Our last half year in Ukraine sank into darkness and uncertainty. The electricity went out every day. Or rather, the electricity sometimes came on. And with electricity came water, heat, internet, mobile service. It reminded me of my childhood, when water ran for an hour in the morning and an hour in the evening. Back then we filled the bathtub so we could manage. I bathed after my brother, because he was younger, and so it was probably assumed he ought to be cleaner. There was a line for the bath: my brother, me, my father, my mother, my grandfather and my grandmother. Baba Ahafiia went last.
In 2022, when the war began, with the power outages, there was no line for the bath anymore — only my wife and me. But there were sirens, and bombs that struck off victims of blind chance each day. Modern sirens require electricity, so when there was no power — which was most of the time — old Soviet-era trucks with mechanical sirens drove through the streets. A man stood in the back of the truck, turning a huge crank, and the siren howled with its mechanical wail. It felt as if great whales of war were swimming through the empty dark streets, scraping their bellies against cobblestones and dirty snow.
At the time we were living in Lviv, in western Ukraine. Even there the war brought daily power outages and constant uncertainty. I knew that even if we failed to cross the border and escape from there, I would have to get rid of everything I owned — my collection of vintage cars, my guitars and all my studio equipment, all my jackets and ties, my entire library. All those things slowly melted away and disappeared from my house as the spring of 2023 approached. What remained were a few boxes, my paintings, some personal memories, notebooks, family photographs, dried leaves from Spain pressed between the pages of little poetry books. Those I could not part with, so I left them in the attic of a friend.
We were traveling to the border by train; civilian planes do not fly over Ukraine now because of the war. A burly soldier, stern and slow like a thundercloud, silently took my documents and disappeared toward the end of the train. He took my passport and everything that could confirm who I was, and vanished without a word. Perhaps we’re not going anywhere after all, I thought.
When he finally returned a quarter of an hour later, he simply handed everything back to me in silence and moved on. He stepped off the train at the next stop, just before we crossed that invisible curtain between Ukraine and the world.
From empty to inviting
Half a year earlier, at the suggestion of my publisher in New York, I had applied for a residency at City of Asylum Pittsburgh. When they accepted me, we decided to leave Ukraine, even though we still did not know whether we would receive U.S. visas. There was no way to apply for them inside Ukraine anymore, so we crossed the border into the unknown. For a time, Poland became a kind of Catholic limbo for us, and after a week or two we finally arrived in Pittsburgh…