Kharkiv. Life happens here

I have been haunted by a dream for two and a half years: a fortress city, a long siege, I have the keys to the secret entrance to the city, and my dearest man is in the hands of the besiegers. “Give me the keys, show me the way – we’ll let you go.” They take me to the tent where they keep him, we look at each other, he lowers his eyelids, we start laughing, laughing until tears that only we understand, and I – as I was taught – cut his throat. Giving away the keys to the city would mean betraying him much worse than killing, betraying everything for which each of us lived, betraying unforgivably.

This will be a text about friendship. Or just about September.

Kharkiv Septembers are the sweetest in the world. The air is concentrated tenderness, you want to slow down and breathe. True, it is difficult to breathe this year: the forests are burning, the grass is burning in the suburbs, the flames and heavy metals are pulling from the ruins of broken houses. Sometimes the air is literally visible. In full light, in an alarming cloud of smoke, Derzhprom finally takes on the appearance of a fortress; allergy sufferers go crazy.

On August 30, an 18-year-old artist was killed by a Russian rocket in Kharkiv Nika Kozhushko. We didn’t have time to become friends, she was just always there. At all cultural events. She searched, thought, drew powerfully. She was “we”. Nika told me a week before her death at the apartment building on Independence Day “Finally let’s exchange contacts!”.

Her death knocks out of me that roar that was suppressed somewhere inside for many, many months.

On the same day, another seven people were killed by shelling in Kharkiv.

On September 2, we and the radio were supposed to go to the village of Studenok in the Izyum Oblast, to broadcast live from there. The village survived the occupation, after the counteroffensive in 2023, it rebuilt farms.

A wonderful community, incredible landscapes, a sculptor’s circle with the potential of an art residency. Due to bureaucratic army reasons, we could not go to Izyum Oblast.

One of the farms in the village of Studenok in the Kharkiv region

Volunteer_ua

On September 2, the village of Studenok almost burned to the ground. Forest fires that started in Donbas due to Russian shelling reached Izyum Oblast, 1,200 hectares of forest were engulfed in flames in half a day, 308 yards were affected by the fire, some of them burned to the ground.

People lost their homes for the second time. The girls from “Volonterska_ua”, who take care of the farmers of Studenko, say that 5 percent left the area – the rest gathered in the houses that survived or in neighboring villages. They say: enough, they have already left.

The village of Studenok after the September fires

Kharkiv OVA

On September 12, the village asked for books and shovels. The books were sent by our friends from the publishing house Vivat.

September 3 Natalya Artyushenko from “Volonterskaya” sat on our air, tired and exhausted, she said: “We are not running there in despair, we are waiting for the emergency services to work, we will talk about the needs when the flames die down”.

The leader of the Kharkiv emergency service Viktor Zabashta repeated and repeated: good people, motorists, you see an ambulance flying by – step aside, it is carrying a person.

Natalya Artyushenko, “Volunterska_ua”

Radio Charter

Serhiy Zhadan spoke with Tanya Pylypetsthe director of the Forum of Military Writers, that after the war there will not be so much “Hemingways” as “Anne Franks” in our literature.

On the 3rd of September, a tragedy occurred in Poltava, which made the country speechless.

We gave up music on that broadcast. Breathing, voices. Coexistence The air left a metallic aftertaste.

On September 6-7, we worked in Lviv during the opening INDEX: Institute of Documentation and Interaction. The 5th was planned in “Dizzy” music event with online broadcast is, among other things, a good way to raise some funds to support our partner team “Charter”.

On September 4, almost an entire family died in Lviv. Clearly, there was no talk of the concert. But people wanted coexistence, separation of pain – we transformed the event into a conversational one “Ether of Solidarity”.

“Ether of solidarity” in Lviv’s “Dzyza” by Radio Charter

Liliya Dyadenchuk

Our friends from the band are in the yard of “Dzyga”. “Pie and Whip” they drank in black: in the morning in the Garrisonnoy, they mourned the brother of Yulia Dolynska, the artist, the wife of Maryan Pirozhko.

Anton Dolynskyi died in battle in the South. Wounded, he was still shooting.

A colleague who lives in the suburbs of Lviv joins us. He, with his wisdom, tact, irony and experience, is one of my most interesting human finds of the year. I relate the above, explaining the context and the maddening fatigue. Including heart fatigue. I hear in response “Abstract. We must abstract”.

I’m breathing Breathing practices save well from overturning the table.

One day in August, I go out in the morning with the dog, the dog puts its paw on a tree near the entrance, and the CAB flies 700 meters from us. It is difficult for me to abstract. It is impossible for me to abstract.

I don’t want to abstract. I want to be driven by this rage and hatred. And fear as an ally. I have to live this pain with my people.

On September 9, I will give a lecture at the Ukrainian Catholic University. Did I think that I would start the course with the question: “Children, how are you after this funeral?”: one of the victims of the Russian attack on the center of Lviv is a student of UKU.

Like every university fall, I look at these kids and see which of them will be “us” tomorrow.

After the lecture, I escape from the eternal pursuit of time and drink coffee with the poet, the translator Ostap Slyvinskyi. The first chestnuts, the first coolness of autumn.

I say: “If I abstract…” – “How will I know that I am human?” – concludes Ostap. “How shall I know that this is not a dream? That this is life and not an illusion of it?”. We fall silent in deep closeness, loneliness seems to fall away from me in pieces, straightens my ribs and lets go.

Ostap remembers the beginning of the invasion, when wave after wave of my people, people from the Ukrainian East, poured out of the trains at the Lviv railway station. And a bunch of volunteers with a big heart took on the enormity of human grief. He tells how he walked through this human sea with two thermoses of boiling water. “Should have fed 5,000 people with it” – I joke hoarsely, and it physically hurts.

More than half a year after the invasion, the people who left did not come into the focus of my attention. Protective reaction of the psyche in conditions of life and death. I responded to calls with a quick check-up: are you dying already? bombs falling on your head? is there water warm? food? No yes? Let’s talk in the summer. Insight came gradually and painfully.

On September 12, I will moderate a discussion about the experiences of internal migration at the festival “Kharkiv: (non) relocated culture” in Ivano-Frankivsk. I almost lose my voice at the end, because for the first time I say out loud:

“I’m in a panic, I’m afraid of losing my house to the point of toothache. I returned to Kharkiv on March 21, 2022, because I’m scared to the point of losing my house.”.

my girlfriend Olena Apchel joins the discussion online. Having left the position of co-chair of the largest German theater festival, TeatretreffenOlena signed a contract with the National Guard of Ukraine.

We correspond for a long time later: “For the military, such conversations about the “trauma of resettlement in Ivano-Frankivsk” look like bullying”. I know, my dear, I know, because even in my experience of the Kharkiv spring of 2022, much simpler than your military one, it once sounded like white noise. This is how the psyche works at a great crisis, on the verge of survival.

Discussion in the Frankiv Drama Theater at the festival “Kharkiv: (non)relocated culture”

Iryna Derkach

On the way home, I manage to meet a friend whom I have known for 17 years. He lived in Kharkiv during the first week of the invasion under enemy aircraft, left, returned a year later, and left again with the beginning of the May advance of the Russian army.

He says: “Why are we keeping people in Kharkiv? We have to take them out of there. It is not normal that more than 1.5 million people remain in the city under the bombs. These cultural events in Kharkiv are absurd. We are risking people’s lives. For what? This everything is an illusion, the illusion of life.”

I’m breathing I remind you that no one is holding people in Kharkiv, “paddocks” there is no Let me remind you that the majority had already left – and returned for one reason or another. I ask: where are the children of one and a half million people? I am modeling how a population increase in a small town will look like by two or three times: an overloaded medical system, transport, social tension – and these are also risks for life.

I rush to say: “I so want you to return to Kharkiv!”. But I don’t know if I still really want to.

On September 25, I write an interview with a friend who is a doctor, we remember how we were looking for adrenaline on March 22. We are sitting on the shore of Bezlyudivskyi Lake, the lake is quiet, the pines smell, behind Victoria a huge column of smoke can be seen from one of the four arrivals.

I am meeting with another one of the closest. Ksyuha lives in Berlin, that’s how her family circumstances are, but all her projects are related to Ukraine. From time to time he comes to Kherson region, Sumy region, Kharkiv region – with monitoring missions of the humanitarian organization with which he works.

Ksyuha drinks filter-tonic on the steps of a coffee shop, which appears in every one of my texts as the quintessence of home and friendship, and says: “You know, I was waiting for you and thought: he will fly here now – so what? I’m at home, my everyone is here. Life in Berlin is an illusion. Here is meaning, logic, movement, you, the city. You know, Vanya, here are my stories. And these stories are more important than safety.”.

And that’s where I have an unexpected problem. For 15 years, I believed that my relationship with this city was tied to a couple of dozen people from my close circle. In the first year of the invasion, only two of them remained in the City.

Month after month, I asked myself: on what is this rootedness of mine in the city built? On the landscape? It changes daily. On cultural life? For the first six months of the invasion, he was not there, believe me. On the usual mode of existence? Broke at 5 am on February 24.

And that’s what it is: stories. Plots that we will protect from the enemy until the last, without giving away the key to the city even at the cost of the lives of the most precious.

After the meeting, we part ways: I choose between the “Pie and the Whip” concert, which regularly travels to the small towns of Slobozhanshchyna, a meeting with the historian Oleksandr Zinchenko, and Yevhen Lavrenchuk’s play “…And All-All-All” (Maidan Story).

Ksenia goes to the birthday of Aid46 – a group of young paramedics who go on flights, strengthening the emergency department. On the way, he hears a familiar voice in the LitMuseum garden – there they are holding an evening in memory of Nika. On the same day, in the “Imagination” space, an event that Nika should host: “Mikhail Semenko is the person who made me fall in love with Ukrainian literature.”

On the last day of September, we are going to broadcast from Kramatorsk. Among our guests are two volunteers. Rima returned to Krum at the start of the invasion after working in London. M. from Kalush, also worked in Britain. I ask: “How did you end up here?” – “With the war” – “With the war, people went the other way”. Laughing Speaks: “But after the war – home!”

We are going to Kramatorsk also because our friend Nastya, a combat medic, is waiting for us there, on the edge of the great Plot. Nastya has been serving for 7 years. That is, from the age of 19.

“Do you manage to notice how your friends change during this time?” – “I manage to notice how they disappear.”

Photo from Nastya’s FB page Liked

Photo from Nastia’s FB page Liked

Photo from Nastia’s FB page Liked

Ivanna Skyba-Yakubovaexecutive director of Radio Charter, specially for UP.Zhyttia.

Publications in the “View” section are not editorial articles and reflect exclusively the author’s point of view.