Another Day Which Will Live in Infamy
The Day of the
Attack
The day started out ordinary enough, as I’m sure it did for
most people. I taught two classes, sat around
for “office hour”, then went to the new American Center in Kharkiv for the
grand opening. I now know that in the hour I was sitting in the office waiting
for students and twiddling my thumbs, people in New York and Washington and
Pennsylvania were dying. At the American
Center I met the Public Affairs Specialist and two other assistants from
Kiev. It was there that I first got word
that there had been some kind of terrorist attack on Washington. An air attack. My first thought was, that’s not possible.
Our army wouldn’t let a foreign aircraft in.
Then someone said two passenger planes had been hijacked and crashed
into the
So I went and read the Washington Post. And CNN. And the New York Times. My first reaction was I wanted to cry. My second reaction was anger. I want the persons responsible for this caught and brought to justice. It took me a while to see the pictures of the destruction on the Internet—it’s hard to load images sometimes at the cafés. Even then what I saw was limited compared to what people with televisions were seeing. I imagined it was like the movie “Independence Day”, but worse. Because this time it was real, and there was no Will Smith and Jeff Goldblum to save us. My friend Peter in Germany sent a nice email of condolences and shock. He had been sitting at a bench eating lunch outside the WTC only a few weeks before. And now it was gone.
And here I was all this time in Kharkov. I got off the metro at Studentska, hoping to call my cousin in New York from the Internet café. There was no connection because their internet phone connection goes through New York. I started walking the long way home, to Geroyev Truda. I saw a little karaoke stand in the dirt with the one lightbulb over the speaker on which the songbooks are kept. I felt I needed to do something positive, something fun. Something to balance out this feeling that some asshole has punched me in the stomach. These people seemed to be having fun singing songs in Russian; they probably hadn’t heard yet about the attacks. Some songs had a video backdrop of images of New York. There was one nice shot of the World Trade Center at twilight…it was heartbreaking. I flipped through the songbook and found the “English songs” section. In my very limited Russian, I asked which songs were popular here. The man had to ask three or four people for an idea, than someone said La Isla Bonita by Madonna. Hey, I knew that one, I liked it. It was a big hit. One woman came up to me with her little girl, so I knelt down and sang to the little girl. The mother said “kras” which I eventually understood as “beautiful”. I got a big round of applause. It usually costs 6 grivnyas to sing a song. Before I started the man said 5. When I finished he said no charge. I had to insist to pay 3 gryvnias. For that moment, I belonged. And I displayed my Americanism with pride. Later I got warnings that Americans should keep a low profile. But for me, being American and singing out loud was the only way I knew to fight the pain and the fear.
Reactions in
First and foremost, let me say that people in the university and in the community who meet me or know me have been very sympathetic and quick to offer their condolences to me. This includes students and university faculty, people in the internet cafes and workers in rynoks. Many asked if my family was okay. I said it was but that it still hurts. One teacher (the same woman who was my guide my first day in Kharkov) gave her condolences and said “I hate Muslims”, a sentiment I did not share. One very smart 1st year student said that it was an international problem; if it can happen in America it can happen anywhere.
The Thursday after the attack I had to teach three
classes. I decided I would make a point
of talking about the attacks in all of my classes. Number one, it would be good English practice
for them. Number two, it would be a good
way for them to learn about American culture.
For example, I had been planning a lesson on American values, and I
could talk about American reactions to the attacks as examples of American
optimism (e.g. Giuliani’s comments that “of course we will rebuild”) and
American patriotism. Number three, if I
could make a teaching point out of the attacks, maybe they wouldn’t seem so
meaningless. That morning I was really
feeling emotional. I really didn’t want
to work but I knew I had to keep going. I started by showing students a
postcard I had of the New York skyline. In other classes that week I had been
showing postcards of America to give them an idea of things they could see
there. Now I was showing my students not
what America is but what it was. I asked
my students for their reaction to the attacks.
Of course the first two words out of their mouths were “shocked” and
“sad”. Other things were more
surprising. They said they heard (from
Russian or Ukrainian news) that 11 planes were missing, not 4. Some were afraid that this would be the start
of world war. A few even quoted Nostradamus who said that a great city would
fall and this would be the start of a war.
Still other students asked me what I thought about the U.S. bombing of
Belgrade, and if we would support such an act again now that we know how it
feels to be bombed. They added they know how it feels to be bombed because of
the terrorist attacks in Chechnya. I
tried to tell them that while America should reflect on its foreign policy from
time to time, we would not let terrorist attacks influence our policy, or that
would encourage more terrorism. I also
told them that from Americans’ perspective, the bombing of
One class was held in a high-tech classroom with a computer hooked up to the Internet and a projector because I insisted on having a room with a blackboard. One student in that class was also the technician for that room. As we were talking he took the initiative to go to the computer and pull up an article from the Internet on the attacks and projected it onto the screen. I let him read it out loud. I wanted to find another article on Giuliani’s “of course we will rebuild” statement, but instead ended up reading an article to the class about last phone calls from hijacked airplanes. The more I read the heavier my heart got. I often sighed or paused at I read. At the end I tried to say that even though things looked bleak, generally Americans believe that life would go on. At that point I’m not even sure I convinced myself. In another class, as we finished talking about the attacks, I heard an airplane whistling overhead. I paused somewhat nervously. They giggled and I told them I was only pausing because it was the first time I’d heard an airplane in Kharkiv.
The reality is that at moment I was not in any danger in