What Comes With You Unannounced
Part 1 - Lola.
For some reason, the first thing I recall, looking back, is being pinned to the kerbside by the harsh Melbourne sun.
I know I am very close to home. I just can’t remember how to get back. There is no one in sight.
And even if there were, I don’t speak enough English to ask for directions.
I am 23.
Eight months pregnant.
Three weeks in Australia.
I should have felt apprehension.
But what I felt instead was something closer to excitement.
It started somewhere else.
Kyiv, 1991.
The city sits high on its hills, held tightly by the river. Summer stretched easily there - long days, warm air, nothing urgent.
I had finished university, and it felt like I was waiting for my life to begin.
I lived close to the river, so I spent my days swimming, lying in the sun, not thinking too far ahead.
That’s where he first saw me.
I hadn’t noticed him. Two boys somewhere behind, watching. Later, one of them followed me.
He started talking as if it was the most natural thing in the world.
Tall, sun-warmed, blue eyes. A smile that made something shift before I understood why.
That was Max.
Part 2 - Max.
It didn’t take long.
There was an ease between us from the beginning.
He asked if I always swam this far out. I said only when no one was watching. That made him laugh, and in that moment I really noticed him - tanned, in white tennis shorts, hair still wet. Too young for me, I thought.
We met again the next day, and the day after that.
Kyiv in summer made everything feel possible. The city moved slowly. Chestnut trees shifting in the warm breeze along alleyways, full of light.
We walked, talked, sat by the river. Nothing complicated. Nothing planned.
We hired an old rowboat and drifted out in the evenings, coming back late, long after the light had gone. It went on like that until the end of summer.
I told him I was leaving not long after we met.
A year, maybe less.
I said it lightly, as if it were just another fact. Something already decided, something that didn’t need to be questioned.
I explained that my parents had wanted me to leave. My father most of all.
They said there’s no smoke without fire. With him, it was only ever fire - sudden, overwhelming, almost too much for his small, delicate frame.
I couldn’t argue with him.
Everyone could see it.
Tanks in Tbilisi. Vilnius. Moscow.
The ground under us was cracking open.
Max didn’t argue. Not really. But something shifted. Not in what we said, but in how we were with each other after that.
Time became more defined. Measured.
We spent two weeks at my uncle’s dacha near the Dnipro a month before I left.
It was very quiet there. Slower than the city. Days stretched out. It was easy to forget everything else.
We were alone in that large, unfinished house. Freshly painted, empty - almost naked on the flat field, dotted with sunflowers.
We woke with the sun and ate outside, under the apple tree.
There was nothing we needed to do, nowhere we needed to be. He carried me on his shoulders to the riverbank. We spent our days swimming. A small vegetable patch and eggs from the local chickens were all that sustained us.
For a while, it felt like time had stepped aside. We were alone in the world.
When I left, it happened quickly.
No version of it felt right.
I had already decided to go. That didn’t change.
But leaving him was something else entirely. As a parting gift, he gave me a giant teddy bear. I clung to it through customs.
In Melbourne, nothing felt familiar.
I stayed with my aunt. The streets were bare, the light harsher, the language still out of reach.
We wrote to each other constantly. Letters crossing somewhere in transit, sometimes arriving out of order, sometimes all at once.
Three, four, five a day.
Before I left, I had recorded my voice on tape. Small stories, to keep him company.
He listened to them over and over. He stopped seeing his friends. Stopped leaving his room. Everything narrowed.
Part 3 - Back to Kyiv.
After three months, I went back.
Not because it made sense. It didn’t.
Everything I had come to Australia for pointed in the opposite direction.
When I told my parents I had to come back, there was no calm discussion. There was no sentimentality for their globe-trotting daughter.
In Kyiv it was the height of winter.
Snow taller than me, heavy and still, covering everything in silence.
Just days before, I had been in forty-degree summer. Sun, heat, bare skin, light.
Now - this.
Cold that didn’t feel like weather, but like a different world entirely.
And still, I stayed.
In that country, everything was coming apart. There were no real rules. Documents we didn’t have. Systems that didn’t work as they were meant to.
We tried to get married. My parents didn't agree, and his parents couldn't quite believe it.
We had to go to a small, godforsaken village. Remote, quiet, unchanged.
I stood out the moment we arrived.
Not just because I wasn’t from there.
I was Jewish. He was Ukrainian.
No one said anything directly.
But it was there, in the looks, in the pauses.
I felt like I had landed in the wrong place.
We went to Moscow for an Australian visa. It was the only place we could get it.
At one point, we found ourselves leaving a hotel in Moscow without paying.
Not on purpose. Just because we didn’t have the money. We spent what we had left on bread and milk.
We ran.
Not dramatically. Not heroically.
Just quickly, quietly, hoping no one would stop us.
Somewhere in all of this, I became pregnant.
That changed everything again.
Now there was a timeline.
Something real, something that couldn’t be delayed or negotiated.
We had to leave quickly now.
And so I found myself back in Melbourne.
The same city. The same streets.
Only now, nothing felt familiar.
Part 4 - Back to Lola on Kerbside.
The sun is still harsh.
I am still sitting on the kerbside, too hot against my skin. I'm trying to remember which way to go.
Nothing has changed. Everything has.
There is a moment where I could panic.
I can feel it just under the surface.
But it doesn’t quite arrive.
I sit there, not moving, watching the street as if it might explain itself.
Cars pass. People pass. The city carries on.
I am twenty-three.
Three weeks into a new country. Eight months into something that cannot be undone.
There is no clear plan.
Only this.
And still, underneath it all, something else is there.
Not certainty.
Not calm.
Something closer to excitement.
A quiet, stubborn sense I have stepped into something I chose, even if I don’t yet understand it.
So I stay where I am for a moment longer.
Let the sun settle.
Let the noise pass.
Let the feeling catch up.
Part 5 - What Comes With You Unannounced.
For most, it’s just an odd-looking beetroot soup. For me, it’s much more than that.
Kyiv - the old town perched high on its steep hills, held together by the river.
In summer, its narrow streets were drenched in lilac and chestnut blossom, generous in the sun. In winter, snow fell in heavy flakes, turning the city quiet, grey, and slightly mysterious.
Kyiv stayed with you. Even when you left.
Kyiv is grandma’s borsch.
Flushed pink and pungent, impossible to forget, impossible not to return to.
It was something constant. Something that didn’t change, even when everything else did.
There were other dishes too.
Herring in Fur Coat - layers of beetroot, potato, egg, and mayonnaise, wrapped around something sharp and unmistakable.
It looked excessive. Almost theatrical.
A bright, stubborn attempt at colour in a life that was often grey.
At twenty-three, I left.
I crossed into Australia with two hundred dollars, a suitcase, a new husband, and a baby already on the way.
Who needs more to start a life?
What I didn’t know was that Kyiv and borsch came too.
Not in anything you could declare.
But they were there.
Some things cross borders with you unannounced.
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