KYIV — Allow me to begin with a disclaimer: The stories that follow are not intended to minimize or overshadow the impact of the dirty, hybrid and barbarian war that Russia imposes on the Ukrainian people like a crippling tax every day.
Life in Ukraine is hard, and I know many Italians — including myself — who would go crazy if they had to live through a working week without going to bed before 4 a.m., being forced to reinvent a second bedroom inside a metro station or — if you own a garage or a very spacious second car — adapting it to a bed for three people.
Yet just like the writer Elias Canetti during the German air raids on London, people living in cities besieged by an invincible enemy want to dance under the bombs, go out for dinner in restaurants where cherries are called “sweet olives,” and bread is served with fancy oils and rosemary.
Bodies seek other bodies, glances seek other glances, tight daytime dresses want to loosen up and become skirts at night.
Russian roulette
I took a walk with a couple of friends through some of Kyiv’s districts. We visited some of the most beautiful and some of the weirdest places in the city: tiny speakeasies, cinema clubs with a bar and a projector, Austro-Hungarian ballrooms turned into clubs playing electro music, and fundraising events for troops at the front.
Everyone has their own way of having fun under the intermittent and sadistic rain of drones — which no one knows when it will come and how intense it will be. The other night I was stunned by the sight of a string of red objects arranged lengthwise across the black sky, accompanied by the sound of a machine gun, which I later realized was the Ukrainian defense system shooting them down.
People make plans for the night, they call and meet their favorite people, but also those they dislike. They swing and stop, move and stay, pay bills and have discussions, they love someone or they regret something. The difference is that here, every now and then, the red strings in the dark dome beneath the clouds are not shot down, and the fake pearls fall from drones just like rain from the sky, striking and burning down living rooms, cars and gardens at random. It is just like a Russian roulette, so to speak, but the gun is applied to the temples of an entire people.
Finding relief
Anna, 25, works in communications and uses words like blunt weapons. “I often go out with my friends to have a drink, either at a bar or at a club. There is one place where every Saturday parties start at 12 p.m. and end at 10:45 p.m. — a bit over one hour before the curfew begins. That’s is a deceiving time: It’s almost late, almost as if there were no limits, almost as if the curfew didn’t exist. I choose to ignore all these ‘almost’.”
Some months ago, the desire to find a shelter to escape this difficult reality led Olga — who is about 10 years older than Anna — to spend a day at a wellness center, outside the city. “Picture a night in May,” she says, hidden behind her heart-shaped sunglasses. “Think about it: You are submerged in the muffled silence of the pines, the grass is so green that it could be fake, the air is so clean that you could be in another world. Then the sirens go off. No one moves. Your mind refuses to accept the fracture. But then you see it: A clumsy and threatening drone, like a flying balalaika, dragging its damned buzzing through the sky.”
When you walk around the streets of Kyiv you see almost only women.
Anya, who works in the cultural sector and has two children, was also looking for a bit of lightheartedness when she joined a women-only weekend some time ago. “On her 40th birthday, my cousin decided to give us a gift: She took us all, along with her friends and family, to the mountains. But I had forgotten how much the women in my family enjoy drinking… For four consecutive days, prosecco was flowing like a river,” she says as she laughs.
“Somehow we even managed not to lose one of our newborn babies — a true miracle, considering the 33 empty bottles piled up next to our trash bin. When I left Kyiv my heart was heavy; my kids stayed behind and I was scared because of the attacks and everything else. But once I got there I managed to relax. I was confident that my husband would have taken care of things, whatever was going to happen.”
Shining diamonds
It strikes me as strange to talk about these things only with women, but that is because when you walk around the streets of Kyiv you see almost only women. Maybe it is harder for men to admit their desire to escape when so many of their fellow citizens are fighting at the front and the cemeteries are turning into a second city, made up of young people who are no longer alive.
Maybe the absurd condition that Ukrainians are experiencing is a formidable way to undercut paranoia. Even if, to tell the truth, no form of genuine pleasure comes without its cheap fears. But when life is made of devastating fears falling from the sky, even the tiniest everyday obsessions turn into shining diamonds to keep in your pockets.