Selections from FM GALICIA
27.01
A meal, any meal, has a distinct ritualistic significance, especially a common meal. A common meal is like an inner circle, a brotherhood, an exchange of confirmations and guarantees, a sign of similarity and camaraderie; it’s like being involved in a crime or taking part in a heroic deed. I have shared a meal in the most diverse, and sometimes uncertain, exotic and wild situations. Holiday parties, family lunches and dinners, wakes, nighttime breakfasts, the distribution of dry rations and improvised drinking snacks with the guys, the feeding of one’s own children and of other’s children, friends and foes, feedings in the hospital and food in the train, the last of what is edible in the mountains and the final grains of various cereals, cooked together, sliced sandwiches, receptions of the highest order, feeding by random people who had put me up for the night. Delicious, improvised suppers and the finishing off of meat scraps in restaurants, mystical Christmas Eve dinners and Easter eggs. And countless other lofty and lowly manifestations of the ritual of common meals.
But a particular one stands out in my memory—an unforgettable breakfast in Kyiv. It was about an hour before the hunger strike demonstration was to begin on the Maidan—Freedom Square.8 Several tens of students entered the cafeteria on the street just above the square for what could end up being our final breakfast. We ate boiled eggs, cheese, sour cream, crepes, and omelets; we drank coffee and sweet tea. Strangely, it was eerily good—calm, placid, filling, and immediate. The October sun broke through the huge windows in a special way and filled the whole cafeteria space. Less than one hour remained before the deciding moment. And then, suddenly, the doors opened and members of the riot police began entering the hall—wearing helmets and carrying batons and shields. They entered one after another, forming a seemingly endless line.
“And in just such a primitive fashion unsuccessful revolutions come to an end,” I thought to myself, “in a cafeteria, when all the participants in the rebellion are satiated and helpless.”
But a minute later, it became evident that this was not the end of the revolution. Because the riot police warriors did not pay any attention to us. They too had come to eat breakfast—they had been brought in from various cities in the morning and, before tending to their duties, before the battle that was to take place in those abovementioned forty minutes, the soldiers wanted to eat. They ate eggs, sour cream, kefir, cheese, and crepes, and sat at the neighboring tables. They did not realize that they had been brought to Kyiv because of those sitting next to them. We finished the meal together. We exited in two separate groups and had a smoke after the meal. We had a smoke and dumped our cigarette butts into the same trashcan. And we parted. Within five minutes, we had run onto the Maidan and sat down on the granite, having begun the hunger strike, the rebellion, and they took up their positions, surrounding the Maidan with a ring of iron. All sorts of things happened in the days that followed. But on that first day, we ate together.
Notes
[1] In October 1990, hundreds of students occupied Lenin Square in Kyiv, in Soviet Ukraine, demanding reforms in Soviet political and military spheres. Many of the participants went on a hunger strike. In independent Ukraine, the Square was renamed Maidan Nezalezhnosti (Freedom Square) and was the site of both the Orange Revolution (2004) and Revolution of Dignity (2013-14), the latter often referred to as EuroMaidan.
Translated by Mark Andryczyk