by Zhenya Berezhnaya
translated from the Russian by Anne O. Fisher
The English translations of the excerpts were made possible thanks to the support of the WE EXIST! Foundation
The war begins
February 2022, Kyiv
Early morning on February twenty-fourth. I’m sleeping a troubled sleep in a rented apartment in Kyiv. Last night I had heart pains and had to call the doctor. I was texting back and forth with my Moscow friends after Putin’s speech, and they were reassuring me: Never, Zhenya… Never, under any circumstances, even the most calamitous, is it possible in the year two thousand twenty-two for there to be a war. Not in Ukraine, in the middle of Europe, not in the city we strolled in one October night, warming our lips and bellies with drunken cherries, not after waltzing in jackets, berets, and the gathering evening, shadows bobbing in sloshed curtseys.
Remember the gilt foil of chestnut leaves underneath our feet, Zhenya… In the sonorous autumn silence their rasping reverberated like a church bell. The sky glowed the blue of the cupolas of Volodymyrskyi Cathedral, which always reminded me of a refuge for astrologers and rebellious fire spirits. There’s a reason its entrance is guarded by a terrible Angel of Justice holding a scale, as wroth as Lucifer… No, Zhenya. No war.
Here’s a street musician singing like Orpheus, fingers caressing his strings. Your favorite metro station, Golden Gate. From there go past the statue of Yaroslav the Wise—oh, those Mongol cheekbones!—and quick, up on your steed and race off, all the way to the Saint Sophia bell tower, wrapped in pale-blue satin and fine lace. What’s in your heart, beautiful lady?
Masks, acanthus leaves, curly-headed cupids, eagles, medallions, clusters of grapes…
Is the God you believe in the right one?
I believe as best I can… Look, if you doubt me, here’s Volodymyr Svyatoslavych, Grand Prince of Kyiv, who Christianized himself and his people in 988; and Apostle Andrew the First-Called; and Timothy; and the Archangel Raphael… Look on them, Zhenya, and believe: on no account will there be war…
Then keep going, out past the restrained monastery of St. Michael, but first stop for a minute to admire the velvety green of the copper cap of Bohdan-Zynovii Mykhaylovych Khmelnytskyi, Hetman of the Zaporizhzhia Host, and then down Volodymyrska Hill… The Dnipro rolls and splashes the way it did hundreds of centuries ago. What’s in the oozy depths between its banks? Ferries, Viking longships, other foreign vessels?
Then through Artists Alley to Andriivskyi Descent. Gorgeous wreaths, dotted with viburnum as though with blood, all embroidered with ribands of red roses and laces blue as cornflowers. White folk blouses with artful satin stitches and the most delicate, fine cross-stitch: red, black, red, black… Pottery, fired on Great Friday before Easter in the enormous bonfire on Bald Mountain, mustard-yellow and so rough it tickles. Drink what you wish, be it coffee, or willow-weed tea, or cocoa from the Maysternya—the Lviv Chocolate Workshop—at 2B Andriivskyi Descent.
Embroidered towels, shoulder bags, bead necklaces… Stroke the fabric, flirting, as you turn this way and that before the mirror, staring into it as though it were a picture of ancient and young Kyiv, all breathing-whispering-guffawing in your face. Where stone-by-stone stand princely palaces, caustic Gothic, Ukrainian Baroque… where layer-upon-layer are stamped, in plastic and concrete, the lanes’ outlines… Is this not life, the tremulous lightness of being?
Cut it out, dummy, and sleep easy; in this day and age, how could there be war?
But carefree sleep evades me. In the pre-dawn chill a terrible ringing bursts out: my sister- and mother-in-law. Kharkiv. Get up, Zhenya, your world has ended. What has started is war.
* * *
It takes me half an hour to get my go bag together. Passports, money, medication, laptop with everything I’ve written and accumulated, hard drive, cords, contact lenses—I’d just ordered a new set the night before—and the deed for the apartment, the first one we’ve owned together: a fourth-floor apartment in Vynohradar, almost seventy square meters of hygge, light, and beauty, with an entryway, a bathtub, two toilets, a spacious open-concept kitchen for cooking together and welcoming cherished guests… I will never get it. On March twenty-ninth there will be no keys, no champagne, no smell of concrete floors or just-whitewashed walls. No tears of amazement that we really have our own little home.
How little did I know… I have no idea what’s going on, I shove the papers into the rear compartment of the backpack. Then a flashlight, pads, a change of underwear. Two bottles of water. Bananas (I hate them!)—eighty-nine calories per hundred grams, easy to swallow, even if my throat’s spasming, if I’m having bouts of nausea.
My e-reader, my husband’s tablet. Symbols of a past life where there were both texts and films. A taser. How does it work? Take it out of the case and press the button if there’s shooting, if fragments of Russian missiles blacken your windows and the walls of buildings crumble and fold like children’s accordion books… Press it until the electric crackling drowns out the people shouting, the volleys of automatic rifle fire, and the rumbling of armored personnel carriers out past the Obolon district that’s coming ever closer… the Ring road, the medical clinic… baboom and the balcony-box flowers are flattened.
And now the cats: litter box, litter, dishes, toys, food… Blankets, so Ishtar doesn’t freeze, and carriers. Sigurd is a Turkish Angora, his thick fur coat hasn’t started shedding yet in February. But Ishtar’s a Bengal, with a muscular body, a massive head, strong paws and a very short coat; she catches cold and gets UTIs at the drop of a hat. How do I give her pills or shots in a bomb shelter?
I’m also afraid of UTIs. A bladder infection last year was torture: burning, nausea, a temperature of almost forty degrees Celsius, an ambulance, two weeks in bed. To keep that nightmare from repeating itself—but what do you know about horrors, Zhenya?—I get my husband and myself warm sleeping bags, and sweaters, and wool socks. They’ll keep us out of trouble. Until the trouble grows as big as the universe.
You were offered the chance to evacuate, though, two weeks ago, to Lviv, or Sweden: pack your bags, turn off the boiler, finish the borscht, rotate the water shutoff valve 90 degrees to protect the neighbors from flood and flame. I didn’t protect them. I went to see a movie based on an Agatha Christie novel and bought a new dress, flowers, and a tablecloth with lemons on it.
So now rush around, half asleep, shaken out of your body by air strikes and the scarlet glow of missiles: dawn before dawn on the left bank of the Dnipro.
Shock (not panic), suffocation, nausea. My heart spasming, booming in my throat. I make myself swallow it back down so I don’t throw it up and flush it down the toilet. Not a single tear in my eyes. Kyiv, Odesa, Kharkiv, they’re shooting at military targets, airports, anti-aircraft systems. But not at civilian people, right? Not at people!?
The news starts coming in by seven am. The Russian Federation, an attack, proceed immediately to a bomb shelter at the sound of sirens… I’m googling feverishly: boiler rooms, basements, parking structures. There are multicolored spots in my eyes. The cats are on a rampage; the conclusion is to leave them in the apartment. My husband’s family in Kharkiv will cram the car to the brim and sit in a traffic jam, trying to get out of town.
I feel around for my former voice in the depths of my petrified throat. I call my Kyiv friends.
“Anya, you okay… Go bag, money, medications, change of underwear, passports… Sasha will take care of Ginny, he gets along with the dog… It shook here, too, don’t be afraid of anything, go to Kropyvnytskyi… Listen to the sirens, answer your phone…”
By eight we’re loaded down with bags and heading out to the parking garage. The map indicates it’s the closest bomb shelter. Freezing cold, twilight. Relief at the thought that diplomatic negotiations will end this soon. But for now, rest on this rolled-up sleeping bag, I’ll keep watch. But don’t sit too far from the entrance: if you’re buried in rubble you’ll suffocate before the rescuers can get through the pulverized concrete.
I sleep clutching my backpack and hear bawling. In Kyiv, Odesa, Kharkiv, airplanes are burning. There’s nowhere to fly out from. The siren howls every twenty minutes. The sun’ll be up soon and I’ll call home. Mom, mama dear, everything’s okay here. Not a word about the shot-down shell still streaking over Yordanska and Darnytsia. Nothing to be afraid of, I’m underneath four meters of concrete and rebar. It’s safe here, and a hop, skip, and a jump from home. My husband and I will take turns checking the cats and calling home. I have my taser and my Pfizer covid booster. I’m not going to die of disease, mama dear, I’m going to die from something else.
* * *
A waking nightmare, cyclical, hypnotic, as thickly sticky as tar on fresh asphalt: can’t wash it off, can’t scrape it away. Home—parking garage—home—parking garage. We move in short bursts, to signal our parents that we’re still here, to have some kefir, to feed the unkempt, agitated cats.
Three times we unload our huge duffel bags in the hallway, pull off our jeans and sweaters, and flop onto the disheveled bed. sending off. But the siren steals away our sleep, our just-achieved body heat, heartbeat, hunger and thirst.
We wake up (panicked): shake a leg, get underground! The ninth floor — If it catches us, the damn thing’ll vaporize us, fry us worse than a snail in full sun!
And where is that sun, now you’re yearning for it? The cold’s numbing my fingers, neither blankets nor thermal underwear are helping. The acrid fumes of the parking garage and the caustic air scour my throat down to a hoarse rasp. I cough. I choke down bananas. But at least I’m not dozing off.
Late that evening we read about the first buildings that were hit, the first casualties. There are more people underground, curfew’s harsher. As soon as it starts getting dark, turn off the light and don’t go wandering around town! The Russians are right here, they’ll hear you, smell you, they’ll come and find you, capture you, kill you…
We take the cats to the shelter. We wrap hard plastic in synthetic blankets, plug up the holes in their carriers to keep the cold air out. Sigurd is resigned; a former stray picked up on the street, now he’s out on the street again. He bears it without complaint, warmed by my breath. But Ishtar’s from a breeder, from affluence; she is terrified, trembling and spitting.
I can’t help myself. I go to where the guard has her storeroom. It’s not a room, it’s a closet, people are packed in there like mourners crammed into a crypt at a burial service: mothers with small children and babies, everyone taking turns sleeping on a cot in the corner while the rest huddle around the radio. The station hisses and snivels funereally. But it’s warm enough to induce a stupor. The old stove crackles like that alchemical vessel: the light bulb. We had one like it when I was little. But I put a blanket on it, by accident, just a dumb mistake, and the fabric caught fire. That stove’s been put away—far away—ever since. This one’s here wheezing and smoldering, though; hope no harm comes of it!
I step carefully in and close the door firmly behind me so as not to let the stifling heat out. The owner-slash-guard, wrapped down to her brows in a black shawl, pokes the jaundiced mask of her face at me. “Whaddaya want?”
“Good evening to you, Auntie, I’m sorry for the bother. Let me bring in my cat to get warm. She’s friendly. Outside it’s cold, and there’s shooting. See how she’s shaking?”
Her eyes, like little coals, blaze up and her thread-thin lips flush with blood.
“Come in, little daughter, why wouldn’t we let you in? But you, how are you faring? What with the IFVs, and February, and the Grads, and the bouts of nausea, and the chills, and the ballistic missiles?”
“Take the cat. She’s got no undercoat, she’ll catch a chill by morning.”
“Won’t you freeze to death yourself? On the bare concrete, in a bunker, in a crowded train station, in an ice-cold train car, in a summerhouse, where the window in the door isn’t glassed-in, and frost furs the inside of the veranda walls, and snowdrifts, those dismal heaps, are high as the windowsills?”
I remain silent.
“You should stay with us… There’s a cot curtained off in the corner. It’s narrow, but if you lie quietly, it’ll do. And don’t read about torn-off arms or legs, or signs saying ‘Children’ on ruins heaped with dusty concrete rubble, or the tortured and raped, or grandma’s house, the one you grew up in, that doesn’t exist anymore…”
The stove’s dying. The stale air condenses and crushes me like a heavy slab… I don’t see the curtain, or the women sitting bent double on stools; all I see are figures with black pits for eyes and mouths. With my heel I feel for the door.
“Take Ishtar in, please. Until morning, just for a time… But I’m leaving…”
“Go,” the guard says, bored, waving her hand at me dismissively. She flips the antique stove’s switch off and on. “Shut the door tight! It’ll let in a draft, and there’s kids here!”
* * *
Morning without morning. The cold and dark are marbled with a thin, pale damp that makes you go blind and deaf, that makes you lose your sense of time and space.
From the stress—don’t sleep, keep watch over your backpack, stretch your legs, don’t slide down the wall to the floor—my hip muscles and the muscles along my spine ache. Every single organ in my body is nauseous; my heart, my stomach, my liver; but I’m not afraid of throwing up, I don’t have the strength to retch.
“Stop, that’s enough!” yowls Sigurd, who’s gone off the deep end.
He tore up his nose on the metal grate of his cat box, he broke off his whiskers, his paws claw out through the cage. He wants to eat, and drink, and go to the bathroom, and get under the bed, so he can be warm and quiet, with no roaring engines, no screeching motorcycles, no panicked voices. Sigurd wants to go home.
Me too.
“We’re getting the cats out of here…” I try to stand up, but the walls buckle and the floor heaves in waves. “And we’ll make some fresh tea. The tea in our thermos is cold…”
“And then?”
“The basement of the sixteen-story building. There are pipes there with hot water, they’ll warm us…”
“What if they burst? Will we be drowned?”
“We’ll be drowned.”
“In boiling water?”
“In boiling water.”
“And there’s only one way out?”
“Only one. But lay down by a concrete wall. That’s safer…”
We haul Sigurd and the sleepy Ishtar to the apartment, boil some water, grab a sleeping mat and a bunch of bananas and move into the basement. A day…
The concrete walls are all taken. The place is full to bursting; to get to the exit we have to crawl through blind alleys and byways, tracing along tendons of batting-wrapped pipes. We look for a roof window, just in case, so our shouting can be heard by rescuers, and spread out our sleeping bags by a brick wall… We’ll be fine, this building’s in the middle of a courtyard, it’s not likely to get hit…
The basement has its own microcosm. People have made themselves at home, furnished with makeshift creature comforts: pallets, pillows, and rugs, giant plaid plastic storage bags of food, canvas folding chairs, kettles, lamps, crackers, house slippers, jam. You go up the stairs to go out for a smoke, to read the news, to listen to the siren and the shooting in the Minsk apartment blocks.
I pull my knees to my chest and try to exhale, I try to feel my shoulders and chest and lower back, so I can relax them so I can get a little sleep. But my body is clenched, disobedient.
* * *
Russian troops are landing in Obolon and automatic rifles are thundering while I’m talking to my mom. Rat-a-tat-tat, bold and angry, just like in the movies, the only difference being that this chatter is coming from near the story where I used to buy my bread, fresh-baked Belorussky or Yurievsky, half a loaf, sliced. And a cream horn.
“Zhenechka, what’s that?”
“A little boy brought his toy fire engine to the basement with him, he’s rolling it around and scaring people…”
I’m not lying. I’m just not telling the whole story. Some little boy really is playing with a red fire truck. The basement’s going pale, bemoaning the beeping and dinging, but it can’t find the words to explain that this is a bad toy. If you grow up, little boy, if your parents don’t take you away to hide in your grandma’s village, in Irpen or Bucha, you will remember the sound of sirens and you won’t play with it again.
But what could happen is your car gets shot as you’re leaving Kyiv, or a rocket catches you at the train station as you’re standing on the tracks, right before departure, waiting to board the Kyiv—Ivano-Frankivsk evacuation express. A mass of metal, bone, and blood, drops dripping from demolished train cars…
No! Don’t listen to furious shushes! Be a fireman, a doctor, a rescue worker—whatever you want to be, once you’re grown up. With no rockets, no flattened trains, far, far in the future… what do you want to be?
* * *
From the outside, the war is horrifying, shocking in its mercilessness. But from the inside, it loses its abstraction, breaking down into a series of concrete events and sensations, usually physical, that are devoid of the grand emotions you have while discussing it after a good meal, at home, sitting back on the couch, feet snuggled in slippers, pillow tucked tight by your side.
Constant cold and the absence of sleep are what make my first days of war horrible. And the more the sirens roar over Kyiv, the more my reality distorts in my overloaded brain.
“Maybe—just let them shoot?” I think. I’ve torn away from my body and am looking down from the basement ceiling at myself, curled tight into an embryo, with ski pants, mittens, and a hat pulled all the way down to my nose, on a haphazard pallet of blankets and sleeping bags. “They won’t kill us all at once. They won’t kill us for laying down to sleep.”
“But what if we’re hit?” I argue with myself. “There’s Ukrainian air-defense systems on the Northern Bridge, they’re a hop, skip, and a missile from home – one volley and they’ll wipe Yordanska off the face of the earth, and your sleeping self with it…”
Another day or two without rest and that thought won’t alarm me, but so long as I still have strength, I hold my life dearer than sleep.
I get up and pester my husband.
“We’ve got forty minutes until curfew begins. We’re grabbing our things and the cats and hustling over to the bunker under your office. There’s electricity there, and water, and cell phone reception, and familiar faces and guards… At least some sense of definition, the illusion of an anchor…”
It takes some doing to find a taxi. The bridges are closed, and Kyiv is crawling with vehicles, ours and the enemy’s. Not everybody’s willing to risk it. But if you multiply the standard taxi rate by six, or let’s say ten, it takes the edge off the danger. And now here we are, ready to head out, after stuffing the trunk with backpacks and bags and the back seat with ourselves and the cats.
“We’re taking the courtyards,” the driver warns us, turning off Stepan Bandera Avenue into the murk of back alleys. “There’s a checkpoint on the main road, soldiers won’t let us through.”
We agree wordlessly, scanning for tanks and rocket launchers amid the alienating mid-rises, their power cut after the alarm signal. But there’s nothing like that out there. The streets are deserted, like a set after a film shoot. If I had known I’d be seeing those buildings for the last time, I’d have been kinder to them, I wouldn’t have muttered about how buckled the pavement was, or how musty the entryways were, or how badly the peeling walls were graffitied.
But I don’t know that tomorrow I’ll leave Kyiv. That I’ll never again catch a storm on the balcony of my Obolon apartment, I’ll never settle in the windowsill with the cats to bask in the sunshine. And that’s why I’m longing to slip through the side streets’ crooked crosshatching, and descend to the under-office bunker—which is protected, and fully equipped—and turn off.
After the compulsory sleeplessness and permafrost of the parking garage, this new refuge is like paradise. There are hammocks with spreader bars, there’s electricity, there’s radio and internet and a bathroom and hot food! And in the intervals between sirens you can run upstairs to the office and get clean the shower!
We billet the cats in my husband’s office, setting up their litter boxes and food dishes and arranging their toys so they’ll sleep more soundly shut in behind sheetrock. The cats are unhappy, it’s cramped and stuffy, and you can hear the alarm signals more. I feel bad leaving them, but if I don’t sleep right this second, if I don’t take out the contacts which have permanently adhered to my eyeballs, I will lose my sight and my mind. And then Ishtar and Sigurd will no longer have an owner who can protect them.
So I head to the shower, ignoring the shriek of the siren, peel the silicon hydrogel from my irises and pupils, boil up some Mivina instant noodle soup, drink two spoonfuls of bouillon, gag and struggle not to vomit, and eventually flush the soup down the toilet. I tumble into a hammock and wrap myself in my sleeping bag.
A minute later the room lights go out and the radio is turned off. The only sound is the guys from the Territorial Defense patrolling the halls. I’m supposed to be able to sleep better because of their helmets and armored vests, because of the automatic rifles in their hands. But I squeeze my eyes shut even tighter so I don’t see the bayonets, extending like a shadow over the defenders’ shoulders.
Their gear jingles: clink-clank.
Tomorrow will be a new day. Then we will figure out what to do. But for now, best to disappear. There’s no me until morning—I’m invisible. Just a vigilant territorial defense fighter who’ll check whether my breathing’s even and tuck in my blanket to keep me warm. There are a lot of cold nights in my future.
Wearing Ophelia’s Dress
September 2022, Darmstadt
Mom’s going home: the double-decker shuttle bus, conversing in whispers so as not to take the children, the border, the middle-of-the-night document check, the air raid zones on the Ukrainian map in all possible shades of red, messages in Viber, Telegram, WhatsApp.
I’m going to Darmstadt for meet my colleagues from PEN for the first time, and to read an excerpt of a pre-war piece that has been translated into German for me, and to mingle with writers and curators, and get into the flow of the literary scene.
I’ve been sieved into reflexes and sensations: if it hurts, run; if it’s pointless, cry—because of the empty space where the fields used to blaze gold, where the stirring scarlet of poppies used to flow along the earth.
My breather’s over. Again I have to search for a roof over my head, live in anxiety, watch a world built of sunbeams melt away… The Müller family got back from their trip and made an announcement: they want to remodel the room I’m using immediately and let a relative who’s moving to Berlin stay in it. Heinz needs space for his brewing, and the kids need to be able to go through the cabinets without me complaining, and Beate needs to be able to store old clothes and furniture. And on top of that, her mother and friends are coming soon, and where are they supposed to go, if not the guest bedroom? Basically, it’s unclear what exactly the Müllers are going to do with the space, but I have to free it up.
Anya is going back to Poland.
I try to discuss the reasons for their decision, remind them they’d promised a year, explain that I refused a PEN apartment, and now it’s not easy to find a new one in Berlin, overfull as it is with refugees. Beata softens: “We aren’t turning you out immediately. It’s important to use that you get settled. Here, see, my coworker’s got a place for rent in Pankow, furnished. A thousand Euros a month, plus two thousand for the deposit.”
I don’t have three thousand Euros. My PEN insurance, like my stipend, only goes to the end of December.
Beate nods consolingly. “If you don’t want Pankow, look somewhere else. There’s a huge variety out there on the internet. There’s subsidized housing, too.”
She won’t understand that without papers, or an income, or the support of a job center, no landlord will take me seriously.
Heinz is not interested in my difficulties. He stopped speaking to me or calling me to dinner after he got back from their trip, and if I happen to encounter him in the kitchen, he shoves my pasta off the stove in irritation: you can finish boiling it after we’ve eaten!
The kids pick up where their father left off: they come into my room without asking, even when I’m home, and go through my things, and leave the door to the back yard open. Sigurd escapes a couple of times and it takes me hours, until midnight, to find him.
Heinz smirks as he sips his beer: “It’s my house; I do what I want. If you don’t like it, lock the cats up.”
I find Sigurd in a tree next door. His tail is covered in burrs, his whiskers are all slimy, and his claws are broken. I lock him and Ishtar up. The cats don’t understand why they used to be able to go out of the room but now they can’t. They protest, and rattle the door at night, and shred the wallpaper along the doorframe. Heinz curses from the third floor. To calm the cats down, I take turns holding and petting them until four a.m. I stop sleeping.
Suddenly our safe bedroom constricts to the size of a prison cell. We feel rejected, unloved, banished to the storage closet because we were bad.
I don’t know what I did wrong, but I’m definitely the problem here. Because people who’ve been close to me—my ex-husband, his family, the Müllers—they can’t all just abandon me, one after the other, with no warning, they can’t be that disappointed for no reason.
Will PEN pay for another place to live for the remaining four months? Will they even accept me for resettlement if I have two cats? And what am I supposed to do after that?
I don’t have enough German to get a job, and without a job I can’t rent anything. The vicious circle is locked shut; my hands and feet have gone to sleep; my throat seizes up in a spasm, I can’t eat or breathe… Again… How many more kilos can I lose before I stop having my period?
