It is on the train from Russia to Ukraine that the moment I have been waiting for finally comes, and Billie refuses to use the toilet, point-blank. She will hold on, she says: she was not born a woman for nothing. The problem, I discover, is not the soggy brown rug thrown over a hole in the toilet’s floor, but something that inhabits a hole in the toilet’s wall – something for which I have no name, but which my daughter, with the full force of her adolescent pessimism, has immediately classified as a used sanitary pad. And so she goes on strike, inconsolable in her revulsion.
 
‘You have not travelled’, I tell Billie, ‘unless you have seriously considered just how far you are prepared to go to keep your bladder from bursting. This is the real journey every semi-decent traveller must take’. We are going from my favourite city in the world, St Petersburg, the ‘Venice of the North’, to my mother’s home town, Kiev, or the ‘Jewel of the East’, as those shameless, pimping guidebooks would tell you.
 
And the toilets are a trade-off for the way simple black tea tastes on the overnight trains, for the stories that fall out of people at this meeting place of intimacy and total anonymity; and for the special kind of sleep, not found anywhere else, the sleep you get when your body is floating, weightless, in the thick of the train’s forward movement. As one habituated insomniac to another, I show Billie that special flavour of train sleep as if it were one of the seven wonders of the world.
 
I would gladly claim as my own country the hesitant trees, the tightly stretched sky, the numbered light poles outside our window, except that in my years of absence this place has undergone an extreme make-over. It has divided like some monstrous parent cell into a myriad of daughter cells, each with its own currency, its own petty czar swaying an iron fist, its own intractable visa entry requirements. ‘This is where your family comes from’, I tell Billie, swallowing countless disclaimers and footnotes. I make it sound plain as plain, desperate not to overdo it, to keep the theatre out of the moment. ‘This is it, Billie, the Point A, the mother of all destinations.’
 
I try to imagine what she sees and whether her eyes get fogged up by all the slimy grey colours, the piles of rubbish, the ribs sticking out from the surprisingly sprightly cows and horses we pass by – that first all-deceiving layer that in any unkempt place makes you feel like you know exactly where you are yet tells you absolutely nothing. ‘So you are going to write about how everything is dirty and falling apart’, my second cousin in Dnepropetrovsk says a few weeks later. There is sadness in her eyes, not contempt. ‘Look at our roads’, she says, ‘our public transport, our buildings, our women in their war paint and impossible heels. God, I can only imagine what you must be thinking.’ But I am not thinking what you think I am thinking, my dear cousin. I am not here to write a coy, sympathetic account of the freak show that was once my home. Frankly, I don’t think the world needs another book about how everything is dirty and falling apart somewhere else; or even another book about the sort of somewhere else where everything is idyllic.
 
←