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The Year

203
The Year
IRYNA KHALIP
PHOTO: NN.BY

Ukrainians don't need a date but a victory. So do we.

Everyone will write "year" today. It will be the key word of the day because there is nothing more important in the world. Only this year. And I am like the rest of humanity will write: The war lasts for a year already.

It has already been a year since millions of people fled their homes. For a year now, many of them have realized that they cannot return to where they escaped from. Those homes and cities no longer exist.

A year has passed since thousands of Ukrainian men and women took up arms. Professional military men and "nerds," grandfathers with pictures of their grandchildren on their cell phones and young brides in lace, Westerners and Easterners, those who adore Zelensky and despise him, the single and those with many children. Many have not returned home, many will not return.

A year has passed since the Verkhny Lars border crossing became a household name, with lines so long to leave that even the Soviet Union never had for sausages. People fled Russia, leaving behind a comfortable life of art spaces and coffee houses or a horrible life of a latrine outdoors and equally hating the country in which this life, no matter how it then evolved, had once begun. Those who remained stares at TV screens to believe there is no other way to survive. However, they didn't survive this way either- some had heart failure; others went to war and came back like a white Lada; some chose never to sober up again.

A year has passed since pictures of military planes flying toward Ukraine became another article of the Criminal Code in Belarus; military commissars became pariahs, and humanitarian visas became an essential. Those who left earlier and hoped every day to return finally unpacked suitcases, which they had kept unpacked for months superstitiously. They realized: their return is delayed and probably for a long time. Those who hadn't left earlier packed their bags and hit the road. Those who stayed are in jail or wait for someone to come for them.

A year when nobody felt safe. A year that should have never happened at all in the twenty-first century. A year that took the lives of hundreds of thousands of people as if it were still the beginning of the last century, and the fog, and the clouds of mustard gas, and there was no scientific and technological progress and no peace treaties. A year that took away the illusions of those naive who retained them until now. A year that gave birth to many real heroes. However, they had better stay alive and play computer games without any heroism, deliver pizzas, bake bread, or sit in science labs.

A year is nothing against the backdrop of world history. One year is nothing. Even against the backdrop of human life, it seems like a very short period of time. Even for a court sentence: a year is not twenty, and being in a detention center counts for a day and a half. But in reality, a year is an infinitely long time. A simple fertilized egg turns into a completely new person in less than a year, albeit a screaming and helpless one. In a year, this person, who at first cannot lift one's head, progresses from a horizontal position to an upright one and begins to walk independently. In the first year of school, one manages to learn to write, read, count, if, of course, one didn't do it earlier. Then, having grown up, one meets a girl and manages to do some crazy things and get married within a year. And then it all starts all over again. A year is an infinitely long time.

And it becomes an eternity for those at war. My friend and colleague Olga Musafirova, who lives in Kyiv, supposes that the ritual counting - 100 days of war, 200, 300, a year - will finally fade away after a year. People will stop counting the days and months, because it is only good to count down - even if it means the release or a trip to the seaside. And it makes no sense at all to count without knowing the final date. An affection for lovely round numbers disappears quickly, unless it's some kind of holiday date. Celebrations of anniversaries will begin after the victory. With flags and bands, parades and banquets, awards and hugs. One wants to celebrate the anniversary of victory. Unlike the anniversary of the beginning of the war.

In late December, sitting in her Kyiv apartment without electricity and typing a column for Novaya Gazeta on her phone by means of a head-lamp, Olga Musafirova wrote: "We do not need a date but a victory". So do we, Olya.

Iryna Khalip, especially for Charter97.org

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