There are no poems about war. There is only decomposition, says the poet Lyuba Yakimchuk. So she breaks down the words: Lu-hansk; Don-basssss; and at the end of the poem her own name: Lyuba is no longer there, but only “ba!”. Whereby the wording “break it down” is wrong, because the words, the places, the people are already broken down, Yakimchuk only writes down what takes place. “Language is as beautiful as the world that surrounds it. If someone destroys your world, it will reflect on the language,” says the author, who was born in the Donetsk region. She sees herself as a literary descendant of Ukrainian Futurists like Mykhailo Semenko, who introduced deconstruction into Ukrainian poetry and, like so many other poets in the years of Stalin terror, was shot.
There are no poems about war. Decomposition only. I’ve been trying to write for the past few months. Not about the war. Just to write. Between phone calls looking for housing for people who are fleeing. Looking for medication, inflatable mattresses, children’s shoes, bathing suits, the right SIM cards. I was on hold at the Citizens’ Registration Office because nobody could be reached via the hotline for Ukrainian refugees and I was forwarded again and again. A slowed down version of “The Sunsilk Girl” sawed my ear as I stared at the blank sheet of paper on my laptop desktop, thinking I might as well write a few lines while I wait. When finally, after almost two hours of waiting, asking questions and being transferred, an officer blurted out and said: “Listen, I can put you through, but the colleagues have been instructed to let it ring,” I hung up. I stared again at the blank sheet in front of me. Now, right now, I could write something.
I’ve had a lot of interactions with Valeria in the weeks since her escape – we went to the medical examination of her eight-year-old child together, we sat together over registration forms, but also in parks, ate croissants out of paper bags and talked about the beautiful city of Kyiv, to which they had moved from the east of the country not too long before the expansion of the war. Valeria said that the many hours spent in the offices are definitely useful for her, she is learning German. She already knows her first sentence: “Please wait.”
“Did you see any crime along the way?”
There are no poems about war. I tried to write a few lines on the train on the way to Tatiana’s. In the first weeks of the siege of Mariupol she had lost contact with her mother, then, after sixteen days of radio silence, the first sign of life came. The mother was found again: she had fled on foot through the war zone across the border to Russia. From Mariupol she went to Rostov-on-Don. Google Maps tells me it’s a 36-hour walk (180 km). When walking without breaks and when there is no war. Tatiana’s mother is seventy-three. The Russians welcomed her helpfully at the reception base, only one question seemed strange to her: “Did you see any crimes on the way?” Then they gave her tea and put her on an evacuation bus bound for Moscow. Tatjana’s mother made it to Germany via Vilnius and Warsaw. Now she’s sitting in Tatjana’s apartment and says that the Ukrainians shot at her and her house. The Ukrainians threw bombs at them, fired rockets at them, destroyed their garden. It wasn’t the Russians, it was the Ukrainians, she knows, that’s what the radio said.
The surface of the water in Tatyana’s glass trembled. “But you know,” she added, “I can still bite my tongue, but how is Rita supposed to stay calm?” Rita is Tatyana’s older sister. She fled Zaporizhia a week before her mother, leaving behind her son and husband, who had joined the city’s defence.
Day after day, the two sisters sit in front of their seventy-three-year-old mother, who had walked over half-ruined bridges and mined fields and is now explaining to her daughters that the Russians want peace.
Maybe the mother will unpack a few old stories to forget about the escape
There are no poems. Valeria calls and says she’s going back. She packs up her eight-year-old son and goes to Lviv. Her husband and her mother and her grandmother were there. It doesn’t matter, the borders, the missiles, the alarm. You can’t breathe here in Berlin, it’s better to be with your family. “Then at least wait until May 9th, okay?” I ask her. “Wait for the day of victory. Who knows what it will mean this year.”
Then I think of the official German “Please wait” and swallow.
The daily news says: “Around 20,000 people would return to Ukraine every day across the Polish border alone, including refugees who had previously sought protection in Germany.”
There is none. “Did she say anything else?” I dared to ask Tatjana after a while. “Your mother must have said something else, except that the Ukrainians shot at her and the Russians gave her tea.” I hoped that the mother might have unpacked a few old stories so that she could forget about the escape. Maybe, I thought to myself, she also said something nice, like how happy she was to see her daughters again. “She told how many lunatics she saw on the way through the destroyed Mariupol,” said Tatjana, and: she saw more crazy people than corpses, crazy people commuting through the streets. “Like broken compass needles.”
“But I’m… No, it’s not what you think it is!”
There is. A friend of a friend fled Odessa with five cats. My friend asked her, “But wait a minute, you also had a suitcase with you. So how did you transport five cats on top of that?” “I don’t know,” said her friend. “I can’t answer you. I don’t remember anything. All I know is I took a large pair of scissors, punched holes in my holdall and from then on I don’t remember anything.”
Decomposition only. The twenty-two-year-old brother of a friend from the Luhansk region was drafted. He was to guard a post. The area was surrounded. He has a bad back since he was a kid. In fact, he was retired.
It. The graffiti left by the Butcha butchers on the facades of the houses: “Who gave you a nice life?” and: “From Russia with love”.
Butcha. irpin. Mariupol. Trostianets. Popasna.
Butcha. Borodyanka. Andrivka. Worsel.
Butcha. Chernihiv. Voyevodivka.
Butcha. That the place is actually called that.
butcher
No poems. I have been invited to a panel discussion to explore the role of art in times of war. The director from Donbass, with whom I go on stage together, asks me in the hallway: “Who is here for the Russian side?” I answer that I don’t know. He asks where I was born. I look at him. “In Volgograd. Grew up in Moscow.” “There you go,” says the director and moves on. I tense every muscle in my body to keep from yelling after him, “But I’m… No, it’s not what you think!”
We sit down in our chairs. The moderator asks: “Can you write now?”
“Danja, tell me about Chernivtsi!” I asked him at the party
decomposition. Lyu-ba! Sa-sha. Dan-yes, Em-ma-ma-ma. This year my grandfather Daniil, called Danja, celebrated his 85th birthday. A pianist, who drew her repertoire fully from Soviet nostalgia, played for him: “Я вам не скажу за всю Одессу / Вся Одесса очень велика / Но и Молдаванка и Пересыпь”: Ichsa is not so huge / can speak for all of Odessa / But in Moldavanka and Peresypj …
The song is about the two crook districts in Odessa where my great-grandparents come from. My great-grandfather Sasha, whose name I bear, and my great-grandmother Etinka, who would have turned 105 this year. These are the parents of Emma, the wife of the jubilee, who married Danja in Chernivtsi 60 years ago. Half the city went through the streets to the registry office and made music and cheered on my grandparents, at least according to the family legend. “Danja, tell me about Chernivtsi!” I asked him at the party. “What was the best thing about Chernivtsi?” Danja smiled like he always smiles when he thinks of Emma (like Al Pacino) and said, “Your grandmother.” Emma’s face lit up like a butterfly had flapped its wings. But this time nobody was dishing up family legends. Danya started rubbing her eyes, murmured that she, Emma and he, like countless emigrants around the world, had always sent money to Chernivtsi to keep their ancestors’ graves clean, but now-“
I promised to go there with my wife next year, find his parents’ gravestone and wash it clean. “The inscriptions are in Hebrew,” Danja added. “But you will find him.” “Next year in Chernivtsi,” I said, as the Jews like to do when they celebrate with “Next year in Jerusalem!” toast, knowing that the Jerusalem they raise their glass to is long gone. And so will never arise again.
settlement. A friend who fled Moscow shows me a video on her phone: military planes in the formation of a “Z” keep marking the Moscow sky. She says: “The world is divided into those who make plans and those who don’t.”
And then at the latest I understand what I’ve lost: being able to think about the future.
This text is the first part of Sasha Marianna Salzmann’s introduction to the international festival “Act with language“, which takes place from June 23rd to 25th in the Literary Colloquium Berlin.