I enter the ticket kiosk where half a dozen others stand waiting. Two at the window talk to the lady on the other side of the glass, and walk away disappointed.
“No tickets?” I say to the young man ahead of me, a girl at his side.
“Right, no tickets,” he replies. “But maybe there is another way.”
“Like what?”
“Like a back door,” and he smiles. His broad handsome face and dark features reveal a keen intelligence I clasp onto, in the hope that this young man – his name is Anton Kistol and he is 17 — might hold the key to entry. For me it is critical to my work. The performance is a major part of the one-year observance of the EuroMaidan Revolution, a national mourning of the 100 people gunned down or beaten to death in the central square that now, more than ever, stands for the freedom and independence of Ukraine. Yet the weekend is also a celebration of the triumph of Ukraine’s free spirit.
I’m told the event has drawn five national leaders to the gallery, those of Poland and the Baltic states as well as Ukraine’s own President Petro Poroshenko.
My work as a reporter comes up as we chat. “Ah, you are a journalist. That will help us gain entry. Who are you writing for?”
I explain my freelance status and link with the Kyiv Post, which has published seven of my articles since October, mostly about the war in the east.
“Kyiv Post! OK,” says Kistol, his girlfriend looking up at him adoringly.
Her English isn’t quite up to his, but his body language speaks volumes. We walk around to the far side of the building and find a door. Locked. Find another. Open. In we scurry, like mice in search of a suitable crevice. Before us is a metal detector and three men in suits. Kistol speaks to them in Russian, and one tells us to go to door 17 on the other side of the building, the media entrance way.
There I produce my card. We meet more resistance. My name is not on the list of certified media. We are locked out once again.
Walking on, we come upon five soldiers in camouflage uniforms. One of them points to a nearby door, and we scurry in again, and up some stairs to a restaurant. Hope – for it might lead to the seats.
During tea Kistol speaks to a waitress and learns there is no access to the theater. “Security is very tight because of the heads of state,” he is told. We leave feeling better for the tea, and somewhat disappointed, but undaunted.
“Let’s try the frontal approach,” I suggest, and we go went straight to the main doors. Before entering we find another of Kistol’s friends, young and smiling Aleksandra Predushchenko. After introductions we enter. Dozens stand waiting, or moving in or out. We talk to one of the men taking tickets, a fellow I have seen before when attending operas and he knows my face, but has to refuse us. We go back outside.
Then a smallish man with a vest, shirt and tie appears like magic, with black hair and a stressed look about him. Kistol tells him a whopper: I am a distant relative of Levy’s from Canada and a journalist as well, who must have entry. He and his friends are my assistants.
He says he is an American Jew, as Levy is a Jew, and he is in charge of the door. He determines who gains entry and who does not. The tickets are free; the Andre Levy Foundation with the Victor Pinchuk Foundation and others have sponsored the event. The problem is acquiring a ticket when demand is so great. We shake hands. “I’ve got 150 people who also want to get in,” he says, looking me in the eye. He doesn’t appear fooled by the fib, but our earnestness impresses him. “I will see what I can do.”
“Thank you.”
Half an hour passes. We don’t pester him. He appears a few times, in and out, in his frantic effort to do his job as the hour of 7 p.m. approaches and passes.
Many enter, in suits and ties and elegance. Beautiful women, handsome well-built men. We consider briefly that Poroshenko himself might go through this door only minutes before the show begins. That doesn’t happen. Not a soldier do we see at the entrance.
A little after 7 we enter the building again and are quickly waved up the steps by our American friend. He whispers to the man taking tickets, and then turns to us.
Will we get in?
“Go in, find seats,” he says. Success!
The four of us scamper down the stairs to the coat room and then up into the area of the balconies, where indeed we find seats – three, anyway. I am happy to stand.
There he is, Bernard-Henri Levy, projecting his strong voice into the theatre, a bathtub to the left, a couch to the right. We made it!
“I got into an argument last year with Lanzmann,” Levy was saying, “when I compared the referendum in Crimea with all the bogus observers from European Neo-Nazi parties, with the one Hitler held after the Anschluss. Obviously I’m not saying that Putin is Hitler. Or that the umpteenth deportation of the Tartars now in the works is Auschwitz.”
His part was that of European writer asked to give a speech in commemoration of the 100th anniversary of the assassination of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo, an event which set in motion the First World War. While preparing his speech he wants to praise the past but keeps remembering the terrible loss of peoples Europe has forgotten or abandoned over the last 100 years.
“What is the point, today, of waxing on about Europe if the Europe they’re talking about, the Europe of the Rights of Man and of the Enlightenment, the Europe of “never again,” couldn’t prevent Srebrenica – or this! (In his web surfing, he has come upon images of the Maidan in Kyiv.)
(The Srebrenica massacre of about 8,000 Bosnians, mainly Muslim men and boys, by Serbian forces, took place in July 1995 and was the worst mass murder since the Second World War, called “the triumph of evil” by the United Nations war tribunal. In addition about 20,000 civilians were expelled from the area, a form of ethnic cleansing.)
Applause punctuates the presentation. Levy continues in this vein for about 90 minutes.
“I’m supposed to raise high the flag of the European ideal that is, I’m sure of it, the last chance for the people of Europe. Yet what come to me are images of shame, irresponsibility, and sadness. Europe dead at 14, when the age of the mass graves began; Europe dead in Spain, when it abandoned the Spanish Republic; …Europe dead at Sarajevo, and all the Sarajevos of today; Europe standing stock still as young Ukrainians die in the Maidan clutching in their arms the starry flag of Europe. How is it possible to die so much, and so often?”
But a positive theme is woven into his verbal fabric as he speaks of Europe: “God knows, I believe in it!”
At the end, the audience stands as one in applause, followed by words of defiance by Poroshenko himself, who mounts the stage to hug his friend and declare Ukraine’s determination to protect its people and borders.
And to think I might have missed this historic evening. Two bookends of wisdom from different places on the road of life: one, Kistol, near the beginning; the other, Levy, approaching the end. It is a metaphor of the potential that lies within, and in support of, this fascinating country.
“I have seen him do such things before,” Predushchenko says of Kistol as we enjoy the free wine and dainties afterwards. She has known him a year. “He is amazing,” she says.
He tells me he comes from Dnipropetrovsk. School bores him, not surprisingly, but his teachers understand and help him get the most of his education. He is politically active.
“I admire your persistence and genius,” I tell the young man. “You’re the guy who got us in.”
“There are no locked doors in life,” he replies. “That is my philosophy.”
Brad Bird is a visiting Canadian journalist.
