So...
Originally appeared @Krytyka
Space can be nameless. Without a capital letter at the beginning of the word. A plantation, a forest belt, a road, a field. You can add the word "mines" or "bombs." Or you can skip them. A space without a name explains everything.
Time passes so quickly that it doesn't allow us to see ourselves. Time passes so slowly that every step in the liberation of our lands takes a bloody eternity.
And yet it stands. Time stands so confidently and unshakably that we can do nothing but stand by it: to hold onto our time, past and future.
It collapses, dissolves, ceases to exist, and thus becomes all-encompassing. Shevchenko's verse "Keep fighting and you are sure to win. God is on your side!" emerges from under a torn poster on the billboard that reads: "Russia is here forever. We are one people."
Everyone's time is different. Questions with and without answers:
"Do you still count the days in February?"
"What day is today?" “Tomorrow is the fortieth[1] day after death…”
"What month is it now?" "The sixteenth. Sixteenth for our guys in captivity."
Unremitting and inevitable, like a shrapnel wound. Not severe, but extracting one of the fragments proved impossible. Hence March in the basement, August in the steppe, November in the hospital; two days at the train station, ten hours under the rubble, seven hours in a trench under intense, ceaseless shelling... And despite any day after that, even a good day, far from death, March in the basement is the only real time that has remained frozen on the clock.
***
Space has names. Nothing needs to be added to the name. Not only Bucha. Although Bucha presides over the hierarchy of unnecessary added words.
Mariupol. The train station in Kramatorsk. Snake Island. Saltivka. The bridge near Irpin. Vinnytsia. The Kakhovka Reservoir. Chernihiv...
The ellipsis after Chernihiv is conditional and dishonest. In fact, there are hundreds more. Hundreds of full stops that require no explanation.
Space can be nameless. Without a capital letter at the beginning of the word. A plantation, a forest belt, a road, a field. You can add the word "mines" or "bombs." Or you can skip them. A space without a name explains everything.
The simple question "When are you coming home?" is no longer simple. Sometimes it's not even polite, and often it's just cruel.
"Never, because there's no home anymore. No street. No city. No one who was your home."
"When are you coming home?" Now after a pause, after swallowing down grief once again: "After Victory. But I will come to Kyiv – Lviv, Kharkiv, or wherever you are – sooner."
Space is like a tattoo inked without permission or anesthesia. The entire skin is covered in bloodied names. The contour map of Ukraine has been transferred to the bodies of Ukrainians. An indifferent eye cannot see it. The indifferent eye wants to squint, to throw it out of its mind. But the head is full to the brim. Here and there, people lived, and after the Russians, no one lives anywhere.
***
The worst fear is having to bury children. To bury raped and tortured children. To die slowly in the rubble of a house destroyed by a Russian missile. To die quickly in a fire caused by a projectile impact. To survive in the hospital only to find out that a child did not. To not get an evening text message from the front. To not have received it for three days. To never have received it.
To bury friends. To bury friends every three days. To sense the smell of decomposition from a closed coffin. To hug a widow. To hug a mother who has lost her son.
To not be able to bury someone... To not be able to get there, to not receive the body, to not be able to get there because of the occupation.
To be afraid. To be unable to resist. To run away. To fall and not get up again.
To betray your people out of cowardice.
To be taken captive. To wait for release from captivity. To never be released.
There is one more terrible fear, facing backwards. The fear of all of us who walked on thin ice in February-March 2022. What if we hadn't made it? What if we hadn't?
If we hadn't there would have been an abyss. Only nothingness. "Deep concern," of course. Sympathy, regret, some programs for refugees. But also "realpolitik," "Russia's sphere of influence," "internal conflict," "a big country has the right to its interests," "Did Ukraine ever exist?" or "Ukraine? Where is it?"
Nowhere. Raped, tortured, shot, burned, beaten with rifle butts, chopped to pieces, drowned, strangled... Like Mariupol, Borodyanka, and Izium.
Genocide by default. Authorized and approved by the UN, the EU, NATO, the Pope, the Red Cross... Who else? Approved by the tightly-closed eyes of pragmatic European intellectuals and scared-to-death politicians. Invisible. As invisible as the concentration camps of 2014 in occupied Donetsk.
...There is only one good, normal fear: not to live long enough to see victory.
***
There are words we don't understand, like "conflict"... The devil's sulfurous smell attracts the "internal" designation to "conflict," diminishes its scale, devalues the victims, and washes the blood from the hands of all the Pontius Pilates. This is not a conflict. This is a war, a massacre, a catastrophe, mass murder. These are all kinds of "-cides" involved. Almost all of them: urbanicide, ecocide, linguicide, elitocide, libricide.
Not a conflict. A genocidal war.
"Peace." It sounds like a good word, but sometimes you don't want to hear it. When framed as a "good wish," it sounds like an invitation to surrender. I want to spit whenever I hear someone sanctimoniously declare that word. Peace makes sense only with victory. Or rather, after it. After our victory. Everything else is about readiness for betrayal. Our ears are very sensitive to this.
There are also such abominations as "brotherly people," "understanding, forgiveness," and "beautiful Russia of the future." All these phrases are meaningless. Their meanings have long been lost, and certainly not in 2022. It is as if they're just filling a void, and so be it. In that part of the world, it is common to mill the wind. So why not putty walls that do not exist? But this is not the case in our part of the world. This garbage will not exist, at least not in my lifetime–neither in the dictionary nor in practice.
There are still phrases that the world doesn't understand. Forces that the world doesn't understand. They're good, sometimes funny, sometimes sad. Most often they're tough. My favorites are yobana rusnia[2] and bavovna[3]. I write the first one to all my friends whenever I hear an air raid siren. And I read the second one with pleasure in the news about strikes on the Crimean bridge, Russian airfields, and military units.
There are many of them – all accurate and useful – that will form our dictionary after victory. But I would like these two to be understood by the whole world without translation, in transliteration from Ukrainian. And if two is too many, let's stick with the first one.
***
Language is the power to live. The instructions for those who will provide first aid at the front include a rule: address the wounded exclusively in Ukrainian. This is not about a ban or discrimination. It's about protection, simple and clear reassurance: "You are home." Not in captivity, a filtration camp, or a Russian torture chamber. You woke up where you should be: at home. The Ukrainian language means that everything will be fine.
Many of us are coming back to our own language – not switching, but returning. By rejecting Russian, it's as if I'm acquiring some secret powerful forces that have been "put to sleep." By imperial colonial policies, yes, but also by my stupidity and deafness. The whole world around me never stopped speaking Ukrainian. Even my Russian-speaking parents and friends. In those main, most important conversations, whether quarrels or confessions, the real thing always came out. We have our own words, sayings that Russians will never understand: Kokhana[4]– And you, Mark, play [5]– Kiss daddy on the cogwheels[6] – He flew in like a hawk[7]...The whole world that I loved and still love spoke to me in my native language. With the Ukrainian "buryak" to refer to beets and not the Russian "svekla," let it paralyze him[8], not...come to think of it, I don't even know how to say "paralysis" in Russian.
Language is a happy moment, a gift, a miracle, and a job. I will be the last generation of my family to dream in the language of the occupier. And hence the refreshing dark joke overheard at the volunteer center: "When I die, I'll switch to Russian in my final breath: let there be one less Russian in the world."
I can imagine the faces of European humanists scrunching up: "Ew, that's so harsh." I can see the eyebrows of homegrown philosophers creeping up on their foreheads, thinking something is wrong with the logic here.
It does not matter if it is or not. It is what it is. It is what will be.
***
The invisible becomes visible. It turned out that we have to fight for the right to call ourselves a colonized people in our world. And that those who have white skin and live in Europe have very few chances to stand next to the indigenous peoples of Africa, Asia, and America. Looking at us, Ukrainians, through the eyes of Russian colonialism, which denies our right to exist, is easier than expected for some.
The solidarity of the colonized is not a simple thing, at least not a natural one. People who have gained freedom in the struggle against one empire take the side of another, asserting its right to genocide. How is this possible?
We gained the right to be visible only when our skin ceased to be white and became red or red-black from blood, burns, and wounds. It would seem impossible to pass by someone who is bleeding, impossible to turn away.
That is why Black lives matter. But that's also why Ukrainian lives matter. Or maybe this song isn't about us:
Everybody has a voice don't you dare stay silent
If you say nothing you are an accessory to violence
Let these words dry the tears of my people that are crying
We can bring back hope but not people that are dying?
This anti-colonial war has been going on for over three hundred years. For a significant part of those years, our skin was not white, but covered with blood or dark corpse stains.
Now more than ever, we are visible.
***
Guilt gnaws at me from the inside. It is overwhelming and daily. The feeling that you live in debt, which you can never–never–pay back. But you take it again and again. Even this text I am writing in debt. It could have been and should have been written by others, by those who answer the question of what war is every minute in front of the whole world. They should have and must speak out. But they are gnawing through meters of our land, moving the front with their lives, giving us hope that we will be.
I feel guilty for not doing enough, for being so scared to the point of shame. Guilt for being able to eat in a kitchen and not in the middle of the ravaged steppe, for seeing wounded friends in hospitals but never pulling them out of a battle, not knowing in advance whether I am pulling them out alive or dead.
For the fact that my address is known and I can be found at any moment, while they went missing a month, a year, a year and a half ago. For the fact that I cannot remember all their names, for the fact that the flowers I take to the cemetery in Vyshneve are not beautiful enough, for the fact that I still have some petty desires, for taking their place, for the fact that I have the strength to make cruel jokes...
Guilt has a powerful, nasty voice that sometimes overpowers even air raid sirens. It teases, mocks, and diminishes me, but strangely enough, it also keeps me in line. It consumes resources and fuels them at the same time. "Please live to the fullest," a warrior once told me.
But without him, without all of them who should return home, I cannot.
***
Evil. Not human beings but anthropomorphic forms, a collection of cells. They have hands. Their hands press the remote control, and missiles fly to the city. The cells know that the missiles will kill people. They do not care. They have legs. They kick the old woman in the stomach, hit the old man writing in pain in the head. They stomp on them. They beat them both to death. Then they kill the dog. They eat it because they have a mouth. They use this mouth – which is completely anthropomorphic – to talk to their wives, who are the same sets of cells. They boast that they have killed everyone, that they will kill more, and consider themselves heroes.
They are not orcs. Actor Sala Baker said:
I played Sauron in The Lord of the Rings, and on behalf of the global orc diaspora, I ask: please do not call Russians orcs. It disgraces us. Orcs do not aim at women and children, steal washing machines, or shit on carpets. Orcs are warriors, not scum.
They are not animals, not even beasts. Animals do not kill for pleasure. Animals do not lie about being forced to do something, animals do not lie at all. Animals suffer and die of grief.
This is evil in its primal form – a set of cells programmed to kill, destroy, abuse and lie. A set of cells called Russia.
***
Magical... Magical thinking. Miracles. Tales told to children and adults. Tales told to oneself. Agreements with the Universe. Signs at every turn. Good signs, but also bad ones.
...Long blond hair, tilted head, light gait. Vika! Vika! I shout silently, catching up, raising my hands to touch her shoulder. But Vika says: "Are you out of your mind, birdie? It's not me. But I'm with you... Hug me as much as you want."
I cannot let go. I am not going to and I will not… I have a big head. Everyone fits inside it. All of them are mine. All alive. We talk. We quarrel. With Vika, for example, we fight non-stop. I get angry, I am still angry with her: "Why, tell me, did you go to Kramatorsk when you were supposed to recite poetry at Arsenal in Kyiv?" "That's the question of the day!" she laughs, "I went because someone had to show the Colombians how and why we are fighting…"
Alive... They are all alive for me. They are all in my phone. They just took a break, they have not responded to messages yet. They say: "Why do I need to poke my fingers at the buttons when you can hear us anyway?" And really, why?
In the world where "it will be done to you, enemy, as the witch says," there is no past tense. There is a long present, on this side and the other. There are thousands of voices on the other side. No, you do not need a psychiatrist. These voices finally have the power to sound as they should. They speak about everything: about Baturyn, Kruty, Prince Sviatoslav; they whisper their poems, hum arias from operas, and reflect on texts that were not written because of the Holodomor, Sandarmokh, and Bykivnia.
Olesia Khromeychuk says that the place left behind by her brother, who died at the front in 2017, will forever be void. But it is possible – she says it is possible – to "grow" another place where there will be a memory of him, which will be about love – the same, but a little different – about life outside the real world.
I think how strange we will all look after we win. A heap of holes and a heap of growths, a powerful abundance of growths, where Vika, Mr. Ihor, Danylo, Yuri, Hlib, Mykhailo, Tetiana, the red-haired lady, her mother... Where everyone whose loss created holes inside can be found, and where love for them grew into strange invisible gardens. Will we manage to nurture these gardens? Or perhaps, like Paul Celan, Jean Améry, and Primo Levi, will we want to become them – be with them – in gardens that others will cultivate?
***
Children. When it comes to children, Zhadan said: "There is a war going on, children are growing up! And you love them because no one else will love them here except you."
Everything is according to Zhadan, and so is the formula of Ukrainian nationalism:
To be a Ukrainian nationalist is to feel that all the children who are sitting in basements, who are being killed in the open air, who wake up in the middle of the night in nightmares that they will never wake up again, are your children.
Children distinguish between air strikes and the work of our air defense systems, missiles and Shahed drones, aviation bombs and barrage fire systems. Children sense the first sounds of the air raid siren a moment before it cuts through the silence. Children know the "two-wall rule," what a "bug-out bag" is, and the recipe for a Molotov cocktail. They discuss the advantages of cremation compared to traditional burial in the ground. They contemplate where they would like their ashes scattered. They should not have to think about any of this. They should not have to think about bomb shelters, parents on the front lines, fundraising for thermal imagers, whether there will be a nuclear strike, or if the world can withstand it. Considering everything this world has allowed to happen to them, they should not have to be born at all.
But they come, receiving "greetings" from the anthropomorphs from Russia.
Ukraine is about children. A child. You can feel it. It is a privilege to protect a child, to be with them. A privilege and an instinct. When a child is crying, afraid, or screaming, we are ready to do anything to make them feel better. To hold them close to our chest, to hear them fall asleep quietly, to see their smile. Just a smile.
"And you love them because no one else here will love them but you."
In the end, there is no one else but you – me, us – is needed. We just need more weapons and less cowardice. When children killed by the Russians are buried in the heart of Europe, that much-feared escalation has already taken place. When children are suffocating from the smoke of fires, dying under the ruins, that escalation is already in full swing. The cells will not stop. The only thing – really the only thing – they are not lying about is this: "We can repeat it," "On to Berlin!", "On to Warsaw!", "On to Washington!"
...Abraham Lincoln once said that America is both a place and a concept. And that these two facts were worth fighting for.
Now Ukraine is both a place and a concept which is, in fact, the same as America was under Lincoln. The space of our – my – state. And the concept of freedom.
If my logic is correct, then in... a hundred years (or maybe even sooner, since everything is happening so fast now) Ukraine will become the leader of the free world.
And we will try to do everything right. Not after we have tried all the other options, but right away. Quickly.
***
Rage. Rage is a jewel, a blessing. A core structure. Its mechanism is becoming more complicated and sophisticated every day. It no longer screams, replacing fear with strength, despair with action, confusion with a firm belief in victory.
Rage is embedded in almost all reactions. And even grief goes hand in hand with it. And "Good morning, may all of them die" needs no further explanation. There is a lot of it, it can be shared, given to charity, somewhere where it is lacking – like Europe, for starters.
Now it is quite decent, as beautiful as the lava of the Aso volcano in Japan. It already knows how to keep itself in check. Now it is more often magma, a mess of molten trust in the world, grief, and the knowledge that the Russians will not stop unless they are stopped.
Rage-magma warms and shines, sings, makes evil and dark jokes, and hugs. It is the first ally for those of us who do not want to be victims, who are not going to die heroically, but rather are going to spit on the graves of our enemies for a long time to come. Not humane? Not in the democratic trend? But it is magma. Rage.
In the end, the UN is also not up to humanism. So what? It is of no use. But the benefits of rage are obvious and well-proven. It has been effective for years. Yes, it does not export good, but only itself. No one buys it. Perhaps they are frightened...
Our rage is a sanitary border, a physiological fuse. It is the first to know what makes us sick, what disgusts us. Not all of us, of course. But my personal rage forbids me to believe in "good Russians." And the further I move, the stronger it gets. It forbids me to sit on the same hectare as those who seek "common denominators." It tells me not to waste resources on possible illusionary changes in Russia. When it is already flowing like lava, it gets furious and it shouts. Missiles flying toward Kyiv are met with air defense and fury. Toward Odesa, Mykolaiv, Kherson, Kostiantynivka, Kramatorsk, Beryslav... They are also met with fear, of course. But rage overwhelms all fears like hot lava.
On days when it seems that there can be no more rage, the occupiers kill, destroy and rejoice in their victories over schools and hospitals. And yet it grows again. Now it is growing more calmly, not in jerks, gradually, smoothly filling the places where there used to be hopes for the civilised world and common sense.
It turns out that rage works just as well as hope. Perhaps even better. It is surprisingly polite and does not dazzle... We do not take into account short outbursts of anger. We acknowledge them but do not count them. Rage is an unquenchable, constant fire. It is cold. The same one that, in Shevchenko's words, "holds no terror for this brood."
The warrior said:
I don't mix love and rage anymore. At first, there was still that cocktail. And now they are in separate compartments. As if some wall has been built. A strange feeling. But noticeable. It's not always possible to reach love, but if I do, it's pure, like the face of our unit's mouse-hunting cat after cleaning itself. Rage comes easier. Good, quality, and, most importantly, targeted. It has become much more convenient. But I can't give the recipe, I don't know myself how it turned out that way.
***
The advantage of my present is that I have time to fix something. Not everything and not with everyone. But...
But I can write this text. I can put a full stop where I want. Where I can...
The advantage of our common present is that we have a tomorrow. That Ukraine has a tomorrow. It has a future. And we can argue, quarrel, get angry, and discuss what we want it to look like.
But this future will always lack some full stops. It will be dotted – it is already dotted – with hundreds of phone numbers and social media pages that have been forever silenced.
Dotted...
Sown. The future is sown with them.
Then my words scatter like my thoughts. They are not at attention or at ease, they do not care about the commander. Or me...
I do not like the game "catch my own words" because I do not know how to do it correctly.
Let me pose a few questions.
About why poetry is possible after Bucha and why, as it turns out, it is the only thing possible?
About how many "Hitlers" humanity is ready to sleep through in order to preserve the phantom status quo?
Is it only about Ukrainians, or do all free people preserve their dignity on the hills of black jokes?
Do dogs and cats go to heaven? If so, has Crimea the dog found his family?
If "dehumanization" means fighting against murderers and torturers, bringing aid to the front, burying friends, relatives and children, donating to the army and laughing when enemies are killed, can my dear people and I not "humanize" back? At least until our victory?
Is singing along to air raid sirens a sign of psychosis or a good musical exercise?
When some people measure their salaries with tourniquets, while others measure their salaries with thermal imagers, is it about social inequality or invincible solidarity?
"I'm giving away combat boots. They have not been worn for long, but they are in good condition." Is this about the winner of a short story competition or about grief that does not require any further explanation?
Why, instead of tears, which should have been in your throat, did a scream settle there?
And instead of words, how about a scream, too?
Footnotes
- ^ This is an important day of mourning for Orthodox Christians, when they believe the soul finally goes to the heavenly kingdom, leaving everything earthly and gaining eternal peace.
- ^ Ukrainian for "fucking Russians."
- ^ Ukrainian for "cotton," used to describe attacks within Russian territory.
- ^ "Beloved" in Ukrainian, used only for one's spouse or partner.
- ^ A Ukrainian folk saying about dullness.
- ^ A playful Ukrainian folk saying that is used to convey you are leaving.
- ^ A Ukrainian folk saying to convey that someone unexpectedly attacked another person.
- ^ Ukrainian folk saying to expresses strong dissatisfaction, disapproval of something.
Olena Stiazhkina
Historian, publicist
Kyiv
Historian, writer, Doctor of Science in History, Professor, leading researcher at the Institute of History of Ukraine, National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine. She researches women's history, social history, and the history of Soviet everyday life. Member of PEN Ukraine.
Translated from Ukrainian by Yulia Lyubka and Kate Tsurkan.
The "War Is… Ukrainian Writers on Living Through Catastrophe" essay project is created with the support of Ukrainian Jewish Encounter (UJE), a Canadian charitable non-profit organization.
