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.
A gas pipeline in Kharkiv caught fire from Russian shelling.
Late in the evening I visit a neighbor. Her door is five meters from mine, but now those meters are so dark that for a brief moment I feel blind. Then I look to the right and see terrible stars watching me through the big window.
They are as numerous as the sand on the seashore. There are so many that I can hardly make out the shapes of the constellations. The whole sky is on fire and it doesn’t look like the inside of a black dome with a few shiny dots like it used to look like. Now the sky has depth and I can see that depth is infinite because it is infinitely clear.
Real stars are mesmerizing. But when are they real? At least not if you’re in a city. Not when you’re on the river and night falls and you’re so far from human habitation that you can’t see any lights at all. There’s always a lantern or a campfire on the riverbank or hot ashes shimmering like a distant city as seen from an airplane at night so that the stars fade.
The last time I saw real stars, unpolluted by human light, was fifty years ago, on a winter night in a village in the Kursk region. I remember them as if it were yesterday, or maybe not really them but the feeling they made me feel, the feeling that Vincent van Gogh was trying to capture in his paintings. Back when I was a little boy, I caught my breath as I felt its nebula lit up by starlight. And when the fog cleared, I could see what real stars really look like.
Now I feel almost the same. The night air is so clear. The snow has melted in the courtyards and on the streets, and everything under the sky appears porous black, smooth black, or just pitch black. The walls of the buildings and the branching trees are inky black, but still visible because they are lit by the cold, distant realm of flame that shines down on them.
Then I hear the sound of artillery fire in the distance, and a second or two later a brief flash of pink light colors the starry sky, the walls of the house, and the trees. Then everything is quiet again. The next moment I see someone coming to the window with a candle in a building across the street. Then someone turns on the light in a room and immediately turns it off again. It looks like a frightened mouse peeks out of its hole and then hides again. After a long while I see two men walking down the street. The one who goes further back is holding a lantern. The one in front casts a long shadow. They both carry submachine guns. Your job is to patrol the streets at night.
I cross the last meters of darkness that separate me from my neighbor’s door. She wants to leave town tomorrow and that’s making her nervous. She says it took her forty years to buy her own apartment and now she’s going to leave it behind for who knows how long. She keeps crying. She tells me where she keeps her groceries because my wife and I will look after her apartment while she’s gone. She still has some rice, eggs and sunflower oil.
She says it’s important that all locks are rotated nineteen degrees. She shows me the safety valve that shuts off the gas in the apartment and says she’s sure about it. The valve was turned correctly.
“Because I made it myself,” she says. «I know how to do it. I turned the valve at five every night.”
“Why is that?” I ask myself. I imagine a disheveled, wide-eyed girl of five who practices turning a gas valve every night.
“To be prepared for the war, which could start at any moment,” she says. “Everyone said at the time that the United States would attack us.”
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 book publishers in Russia, such as AST and Exmo. 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.