Boris. The Official Hat of Winter.

Note: The article below contains the occasional disparaging comment about Ukraine. But the Ukraine I write about is a 1990s version of the modern Ukraine of today that I love (where there is no gas, the banks are closed so you can’t get a check cashed, and the doctors haven’t been paid in three months.). Any resemblance is coincidental
So: No offense intended. Of Course.

When a man starts to name his hats, it is possible that, as they say in Canada, there are Labatts in la belfry (note the obscure beer reference). Or maybe the snow in March has gone to the head. Which is, fortunately, covered by a hat.

But Boris isn’t just any hat. Boris joined the family on my first trip to Dnepropretrovsk, Ukraine, many years ago. And therein lies a story.

Dnepropretrovsk (pronounced…well, let’s just call it Dnep) is a city of about 1,000,000 people in central Ukraine. You may be surprised, that, having pulled out your pre-1992 Ukraine atlas (I keep mine in my Sunday pajamas) to find no mention of such a city, 1,000,000 brave souls or not. This is genuine Cloak and Dagger stuff, not just bad geography.

Dnep was an official Secret City. Back in the bad old days of the (first) cold war, Mother Russia in effect sublet the manufacture of all their nuclear bombs and missiles –those nasty things those of us of a certain age can recall being told not to worry about, just to hide under our school desks during bomb alerts – that were pointed, well, at us. So while the city was chock full of scientists and researchers and people who could screw a bomb together to go bang in the night, it officially Did Not Exist. Like the Roach Motel, you could get in, but you couldn’t get out.

When the wall fell in 1992, and all those godless Commies became our new best friends…Eureka, guess what we found? All those people (and all those bombs, and all those missiles). The people were maybe were lacking a few basic things, starting with food. Also, because Dnep sits astride the Dnieper River, which flows on down past Chernobyl, where some really bad stuff happened, and then past Kiev, where all the sewage gets dumped in the river, and then down to Dnep, where the local delicacy is glow in the dark two headed brown fish stew, there are statistical anomalies: The incidence of cervical cancer is about a million times the world average, every other nasty disease seems to grow on trees, people turn grey and die young, and that’s the good news.

The bad news came if you went to see a doctor. Now, I’ll stipulate to being a medical snob— I get to hang out with the docs at Mass General, and it’s not…well, nuclear science, to me to expect them to do stuff like…wash their hands between patients. Skipping ahead here, I once scrubbed for surgery in Dnep – me, who gets queasy when my kids get a mosquito bite or a splinter – and watched well-meaning surgeons work on two patients in the same OR, passing instruments back and forth. Lose a scalpel – whoops, sorry, must have left it in poor Igor here… But I digress.

Among the million or so people who pop up in this place that does not officially exist, it turns out that there are maybe 70,000 Jews who have been hanging out, in their own way, since the last rabbi, in a chain that went back hundreds of years, got himself shipped off for a winter vacation in Siberia, guest of a Mr. Stalin, in 1952 on a ticket that turned out to be one way.

So Rule #1 about Ukraine: There are no coincidences. Rule # 2: There is no truth in Ukraine , except multiple versions the truth you really want to believe.

JDC, the coolest philanthropic and social action group in the world, about whom and with who I write and serve with admiration and appreciation, and CJP, a close # 2 in all of the above, in the world of Jewish alphabet soup, put the first boots on the ground in Dnep when the city, like Lana Turner, got discovered. We brought food, books and medicine. Everyone thought we were spies. Go figure.

How I got there is yet another long and winding story, maybe for another day, but there I was one November, in a place that can truly be called colder than my high school sweetheart. I was trying to learn about the delivery of health care to women and children, which was not hard to learn about since there pretty hadn’t been any before we got there.

I had spent the morning in a new clinic for women. It was doing radical things like keeping files on patients, teaching the docs to wash their hands between patients, and discouraging vodka toasts before noon. The clinic later became the Corky Ribakoff Woman’s Clinic and the Children’s Clinic, where we now treat about 600 women and children there every day, free, and is now affiliated with the Harvard Medical School. But that’s yet another story.

Now, you can say what you want about Ukrainian medicine, or the glow in the dark two headed fish stew. But there is one thing you cannot deny: Ukraine is a country that knows its hats. In a place so cold your tongue can freeze to a pump handle, even if the pump is in the next oblast, they have figured out ways to stave off the cold. It isn’t elegant – kind of Jackie Kenney’s pillbox hats on steroids – but they do keep you warm, and they are worn ubiquitously. There is a pecking order in the Ukrainian hat world, from cloth, to some kind of fur that looks like unborn poodle, a domestic rat of some sort, and so on. At the top of the food chain, hatwise, is the mink. Sorry ‘bout that, PETA. Go freeze.

All of which, finally, leads us to Boris, the Official Had of Winter. You may recall that this started out being a story about Boris.

We were driving somewhere in our state of the art 1990s Russian Llada (imagine an evil Soviet spy had stolen all the plans for the 1960 Ford Falcon (probably, he shoplifted a copy of Popular Mechanics), but gotten them all crinkled and mixed up, so when the Llada got built from them, there wasn’t a single straight line on it), when I saw a street market. I asked my guide/minder (who referred to me in Russian as The Inspector) to please pull over.

A Ukrainian street market makes a Cape Cod yard sale look like Tiffany’s on Christmas Eve. To steal an old joke, put 32 Ukrainian street vendors together, and what you have is a full set of teeth.

There was an old woman with what might have once in a prior life been a sturgeon mounted on a grocery cart, selling handfuls of what might have been fish eggs from the fish’s open belly, vendors with still-like barrels selling home made vodka that would surely cure your need for glasses, since you would no doubt go blind), bootleg copies of every Microsoft program and Madonna CD you can think of, requisite T-shirt stands (“My parents joined all the pogroms, and all I got was this lousy t-shirt”)…and the hat stand. I assumed the seller must be named Boris, because about everyone was a Boris or an Igor, and, like all world class designers, I was certain he named his hats after himself. I was a cold man in need of a hat, and Boris was a warm hat in need of a home.

Nothing in Ukraine, of course, is that easy.

With the use of many hand signals and my translator’s broken English (imagine Larry, Curly and Moe buying a hat), we established that this was a very special hat, the organic free range chicken of minks, a mink that had never worked a day in its life. I had always thought Ukrainians got minks the same way minks get minks, but this mink was beyond mere barter.

Meanwhile, I’m standing there with my teeth chattering, and all I want to know is how many filthy American dollars I have to give this guy to a/ shut up and b/ give me the damn hat.

Finally, he made known, that, at great personal sacrifice, and because of my obvious culture and taste, (not to mention my being the only customer in the whole market) he would consider sacrificing the hat for, maybe, $50.

Sold American, as we used to hear in the Lucky Strike commercials. I pulled $50 bucks out of my pocket (probably 3 months pay in the months the guy got paid, which were likely not consecutive), put on the hat, and started to walk away.

Big mistake.

The hat seller looked like I’d insulted his mother. Even my translator was horrified. Vendors in the market stopped and pointed. It is apparently a serious cultural violation not to bargain. Silly me. I had the $50 bucks, I wanted the hat, and I had a couple of other things to do that day.

The gesticulating got a bit wilder, and, in the manner of people speaking different languages everywhere, we compensated by talking louder. But talking louder doesn’t make you any warmer, and I wanted the damn hat.

“Offer the 3 toothed moron $1,” I hope I thought rather than said. But it didn’t make Boris the hat seller any kinder or gentler. Sometimes you wonder how you wind up in certain situations, like what in the world am I doing participating in close to full contact barter in a third world country.

Just prior to my participating in yet another international incident, the translator grabbed the $50, gave $30 to Boris, put the other $20 in his pocket, and, voila, Boris the hat had a new home.

That’s my story, and I’m sticking to it.