Translated by Shashi Martynova
A Winter Without Snow Excerpts from the book
I hear that elderly voice again. Heat. Both rooms are on the sunny side. Even the cactus is uncomfortable. Here, in a small apartment on the outskirts of the city. I come here every other day. I cook. Most often, Korean noodles. Because it’s fast. But mostly, I try to calm her down. Grandma had a stroke; she mumbles, constantly worried. In the mornings, she calls and promises to set the apartment on fire. Then one of us goes. Why do you want to set the apartment on fire, I ask. Because I’m dying. I try to reassure her. Then she might say something coherent. She says, mushrooms are out. There have never been so many. It’s a sign of a war coming. Grandma is very concerned. She says if NATO expands, there will be war. The year is 1997. I’m 20, NATO doesn’t bother me. Grandma is 81, and she’s scared. Some thing or another will break, she thinks. The sewer will burst, and shit will flow. “What will happen to you all when the war starts if I’m not here?” she says, as if she could protect us if she stayed alive. I thought: sometimes, before death, people see something, and some, they foresee the future. Maybe she knows something of the sort? That’s what I thought, and then forgot. Afterwards, the market crashed. One morning we woke up, and money was worth nothing. With Grandma’s inheritance, I bought five volumes of Proust and three of Borges.
Mom baked pies and went hawking them at hairdressing parlors. I begged her not to demean herself, and even though I was a student, I started looking for a job. Сhanging the cooker was out of the question. First, there was no money. Second, if a war was about to start, we needed the stove to remain gas-powered. Why, I asked. Because if the electricity is off, at least there will be gas, and then we’ll somehow survive. All of this was background, casual conversations.
Many years later, when my parents moved to live in the countryside and I had been translating various texts, I made a decision: the world may collapse, but I shall be involved with books. That’s the only way I can keep my sanity. I started gradually selling off my father’s treasures that he brought back from trips around the world. My father was a diplomatic courier. During the years of perestroika, he immersed himself in Kissinger and Ford, the Elders of Zion, Blavatsky, the Roerichs, and was convinced that America was against us, and Jews were to blame for everything. He could say of someone, sort of playfully, “Who is he?” “How do you mean?” I asked, bewildered. “A Jew!” my father responded. “So what?” A mysterious silence followed. It seemed like enough was said.
Much later, I found out that the ivory statuettes brought by my father were plastic. And the little diamonds he intended to order to be made into a jewelry set for my mother were bottle glass. Among all the trinkets, there was a radio receiver. A portable Soviet receiver that used to be worth next to nothing. My father kept it in case of war. “What war, Dad!” “Just like that. When they attack us, how will you listen to the news?” Of course, I threw the receiver away. And I remembered it on the morning of February 24, 2022.
On that day, when I woke up and shuffled to the kitchen to make tea, Kirill, my husband, asked me in the corridor, “Are you going back to sleep?” I sensed something was wrong and said, “I’m not, tell me what’s going on.” “They are bombing Kyiv, Kharkiv, Mykolaiv, Odessa—”
My legs gave way. I leaned against the wall to keep on my feet and not collapse. I got to hear that grotesque phrase, “special military operation.” Although it was clear; it’s war. When they bomb, it is war. But because of this phrase, everything was in a fog. What now? I was overcome by an unfamiliar, peculiar dullness. It possessed me for several days. I didn’t know what should be done in a situation like this. I went outside. I expected to see tear-stained, gloomy faces. But everything outside was normal. The sky wasn’t falling down. People were going about. And then I came across an old man, and then another. Suddenly, I found myself in the world of Daniil Kharms. Old men were walking around, carrying cheap Soviet radios. One held the receiver in his hand, the other had it dangling on a strap, and it was broadcasting loudly while the old man walked his dog. The old men were businesslike, tense, as if they had finally started doing what they had long anticipated. It was as if they had been summoned to a job. Only it wasn’t an attack on them. They were the ones attacking.
In the post office queue, there was a woman, one of those who told everyone what they had for breakfast and what they were doing today. I involuntarily listened to what she was telling the clerk. “And I bought air conditioners! As soon as they entered, I immediately ordered air conditioners!” It dawned on me; as soon as Russian troops entered Ukraine, she rushed to order air conditioners, fearing that prices would rise. And she kept blabbering, and I felt chills on my spine, knowing that I would remember this dialogue for the rest of my life.
Something became clearer when I came across an interview with Hristo Grozev. He did what I so desperately needed; he structured everything. Russia is changing its political course. It seeks to destroy the Ukrainian government, subjugate Ukraine. Then other countries will follow. Everyone will become military, some way or other. There will be no way out. Russia will continue its wars. With Poland, with the Baltic countries. Finally, the whole picture appeared before me. That evening, I had my first hysteria. I didn’t roll on the floor crying; something happened to me that used to occur in my childhood when I suddenly realized the inevitability of death and tried to imagine the infinity in which I would no longer exist. Absolute helplessness, the impossibility of changing anything, letting life go its course without violent intervention. The inevitability of what was happening, the change of all plans by someone else’s insane will. The obviousness of Grozev’s words struck me. That’s how it will be. Wars, torture, and labor camps. What was called “sovok” after perestroika, an interminable, interminable narrowness of the mind, my childhood and early youth nightmare. I was suffocating. I grabbed the shelves on which dozens of pots with violets, grown by me for sale, sat. So, the plan is as follows. I take garbage bags and take all these plants out into the frost; half the night I’d be carrying them all to the bins. And in the morning, we leave. Where can we still go? To Kazakhstan? A question. Why do we necessarily have to throw out the plants? If we’re leaving, there’s no need to waste time. A question. How much money do we have? How long will we stay there? What about our dog?
On one of the first days, I read a post of a Facebook friend who lived in Dnipro, Ukraine: “As you know, I love painting! Took a bucket, went up to the roof. And painted everything over.” For half an hour, I couldn’t get what he meant. And then I realized; my namesake in Dnipro painted over the crosses on the roof that marked the building, making it easier to target for bombing. He erased them. Not long ago, we worked together on subtitles for Duras’ films. I translated the text; he put the subtitles. He’s a true cinema enthusiast with a team of authors, an online film magazine, and a university teaching position. This was about the roof of the university he taught in.
I hadn’t seen photos from Bucha; I had only read descriptions. I knew that if I looked, I wouldn’t be able to act in any way. But action was needed, and quickly. However, I saw footage, I don’t know where from, showing bodies being thrown into a massive pit. Someone was filming from below. From the sandy slope above, bodies were thrown down. They pushed the body of a girl. She was undressed, hands tied behind her back, and her body was thrown, somersaulting, down. And behind her, there were other bodies, already in that pit. I don’t know why but I was not looking at her, she kept being shoved into the pit, and she kept falling. Did the people throwing bodies from above do this? Were they people who did it? Apparently, my brain perceived movement as a sign of life. And those behind the girl in the pit were clearly dead to it. I watched there, into the pit. There was a young guy. Tall, in clean clothes, in jeans, with an orange raincoat. Young. Tall. For whom, that’s that. And for all of them, that’s that. For her, that’s that.
Sometimes, seldom, we went out in the evenings to avoid staying within four walls. I walked the dog, marveling blankly that people, as usual, were walking on the street. It struck me that the same snow, exactly the same snow as on February 24, lay around and nothing changed. Two fools, two powerless people in a hopeless situation; where to get so much money, how to take the dog with them? “You should have protested, resisted, and made your opinion expressed.” And I had forgotten. On the first day—the protest—either the last or the penultimate. We were both going to go. Kirill said, they’ll notice us, the dog will be left alone for an unknown number of days. Someone has to stay behind. “I’ll go, and you stay with him and find a lawyer.” He took his passport, a chocolate bar, a bottle of water, and a book to read in detention. And he left. He returned after about three hours. “No one was there. Lots of police vans, barriers everywhere, few people going about their business, but no protest, neither in the center where they were supposed to gather nor along the entire street. I walked from Teatralnaya to Belorusskaya. No one.”
We met with friends, Maxim and Tyoma. Seeing no solutions, I alone was against leaving. What, am I going to visit museums there? Go to the theaters? They painted such bleak prospects that those conversations took away my wish to live. So what if he kicks the bucket? It won’t change a thing. Maxim explained how all this happened. He read Foucault, Michael Mann. It’s not about him; it’s a whole class that emerged after the collapse of the Soviet Union . . . Tyoma offered a Belarusian scenario. He was from Minsk and for many years hadn’t been able to see his parents because he would then be immediately imprisoned. “You’ve got a Sunday school picnic here so far. Do you know what will happen next? I’ll tell you—” For the last time we met in April, to somehow celebrate Maxim’s birthday, in the park not far from their home. Along the paths, someone hung scraps of paper, someone wrote on the tree trunks: “No to war!”, “Putin is a murderer!”
And what about my father? He was 87, he grew up during the War. He stood under the arch of the house hit by a bomb. I don’t know what possessed me to say in our last conversation that I was scared, that it was time to beat it, and to ask if he could take the dog for a while. He couldn’t take the dog, son. Your dog is big; it will bother me. Our dog doesn’t even bark, Dad. You can just let him out in the yard. “I need peace, you see.” “And what about the dog you host when your friend Anna, who helps you, goes on vacation? That beast never shuts up day or night.” “I can handle him, but I won’t be able to manage yours. And then, where are you going?” “I don’t know, Lithuania, Latvia.” “You won’t have a life there. Stalin wisely chose Latvian riflemen for his guard. They are fierce, nasty.” “What does Stalin have to do with it? When did this happen?” “Any other options?” “I have no idea. Germany. Italy.” “You can’t go there. Too many fascists. Everywhere in Europe. Their number has increased significantly. They’ll just kill you.” “What are you talking about?” “You won’t have a life there. You won’t find a job. Borders will be shut. You won’t come back. You’ll die there.” “Dad, there’s a war going on.” “What are you afraid of? Conscription? They won’t take you. You’re unfit for anything. What bothers you? The whole world wants to wipe our country off the map right now. You’re nobody there. It’ll be a bloody mess there. Italy? That’s where it all begins.”
We talked for an hour. He performed wizardry, summoned all calamities, like a seasoned sorcerer, insisting that I would be killed, that I would get sick and die. I understood that it was no use to listen to others’ rules of life. Neither those in the Bible, nor those of beloved poets, nor those that my mother spoke of. At night, I would drift off, wake up, sink into slumber, my body was on fire. At around 6 o’clock, I woke up completely. My brain was working fast, analyzing what to do and how. It was May 8, tomorrow there would be a parade and the speech of the murderer. Action was needed right now. The night of May 8, 2022, I died. My father killed me. At 8 am, I got up, woke up Kirill, waited for him to gather his wits, and told him we were leaving. In the evening, we took the overnight train to Minsk. Maxim was already in Vilnius, Tyoma was flying there via Kaliningrad. The next morning, we were in Minsk; a bus took us to Vilnius. It was just the beginning. We later collected the dog.