Last week Lesya and I met with Andrey from the barricades again. He'd been to Kharkiv and back, and we'd been offering to put him up at our place for ages. (he is from Luhansk, and has no home in Kyiv aside from the tents).

When he came to our door he gave us a surprise. He arrived in a neat vest and slacks, both dark with pinstripes. His hair was combed back against his scalp with extreme care. As a matter of fact, as soon as we'd greeted one another he looked in the mirror in our entryway, pulled out a comb and spent five minutes putting the last two misaligned hairs back in place.

Then we sat down and chatted. "Get this," he said, "on my way back from Kharkiv, there was a woman who saw my Yushchenko ribbons and things. She was a young woman, probably not even in her thirties. We talk a bit, and she tells me she will vote for Yanukovych because 'Yushchenko will take the atom bombs from America and store them here."

"How do you argue with that? What can you say in response?" he asked in exasperation. "You get things like that a lot. When we were there, the Yanukovych people often shouted things like 'American sellouts!'"

"I'd think, 'well really--even if you're right, whom would you rather sell out to, the West or Russia?' I know what I want. I want to live in a normal Western European country. I want to be European. But there was no reasoning with them, they already knew Yanukovych was an oligarch criminal but they didn't care."

"They act like they don't want to change anything. They're unhappy about life, but they still support the guy who wants things all the same. It's like that old saying, 'Those who seek happiness rarely find it, but those who don't seek it never find it.'"

He chuckled, "There was this one old grandmother who came up to me in the Metro once, and she started getting worked up, told me 'You've sold us to America!', I said 'Please Granny, calm down, nobody's gonna buy you.'"

He had been in Kharkiv as part of a kind of intervention on the part of his Dad and a friend. He'd been working nonstop without a break for days, and they thought he'd seriously hurt himself if he stayed with the protesters much longer. They put him on a train to Kharkiv and when he got there he immediately slept for a day. "Then I got up and went to the Yushchenko camp in Kharkiv. I mean, how could I not? This is too important."

He drew up a picture of the camp for me, and it looked like this: [it really is the biggest square in Europe, so please forgive any problems of scale in my diagram; instead try to think of the two groups as facing each other across a very long distance]

Slava Vakarchuk of Okean Elzi came around to cheer the Yushchenko protesters while Andrey was there. While there he went across to the Yanukovych side with flowers. "They wouldn't even talk to him, except to swear and say things like 'you're sold to America!'" said Andrey, "He'd tell them, 'C'mon guys, I just want to talk with y'all, we're all brothers and sisters with you.' They just shouted at him. He eventually set down the flowers and walked back, looking sad."

That same Vakarchuk was on stage with Yushchenko yesterday for the month anniversary of the protest. He said again what he'd said before. "I've got a special word for all of the people out in Donbas, in Crimea and Zaporizhya and Kharkiv, all our brothers and sisters out there: We love you guys, I love you guys, and we're coming out to give concerts for you because together with you we're one Ukraine, one people." The people in Maidan shouted "Well done!"

We told Andrey about our visit to the tents and what the residents had said to us. We told him how all of them had agreed that the first day was the hardest.

"The first five days were all the hardest," he replied. "There was so much stuff. Kids were coming with trucks full of medicine. I eventually just told them to find the first empty tent they came across and dump everything in, we'd figure it all out later. What we really needed, what would have really helped, would have been if we just had maybe fifty guys who knew how to organize a camp. Fifty guys who'd seem combat experience and could just help us get some real order in the camp, like military order. But all we had was volunteers."

"There was a French journalist that came to talk to me, and he didn't know any Russian. But I was supposed to be helping talk with the press. So we didn't understand each other for a while, then he mimed taking pictures and I said, "OK."

"He took some pictures, asked me 'Doing your business?' in English, and I said 'Da,' and he said, 'OK.' That was it, we got along."

"The Kharkiv camp was a little better organized, because it was more dangerous. We had a commandant who told us if the Yanukovych people ever attacked, all the girls were supposed to move into the center of a circle, with the guys on the outside facing inwards. Then just let them beat at us, last man standing, you know? It was better organized. Dangerous, though. I once wanted to go home for a night, but had to sleep in the camp because my dad told me that a big bus full of people from Luhansk had showed up. You never know, forty people on a bus could be anybody, could be enough big guys to take on the whole group of Yushchenko volunteers, because lots of us were just small college women. In any case, I definitely couldn't go walking off to a bus alone in the middle of that night. I had to stay."

We started talking about how tenuous the first few nights in Kyiv had also been. "You know," he said, "the thing I keep thinking is that it must have been God that kept us safe. When I think about all the times they could have just sent in a bunch of thugs, sometime in the middle of the night, or when there might have been a big fight that turned into a riot. But everything stayed peaceful."

"And what about the weather?" we asked, "wasn't that something, too?"

"Yeah, two straight weeks warm with no snow, and clear days. It just doesn't happen."

Later on we asked him if they were starting to run out of things now that the situation had settled down. "Oh, when things started we had so much stuff. There was a ton and a half of apples just lying out. We tried to give it away before it spoiled. We gave stuff to orphanages and old folks home, and kept shoveling it. You know, there was this one homeless guy who took a bunch of shirts and things and then curled up in one of the piles of clothes. We didn't see him and almost shoveled him into the truck with the rest of the stuff."
 
"Now things are a little rough, because we're down to Mivina [like Top Ramen] and sausages. People aren't giving as much stuff. That first week, though, protesters were eating better than they did at home. Like I said about organization, if we'd just had some good camp organizers, we might have saved some of the stuff for now, less having to eat package soup."

We asked him about the accusation we sometimes hear that everything had been planned in advance. "Well Yushchenko, Pora and Maidan, they all knew something would happen, so they planned to at least have a rally or something. But nobody knew that many people would come out."

We talked into the night and then again the next morning. That morning we made up a CD of our pictures from the protest, so Andriy would have something to remember it by.

Before leaving, Andrey offered us some packaged soup and a book that promised greater peace through mystical enlightenment. "I've been reading this really slowly, even though I'm a fast reader, but I figure if I can really understand it, I'll probably be able to get control of my life," he said. We politely declined both.

On his way out the door Andrey borrowed our shoe polish. Kneeling down and repolishing his already immaculate shoes, he told us, "It only takes five minutes to shine your shoes. And you go out, people notice, even when they don't know it. A man's shoes say a lot about him." He finished and he walked out the door.

Watching the back of his pinstripe vest, I decided unseasonable weather was not nearly the most miraculous thing to happen during this protest.