The windows of my small room are darkened with duvet covers. There’s a light on and you’re reasonably comfortable. An application on my mobile announces in a woman’s voice: “the air raid alarm has ended”. It is one of those moments in which I think I have discovered something fundamental: I understand what photography is for. I’ve been into photography for quite some time, but I’ve never understood it as pragmatically as I do now.
Then I thought that at least I am in Kyiv, that I must value every minute and look around
Only thanks to the help of photos and images can I remember the route of today’s walk. In the daily life of war, only something like photography – unknown, auxiliary, almost mechanical – is capable of keeping sequences and memories together.
When I went for a walk, my thoughts were still on the morning news and I barely paid attention to the street. With deep sadness, I had to admit the possibility that we might eventually be forced to leave Kyiv. I’ve known all along that we could get to that point, of course, but today I’m thinking about that possibility again.
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Then I thought that at least I am in Kyiv for the moment, that I should value every minute and look around me: look at the city, the streets, the people. It’s kind of naive, yes, and I quickly drift back into my thoughts, barely noticing what’s going on around me.
The territorial defense soldiers were warming their hands. I saw the beautiful faces of two young women who laughingly told me that they belonged to the “Ukrainian Volunteer Army”. They gave me their phone numbers. What that meant was: maybe we’ll meet again soon.
To my surprise, a little later I heard music. I was walking through the sculpture park, along Landscape Alley. In the distance I heard drums, a melodic whistle and bells. The music came from the hills. I listened intently as the music grew louder with each step. Then I saw a small group of men and women playing musical instruments in the distance. What a combination of different fragments, tones and pauses. I listened, delighted. They approached and continued on their way with friendly looks. I was so shocked to see and hear those musicians that I can’t remember what happened next.
But thanks to the photographs, which I keep trying to take, another important scene comes to mind. Kyiv municipal employees went around the city using spray to cover up tourist maps of the city center that can be seen on billboards throughout the area. The workers were accompanied by armed members of the territorial defense. I was allowed to take photos on the condition that no faces were recognized in the images.
Now my memory jumps to another episode that has to do with music: on March 8, International Women’s Day, I went to a pharmacy with my mother. On the way we met an old woman carrying a rose. My mother approached him. They chatted and exchanged contact information so they could help each other in an emergency.
Then the woman began to recite a poem she had written in Russian during the war. It was about dictatorship, about war, and at the end the promise was made that this utter nonsense, this hell, could never win. The woman was wearing a headscarf, she seemed humble, but the melody of her verses sounded musical and concise.
They have covered up the tourist map signs so that the wreckers, who are constantly trying to get into Kyiv and other cities, cannot use them to find their way around. It is rumored that they often do not carry smartphones and get lost in the streets.
Today the news was terrible. I think of the songs that people sing here despite everything, I think of the music. The air raid alarm sounds again. I hope and wish that they close the sky soon.
Today I woke up early in the morning and found eight missed calls on my phone. They belonged to my parents and some friends. At first I thought that something had happened to my family and that my friends were trying to locate me because, for whatever reason, my parents had warned them before. Then my imagination went in other directions and I thought of an accident, a dangerous situation in the center of Kyiv, something you would like to warn your friends about. I felt a great unease. I called my cousin because her pretty voice, brave and rational of hers, always has a calming effect on me. She just told me: “Kyiv has been bombed. The war has begun.”
Many things have a beginning. When I think of the beginning of something, I imagine a line drawn very clearly through white space. The eye observes the simplicity of this trail of movement: one that we are sure of has a beginning and an end. But I have never been able to imagine the beginning of a war. It’s strange. I was in Donbass when the war with Russia broke out in 2014. But I got into the war anyway, I got into that zone of confused and blurred violence. I still remember the intense guilt I felt at being a guest in the catastrophe, a guest who was allowed to leave whenever she wanted because she lived somewhere else.
The war was already there, an intruder, something strange, alien and insane that had no justification for happening in that precise place, at that precise moment. Back then I kept asking people in the Donbass how this all started, and the answers were always very different.
I think that the beginning of this war in Donbass was one of the most mythologized moments for the people of Kyiv, precisely because it remained incomprehensible how something like this even started. At that time, in 2014, the people of Kyiv said: “The people of Donbass, those Ukrainians who are sympathetic to Putin, invited our country to war.” For a while, that supposed “invitation” has been seen as an explanation for how the utterly impossible – war with Russia – suddenly became a reality despite everything.
At the end of the call with my cousin, I spent a while walking around my flat. His mind was completely blank, he had no idea what to do. Then my phone rang again. And one call followed another: friends sharing plans to escape, some calling to make sure we were still alive. I got tired soon. I talked a lot, constantly repeating the word “war”. In between, he looked out the window and listened to see if he felt the explosions getting closer. The views from the window were quite ordinary, but the sound of the city was strangely muffled: no children screaming, no voices on the wind.
Then I went outside and discovered a totally new environment, an emptiness that I had not seen before, even in the most dangerous days of the Maidan protests.
Some time later I heard that two children had been killed in a bombardment in Kherson oblast in the south of the country and that a total of 57 people were killed in the war today. The figures became very real, as if I myself had already lost someone. I was angry with the world. I thought that this had been allowed to happen, that it is a crime against everything human, against the great common space where we live and where our hopes for the future are placed.
Translation: Thomas Burnstead and Ana Sánchez Highlight