Last weekend explosions took place in Lviv, where friend O. (34) is still living. He texted me that he was okay, that I didn’t have to worry. To distract myself, I went to a terrace with a club, where it was immediately about the war again. At one point, one of the table mates, who is the one who usually looks on the bright side, begged us if we could please talk about something else.
“I think it’s all terrible and I really sympathize but I’m just completely Ukraine tired,” she snapped.
When we looked at her in shock, she muttered that she had deposited money last week.
“It will soon be over,” she said, more to herself than to us. “It’s just going to work out.”
I was too stunned to say anything about it. I notice that especially optimistic, well-attached people become nervous about the war. Perhaps because all that violence is at odds with their belief that everything always ends up right. Their previously rock-solid belief in manufacturability and thus self-reliance is showing cracks, and this is how a trust is slowly broken between them and the future.
The whole party didn’t know what to say anymore. I just started scrolling through my Instagram. The friend from Lviv had since reassured his followers: he was safe and continued to erect blockades and manufacture Molotov cocktails. He also wrote that he was no longer afraid. He had grown accustomed to the turmoil, the pillars of smoke, the air-raid sirens. The bombings strengthened his resolve to continue fighting, not only for his country, but also to dethrone Putin along with the rest of the world. No one was safe, he said, until the president disappeared from the scene.
The table companion, meanwhile, stared at her wine, lips pursed together. The wind played softly with her curls, but the radiant spring seemed to only make her more depressed. Vasalis once wrote in her war diary that fine weather produces a “hurt bitterness”: “The blossoming, the defenseless of desire and suspicion of happiness, and in that defenseless the icy wind of reality.”
Embarrassed, the table companion leaned toward me.
„I didn’t mean it like that, you know, when I said ‘Ukraine tired’. It’s all very bad,” she whispered.
She remained silent for the rest of the afternoon. Chock full of wounded bitterness, shrinking under a spring sun that clattered mercilessly down on her.
Ellen Deckwitz writes an exchange column with Marcel van Roosmalen here.
A version of this article also appeared in NRC in the morning of March 29, 2022