Dispatches from Ukraine - but starting in Krakow
While I am travelling in Ukraine, I thought I would write personal reflections about how I feel about it all. This first post starts before I even arrive...
DAY ONE - 3 July, 9.30am CET
Krakow
We have woken up to the news we have been dreading - the death of Victoria Amelina who was killed in the airstrike on Kramatorsk last week. She was 37, and a single mum to a son.
My colleague who I am travelling with met her last year. The night before the news broke, we were sitting in a bar in Krakow’s market square, me half-asleep from more than 12 hours of travelling, the two of us talking about her work and how horrific it was that this pizza place, which everyone knows, had come under attack. It was late, gone 11pm, and the horses wearing harnesses covered in bells were snorting and stamping their feet. The huge square with its imposing empire buildings was lit up.
There were lots of British men. Krakow, it seems, attracts stag dos. It’s hard not to feel awkward.
I messaged my fixer this morning to say how sorry I was about Victoria, because whether she knew her or not, it’s a tragedy and there is that sense when a journalist dies that we are a community in mourning. I have been thinking a lot since a recent death back home about what my friend had recently told me about circles of grief and which circles we find ourselves in. Obviously this is the widest circle: the sense of losing someone you did not know but who is part of a shared community and effort.
It is the closest circles that matter, where your heart goes.
As so often happens, I feel like I am discovering her work too late.
Here is a video of her reading her poetry.
And a translation of the poem by Uilleam Blacker.
Here is a link to two of her essays on Arrowsmith.
And a link from Pen with details of her books which I hope come out in English.
Her death focuses me on the questions I am hoping to answer in the coming days. About what it means to be a war reporter, about the need to bear witness, to keep going, to shine that light and make sure these crimes do not go unseen, unrecorded, unreported. To be in the room so that disinformation does not win.
But at what cost.
I guess in some ways I have questions about why am I doing this - why am I going somewhere dangerous and putting my family through all this stress and worry. Am I going for good reasons? What purpose does my story have? What purpose does any of my writing and reporting have?
I guess there’s no point trying to second-guess what I am going to get when I haven’t even got there yet, let alone second-guess in a negative way.
Gosh, I have gone from paying tribute to a woman who has tragically died, to moaning about myself and my self-doubts.
11.30
Krakow – it is the city of churches. There are tourists, and I am probably getting ripped off by ordering coffee and grapefruit juice in the main market square. I watch the swallows or swifts circling the Basilica. But man, juice! I need vitamins so much. It’s been days of eating junk after conferencing in London and then travelling and then carnival and then more travel.
I feel that familiar conflict of admiring the architecture of Catholicism against the fact that so much of my work is reporting on the women that Catholicism combined with right wing authoritarianism has killed in this country.
I’ve bought ham, salami, cheese, bread and beers for the train journey.
DAY TWO - 4 July, 11.21AM EET
Arriving in Ukraine
I am so dizzy from the train that I don’t quite know where to put myself. Have just taken two travel sickness tablets to try and regain my balance but genuinely feel quite terrible. The world is moving under my feet and when I turn my head too quickly everything tips on its side.
The train is, and all I can think of is a Hemingway-esque phrase, “hot as hell”. Within seconds of boarding I am sweating, beads popping on my forehead and upper lip, and pooling in my chest. Talking to an Oxford academic, as we stand next to the window gasping for any semblance of breeze, I keep lifting my sticky top away from my stickier skin, but by this point, sipping a warm can of Tyskie, I can no longer care about propriety or modesty.
When we reach the border, the sun has long gone down. We have passed through a flat landscape, churches popping up, a cemetery. I am tipsy by now, and laughing a lot, fairly confident that I’ll be spared a hangover due to the intense sweating out of alcohol that I am doing. My colleague has ripped open the salami but even I cannot eat it, it is too warm.
The soldiers board the train, taking our passports and asking the purpose of our trip. They are friendly but it is a reminder of why I am here, what we are here to do. And then the waiting begins. We wait and we wait. For an hour, surely two. The dark is thickening around the train, and there is not a breath of breeze or air to relieve the tension. The heat is heavy, but the bubbles from the flat beer are popping light in my head. At one point, the soldier returns with a dog and we are all told to go into our cabins. I’m worried my incessant chatter is going to annoy our fellow passengers, both of whom have chosen the top bunks (later I understand why - surely the top bunk does not have the feeling of the train’s wheels rolling and rolling and rolling under your back… but also how would I get down if I needed a wee?).
The stillness of the heat has attracted mosquitos.
A border feels out of time and space. You are in limbo, in neither the place you want to reach yet, nor still in the place you want to leave. The silence outside, the vanishing of the landscape and the place left behind and the place to come into the darkness, amplifies the sense that we are suspended in a liminal space.
I start to talk about Bleak House and the line about Nemo, how Nemo means No Man. I can’t remember why. Then I start on Middlemarch. Am I boring? Probably, but neither of us are ready to sleep, neither of us can sleep until we start moving.
Then the movement begins. I take 1.5 antihistamines which, combined with the Tyskies, sends me off to a heavy, drugged sleep that offers some relief from the heat only because I am not conscious to care.
But not for long. At 6am I wake up to the light dancing on the dew-kissed grass. It looks so cool, so new and fresh, I want to barrel-roll out of the train window and wrap myself up in the grass, to feel the sweet damp on my parched skin.
This, then, is Ukraine. I huddle against the window, watch the landscape roll past me. There are small villages, and people up early for work waiting at empty platforms. I feel like a child wanting to wave, particularly at the railway workers waiting in ancient-looking signal huts. Reminds me of Dickens again.
There’s a crane in a field, standing tall. An old woman with a kerchief over her hair, herding two goats. As the morning pushes forward a little more, school children join the workers on the platforms we whizz by. After an hour of watching, the only person awake in my cabin and, it feels, the whole train, I fall back to sleep. There are more hours of this journey to come, after all.
By the time we arrive at our destination, I am the dizziest I have ever been. The world is turning, but for me it is tipping on its side.
The days are taken up by meetings that are intended for a journalistic piece… these SubStacks are the me me me reflections
On the first evening we go to a Georgian restaurant – it is fancy, £££ on Google maps but my first meal since Saturday that wasn’t a sandwich or a breakfast buffet. I order a green and tomato salad with walnut dressing, roast chicken and pan-fried potatoes. It is delicious. I had to borrow my colleague’s sunglasses as the sun was so bright while it was setting that I could not see. Of course, I can’t see wearing his either, because they are not prescription. Luckily by the time the food comes, the sun has sank far enough.
The restaurant is laid out on a terrace, overlooking a park, and we talk about how a restaurant like this would be so popular in the UK and how come none of our restaurants do indoors/outdoors so well? A family with the happiest golden retriever is having a birthday dinner on the table behind us. The staff bring cake and everyone sings happy birthday. One of the diners is wearing a t-shirt that said ‘I want to go far away’.
There is no doubt we are in Ukraine, but the evening scene is so peaceful and so familiar, we could also be anywhere. Children are playing on the climbing frame in the sandpit. Four dogs are playing wildly, the littlest terrier terrorising a beagle who keeps coming back for more, chasing one another and tumbling on each other. The terrier jumps in the fountain to cool down, then runs back, at one point grabbing the beagle’s floppy ear in his teeth – the beagle starts howling. The golden retriever joins in, running in circles as the terrier tries to climb on his back.
They are so happy, playing and running and splashing in the fountain. The scene is almost too perfect, too picturesque.
What I’m reading
So many novels. And I have broken out of my thriller tip…
Trust by Hernan Diaz
The Square of Sevens by Laura Shepherd-Robinson
The Cameraman by Matthew Kneale
Demon Copperhead, by Barbara Kingsolver
What I’m writing, loving, watching… this can all wait for another day.