Portraits of War: Anastasiya

This is the seventh in a series of portraits from our home city, of Berliners affected by the war in Ukraine. You can see all the portraits as we publish them here.

By Jacob Sweetman:

As Anastasiya Volokita and I walk back towards Friedrichshagen station from the Müggelsee, we are talking about her Mum, her sister and her young niece, all of whom have managed to settle in a small Polish town, having escaped Ukraine. Her Mum, she says, used to be a bank teller but now cleans posh apartments for a living. It's okay, says Anastasiya, she likes it there and it's better than nothing. 

It's better than war, she says.

But then a cat crosses our path. The cat is a mess, its mangy fur is patchy at best, its ribs poking through. It limps sadly, like a drunken old man trying to get back to his empty home, far too late.

Anastasiya's got a cat, named Mushka Mukhich, that a friend brought out of Ukraine via Czechia to  to Poland. Anastasiya picked her up from there. Mushka Mukhich is a well travelled cat. She loves cats, and the state of this one floors her. We stop, she asks about where to find an animal shelter at this time of the evening; I've no idea, it's Friedrichshagen, it's May and the sun is already starting to set. She worries, asking two teenage girls passing if they can help. 

They can't.

A woman with a zimmer-frame comes slowly past, but she stops only to say how she loves Anastasiya's hair, intricate long plaits tightly, precisely woven with Ukrainian blue and yellow thread. 

And I too have to go. Anastasiya says it's fine. She'll take care of it, somehow.

She is wearing a black hoodie that she has zipped up, and pulls over her hands when the wind gets up as it does over the Müggelsee at this time of year – at any time of year. She has a pair of blue jeans that a friend gave her, and simple white toed trainers that were bought for her by a guy she met when she realised that she would be stuck in Berlin for a long time yet.

Because she'd never meant to stay. Anastasiya Volokita had just come to Berlin on the 22nd of February to celebrate her birthday three days later. But the most recent incarnation of the war in Ukraine broke out on the 24th, and she's not been back to Kyiv since.

“I just came for five days, for a change of mood, to have some fun, to take some time, to clear my head to prepare for the next festival season of work,” she says.

And though it might not seem much, it's the little things that have started to chip away at her confidence, at her sense of self. Anastasiya used to be, as she describes herself, “a fashionista”. Her wardrobe in Kyiv was full, she shimmered her way through the scene, but she says she doesn't really know who she is any more. Her brother will send some clothes from Kyiv soon, but she's already donated many of them to people there, people who have lost everything. 

She pulls at the sleeves of her hoodie again. At one point she giggles with a charming lack of self-consciousness when she says that she thought “it was always important to be important”, realising that maybe it wasn't.

She's a busy woman, Anastasiya. Or at least she used to be. From her first days at the design institute she moved to Kyiv to study at, her and her friends had made money by embroidering, decorating clothes for fashion designers and pop stars. She says they could do anything by hand and my eyes are drawn again to the eternal plaits in her hair. She went on to work for a designer, travelling to exhibitions, that sort of thing. But then, around 2014, she realised that she didn't need a boss who, as she says, didn't listen to her, and nor did she want one. So she struck out, alone.

“I just jumped onto the water and started to swim,” she says.

Her boyfriend was a producer, so she started managing, doing PR, helping spread the word and putting out fires, she became a promoter, a spokeswoman, the public face and internal engine of Comic Con Ukraine and the White Nights and the street food festivals. 

She misses the constant whirr of action because she's always been able to get things done, to use her contacts, to find solutions to problems. If there was a crisis then she would work it out, it was her job.

Her skills are well honed, for in Kyiv in 2014 there was a fundamental crisis. 

Kyiv's Maidan square - at the heart of the city both geographically, and spiritually, she says, as the point where the big concerts and the parties, and the fayres and events would take place - was occupied, ultimately, by tens of thousands of people, protesting against the pro-Russian president, Viktor Yanukovych, and the corruption and abuses inherent in his regime. 

It was a movement that divided the country in many ways, but also brought much of Anastasiya's generation together. In the protest's earlier days she was a regular visitor. She says there was something about the atmosphere, what she calls the revolutionary mood of the time, that couldn't help but draw her in. 

She felt she could do something important.

So she started doing what she did best, organising. She was letting volunteers stay on her floor or on her sofa. She and her friends set up flea market stalls to raise money to help. She sold off band merchandise at hers, anything she could, plectrums and drum skins and records autographed by big Ukrainian acts because she knew them all. 

And when Russian troops invaded Crimea she and her friends – and every tailor she knew - used the skills they had again. They made bulletproof vests and sent them to the volunteers going to the front. Anastasiya sourced the fabric and the materials for free, she arranged a studio to manufacture them in someone to pack them and someone to deliver them. 

But she can't do much here, in Berlin. She can't even speak the language, it's frustrating as hell. She's staying in the guest-house of a man who works in TV. She knows she's lucky, she's got enough space that friends can come to visit, but still.

“Now after three months... I don't understand who I am,” she says. “In general, I feel like like there's a big wall up, and I can't go back home, I don't know how to go back home.”

But, while at other times she is defiant, bullish almost, she says this plaintively. She says the word 'home' like it's a tennis ball being tossed in the air, her tone goes up and down. She almost howls it.

Kyiv is a cool city, she says, and she'd dreamed of it from the first time she went as a kid. Even when she was at the heart of a scene around a club in her home town of Dnipropetrovsk called Torba - which means either an old bag or to get pissed, depending on who you ask - where she knew all the musicians and the DJ's, she focussed on leaving. 

There's clubs that rival Berghain easily, there's districts that look more like Dubai than Berlin, she says. The effect of Comic Con Ukraine, for example, has been international, and she talks proudly of 'geek culture' and its importance to a generation who might never have connected in person without it. She talks of YouTubers and bloggers and of people being drawn there, when before they'd have otherwise ended up here.

She's in full flow. I ask if everyone in Ukraine is like this, talking and talking and talking, openly and honestly and endlessly, flitting between subjects the way a hummingbird does blooms, her sentences drawing themselves out, stretching over clauses and parentheses like the blue and yellow cotton spun through her plaits, but she says not. She says that in fact she's quite shy, but I don't believe her. 

At least not at that point.

The Müggelsee behind us is choppy. I drink a beer, Anastasiya a lemonade, and we are sitting down at a cafe table. The wind blows across us, whisking the ash out of the superfluous ashtray, and I worry about it blowing across the microphone on my recorder. 

So I push it closer to her at one point, only to withdraw it, unconsciously, a little as she talks of Bucha, where many of her friends had bought apartments because they were cheaper than in Kyiv, and where she had had an office before. Where she'd worked on a project setting up children's playgrounds. 

She says she knows that soldiers had ransacked those very offices, but that was the least of things, because she also knows of rapes and of murders. She says people she knows, colleagues and friends, died in the horrors that engorged the district in April, but she doesn't want to ask who. Her eyes are red, I ask her if she's okay, and she says she is. 

And then she tells me she can give me an “exclusive.” She says this with a nervous giggle that isn't entirely convincing, and one that makes more sense when I think of the way she pulls her sleeves over her hands, and the way her eyes are reddened, and how she seems so determined to convince me that she is okay with all of this - that she'll find a solution, because that's what she always does, despite the fact she's been stuck in the city she came to for a five day holiday four months ago, because her home country has been invaded and is currently at war.  

Anastasiya tells me then that she is also pregnant.

“Yeah,” she says, realising how weird it sounds to say out loud to a stranger.

She says that this is how men and women are in times of war. Men are drawn to fight and women to motherhood.

“I really think that when the war started, and I was like naked nerves, I needed a man who can relax me. It was a surprise, it's just happened, and we didn't talk a lot, we didn't know each other a lot, and we have just started to communicate. He has a lot of his own problems - I am in shock, I don't know what to do,” she says. 

“Life is changing so fast” she says, smiling again.

I tell her this is great news. “Congratulations” I say, and I mean it. I tell her having a baby is easier than you imagine, that the joy outweighs the struggle, which is true, but here and now as I say all this out loud the only thing really clear is that I don't know what the fuck I'm talking about. For at  least my kids were born in a country of my choosing. 

She carries on though. She always has.

“But, no, I will find a solution. What I need to do - I have free time right now, and not so much work to do - I have time to learn German.”

She also says she wants to train to be a psychologist, she says she knows that it'll help, that it'll be needed in the aftermath of all of this. She's making plans already. She wants to go home desperately, but it's not just her any more. She also says the baby's father is serious, he wants to be there, he's talking of them buying a house in Ukraine when this is all over. He's the one who bought her trainers. But she's being pushed and pulled at from all sides. 

“Space”, she implores. “What's space doing with me?”

But then space had one extra little hurdle to throw in our way in the form of that battered old cat, sloping off to curl up somewhere for eternity. Later she tells me that the cat had limped away while she was asking in a restaurant for help, and I know she went back to the guest-house of the man who works in TV that she is currently living in to worry all about it.

***

Jacob Sweetman is a writer and sports journalist, at home in Berlin. His work has appeared in 11Freunde, The Guardian, The Berliner Zeitung, Wisden amongst others. His writing about 1.FC Union Berlin can be mostly found here and he has a website here

Emily Sweetman is an illustrator, at home in Berlin. She is a genius, and her work can be seen here

Portraits of War: Tahir

Illustration by Emily Sweetman

This is the fourth in a series of portraits from our home city, of Berliners affected by the war in Ukraine. You can see all the portraits as we publish them here.

By Jacob Sweetman:

When we speak, a few days after Filippo Grandi, the head of the UNHCR, released a statement,  confirming that “the ugly reality, that some Black and Brown people fleeing Ukraine – and other wars and conflicts around the world – have not received the same treatment as Ukrainian refugees”, Tahir Della is just off the phone to the Polish / Ukrainian border. 

And though he is in good spirits, and flashes a brilliant, American toothed smile, his frustration still shines through. 

Della says from his office in Kreuzberg that people on the ground are just “sick and tired of it now”. He says that there's no support, nor the political will to help people of colour in their time of need, as they try to flee from the Russian invasion. Or for the sleepless volunteers trying to help them. 

They are sick and tired of still having to fight for something so basic, so fundamental. Sick and tired that a moment of solidarity across Europe in support of a people enduring the most terrifying and barbaric of situations, is still mired in the same old bullshit of different classifications being made for different people of different skin colours. 

Such as the free train tickets offered to refugees. As long as they are European.

He knows all too well that, with grim inevitability, racism will always rear its malignant head in the worst of times, too. 

Della and I talk about the Humboldt Forum, the grotesque reimagining of the Prussian Stadtschloss, filled with the fruits of colonialism. In there is a new exhibition, dedicated to Berlin, patting itself on the back for being modern and cool, daubed with “urban art”, which greets its visitors with a statement about how change in the world could be brought about 'holistically', when it ignores the fact that the system itself is at fault. 

The system that put the exhibition together, that rebuilt the palace, the system that put a tiny piece in the corner about the German genocide in Namibia. 

Though we can't call it that at all. 

“It was horrible, everybody accepts that. It was wrong, against humanity...” he says. “But it wasn't a genocide. Because if it's a genocide you have to take care, responsibility. At least, you apologise for it, and you say, okay, what do the people or the country who have been impacted want from us?”

It's like he's in Catch 22.

“We have accepted for a long time that this happened, but we don't want to be responsible for it. We can do things, make announcements, we can sign petitions, just so we don't have to look at ourselves.”

But we come back to Ukraine again and again. It's an extension of the same fight he's been fighting for years. 

Della says that he understands the closer proximity of Ukraine to Germany is a factor. He is German, he was born in Munich, of course he understands. So he's sick and tired, too, that the capacity of Europe to help refugees can be so malleable all of a sudden, when it was previously too stretched to help pluck children out of the Mediterranean to save them from drowning. 

It goes on and on. He doesn't want less help for Ukrainians, it's not a game, he knows how many have died, how many are terrified for their lives there. He just wants the same amount of help for everyone. He's just had two Senegalese staying in his small flat, having come to Berlin before they can to France. Della speaks no French, and they no German, but it worked out okay, he says. They understood each other pretty well.

When Tahir Della was young his American Grandfather told him a story about his own uncle in Louisiana. 

“He was a carpenter for a white company and he was waiting for almost two months to get paid. And when the money still didn't come he went to Baton Rouge to find out what was happening... and he never came back.”

He repeats himself, for even now the story is so tragic, its conclusion so callous, it doesn't make sense.

“He never came back.”

“Nobody knows still today what happened to him...  and the thing that was really moving... or...” He pauses again, for there are really no words fitting to the feelings this brought up in the young Della, in either the English or German languages that he flits between with such a lightness of tongue.

“...there was no structure back then where black people could go and say 'we are missing somebody from our family'. There was no legal body who could go and investigate when somebody is just gone. And that's not even a  hundred years ago, that was in the 40's of the last century.”

It wasn't the only story like that his Grandfather had. But that's why the older man was so proud when Della took his somehow inevitable place - with a spit-bucket and a gumshield and a towel in his hand, and a courageous streak a mile wide within him - in the corner of all the people of colour in his country. 

Now, in his 60's, Della is still there in that corner. 

He was on the board of the Initiative for Black People in Germany (ISD) til 2019 and is their spokesman. He's fought against the continuing riches reaped from colonialism, against double standards and hypocrisy, and against the racism inherent within the system itself, for more than half his life. 

He joined the ISD in the eighties, a group of advocates and activists founded by the likes of the poet, writer and academic, May Ayim, of whose 'daily deflowahin a di spirit,' and
'evryday erowshan a di soul' the great dub poet Linton Kwesi Johnson wrote in his paean, 'Reggae Fi May Ayim'.

And now if you walk along the southern bank of the Spree - once the industrial heart of Berlin, crammed with warehouses and factories until it was bombed to the ground, which would then become transformed as clubs like Dimitri Hegemann's UFO sprung up just around the corner, playing techno, black music from Detroit - Underground Resistance, lest we forget! – you will now see Ayim's name, having replaced that of the original Gröbenufer. 

Della says he knew Ayim for years. They were about the same age, they fought the same battles, but drifted apart as she withdrew into herself before her tragic death in 1996. But her role in the organisation was  never forgotten, her soul never completely eroded even if her spirit grew deflowered. Della played a large role in the renaming of the river bank in her honour and he remembers fondly the day they could finally celebrate her immortalisation. 

There were speeches and there was music and the sun was bright in the sky.

“It was a beautiful event,” he says, his sentence dripping with understatement.

He's not one to talk himself or his own efforts up. But the following lines from 'Reggae Fi May Ayim' - 'Tru all di learnin, Di teachin, Rizistin, An assistin, Di lovin, Di givin, Organizin, An difyin' - could have been written about him, too.

He's been doing all of these things since this war began, too. In the face of what he sees as mainstream apathy at best, of ignorance and intentional silence at worst. It's pretty simple, really. 

Ever since his Grandfather told him that story about his murdered uncle, he felt he had little other choice.

Della has worked in theatres, he's driven a cab. Anything, really, he says, to pay the  bills while he concentrates on the bigger things. But mostly he worked as a photographer. It was commercial stuff, he'd shoot for adverts, and he's quick to say  that he has never considered himself an artist, that his view of the world is that of a political activist. But the two  things almost certainly inform each other. He has to be able to view things with a certain detachment. 

He has to be able to let neither his righteous anger nor his natural romanticism get in the way of his vision. He has to be able to explain soberly what he sees, so we can understand it better.

“We have a very small, narrowed narrow view on what racism is,” he says. “For many, racism is skinheads, Nazis, you know...” 

He says that we think it is only about intent, but that this is an act of self-delusion. 

“This is the same for the institutions. The police, they say they cant be racist because they are working according to the Grundgesetz. As many people say 'okay, you know, I have black friends though, how can I be racist?' Or, 'I  live in Neukölln, you know...'

“This is really a problem, because as long as you can't identify or accept that there is a problem with racism, you are not coming to a point where you can deal with it. We have to listen to those who complain, who say they are afflicted by it on a daily basis.”

And now he is facing this new fight, a continuation of all the others that came before, certainly, but complicated by the fact that, though there are organisations similar to ISD in Poland and Ukraine, they are far less established, less significant, less well funded.

And let's be frank; Tahir Della is far from optimistic when it comes to the chances of Olaf Scholz's new government addressing the institutional racism that is affecting tens of thousands of people of colour fleeing the horrors of the war in Ukraine.

He laughs when I ask, spontaneous, loud and true. He makes it seem like such a stupid question. 

It won't stop him trying to do what he can though.

“From the first day on after the beginning of the war it became clear that there was a big problem. I never had thought - honestly, I really didn't expect this. Because we didn't know. We are speaking of 70,000 people. 70,000 people of colour who don't dare to think 'what will happen with us?' 

But even now, knowing everything he knows, everything he's learned in the face of this brutality and of the innocent people caught up in it, he still seems shocked.

“That,” he says, “I didn't expect that on such a scale.”

***
Jacob Sweetman is a writer and sports journalist, at home in Berlin. His work has appeared in 11Freunde, The Guardian, The Berliner Zeitung, Wisden amongst others. His writing about 1.FC Union Berlin can be mostly found here and he has a website here

Emily Sweetman is an illustrator, at home in Berlin. She is a genius, and her work can be seen here

Portraits of War: Yuriy Gurzhy

Illustration by Emily Sweetman

This is the third in a series of portraits from our home city, of Berliners affected by the war in Ukraine. You can see all the portraits as we publish them here.

By Jacob Sweetman:

You can tell Yuriy Gurzhy's a singer. It's there in the way his voice rises when he's excited; talking about the success of his seminal Berlin parties, Russendisko, that spawned a phenomenon he'd never expected; or about hearing Lou Reed's 'New York' album for the first time as a teenager in Kharkiv. That was on a tape, recorded itself off another tape, taped in turn off a tape belonging to a guy who'd brought a bagful of these black plastic gemstones back from a trip to the States. 

“17 is an exciting age, anyway,” he says, noting that he is now getting to experience it again vicariously through the eyes of his son. But his late teens were spent watching the fall of the Soviet Union from within, and he was compiling his own soundtrack to it.

There was rarely much decent information about the music he listened to. Sometimes the name would be written on the sticker or on the case. Sometimes a year, but often not. He heard the Velvet Underground's 'White Light White Heat' a while later, realising slowly it was the same guy singing.

It was like he was collecting together all the pieces of a jigsaw, and only years later did they start fitting together to form a bigger picture. He was listening to bands like Dead Can Dance, to Throbbing Gristle, but also Grazhdanskaya Oborona, Egor Letov's seminal band from the Omsk underground.

“I don't know if these guys ever intended to sound like punk rock, but they had no chance. They couldn't play, the instruments were shit, the recording machines were shit, too. Probably just a tape recorder. But they were big, and they were banned in the late Soviet years so they really gained popularity in the early 90s as martyrs, suddenly able to play huge venues.”

This was a logical process, the natural emerging of a post-Soviet culture, but one that had begun a long time before, even from the Ukrainian folk songs his father knew, collected by people passing through villages, listening to whatever they could and learning it to preserve them, like Alan Lomax did in the Tennessee mountains a world away but at a similar time.

Gurzhy's dad would sing at family parties, playing on a seven string gypsy guitar, or on an old piano with his right hand much stronger than his left. They'd all join in.

His Dad was not very good on guitar, he says, but they didn't have an accordion at home, at which he was much better. 

But it was his dad's secrets that comprised his greatest loves. He was married to a Jewish woman, had banned, home-printed samizdat texts at home, and spoke fluent Ukrainian, none of which were fully apparent to the young Yuriy. He wanted to protect his family, he didn't want to attract attention to them. Yuriy's maternal grandfather and grandmother were dentists who also saw patients at home, illegally.

Yuriy's father liked the Russian songwriters of the sixties, but while far from pop, he wasn't into the “heavier stuff” Yuriy would discover later, with cryptic meanings hidden behind obscure metaphors.

“I remember hearing bands from Lviv in the early 90s and... 'woah'. You understand the language perfectly, you understand every word, but sometimes it's like, '...who's this partisan fighting again?' There weren't too many possibilities to find out more. So you have a song, and you listen to the song, and then one day maybe you get to meet the guy who sings it.”

It was the passing on of musical traditions. He calls it a folkloric process, and is also what he has spent the last couple of decades contributing to with his band, Rotfront; making pan-European music, rooted in ska and klezmer, with in-jokes about Berlin and Barcelona, dotted with hip-hop flourishes and proto-dancehall toasts, and horns that brighten corners otherwise occupied by rumbling bass lines. 

He jokes that they are thought of as German when abroad, but as a migrant band in Germany, though he later says that he wasn't really joking.

It's because he ties together all these loose ends. It's the way he is wired, curating the contents of what he calls his “internal hard drive.”

So his efforts to help his home city in its time of terrible need is centred around these connections, his ability to string together the different parts of his world into a cohesive whole, organising, communicating. 

And it's largely the same thing, anyway.

Yuriy is good company, we drink strong coffee, we talk about music, mostly. Even though he's exhausted.

But the city he and his forebears called home looms over the conversation.  

“Kharkiv was home to the new Ukrainian literature, until most of these writers and poets were killed in the '30s. So I remember wondering, when studying, where is all the good stuff? But there wasn't anything else, because they were all fucking killed.”

Kharkiv is as far from the Russian border as Potsdam is from Berlin. It's only 20 miles or so, nothing. Kharkiv is under attack as we speak, as we talk of old bands and mutual interests. Rockets rain down upon the city every day. A third of its residents are thought to have fled including most of his family, but he's still got many friends there.  

He's been writing a diary for the Tagesspiegel since February. The latest post when we meet is about a trove of old photographs taken by his father, comparing them with ones from today, with holes in buildings that were once whole, with dust and rubble lying like a shroud across previously clean, friendly looking streets, all shot in sharp, Kodachrome colours. 

It is, he says, an attempt to give some context to German readers. He says all we really need is some empathy.

Then he echoes what so many people have said to me recently. 

“I know how it works sometimes, you just turn numb. At some point you just can't react to these images any more, the numbers are just so abstract.”

It's then his voice drops half an octave into a rich baritone; like when he talks of his cousin's nine month pregnant wife sheltering 24 hours a day, seven days a week, in a cellar with 200 others, hiding from the Russian bombardment. And the tone continues, though he speaks more wryly of gigs that will likely never happen, but that were already being planned, in Mariupol and Kyiv and in Donbas for this Spring.

You can tell Yuriy Gurzhy's a guitarist, though he's better than his dad ever was. It's there in the times he doesn't know what to do with his hands; he rubs the drying skin on his forehead; he fusses around his neat Prenzlauerberg kitchen; he plays with the pastry sat in front of him. 

He gets up and sits down, he gets up and sits down. He's being pulled in a lot of directions at once.

Yuriy grew up speaking Russian. He's spoken more and more Ukrainian for years now, but remembers when it was still an alien concept.

“One of my classmates switched to Ukrainian in the fourth year, I think. It was really weird, until I realised that he actually comes from a Ukrainian speaking village... so in a way he closed the circle. But I remember what a shock it was, because it was after the holidays he'd spent back in the village of his grandmother and he came back and spoke Ukrainian to all of us. And people were like 'are you fucking kidding?' But we learned to respect that pretty soon. He was the first one.”

He says he sometimes feels ashamed for having Russian as his native tongue. That's another thing. But he also says he feels guilty all the time anyway, even though he's been living through a whirlwind for the last fifty days.

“I've not done that much. I still feel like it's not enough. I hate myself...” It's not self-pity, though, just a rumination. “But also on good days I feel like I'm doing more than ever. So there's strength, and there's an energy coming from out of... I don't know where, but probably just of necessity. And as long as it keeps me going and going.”

He bristles when I ask him about hearing the news of February 24th. 

“The war has been going on for eight years”, he says.

“I played Donbas a couple of times, I saw the places affected by the war, the people affected by the war. It's not 'coming', it was already there, we are just in the escalation phase.”

I try to say I meant this, but I too still think of this war as being a sudden development. He cuts me off. It's something he has to say in every interview he does, and he's doing a lot of interviews now we are all suddenly interested in Eastern Europe again.

We talk of the importance of music to all this, of how in the modern world it can cause tangible change in terms of instant distribution, of exchanging information, and the fundraising capabilities unheard of a decade ago. 

We always come back to music. 

“I think the real music freak was my grandpa, my mothers dad,” he says. “He hated all this songwriter shit, he was into pop. And when I was growing up we lived in the same apartment, six of us, grandparents, parents, my sister and me. I was sick a lot as a kid and I'd stay home and my grandparents stayed at home too.”

Yuriy still has his grandfather's tape deck at home in Berlin.

He then tells me of a friend who arrived in Leipzig with her son, a 14 year old, who'd had to leave his guitar behind. Yuriy managed to sort one out for him in four minutes. 

“It was a personal best” he says, allowing himself the small consolation that he's helped, because he knows of an instrument's inherent importance. 

His grandfather wanted to pursue a career in music as a young man, but then after the 2nd World War he became a dentist. His violin had been stolen, and he probably thought he needed to do focus on survival, to do something less fun, more solid instead.

So I ask Yuriy if he thought his path to becoming a musician was, in a way, making up for the dreams he missed out on.

“Absolutely,” he says. “Both him and my dad, I had it from both sides. I had no choice.”

His inheritance is in the knowledge passed down that those strings, however loosely strung and amateurishly struck, that that neck, however wide or well attached to that body, however battered and chipped - and that the voices, singing in whatever language is at hand, holding a simple melody for a fleeting moment - are as important, sometimes, as anything else.

***

Jacob Sweetman is a writer and sports journalist, at home in Berlin. His work has appeared in 11Freunde, The Guardian, The Berliner Zeitung, Wisden amongst others. His writing about 1.FC Union Berlin can be mostly found here and he has a website here

Emily Sweetman is an illustrator, at home in Berlin. She is a genius, and her work can be seen here

Portraits of War: "Anna"

Illustration by Emily Sweetman

This is the second in a series of portraits from our home city, of Berliners affected by the war in Ukraine. You can see all the portraits as we publish them here.

By Jacob Sweetman:

After we spoke in early March she sent me a message about what to call her. She wrote, “In Max Frisch style: let my name be... Anna” 

Anna smiles guiltily when she says she's started smoking, knowing how ridiculous it is after all these years. But I don't blame her, and God knows it's understandable. For smoking may well be the last thing she has any agency over at the moment, seeing as she has no idea when she'll be able to return to Russia,  if ever. 

But she also senses that much of Germany - the country she lives in, and has done for more than a decade, and in which her daughter was born - regards her with ill-concealed suspicion. Though Anna faces neither daily shelling nor tanks, and her home city remains intact, at least physically, still, she feels helpless and lost, and she doesn't know what to do. 

Still, she feels a crushing pressure, from without and within. 

Anna was born in Chelyabinsk, “in the Soviet Union”, she says as if to emphasise that it is a different country to the one currently waging a war inside of Ukraine. It's a city of about a million people, flanked by the Ural Mountains, equidistant between Yekaterinburg and Magnitogorsk (where the first of the triptych of huge sword featuring sculptures, that includes the Soviet memorial in Treptower Park, stands. The other is in Stalingrad). 

It is an industrial city, an isolated city on the edge of Siberia, famous mostly, not for its production of tanks during WWII or even its tea packing factory, but for the meteorite that exploded above its skies and onto the screens of our phones a few years ago.

She was still in single figures when communism collapsed, though the old textbooks hung around in school a while longer. I ask first if she remembers a sense of optimism around the time, but she says not. 

“Other people saw a chance to make business, maybe, but we were just worried about what to eat the next day. There were no hopes. Just survival, from one day to another. We were in a one room apartment, my mum and I." 

She says it was humiliating watching the flashes of sudden wealth on the backs of others while she was wearing worn out clothes. Later on, of course, Vladimir Putin would weaponise this feeling across much of the populace.

She laughs as she toys nervously with the small golden crucifix around her neck, sunflower yellow painted fingernails flashing in the Spring sunshine. It's not entirely convincing, her laughter. She's come so far geographically, 2,000 miles. But it's as if she's gone backwards, too. 

She sits near the window in a two bedroom Berlin apartment she shares with her daughter and her mum, who came over before the war started to help Anna out after her marriage collapsed. Her mum speaks no German or English apart from a flawlessly annunciated, polite and practised 'hello'. Anna says she wants to return - to what, she's not sure - but she's trying to keep her here as long as she can. It's ironic, she says. They tried originally to move to Germany in the 90's, Anna ultimately making it in 2004.

"And now she's here, she doesn't want to stay." 

Anna says that her mum still harbours plans of a Crimean holiday in the Summer, despite her daughters' protestations. Her mum's memories of state TV news reporting that all is well in the annexed region linger somehow. 

"I remember visiting my family and watching TV. They always started with 'the President did this today... He visited...' and the next part was 'The Crimea is going very well, they are very happy with being part of Russia'."

Anna says she already understood that the prospect of Putin resetting what she calls the "embarrassment" of Boris Yeltsin's drunken, corrupt presidency was impossible a long time ago.

The gaps in her sentences grow longer, partly because her English isn't as good as her German. But mostly because for a lot of the time she just doesn't know what to say.

"I started to understand it when he exchanged the presidency with the Prime Minister. I was very scared back then, it was just so obvious. I went to demonstrations and I voted, but there was always this sense of being observed. It was a touch screen and I was thinking maybe they were also saving my fingerprints." She will need to renew her passport at some point in the next year, but the idea of entering the Embassy again fills her with dread. 

"It's Russian soil," she says. “I never feel safe there.”

She knows that someone in a building opposite the Kremlin has been looking at her website, that they know she's been critical of them, and that her breaking of new laws could mean her imprisonment. 

"As a linguist, I am scared by the use of language, and how they have started to tell you what to say, what to call things.  I know it's a war, they shouldn't tell me not to call it a war if its a war, you know. But if I call a war a war, I go to prison."

Though she's been in Germany for a decade and a half she's never felt at home here. She lived in Leipzig for a few years at first where she learned to speak German as flawlessly as if it was a mother tongue to avoid the stares of people on the trains, on the trams. 

“They just wanted me to leave,” she says. 

Berlin was better, at least through the comparative anonymity offered by the city – and she is keen to point out her neighbours have offered meals if she ever finds herself stuck, though a lack of food is not the problem - but the staring on the trains and on the trams, and the fear of speaking her language has started to return.

She fears the wave of rage against any Russians, and mentions the recent firebombing of a Russian school in Marzahn, one of hundreds of attacks on buildings and on people since the invasion. She says it doesn't feel safe here. She's glad her daughter doesn't go to a Russian school.

Her daughter is about the age Anna was when the Soviet Union collapsed, but she has access to the outside world in a way Anna never did. She watches kid's news. She asks Anna every day how it could be that Russia have invaded Ukraine, that they have started a war?

Anna says she doesn't know how to answer any more. She doesn't know how it happened, herself. Even until the invasion, like so many of us, she was convinced it wouldn't come, that this was all just a game, the timeless noises of little men in far away places, puffing out their chests. 

But it was an act of self-delusion, a bit like her Mum wanting to go to Crimea. 

And in turn Anna has friends and family who now call her a traitor.

"Yeah, they were very angry at me. They said now that I'm a 'foreigner, I'm different now', that I don't see the truth. And, 'look at the Crimea,' they say. 'It's so good and it's ours it has always been ours... My aunt is very much pro-war, and she screams at my mum on the phone, saying 'how dare you say Putin is a shit, because if we didn't go in, the next day they would attack us...' It scares me because just a few weeks ago I could visit them without talking about politics, but now that's over. I cannot go there any more. It just wouldn't be... it wouldn't be me."

Her father is "patriotic" (when she says this, she thinks first long and hard about the correct word to use) and works in education. “He studies means of measuring patriotism in children.” 

She says he has a list of qualities each girl should have and each boy should have. 

"It's so Soviet," she says with a smile.

She says contemptuously how people are still making jokes about the war, how there's one doing the rounds about the men of Russia being happy that Apple pulled out before International Women's day, so they didn't have to spend money on expensive gifts for their wives and mistresses and girlfriends.  

"They say, 'oh we don't care about McDonald's', and the Prime Minister says 'we can produce cutlets and rolls ourselves.' Well I don't care about McDonald's and it's not about cutlets and rolls."

She estimates that 70 percent of Russia supports the war, and that there'll be no getting through to them.

"I spoke to a  theatre director, a Russian, who lives here, and he says the only thing for us to do -  for the 30 percent - is to leave, we cannot deal with the rest of them... We need to establish a Russian life here."

She sees beauty in so much Russian culture, classical and contemporary, but she talks sadly of her favourite actors, musicians, poets, being scattered around the globe. They have no choice, she says.

"I'm afraid to lose the connection, and I'm afraid the day we try again we'll have nothing in common any more... I'm losing my people," she says. 

"Yet at the same time," I say, "you're here and you don't feel you have these people behind you either."

"I never had them."

"But you're not thinking of leaving Germany?" I ask.

"No, not yet. Because of my daughter, and, as well, where to live? Europe is united. So South America or what? China? Turkey? But even if I leave I'll carry it with me. Even if they stop tomorrow the damage is done."

I'm reminded of Kurt Tucholsky, a man who knew what it was to have to leave his country, who died by his own hand in exile, who wrote in 1929:

"We have the right to hate Germany, because we love it... Germany is a divided land. But one part of it is us." 

Well Anna isn't talking about Germany. But through the pregnant pauses in her sentences and the way she  plays with her necklace, and stares at the pot of yellowing Russian tea that sits in front of her, untouched, I know she feels a similar divide.

"There's no Russia - my Russia - any more. It’s gone."

***

Jacob Sweetman is a writer and sports journalist, at home in Berlin. His work has appeared in 11Freunde, The Guardian, The Berliner Zeitung, Wisden amongst others. His writing about 1.FC Union Berlin can be mostly found here and he has a website here

Emily Sweetman is an illustrator, at home in Berlin. She is a genius, and her work can be seen here

Film: Rights of Nature

Watched by Phil Scraton:

Narrated by Ireland's fine singer-songwriter, poet, story-teller, and environmental activist John Spillane, Rights of Nature is a fine short film proposing the necessity of taking a 'journey of unlearning' to develop and progress a 'dialogue with nature'. It envisions a new socio-economic narrative for Ireland that resonates well beyond its shores.

It is self-evident that living beings are subjects despite consistent attempts to objectify the human experience, limit potential and impose restrictions on freedoms of thought, association and movement. We live in environments alongside non-human subjects consistently objectified as property to be used and discarded. Land is owned, enclosed, exploited and changed forever without consideration of long-term consequences for the future of life in its broadest definition.

The film asks what it means to claim ownership, to 'belong' within place, exploring the significance of cultural and spiritual inheritance and their connection to identity. It considers the destruction of culture, language and community through colonisation and its invidious political-economic exploitation and cultural subjugation; the objectification of place and the control of land through property law; the denial of access and the right of commons. It proposes a new dimension in approaching democratic rights.

The narrative challenges the assumption that nature is nothing more than property to be owned, developed, laid waste and destroyed by private interests but is essential to the construction and maintenance of communities through time. It calls for the defence of our environments against commercial exploitation and the clear evidence of harm. Only through personal engagement and collective activism, committed to challenging the short-termism of that commercial exploitation, will the health of communities, the land and seascapes be protected and advanced.

Together with the depth of his narration, John Spillane's music is woven into the film's dialogue.

Filmed and edited by Simon Wood
Directed by Peter Doran

Canal

By Rachel Sloan:

2000

The first time I find the canal, it’s an accident.

It’s January, I’m twenty, I’ve been in London only a few weeks. I’ve never been abroad before and everything dazzles me. But I spent last night in a crush of bodies in some West End club and this morning I’m desperate for quiet and space, so Regent’s Park it is.

Restless, I stride past the places I already know well and head north – in search of what, I don’t exactly know. I know Primrose Hill lies beyond, but before I reach it, I glimpse a snaking line of trees. Patches of water flash between the gaps. There’s a path and I follow it down and then everything changes.

The canal unspools in both directions. To my right, a long green ribbon of water and the peaks of Lord Snowdon’s aviary. To my left, a string of weeping willows, bare branches bowed toward the water like a group of mourning fair-haired giants; an enormous double-decker scarlet barge that looks like leftover opera scenery; a low bridge through which the canal bends away sharply and disappears. I turn left.

I pass gardens that spill down to the water’s edge, arbours laced in barky coils of wisteria, warehouses with windowpanes punched out like black eyes, thickets of trees and brambles wedged against brick walls. The silence is near total, the clangour of traffic sinking away into leaf mould and water. Crumpled lager cans and eviscerated crisp packets drift together in makeshift islands but when I stare down into the water I catch flashes of silver and gold tipped with red: roach, maybe bream. I round another bend and catch a heron picking its way through fallen twigs, its neck unreal, its eyes locking for an instant with mine.

I grew up thinking that the world was parcelled into boxes marked City, Suburb, Nature. As I walk I feel those tidy divisions blowing apart. In their wake is something rich and strange. Something that just yesterday I would have laughed off as an oxymoron. 

Urban nature.

I don’t yet have the vocabulary to get to grips with this new kind of nature, just a bone-deep feeling of belonging, despite this being a place I’ve only known for weeks, unlike the place I was born and where I lived for eighteen years. What I find at the canal isn’t the Romantic landscapes of Keats and Wordsworth that I spend my days dissecting in cramped seminar rooms.

One day, browsing a bookshop table piled with contemporary poetry, I stumble upon Tobias Hill. The Regent’s Canal runs through his poems like a mud-flecked golden thread. Here is someone who understands this place that exists within London and yet is not fully of it, that ticks along on its own parallel time, someone who can feel and give form to what the canal does to sound and light. He writes of air ‘pressed / into white slabs of mist’, of a dying eel entangled in a sunken shopping trolley, of canal-side magnolia blossoms glowing like lightbulbs and blackbirds whose pollen-filled mouths ‘burn with it / like fuse wires’.

When I leave London at the end of my semester abroad, Hill’s books are in my suitcase. I cling to them over the next fifteen months as I half-heartedly try to fit myself back into the contours of a life and a country in which I no longer feel I belong, as I plot my return. When I move back to begin a postgraduate degree, they, too, retrace their journey across the Atlantic. The canal is just as I’d left it; walking the towpath is a homecoming. But Hill has stopped writing poetry. He’s turned to novels, and although I try to love them I somehow can’t. As the years pass I dip into his poems now and then and I can still sense a kindred spirit – a ghost, growing ever fainter.

Only fourteen years later, chancing across a newspaper interview, do I learn that Hill and I have something else in common besides our love for the canal: he, too, is Jewish. And only some years after that will I realise how rare the two of us are, writing about nature, urban or otherwise.

2014

I’ve been walking the Regent’s Canal for years by now, in sun, fog, veils of rain. I’ve kayaked it too, clambering from my boat glazed in duckweed. I know it – or so I think – like the back of my hand.

One Saturday in November I visit the London Canal Museum and I discover how little I really know. In the grand scheme of things, the Regent’s Canal is a bauble, a plaything beside the mighty Grand Union Canal. I’ve always been vaguely aware of its existence without having any notion of its course; now I learn that two of its arms link the Regent’s Canal to the Thames in a series of snaky, unruly bends just over 20 miles long. I need no further urging. The next morning I’m on the towpath at Paddington Basin, walking to the Thames by the longest possible route.

The Grand Union has none of the tame prettiness of the western reaches of the Regent’s. At first it’s tough, gritty, obviously industrial. It curls past windswept tower blocks, empty warehouses. Islands of rubbish outnumber waterbirds. There are regular signposts for walkers but no other accoutrements of leisured walking: no waterside pubs, no enticements to linger. London seems, resolutely, to turn its back on the canal.

And then, imperceptibly, the canal grows wilder. To my right stretches the majestic mossy ruin of Kensal Green cemetery; seen from the canal you’d never guess it was still in use, the tombstones crumbling under skeins of ivy and bramble. To my left is a gargantuan Tube depot, an unravelling braid of steel in a sea of gravel, crosshatched by wires.

A few miles on, a mobile drift of snow carpets the towpath and I blink in disbelief. The snow resolves itself into the largest flock of mute swans I’ve ever seen. I edge toward them cautiously – no cygnets in evidence, but I know how quickly swans can shift from regal aloofness to hissing and snapping. They show no inclination to move out of my way. If I try to go round them I’ll end up either in the canal or snagged in brambles. Holding my breath, I wade through a sea of swans and everything changes again. The canal spills out into fields punctuated by scrub, thickets of hawthorn, banks of water-loving willow and alder that gradually condense into low-lying woodland. According to the map I’m still in London. But I know by now that maps can be right and wrong at the same time.

By four o’clock the shadows are fading. The edges of the clouds glow pink. Despite my woollen gloves, my fingers ache. I’m hollow with hunger; there are no blackberries to scrump now, just last summer’s wizened black buttons. I curse my poor planning. How could I have thought I could cover 20 miles in a day in November? Admitting defeat, I turn off the canal path to the nearest Tube station.

Greenford is on the branch of the Central Line that goes to Ruislip, the one that I’ve never had any reason to take. I almost lose my way in the cookie-cutter drabness of the streets. There’s a Polish delicatessen across from the station but fantasies of sinking my teeth into a hunk of poppyseed roll or a slab of apple pie are instantly dashed by the CLOSED sign on the door.

The platform at Greenford is above ground. At the top of the stairs, I find myself standing under a vault of flame and pearl, mackerel clouds stained rose-gold drifting away from the setting sun. Despite cold and hunger part of me wants to stay here until the last light fades, but the temptation of the warm interior of the train is too much. As the doors slide shut behind me, I remember a snippet of wall text from the Canal Museum. I didn’t think to note down its author, but this wise person observed that the joining of the Regent’s Canal and the Grand Union Canal, and their links to the Thames, effectively turn London into an island. An island within an island.

With one last glance at the blazing sky, I let the train carry me inland, away from the canal and into the heart of the Island London that I have made my home.

***

Rachel Sloan an art historian, curator and writer. Born and raised in the suburbs of Chicago, she has called the UK – first London, now Kent – home for most of her adult life. Her short fiction and creative nonfiction have appeared in Moxy, Stonecrop Review, STORGY, and Canopy: an anthology of writing for the Urban Tree Festival (2021). Her short stories have been Highly Commended in the 2020 Bridport Prize, runner-up in the 2021 Urban Tree Festival writing competition and longlisted (twice) in the 2021 Mslexia Short Story Competition. She was also longlisted for the 2021 Nan Shepherd Prize; 'Canal' is an excerpt from her longlisted book proposal, a nature memoir entitled Taking Root.

Searching for home beneath the horse chestnut

By Jennifer Carter:

I smelt my success before I saw it. It was the smell of the demise of fresh green leaves into brittle, curled objects that just about resembled their original shape. They were scattered across the ground. Some were almost completely rotted, whilst others lay proudly, showing off the intricate veins where their rich colours seep into one another. A paint palette of mahogany, rust, and amber.

It was the smell of Autumn.

One of my big ambitions whilst away, inland, was to collect conkers for my four-year-old daughter. I was elated to find them within only a few hours of arriving. Scrabbling around the damp, leaf littered ground, I tried to find the biggest, smallest, and smoothest. My hands were numb with cold as I unzipped the bag to place them all safely inside.

I heard a familiar thud. A conker, still in its shell, fell from the branches which leaned over me and hit the ground. That blunt, seemingly insignificant sound threw me straight into a vivid memory.

The memory of traipsing around the dell, at least that’s what we called it: a small valley in an area of parkland behind my childhood home in the Midlands. There was a mysterious old brick building there, surrounding a deep hole shut off by a metal grate, and one of the biggest horse chestnut trees I have ever seen. My mother, father, brother and I would go there every autumn, looking for conkers. I remember fondly the moments of finding a whole one, still in its shell. I would proudly squash it between my shoe and a bit of hard ground, cracking it so I could reveal the rich, dark brown fruit, fresh enough to still glow where the golden pattern adorned it.

Every year in Falmouth I look for conkers, but the sea air prevents them from developing. I moved there from the midlands 10 or so years ago, and at the time I couldn’t resist the sandy beaches, warm microclimate and laid back inhabitants of the transitional student and holiday town. But the place I had started to call home didn’t excite me anymore. The coastal environments which are so sought after, so popular for holidays, praised so highly every time mentioned, I found dull and expired.

Standing in a field surrounded by towering trees, it made sense why. I was exhilarated by being in a place where the seasons were true to how I remembered experiencing them as a child. A place where I could hear birdsong which wasn’t drowned out by the harsh calls of Herring Gulls. A place where the air wasn’t so thick with salt that chestnut trees couldn’t bear fruit.

Suddenly I noticed the distinct call of a nuthatch. I found it straight away, making its way up one of the vast trunks behind me, flying into a neighbouring tree, and continuing its journey upwards. I cherished the still, cold air, the silence, and the time to reflect on where I belonged.

***
Jennifer is a writer and photographer based in Falmouth, Cornwall. Combining a love of wildlife with her passion for life writing, Jennifer’s work often reflects on how our environment can impact the way we think and feel. She is currently studying towards an MA in Travel & Nature Writing. You can find more of her work on her website.

On the verb 'to be'

By Ciarán O'Rourke:

After they died, I experienced a slow longing to see my grandparents again, but also for Rossinver itself. Their now-permanent absence seemed increasingly entangled with my yearning for that small corner of north Leitrim where they were from: the acre of mown grass at the back of their bungalow, within earshot of the Ballagh river, and haunted in summer months by quick-darting swallows, skirting close to ground whenever skies were changing, blue to grey. 

The poems I wrote for my grandparents – deathbed portraits, reaching through loss – were also tributes to this place that had shaped not just my siblings and myself, but several generations of my Dad’s family: a weathery place, rich with rain, that for me, visiting in summer months from the Dublin suburbs, had always been both recognisable and strange, a home away. 

I felt a similar sensation last autumn when I moved to Carrick-on-Shannon, with my bicycle and a bagful of books in tow. There was a quiet happiness in arriving not only in this town – with its wide, surging river and cautiously bustling streets – but at being able to call Leitrim my home county. By choosing Carrick, I imagined that I was somehow mending a gap, bridging the long aftermath of my grandparents’ lives.

The first time I decided to read the elegies for my Grandad in public, I had forced myself, beforehand, to practice the lines aloud, like an actor, until I knew their sound by heart. Regardless of what I consciously felt while reading, my voice and body could complete the performance, by reflex if necessary. This is now one of my preparatory rituals for any live event: I read (noisily) to myself, the very repetition of the words gradually providing a protective shelter against whatever gusts of panic or self-consciousness may arrive in the actual moment.

In decamping to Leitrim, of course, I was entering the demesne of a number of literary figures, past and present. On my daily walks, I pass a mural celebrating Carrick’s writers, including John McGahern, whose stories and often mordant essays my Grandad used to quote with admiring precision. “It takes some skill”, I recall him saying, definitively, “to finish a sentence with the verb ‘to be’”: a feat the Leitrim author had managed to do, with his adage that “all understanding is joy, even in the face of dread, and cannot be taken from us until everything is.” 

Another of McGahern’s creative credos concerned “the quality of feeling that’s brought to a landscape”, and his belief that this “is actually much more important” in the making of literature “than the landscape itself”. The question of “whether it contains rushes or lemon trees”, he said, is less vital than “the light of passion” that an author brings to the view. I agree with him. But I also suspect that he made these remarks partly in resistance to a culture accustomed to placing (perhaps even pigeon-holing) its writers: as if by re-affirming his fidelity to literature’s universality, he were also implicitly raising a question mark over its so-called “Irish” variety, or the applicability of this brand to his own origins and literary practice.

In fact, Leitrim, specifically, rooted and nourished McGahern: filtering that “light of passion” he so sought and valued, and helping to sustain the restraint and fierce clarity of his writing, with its breathing fields and hedgerows, its turning seasons. It was here that his revolving cast of reticent, perceptive characters became real, where his skill in rendering their flinty, sidling conversation was honed. His stories of endurance and return (both human and natural) were invariably drawn from Leitrim’s rushy hills, sodden with darkness and light – without a lemon tree in sight.

McGahern’s was a particular kind of attachment to a particular part of the world, his work lit through by a clear-eyed attentiveness to his own locale – an observational intimacy, allowing both vividness and depth. What I find in McGahern’s fiction is close, I think, to what led me back to Leitrim in life: the desire to stand on the fringes of a single place, only partly my own, with its hidden history and visible dailiness, looking in, hoping at last to belong.

***

Ciarán O'Rourke lives in Leitrim, Ireland. He has won the Lena Maguire/Cúirt New Irish Writing Award, the Westport Poetry Prize, and the Fish Poetry Prize. His first collection, The Buried Breath, was published by Irish Pages Press in 2018. His second collection is due to be released in 2021.