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

Combustion

By Erin Ruble:

We walk from the airport into smoke. There are mountains all around but you cannot see them. Roads end, not in horizons, but in brown smudges of indeterminate distance.

Light looks different, pulling the luster of sunset forward into mid-afternoon. Actual sunsets are religious affairs. Exercise is dangerous. Clouds become suspect, especially those that plume at a single point on the horizon.

This morning we watched the sun rise over Vermont’s Green Mountains before lifting off from an earth lush with water. As we flew west the land flattened and broadened like the vowels of those beneath us. By the time we passed the Mississippi, Kelly green had faded to sage and then to tan. Irrigation created strange geometries, perfect circles, rectangles, and stripes across an otherwise sinuous landscape. 

Evidence of water is everywhere here: in the ripples of sandstone, the crooked paths of coulees, the cumulous clouds that stack in the sky. Water is visible in everything but itself. Step off the plane and your skin will crack and dry. Blow your nose and you will find dust and blood. 

My husband and children and I return to Montana every year to visit my parents. This summer, as a hurricane drowns Houston, wildfires have spread across eastern Oregon, Idaho, and Montana. The smoke is thick enough to touch. People follow the Incident Information System, InciWeb, like news junkies watch CNN. 

Grass crackles under our feet, brittle, brown, thin. My mother reports that the Ponderosa pines in the pastures hold less moisture than kiln-dried lumber. I’m not sure how anyone knows this but I do not question her. 

Combustion is my parents’ favorite summertime conversation. Too frequent school fire drills have spooked my seven-year-old, though, so I ask them not to talk about it. But after a few days at my family’s vacation cabin my husband and I, coming back from a hike, see a billow of dirty white down the valley. The cabin is surrounded by mountains on three sides; the only road out is somewhere near that fire. We head back along the ridge in order to keep track of its progress. As we walk it jumps over the top of a hill and starts down the other side. Now, faintly, we can see flames. 

This is a familiar threat. My sister and I used to sit in the bay window during summer nights, watching lightning pulse through clouds. Just half an inch of rain fell during the entire summer of 1988, as Yellowstone burned; by the end of August, ash capped every fencepost. Everything smelled of quenched campfires when the clouds finally broke. When I was twelve I drove our pickup through our rocky back pasture, peering over the windshield for tracks to follow, shuttling firefighting supplies to my parents and neighbors so they could fight a blaze that the city fire department refused to address. The year before my son was born a fire roared through the valley that holds my family’s cabin, missing it only by the grace of a sudden change of wind. 

Now my mother calls the sheriff’s department. The fire began only an hour ago but the powers that be have learned of it already, and are sending helicopters, earth movers, even a slurry bomber. The forest service is adopting a let it burn policy when they can—lodgepole and grasses and all kinds of organisms depend on fire, and it’s too expensive to obey Smokey the Bear’s edicts anyway—but a few years ago a lightning strike just down the road burned over 200,000 acres and cost $22 million, so today they’re taking no chances. 

We pack up the kids and drive down the county road to where the fire eats its way downhill. We pull off and park. Expensive ranches line the river, sagebrush bluffs giving way to emerald pastures. Someone has let their horses out and a black and white pinto trots over to us. 

Helicopters drop what look like thimbles of water on the fire. Each time they seem too small to make difference, but after a moment, the orange glow dims. Bulldozers crawl over a ridge I’d swear was too steep for a horse. 

My parents and son stare at the work. My daughter draws a picture in the car. I pat the pinto. A neighbor stops to pass on news. Everyone seems very calm, and in fact, by evening they will have put out the fire. When we drive home the next day, we will see miles of black stripes across the tan hills, the red stain of retardant like glowing coals. 

Soon another summer will be gone.

***

Erin Ruble’s essays and short fiction have appeared in Boulevard, Green Mountains Review, Tahoma Literary Review, and elsewhere. Originally from Montana, she now lives in Vermont with her husband and children. You can find her at erinruble.wordpress.com.

Portraits of War: Yuriy Seredin

Illustration by Emily Sweetman

This is the sixth 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:

Though in exile in Berlin since the start of the war, Yuriy Seredin is still in his position as a professor at the Lviv Conservatory. He's teaching remotely. The building itself - with its warm, storied rooms, flanked by pictures of, and played in by disparate figures such as Chopin's disciple Karol Mikuli and the pop star Rulana – sits empty, waiting to be filled with music again.

The carved figures of two muscled, loin-clothed men flank its name on the faded sky blue and pale mustard yellow coloured facade. A stone bandura, the 36 string instrument that stands as a potent symbol of Ukrainian musical nationalism, is below. 

It was Seredin's dad who introduced him to music, who showed him his first chords on a piano, and who realised the young man's perfect pitch when his age was still only just in double figures. He could pick out a melody without trying, there was something natural, an intrinsic musical sense about him. 

But that sense was honed by Eugen Filin, a teacher, pianist and prodigious composer, who'd previously studied and taught at the fabled Moscow Conservatory. Later, Seredin would go to boarding school for young musicians, but it was Filin who was the formative musical influence.

He talks about him with a certain awe, its as if he's in the park with us, off in the trees, listening in to the conversation, somehow. He taught the young man about Orlando Di Lasso and the Flemish school, about the history of polyphonic composition, and he gave him the courage to trust his own instincts. 

Seredin says that Filin changed his life. Though one is in Lviv and the other in Berlin, they're still in touch.

“He basically taught me how to improvise, not like in jazz, but how to play in different styles of classical music. And also he showed me how to play expressively on piano, like when you choose any two sounds and you can play them endless amounts of times, every time differently, emotionally. It's like psychokinesis... the human brain can do amazing things with that.”

It is as a jazz musician that Seredin is best known. His father had bought him a Louis Armstrong tape; it had the hits on it, 'Hello Dolly', that sort of thing, but then came another one, the greats of jazz piano with Fats Waller and Chick Corea and Dave Brubeck. Seredin then discovered Oscar Peterson and Erroll Garner, and, despite a time when he focussed purely on classical music, his fate was largely sealed. 

The first track on Yuriy Seredin's breakout, award winning 2018 album, 'Asylum Search', is called 'Krasne', after the village his Grandmother lived in. A little way east of Lviv, it's tiny and rural, nowadays dominated by the silos of the grain production plant, and cleaved in two by a railway. She was, he says, like a second mother to him, though he remembers the poverty that lead to him spending much of his childhood there. 

His memories drench the composition, and he describes the way they permeate his work.

"I live through this euphoric state when improvising; and at the same moment I am in real time, living through visions. It's like I'm fantasising, and playing that into the instrument... you know, living life through music"

The opening stabs of tenor and alto saxophone are rooted in the traditions of American hard bop – tonally it sounds like 'Eventually', the opening of Ornette Coleman's 1959 masterpiece 'The shape of Jazz to come' – but they are soon underpinned by Seredin's vast, swelling piano parts.

I had thought the record's underlying message was of unavoidable exile. It is called 'Asylum Search', after all – and it was recorded in Berlin, not Lviv or Kyiv - but he says not. He says it's more about the search for solace, for internal peace, a place to be.

"When I was recording this my father was about to die, and what I was playing in the studio was all about this. Thoughts and memories... it was a really personal record. Asylum Search is about looking for a place where you can feel an asylum for your soul, your home in the highest meaning, you know?"

But his search for asylum is no longer metaphorical, internal. He's sat in Berlin watching the war at home. It took a while to adjust, to train his focus, and he says that his relationship with his music has changed. He pours his energy into his piano when he's on stage, he calls it his thirst to express. 

But Berlin's not his home, no matter how he says he does like it. Even if the jazz scene is better than Kyiv's. Even if, as he says, the players are better and more numerous here. 

And he doesn't know how long he'll stay now. He says it depends, depends on the war, and on what's left when it's over. He'll still need to be able to play. He's resigned to being away for a while. 

“Time will tell”, he says.

Yuriy Seredin thinks a lot abut the composition process, and it dominates our conversation. Especially, I think, because it's so much harder to come up with much new material since the war began. 

“I'm still in this position where it's really hard to get into this euphoric state to compose, because all this background stuff is fucking it up”, he says. 

He's polite, and answers all my questions, no matter how stupid they may be. It's the first real day of sunshine Berlin has seen for months, and we are sat in the Tiergarten as birds around us regain their voices and schoolkids give continued exercise to theirs. Police in short sleeves drive lazily around the gravel paths looking for something to do, someone's day to interrupt. 

But there's a sullenness to Seredin, something looming over him, a weight bowing his back. We sit in the shade. He has a thin puffer jacket which he zips up halfway through our conversation. His skin is pale, his hair dark and thick. Though he's probably two metres tall, he reminds me a little of Andrea I Appiani's painting of Napoleon, somehow. His nose is inquisitive, it pokes out of his face, but he points it at the ground between his feet a lot.

His voice is low, and he talks of mental health issues he's faced before the war in his home country began. 

Seredin is happy about the path he now treads (though he's careful to say he's not proud, because pride stunts development), the one that winds between playing and composing and teaching a new generation of Ukrainian musicians at the conservatory. He felt let down by at least one of his professors when he studied there, who barely seemed to care about his charges and their musical development at all. It was as if he was just killing time, dining off his reputation.

He takes music seriously. This is more than being just about melody and arrangement. Shit, he says, he's hardly in it to get rich, and in this he probably has a point. 

But he also knows of music's inherent political power, as embodied by the contemporary recognition of the blind peasants who played the bandura, that strung instrument embossed in stone on the conservatory's front, wiped out under Stalin in the '30s. 

Or by the ideas of its founder, Mykola Lysenko, himself.

Lysenko, who died in 1912, was a composer whose life's work was dedicated to the pursuit of creating a purely Ukrainian canon. He wrote the music for the hymn, “Prayer for Ukraine” still played across the country today, and described as Ukraine's 'spiritual anthem'. There is a story about how Tchaikovsky wanted to stage one of his works in Moscow but the state wouldn't allow it to be sung in Ukrainian, and Lysenko refused to have it translated into Russian. 

So when Yuriy Seredin talks to me of a nascent new project, adding orchestral music to traditional Ukrainian folk songs, he is again following in Lysenko's footsteps. Lysenko published seven volumes of them in the 1800s. 

But there is something unsettling in the darkness Yuriy feels, at the destination his desperation has lead him towards as we talk. He is embittered by the war, and when we speak he is clearly being dragged through the mires of his emotions. It has made him, as he says, “at different moments, disappointed, desperate, sad, bitter and depressed” – justifiably so, of course - but he's closing himself off. 

"After last April I realised I needed to get rid of the influence of any Russian info-space. Because I was a big fan of Russian literature, of Russian music. Of course I speak Russian to some Russians here because they don't speak Ukrainian, and these are people who I know, that I'm quite sure about their okay position regarding the war. I understand from human point of view Russians, who are against war and suffer from hate. For that I pity them. But the thing with collective responsibility, I guess, also remains. But I'm trying to avoid... I stopped reading Russian books for sure, listening to their music. I just want to distance myself from that.”

We moved on after he said this. We talked about composition, about jazz and about Berlin, but I couldn't shift it from my mind. It drew me back again and again.

“I decided that I will never play with any Russians 'til the end of my life, it's just my civil position after what Russia did. It's like... I'm not... I know many people are against the Putin regime and I have friends there, but... like... at least what I'm thinking now, its my - how do you say - not to say my tribute to the victims - that's the wrong word - but in memory of the victims I don't ever want to play in any Russian band or one that contains Russian musicians. I think that's not right.”

Aside from the obvious tragedies of this war it strikes me that this is one of its most pernicious and devastating, and long-ranging effects. The closing off of cultural exchanges, doors slamming shut on other worlds. And I suppose I really just hope at some point he will be able to change his mind.

***

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

A time of hopeful anticipation

By Ruth Bradshaw:

The park is deserted at this hour, the café closed and the playground empty. The dog walkers and joggers are still sleeping. It is that time after the coldest, darkest part of the night has passed but before the sun has risen. A faint glimmer appears on the horizon and my nervousness at being out alone in the unpeopled early morning is gradually replaced by a sense of anticipation. The darkness will soon be gone. Dawn is here and the sunrise I’ve come to see will not be far behind it.

The only sign of human life is the faint sound of distant traffic and even that recedes when I reach the top of the hill where there is more tree cover. Here it is tranquil but still far from silent. The birds make this space their own with a rush of notes that feels more of a competition than a chorus and, as the light slowly increases, they grow louder still. It is impossible for my inexpert ear to distinguish most of the individual voices, but I recognise blackbirds and robins and hear the occasional cawing of crows accompanied by the shaken cloth sound of their wings flapping. I can only guess at the rest, but I decide that today it matters not what all these birds are, only that there are so many of them singing. 

As it grows bright enough for me to make out traces of the hilly fields and meadows which the park replaced, it is not difficult to imagine that a line of taller trees could mark an ancient boundary. I walk over and lean back against the nearest of these with my eyes closed. It is a mature lime tree, its bark ridged and furrowed with age and experience. The sound of the wind in its leaves is so like gentle rainfall on dry ground that when I open my eyes, I expect to see a soft rain falling.

At this time of half-light, half-night, nothing is quite as it first appears, and the past feels closer. It is the time before this landscape was farmland that I can sense most strongly. In the twilight it is possible to replace the parkland limes and chestnuts with the woods of coppiced oak and hornbeam that covered this part of London for centuries. I think of the sights, sounds and smells of that woodland - the calls of turtle doves and cuckoos, the rich scent of wild garlic, the orchids and helleborines growing among a multitude of other plants - all long since lost to this place.

If I were a visitor in one of those earlier centuries, it would have to be necessity rather than curiosity that brought me here at this hour, something that made me desperate enough to risk the dangers of the woods at night. For even after the wolves, bears and lynx were gone, there was still the threat of robbery or worse. Perhaps I am here to search frantically for firewood to heat food for an ailing relative? Or maybe it’s to find the herbs I need to cure that relative using a knowledge of plants taught me by my mother just as she learnt it from hers. I’m sure I would know that when I find the right plants, I should take only as much as is needed so plenty are left to grow for future use. But would I stop for a moment to appreciate the wildflowers and birdsong on this fine Spring morning? Or would this experience be so commonplace and my fear so great that I would hurry home without paying them any attention? 

The high-pitched screech of a ring-necked parakeet returns me to the 21st century. I am thankful that my survival is no longer dependent on what I can gather from the woods. But I am sad too that I do not have the knowledge needed to do this anyway and sadder still that I will probably never experience a springtime woodland with quite such a variety of sound and beauty as that earlier visitor. My greatest sadness is that I live in a time and a society whose untamed desires have so changed the world, that the future of many species, including my own, is now uncertain. Even now we understand the damage we are doing to the world we don’t seem to be capable of taking only what we need. We must always have more. 

As the light grows, I think of what the future holds for this area. This is not as easy as picturing its past. Not because I cannot guess the impacts of the storms and droughts that already arrive with increasing frequency but because it is too painful to contemplate the uprooted trees and withered plants they will leave in their wake. I know I cannot ignore those threats but, as a new day starts, I focus instead on how green and vibrant the horse chestnut leaves look when backlit by the rising sun. 

***

Ruth Bradshaw works in environmental policy and has been a regular conservation volunteer for over a decade. She is currently writing a book about the value of urban wildlife which draws on both her professional expertise and her volunteering experiences. Her essay ‘Stories of Co-existence’ was recently shortlisted for the Future Places Prize and her creative non-fiction has also been published in a variety of websites and journals including Canary LitMag, The Clearing and The Selkie. When not writing or working, she can often be found in the woods near her home in South London and occasionally on twitter @ruthc_b

Under the Over

By Alex Rankin:

There is no right way to go at this end of the harbour. No signs, no barriers and no lattes. It’s as close to abandoned as you can get without being out of use.  

Activity is everywhere, though less conspicuous than upriver; control rooms squashed beneath the overpass, a maintenance yard and of course the relentless traffic. People leave their mark here too. The base of the swing bridge is splattered in a multi-coloured crime scene and evidence of guerilla gardening is everywhere in the form of troughs and plant pots. 

Under the overpass, pillars uphold the status quo. They’re painted in bright colours, another human intervention and the sunlight adds its own touch, carving up the shadows with long arcs.  

I follow the snake of concrete to a point where two roads merge. There are life-size Lego blocks here that look like they’ve been airlifted straight from a fabrication plant. I wonder what they might be used for, BMX or parkour or maybe builders like to come and sit on them on their day off. A ramp made from broken slabs tells me there must be wheels involved.

Back across the lock is a land of mud and rust. Old landing stations quietly decay and thick tufts of grass hang down over primordial mudslides. It’s easy to lose track of time here, because time doesn’t exist. For the time being, at least. Somewhere else in the city, councillors huddle over prized plans for this area, passing them along the conveyor belt of authorisation.

On my way back, I find a bench encrusted with lichen. It’s surrounded by ancient lines of moss and scrub and I wonder if you were to sit there long enough, would it transport you back to a time when nature ruled and things were a little simpler?  

***

Alex Rankin is a writer from Bristol, UK. He has always had a passion for writing fiction, but ended up studying journalism. He now writes a mix of fiction and nonfiction (with a sprinkling of poetry). Previous work has appeared in The Drabble, A Thin Slice of Anxiety and The Hyacinth Review.

Portraits of War: Emmanuelle

Illustration by Emily Sweetman

This is the fifth 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:

Emmanuelle Chaze says she'll never forget the night of the 24th of February when she got the call from French national radio.

'Be ready,' they said. 'It has happened'. 

She'd been at the Munich security conference the week before, she'd heard both the platitudes and the pleas for help. Chaze already knew the invasion of Ukraine was a fait accompli, but still.

“My immediate thought,” she tells me, “was about the people that would be displaced.”

People say to her all the time that because of her years of study into the lives of the Huguenots - persecuted and driven out of Catholic France to scatter themselves across Europe, putting down roots that persist to this day – it makes sense that Chaze spends her professional career reporting on migration, on refugees, on the human stories of degradation and fear that take place at international borders during all too unexceptional times. 

Chaze catalogues those spaces where war spreads out its wings, the hinterlands of our most invidious, inhuman actions. Though she says any link to her academic past is coincidental.

She grew up in France, but close to Germany. She speaks several languages and is learning more. They come easily to her, as if disregarding the lines drawn on maps supposed to keep us all apart. And maybe it is just another coincidence, but she does go on to say that, actually, 

“I don't really think anything happens just by chance.”

She says all this in the cafe in the swollen, gilded belly of Dussmann's Kulturhaus, as officious waiters fuss around inadequately sized tables and the goldfish swim placidly in the blue tiled pond behind us. We are at the heart of the Friedrichstadt, part of Berlin founded by the Huguenots. 

We are also only a stone's throw from the Tränenpalast, the former crossing point between what were once called East and West Berlin.

Coincidence or not, there is at least a certain synchronicity here. 

Last year, Emmanuelle Chaze stepped on board a boat for the first time in her life to set sail into the Mediterranean for seven weeks to report on the crew's desperate efforts at rescuing refugees cast out to sea. She faced tragedy on that boat, as she also saw occasional moments of the best of humanity. She got to know kids, eight, nine year olds, pulled from the sea; they played with her camera, they smiled into its lens.

So she was ready, mentally, to go to the Polish / Ukrainian border when the call came on the 24th.

But she took a few days to prepare before heading for Hrebenne. She needed time to find out what was really going on. She needed to make sure she had security, sorting out the practicalities, like a hotel far enough away so she didn't use up nearer rooms necessary for refugees or volunteers. But she was still one of the first there, early enough to witness everything falling into place, seeing the evolution of the border town as the crisis developed

The first report she made was before she'd even reached the checkpoint. Her fixer (though she says she hates the term) thought she was mad.

She had five minutes until she was live, the feed already running in her ears. She simply put up her tripod and started narrating the scene; a usually busy motorway almost empty; a few parked buses in the distance at the Ukrainian border; the bitter cold, it was minus 15; the people who had made it this far with bowed backs, sunken faces and lowered heads, looking, as she said on live TV, completely exhausted.

She says that she's not seen anything like it before, it was like a film. It was eerie, frightening.

“People were coming one after the other, and they were looking at their phones for directions, like you would in a city when you're a tourist. But they all looked like they hadn't slept for days. And I know those people, because I've been on other borders...”

She's told the stories of people in Calais and Lesbos, too, places at the very edges of other conflicts.

“...And seeing them there in that otherwise fairytale like scenery is strange. Western Poland is really pretty,” she says, trying her best to describe images so discordant that they only really made sense as she slowly talked us through them.

She didn't do any interviews with refugees to camera at all that day. She couldn't do it to the people coming across. There's a time and a place, she says, even if it would have made better news. So she worked, she tried to keep warm. She tried to keep her equipment functioning. 

Talking about the seven weeks on the boat - an experience that she says changed her life forever - she mentions the camaraderie of the crew. They were professionals, honest and blunt, as they have to be, because they have to trust each other, their lives depend on it, even if they can't always get along. And she talks similarly of bonds between fellow journalists whose silent understanding is forged through a common experience most of us could never comprehend.

That of a border during wartime.

After coming back from Hrebenne she spent a few days back at home in Berlin, before heading back, this time to Medyca. She wasn't alone. All sorts of people are drawn to these weird, tragic places.

There are, at first, local, then national then international TV channels, elbows out, vying for position. Different newsrooms wanting different stories for different audiences. There are volunteers, well wishers, fixers, locals too. 

There are thrill seekers and amateurs trying to make their names with footage who the serious journalists won't mix with because they are unprofessional and take risks that no-one should, and who the serious newsrooms won't touch any more, not with a bargepole. 

Then there are the profusion of well-meaning incompetents, bogged down in the mires of their own bureaucracy. NGOs like the UNHCR who had to apologise for being late to Medyca, but whose gazebos sprung up like mushrooms after the last frost, that will stay there for months now, years maybe, as the border situation becomes normalised like so many others around the world.

Then there are the refugees themselves, different movements of different people, arriving in stages, sometimes according to status, sometimes to chance, and at others to the realities of the war itself. 

She talks about the first groups often to arrive. In some ways they are the lucky ones. 

“So at first there is the relief, 'we are safe'. But then as soon as they get some rest and a shower, proper clothes, they realise that now with that comes the deep humiliation that you depend on someone else... Nobody wants to be a refugee.” 

This is why, she says, people are already returning to Ukraine in ever greater numbers.

She also met young men in their early 20's who'd been living in Poland, on their way back into Ukraine to fight the Russians, noting that this was one of the toughest, most moving encounters she had out there. They were at least well prepared, which cheered her slightly, but not entirely.

For they also knew they were probably going back to die.

She says the people who are drawn towards the borders are also not always altruistic. Some will always see opportunities to exploit other people's misery, like the human traffickers, vultures, circling. She fails to hide her disgust. 

Chaze works all the time, and it’s only afterwards, when she goes home, that she can begin to try and sort out things in her head. She says she'll have to 'try to tie herself down', only half jokingly, because the clashing of images, of feelings, of emotions, and of helplessness come up against her impossible drive to work, work, work. 

After she got off the boat, people thought that she'd go mad during the two week quarantine in Sicily, but they'd missed the point that this was necessary, just as her conversations with other journalists on her return from the Ukrainian / Polish border with other journalists were. She needed to decompress, to process everything she had seen, to put things in some kind of an order. 

The first thing I asked when I got in touch originally, was how she deals with what she's seen, how it doesn't make her tear her hair out, how she doesn't end up punching the walls or crying in the streets.

She answered that she was actually asking herself the same question at the time, but she still didn't know, really. 

“I just do what I do,” she says as if it's the easiest thing in the world. 

“You know everybody was so shocked by the pictures [of Mariupol] over the weekend - and they are absolutely shocking - but if people are surprised, I wonder what they imagine happens during wars. Because the sufferings of the Ukrainians are the sufferings of the Syrians that we could see happening for years if we opened our eyes. So now, just because it happens on the continent more people are touched and are receptive. 

“But a war is a war,” she continues. “It's atrocious. Innocents die. A few days ago there was a bombing in Idlib in Syria, and the father could only recognise his child from the shoes he was wearing. This is happening right now, and its always happened and unfortunately always will because we aren't changing.”

I say that this is where she comes in. This is where she makes a difference, where she is important, because no-one else is telling these stories. She disagrees, though.

“None of us is irreplaceable,” she says.

***

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

Eh-ALL-ing: Finding Poland in London

Photo by Nina Vlotides

By Emma Bielecki:

Let me take you to a part of London you probably don’t know, and won’t find on any map. It has a physical infrastructure, located in West London, but mainly it exists in people’s minds, and more specifically these days in their memories. It exists in my memory because it’s where I spent slivers of my childhood, taken there by my father, who inhabited it psychologically if not physically, and who would now and then announce on a Saturday morning: ‘Let’s go to Eh-ALL-ing.’

Going to Eh-ALL-ing — or Ealing, as people without Polish accents persisted in pronouncing it — most often meant going in search of foodstuffs then unknown to English supermarkets, with strange, sonorant names: kabanos, myśliwska, krakowska, chleb. Kabanos: a long, thin, leathery sausage hung in horse-shoe shapes behind the counter of the Polish delicatessen; myśliwska: a short, thick, leathery sausage displayed in bunches like bananas; krakowska: a fat cylinder of pork, paler pink on the inside than the others and with bigger white splodges, which comes in a synthetic casing you need to remove.

I remember how my dad would peel the sausage as he ate it, leaning against the kitchen counter with the sausage in one hand and a sharp knife in the other. I would try to imitate the gesture, the confident twist of the wrist, but I always made a mess of it, hacking off big bits of meat along with the casing. There was, though, something thrilling about the process. When I was a child, meals were often a formal and fussy affair: one ate sitting down, at the table, never standing up and never, never, in the street; one minded one’s manners, which meant worrying neurotically about one’s elbows and the correct way to hold the utensils. How liberating to be able to stand at the counter, to peel the casing from a sausage in a gesture that could never be described as either well-mannered or ill mannered, but was simply, perfectly, adequate to the task in hand. To see my father peeling smoked sausage was to see a man completely at ease in the world.  

Most often we ate the sausage withchleb and Kremska. A dictionary will tell you that chleb is bread. The dictionary is wrong — or was wrong in the 1980s, when bread was white and spongy when untoasted, but hardly ever untoasted or unbuttered; chleb was darker and harder, with a little aniseed kick from the carraway seeds. Kremska is a Polish mustard, and was a source of endless frustration and disappointment for my father. No jar of Kremska bought in London ever tasted right, which is to say no jar of Kremska ever tasted like it had back home. 

My father chalked this up to geographical displacement: in Poland, surely, Kremska still tasted like Kremska? He was wrong, of course, because it wasn’t physical distance that had wrought this change, but time. Kremska in Poland no longer tasted like Kremska either, that is to say no longer tasted like it had when my father was a boy.

Nowadays, all these products are widely available. You can get Polish sausage and Polish bread and Polish mustard in pretty much any supermarket in England. Along with Polish foodstuffs, the Polish language has become ubiquitous. I’m writing this in a café and I can hear Polish in stereo — a conversation between two young men in one corner, between two young women in another.  I think of pierogi, those little dumplings stuffed with all sorts of things. I like mine z kapustą i grzybami, with cabbage and mushrooms. When I hear Polish in the background, wherever I am, on the bus or the tube or in a supermarket queue, phantom pierogi always haunts my palate, the bassline rumble of affricate consonants like the deep umami taste of mushroom, the nasal vowels like the sharp acid burst of sauerkraut.

Sometimes, when we went to Eh-ALL-ing it was not to buy food but to visit friends of my father. In general, this was not an experience I enjoyed. My father’s friends seemed much older than him (they weren’t, but in his 60s he had married a much younger woman and had kids for the first time, creating an illusion of relative youthfulness) and much more old-fashioned. They lived in tudorette semis furnished with tasselled lamps and Roman Catholic wall art, smelling of herring and talc. 

As a small child I slightly dreaded venturing into such houses; as an adolescent, I sneered at their decor. It was only as an adult, at funerals, that I learnt about what had brought their inhabitants to Ealing in the first place. About Zula Stankiewicz, who spent her childhood in Dachau; about Andrzej Plichta, who had five older brothers, all killed at Katyń; about Halina Kwiatkowska, who lived for six years in the sewers under Warsaw; about Olga Rymaszewska, who joined the resistance at 17, was captured and tortured and sentenced to death, but who survived because, for some unknown reason — maybe she reminded him of his sweetheart back home? maybe it was his mother’s birthday? — the German officer supposed to shoot her let her escape. Now I regret every time I wriggled away from a bosomy hug, or rolled an eye at a tasselled lamp, or imitated an accent for a cheap laugh. Now I marvel at the how the heroic made a home in the most humdrum of English suburbs.

What I learnt from my father and his friends is that nothing is fixed: you can always rebuild a life, even on a heap of rubble and ash. The reverse is also true though — a life can collapse into a heap of rubble with very little warning, can go up in flames in the blink of an eye. The town my father was born in was in the east of Poland. When the Soviets invaded in 1939, he was sent with his mother and grandmother to a labour camp in Siberia. Now the town he is from is in Ukraine, and women and children are being deported once more. 

***

Emma Bielecki lives and works in London, where she teaches and researches nineteenth-century French literature. In addition to authoring articles on Balzac, Belle Époque detective serials, and radioactivity in the popular novel, she sporadically enjoys writing about other things that interest her, such as Bob Dylan, pet cemeteries and the history of Poles in London.