Written By Brad Harness
The train from Lviv left in the morning and Borys Nadiya was on it. He had all his luggage and sat in an ultramodern train car watching a movie on a flat screen. Surreal, actually. The car was packed and a woman and her little boy had the next two seats. The boy squirmed and fussed. He looked bored.
Borys reached over and lowered the boy’s tray from the seatback in front, and then gave the lad a pencil and paper to draw with. They spoke no English, but smiled and nodded.
Borys returned to his movie, putting the earphones back into his ears. The music he understood, but the language, not really.
Eventually they arrived in the capital, Kyiv. The train station was a large impressive building in the centre of the city. The street out front was busy, cars and taxis everywhere, with many people either travelling or meeting someone who was.
Frustratingly, the signage was only in Ukrainian. It would have been helpful at the station to have had something in English, French, Spanish, even Mandarin. But only Ukrainian. The next reality was that most people he came across in the city were speaking Russian, their mother tongue, as the Soviets had suppressed the Ukrainian language for decades.
Borys could understand Ukrainian, but not read it. He could not understand Russian. And yet here I am, he thought to himself, prepared to join the fight against the Russian invaders but I can communicate.
There were soldiers everywhere in the city and soon he was able to be directed to one of them who did speak English.
“Passport, please,” the man said.
He took the document and looked it over. “Canada?” he asked with a look of curiousity.
“Yes.”
“What can I do for you?”
“I came to join one of the foreign legions to fight in the war.”
The man’s smile disappeared. He leaned in closer and whispered, “Are you sure you really want to do that? The fighting…It is horrible!”
Borys looked at him sincerely and nodded. “Yes, I am sure. That’s why I am here…to help my parent’s homeland.”
The man nodded reluctantly, aware he had been unsuccessful in deterring the Canadian. He pointed to a coach with its luggage compartment open.
“You take that coach to Dnipro. The legions train there.”
NEXT WEEK: PART 5
