I’m travelling by train from Kyiv to Przemyśl, then to Krakow, and finally to Berlin. What used to be a quick hour-and-a-half flight now takes as long as a transatlantic journey with a layover.
A close friend invites me to visit her in Greece. She’s upset that I don’t want to just take a plane and come over: the flight takes less than two hours! It wasn’t a problem before. Now, I’m explaining to her that passenger planes don’t fly from Ukraine anymore. This isn’t the first time I’ve had to explain this. My friend, with all her Cypriot expressiveness, shares her frustration: “What kind of chaos is this?”
I’m reminding her that missiles are flying in our sky with the simple and grim purpose of killing. I’m not at all offended that she forgets about such “trifles.” It’s hard to believe that this is a reality in parts of Europe! My world surprises her, but hers doesn’t surprise me. Her world is familiar and understandable to me, while mine is unbelievable to her.
I’m travelling by train to Przemyśl, unwrapping a candy. My husband handed me a bag of funeral sweets at the railway station. He had just returned from his brother-in-arms’ funeral—the fourth one this week. Tomorrow, he’ll attend the fifth. “Take it, we have plenty of funeral candies at home,” he said.
I’m travelling on a comfortable train, eating a funeral candy made in a Kharkiv factory, and thinking about the deceased man. All I know about him is that “he was big and very kind” and that his funeral was sombre because everyone in town loved him dearly.
My journey takes me to Germany and then to Switzerland, where I’ll attend international conferences to tell the world about things that are extremely obvious to Ukrainians. I’ll talk about our war and what life is like in it. This war has become uniquely ours… Or perhaps it was only ours from the very beginning? Maybe it just took us a long time to realise it.
Outside, it’s getting dark, and the train is getting dark, too. I recall the first weeks of the full-scale invasion and the initial blackouts. How strange and unsettling it was to travel in complete darkness! Now, the destroyed power plants ironically provide us with the necessary camouflage. I’m sure I’ll have to explain power outages, or rather sporadic power availability, to my colleagues in Europe. I’ll see sympathy and some skepticism in their eyes: “It can’t be like this, it’s an exaggeration.”
When we have electricity, and the lights flicker on at home, it almost feels like we’re connected to Europe. But those moments are fleeting; electricity is a luxury. In the soft glow of gas lamps, I find myself reflecting on the wisdom our ancestors left behind, wondering why we haven’t heeded it. I contemplate the lessons life has yet to teach us. Meanwhile, our children find solace in shelters, nibbling on funeral candies… Yet, at kindergartens, in the cacophony of electric generators, they’re still watching Russian cartoons sometimes. Perhaps, we suffered disproportionately if such a thing is still possible during the third year of the full-scale invasion. In fact, during the eleventh year of the war.
I’m thinking about the stories to tell our allies. Surely, I’ll mention the children in shelters. But I won’t tell them about Russian cartoons. It’s embarrassing… I’m thinking about how to tell people stories from the 21st century from our Ukrainian 18th century: without electricity and with positional war.
And I’ll treat them with candies as well. We have plenty of those at home now. Too many.
