This was originally posted by Svitlana Matviyenko on the Institute of Network Cultures blog on March 12, 2022.
March 11, 2022
At 11pm, I go to bed with the intent to spend a couple of hours on writing. I am staring at the blank page for quite some time; the siren goes off and then, as if by following its call to tune in, I start writing. A reporter from the Canadian Press phones me, she asks if this is a good time to talk. “It is. Would you like to hear an air raid siren?” I approach the open window of my bedroom, stretch my arm with the phone out of the window, and she hears it. A little confused, she asks if it’s safe for me to speak to her and she also asks why I am not going to the shelter. I tell her, on the sixteenth day of the war, how I came to ignore the air raid sirens at this point and that between spending my night hours alone in the wet and cold basement, and staying in my bed, I choose the latter. The siren stops. She asks me how I spent this day. “It is my birthday. I am forty-six today.”
Early this morning, right after I made my coffee, I received a call. “We have a flower delivery for you.” “Where are you calling from?” I ask almost like I check a password or a secret word. “Kamyanets-Podilsky. Please come downstairs.” I open my apartment door and I see the staircase floor freshly clean, still wet; I sense a subtle smell of cleaning chemicals in the air. For a brisk moment it feels like I am stepping into a different timeframe, either the past or the future, and my elevator akin Doctor Who’s telephone booth scrolls me down the building. A note is attached to the bunch of while and purple tulips: “Love, Asia.”
At 11am, I must be at my parents. A WhatsApp message from my Russian friend in the Netherlands, after a very long while, stops me. A sympathy message? I hope not – I still do not know how to respond to these, no matter where they come from. But she needs my help – her sister with her Ukrainian husband and a cat are on the run from the war, and they are in my town. I call several people asking about available apartments. I speak to my friend’s sister, we talk through the options, postponing the decision until tomorrow; and I leave. My mother and father, as fragile as they are, have been preparing to celebrate my birthday since yesterday. This is the first time in more than twenty-five years that we are together on March 11th.
For accuracy, I should disclose that I spent my forty-fifth birthday in Kamyanets too, but on that day last year, I was sitting near my mother’s bed at the hospital after she broke her spine and went through a very complex surgery. The surgery was on a cosmic level for a small Ukrainian town, and it was performed brilliantly. When after the surgery my mother was brought to the room, still half-conscious, she kept repeating in a hallucinatory way: “You and the doctor are from the Moon. My daughter is from the Moon” – with such a dead seriousness that I could not help laughing, almost hysterically, and crying, too, as I kept her lips wet with a sponge.
While the surgeon was great, the nurses were a dangerous gang of corrupt cold-blooded creatures. Their unsubtle techniques of squeezing bribes out of you were diverse. They would talk to you as if you are a friend, complaining about other people whose relatives are hospitalized and how they never reward them with a 50-gryvna bill as they should; they would look directly into your eyes and compliment you on your jewelry or clothing, emphasizing that it might be expensive; they would be aggressive and rude, whipping the room and kicking your stuff, should it happen to be on the floor; they would threaten you, almost in passing, that your mother may get suddenly worse at night; and finally, they would just yell at her, an 80-year old woman with a broken spine, when I was not there, that she “shits too much,” directly in her face, as my mother later recalled, and they would refuse to change her diapers. This was dangerous as the moisture from her sweating body could accumulate in the back side of the diaper and prevent the scar on the lower back from healing.
The doctor who did the rounds yelled at me, and not at the nurses, several times when he noticed the diaper was not dry enough, but at one point I also lost my temper and yelled back at him and at the nurses who gathered around to watch the scene, “I am going to write a fucking book about this apocalyptic place one day!” Covid was also an instrument for pressing people for bribes. The rules at this Lenin Central City Hospital, the old name it is still called by among people, were that nobody was allowed in the Department of Traumatology and Neurosurgery without a negative Covid test; but if you pay 50 gryvnas to a nurse in charge, you can come in and spend time with your relative. The rooms were full of visitors. When they asked me for a test on the first day, I went and did one right at the hospital’s lab. Having talked to other visitors later that day, I realized that I was the only one who had a test done, and the rest of them paid bribes. I should also mention, for a context, that nobody – nobody! – neither the nurses nor visitors – wore surgical masks; and it was several months prior to the beginning of the vaccination campaign in Ukraine, when the Covid statistics were mind-blowing.
I kept doing tests for four days, but then the director of the hospital lab came out, looked at me with her eyebrows raised and asked me who sends me here and why I am coming here every day; I explained. She said the tests are limited and this whole thing that nurses orchestrated does not make any sense, and she would stop it by calling the hospital’s President and telling him about this scheme. Next day I come to visit, nobody asks for my test, but also no “hello,” nothing, just mean and offended faces; so, I silently proceed to my mother’s room to take up my post protecting her from the hospital’s personnel. And that was March 11th last year.
I remember how I enter the hospital room and my mother is very happy to see me, and she apologizes that we must spend my forty-fifth birthday here, me changing her diapers. I cry, certainly, and she reminds me, not that I forgot it, how in Soviet times, this building was a maternity hospital, where both my sister and I were born. And then she says, “You know, I gave birth to you right here, in this very room.”
This year my mother is so happy to cook some dishes – stuffed cabbage, dumplings, vinaigrette. My father got a huge, letter page size birthday card and my mother wrote the greeting. We served the food and she stood up to read the greeting but started crying twice as she was going through those ten lines. We raised the glasses – she chose the wine that my father makes, very sweet, not to my taste at all; my father and I chose horilka, of which I had bought three bottles just before Zelensky’s order forbidding alcohol sales came into effect during the first days of the war. With the card, my mother gave me a tiny baby shirt, which I had worn when leaving the maternity hospital in her hands in 1976, with personalized embroidery done by her close friend, wishing me good health, in Russian.
My father was not feeling well and had to go to bed soon. He asks God to help him die every day. He is exhausted from constant pain in his legs and back and heart and head. His blood pressure is now higher than usual. I can see he does not have much left. My mother and I kept talking for another hour until my phone air raid alarm suddenly announced that we can leave the shelter now. But when did the alarm go off? I check Telegram channels and see that it had been going off for almost two hours, the longest time thus far in our region, but my phone notifications did not come through, possibly, due to the poor connection.
At 6pm, Natalka and Serhiy came over my place; Natalka brought a gift – one of her stunning graphic work, which I will frame and hang on the wall when I am back in Vancouver, and Serhiy gave me a book on the history of Ukrainian jewelry. They also brought a bottle of red wine that was secretly sent to them yesterday by a friend from another town. A curfew is imposed in the city in the war time, it starts at 9pm, so we do not have much time. Serhiy is shaky, nervous, and telling Natalka and I, “They will attack us this night from Transnistria.” “How do you know?” “It is clear, cannot you see? The shit in Odesa, Mykolaiv, and more. The move from Transnistria is next.” He goes for a smoke at the balcony, comes back and asks if I have some bread. I have, and also smoked pig fat that I bought today. He consumes the whole piece of fat, as Natalka and I speak about how the work with refugees is organized in town. He says he feels much better now, and he looks better too, and says “Sorry, it was weird.” We laugh that fat has always been the best medication and, as Ukrainians, we certainly know that. I hold a glass of red wine in one hand and a glass of Pepsi in the other, I sip from both. They leave very close to 9pm, hoping to walk through the inside yard paths and small streets to avoid our Territorial Defence checkpoints on their way home.
A call with Asia. We speak about how this war is addressed by many Western academics. She is disappointed that “even David Harvey” is mesmerized by Russia and takes a position against us. And I think, as I listen to her, that my reading list will never be what it was before the war. The need of a radically different vocabulary is urgent. And it is my fault, too, that such a vocabulary is still inexistent.
As I finish my phone conversation with the reporter from the Canadian Press, closer to midnight, she asks me about the changes in habits and in how I organize my life now. I tell her that now I do things faster – I think faster, I write faster, when I wake up, I quickly get out of bed, clean my teeth, make coffee, I spent less time in the shower, when I persuade myself to take it amid these really, really busy days. She asks me if I have a feeling that I live every day as my last one. I say no, not me, certainly; it is safe here, where I am in Kamyanets-Podilsky, but I am sure many people who went through the horror of the last weeks’ bombing and shelling, or those who are still under occupation in Melitopol or the Chernobyl NPP, many of them, probably do. And I also admit that I did, however, notice a very subtle reminder formed somewhere deep in the back of my mind that anything can happen under the circumstances and that I better not waste my time. What comes, comes. “You probably keep all your deadlines,” she says. “I certainly try harder than usually. That’s how you do when the word deadline becomes a little too literal.” “A little too literal…” she repeats after me, “may I use that?”
When I am finally done with emails and writing, about 2am, I suddenly receive a WhatsApp message. “Good evening, Svitlana. My name is Katya. You don’t know me, but I heard many good things about you from Sasha. He gave me your number once when he had heart issues, in case that something happens to him, and I would not be able to help. Could we speak now?” Sasha is my former boyfriend, we separated a year ago, in the first days after I arrived in Ukraine; and it was my decision. I read the message again, I have no idea who Katya is, and whether it means that Sasha is dead. I respond, yes, she can call me now. Katya calls and tells me that she and her small daughter are now in Florence but will have to leave soon and she considers immigrating to Canada. She asks for my help to understand some details of the Canadian immigration process, and poses several more specific questions. I don’t ask about her connection to Sasha, I just answer her questions to the best of my knowledge. “May I call you again?” “Yes.” “Could you, please, not tell Sasha that I called you?” “Sure, I am not in touch with him for about a year probably.” “Okay. Me too. Maybe this is best, for both of us,” she says. I am not sure what she means and why, but I say, after a little pause, as I don’t know what to say, “Yes, maybe.”