I travelled to Ukraine for three weeks and became estranged from my film camera. It’s like we had never met before and I was all fumbling fingers and incomprehension. I unknowingly photographed over used film, tore another roll through impatient winding, before exposing it to daylight when trying to figure out the problem. I ended up in a dark bathroom winding the film around my fingers to try and save what I could for the printers. But the photos I picked up were perfect. Their accidental layering of light and time had captured something I could never have planned for, something that was more feeling than straight visual record. The photos led me to find the words that follow:
At 2 in the morning my phone begins to buzz and flash: an air raid warning for Kyiv city. The window is open and the room hums with the sound of heavy rain; I lie looking at the net curtain flapping against the glass, the window frame tapping a rhythm into the bookshelf. A few seconds pass and I hear the city sirens start up, always slower than the phone alerts, muffled and undulating through the rain.
It is the third night in a row the sirens have started at this time. The 5th night out of 10 I have spent in the country. There is a flash of lightning followed by a crash of thunder that shakes the room and startles me onto my feet. I can feel my heels touching the floor through the mattress and I listen to the rain. Something is off, the rhythm of raindrops is complicated with something else, a throbbing sound perhaps. I think of helicopter blades, I doubt my ears.
Another flash and a boom. The curtain snaps back against the window and my breath catches in my throat. Is it even lightning. Should I be afraid. I open the bedroom door and step into the windowless corridor, just in my underwear, a thin sheet draped over my shoulder like a toga, I stand in the darkness bleary, indecisive, hand still on the door knob.
Though I could still hear the rain through the door, the corridor was absolutely silent. My friends must have been asleep, or, if they weren’t, they were at least still in bed. No signs of disturbance or panic, perhaps they had just put their ear buds in and turned over.
I remembered the first air raid siren I heard on this trip. We were in Odesa and the haunting howl of the siren filled the street we were walking along. I froze and looked around for what to do and where to go yet no one was reacting, pedestrians maintained their pace and cars waited at traffic lights; no visible shift in momentum or intention.
I was new here. I had not spent the last two and a half years at war. Was their lack of reaction a symptom of desensitized exhaustion? Or a conscious refusal to let the sirens dictate when you live your life and when you sleep?
I would later learn that the Russians often use bad weather as cover for their rockets and drones. They use the clouds as camouflage for their violence, weather becoming a tool of confusion and disorientation, making it harder to know what is a real attack and what isn’t. The Ukrainian weather becomes a tool of war in the hands of the Russians. In a similar way, they use the Ukrainians’ own air raid systems against them too.
Take the single drones that are sent drifting across Ukrainian airspace, designed to trigger the air raid alarms of each region they fly over rather than attack a specific target. They set off a morbid relay of phone notifications and howling sirens to evoke a threat that is not there, this time. Warnings are weaponised against the people they are designed to protect; their purpose becomes blurry and suspect.
In the long game of psychological warfare, the Russians work to devalue the currency of safety. Ukrainians are constantly reminded that they do not know when and where the next threat is coming from, that warning signs are not reliable, that there is always the possibility they are in danger.
That danger becomes woven into their daily lives. Danger becomes an extra weight to carry, an obstacle to be overcome in the day-to-day.
I think of the crowd of people standing outside a car registration centre during an air raid alarm. The state-run department is closed because of the air raid, yet the crowd waits patiently for hours on the street, plastic folders filled with documents in hand, waiting for the all-clear, staring at the locked front doors.
And sometimes, instead of carrying that danger, and managing it, it is easier to ignore, to wish and pretend that it isn’t there. Especially at 2:30 in the morning.
As I stand in the corridor, held in place by my own indecision, I feel a surge of stubborn, tired anger. Above all else, I want to sleep, so I sweep the threat of the rain and the thunder to the side of my mind and go back into the bedroom, I slam the window shut and lie down. I fall asleep quickly.
The next morning I get a taxi to meet my friend. “How did you sleep?” the taxi driver asks. “Badly” I say. “Me too” he replies.
If you would like to support Ukraine, please consider donating to KHARPP.com, a charity rebuilding homes in Eastern Ukraine.
Nathan Jeffers is a writer, translator and teacher based in London, UK. He translates from Russian and Ukrainian into English and recent translations include the books “Socrates the skinhead: The Life of a Russian Antifascist” published by Active Distribution and “The Art of Ukraine” by Alisa Lozhkina, published by Thames & Hudson. He is working on his own book of speculative fiction that deals with motherhood and his Irish heritage. His website is njtranslation.com.