Day 5
7 July, Ukraine
I’m in meetings until 7.45pm and then it’s a 15-minute taxi ride to a bar where I have been promised music, beers, and food. It’s just after 8pm, and it’s finally stopped raining, so two hours before it will close and everyone heads back to avoid the curfew.
The place is lively with parties, couples, friends making new friends and catching up with old, and the crowd is both local and international. The bar is busy with people ordering cocktails and beers. I sink into a baggy leather armchair, and the underground setting reminds me of all my favourite bars from my teens and early-20s.
On the table next to mine, a family are celebrating a birthday and a man is rocking a young baby in his arms. There is a live band singing latin music, and my heart is lifted by the songs, by the laughter coming from every table, by the joys to be found in hot food and cold IPA and singing.
It's not long before couples take to the narrow dance floor and execute tango steps, and I wish I could remember more quickly how the music sounded, that I had paid more attention to who was on the stage, what the band looked like and how they played. But perhaps it’s good that I don’t remember it very clearly, because it means I was having fun and immersed in the experience of music and dancing and laughing, rather than being outside of the scene, a passive observer not an active participant.
I go upstairs to make a quick phone call, and the siren sounds. At first I can’t quite believe it is the siren; I stare transfixed at the church across the street, as if somehow it can make sense of that noise for me. I want to believe it’s whining motorbike engine; or that the noise is somehow connected to the church. I almost feel like the noise is part of the church.
This is the second time I have heard the siren – the first time on the second night here – and it feels more surreal this time around. Because I am out, because the sounds of war make no sense in this space where there is live music and young people drinking cocktails and shots, and where couples are dancing, their hair flicking over their shoulders.
I take a deep breath and go back into the bar, taking comfort that there is a shelter should the worst happen and that the bar is underground.
Last time I heard the siren on my own, in the enclosed solitude of an anonymous hotel room. This time it is different. While I can feel my chest and jaw clenching, my mind fizzing with what the correct next steps should be, around me people are performing the next steps of their dance moves.
The music continues to play, the dancers continue to dance, and if the laughter and beats are interrupted with the beeps of the Air Alert! app, the conversations in the bar acknowledge the siren, before moving smoothly back to whatever they were focused on before: news, gossip, friendships, families, music, movies, books… the stuff of life, not of death and war.