By Viktoriia Grivina
I’ve recently been told about the novel Unterstadt, in which Croatian writer Ivana Šojat writes about returning to her hometown of Osijek after the Balkan Wars. She walks from the station, recalling places that have been wiped out by the artillery, and with each step the city of her childhood is slowly erased by the vision of a new city, carrying a bitter realization that nothing is in its place and nothing will ever be in its place again. I haven’t read the full novel as it hasn’t been translated yet, but I’ve read parts of it as I walked with the guide alongside the contemporary city. Similarly, in fragments, I saw my own city, Kharkiv, being bombed live by Russian aircrafts and shelled by Russian artillery. I watched short videos and newsreels, and as they piled on and on, the city that I left only one month before the full-scale invasion became history.
I remember leaving Kharkiv on a cold January day of 2022, hungover from the party and art exhibition from the night before. When the plane took off from the Kharkiv airport to a layover in Istanbul, tears ran down my cheeks, and I couldn’t explain these unexpected, bizarre slurp of emotions and mostly slept through the other flight.
I was a thousand miles away when the full-scale invasion began. I knew the facts. I saw the videos. I knew which of my favorite places ceased to exist, what parts of the city were being erased, from day to day. But as long as I was far away, my city was still there, and the news remained a big Truman Show-style illusion.
For the first time in my life, I didn’t want to come back home. The destiny of Ivana Šojat haunted me. To see it with my own eyes would make it real. To come back would mean to ruin the city that I knew forever. I didn’t want the war to be real. Didn’t want to see the destroyed Palace of Labour, a grand 1914 Art Nouveau construction that used to connect two historical streets with the arched courtyard. In my mind that building was still there, enveloped in a busy humdrum of passersby and trams, with its herb apothecary, sneaker-repair shop and cafe, and offices of murky NGOs. At one insane moment a year before, I was thinking of buying one of those tiny condos rebuilt from the former communal flats on the upper floor of the Palace. I did not want to see those last floors gone, the broken windows and the smell of the graveyard cold that comes out of the abandoned houses. Six months before the full-scale invasion, I stood on the observation deck of the twelfth floor of an iconic modernist skyscraper, Derzhprom, and looked at my city of 1.5 million residents underneath, thinking that it could only get better from here.
The pulsating ache of not knowing was, however, stronger. On June 1, 2022 my international passport was stamped, and the train slowly rolled across the Hungarian border. “Is it Ukraine, Mom?” The girl on the seat in front asked, and when the mom said yes, I noticed Ukrainian number plates on the cars waiting at the railway crossing. Strangely, the earth did not explode, the sky didn’t turn black, and no sirens could be heard. War is not a cinematic apocalypse; it
crawls into you slowly. The air outside was as summery and hot as in Budapest, and the only sign of home was that the train stopped short before the actual platform, and people spilled out across the dusty rails and onto the familiar streets of Mukachevo. A friend from Kharkiv who came to the platform missed me and when we finally met on a scalding dusty street, she asked if I wanted “local food” or “normal food.” The big city snobbery resurfaced, and so we went to “the only place they serve decent coffee.” It felt like home—we walked and commented on the plurality of secondhand stores selling European stock from last year’s collections, on how one can live in a place with no metro and no sushi and boutique wine cafes. But most importantly, I heard about Kharkiv firsthand. My friend’s face changed when she learned I was coming to Kharkiv. It was clear she did not feel she could ever come back. There was horror and envy in her eyes.
I explained that coming back had become my idée fixe precisely because I couldn’t live in the suspended state, where Kharkiv, like a Schrödinger cat, was both alive and dead. During that first week, I called my dad hysterically (a big setback after having spent a lifetime on establishing a limit of two calls per week), and demanded reports on what blew up where and how many of our relatives got shelled or trapped in the occupied territories. I started to care about everyone, including the lady my mom had befriended once a long time ago when she’d come to sell us milk. Our small, comfortable world of weekend drives to the countryside, fishing on Donets River and visiting a horde of distant family I hardly remembered, became as fragile as a china tea set, driven over by a Russian tank.
The images of the bombs thrown on the historical center of Kharkiv kept rolling on repeat on major channels across the world, but I skipped them whenever they appeared. I watched the explosion of the regional governmental building once, after which my hands started to tremble. In those first most horrible weeks, ideas popped up in my mind. To return immediately. Drop the PhD that I’d started at a British university, cross the border, cut the endless tide of refugees fleeing the Ukrainian East. Come to witness and live through the last days of my city, and go down with it, like the Trojans once did if we believe Homer. At the same time, I didn’t feel like dying. In fact, I’ve never wanted to survive so very much. Perhaps because after the initial fears, it soon became clear that the Kharkiv region would stand. I especially wanted to live so that I could see the last Russian leave its borders.
Everything about the invasion was Orwellian. Russians were orcs, and, funnily, they called us “elves” to show the effeminate nature of our society, weak in their eyes, because we did not have a cult of a half-naked sixty-year-old dictator on a horse like they did, in a very manly “orc” kind of style.
The city met me with 90-degree temperatures, boiling sun-dried streets, and hot winds that came from the steppe. I was supposed to go straight to the underground beneath the station and take a metro. It was bizarre that Dad didn’t meet me as usual on the platform. It was too dangerous, as the train stations were being targeted by Russian missiles. I touched the cold metal of the metro door handle and stopped. I reversed, and walked out. Walking through the city was the
way I appropriated it, made it my own. The taxi drivers shouted out the names of the streets that they were brave enough to bring you to. I walked past them and dipped into an old nineteenth-century market neighborhood. A car stopped, and the military asked if I needed help getting anywhere. I shrugged, “No”. The suitcase only looked big, but wasn’t heavy. Definitely lighter than my nerves.
The first thing you notice in a Ukrainian city close to the frontline is the taped windows. In the early days, locals got their hands on any Scotch Tape they could find. The patterns and multi-colored tape could be seen all around, as if we had a new festival. The tape didn’t prevent the window from breaking, but helped to stop the shards of glass from spilling on the people inside.
Kharkiv was quiet, taped. In some places I saw traces of shells. In others, traces of gunshots. Not everything was on the news.
Quiet and demure, with distant artillery work, Kharkiv stopped being the city I had once known, my default perfect city. But walking down its streets, alone, but for an occasional person who tried to offer me help—everyone offered help in those days—I also felt relief. For months, the city had been chasing me in dreams and memories and daydreams, and finally, as I walked through its damaged hurting body, it stopped being the painful David Lynch kind of space, the red room in my nightmares. It was still Kharkiv. I took a metro ride to the station where Dad was waiting for me. The house smelled the same, of tomatoes and soap that mom loves to buy in bulk.
On a jog the next morning, I saw the shell wounds of the house. The ground floor balcony was gone and our neighbor was injured in one of the attacks. Everyone I met as I walked down in my pink jogging pants said hello. Neighbors talked to one another and discussed the particularities of heavy weapon shipping to the country. Shop assistants talked about S-300 missiles and that it was a bad year for cucumbers. Suddenly, the entire city became gentler to one another, holding the doors, saying sorry, trying their best to smile at strangers.
Suddenly the city was more alive than I’d ever remembered. My friends laughed louder, and went to all the cultural events, and every reopening of a cafe, and even the literary snobs who used to never remember my name hugged me on the streets. And I hugged the damaged Palace of Labour, and stroked its fractured walls. It wasn’t that bad, I suddenly realized. Kharkiv became a street cat that got out of a fight with a pack of dogs. Its ears were torn in each and every place, and its gaze got weird and rough, but it got out alive. Elves and hobbits walked its streets. And I got a strange tingling wish to smoke a pipe when I saw them and smiled at them.
I cried through the quiet night on a sleeper train that was taking me away back to the West. Tears, involuntarily, again rolled down a freshly washed train pillowcase, and got into my ears and headphones, making strange messy puddles in my braids. In a next-door compartment, women from Mariupol exchanged the news of the occupying army who raided their flats. I cried like a thief, quietly, guilty of happiness that my city was still “ours,” that every enemy soldier who
tried to walk into it was dead and silent, and would never be able to tell their friends and family of how they “took the city.” I tried not to sob too loud.