a Kind of Refugee / 03.10.2022

I dreamt I was living in a house with Putin. That’s the thought I awoke with on Sept 29. It was scary. We’d meet in the house in passing. I wanted to shoot and kill him. This is one of those actions that must succeed on the first try. But I was afraid he was out to kill me. It’s the first dream I remember having since before February 24.

The sensation of being under attack, knowing that someone, an entire country and people, wants to destroy me, is real. The words and rockets emanating from russia are a constant reminder.

***

Imagining the finality of a nuclear attack is tempting. It fills you with horror that floods the senses. You’re practically paralyzed. Your stomach knots up and your mind is overwhelmed by fear. It’s not unlike the feeling after you’ve eaten an entire box of cookies in one sitting. The rush of sugar is stupefying; the sense of dread and disgust at what you’ve done is enough to keep you from writing a paper or calling a friend or going outside.

Living with the threat of nuclear attack is another story. In fact, if you survive the blast and the first hour and then the next 24, you have a pretty good chance of going on living. But it takes a bit of time to calm the nerves and start making preparations to survive.

You start packing your bag on Sept 29, the day before he’s set to make the announcement, which for all its fictitiousness will provide the “grounds” to justify a more brutal attack. Though a terrorist state needs no grounds or justification for its acts of terror.

Still you are pretty sure that the city you’re in will not be subject to a nuclear attack tonight, and if you start getting ready now, when you have the time to fumble around and think spatially, you’ll work some things out and be able to act more quickly the next time.

Rehearsing is important. Because you can’t expect to think of everything on the first try.

So you decide, yes, you will pack your bags for real, meaning close the computer, put it and the power cords in your backpack (I know a nuclear explosion will knock out electricity, but still, my computer is practically everything), accepting that you will have to take it out the next morning and repeat the same procedure every night… until…

Cool head. It’s like packing for a trip. Something you’ve done countless times before. Something you’ve gotten really good at. You know how to live out of a backpack.

The threshold between imagining and action is personal. Crossing it is empowering.

You grab a change of clothes and put it in your bag, along with a bottle of water, acetone nail polish remover, and a specifically Ukrainian detoxification substance (that’s helped me through many a hangover). As you’re walking around the apartment, the question at the front of your mind is: Where will you go? It’s so obviously ridiculous that you’re packing a “go bag” with no clear idea of where you will go with it that you start to laugh. And this too is real.

Rehearsing for me is not about the future at all. It’s how I stop my head from spinning into wild fantasies about what might happen by doing something concrete now.

You don’t need to know everything all at once. You just need to know what you will do tonight. And tomorrow if I learn of a better option I’ll revise the plan. That’s how we live now.

***

At night I open The Black Book, a thick volume documenting the Nazis’ destruction of 1.5 million Soviet Jews, and read tales of who was killed and where exactly 81 years ago in Nazi-occupied Kyiv.

Sarra Evenson’s advanced age and bad health did not permit her to be evacuated from Kiev. She had not left the house for two years. This great-grandmother was thrown from a third floor window at 14 Gorky Street.

Regina Lazarevna Magat (10 Gorky Street), the mother of a professor of medicine and biology who had died at the front, was murdered by the Germans. The well-known lawyer Ilya Lvovich Bagat died from a German bullet along with his two grand-daughters, Polina and Malvina. Moisey Grigorievich Benyash, a professor of bacteriology known throughout the Soviet Union and Europe, also perished in those days together with his sister and niece.

But all this was merely a prelude to later events which unfolded in the cruelest and most treacherous fashion in Babi Yar.

I take comfort in the concrete facts, imagining each neighborhood. It’s humbling to remember that my city bears a long, ugly history of genocide.

There is an excerpt from the diary of a woman who was rounded up in Mariupol for execution. She awoke under a pile of corpses; the Germans had done a sloppy job of killing the city’s Jews at the edge of a defensive trench beyond the city limits. Sarra Gleykh crawled out and spent a month outdoors before finding a Red Army detachment. Her journal of the first days of the Nazi occupation, including the detailed recollection of her intended murder, survived. How did she hang onto it while being stripped and shot? She must have written it later from memory. Then did she leave her notebook behind and find it afterward?

So many stories I had heard about World War II make sense to me now. Including the vexing question of why Jews showed up with their belongings when called to collection points by the Nazi occupiers. “How could they have been so gullible?” I used to think from my 21st-century point of view. Now, even without direct experience of living under occupation, it’s obvious how in dire, chaotic situations, you listen to the people with the authority to organize evacuations, distribute food, exercise deadly force, etc. Some people showed up to Babi Yar on September 29, 1941, expecting a labor mobilization, resettlement, or to be exchanged for German POWs and end up in Soviet territory. Other Jews did not heed the call to go to the ravine in northwest Kyiv. Some tiny sliver of them must have survived, the rest were found and killed anyway. At some point even your cleverness wears out; it’s just a matter of luck.

***

There is no nuclear explosion in Kyiv on the night of Sept 29. On Sept 30 I sleep in and then turn on the news and learn a humanitarian convoy of civilian automobiles outside Zaporizhzhia was struck by a russian missile, killing 30 people (there were, of course, no military objects nearby). Another couple missiles hit the center of Dnipro.

Morning on October 1 in Kyiv is glorious: vibrant with color, a bright blue sky and the river without a ripple.