IN A FEW MINUTES, the air-raid siren will begin to wail. “The kid is dragging his neighbor’s bodies,” Zarina says. “Adults, children, all morning. He’s dragging them from the rubble of a bombed-out building. I ask him questions but all he wants to talk about is nails and a hammer to repair the window. That’s all he speaks of. Hammer. Nails.”
We are sitting in a restaurant on Kanatnaya Street in Odesa, Ukraine. Zarina looks straight at me.
“He was dragging grandmothers and moms and toddlers from under the rubble.”
Instead of running to the shelter, Zarina will ask if I would like more cognac. Surreal to be clinking glasses and continuing our dinner during the air raid. But that’s what we do.
“The city itself helps to get over it,” she says. “You walk into the street and feel better.”
Zarina is a war journalist. She runs her fingers around the rim of the cognac glass and whispers, “I told my family I was going to visit friends in Europe. I keep sending home photos of kittens.”
Her phone vibrates: a journalist from the U.S. wants to borrow her bulletproof vest. She is going into an active combat zone, she says. Then she proceeds to order appetizers.
The next day, I find myself at a poetry reading in Odesa.
Not exactly a thing you expect in a city with a curfew and sandbag barricades.
The poetry recitations take place between air-raid sirens. Wine is served. Cherries.
Elena Andreychykova is here as well.
A few days ago Elena arranged a car for my visit to the city. Ukraine is a no-fly zone, so one must fly into the neighboring Republic of Moldova and cross the border by motor vehicle or on foot.
She herself left Ukraine to make sure her mother and child were safe, and then returned.
“Despite everything,” she wrote in an email, “Odesa is so luminous.”
At the event she turns to me. “Odesa isn’t occupied like Kherson. So let’s come together and read poems. We have only one life.”
And so we read along with the others, our words punctuated by air-raid sirens.
At home, I get an email from Ludmila Khersonsky, who fled Ukraine with her husband, the poet Boris Khersonsky, a few months earlier. She describes fleeing the country, the first days of bombardments. How she barricaded her windows with her own poetry books—so
