the nurse scared her. She scared me. The nurse left and we got to play with her.

“Give her a spin,” I joked, and then moved to sit a safe distance to get out my camera. Sherry just glared at me.

“I don’t know what to do,” she said, while I held the digital camera away from my face and framed her in the little TV screen on the back. I pressed the button in front and froze the moment in electrons.

“I don’t know either,” I said, lying, framing Luba and then getting a shot of her standing at the piano, alone, the ruffles in her dress wilting a little. I set down the camera and took out a measuring tape from my backpack. Unrolling the tape I noticed with a little concern that my expensive, new, Sony digital camera was just a short toddle from Luba. She looked at the camera but made no move for it. I put the camera behind me and scooted over to her.

I measured her head, took her height, and wrote all this down to email the doctors in the U.S. She was 23 months old and looked like a perfect little replica of many of the young Ukrainian women we saw on the streets: thin (everyone in Ukraine was thin), with their deep, blue, unearthly eyes, their perfect noses and soft, wispy blonde hair.

I had expected everyone to have a Slavic heaviness about them in Ukraine, like the people I saw on the el back in Chicago: potato people with bulbous noses and large arms, legs and breasts. The look, at least in this corner of Ukraine, was different, kind of Scandinavian, but with dark, arched eyebrows, large foreheads and something else in their faces I couldn’t place.

The men looked darker than the women. At least their hair was darker. And they moved with a kind of tough, cool, wary grace I’d seen many times in the young African-American men on Chicago’s west side. They were full of coiled male power, but were also a little beaten down, shoulders bent forward, head lowered, as if they had put in too many hours at the steel plant or the auto plant or the gas station. Only, as our guides told us, there were no working steel plants in this part of Ukraine anymore. Or auto plants. And the gas station jobs usually went to family, or very close friends.

I photographed Luba from the front and the side. I felt like I was taking mug shots. She complied to being photographed without protesting and without trying to grab the camera. We knew a little about her medical history. She had been born prematurely to a woman in her 20s who had had six pregnancies before, only two of which she carried to term. Nothing else was known about the mother, except that she had given up the child the day she was born.

Luba had spent her first six months of life in the hospital, in part because she caught some awful respiratory infection. When she had finally been transferred to the orphanage, she had rickets. She was almost two, but only knew a couple words. We never heard her say a thing.

We were worried about hepatitis B and syphilis. The book I’d read said that Ukraine had the highest syphilis rate in Eastern Europe. The French language newspaper I’d read on the plane said the cases of HIV infection were skyrocketing, too. We couldn’t test for blood-borne diseases, so we worried about something we could detect: Fetal Alcohol Syndrome. Fetal Alcohol Syndrome is a problem wherever alcohol is a problem, in Ukraine and in the Scandinavian countries, in Russia and parts of the U.S.

People worry about crack babies, or babies addicted to heroin and cocaine, but children exposed to alcohol in the womb are in at least as much danger as those exposed to other, less socially acceptable drugs.

Fetal alcohol kids look a little dopey. There is no polite way to put that. They have larger than average ears and smaller than average eyes that look vaguely Asiatic. They have no philtrum, the flesh connecting the upper lip to the mouth, which makes them look like they have an overbite. Even babies without teeth look like they have an overbite.

In Eastern Europe the Asiatic eyes are not a helpful indicator. These countries were invaded many times by many peoples from east and west, and lots of people on the street had slightly Asiatic eyes, faint echoes, through the centuries, of fierce warrior tribes that rode in on horses from the Steppe, the Tartars, the Mongols, the Kazakhs. The ears and philtrum are better indicators in Ukraine.

Dopey of Disney’s seven dwarfs is a classic fetal alcohol child, big ears, overbite, and all. So are many of the village idiots in Russian literature.

“Are you a village idiot?” I asked Luba, but she just looked back blankly, her eyes wide, wondering, I suppose, who I was to ask, or, even more likely, what language I was speaking.

“Jack!” Sherry said, shocked at the darkness of my joke.

“I was just–“

“I know. I know. Don’t. This is hard enough. And it’s a mean joke.”

I looked up across the open room and caught sight of a large pram, crowded with tiny ones, being wheeled past the door. It was May and the days already had the dusty, dry heat of mid-summer in Chicago. But the children were all wrapped up, in heavy coats and odd hats that tied on.

This was orphanage superstition. The authorities are so determined that wards of the state would not freeze, that they are willing to risk heart prostration to prevent it. I always expected to see the kids panting like dogs, their hair matted with sweat. But even in their thick, winter coats the children looked pale and cold, pale because they rarely went outside, cold because I don’t know. Maybe they just got used to wearing lots of clothes in the summer.

“I guess we should try to play with her.”

“I have no idea what she likes to do.”

I glanced around the room. I saw a closet, packed so tightly with clothing that the door wouldn’t close. I saw a table, buried in stacks of paper. I saw another table, piled high with children’s coats. Way on the other side of the room was a cabinet with a glass door, a display case of sorts, full of toys, flaking paint with faded plastic wheels and pieces missing. Hanging from the glass door was a gigantic, rust-colored pad lock. I was sure it would take half an hour just to find someone with a key to the lock.

I turned to Luba. “Well, kid, what do you want to do first?”

We played with Luba for some time. I took some more photos. We tried to get Luba to play the piano, stack some blocks, put plastic donuts of different colors and sizes on a cone in the right order. She didn’t seem interested in the piano. She tasted the blocks one by one and then set them down in front of her.

Page 1 of 4  Next Page

All contents copyright ©2005 Pology Magazine. Unauthorized use of any content is strictly prohibited.