Lviv: A Canary’s Diary
February 20, Sunday
Yesterday, at home in Kyiv, we listened to Boris Johnson’s speech and immediately bought tickets to Lviv. My husband Roman suggested a week ago that S, our three-and-a-half-year-old daughter, and I stay with my parents in Lviv, but I refused, despite the American and British embassies having already relocated there (and my mother begging us to come). A few days ago, the older daughter of my husband, a first-year student, left to join her mother who lives abroad.
Now it’s time for us.
As I’m packing, S is running around, exclaiming “Let’s go to Lviv, to Lviv!” An unusual enthusiasm, which I wouldn’t notice if she didn’t also say: “I don’t want him to kill us all!” “Who?” I ask. “Who’s gonna kill us?” She doesn’t answer, just keeps selecting which things I should pack. I’m astonished: she couldn’t have heard anything like that from me or Roman, as we didn’t discuss the situation in such a dramatic manner. Her kindergarten, maybe? They were preparing children to go to a shelter, and she might have overheard the older kids. During the last month schools and kindergartens in Kyiv and Lviv (I’m not sure about the other cities) taught children what to do in case of an air raid. We were all urged to prepare survival bags, or, if literally translated from Ukrainian, “an anxious backpack.” There were dozens of how-to articles everywhere. Yet we didn’t pack ours until now.
I keep telling myself that we will come back in a week, covered with shame. Another voice in my head tells me that we may never come back if the city is occupied or destroyed. We send a couple of boxes with clothes by post to pick up in Lviv later. We take all the documents, many toys, and almost all of S’s clothes with us. What I learn instantly is that you look differently at your belongings when your home may be destroyed or vandalized. I take my diary, which I gave up after I started to write a book last year. I take my daughter’s vyshyvanka (a Ukrainian folk embroidered shirt) for the same reason: I just hate to think anyone may touch it. I take three books: two old Polish books I recently purchased at the Internet flea market, and the first edition of Yuri Andrukhovych’s novel Perversion. Not only is it my favorite book, I bought it at a very special moment of my life in 1997, so I guess it’s my most precious possession, when it comes to material objects.
One of my duties as a fellow at a Central European think tank — the fellowship is named for Marcin Krol, the Polish philosopher and democratic activist — has been to contribute to a weekly overview of security in the region. And so I’ve been explaining my anxiety by the fact that I have to read all the news. It’s hard to draw a line between my intuition and my information overload. I notice my relief as soon as our train reaches the Ternopil region, officially western Ukraine, the area that is not of Russian interest according to the published maps of future invasion.
A canary in a coalmine:
No, the Russian invasion was not a surprise.
Ukrainians tend to say that we’ve been at this war for eight years, since 2014. That is true: even those not directly affected by the aggressions of the past eight years know someone who was. Almost every morning the war was mentioned in the news: someone was killed or wounded; even in the “quiet” period it was not really quiet. My husband later told me that his heart sank as he was closing our door, thinking of his friends who, in exactly the same way, closed the doors of their apartments in Donetsk eight years ago.
At the same time I never felt so much at home in my country as after Maidan. The paradox is that while parts of the country — Crimea and areas in the Donetsk and Luhansk regions — were occupied by Russians in 2014, the rest of the country was, as I experienced it, de-occupied; emancipated. I started my own small business, a publishing house, in 2015, since finally I knew that I wouldn’t be persecuted by the tax administration, and that my business would not be raided, as happened before to many people I knew, especially when Kuchma and Yanukovych were our presidents. Of course, many others had businesses in the pre-Maidan years, but I was not as brave as them. In 2014 I applied to the State Security Service to use its archives because I realized that they are my public service now, no longer just the former KGB, politicized and filled with Russian agents.
Then, in 2018, it changed for me, when my daughter was born. I became terrified by the images of all possible dangers and risks. I couldn’t see a movie or read a book (except for some non-fiction) if they included a situation with a child in danger. Even fairy tales horrified me: how can any sane person let a child go into the woods alone?
Of course, I told myself, there were rational explanations for my outbreak of fear. First, the oxytocin storm, which is normal when you have a newborn on your hands. Second, all survival mechanisms are on. And finally, the family traumas in anamnesis: both of my maternal grandparents were orphans. My grandmother lost her mother when she was seven, growing up mostly with relatives who weren’t particularly kind to her. Her painful memories were among the first stories I heard. And so I felt like I was five again, brimming with the fear of becoming an orphan. My grandfather, too, grew up in an orphanage, after his parents were killed by the Bolsheviks as “class enemies.”
It didn’t get better with time. I read so many books about the atrocities of the twentieth century. I wrote and edited articles about them, and here I was, helpless to say “no” to my daughter asking for a cookie because how can you not give food to a child? Five years earlier I put some effort into the Ukrainian edition of Bringing Up Bébé by Pamela Druckerman, an American journalist who moved to Paris and tried to raise her children in the French way, that is, giving them only healthy food and teaching them to eat gracefully. A big enthusiast of the book, I was sure that one day my own child would eat steamed broccoli, too. Now I realized that one needs to have had one’s grandmother live through World War Two in occupied Paris, not in occupied Kyiv as my grandma did (though she was a survivor of the famine in 1933), to have a gut tough enough to issue a firm “no” when a child asks for an unhealthy snack. Pamela Druckerman is Jewish, and so I speculate that this partly explains her struggle. Now, as I was preparing chicken meatballs for my not-that-French baby, I suddenly realized that I have myself become the proverbial Jewish mother from the jokes we used to tell. Except that they are not so funny anymore.
I have been living with these fears for more than three years. During the last month before the invasion, I was totally freaked out for seemingly no reason. And so with the first bombings I felt a kind of relief, and I began to calm down. As in a horror movie, the part after the monster is visible is not as scary as the suspense at the beginning.
Something like this had happened before. I knew that something was coming before the Maidan revolution. I wasn’t afraid, I just avoided making big plans. During the three months of Maidan I was extremely lucky: I didn’t suffer a bruise, though I was in the thick of things. Like a canary in a coalmine, I feel the danger before the explosion.
February 22, Tuesday
As expected, Putin signed the decrees of “independence” of the occupied territories of the Donetsk and Luhansk regions. Shchastia (a town on our side of the frontline) was shelled. It has begun.
February 23, Wednesday
It seems that everyone I overhear while taking my walks with S comes from elsewhere. On a playground on the neighboring street, I met a woman from Vyshhorod, near Kyiv. She rents an apartment in a building of the same type as ours — they call it “Polish luxe,” meaning very nice and comfortable interwar Constructivist buildings, with thick walls, relatively wide stairs, sometimes marble panels in the hall, and solid, deep cellars. She asked me where the local bomb shelter is. I told her to use the basement, they are good for this purpose in our neighborhoods. And I realized that basements in these buildings are so well equipped as shelters because the people of that era expected a war. That never occurred to me when I was growing up here.
Later I noticed a sign that said “Shelter” in our own hall.
February 24, Thursday
I wake up as my mom was talking on the phone with my in-laws. Kyiv and its surroundings were attacked from the air. The Russians invaded. Roman’s parents are coming to be with us. Or rather they are trying to come. All roads from Kyiv are jammed with cars, and the lines for fuel are huge.
Later I go to a pharmacy and do some grocery shopping. There are no signs of panic on Lviv’s streets, except perhaps the long lines at the ATMs and at every pharmacy. It’s unusually quiet for this area: we live seven minutes from a big crossroads and a farmer’s market. I notice that there are fewer cars. Some shelves in the grocery store (bread, flour, sugar, and so on) are already empty. That’s understandable, I say to myself: we live in an old residential area, there are a lot of elderly people here, and they are not used to Internet shopping. And they remember the Soviet shortages of, well, everything.
I also went downtown. Most of the shops are closed. That makes sense: who needs boutique clothes today? I noticed some people in military uniform with rifles.
I spent most of the day writing emails and texting. Friends from all over are worried.
A tale of two cities:
I moved to Kyiv from Lviv in 2011. Before that I spent thirty-three years here. Most of my friends left Lviv earlier, some of them when I was still a student. They graduated hastily from university and moved on. I’m not sure how much I belong here. Still, all this time I’ve been registered in Lviv and my income taxes go to the Lviv city budget. I once had an apartment here (I sold it in 2019). My mother was born here.
But my grandmother came from Kyiv in 1947, the period called “the second Soviets” (the first Soviet came in 1939, after Stalin and Hitler invaded Poland). She left starved and ruined Kyiv, where she didn’t have any means to live with her sister, who moved earlier. In other words, she came to save herself and her daughter (my aunt). The population of Lviv changed almost completely after World War II. Many Poles, who had been the majority, were killed or forcibly deported to Russian camps, and so were Ukrainians. Almost all the city’s Jews — they knew it as Lemberg — were killed by Nazis during the Holocaust. After Yalta, Lviv became a part of the Soviet Union, and few Poles stayed in the city. Russians, Ukrainians, and Jews came from the USSR. They somewhat derisively called those Ukrainians and Poles who had stayed “the locals.” Their children, and often their grandchildren, did the same. My grandmother used the word in that way. My mother pronounced it mostly with respect, as she considered “the locals” to be kinder than the people she knew at home; but pronounced in a different tone the word was a pejorative. “The locals” in turn called the newcomers “liberators” — vyzvolyteli in Ukrainian, or osvoboditeli in Russian (the latter was used to add a little acidity to the sardonic usage).
Were we “liberators”? Technically, we were. We spoke Russian while my grandparents were alive. We lived as the majority of Soviet people did, an extended family in one apartment. Both my mother and I went to Russian schools. We lived in the city center, that is, the quarter of the city built before 1939. My grandfather was a captain in the Red Army and an invalid of the Great War who came to Lviv in 1947.
And yet we were not like typical Russians, not at all. My grandmother never had a job in Lviv, and she lived completely immersed in the world of relatives and family, never embedded in any Soviet social structure. My grandfather once held some power in his hands: he distributed “liberated” apartments (empty after their owners were either killed, or deported, or left for Poland or the West, the luckiest ones). As he had never known anything but an orphanage, a military training, and the Red Army, my grandfather believed that a person may be happy with only a bed and a nightstand, and so he stayed in a shared apartment (kommunalka) and refused to get a four-bedroom place for himself. It was only when he married Grandma that she made him apply for a modest one-room apartment. Nor did he avail himself of any of the opportunities for corruption, except for a bottle of vodka as a present after the paperwork was done. Soon he ended up on the bottom of the Soviet bureaucracy’s food chain, and most of his life he worked at a factory. Moreover, he was not Russian but Chuvash, the Turkic ethnicity in the region of the Volga River. The most interesting thing about the Chuvash is that their language is the closest to the dead language of the Khazars, a Turkic people who are said to have adopted Judaism in the Middle Ages. Anyway, my grandfather struggled with Russian grammar until his death. My father, born near Lviv, grew up in the Dnipropetrovsk region, and came to Lviv as a student. So maybe we were not real “liberators,” but neither were we “locals.”
The real “liberators” were mostly part of the machinery of repression in a rebellious region, where the underground Ukrainian resistance operated until the late 1950s. (Strangely, I never heard of the banderivtsi, the anti-Soviet partisans, before I went to school at the age of seven, which means that in our family they were not considered a menace.) Unlike in other Ukrainian cities, Russophones here were not Ukrainians who had to switch to Russian, but ethnic Russians, since they were regarded by the authorities as more reliable politically, and dominated the army and the KGB. Even the Russian language was different in Lviv: it was proper Russian, without a Ukrainian accent. And the KGB staff was as large in Lviv as it was in Kyiv, the capital of the Soviet republic, a city almost three times larger. The closeness of the Western border (the territory of the enemies — yes, socialist Poland too) explained the extensive presence of the military. Thus the lines between the castes were more visible in Lviv (as in the other cities occupied by Soviets after the war) than in the east.
My grandmother missed Kyiv, but she never came back. My history with Kyiv had one more twist: my father started to work in Kyiv, and my mother joined him soon after I became a student. We started to live in two cities: me in Lviv with my grandparents, and my parents in Kyiv. Mom hated it, and that was understandable. It was not a hospitable place back then. They came back to Lviv in late 1998. That was their first experience of living apart from my grandparents, and they switched to Ukrainian there, a rather non-conformist move for Kyiv in those years. I meanwhile switched to Ukrainian in university, so it was all very natural when they were back.
I decided to move after I realized that I was spending more and more time in Kyiv and enjoying it a lot, that I had exhausted Lviv, that most of my friends were in Kyiv. I wasn’t bitter. I left determined to be happy, and I was, just as I had once been in Lviv. My 33 became a new 19. I had a happy farewell to Lviv and a happy arrival in Kyiv. I found a place in an old building in Podil, the nicest neighborhood in the city, just a few blocks from the riverbank. My windows faced the emerald rococo dome of the Andriivska church (and a red flag directly in front of me, as I lived next door to a Communist party headquarters). The Maidan was a short walk away, which was a strategic advantage during the revolution. I spent the next eight years in that apartment. My future husband moved in, and later we bought a new place, also in Podil, after our child was born.
While I lived in Kyiv I didn’t like to come back to Lviv. I did so, just a few times a year, mostly for an annual book fair (I worked in publishing), and sometimes for Christmas or Easter, certainly far less often that most of my friends did. At some point I realized that the obstacle was physical: I felt suffocated in Lviv, as if I had only one lung. The thought that I might one day have to return to Lviv (if I lost my job, say) was my nightmare. Yet something changed last year, in March 2021. I came for longer, more than a week, to work with the Cultural Strategy Institute, a think tank for which I serve on the supervisory board. Though the institute is a relatively new municipal body, for its institutional memory and its people it is a sort of sequel to the Dzyga Art Association, where I worked twenty years earlier, and which provided the best professional experience of my life. Dzyga organized festivals, rock concerts, and exhibitions, a sort of production cmpany with an asymmetrical focus on being good in art rather in business. It also opened clubs and cafes, and its venues were safe spaces for artists, journalists, academics, and students like us.
This time I came to Lviv with my daughter, who brought long and slow walks to my life: you can’t walk fast with a two-year old. For the first time in years, I had occasion to meditate on the blurred surfaces of the old Habsburg-era buildings, on all the backyards, on the hypnotic topography of the city. Another novelty: I began to think obsessively about people who had lived there before World War II. Not that I wasn’t aware of them all those years. I just didn’t have much empathy for them. In Kyiv I once started to write a book of essays partly about that. I even entertained the possibility I might come back to Lviv someday. I didn’t tell anyone.
February 25, Friday
I woke up in the middle of the night because of a strange noise — the airplanes, I guess. The distant sound is familiar, and not: it was as if I had heard the planes before, but in a dream, not in reality. Though I understood the planes were most likely Ukranian. I think that the afterlife may sound like that.
Then we heard the air raid sirens. I held the sleeping S tight.
Roman’s parents are still on their way: they drove all day but could only make it to Ternopil, and they stayed there for a night. They arrive, finally, in the afternoon, exhausted.
Roman is busy renting and arranging everything necessary in the apartment for the refugees. His friend gave him a substantial sum of money for that purpose on her way to Poland. She threw a pack of cash over the heads of the crowd at the railway station. He reported that the people at the station were weeping and gnashing their teeth.
February 26, Saturday
I texted Andriy, my daughter’s godfather, to check on him. (He stayed in Kyiv.) I found him on his way to his hometown for conscription: the military mobilization is not digitized. His home is high in the Carpathian Mountains.
Andriy is an old friend and a kum. Kum is a family you choose yourself. The official title “godparents” means that they should provide spiritual guidance for a child of their friends. I recently realized that our bloodlands made the title special also for another reason: godparents have the responsibility to care for a child if the parents should die. That signifies an enormous degree of trust, and the ties are so important that they gave a name for the Ukrainian practice of nepotism — kumivstvo.
Andriy is seven years younger than me. I got to know him when he was a student at Ukrainian Catholic University in Lviv, and I had just started to write articles in English. I wrote a piece about the heroes of the Orange Revolution, and he was one of them. In 2004, as an observer at the second round of the presidential election in some distant village in the Odessa region, he hid himself under the wheels of the truck when local authorities tried to steal the box with the votes. When he confronted the local authorities, they tried to ignore him; he figured that they wouldn’t dare drive over his body and kill him, and it worked. He came to Maidan directly from there and spent the entirety of the revolution in the square. Graduating with a masters in theology, he moved to Kyiv to work in an organization providing assistance for people with HIV. Sometimes I stayed at his place when I was in Kyiv. For years Andriy has been providing me with guidance in several areas, above all in music (he is also an extraordinary DJ) and spirituality. He has a special talent for explaining the Bible in the style of a stand-up comedian, using the vocabulary of a street pusher. He looks like another hedonistic Kyiv hipster, and few know that he is a devoted Christian, living what he preaches.
Most universities in Ukraine have military classes for male (and sometimes female) students, so they can get a rank with graduation. Ukrainian Catholic University does not have any. Andriy is a private now. I saw him at Maidan and in many other situations, I know how selfless he is, so now I’m desperately worried about him. When I asked him to be my kum, I made him promise that one day it will be he who introduces my daughter to her first joint. He must keep that promise.
February 27, Sunday
In Hostomel, Russian bombings destroyed AN-225, the famous gigantic airplane known as “Mriya.” It wouldn’t matter so much if “Mriya” had not had its special moment last August, during the thirtieth anniversary of Ukrainian independence, when my daughter became fascinated by it as it flew over our home during the rehearsal for the parade and then over the parade itself. Since that day, she has called every airplane “Mriya.” Not long afterwards Roman took her to the Aviation Museum, and it looked like she found her new passion. We haven’t told her that it is gone, of course.
“Mriya” means “dream” or “aspiration.”
February 28, Monday
It is snowing, and the trees in the huge backyard that we share with the nearby buildings are all white. You can barely make them out through the wet snowy lace. In the morning someone plays the Ukrainian anthem on a trumpet, we can’t see exactly where, maybe on his balcony. We open our balcony door and applaud him as he finishes, as do some other neighbors whom we do not see.
Lida, my old friend and colleague at the Cultural Strategy Institute, called. We worked together at Dzyga: she was there from the beginning, in charge of finances, and I came later and did press and promotion. Her mother died shortly before the invasion. Contrary to Ukrainian tradition, she didn’t wait and instead let refugees live in her mother’s apartment immediately, and gave away most of her belongings to those who need them now.
Lida is just back from the cemetery, visiting the grave on the ninth day after her mother’s death, in accordance with Ukrainian tradition. She couldn’t buy candles there, as is the custom; the gravediggers were busy preparing Molotov cocktails for territorial defense.
March 1, Tuesday
The Russians hit the TV tower in Kyiv. Five people were killed, and some were injured who were just passing by. The shells damaged the broadcasting facilities nearby and also the territory of Babyn Yar, which is right there. The tower stands.
March 2, Wednesday
It seems like everyone I know is volunteering. I joined Lida to help pack necessities for the territorial defense and the refugees; she had volunteered there the day before. It turns out that the hub is managed by the daughter of a well-known Lviv architect and political activist, one of the members of the Lviv Student Fraternity in the late 1980s. Lida was also a member. In those days the “brothers” organized anti-Soviet student strikes, including the major hunger strike in Kyiv in 1990 that led to the resignation of the prime minister in the still-Soviet republic. (It was the first Maidan.) The head of the fraternity, the late Marek Ivashchyshyn, shortly thereafter founded the Dzyga Art Association. Both Marek and most of the other “brothers” never stopped being politically active, no matter what they did professionally.
I can’t help noticing that today I see the same people I knew from my work at Dzyga. The network becomes visible with every political crisis: when Georgy Gongadze was killed and the Russians used the political crisis to assert control over our president Kuchma, and when Marek and Yaroslav Rushchyshyn, another former student leader, founded an opposition newspaper and were persecuted by the brother of Victor Medvedchuk, Putin’s kum, during the Orange revolution, and then during the Maidan revolution. (Medvedchuk was the director head of Putin’s presidential office in the early 2000s and is now under arrest for state treason. His younger brother Serhiy was the head of tax administration in Lviv, an institution that was weaponized for political repression.)
And now their teenage children are packing the medicines, the clothes, and the food for the war with the same enemy. Will it end with their generation?
March 3, Thursday
We saw our trumpeter: he went out and played the anthem between the two neighboring yards.
I came back home in the evening to have an online PEN discussion with the historian Marci Shore, who knows so much about Ukraine. I was covering for the wonderful Ukrainian philosopher Volodymyr Yermolenko, who was evacuating his family from Brovary, a town near Kyiv.
Today we mostly sorted out thermal underwear and packed it for the people in Kharkiv. It is much easier to do manual labor than intellectual work. That was the same problem during Maidan. Being a rational thinker, I tried to create added value amid the turbulence, to do what I do best. Anyway, I’m never sure I do the right thing.
March 4, Friday
I stay home today: S is very nervous when I’m away, despite the two sets of grandparents. There is a lot of drama when I get back. She sleeps badly.
In the city center the sculptures in the UNESCO heritage area are wrapped in special protective materials. Some of them, such as a crucified Christ from the medieval Armenian church and a seated Christ from one of the domes, are hidden in shelters. The famous Renaissance market square and the nearby quarter have already survived several wars, as has the rest of the city. Even after World War II the damage was minor, nothing comparable to Kyiv or Warsaw. Over the last two decades the city fulfilled the dream that was in the air in the early 2000s, which I felt when I would cross the deserted square in the evening on my way home from the gallery. Lviv became the new Krakow, full of tourists (before Covid), with a bar in every hole in the wall.
It is full of other kinds of newcomers now. It is easy to spot them: they are usually waiting for someone. Do they think I’m one of them when we look at each other nervously? I, too, also wear warm comfortable winter clothes when a simple coat would be more appropriate. I, too, keep looking around as if I had never before noticed the strange mascarons on a nineteenth-century facade. But I’m not like these new arrivals: I came in peace to the city I know.
March 6, Sunday
In her sleep my child says, “Home!”
She is needy for my attention, demanding that I “read” a tourist guide of Stockholm that I brought from there in 2005. I promise her that we would go to Stockholm when she is a little older. She asks questions about every picture, and we make plans: we will see the Royal Palace, we will meet the Queen and the King, we will run in a park. Nothing is more important these days than spending time with her.
I’ve been to Stockholm once, and I fell in love forever. Ever since that visit I used to say that I will go there to die. Today I received an invitation to spend some time in Gothenburg, a fine opportunity for Ukrainian editors in need. Well, I’m not in need, at least for now; I’m quite comfortable. I have no right to take a place that others may desperately be seeking. And I don’t want to go anywhere without Roman. Besides, the prospect of going to Sweden is not as attractive these days. If I really need to go there — if, say, Lviv is occupied — it is very possible that I will never come back. The idea of dying in Sweden is still attractive, but I would prefer to do it on my own terms.
March 7, Monday
I’ve written a short piece called “Postwar” for Krytyka, the journal I used to work at, about how the West has been mesmerized by toxic Russian narratives for decades, about how disgusting are the attempts to justify Russia’s “great culture,” as if that is the most important thing right now. At first I thought that my piece was too harsh. Then I read the statement of German PEN, which was concerned mostly with the fate of Russian writers and made an equivalence between “poorly equipped Russian soldiers” and Ukrainians under attack, since both were “Putin’s victims.” No, my piece wasn’t too harsh.
The infotainment of our days: a woman at Darnytsia, an old working-class area in Kyiv, knocked off a Russian scouting drone with a jar of preserved tomatoes. She was out on her balcony for a smoke, and this was what she thought to do when she saw a drone and panicked. Some may say it’s an urban myth, but I can easily imagine such a woman: she might be one of the women I met many times in the printing shop at Darnytsia, where I discussed the paper and the bindings with them. They could easily do what the woman in Darnytsia did.
I notice the announcements on every pharmacy door I pass: “No iodides available.” The Russians have occupied Chernobyl and are holding personnel as hostages; there was a fire at the captured nuclear plant in Energodar, the biggest in Europe. The possible consequences may be far worse than the Chernobyl catastrophe in 1986. No wonder people bought out everything that might protect them. After Chernobyl they gave us kids antistruminum, small sweet pills of potassium iodide. Like almost everything in Soviet schools, it was obligatory: from time to time a school nurse would deliver it to the classroom at the beginning of a lesson.
Recently I remembered that we moved into the apartment in which we now live three days before the Chernobyl catastrophe, on April 23, 1986. I was in the first grade, and I don’t remember exactly when we learned about the explosion. I’m sure that my parents understood how serious it was from some of the “hostile voices,” that is, from Radio Liberty, the BBC, or the Voice of America. My father brought a Geiger counter. It stood on a windowsill for some time, but soon my parents were so annoyed by its sound that they just put it away in the basement. Lviv was lucky again in 1986, not affected by radiation, but Kyiv was heavily affected. I don’t really remember people coming from Kyiv and Prypyat those days, though I knew they were trying to escape. Only later I learned how difficult it was to leave Kyiv. People fainted in lines to get a train westward. Exactly like now. I don’t remember anyone using the word “refugees” back then, but we were aware that many people from Prypyat found their new home in Lviv.
I was eight, and my own fears were a consequence mainly of books and movies: as with many Soviet “technical intelligentsia” — people involved in what is called R&D in the West — my parents liked science fiction and I was caught up with their interests. In the Soviet Union science fiction was a loophole in Soviet censorship, but probably a slightly different pool of authors than people in the West read. Ray Bradbury, Herbert Wells, Arthur Clarke (until some point), and Clifford Simak had been translated and published in the Soviet Union, but I doubt that I know a single name of the writers whom Americans of my generation preferred. Stanisław Lem, who grew up in Lviv, and had to leave for Poland after the Soviet occupation, was hugely popular. As we didn’t have real news in 1986, but only indoctrination programs, my idea of the catastrophe that we faced was embroidered out of the plots of man-made apocalypse in science fiction. Yet the idea of a nuclear apocalypse had one more source in my case: oddly, I loved the Soviet “international news” TV program, which was in fact propaganda speeches about how mad Ronald Reagan was and how the USSR was striving for peace. I was the only one in the family who watched it, terrified that Reagan might start nuclear war at any moment (as they said he might). In school corridors I saw older kids running in gas masks. Happily I was spared that experience, thanks to Gorbachev.
Chernobyl marked a huge shift in Soviet consciousness, as Soviet people realized that they themselves may cause nuclear catastrophe, not the capitalist demons overseas. Many years later I read that it was also the beginning of the end for the USSR: people learned that there are things more dangerous and powerful than the KGB. My interest in science fiction faded with glasnost and perestroika: it turned out that reality itself had almost infinite resources for miracles. Westerners often underestimate the isolation in which Soviet people lived. (The situation was very different in “socialist” Central Europe.) Back then no aliens and distant planets could compete with the newly opened Western world. In fact, we were the aliens.
March 8, Tuesday
I saw a person I’ve known for ages. Yurko is also my neighbor. He had a Kyiv period too, and now lives with his family and children at his old home, the grand neoclassical four-story apartment building that we see from our windows. The building is quite unusual for Lviv: its palatial design would fit Paris. When I was a child, everyone called it the “professors’ house.” Yurko’s father, who is now ninety-six years old, is a member of the Academy of Science, a distinguished achievement, and the honorary director of the Physico-Mechanical Institute, where my parents once worked and started dating. Yurko tells me that until recently his father went to work, having taken a break only due to Covid. Yurko himself walks with a cane: he badly injured his popliteal ligaments five months ago, and this keeps him in Lviv. As he spent two years in the military in the Donbass war, he is one of “the first-call reservists.” “They told me to come back when the knees are fine,” he says. In the 1990s Yurko was one of the first Internet-providers in Lviv and more broadly in Ukraine. His company made the first websites for almost everyone I knew. He was also the ultimate party guy, making cocktail shots of his own recipe and usually the last man standing.
I received a long email from my editor at the European Review of Books, a new magazine for which I’ve been working on a review of a new book by Yaroslav Hrytsak, a historian and public intellectual whom I’ve known for years. (He lives in Lviv.) This task was a real joy from the start, but now it gets tricky: as I write about Ukrainian history, Ukrainian history starts to run amok. Now I discuss the ending of the review with my editor. The previous ending is outdated already. The article is supposed to appear in May. Our history will be different in May. But how different?
March 9, Wednesday
I texted with my kum. He finished his training and is “fully deployed.” I can’t ask where he is and he can’t say. I promised to keep a bottle of cognac for him. (I was referring to a Ukrainian brandy that we prefer. It’s imprecise to call it cognac, but we do.) We agreed to drink it on a bench at Podil as we did after Maidan.
An acquaintance of mine, a Belarussian poet who moved to Ukraine many years ago, and his wife, a Ukrainian poet, wrote on Facebook that they are stuck in occupied Bucha. He quoted a Russian occupier who told a group of women and children: “Well, Ukrainian tribe, are you dying out? No one is gonna rescue you from here.” They didn’t let them leave.
We celebrated the New Year together once, in 2012. It was my first New Year’s party in Kyiv. I was happy then, and even happier that night. We danced to a remix of a Soviet children’s song with a refrain that was changed to “Lu-ka-shen-ka!” I had many hopes for the upcoming year.
Our host that night went to Donetsk in 2014 and was arrested as a “spy” by the separatists. He spent forty-eight days in the Donetsk concentration camp known as Izolyatsia, interrogated by the Russian FSB. (A book about Izolatsia by Stanislav Aseyev recently appeared in English.) I guess it was then that he (or his kidnappers) deleted the photos from that New Year’s party from his Google drive, the ones that he shared with us back then.
March 10, Thursday
I take S for a walk in the park near our home. There is also an amusement park there, obviously not functioning now. Many of the carousels are the same ones I used to ride decades ago. It is cold, even colder than it was in winter, and we are almost alone there. S likes the small stadium where I ice-skated with my mother when I was six. S keeps herself busy cleaning the seats with her mittens, when a David Lynch-ish thing happens: an elderly man who had been pacing along the stadium suddenly stops after having walked three hundred feet and starts to step backwards, slowly, almost like a moonwalk. He traces his entire way backwards and then hides in one of the stadium facilities.
It is almost the city center here, but it is absolutely quiet. It could be any other cold spring day in a deserted park: no signs of war. Like a time capsule.
March 12, Saturday
The air raid sirens wake us up again very early this morning. We all have a special app for air raids on our smartphones now, and the sound is awful. S is afraid, and Roman makes up a story for her, about a small brave bear who travels to Baryshivka, a village near the summer house of his parents. Baryshivka was bombed yeaterday. Roman’s parents talk to the neighbor who looks after their cat, urging him to use their food storage in the house. Their village is cut off from food supplies for now. We all fall asleep soon, but S has a bad dream. I feel her shiver.
March 15, Tuesday
A sunny day. It smells of March, but not as it was last year. The fragrance is of the past, when I was a teenager. I believe this is because fewer people are using their cars now: the price of fuel has risen, business has slowed down, and the air has become again as it was when we were poor. The old city center is almost a cup, a lowland, partly open and partly encircled by hills. All its smells are more intense, as I learned after moving to windy Kyiv.
People sit in cafes, but no one is relaxed. I took a photo of the wall of the yard we went to with S a year ago. The same playground, the same wall, a different March.
March 17, Thursday
I meet a friend of a friend for coffee: a lovely American-Israeli journalist. Almost everybody around us in the café speaks English. She asks me if she could hug me when I have to go, and we laugh about how quickly we have all forgotten about Covid.
March 18, Friday
Russian missiles hit Lviv for the first time, the facilities near the airport. It’s a sunny and cold day.
I think to myself that from now on I can never think of Lviv as my own special experience. Any Lviv story is now overshadowed by the thousands of stories of those who found shelter here.
March 23, Wednesday
We meet with Lida and Vlodko Kaufman and discuss our plans for a big exhibition of contemporary Ukrainian art to be shown in Lithuania, Poland, and maybe France and Austria — a retrospective of a kind, mixing old and new.
Kaufman was one of the founders of Dzyga back in 1993. When I started to work there in 1998, I was overwhelmed by my proximity to a living legend, though as a journalist I had written about his work earlier. Already at that point he was celebrated by the writers I admired. Later I was deeply honored to write commentaries for his various projects. He would bring a pile of trash to the gallery and announce that it would become his new installation, or he would show some new paintings, or he would try to explain the idea of a performance. As I would produce a text about it, he would exclaim: “Oh, that’s what I mean!” A stranger overhearing us would have thought that we were mad. What Kaufman taught me in the process was priceless: he managed to explain the few seconds of ecstasy he lives through during a performance, the elusive magic that an artist may capture if he or she is very lucky. He prepared me to recognize and to welcome those moments of selflessness that nothing in the world may give us but art. I would never have written my first (and last) novel if not for him.
And now we discuss how to present Ukrainian artists to the public in Europe, when that public is finally ready to look more closely at what was under its nose all this time. I must admit that in retrospect I’m a little bitter: even as I enjoyed my work in Dzyga, I was not able to grasp how valuable the art, the music, and the people were back then. But as the world became global for us too, and I’ve seen a bit here and there, I realize that what was happening in Ukrainian culture back then was unique. And almost no one mentioned it. Kaufman talks about how Malevich and Archipenko were appropriated by Russians, and about their roots in Ukrainian contexts, and about the many more artists still unknown to the world, a whole invisible universe that survived the oppressions and the occupations of the past. As he speaks I wonder whether I know how to tell the world a story about the magic that I remember myself.
Roman’s parents left for Vinnytsia, their native city. No air raids today.
March 24, Thursday
We go to a playground with S, the one we used to go to last year. But it is full of people now, mostly newcomers it seems. On our way home S asks, “Where is my home?” She is tired, and probably is asking how long it would take to get home, but it sounded desperate.
March 26, Saturday
I was coming back from a coffee with Elliot, a journalist for Time, when the air raid siren went off. It feels different in the city center, where we hear the voice urging us to get to shelters. The wind rose, almost a storm. The touristy horse-and-carriage passed by in a hurry. It is a strange combination, an air raid siren and a cabbie in Habsburg-era costume, his carriage decorated with gilded patterns.
I hear an explosion, then another, when I go up the street not far from home. The distant explosions catch me on the top of the hill, and I see the thick black smoke quickly covering half of the sky behind the familiar hill on the far side of town. I call Roman: he has taken our girl for a walk and the blast was even more distant on their side of the hill. On my way I meet Yurko coming back home with his kid, both totally cool.
The rockets hit the oil depot on the other side of the city, less than a mile from my godmother. She said their windows were intact, but the fires were raging and the black smoke was everywhere.
March 28, Monday
Our trumpeter performs again in the backyard.
We have a long walk with S to Stryiskyi park, a beautiful nineteenth-century park with dramatic ravines, a pond with swans, pseudo-Romantic ruins, springs, and a greenhouse. One of the few prewar Polish monuments that survived the war is here, a monument to Jan Kilinski, a hero of Kościuszko’s anti-Russian uprising. The whole park was named after Kilinski when it was established, but everyone called it “Stryiskyj” even before Soviets, and the old name prevailed. My mom used to take me there when I was S’s age. We lived close by then, and we live close by now, just on the other side of it. When I was little I didn’t know how unique our street was, with its upward spiral of remarkable early twentieth-century buildings. I also didn’t realize how unusual the street on our way to the park is, a dark ravine between two high slopes with the buildings over our heads.
How does a landscape determine who we are? The back of our building faces the hill. Not only does it confer upon us the privilege of a huge green backyard with fruit trees, which were once my overgrown magical woods when I was little; these days it also provides us with a sense of safety. We never go to our basement shelter, the hill protects us, as if we can hide from the bombings in the folds of the landscape.
You can’t explain Lviv until you explain the landscape. First, the river. The Poltva once gave life to the city, but it was buried beneath its streets in the nineteenth century. Now it is the municipal sewer system. The central prospect and Lviv Opera House stand on what was once the mainstream. Our building stands on the bank of what used to be one of the Poltva’s tributaries, now a busy and noisy street. The pedestrian and transport arteries of the city repeat the course of the underground river. We somehow feel the streams under our streets: even S spins in her sleep to adjust to the flow of the underground river.
We connect the dots of the familiar locations when we see them from the top of the neighboring hill, especially now, when the trees are not green yet. In a few weeks, when the foliage is thick, we will use our inner Google maps. Mine is especially rich with pins these days. I can point to a building with a kitchen full of smoke and Taschen albums where I was happy in 1996, sitting with my new friends, both dead now. Or to a building where a boy lived with whom I was hopelessly in love in 1992, and the nearby yard where we used to try our first cigarettes with my friend, who left for New York. In my private chronology, different blocks are different worlds. But a single missile can wipe away all the nuances of these worlds, and turn the whole terrain, crowded with miniature scenes and characters as in an illuminated manuscript, into a mash of ruins.
A landscape also means a lot for an army. If I’m not mistaken, it is one of the primary considerations of military thinking: “take the heights.” The landscape is what they see on their maps, but it is different from mine, which is dotted not with targets but with memories.
S is busy with her ice cream when we run into Yaroslav Hrytsak, whose book I’m reviewing, taking a walk in the company of other people from Kyiv whom I know, including my colleague from the Soros Foundation. I am unexpectedly happy to see them all, and when they leave I realized why. These days our life in Lviv, filled with foreigners and high ranking guests, is dream-like, in that you meet people where they are not supposed to be. Only it’s war, not your brain, that oddly reshuffles them.
March 29, Tuesday
I woke last night terrified for no reason, and soon the air raid siren went off. S woke up too and she snuggled me.
We had two more air raids today, one of them as soon as we went for a walk with S. On our way back I made up a story about monsters we must hide from. I don’t know how else to explain to my daughter why we must stay at home. I also realize how fortunate we are: we are not hiding in a shelter. I’m making a chocolate pie during an air raid, and recalling many texts that were written by frightened people like me: on the curbs of wars, on the safe side of catastrophes.
April 1, Friday
We went with Lida to Genyk Ravsky’s exhibition at the Dzyga Gallery, one of my favorite places in the world. We noted that it’s been a quarter of a century since its opening. Dzyga is a part of the former Dominican monastery. The narrow medieval street, called Virmenska for the Armenians who lived there for centuries, ends at the gallery’s doors, but the gallery hall is a prolongation of the street, just under the arch, which was painted black twenty-five years ago. The scene is usually full of people sitting in the gallery café.
Genyk Ravsky is one of the first artists who was involved in Dzyga. I remember him from the old days in a leather jacket and long hair, looking like one of the rock musicians who loved his paintings (he played also, but I was too young to witness it). Genyk used to mix pop art with classical images, to put jeans on the characters of the Iliad. I guess it was a mark of those times and that milieu. Now he is in Territorial Defense. Lida would later send me a photo of him in the gallery when he managed a day off: in a military uniform, with unusually short hair.
There are many photos along the stairs to the second floor, where our office once was. All the photos are black-and-white all are by Vilya, the eccentric photographer who died fourteen years ago, one of the regulars of the old Soviet underground scene — not glamorous at all, like his photographs. He was already quite old when our nightclub in the basement of the Lviv Puppet Theater had its heyday. He was so poor that sometimes he didn’t have film in his camera, though he pretended to take photos anyway. But his photos preserved the era for us. Here is Junko, the rock musician. He was roughly my age, now dead. Frankly, he always had a kind of a mark on him: both a mark of genius and of death. I remember he had a small volume of Rimbaud in his backpack when I first saw him, and he also looked like Rimbaud. I mentioned this in my novel. When I saw him for the last time, at Maidan on the day after the shootings in the government quarter, and learned that he escaped the massacre, I felt immense relief: if he survived that, he would live. He died soon after. Listening to the songs that his band played in the late 1990s, I marvel at how original and progressive they managed to be, a galaxy away from the mainstream music industry. If Junko and his band had lived in London or even in Bristol, they would have become global stars. I see also the ghosts of many other musicians, writers, and bohemian types, and of course of Marek himself, a father figure for them even if they didn’t know it. All of them are gone now. I reflect that Lida and I are among the few survivors, and it has nothing to do with the bombings. Some people die because their environment is too harsh and unresponsive, because they don’t feel that they are needed.
Our club was in the basement, and this accurately reflected the status of Ukrainian culture at that time, even when the state was nominally “ours.” The people in the photos were mostly marginal for their own TV and media, even in Lviv. My perfectly Ukrainian first editor, a nice guy, approved my pieces about Dzyga and Ukrainian rock musicians without much enthusiasm, encouraging me instead to get interviews with the Russian actors who were regularly touring in Lviv.
Now most Ukrainians spend time in basements of another kind — the opposite of the basements of my youth, the workshops of musicians and sculptors, cafes and clubs. Why do I feel that there is a connection?
April 3, Sunday
I noticed that Lviv used to annoy me when my mind was all about the future, but now I have surprisingly intense flashbacks, an urge to visit the sites of my student years. When planning, and thinking about the future, is not an option, the past dominates the mind. As one door shuts, another opens.
April 5, Tuesday
Olesya Ostrovska-Lyuta, the director of Art Arsenal, the huge national art center in Kyiv, wrote a Facebook post that perfectly captures what I feel these days. Olesya calls herself a bureaucrat, but in fact she is one of the most profound intellectuals I know. She is my age, also from Lviv, but she left early and graduated university in Kyiv. She wrote that after the first shock of the war her mind was crowded with reminiscences:
These visions come one after another. I’m kind of wallowing in them, telling them to family and friends. I enjoy recalling small details, rolling a memory of an air temperature or light in my head.
Maybe that’s exactly what happens to an old person, when she slowly departs from reality, immersing herself in her own vanished world instead. Maybe that’s how our mind reacts to a boundary experience, which in my case is the shocking reality of war and the risk of death, and in the case of old age is an approaching transition to nothingness. And so you feel as if you are swimming in a soft fog of your own stories, there is just you and the world that has passed by, and thus has lost its acuteness, has become amicable, like a grayish anesthetic substance. Maybe this is how we cope when approaching the frontier of the unknown.
We stay late at a playground, it is dark when we leave. We leave almost simultaneously with another parent, who is obviously not from Lviv, and I wish him a good night. Again I feel like I’m cheating: because of my shabby winter clothes in April (a cold April, but still) they may think that I am one of them, that like them I return to a rented apartment with uncomfortably high ceilings, strange smells, and a chilling uncertainty. Whereas I’m coming back to the apartment I grew up in.
April 14, Thursday
I take S to a meeting with my colleagues in the Institute for Culture Strategy to discuss the exhibition we are planning. We put up a name already: “Ukraine. Unmuted.” S causes only minor damage at the office.
Then we go to a playground at the top of the steep street on the hill of the Citadel. Just above us is one of the Citadel towers, now turned into a five-star hotel. Most of the people descending the metal stairs from the hotel and down the street speak English.
An elderly man with a small, cute dog starts a conversation with a janitor. The two seem to know each other. The older guy speaks Russian, trying to switch to Ukrainian. He gives some intangible impression of wealth, as some people do: it was easier to spot in our part of the world when imported clothes were a sign of privilege, but I can detect it even now, when the same brands are worn everywhere. They discuss the area, and the man with the dog turns out to be immersed in his memories: he points to the fancy hotel and says, “That used to be a Torture Tower. When we were kids we found bones here all the time.”
I know what he means. The Citadel was a concentration camp, Stalag 328, during World War II, mostly for prisoners of war. About 140,000 of them died there.
Built in the 1850s as Austrian fortifications, the four towers and cantonments for the garrison were supposed to protect the city. The idea came after the Austrian army used the hills to batter the Polish uprising in Lviv in 1848. In Soviet times the territory of the Citadel was closed, but some of my classmates boasted that they had explored its bunkers. There were some military facilities there, and, they said, the KGB too. (The headquarters of the KGB was on the opposite side of the hill, on my street.) Since my school was just in front of another slope of the Citadel hill, I stared at the other death tower during my boring classes. Most of my classmates lived nearby: in Soviet times children attended the school nearest to where they lived. This was the Russian school, meaning that instruction was in the Russian language, quite natural for the city center. The elderly guy likely went there, too. It is possible that he brought his children there, and that I knew them.
Our school was a sort of citadel as well. It used to be an unofficial obkom school, meaning that the children of the local Communist authorities went there. It was renowned for its math teachers, who were so good that their students could enter elite Moscow universities. (They didn’t help my math skills any.) We were isolated from the roiling political and cultural Ukrainian life just a few blocks from our building. I remember that the teachers were once concerned for our safety because a huge anti-Soviet rally was taking place in the city center.
I don’t quite remember when the Citadel was opened to the public, certainly sometime in the late 1980s or early 1990s. For a while my dad had an office in the former Austrian cantonment. When I was fifteen, I went there with friends. Though it’s in the heart of the city, encircled by nineteenth-century streets from every side, it was a separate world, like a summer camp. The view from the ground of that death tower, then abandoned, was breathtaking.
Today I watch a group of teenagers cross the playground, heading up to that place. The girls wear heavy makeup, exactly as I did when I was their age. I overhear them talking about the war. They will hide from it there, as we used to hide from the challenges our parents faced and the 10,000% inflation of 1993.
We follow them. As we walk, I tell S that I spent a lot of time here when I was little. “Were you little, mommy?” she asks skeptically. “And I was once big,” she says firmly. “Will you be little, mommy?”
“I will.” I’m proud of myself, the mother of a natural born Buddhist.
April 25, Monday
A heavy rain catches us on our way home. My daughter is happy, jumping into every puddle. The rain is brushing the blossoms off the trees when an air raid starts. And immediately the blinding sun shines. The air raid siren yowls. I look back and see a huge rainbow across the sky. In a universe such as this, no one should judge anybody for dancing at a funeral.
May 1, Sunday
I’m 44 today. Eleven years ago on this day I was buying the first bottle of brandy as early as 11 am. It was for a traditional morning rock concert in the inner yard of the city hall, organized by Dzyga. A long line early in the morning for a rock concert on the first Sunday of May: this was another mark of the city. It was also my farewell; I would leave for Kyiv soon afterward, and I mostly remember that May as endless walks and drinks with my friends. Today I use the opportunity to walk alone and take some of my old routes.
Two days ago Kyiv was hit with missiles again, including a residential building not far from our home. It’s too early to go back.
Every Monday morning I finalize the weekly overview of the news from Ukraine. I sort out the dispatches about attacks, about the killed, the tortured, and the raped, to include all that is important for the security of the Central European region. I do it cold-bloodedly. But I may burst into tears seeing sun streaks on a familiar roof, or young grass in an abandoned lot, or a splash of audacious green in a backyard behind the narrow front door.
I think again about how a landscape shapes you: it’s easier to believe that the world is full of miracles when you know that a dirty, dark, and uninviting entrance may hide a magic garden behind it. A person accustomed to walking in a flat city gets a particular idea of time, her time is linear, as block after block is left behind, becoming the past. But keeping several hills in your sight simultaneously, several distant areas at once, makes it easier to connect different eras in one’s mind — to feel the past, which is never dead, and not even past.
About thirty years ago, every day on my way to school and back, I passed by the Citadel, the KGB, and the notorious prison on Łącki, now the Museum-Memorial of Victims of the Occupation Regimes. At that time I did not know that during “the first Soviets” in 1939-1941 it was the NKVD prison where up to a thousand people were tortured and killed. Polish girl scouts were raped there in the way young girls, almost children, have now been raped in Bucha, Borodyanka, and Irpin. Unlike the Russian soldiers near Kyiv, the Soviets came back. Maybe some of those soldiers picked up their grandchildren at my school. Anyway, they owned the city because of what was done in 1939, and then in 1944, and then later. But the city in its turn owned their children and grandchildren, at least the many of them who became hippies and underground artists. The city owned those who came here during the urbanization of the 1960s: unlike most peasants who switched to Russian as they moved to a city, in Lviv they were sticking to Ukrainian, and eventually turned it into a stronghold of the Ukrainian movement.
I need this city even after I die. I need it to lie on the abandoned concrete slabs, warmed by the sun, at Citadel hill, just as I did in 1993. I need it to hang out in the Jesuit gardens, the beloved park of little Stanislaw Lem, just as I did in 1995 with the grandchildren of those who pushed his family out of the city. I need it to listen to music and poetry under the walls of the Dominican monastery as the sun still shines, because it is June, the enchanted June of 1997. I wish I could somehow do that before I become little again.
