Food lines are no longer measured in people. They are no longer measured in meters. Now they are measured in hours. When you wait in them, you feel that space and time are so closely connected that they become practically the same thing. A quarter of an hour is equal to five steps. Turning ninety degrees to the right means thirty minutes, because lines are too long to be straight lines now, they are polygonal lines and curves.
The morning of March 4, 2022, is snowy. The whole world outside is covered by untrodden whiteness. The wet snow makes the wires above the street as thick as a child’s arm. There’s no wind at all, and all the trees on Zas-minovy Boulevard are beautiful, like some magic things from a fairy tale. It’s almost eight o’clock when I come out. The street has turned into a uniform field of snow, with a thin trail trodden across it. The tall dog roses growing on both sides of my porch are now bent by the weight of the snow. They are lying across my way instead of standing upright. I go around them because I don’t want to touch them and destroy the fragile, lacy beauty in front of me.
The sight of the bent dog roses reminds me of the olden days, when we used to set off on a skiing trip, starting very early, before the first light of dawn. We skied along the bottoms of the ravines outside the north part of Kharkiv. We were the first to lay the trail after a heavy snowfall. The silence was complete because the slopes of the ravine shielded any sounds. The only color was pristine white—the color of the snow, the color of the trees, the sky, and the air. We would come to the spot where it seemed we could not move forward at all because long branches and even small trees were lying across our way. But once I touched a snowy branch with a ski pole, it unbent upward, touched other branches, and shook the heavy snow off of them. They unbent as well, shaking on the way the snow off the new branches and saplings. The trees were standing up in front of me, but not simultaneously: they did it one by one, in a slow chain reaction. And then I saw the way in front of me and started ahead.
The only chain reaction people think of now is the chain reaction of nuclear fission: an atom of uranium produces a couple of neutrons, then they hit a couple of new atoms of uranium, out of them new neutrons. The new neutrons hit more and more and more atoms of uranium, producing nuclear contamination of the whole planet and quite probably the slow, painful death of everyone. Today, just a few hours ago, Russian troops attacked the Zaporizh-zhia nuclear power plant, the largest nuclear power plant in Europe. They shelled it, damaging one of the six power units and threatening the future of all mankind. Historically speaking, we live in an interesting time: the first nuclear maniac in history has already been born, and his brain is full of wriggly worms. The sad thing is, he may as well be the last nuclear maniac in history, because the world’s history may stop at this point.
I approach the Rost supermarket. The line of people in front of it is corkscrewing into the distance; it’s an hour and a half long, which is not much. I join the back of the line and wait, slowly moving forward, feeling the difference between space and time disappear. When I walk under a tree, a woman in front of me reaches up and touches the lower branch. We all are showered in a great amount of feathery snow. People smile.
Then, some twenty meters in front of me, a man falls down. His eyes are closed and his lips are blue. Some people come to help. They take off most of his clothes so that he can breathe more easily, and slap his face. He’s probably had a heart attack or a stroke. He looks dead for some time, but they keep slapping his cheeks, and he starts breathing again. People carry him and place him on a bench. He is still almost naked. I can see his eyes, and they look like two tin globes. That can’t be good, but then he bares his teeth, and I realize it’s neither a heart attack nor a stroke—it’s an epileptic fit.
Two policemen try to help. They hold his hands. The man starts growling like an animal. He growls louder and louder, then he shouts, his eyes still two dead tin globes, “I’m not a Russian! I’m not an enemy! I am me!”
One of the policemen calls an ambulance. After a few quick words on the phone, he shakes his head. No ambulance, sorry.
The man on the bench starts breathing very fast, then his breathing stops, and his head tilts to one side. The pharmacy is across the street, but the line in front of it is at least two hours long.
“Go there and get some medicine!” a woman shouts to a policeman.
“Sorry, I can’t,” he says. “Those people are not going to let me in. They are going to shred me in pieces.”
“How do you know?” the woman demands.
“I tried it yesterday.”
“But you are a policeman!”
He just shakes his head.
The man lying on the bench starts breathing again, jerkingly, but his head is still tilted to one side. His lower jaw falls open. He has perfect teeth. He must have visited a dentist regularly.
The line moves on. I see a billboard over the street. It’s old, it’s been hanging here since the days before the war. There are two really smug women on it who look almost identical. They stare at each other. “I love myself” is written on the billboard in huge letters.
The line moves on. The next billboard is much smaller, and at first I don’t understand what is wrong with it. “You, Moscovites, conceived by fucking drunk dogs, go away to your Russia!” says a Ukrainian Madonna painted on it. It is not printed. It is a painting on canvas, it is a real piece of art. It would probably cost millions in some fancy art gallery.
The line moves on. I see a small girl in bright pink overalls who digs the snow with a plastic shovel. She makes a cake of snow and offers it to her mother. The woman shakes her head because she doesn’t want to eat the snow. The girl offers her cake to her father, but the man is not delighted by the prospect of eating the cake made of snow either. The girl picks her nose thoughtfully, then starts eating her cake herself. Her parents don’t see her. They are talking, staring above her head at no one, at nothing but the war dissolved in the snowy distance.
The line moves on. A playful little dog digs the snow industriously. After throwing the snow off, it starts digging the earth. It excavates an old chestnut and starts playing with it, throwing it up and down. It hides it in the snow and digs it up again. Then it looks at its master, waiting for the appreciation of its efforts. It lowers its fluffy ears and yaps in a paroxysm of love and affection.
Then we hear the first loud BANG! above our heads. It bounces from the tall buildings around, turns into a brief chorus of echoes. All the overhead wires shake off the heavy show at the same time, becoming charcoal-wet: all the snow sleeves are falling in geometrically perfect parallel lines and squares. The snow slides off a parked car, and I see that the car is actually not white, but orange. Another BANG! and the dog roses that lie covered by the heavy snow shake it off. But they don’t all stand up at the same time. First, the nearest bush unbends itself, it pushes the next one, then the next one again. I see the chain reaction of snow being shaken off, and it reminds me of the nuclear power station, shelled by the idiots who don’t mind destroying the fragile, lacy world of people.
The line moves on in a long polygonal curve. When I again walk past the half-naked man lying on the bench, I can’t tell whether he is breathing or not. But the snow falling on his bare chest melts, so I hope he is alive.
Sergey Gerasimov lives in Kharkiv, Ukraine, and has chosen to stay despite the proximity of the front line. He writes to preserve the fleeting truth of this war.