Unimaginable horror
русский корабль, иди нахуй!
'I can’t even imagine what you’re going through.’
‘I can’t even imagine what it’s like.’
These sentences, or a variation of them, have featured in most of the emails I’ve sent and received in the past month or so.
As clichéd as it is, it has to be said because it’s so true. I truly can’t imagine what some of my friends are going through. I truly can’t imagine the unspeakable horrors happening right now.
My grandmother used to tell me stories about Belfast being bombed by the Germans during World War II. She was a teenager at the time, and the tales she told me about fleeing to bomb shelters in the middle of the night and the bombs exploding around her and the house just across the road that got bombed were simultaneously fascinating yet terrifying. I couldn’t even imagine the reality. From afar, with the passage of time, it was so distant that I could barely comprehend how shocking it must have been. It seemed like more of an epic adventure.
Spending much of my childhood in Belfast during the 1980s there was always that distant threat of bombs, but it was so far removed from everyday reality. You heard the stories, you occasionally heard the very distant rumble of an explosion, you could see the flames from the upstairs window way, way off in the distance, but we never felt directly threatened. The one time that we heard an explosion so loud and booming that it shook our house and we ran upstairs to see the flames shooting into the sky barely a mile or so from the house, it turned out that it wasn’t even an IRA bomb but a gas explosion at a nearby pet shop.
Another sentence that I’ve probably written at least a dozen times: ‘I know this is a ridiculous question, but…how are you?’
A typical response might be: ‘Don’t ask me how I am. I’m not okay.’
People do care. But people don’t know what to write or how to phrase things.
A dear friend has lost a family member, or someone close to them. What do you write? ‘You’re in my thoughts and prayers’?
People hate that. It’s hackneyed, it’s trite, but it’s a struggle to think of the right words to say.
We’re all processing this differently. There is no wrong or right way to grieve, to process, to accept, to deal with.
The things that go through my mind as I toss and turn night after night are terrifying…and oftentimes rather banal and mundane. While one minute I’m grieving over the unimaginable tragedy that has befallen Ukraine, the unspeakable, horrific acts of violence; the murder; the carnage; the bloodshed, the pain, the loss…loved ones suffering…the vile cruelty being inflicted…the rage, the fury, the the the… (I struggle here for words…)
…the next minute, I’m thinking, restlessly in the wee hours of the morning ‘why didn’t I pack that new pink sweater? How could I have forgotten my old journal from 2005? Why didn’t I drink more of that really nice scotch – Raasay – that my brother-in-law got me for Christmas? How on earth can people sleep these days?’
Some type of cognitive dissonance, maybe.
And then there’s the guilt. It doesn’t go away. At first, there was relief, but fleeting – it quickly fades away. There’s relief that I, and my daughter, got out before things kicked off. (‘before things kicked off’: another phrase I’ve used in countless messages – a sporting metaphor sounds so much more palatable than ‘before Ukraine got invaded’ or ‘before the war started’)
But the guilt quickly takes over. Not the guilt about ‘I should’ve stayed’. No, it’s more about having negative thoughts now, when I’m safe, when I’m out of harm’s way, and I feel guilty for not being positive about it all the time. As in, how dare I put myself through any type of suffering when others have it so much worse?
We’re in Vienna now, the family reunited. Life can be rather unfortunately ‘amusing’ at times – not the best choice of words, but I shall leave it here. In late January, in my first blog post of the year - ‘Don’t pickle anything’ - I related how, despite numerous trips to Vienna over the past six years, I had failed to do all the things I wanted to, and how I regretted not having done them all, lamenting this and wondering if it was too late, and would I ever have a chance to return. The theme of that post: don’t put off things until it’s too late.
Well, damn it, here I am back in Vienna, just over two months later. And I’m not at all happy about it. I walk the streets in a daze, depressed, forlorn, feeling glum…and then feeling guilty for doing so. I have it so good here, right? I should be relieved and trying to enjoy myself the best I can, right? With all this art and high-brow culture, and living in a city that usually ranks high in the top ten year after year in various ‘quality of life’ rankings, with all these splendid cafes and playgrounds and a wonderful public transport system, I should be making the most of it, right?
Wrong.
I miss Kyiv and want to go back. I don’t want to lose our new flat. I don’t want most of my life savings to go up in smoke – literally.
This, despite me whingeing and moaning about how fed up I was in Kyiv over the past few months.
How times change. We always want what we cannot have. (yet another cliché alert)
That phrase, ‘the grass is always greener…’ immediately springs to mind. We all know it, but very few of us know the entire phrase:
‘The grass is greener on the other side…but it’s also fertilized with bullshit.’
Vienna is driving me crazy. I know there’s still a covid epidemic raging, with one variant after another, but it’s hard to take seriously when your home is being bombed and so many are suffering. I really have to wear this damn FF2 mask everywhere? And yet you allow smoking indoors, Vienna? Really? I get so angry over this, and then immediately feel guilty. There we go again.
Vienna: what a dull place. I used to like it, and maybe I still do, maybe it will [re-]grow on me, but…I can’t help but think of the Harry Lime quotation from ‘The Third Man’, perhaps the most iconic film ever set in Vienna. It really does ring true in light of what’s happening now in Ukraine, and my feelings whilst here:
‘Like the fella says, in Italy for 30 years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love - they had 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.’
We all deal with these things in our own way. Sometimes, the only thing I can do in messages to friends is resort to gallows humour: I hope the russians appreciate good scotch. I hope they enjoy reading my books. I hope they notice the lovely hardwood floors. I hope, before it all gets turned to rubble, that someone can at least appreciate a few of my precious things, in our precious new flat that took years to finish, and that we only moved into late in 2021.
The shit that goes through your mind in a situation like this. It’s unbearable, I don’t know how to deal with it, I don’t know what to say, I keep waiting for this nightmare to be over. The uncertainty, the waiting, is agonising. It’s sickening, my thoughts. How can I joke at a time like this? How can I get annoyed or upset with things in Vienna? How dare I?
Mostly I’m consumed with rage and unbridled anger about what is happening and I feel utterly helpless and afraid that the world isn’t going to do enough, that these venomous, murderous, scum-sucking bastards are going to get away with this and I want to castrate every mother-fucking last one of these swines who have committed the most heinous crimes against the most innocent of people and and and…
I can’t imagine the horror. What I read, what I see – and I can’t avoid it, I just can’t, and/but it’s so unimaginable.
I can’t imagine the friends I have separated from loved ones. The friends I have, with small children, their fathers back in Ukraine. Friends with older children, separated from husbands, from fathers. A family friend, pregnant with her first child, alone, her husband back in Ukraine. But even together, the uncertainty and horror is unimaginable. Another friend, pregnant, thankfully together with her husband in Ukraine, which gives me comfort, but I still can’t imagine how nerve-wracking it must be.
The uncertainty, the ‘what’s next?’ is unbearable.
I can’t imagine what people are really going through.
Long-time readers will know what an avid reader I am, and will remember how many reading-themed posts I’ve had over the years. Reading is my solace, my comfort, my catharsis.
Reading is an escape.
But at a time like this, I can’t switch off, and I cannot escape. I can’t read anything that isn’t somehow related to what’s going on. I can’t disconnect and read a piece of classic literature, I can’t find any sort of escapism. When I’m not scrolling through and refreshing my Twitter feed – rare – I’m taking ‘comfort’ in material related to goings-on, either directly or tangentially.
I’m delving into lots of history to try to make some sense of it all.
I could quote endlessly from these books, because there are so many echoes. The same shit keeps on happening. The same shit will continue to happen.
It brings to mind a Günter Grass quotation:
‘History, or more precisely the history we are stirring up, is a blocked toilet. We flush and flush, but the shit still keeps rising.’
What I’m reading
1 In Europe, Geert Mak
Written by a Dutch journalist in 1999, on the eve of the millennium. A political and historical travelogue covering events of the 20th century, juxtaposing past and present, travelogue and history. It’s amazing how much history not only repeats itself, but just how much it sucks. So much of it resonates now…the ordinary Austrian citizen who can’t believe war is happening yet again in Europe…in 1914. The ordinary Dutch citizen who can’t believe war is happening yet again in Europe…in 1939. The ordinary Czech citizen who can’t believe that his country is being invaded…by the Soviets, in 1956. And on and on…And those who can’t believe that, on the cusp of the new millennium, with Kosovo being invaded by Serbia, that we could be facing World War 3. How can war be happening again, in Europe, in 1999, countless citizens ask.
And those who can’t believe what humanity is doing to other humans, the killing, the torture, the carnage, the looting, the pillaging, the the the…
It all sounds too familiar.
Never again. Never again? Never again.
2 The World of Yesterday: Memoirs of a European, Stefan Zweig
“Any book, which is at all important, should be reread immediately.”
(Arthur Schopenhauer)
It’s not quite ‘immediately’, but I first read this in 2015. And it’s well worth a re-read now, from one of Austria’s most renowned writers. This autobiographical work covers Vienna from 1934 up until the start of World War II. It’s often referred to as ‘a unique love letter to the lost world of pre-war Europe’ and I can only concur with this. Tragic, poignant and all-too-familiar.
‘For I have indeed been torn from all my roots, even from the earth that nourished them, more entirely than most in our times. I was born in 1881 in the great and mighty empire of the Habsburg Monarchy, but you would look for it in vain on the map today; it has vanished without trace. I grew up in Vienna, an international metropolis for two thousand years, and had to steal away from it like a thief in the night before it was demoted to the status of a provincial German town…I belong nowhere now, I am a stranger or at the most a guest everywhere. Even the true home of my heart’s desire, Europe, is lost to me after twice tearing itself suicidally to pieces in fratricidal wars. Against my will, I have witnessed the most terrible defeat of reason and the most savage triumph of brutality in the chronicles of time. Never—and I say so not with pride but with shame—has a generation fallen from such intellectual heights as ours to such moral depths.’
‘Never until our time has mankind as a whole acted so diabolically, or made such almost divine progress.’
3 When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit, Judith Kerr
A classic teen book that I’ve somehow never read until now, and that one day I’ll give to my daughter to read. A tale of innocence and a lost European childhood, in yet another autobiographical work, as the author recounts having to flee Germany on the eve of World War II.
‘Deciding which toys to take was the hardest part…In the end there was only room for some books and one of Anna’s stuffed toys. Should she choose Pink Rabbit, which had been her companion ever since she could remember, or a newly acquired woolly dog?’
4 The World for Sale: Money, Power, and the Traders Who Barter the Earth's Resources, Javier Blas and Jack Farchy
A book that’s so rich and informative and will make you so much smarter. And you’ll quickly realise just how much oil, commodities and so many other products make the world go round. With all the debate over sanctions and and oil and natural gas and who controls what…you’ll quickly realise what a murky world it is, and how damn complicated it is to extract ourselves from our over-dependency on resources.
5 Kleptopia: How Dirty Money is Conquering the World, Tom Burgis
The title pretty much says it all. This one is timely and relevant. Two other excellent books in this category: Moneyland: The Inside Story of the Crooks and Kleptocrats Who Rule the World, Oliver Bullough; and McMafia: A Journey Through the Global Criminal Underworld, Misha Glenny
A very brief Ukraine reading list
There have been various iterations of lists like this in the media, both traditional and social, over the past month or so, but because a couple of readers/friends asked, I’ll share a mere handful of some of the best books I’ve read on Ukraine and Russia over the years. If there’s a good book I’ve missed, it’s either because I’ve not read it, or I’ve forgotten to include it. If there’s a must-read not here, please mention it in the comments below. This is just a small handful of the many, many books out there:
Anne Applebaum, Red Famine: Stalin's War on Ukraine
Anna Reid, Borderland: A Journey through the History of Ukraine (be sure to get the updated 2015 edition)
Orest Subtelny, Ukraine: A History (a pretty weighty tome, and not always a light read, but probably the best comprehensive overview of Ukrainian history)
Svetlana Alexievich, Chornobyl Prayer: Voices from Chornobyl
Peter Pomerantsev, Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible: The Surreal Heart of the New Russia
Catherine Belton, Putin’s People: How the KGB Took Back Russia and then Took on the West
Fiction:
Mikhail Bulgakov, The White Guard
Andrey Kurkov, Death and the Penguin
And finally – read this
I’ve recommended Morgan Housel ad infinitum on this blog. I can’t recommend him enough. Read him regularly, it’ll make you smarter.
The first two are very short:
An excerpt:
‘What Covid-19 and the Ukrainian invasion have in common is that both have happened many times before but westerners considered them relics of history that wouldn’t resurface in their own modern lives. Maybe the common lesson is that there are difficult parts of humanity that can’t be outgrown.’
This last one is longer, but read it. Again and again.
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