On March 22, Russian missiles flew into Kharkiv. 15 missile strikes on the city. Fires at power stations. Kharkiv is completely de-energized.
On the evening of March 21, my friend from Kharkov and I scheduled an online meeting. But it turned out that the girlfriend did not have a camera. I heard her voice, but only saw a black screen.
“That's not going to happen,” she said and called me from the phone.
I saw her smile. And she saw that I saw her, too. And that I smile too. We talked about why we learned to pause before saying something that could scare. And about why we talk so much and there are so few stories left. We talked for a long time. She moved around the apartment. I turned on the lights in the kitchen. I turned off the light in the kitchen. And lit it in the living room. And then her phone ran out.
On March 22, I wrote to a friend, the message hung unread for a long time, but closer to the evening she wrote back: “Here we have an apocalypse.” I offered to come to Kiev. “I want to be in Kharkov,” she wrote back.
In the photo of Alexander Osipov, the center of Kharkov, the descent from the university slide, the darkness cuts the light of the headlights. I recognize the flagpole and the flag and the outline of the Annunciation Cathedral lowered as a sign of mourning. My girlfriend calls it “Gingerbread”. Because of all those details on the polychrome facade, because of the horizontal rows of red brick and light plaster, which are not visible in this photo. “Gingerbread” is black. It is present, but it is as if lost in the darkness. And it ignites my desire to see at least a hint of gingerbread decoration.
Osipov signed this photo “Blackout in Kharkov”. Two years ago, “blackout” for me meant only curtains in hotels that plunged the room into a dead darkness. Last time I saw these on the windows of a hotel in Kharkov:
“Did you cover the curtains?” a colleague asked me.
“No, I don't like it when it's dark in the room in the morning,” I said.
- Zatuli, they hold back splinters, - and I dared.
I can cook dinner when there is no light and gas, I know how to unsubscribe to work mail, when there is no Internet, I know how to dry my hair by the fireplace and make coffee in it. I can tell stories about headlamps and canned tuna for wine at international literary festivals. I know how to make witty darkness that swallows gingerbread cathedrals and the opportunity to call a friend. But I do not know how to hide my own darkness, as well as the doubt that curtains with the effect of “blackout” will save during rocket fire.
I look at Osipov's photo and fix each light source, I record both lack and absence. But also as an illusion of his closeness. And I also think that it would be good to “catch” the car on the left half a second earlier.
“I don't know when you'll get this message,” a friend writes to me.
“Always on time from you,” I write.
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Oleksandr Osipov — Ukrainian photographer who, since the beginning of the full-scale invasion, has filmed Kharkiv citizens resisting Russian troops, creating art under shelling, painting in the subway and playing concerts in basements. Thanks to his work, the world learned about the indestructible Kharkiv, which preserves beauty in the darkest times.
Olena Huseynova — Ukrainian writer, radio host, radio producer. Since 2016, he has been working on Radio Culture (Social). She is currently the editor-in-chief of the Editorial Radio Theater and Literary Programs. From February 26, 2022, Elena worked as a live presenter of a 24-hour information radio marathon on Ukrainian Radio (Social). Author of two poetry books “Open Rider” (2012), “Superheroes” (2016). He writes essays and small prose.
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