The Ukrainian writer Sergei Gerasimov lives with his wife in the center of the embattled frontline city of Kharkiv. He sends his “Notes from the War” from her apartment in a high-rise building.
Clothes of a family who fled from the East hang in Lviv, April 3, 2022.
The man is tall and heavy. His cheeks are red. He has a big dog that looks like a German shepherd. The animal is leashed but not muzzled. It has the broad smile of a perfect pacifist and kind eyes that say, “My humans do something good for me every minute. What could it be this time: a treat, a toy, a tummy rub?”
It’s so strange to see a dog that big wearing a sweater like he’s a chihuahua.
“His back is burned,” explains the red-cheeked man.
The man says it’s not his dog and then tells how he found the animal two weeks ago while fleeing Saltowka. He and several other people ran to her car to save her life. When they saw a dog coming towards them, they got scared, because wild dogs attack everything that moves. The dog was as big as a wolf and looked ready to attack.
The man stopped and got ready to defend himself, but when the dog approached, he fell on the asphalt in front of him and clutched the man’s legs with his front paws. He didn’t want to let go of the man.
“It was like that,” says the man, making a big gesture with his hands that shows how the dog hugged him. The dog sits on the snow all the time, his eyes following his master’s face and hands. When he realizes we’re talking about him, he smiles even wider, his behind starts to squirm, and he pats his tail on the snow a few times.
“So I had to take him with me,” says the man. He then goes on to say that after they got home, the dog crouched in a corner and stayed there for two days. He whimpered all the time, day and night. Then he got better and came into the kitchen to be fed.
“My wife gave him a boiled potato first,” says the man.
But the dog must have lived in a rich family before, so he didn’t know what a potato was. He didn’t even sniff it.
The man who was eating a boiled egg found he couldn’t swallow it. He took the egg out of his mouth and gave it to his wife to feed the dog.
“I’d rather starve myself,” says the man, and the dog pats his tail on the snow because he knows we’re talking about him. The dog doesn’t have a name yet.
We’re in line at a drugstore. Someone has placed a small wooden chair in front of the door. The red-faced man sits heavily on it and explains that his feet are frostbitten and he cannot stand for long. I see that the laces of his boots have been torn and his feet are swollen. He says it’s a result of recently standing in line at another drugstore that lasted two days.
I don’t believe him at first, but he explains that the line was three hours long the first day and six hours the second day.
“That was the next day after they started the bombing,” says the man. «First I went to a ‘rust’ supermarket. When I was there, suddenly there was a loud bang and the light went out.”
He says there were a lot of people inside, probably hundreds, but nobody said a word. Everyone stood silently in the complete darkness and listened to what was happening outside. Then the computers booted up again, and a few minutes later the overhead light came on again. People started talking to each other. Then another bomb fell and there was no more light.
At that moment, the man thought he might need some emergency medicine just in case, and decided to queue at the nearest pharmacy. That was a wrong decision, because in the end he had frozen his feet off.
When the man has finished speaking, the dog comes to him, puts his head on his knee, closes his eyes and floats in the seventh heaven of dogs. The man runs his hand down his neck.
To person
Sergei Gerasimov – psychologist and novelist
Sergei Vladimirovich Gerasimov was born in Kharkiv in 1964. He is a citizen of Ukraine. He studied psychology in his hometown in the early 1990s and later authored a psychology textbook for schools and a book on psychology in relationships. He is the author of several scientific articles on cognitive activities. He is also a novelist and translates poetry. One of his specialties is science fiction. For a long time, his books could also be published by the largest publishing houses in Russia, such as AST and Eksmo. The stories and poems, written in English, have been printed in numerous English-language journals. Gerasimov and his wife live in the center of Kharkiv in an apartment on the third floor of a high-rise building. From there he sends his “notes from the war” as long as the internet connection allows it.
Translated from the English by Andreas Breitenstein.