Picnic at the Iron Curtain: A Memoir: From the fall of the Berlin Wall to Ukraine's Orange Revolution by Viets Susan

Author:Viets, Susan [Viets, Susan]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
ISBN: 9780987966421
Publisher: Delfryn Publishing and Consulting Inc.
Published: 2012-08-12T04:00:00+00:00

9

SHOPPING AND A CIVIL WAR

“This doesn’t look good,” I warned Charlotte. We stood at the Aeroflot desk in Boryspil airport.

“Your flight’s delayed,” the attendant said.

“For how long?” I asked.

“Who knows?” she replied. “Yesterday no flights took off – no fuel.” Charlotte and I shuffled back to our seats in the departure lounge.

“How can she not know when the plane will take off?” Charlotte asked. She had arrived back in Kiev in September, a month earlier, and decided to join me on this trip. It would be my last before leaving Kiev to begin a new job in London at the BBC. The Financial Times had commissioned Charlotte to write a piece about shopping in Central Asia. I was on holiday, but planned to use the trip to build contacts that would be useful for my London job.

“It’s been bad since independence but never quite this bad. Russia’s selling Ukraine a lot less fuel now. Corruption doesn’t help. One official here sold a shipment for Ukraine’s air force on the black market.”

“And pocketed the proceeds?” Charlotte guessed. I nodded. “The pilots didn’t have any fuel to fly, so they spent their time playing soccer on the runways.” We chatted about what we would do when we landed in Tashkent and reminisced about our last Central Asian shopping spree.

“I turned all that silk into seat covers,” Charlotte said. I envied her domestic skills. I had copied her and staggered out with bag loads of silk from that musty Tashkent market store, but most of the silk sat untouched in my cupboard.

“I don’t usually like shopping, but I’ve become an addict. I think it’s all those years living under Communism with nothing but bare shop shelves,” I told her. I was worried about the ongoing delay, so I went back to the counter to check on our flight status.

The woman at the information desk suggested that we fly to the Kyrgyz capital, Bishkek, instead of Tashkent.

“How far is Bishkek from Tashkent?”

“Nearly six hundred kilometres.”

“The road conditions?”

“Girl, I work for an airline, how should I know?” She had a point. After so many journeys on potholed roads that disappeared into ruts I felt skeptical about the possibility of a decent connection between these capitals. Still, Bishkek, the site of a political meeting, did eventually feature on our itinerary and the Aeroflot woman seemed confident that the Bishkek flight, scheduled to take off at 1:15 p.m., would fly. The tickets cost the equivalent of a few dollars each so that even on our limited budgets we could afford to buy tickets for that flight and for every other flight leaving for any Central Asian destination over the next few days.

Someone’s information was not very good. At check-in that afternoon, the Aeroflot woman said, with no hint of an apology, “that flight is cancelled. The only one leaving before 8 p.m. is the flight to Leningrad.” Defeated, we gave up and went home. A pizza delivery service had recently opened in Kiev. I thought that fresh pizza would be some consolation for a wasted day with no food at the airport.

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