Sergei Gerasimov is still in Kharkiv and continues his war diary. Even if the rocket attacks have subsided, the horror of war with its psychological depths and absurd situations remains urgently present.
Street scene in Slovyansk, October 2023.
Bram Janssen / AP
10. September
I am in a looted supermarket on the outskirts of Kharkiv. Broken glass and empty boxes are scattered everywhere. In addition, everything is littered with pieces of corrugated pipes through which electrical cables once ran. These pipes used to be laid on the ceiling, and when it collapsed during the shelling, they also fell.
Everything here has been stolen. Even the sockets were ripped out of the walls.
A group of guys in military uniforms enter the room through a hole in the camouflage nets. At first I think they are soldiers because they are wearing real uniforms and have military backpacks on their shoulders. They wear padded military-style masks over their faces, and all I can see is their eyes.
The next moment I realize that they are teenagers, boys around fifteen or sixteen years old. I have no idea what they’re doing here and they don’t know what I’m doing here, so as a precaution we greet each other politely and go to the opposite side of the hall that used to be a huge supermarket.
One of the boys takes a corrugated pipe in his hand and begins to swing it over his head. To my surprise it starts to sound loud and melodious. I realize that they have been here many times.
All the doors here, along with their frames, have been torn out and stolen. Through the hole that was once a door I get into another part of the supermarket. Here the walls are painted with graffiti. Most of them were made with colored markers. Judging by the labels, the boys here mostly played cards and scribbled results and winners on the walls.
Drawings on the walls, like rock paintings in prehistoric caves, allow us to understand the lives and psychology of the people who made them. Strangely, there is not a single military theme in the pictures here: neither tanks nor machine guns, neither explosions nor killed people. There is also a complete lack of anything sexual or obscene. There is clearly something wrong with the young people in military uniforms gathering here with masks pulled up to their eyes.
One of the doors is actually still there, but broken open. It says “warehouse for luxury products”. These include precious cognacs, caviar and the most expensive types of smoked fish. A few empty cognac bottles that were drunk on the spot are still lying around, but the boys have turned the luxury warehouse into a toilet.
Sheet metal clatters beneath my feet, so full of shrapnel that they resemble a starry sky.
I enter a room that used to house the accounting department. All the furniture here has been stolen, and the papers and documents are at least four centimeters high on the floor. I pick up a few and start reading: “Checklist for regular control of camp hygiene.” The document is written in Russian, which seems incredible to me now, a year and a half after the start of the war against Russia. In column 5.5, the inspector wrote “dirt,” also in Russian, and marked the paper.
In the “Occupational Safety Instructions No. 1” I read the following pithy lines:
“Do not cross the street until the traffic light is green,” “Before entering the elevator, read the rules for using it.”
Forty supermarket employees signed this nonsense. Fourty. That means that on the morning of March 1, when the supermarket was hit by artillery fire, several dozen men and women were working there. They were here when the walls and ceiling collapsed, when shrapnel riddled the roof, when a blizzard of flying glass raged inside, and cars parked outside caught fire. As falling shells dug deep craters from which geysers of pipe water immediately erupted and street poles snapped like matchsticks. When in a few moments the entire area was covered with a layer of black earth that had been thrown out of the ground.
This was not provided for in the “Occupational Safety and Health Instructions No. 1”.
From behind the wall, melodic sounds come from: the boys, dressed up to their eyes in military uniforms, swing plastic pipes over their heads. They don’t play war, they don’t play Star Wars, they don’t play anything; they just hang around sadly and let meaningless tricks circle over them.
To person
PD
Sergei Gerasimov – What is war?
Of the war diaries written after the Russian attack on Ukraine on February 24, 2022, that of Sergei Vladimirovich Gerasimov is one of the most disturbing and touching. It combines observation skills and knowledge of human nature, empathy and imagination, a sense of the absurd and investigative intelligence. Gerasimov was born in Kharkiv in 1964. He studied psychology and later wrote a school psychology textbook and scientific articles on cognitive activities. His literary ambitions have so far been science fiction and poetry. Gerasimov and his wife live in the center of Kharkiv in an apartment on the third floor of a high-rise building. The beginning of the diary is now available as a book from DTV under the title “Fire Panorama”. Of course, the author doesn’t run out of material. – Here is the 353rd post of the fourth part.
Translated from English by Andreas Breitenstein.
Series: “War Diary from Kharkiv”
2023-11-14 04:41:14
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