Where were you that morning when the great war broke out?

Andriy Lyubka— an important figure of the new generation of Ukrainian writers, extremely active in supporting those fighting in conflict zones.

Here is my story: The war spoke to me with the distant sounds of explosions, but I couldn’t believe it. I thought I was dreaming. Then, on the second floor of my friends’ house near Kyiv, I heard a door slam and steps on the stairs. “The war has started, the airspace is closed,” Katya, the owner of the house, told me. He said about airspace, because in two hours I was going to fly to Vilnius for the presentation of the English edition of my novel. Her voice, awakened from sleep, seemed to me rough and masculine, hoarse and smoky. In fact, it was only the sound of primal fears. There was a big dog in the kitchen, in front of the window. He stared at the dark sky and barked nervously as he listened to the roar of rockets and fighter jets.

Every Ukrainian will forever remember the dark morning of February 24, 2022, when the full-scale invasion of Russia began. Someone was woken up by the sound of explosions, someone by the alarmed calls of loved ones – but we all remember those seconds down to the last detail. It is a memory that spans our whole life. Shared experience makes us not just one people, but a closer and closed community – something like a family. Because we lived this moment together.

Then there were many different moments, with anxiety and tears, with pain and anger, but those first seconds remained in the memory. As in a 3D program, I remember all the details around me, including the temperature in the house, the glasses on the table from last night, the hands of the clock above the door, the smell of the dog in the room, the cold tiles. It was the most important moment in my life, after which everything went crazy and all plans turned upside down. Perhaps I will remember the moment when I hear that the war is over, if I live to see it, just as deeply.

Two terrible years have passed since then. What has changed in us and around us? The most significant change is that we are used to war – it is part of our life, our routine. This is the most terrifying change, because we are used to something completely abnormal and terrible. We have learned to live without paying attention to it.

Now, when the air raid siren sounds in Kyiv, almost no one rushes to the nearest shelter – people leisurely go about their usual business. Death took on the features of an ancient Greek tragedy, being controlled by fatum and fate. You practically cannot influence it – today a rocket can destroy your house, fall on the cafe where you order a cappuccino, or destroy the train station where you meet friends. It is almost impossible to defend against this danger, so we must accept it as a daily possibility. “Thy will be done,” as we atheists say.

There are many deaths around. In the spring of the 22nd, when the first coffins with soldiers who died at the front began to be brought to my city, each death was perceived as a personal tragedy. As the hearse passed through the streets, people knelt on the sidewalks, laid flowers on the sidewalk, and crowds gathered at funerals. Now the city cemetery has a whole section of military graves, each of which is decorated with the Ukrainian flag. The coffin is accompanied by relatives, colleagues from peaceful life and comrades from the front – it is usually a small procession. Passers-by stop as a sign of respect, but no longer cry or kneel. People are generally more comfortable looking the other way or hurrying to the nearest store to avoid a personal encounter with the death of someone who sacrificed his life for our right to live in a relatively quiet part of the country.

Do not be too quick to judge these people – they are not cynical or insensitive. But there has been so much death, pain and suffering in the past two years that tears have already been shed, emotions have faded, and the shock of each new tragic news paralyzes us to dissipate quickly. It is necessary to muster all the strength to live on – it is easy to lose one’s mind from the carousel of emotions and experiences. Sometimes I think we’ve all gone crazy together.

I’m not exaggerating, believe me. In Kharkiv, a whole family – parents and three children – died as a result of the Russian bombing. The Russians attacked an oil depot, causing a fuel leak that spilled onto the streets and set fire to dozens of houses in a residential area of ​​the city. A real hell broke out on earth, people were burned alive. The father and the boy were in the corridor and tried to escape. The mother and two other children were in the bathroom. The youngest boy, Pavlo, was 7 months old. His mother held him tightly as they died. There was nothing left of that baby, not even his bones – only ashes.

Is it possible not to go crazy after such news? And am I really crazy if my first thought was that it would have been better if it was a rocket, that they all died on the spot, because they all suffered fear and pain in the fire.

A Ukrainian military man, who only returned from Russian captivity on January 31 after two years of abuse and torture, was fatally hit by a truck at an intersection on February 8. After returning from captivity, he did not even have the opportunity to see his daughter Valeria Galkina, now a refugee in Lisbon. The daughter wrote on Instagram: “My dad died today. He was killed not by war, not by a bullet, not by two years of captivity. He was crossing the street and was hit by a car. It’s surreal. I can’t believe this is real. I’m sorry for everything. I was waiting for your call, as you promised, but I’m not waiting anymore…”

These are not the brightest stories from the war – just two news from the morning. This is what our usual life looked like for two years – 730 mornings in a row. Defenseless, innocent, absolutely ordinary people die every day, killed by Russia in a store, on the street, in their own homes.

But not only civilians die. Russia kills our soldiers every day. The world has accepted the idea that soldier deaths are normal, that they are just statistics of war. But aren’t soldiers human too? Can they be killed simply by invading our country? Who and when decided that killing soldiers is not a crime?

Especially if you take into account that the Ukrainian army consists mainly of civilians – people who voluntarily went to defend their country or were mobilized by the state. These people had no military training for the invasion. They were company administrators, bus drivers, pizzeria cooks – just like you, who are reading these lines.

Take the example of my friend Maxim Pleshi, a 32-year-old artist whose lifestyle embodies the hippie style. He was a true free spirit. He earned his living by taking portraits of passers-by on the street and restoring murals in churches. He voluntarily went to the front, although he had no military training. He was wounded twice, survived the fighting near Bakhmut last winter. He was in pain and I joked that he was like a cat with nine lives. These extra lives saved him more than once, but when the war continues every day for two years in a row, even nine lives are not enough to survive. Maxim was killed last year, and his beautiful body was taken to the cemetery in a closed coffin, because it was badly mutilated. Killing such a soldier is a crime or not?

Now let’s answer together a question that I am asked very often when I travel to other countries: “Are you writing fiction now?” The answer is obvious.

We live in such a whirlwind of stories every day that fiction simply surrenders to reality. No novel can compete with the flow of everyday problems in the life of an average Ukrainian. I don’t write anything fictional, and I don’t think of literature at all as imaginary or detached from life.

Because the only function of Ukrainian literature today is to bear witness, to describe destinies, to document crimes. When I wrote about Maxim, his relatives thanked me for the fact that in this way his memory will live a little longer and others will learn about his life. Literature becomes a form of psychotherapy, helps to endure the greatest losses, gives hope that all this is not in vain, that we will be heard.

These are not empty words: during the war years, against the background of a deep economic crisis, the circulation of Ukrainian books doubled, and the book market remained one of the few profitable ones in the country. A paradox, but only at first glance – in times of turbulence and uncertainty, people need books. The demand has increased because it is about people, about human and intimate things. Being a writer in our time is honorable and extremely difficult, because modern literature is not meant to rest, but to help and save. But this is also associated with a certain risk: if you have a large library at home, you risk that in the event of a missile attack, your house will burn much faster than others – the fire brigade may not have time to save you. .

But this is not something that can be predicted. During the two years of the war, as I have already said, we learned to rely on fate and destiny. We have become accustomed to the deaths around us and accepted the possibility of our own sudden disappearance….- Read the full article and comment on Contributors.ro