Sergei Gerasimov is holding out in Kharkiv. In his war diary, the Ukrainian writer reports on the horrific and absurd everyday life in a city that is still being shelled.
Supermarket with an ATM in Kharkiv, October 2022.
November 30, 2022
I get up at six o’clock. The city is still dark. Today I will withdraw cash with my bank card. The last time I did this was in February, just a day or two before the war started. With this money we managed to make ends meet during the first months of the war. The banks didn’t function properly at that time.
As for the banks, the situation now seems to have deteriorated again. If the Russians fire their rockets again – and they will sooner or later – bank cards could become unusable pieces of plastic for days or weeks. Now that the electricity is off most of the day, I have to pay mostly with cash.
Yesterday and the day before the electricity went out at nine in the morning and of course all the ATMs stopped working, so now I have to find a working machine before nine, better before eight. I already suspect that this will not be an easy task.
The first ATM I see glows happily in the early morning darkness, but no money can be withdrawn due to “technical problems”. A line on the screen directs me to the nearest bank or a large supermarket two kilometers away. I already know that the machine in the bank branch doesn’t work, so I walk to the supermarket. The ATM there also has technical problems, which is not good at all. Finally, I find a working ATM in a hotel near a subway station.
The trolleybuses are full of people at this early hour. All these men and women are rushing to their work, even though the electricity will be cut off in an hour or less. They somehow manage to work without electricity.
I also work without electricity. Children, who are naturally adaptable, find it neither strange nor sad to be taught English by lantern light. For her, that’s perfectly fine.
I would now like to buy bread and a pack of salt, but as soon as I want to go through the supermarket entrance, a security guard pushes a woman out and locks the door from the inside.
“Are they closed?” I ask the woman.
“There’s another power outage,” she explains. “They said it took them ten minutes to turn on the generator.”
“Isn’t ten minutes a bit long to push a button?” I ask. She shrugs.
She has two pale white pigtails that make her look younger than she is. She’s not dressed warm enough for this cold weather.
“I live right next door,” she says, “and I only went out for a short time. I was already at the checkout with a full shopping basket.”
“You shouldn’t keep us waiting out here in the cold,” I say. “They have a security guard who can take care of us inside.”
“Yes, but this is the most inhuman supermarket I know,” says the woman.
She is right. While this supermarket is cheap, it often sells inferior food. If you forget something in the lockers, things are always stolen after midnight. They will then inform you that they will dispose of them.
“Kids love power outages. They’re happy when they don’t have school,” says the woman. «I know that very well. I have two children.”
We’ve been waiting in the cold wind for half an hour, and the woman is getting as pale as her braids. Many people have now gathered in front of the closed door. A woman who seems very confident says, “Okay, I’ll show you!”
She calls the hotline and then bangs her fist on the door. A smiling saleswoman opens.
“Your hotline isn’t working!” screams the bossy woman. “That’s a scandal!”
“That’s because there’s no telephone connection,” says the smiling saleswoman and disappears. The woman angrily stalks away.
“What an old fool I was to vote for him!” hisses a granny next to me angrily. Of course she means Selenski.
“What?” other grannies ask her in horror. “Did you really vote for him?”
“I thought he’s young, maybe he can change something. But he made everything worse, much worse!”
All the other grannies in the group agree. They seriously believe that Zelensky is to blame for everything that happens here. They begin to feed each other Russian propaganda messages. They stare into space, like young schoolgirls reciting a poem.
Luckily, an employee shows up from the supermarket, goes to the orange cube of the power generator, switches something on and pulls a rope. The generator coughs, spews out a thick cloud of blue and gray smoke, coughs again, and finally begins to hum steadily. The woman opens the door with a smile and barks for us to come in.
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. The NZZ published 71 “Notes from the War” in the spring and 69 in the summer. The first part is now available as a book on DTV under the title «Feuerpanorama». Of course, the author does not run out of material. – Here is the 73rd contribution of the third part.
Translated from the English by Andreas Breitenstein.