Kharkiv war diary, part 2/2

After a break, the Ukrainian writer Sergei Gerasimov has continued his war diary. From the beginning of the fighting, he reported on the horrors and absurdities of everyday life in the center of his hometown of Kharkiv, which is still being shelled.

If you want to become a patriotic fighter, practice early. Two Ukrainian boys, plastic guns in hand, salute passing troops near Kharkiv.

Evgeniy Maloletka / AP

April 19, 2022

We have now become experts at reading maps and interpreting the short red arrows that scatter across the maps. We know the names of small towns and villages by heart that we have never heard of before. We understand what the red arrows mean and why they point in one direction or another.

I have saved the links to all my electronic maps in a folder called «Poetry». I don’t know why, it just happened that way, but in fact there is nothing more expressive, graphic or moving than these red arrowed cards right now. I keep waiting for them to update. They are the first thing I look at in the morning and the last thing I look at at night.

When I used to read about wars, I used to have the vague notion that armies massed like thunderclouds and covered the earth with their shadow. Now I understand that enemy forces seep through cracked asphalt like water: first they find small cracks and fill them in, and then they go for big gaps.

Maps show this and everything else. I can see how tiny bodies of water, rivulets a few meters wide, or swamps that are more like muddy puddles besieged by frogs, can dramatically change the geographical course of the invasion and become insurmountable obstacles. Where men can wade waist-deep in water, tanks fail. They sink into the wet Ukrainian soil.

The red arrows keep crawling across the map. They move constantly and always open up new areas. I hope they stop when they reach the forest belt around the Donets River. I know its places well.

I know what the swamps look like around these woods; I’ve waded through a few of them.

One summer, when the weather was very hot and dry, we were paddling down the Donets in a kayak. We stopped for the night at what is now a battlefield, pitched a tent, and in the morning I went out to find dry wood for the fire. The south bank of the river was covered with dense bushy forest, while the north bank was an immense plain of dry rushes and scattered willows that rose in places. The willows looked old, and most of them had been scorched by lightning.

I walked through the rustling rushes, which were much taller than me, to the nearest tree. The summer was unusually dry, and the water level of the Donets had dropped so much that the ground under my feet was soft and dry, like ashes.

I expected to find some firewood under the willow. As I approached the tree, I suddenly found myself under a sparse canopy of dried water grass hanging from the lower branches of the willow.

I descended into the dry grotto, in the middle of which stood the mighty trunk of the old tree. The dried grass above my head was partially transparent, like the roof of a greenhouse. Inside the chamber everything was withered and dead. I saw mummified frogs and even a dead snake, dry and hard as a twisted branch. The white ring on the willow trunk marked the highest water level that the water had reached in the spring; it was about ten feet higher than the one on that August day.

As I stood there, I had the feeling that I had entered an enchanting underwater world. In fact, I was at the bottom of an old swamp that dried up in late summer but would come alive again in the spring. I tried to imagine what this willow-studded plain would look like in March, April, or May—a sea of ​​tall reeds, interspersed with unexpected ten-foot-deep expanses of water. In spring the ground is so soft that people quickly sink in up to their knees. But tanks drown completely.

Such vast bogs stretch everywhere north of the Donets. They protect us from the red arrows marking the Russian advance. Understanding space is an important part of the art of war, and I know geography is on our side right now. I think the red arrows will stop once they reach the swamps and the forests. But they are still moving forward, which gives me a queasy feeling every time I look at them.

To person

Sergei Gerasimov - What is the war?

PD

Sergei Gerasimov – What is the war?

Of the war diaries written after the February 24 Russian invasion of Ukraine, those of Sergei Vladimirovich Gerasimov are among the most disturbing and touching. They combine the power of observation and knowledge of human nature, empathy and imagination, a sense of the absurd and inquiring intelligence. Gerasimov was born in Kharkiv in 1964. He studied psychology and later wrote a psychology textbook for schools and scientific articles on cognitive activity. His literary ambitions have so far been science fiction and poetry. Gerasimov and his wife live in the center of Kharkiv in an apartment on the third floor of a high-rise building. During the spring, 71 “Notes from the War” were published in the NZZ. They are now available as a book on DTV under the title «Feuerpanorama». Although Russian rockets are still falling over the city of Kharkov according to the principle of chance and terror, the couple decided to persevere. After a break from exhaustion, Sergei Gerasimov has resumed his writing.

Translated from the English by Andreas Breitenstein.

Kharkiv War Diary

After a break, the Ukrainian writer Sergei Gerasimov has continued his war diary. From the beginning of the fighting, he reported on the horrors and absurdities of everyday life in the center of his hometown of Kharkiv, which is still being shelled.

source site-111