A Year of Pickled Tomatoes

I felt the warm chestnut-flower breeze lift my fringe as I faced her, my arms raised in adoration. She was my newly-adopted 100-foot-high titanium mother and her sword pierced the ozone as I sang and swayed below. This new matriarch that gave me the gift of re-birth and nurtured me against her metallic bosom was a thousand miles from my native Wales and, since landing at 12:30pm, I paid homage to her in the only way I knew best. I was stumbling like Bambi - steaming drunk on a mixture of 15-year-old Scotch and Slavutych in the sunny city of Kiev, Ukraine. It was the 15th of August 2004 and, from standing in front of this magnificent irradiating statue, my real journey began. Visiting days were over.
The swaying intensified as I closed my eyes, absorbing the sun’s radiance and photosynthesising like a newly opened leaf; here I was poetic even when drunk. David shook me back to reality. Damn it. He had a nasty habit of doing that. He didn’t do subtle or gentle at all; he’d majored in wrestling at his former college in California. It figured.
‘Come on man’, he slurred with a thick drawl. ‘Let’s get to Zhitomir before it gets dark. It’s gonna take us, like, 2 hours to get there - longer if we crash, heh heh heh’ He slapped me on the shoulder. ‘I’m gonna call Uri, let’s get our asses down to the road’
It was only 4pm in the afternoon.

David Neisingh - unashamedly clichéd all-American entrepreneur with a hideous taste in Hawaiian shirts - was my friend and business partner.
He’d spent the past ten years living in this country trying to build the Neisingh Empire which, at that point, consisted of around thirty thousand square foot of ex-Soviet factory in Zhitomir, a reasonably skilled but unreliable workforce, a nuclear bunker, and a half dozen press machines dating back to about 1950. Still, it was a lot more than I had. My total possessions consisted of suitcases (two), briefcase (one), shirt-on-back (one), shoes (pair) ... you get the picture. My role was to change things, and both his and my fortunes in the process, as the new Manufacturing Director of Synergy Ltd. It was to be an undulating journey of change, revolution and revelation. None of this was known at the time. At that moment all I could think about was getting to my new apartment and lying down for a bit, or a week. There would be plenty of time for change later.
Uri, our simian driver, who had been waiting patiently around the corner, was immediately summoned by David’s mobile and he screeched up outside the military museum like The Sweeney, although he’d probably never seen an episode. We stumbled into the back of the Zhiguli, laughing and patting Uri on the back as we tore away past the monastery, scattering babushkas and limping pigeons. There was a choking cloak of dangerous exhaust fumes left behind as we raced into the unknown, and I was about to be sick over Uri’s shoulder.

Heading out of the city that day I remember looking in hazy awe at the dazzling countryside as we travelled 200 kilometres west from Kiev to the city of Zhitomir. It was a tourist-board film of a journey with sweeping blankets of yellow wheat fields, interspersed with odd-shaped houses, gathered like poker chips into little offset communities. There were scatterings of randomly built white-bricked houses of any size or shape that the winnings or earnings allowed. I studied this through my newly acquired Russian ex-army, night-vision, camouflaged, binoculars (with no case), only $5 at the Andreyivsky touristy-trap market of souvenirs. All I remember of that remaining afternoon and evening was the binoculars frequently going out of focus.

16th August 2004
Not feeling well this morning; may have been something I ate. Landed at Boryspil Airport at the usual time, David met me; we drank some whisky I’d brought with me, Glenfiddich sherry-cask conditioned 15-year- old, excellent stuff which he drank like pop, the heathen. Switched to lager after that. Feels like coming home here. Bought this diary in Amsterdam. Thought I’d keep a record of events. I’m crap at keeping diaries. Jean-Luc called earlier; meeting on Monday morning 18th. Can’t wait to start. It’s about 34 degrees today! Woot woot!!

I stared at the mosquitoes clinging to the ceiling. They looked hungry; so was I. As I lay in the recovery position, the words of my former Operations Director, Ian Barnes, rang in my ears; and not for the first time since I’d resigned as the Operations Manager of Expamet Building Products, (Metpost Division).
‘You’re a very brave man, I’ll give you that.’ He said, shaking his ginger head and gurning.
Brave or stupid bastard he’d wanted to say, I could tell. There was no going back now. I was like the Spanish conquistador, Cortez, who had burned his ships to stop any possibility of retreat after landing near the site of Veracruz in the heart of the Aztec empire, except I was a bit further east. From an early age I liked to travel and explore different cultures and civilizations. It was my father’s influence. Or rather it wasn’t, it was the ‘travelling’ holidays we had when my sister and I were young.

The binoculars reminded me. It was 1976. We were in the back of our yellow Volkswagen Beetle, registration SGH 810L, heading for Llangorse Lake, Mid Wales. There was a feeling of car-sickness, trying to read my I-Spy book of birds in between scanning the scenery. I was hoping there wasn’t going to be another emergency stop at a lay-by to throw up the recently eaten egg and salad cream sandwich.
‘Mum, I’m gonna be sick.’
‘Oh gawd, try to hold it in.’
‘Can’t’, I groaned. I wasn’t a good traveller, always sick. Some things would never change, except the reasons behind them.
‘Christ, we’ve only just bloody stopped.’ Dad shouted, indicating for the nearest lay-by. It didn’t take a lot to make him grizzly. He’d be fine later when we were sat outside the pub, in the beer garden. Some memories are best left behind.
Day tripping is what we did best on our holidays. It was all we ever did on our holidays. Castle hunting, bird watching and exploring were my passions though. The scrapbook was full of postcards, the odd sick stain, and entrance tickets to grand ruins and symbols of mediaeval power. Who lived here? What did they do? How did they speak? Where did they go to the toilet? I suppose this fascination for travel and different cultures and even historical events started here. It didn’t end. Later I would become part of an historical event that would bring me even closer to the bosom of my newly adopted country. Yes, there would be plenty of time for changes yet, or would there?

It was midday-ish when I finally summoned enough strength to swing my legs over the side of the bed, weak as a kitten. Not like the cheetah I was earlier when racing to the bathroom to gag. Perhaps that’s where all the energy went.
I loved that apartment; unrivalled in the area, apparently. It was on the ground floor, with ‘tasteful’ décor, bars on every window and ten locks on the door. Poetry again, see? There was bugger all in the fridge. The cupboards were as empty as Cortez’s matchbox and smelled of lard and dried herbs. In fact the only food I discovered were the numerous jars of pickles that looked like they’d come from a laboratory, neatly lined on shelves in a murderous-looking cellar. Call me fussy, but anything that looked green and acid-soaked in a jar covered in cobwebs wasn’t going on my plate, no matter how hungry I felt. I let the cellar trap-door crash shut, narrowly missing the ends of my toes, and I dragged a desk over it for good measure. That meant I had to go out and shop in this strange new world. Great.

After splashing water on my face, and shaking my head a few times, I hunted for the phrase book to practise some greetings to prepare me for the city waiting outside - or rather prepare the city waiting outside for me. ‘Zdrastvoytyah’ I pronounced, smiling confidently in the mirror. It was the moment I first realised I was alone.
Zhitomir market was a bees’ nest of erratic drones. The garbled language of market traders and buyers mixed and negotiated amidst the miasma of ready-cooked snacks, and varying degrees of body odour. It was fantastic. There were wondrous new things to eat and sample, together with fresh vegetables, complete with their own dirt. None of your Brussels-imposed, trigonometrically assessed, plastic-type vegetables here, oh no. It was all real. As real as the weather-beaten small-holders that sold them, and a great deal more satisfying, from a buying perspective. I could see freshness and I could see where my money was going. It was value for money indeed. Here you could buy a weeks’ worth of vegetables for the price of a prawn sandwich back home and still have change for a watery lager afterwards. I imagined myself living in that city for good, but the time for further change was almost upon me.