Minute of Silence

My city is changing throughout the course of the war. As if Kyiv were living through an accelerated historical transformation. Every return astounds me anew. In recent months it has surprised me above all with a feeling of new emptiness, new absences.

More friends and acquaintances have been mobilized; some left the country or made plans to. There are also those who were willing to risk their lives and crossed the border illegally to avoid taking part in the war. On the street, I will no longer come across those who died in the months of my absence. Some of my friends are among them.

The feeling of continual deprivation, of creeping destruction, it seems surreal. It hurts simply because the destruction doesn’t stop. And because the prospect of further destruction is discussed as if it were a constructive measure that could save something.

Already in the first months of war, when it became clear that the desired peace wouldn’t come, an opposing idea emerged: the concept of “endurance,” of being unbreakable. Along with it comes the contradictory notion that the war is both a free choice and an unavoidable necessity.

I remember how in May 2022 I returned to Kyiv after a month’s absence. The car radio was on quite loud. The almost ear-splitting voice of a woman shouted: “Good morning, heroic people of a heroic nation! We know who we are. We will not be broken!” News reports followed; already then I couldn’t fully trust them. The anchorwoman’s voice, expressing her fear through rage, as if she were really begging for help, is still stuck in my head. Her intonation, it seemed to me, refuted her assertions. The entire tone of her voice screamed at me: “Can’t you see, they’re forcing us to be heroes?”

A present echo of this voice is the answering machine of my mobile network in Ukraine. When you call someone who’s on another call, the automatic response is: “This subscriber is not available. Perhaps this very conversation brings us closer to victory.” There’s a threatening ring to these sentences. But to me, they’re still poignant. This society is still seeking words that can become symbols of solidarity, resistance, and survival.

This “us,” this “we” is meant to convey a feeling of togetherness, a a sense of the totality of war. And this war continues to seizes new realms of the everyday.