The Czech Republic is My Third Home

Text: Petra Kintlová, Praha
Photographs: Vladimir Krynytsky, Praha

Ludmila (49) had already had some experience living abroad. However, coming to the Czech Republic was the first time she went abroad for work. Since her arrival here she has been employed legally. She originally planned to go back after a year and use the money she would have saved to open a small shop selling clothes. Instead she stayed on, and has been living with her Czech partner in Olomouc now for eleven years, visiting her relatives in Ukraine and Russia once a year.

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There are several bags waiting in the corridor behind the door. The taxi arrives at 3:30 and brings Ludmila to the railway station. For five weeks, she will be able to escape the routine work and pollution of the industrial zone. Last minutes together, last hugs and kisses. Five weeks without her husband, her garden, the violets she grows.
After a year, she will see her son, her relatives and childhood friends again. The month of August is the time when all of Ludmila’s girlfriends come to Javorov, western Ukraine. She will meet Natasha, who will fly in from Spain, Svetlana from Italy, Irina from Israel and Vera from Germany.
From Javorov she will go visit her mother and sister in Russia. Then she plans to spend a week at the Black Sea before going back to Ukraine and the Czech Republic – back to her husband, garden and violets. On September 11th she will be working her morning shift again.

The bus for Lviv leaves from terminal one. Parents with two young children are standing around, the younger child is asking lots of questions, the father gives him just one word replies. An old glassy-eyed woman sits on a bench, alone. Next to two large taped paper boxes with the inscription Microwave stand two slim girls. A bit further, three young men in jeans smoke cheap cigarettes, wearing collared T-shirts and jeans jackets.
Everyone uses the toilets one last time before the trip or gets a cup of coffee and cigarettes. The bus is late; the driver then helps to load the luggage.
A Polish shopping bag, a handbag, plastic bags and bottles create an obstacle in the central isle of the bus. The boarding passengers have their last exercise before the twenty-hour trip in the cramped bus.
Although everyone has a ticket with a seat number on it, people are fighting for the empty as well as the occupied seats. Shots from an action movie accompany the quarrels of the passengers – the TV is already on. “Sit wherever it is free”, the corpulent driver orders, “we are leaving”. It is 4:30 p.m.
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When Ludmila decided to go to the Czech Republic for work in the mid-1990s, there was not much that kept her home. Her husband, without her consent or knowledge, took their son and left for Syria. She remained penniless, without any contact to her child, a burden to her relatives in Ukraine. During this difficult period somebody gave her a contact for Vanja, who was “recruiting” people for work in the Czech Republic. She did not hesitate for a minute. She handed him the necessary documents and within a month, Ludmila and two other women sat in Vanja’s car heading west.
The work was already negotiated in Ukraine and Ludmila did not, unlike many of her compatriots, have to pay anything for the work arrangement. She only took a few personal things. “There is everything you’ll need in the hostel, from pegs to rugs for washing the floor”, Ivan promised. After she arrived, she found neither coffee cup nor spoon, to say nothing about a peg.

On her second day, she started working in a garden supplies store. During the first three months Ludmila and her Ukrainian colleagues worked twelve, sometime even sixteen hours a day, including weekends and holidays. “Work, eat, sleep – we did not even know where we lived”, Ludmila recollects. After she understood that Czech labour law covers her as well, she decided to work less and have a look around town and the surroundings.
She discovered a forest near the town and started going mushroom picking there. With friends from the hostel, she sometimes went to a concert, exhibition, disco, zoo, sometimes they took a trip together.

Her employer, happy with Ludmila, offered to prolong her work contract for a year, and then yet another. She accepted. By that time, she already had a Czech boyfriend and lived with him in a small apartment. She went home once a year and stopped thinking about ever going back to Ukraine for good. After three years, the garden supplies store went bankrupt. Because there was no other way to prolong the residency permit, she got a trade license but was in fact not doing any business. Instead she worked illegally in a restaurant, in a kitchen and a 24-hour bar.
After five years, Ludmila was in danger of having to leave the Czech Republic. Her boyfriend saved the situation by proposing marriage to her. Shortly after the marriage, they were both invited for an interview at the foreigners’ police. The testimonies of the husband and wife did not contradict each other and Ludmila received the much-hoped for residency permit in her passport.
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The old Mercedes bus gets to the border crossing in Cesky Tesin in about two hours, getting in line behind an old Karosa bus, an MAN and newer kinds of Mercedes buses that have been waiting for the customs officers’ verdicts. The buses wait, then go, their motors starting and turning off. The passengers are talking, smoking, eating snacks, doing crossword puzzles, and looking bored or sleeping.
“They were bribed not to search our bus”, one of them says and points at the backs of two Czech customs officers who leave the bus drivers with plastic bags of unknown content. The waiting stretches to three hours. It gets dark. At nine, the customs officer brings everyone’s passports back. Finally, the passengers can start laughing at the jokes in a Russian comedy on TV. The journey goes by more freely in Poland.

Ludmila comes from a coal mining area of southwestern Russia. Her mother is Ukrainian, father was Russian. She always had a lot of friends. As a child, she wanted to become a ballet dancer, then a tank driver, then journalist. She wanted to travel the world and this desire never left her. When seventeen, she left for Rostov-upon-Don to study at the Railway University. After a year, she switched to evening courses in economics and found a job in an aerospace factory. During her studies she met Georg, a medicine student from Syria whom she later married. Already during the first year of their life together, they did not get along well but had a son, Farid. She did not want to take the child away from the father and had nowhere to go at the time.
They lived in a hostel for foreign students – the foreigners were not allowed to live anywhere else during communism. They made plans that after Georg finished his studies they would go to Syria and live with his family. Plans changed as Georg got an attractive job offer to go to Libya as a doctor. Ludmila with a seven-year-old son went to stay with the in-laws in the countryside in Syria. Because her husband was not doing well financially at first, she found herself in a foreign country with no means.
Getting used to living in Arab society was very difficult for Ludmila. She used to be independent and self-reliant, now she had to submit to differences in the status of men and women she did not comprehend. After a year of hardship and crying at night she decided to leave and stay with her aunt in Ukraine. It became obvious to her that her marriage could not be saved so she left for Russia, where she worked as a business officer. In mid-1990s, the Mafia began to threaten the prosperous company where she worked and Ludmila, fearing for her life, went once more to Ukraine.

Her husband started doing business in Kiev at that time but lost all his savings in a suspicious business with a Swiss firm. As compensation, he was given a small present – a holiday for two at the seaside in Bulgaria. On Ludmila’s request, he took Farid with him, since the son frequently suffered from bronchitis. Georg brought him to his parents in Syria and returned from the holiday alone. At that time, Ludmila could not know that she would not see her son for the next four years.

The convoy of buses and trucks congests the right lane in front of the Polish-Ukrainian border crossing. The courageous driver has to risk several kilometers driving only in the left lane. The cars coming from the other direction seem to understand and move off the road for him. It is three o’clock at night. The first stop comes after six hours. Toilets are about a hundred meters from the bus in the bushes between the road and a field – ladies on the right, gentlemen a bit to the left. The paper towels scattered in the tall grass signal the spots where one should not step.
At seven in the morning, the rows of tilted heads, open mouths, tired eyes, hurting backs and stiff joints wake up and slowly walk towards the border crossing. After eight, a customs officer in glasses shows up and carefully compares the pale faces of the passengers with the color photos in the passports. Then a police dog comes running to analyse the smells of the vehicle. The bus is given green light to enter Ukrainian roads.
Ludmila wipes the foggy window with the back of her hand, watches the landscape with overgrown ditches, fields, small gardens, concrete walls and gladiolus and sunflowers behind picket fences. Geese, hens, horses, unfinished houses, opulent new houses, shabby buildings.

For the past three years, Ludmila has been employed by a cleaning company. It is not so hard as before, she does not work more than 10 hours a day and can take every second weekend off. “I am not ashamed of cleaning, of washing dishes in some kitchen – the main thing is to have a job and make some living. Even intellectuals worked with their hands”, she smiles. She would like to brush up her Arabic and work as an interpreter. She asked her son to bring her an old textbook.

Farid decided to study medicine in Lviv. The years of separation are already forgotten and Ludmila manages to renew the relationship with her son and be on friendly terms with her ex-husband. They share the costs of Farid’s studies. Ludmila hopes that Farid, with his Ukrainian girlfriend, will one day come to work as a doctor in the Czech Republic. Farid has Syrian citizenship and if he ever decides to come, the bureaucratic requirements will be difficult.

At first, Ludmila did not understand the distance the Czechs keep towards foreigners. She thought they were cold as charity. In personal contact they were very polite: thank you, please, and then bye, no further contact. “I soon understood why the nation is like that – it is a tiny country between two giants, a country that managed to save its language and culture, and that is quite an achievement”, she says.

The Czech language, maybe because of its similarity to Russian, posed problems for Ludmila at first. She could understand Czech soon, but to know where the vowel was short and where long or which consonant was hard or soft was a mystery to her. She never took any language courses, did not have time. She learned reading from womens’ magazines that she borrowed from colleagues at work. Later she started doing crossword puzzles and read fiction, even classic works by Němcová or Čapek. Her syntax is perfect today, and only a slight Russian accent remains.

Ludmila can apply for Czech citizenship but as long as her relatives live in Russia and her son studies, she is in no hurry. “I have the same rights as Czechs, the only thing I cannot do is vote and travel, for which I am quite sorry.”
Officially she has Ukrainian citizenship but in her heart she is Russian. “I always used to say that I am Russian even though I knew that Russians were not popular in the Czech Republic. I was born in Russia, and be it as it may, it is my country, which for me means my people, my family and my friends. It will always be my home, but I am grateful for living in the Czech Republic and I like it here.

After a couple of minutes, the bus stops at a crossing for gas. For Ludmila and a young couple, this is the end of the journey. Cousin Sergei gets out of a dark blue Daewoo. He hugs his relative, tells her news and together they proceed to aunt Svetlana’s and Uncle Sasha’s.

“Ukraine is also my home – so I have three homes and feel well everywhere”, Ludmila says before saying goodbye.

Episode:

Tuesday – One of My Seven Workdays

The morning is cruel; I have to get up at six. I go to the bathroom, get dressed, drink my coffee and start biking to be at work by seven.
I clean up at a railway station, in a high-rise building, one floor, all offices, then the next floor. I’ve been cleaning the offices of the first company for three years already. Well – I take off my shoes so my feet don’t hurt.

First I dust: the tables, shelves, wardrobes, sometimes pictures and windowsills. Then I polish the signs on the doors. I empty the wastebaskets into a plastic bag, clean the toilets, mop the floor, wash the basins and tiles and polish the mirrors. In the offices, corridors and waiting room I vacuum the carpets. I check if everything is in its place. Then I put my cleaning utensils in a little closet. I smoke a cigarette on the balcony. I close the doors of the offices, put on my shoes again. I dump the plastic bag in a container in the basement. The first company is finished, so now on to the second floor. The sooner I am done, the longer my break is. I have about an hour. I get something to eat. Then I go to the Baren company, also to clean. The routine: offices, corridors, and toilets. I am done at two, so I can get home, cook something or do stuff in the garden. At four thirty, I go to clean at BEM and from there directly to EK, where I do a lot of offices and also dining hall, workers’ toilets and the changing room.
I get home after ten, take a shower, eat a little something, watch some TV or just read for half an hour.
To be honest, I am a bit sorry because I know I am capable of more – I could do something else. I have the abilities. But to get awfully upset and sorry, that’s not my style. As life decides for you, so it will be.