I suppose a bride is out of the question?

Romeo & Juliet’s offices were situated at the back of a dingy, basement tyre shop, on a quiet street, just a short cab ride away from my apartment. There was no sign out front and you had to pass through the shop to get in. We arrived there at around 11.30am, half an hour before my first scheduled date.

Julia led me downstairs and into the back, blaming me for the lousy weather as we walked (“I zink you muzz hazz brought eet wiz you!”). I was still tired and disorientated, and the guy working out front glared fiercely at me as I tripped through his tyres, shakily attempting to navigate my way around the large stacks of rubbery-smelling stock that covered the floor. He looked like Oddjob’s brother, especially when he narrowed his eyes.

The offices were spartan and shabby, but they put the furniture – two desks, some battered filing cabinets and a couple of worn couches – to shame. A busty, leather-clad blonde, who had to be in her early fifties, was perched behind a computer screen, painting the long nails at the end of her heavily bejewelled digits a particularly virulent shade of red. Julia introduced this vision as her mother, explaining that they ran the agency together. The blonde waved a friendly hello and made approving clucking noises at Julia, as she led us into the adjoining room. She went off to make some coffee.

So Romeo & Juliet was family-run, as opposed to being run by, em, ‘The Family’? I told Julia that I had been nervous about the Mafia being involved. She looked a little uncomfortable, the way people in Belfast react when you mention the IRA. “Some agencies would be controlled by the Mafia,” she admitted. “They run a lot of things over here. But not Romeo & Juliet.”

Juliet told me that she had lived in Kherson all her life. Having graduated from the local university as a maths teacher, she did some calculations and decided that she’d be better off marrying a wealthy foreigner, than teaching multiplication tables. She had registered with a marriage agency, and set about learning English to give herself a better chance of finding the man of her schemes (sorry, dreams). The agency was useless and so she saved up to buy herself a computer, so that she could correspond directly with men over the Net. While buying the computer, she met Roman, a Ukrainian software programmer. They fell in love, got married and decided to set up their own agency. Thus ‘Romeo & Juliet’. Roman, who divides his time between the US and Ukraine, designed and maintains the website. Julia and her mother look after the day-to-day running of the agency.

Business is good. There’s a huge demand for foreign men amongst Ukrainian girls, Julia told me – and vice versa. Although the women pay nothing to go on the books, it costs men who want to correspond with them a minimum of $50 to register with the agency – or more, depending on how many girls they want to contact. Videos, gifts and interpreted phone calls can also be organised. They receive anywhere between 100 and 200 letters a day from men all over Europe and America, the vast majority of which have to be translated.

“We have girls employed to do the translating,” Julia explained, “but they mostly work from home. And always we have somebody over who is, like you, a visitor. That is where we really make our money. Usually men come here to meet girls after some months of corresponding with them. But then sometimes we get men like you, who come not to meet one girl but a few different ones. And then sometimes men come to meet the girl they have been writing to and they find that they do not get along so well. Then they will ask to meet other girls.”

I wondered was there any other prospective husband on the prowl.

“Yes, there is a Norwegian man here right now,” she said. “He is here for the second time. The last time he was here, he was with a different girl, but now he has met someone else. Today they have gone on a trip to the zoo. And next week we have a man coming from France, and then we have two Americans. There is always someone over – and sometimes a few men at the same time.”

I tried to imagine what these guys would be like. I could see sleazebags with fat bellies, thinning hair and briefcases. But what did I know? I was one of them.

“They are all in their forties and fifties,” she said. “You are very young for the average age of our men. Sometimes our men will be in their sixties – they’re mostly divorced or widowed. Last year, though, we had a man from England who was only about 35.”

“Have you ever had anybody from Ireland before?” A politician’s face materialised in my mind’s eye.

“No, you are the first Irishman I’ve ever met,” she giggled. “We have had quite a few men from England though.”

“Do many of them actually wind up getting married?”

“We have had a few marriages, yes,” she said. “It’s hard to say how many, though. Often the girls will go back with the men to their country without actually marrying them first. We don’t usually hear what happens after that.”

“Are the girls free to leave Ukraine, just like that?”

“Well, of course they need a visa but a visa is not hard to get nowadays,” she said. “In Ukraine you are free to do anything you like, if you have money. The problem is that nobody has any.”

As she was talking, she was spreading dozens of Polaroids of pouting women all over the table in front of us, dealing them out like cards from a deck. “All of these girls live in Kherson,” she explained, “and all are available for you to meet.”

I felt like a kid in a candy store as I started to sift through the pictures. All forms of human wife were there. There were gorgeous girls galore – busty blondes, beaming brunettes, ravishing red-heads, some dressed in elegant evening wear, others in far skimpier outfits. All of the pictures were obviously posed and, holiday snaps aside, many of them looked like they’d been taken in the same studio. I picked one at random – a raven-haired, blue-eyed lovely, who looked to be in her early thirties.

“She is a very nice lady,” Julia assured me. “She is a doctor, 35-years-old, divorced, with one son. Her son is only fourteen but he is already a very talented football player. You can meet with her if you like.”

Why did 35 seem too old to me? I put the photo to one side and picked up another. Julia took a look. “She is a student teacher at the local university,” she said. “She is a lovely girl but she doesn’t speak any English. If you meet with her, you will need to have a translator.”

“Do you know all the girls personally?” I asked.

“Some I know better than others,” she shrugged. “But yes, I would know them all. They have to speak with me before we put them up on our website.”

I sifted through the pictures, Julia giving me the low-down on each girl I picked out. She’d set up her laptop on the table and connected it to the website to pull up any additional information I might need. The girls are fully profiled on the site – age, education, occupation, hobbies, standard of English, etc. Their names were neatly printed on the backs of the photos, their surnames even more difficult and multi-syllabic than my own – all Tikhonovskayas, Makarenkos, Emelyanovas and Ponomarenkos. If I did wind up marrying one of them, I’d definitely need a sober priest.

I felt like a slimeball, sitting there thumbing through the photographs. Guilty too. What could you tell about a person from a Polaroid? Did every jerk who came here feel like this or was it just me?

“Look, why don’t you choose some interesting girls for me,” I asked, “I can’t really decide from photographs.”

“OK, no problem,” she smiled. She looked pleased that I trusted her taste. She scanned through the stack and picked one out. “This girl here has a lovely personality.”

I took a peek. “Nah,” I said, shaking my head, “she’s way too ugly!” I hadn’t meant it to come out that way, but it did.

Suddenly Julia’s mother stuck her head back around the door and announced that my first date had just arrived and was waiting in the outer office. Showtime! I stood up and started to get myself together. Rather touchingly, Julia helped – straightening my shirt collar and brushing my hair back out of my eyes. I half-expected her to spit on a hanky and start rubbing my cheeks with it.

“Look at the state of you!” she chided, removing the cigarette from my mouth and extinguishing it in the ashtray. “You mightn’t think so, but you actually need a wife.”

I already knew from the schedule that my first date’s name was Olga, but I had no idea which girl she was among the photographs Julia had shown me the night before. I strolled into the front office to be met by a pale, pretty and casually dressed 27-year-old with short blonde hair and highly distinctive Ukrainian features. Her face lit up when she saw me, presumably because I was walking without the aid of a Zimmerframe and still had all my own teeth.

No time wasted. We all knew why we were there. Julia quickly did the introductions and, within less than a minute, she and her mother were cheerfully waving us out the door, reminding me that I had to be back in two hours. As we exited through the tyre shop, the proprietor shot me another glare, which I duly returned. Over the days that followed, I passed him numerous times, always with a different girl in tow, and he never once failed to fire me a look of total and utter disgust. I eventually resorted to smiling as widely as possible back, as though we were the best of pals, which infuriated him even more. It was a thing we had.

We went up the stairs and out onto the rain-soaked street. Olga immediately hooked her arm around mine and squeezed it tight. We both giggled nervously as we walked between the cracks in the pavements, unsure of what to say to one another. Eventually, she took hold of the reins. “What would you like to do?” she asked, in an accent as heavy as Julia’s. “Have you had any breakfast?”

“To be honest with you, I’m a little hungover,” I said. “I really feel like going for a drink.”

“Oh, you like to drink?” she said. I could tell the idea didn’t impress her.

“Yeah,” I replied, lighting a cigarette. “But not usually this early. I’m making an exception for you.”

“I see that you smoke as well,” she noted, looking even more disapproving. At that very moment, I decided that I definitely wasn’t going to marry her. To keep the conversation flowing, I jokingly told her as much. She laughed, “It’s OK, Julia has already told me that you aren’t really looking for a wife. But you are single, yes?”

“Yeah, pretty much,” I admitted.

“Well, then we will just have to wait and see,” she smiled. “Maybe you will not be so single by the time you leave.”

Olga knew a good bar nearby. I had spotted a battered looking bureau de change just up the road and so, arm in arm, we headed there first. I needed some spending money. Outside the booth, I dug my wallet out of my pocket and withdrew a couple of crisp American fifty dollar bills. With an audible gasp, Olga quickly put her hand over mine, covering the money and glancing around suspiciously. “Do not change so much at the one time,” she advised, “and always keep your money well hidden.”

“But there’s nobody around,” I protested. “What’s the big deal?”

Olga slyly indicated the girl behind the counter with her eyebrows and whispered conspiratorially, “She could call someone and tell them there is a foreigner here. You don’t understand. You must be very careful.”

It was impossible to be sure how much of this was hype and paranoia but I did my best to be discreet as I handed the girl one of the bills. The national currency of Ukraine is the hryvnia and the exchange rate is about five hryvnias to a dollar. Three or four hryvnias per day is the average wage for most people. The teller handed me back a small bundle of dull-coloured bills, and Olga and I quickly walked off, nervously checking that we weren’t being followed. It didn’t feel like it, but I was loaded.

“Is this place really all that dodgy?” I asked her.

“For you it is,” she replied. “There are lots of bad men in Kherson.”

“Maybe I’m a bit of a bad man myself,” I said, playing the macho card.

Olga looked me up and down. “No,” she said, smiling. “You wouldn’t stand a chance!”

The bar was completely empty, so we took a seat by the window. The barman came over and gave me a strange look, muttering something that sounded unpleasant under his breath. I could tell that Olga was flustered. She ordered a coffee for herself and a pint of Slavutych, the godawful local beer, for me. “He knows you’re a foreigner,” she said, when the barman had gone. “Does that matter?” I asked.

“He knows why you’re here.” “Does that matter?” “Umm… not really to you,” she shrugged. “He just won’t think much of me.”

Despite the strangeness of the situation, we were still on a date and, over our drinks, she told me a little about her life and I told her about mine. She was shockingly well educated, with degrees in both psychology and mechanical engineering. Her study done, she worked fifty hours a week in a factory, making parts for tractors. It didn’t pay well, but it was all she could get. She lived in a three-roomed apartment with her parents and sister, who also worked in the factory.

Did she mean a three-bedroomed apartment? “No,” she replied, “we have only three rooms. I sleep in the hallway.”

I’ve known the odd hard time along the way, but I felt boorish and pampered by comparison, a colossus of self-indulgence and shirking. Not that I was about to admit it.

I told her a bit about my family, my life in Ireland, and my work for hotpress. She wasn’t a big fan of rock music, explaining that she much preferred jazz. We chatted about Miles Davis’s Kind Of Blue, before moving on to the subject of literature. She hadn’t heard of any of my favourite authors and I couldn’t even pronounce any of hers. Eventually, we found common ground with Tolstoy. “Every foreign man who comes here has heard of Tolstoy,” she laughed, “but there are much better Russian writers than him.”

How many foreign men had she seen in her search for a husband? Olga explained that she used to have a boyfriend but they’d split up two years ago, after nearly five years together, because he had “refused to grow up”. Cheap Afghan heroin is easily available in Ukraine and he smoked it habitually. When she asked him to ditch it, he wouldn’t. So she ditched him.

She had been with the marriage agency ever since, and dreamed of meeting a foreign man who would take her away from Kherson. I asked her had she met any eligible types. She had met quite a few men, she told me, and had received two proposals of marriage in the last two years – both from wealthy middle-aged Americans.

“Why didn’t you take one of them up?” I asked. She paused for a moment, searching for the right words. “Some men are like hunters,” she said, eventually, aiming her finger as though it was a gun. “POW! You understand? Yes, I would like to meet a foreign man but I will still only marry for love.”

“Do many Kherson girls feel the same way?” I asked.

“Some do, of course,” she shrugged. “But most of them just want to get out of here, and would happily marry the first man who asked them.”

Most of Olga’s single friends are registered either with Romeo & Juliet or with another local agency called Pearls Of Kherson. So far, none of them has actually gotten married, although one looked like it might happen soon. “Her man has come to see her three times now,” Olga explained. “He lives in Germany, but she still isn’t sure if she will marry him.”

“Why? Is there something wrong with him?”

“No. He is very nice,” she said, “but he is almost forty years older than her.”

After an hour, we left the bar and went for a stroll through the town. It had finally stopped raining and we wandered the glistening streets for a while. Apparently Kherson has a population of 400,000, but there wasn’t evidence of much going on in the city centre. Ushakoba Street is the main shopping drag but it had all the appeal of the main thoroughfare of a small Irish provincial town. Most of the shops looked like parking garages and, not being able to read the signs, I had to actually go in to see what they sold. Practically all of the streets leading off Ushakoba Street, appeared to be residential rather than commercial.

“Kherson is just like a big village,” Olga told me. “Everybody knows everybody and everybody knows everybody’s business.” We were certainly getting some strange looks as we wandered around, turning heads just about everywhere we went. The women merely looked curious. The men glared the resentful stares of the long-term unemployed and terminally bored. Olga seemed to be quite enjoying the attention and held her head high as we walked. Personally, I could have done without it. The place was a céad, a míle and a fáilte short of a céad míle fáilte.

My dislike for the town intensified with every step. The unpleasant tang of medium grade poverty hung heavily in the air – a sweet, sickly smell of open sewerage, rotting rubbish and traffic pollution. The streets were strewn with dogshit, rubble and broken glass. If Ukraine has an equivalent of the Tidy Towns competition, Kherson definitely doesn’t stand a chance of winning it.

Structurally, the place looked as though it had just recently been hit by an earthquake. The streets were literally cracked wide open every twenty feet or so, leaving gashes like big gaping wounds in the cement. Plaster was falling off many of the buildings, exposing their crumbly brick innards. I spotted several open manholes in the middle of the street, their covers long-disappeared, the smell emanating from them completely noxious. Compensation obviously wasn’t part of the culture here. In Ireland, there’d have been a queue of entrepreneurs lined up to fall in and make a claim.

“This place really… well, it really sucks!” I eventually told Olga. “Yes, I know,” she replied, looking doleful. “Why do you think I want to leave?”

As she left me off outside the tyre shop, Olga asked could she see me again before I left. She had enjoyed talking to me and would like another chance to practise her English. “Sure,” I said, kissing her farewell and heading back into the offices. I genuinely wanted to see her again. Despite the unpleasant and unwelcoming vibe of the town, it had been an enjoyable couple of hours.

I was pleased. It had been a good start. If every date went as well, it could yet turn out to be quite a fun week.

Provided I didn’t run into any “bad men”, of course…

My second date had already arrived and was chatting quietly with Julia’s mother when I walked back into the office. My heart leapt the moment I saw her. Zhanna was utterly gorgeous, a very shapely 23-year-old, with dark doe eyes and beautifully flowing, long, black hair. Talk about eye-candy! She looked like she could be Catherine Zeta-Jones’s little sister.

Julia came out and asked me how things had gone with Olga. I told her that we wanted to see each other again, and she seemed pleased that her first choice of girl for me had proved so successful. “I thought you might like Olga,” she smiled. She then formally introduced me to Zhanna and sent us off on our way.

Before we left, I asked Julia to hold my fourth encounter till 8pm. I was definitely going to need a break at some point and I figured that three girls in a row would be more than enough. I was already beginning to fear some kind of overload. I had known it would be a bizarre experience but now that I was doing it, I was feeling overwhelmed.

It quickly became obvious that Zhanna didn’t have much English. Perhaps because of this, she seemed nervous. In fact, she seemed mildly terrified. She kept her head bowed low and remained quiet as we walked up the street, speaking only when I spoke to her, and not saying much even then.

I had spotted what looked like a museum up the road and asked her if she’d like to go there. “Yes, that would be very nice,” she said, timidly. I took her by the hand and gave it a reassuring squeeze. “It’s alright, I don’t bite,” I told her. “Bite?” she squeaked, looking alarmed. “Em, it’s a figure of speech,” I said, doing my best to give her a reassuring smile. This was going to be hard work.

The place turned out to be a natural history museum and, judging from the surprised looks we got when we wandered in, they weren’t used to having visitors. There was nobody behind the admission desk, just a couple of bored-looking, card-playing security guards in the hall. When the clerk finally did arrive, I paid a pittance for both of us and, sure enough, once we’d gone in, quickly realised that we were the only two in there. Well, we were the only two visitors anyway.

There was an abundance of elderly staff on duty. Each room was separately monitored by a little old lady, whose only job appeared to be switching on the main light when somebody entered, and then following you around, switching on the lights behind whichever display case you happened to be examining. When you left the room, all the lights were turned off again and the attendants sat there, alone in the dark. It didn’t seem like the most economical way of saving electricity. Nor the most challenging of jobs. Still, I guess it kept them off the streets.

Zhanna and I wandered from room to room, checking out the rather paltry exhibits, most of which looked more like the results of a primary school nature project than anything you’d expect to see in a museum. Neither of us said much. We were behaving like a couple of shy and embarrassed teenagers, tricked into a date by our giggling peers. I caught her looking at me a few times but, whenever I looked back, she’d quickly turn and feign interest in one of the displays. Eventually, I managed to make her laugh by repeatedly walking in and out of the same room, causing the light-switch lady to get up out of her seat several times.

“Stop it!” Zhanna giggled, grabbing me by the hand and apologising profusely to the old woman as she led me away. “You’re a very bad boy!” she scolded. This sounded promising! She did her best to look annoyed but I could see she was amused. “She looked like she needed the exercise,” I protested.

We left the museum – actually we were chased out by the old woman – and went directly to a nearby bar. She ordered a coffee and a bar of chocolate and, like Olga, frowned disapprovingly when I called for a drink and lit a cigarette. Still, at least she’d perked up a little.

“So tell me a bit about yourself, Zhanna,” I said. “What do you do?”

In makeshift English, she explained that she was a final year economics student at the university. She wasn’t too sure what she’d do for employment when she left. She told me that she’d like to marry a foreign man for the security, but that she wasn’t so keen on the idea of leaving Ukraine. Life was hard here, she said, but she’d miss her mother too much to live abroad. Her father had died recently and she was all her mother had. Anyway, she had no great desire to see the rest of the world.

I told her a little about myself. While she nodded in understanding, I got the impression she was only half taking it in. When I mentioned that I lived under a big circus tent and occasionally slept in the tiger’s cage, she smiled and said that it sounded very nice. More than once, I caught her looking at her watch. This date didn’t seem to be going well after all. She looked like she’d rather be somewhere else.

“Zhanna, you look very uncomfortable – am I boring you?” I asked. Her cheeks flushed a little. “I am sorry,” she apologised. “It’s just that my son is very sick and I had to leave him with my mother to come and meet you.”

“You have a son?” I said, surprised. It was the first I’d heard of it. She went completely red and put her hand up to her face. “Oh no, they did not tell you I had a child,” she gasped, looking mortified. “But it is on my profile!”

Stupidly adding insult to injury, I explained that Julia had picked all of my dates for the day and so I hadn’t actually seen her profile. It really wasn’t the best way to make a girl feel special, but I’d said it before realising. Her face fell a little further. “But it’s OK – I don’t mind,” I reassured her. “I love children. Tell me about your son.”

She explained that she had a three-year-old named Vlad. Her marriage had broken up shortly after Vlad was born. Like most Ukrainian men, Zhanna said, the father was a drunken bum and hadn’t really been around since they’d divorced. She had just recently registered with the agency, as the child had taken up all of her time until now, and I was only the second foreign man she’d met. The first had been an American with “no manners.”

Feeling ashamed, I made a rash suggestion: “Look, maybe tomorrow or the day after, we can bring young Vlad out somewhere for the day. We could go to the zoo or something.” She smiled, reached over and touched my hand, and said that he’d love that.

We spent the rest of the time planning our big day out. Even as we talked, though, I knew I was going to chicken out. Zhanna’s English just wasn’t good enough for it to make sense to spend a whole day with her and, given that I had no intention of taking things any further, it would hardly be worth her while either. I was here to work, not to play happy Ukrainian families. Still, I felt like a bit of a prick. It had been stupid of me to offer.

When she left me off outside the office and kissed me goodbye, it was obviously a final farewell. I stood there for a while, guiltily watching her walk off up the street, feeling like a cad (and, admittedly, checking out her perfect ass). I hoped things would work out for her and Vlad, I really did. I just wasn’t going to be able to help.