Sergei Gerasimov is holding out in Kharkiv. In his war diary, the Ukrainian writer reports on the horrible, even absurd, everyday life in a city that was shelled until recently.
Apartment with a view of the undesirable kind – destroyed block of flats in Kharkiv.
June 15, 2022
People are returning to their bombed-out homes to collect their belongings. They need money, documents, clothes or family photos. It’s dangerous because walls could collapse, but people still don’t let that stop them from coming back. City officials have decided to have some of the front doors welded shut, but people can get in through the broken windows on the lower floors if they want.
Looters do this all the time. However, there is a way to protect your home from them. If you spread things out to make it look like other looters have already been there, they just pick the lock on the door, come in and find there doesn’t seem to be anything of value left.
They won’t bother to check if that’s true or not because they have hundreds of other homes to loot and it’s hard work. Everyone knows how exhausting it can be to look for a key or a wallet that you left somewhere and you can’t remember where. Searching through hundreds of rooms must break your neck.
People are returning to bombed and looted homes. If allowed, they sometimes use mobile lifting platforms. They climb in through the balcony window and come out after a while with plastic bags full of things they need. Sometimes they are also holding something more interesting than plastic bags.
For example, one man recovered a whole collection of embroidery art. These are hand-embroidered copies of famous paintings. The largest embroidery is beautiful and depicts the Sistine Madonna. The Christ Child, Saint Sixtus and Saint Barbara, the two angels, the figure of the Madonna, all of this is depicted in great detail. I remember this classic painting well because when I was a teacher at school I had a girl whose face resembled that of the Sistine Madonna. At sixteen, the girl was a spitting image of her, but by seventeen she had changed and didn’t resemble the Madonna one bit, which was odd.
I’m watching a video of a woman dressed in red climbing into a cage that’s mounted on a hoist. She is about sixty years old. The platform goes up and the woman climbs into a window hole. The room looks tidy. Nothing is broken. There is no clutter just an old mattress lying on the sofa for some reason. The woman begins to cry and talks about her husband, who was a wonderful person. She doesn’t say how he died. The camera shows us a bookshelf with a few popular books, such as Dale Carnegie. But something is wrong here, I just can’t say exactly what yet.
The woman climbs out over the windowsill on the fourth or maybe fifth floor. She climbs into the cage of the lift as easily as if she does it every day. For a moment I imagine my mother in her place and realize that this is impossible: any old woman climbing out of the window so high above the ground would be frightened. Any old woman would look down in fear and her hands would clench the window rail. Then I notice the fresh green leaves of a potted plant.
No plant would have survived in this room if it hadn’t been watered regularly. So people could get into the old woman’s apartment without a hoist, and they did it many times. The video I am watching is most likely a fake or, in other words, an element of information warfare.
Now I understand why the room wasn’t a mess, why the floor wasn’t littered with broken glass, and why the woman didn’t look back to take one last look at her apartment like any owner would.
I’m sorry to have to think about these things because the wife’s tears seemed real as she told about her dead husband. Maybe I’m completely wrong about all this, maybe I’m just imagining things, but a potted plant definitely cannot survive without water.
To person
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». After a break from exhaustion, Sergei Gerasimov has resumed his writing. – Here is the 51st contribution of the second part.
Translated from the English by Andreas Breitenstein.