I could not help but say a few words after I read about the couple, an Italian pensioner and Ukrainian woman, who have settled in Khmelnytsky oblast. After all, I have been with my Ukrainian wife for almost nine years (seven and a half years officially, for getting through the Ukrainian bureaucracy takes time). The whole system of getting married here for a foreigner from the so-called “far abroad” (will somebody please explain to me why Warsaw is the far abroad, while Bishkek and Astana are the near abroad?) seems to have gotten easier. I recall how we stood in line at the central registry in Kyiv, then the only place a person from the other shore could legally marry in Ukraine, and saw bevies of buxom blonde beauties with their swarthy swains ready to take them off to Morocco, Tunisia, or some such place. One wonders how they are doing in their Muslim countries today.
Especially now, as the local authority in charge of hot water takes a week or two off “for prophylactic maintenance,” after which nothing ever seems to get any better, I can understand the difficulties of adapting to a place that during the Cold War was “the enemy” for the West and for which the “bourgeois decadent West” was just as much the enemy. Still, the amenities of everyday life have come much closer to Western ones, and a person can get most of what he or she wants if there is the money to pay for it. The main lesson is not one of the divide between civilizations but of kindred souls to bridge any barriers and adapt to any conditions. If love is there, the rest follows. I have known this for almost a decade now and am confident that our Italian-Ukrainian pair in Khmelnytsky oblast have learned it as well. I have made a life here with my own lady love and am confident that our Italian friend will do the same. The political barriers have disappeared, but the bridges built of love are only now being erected. Our friend’s Roman forefathers could not have left any edifice more lasting.
