Fiction by Peter Newall
It was ten o’clock on a hot July night, at the end of a long, hot July day. With eight of us sitting around the table eating, drinking and talking, the kitchen was close and stuffy. When Zina turned to speak to someone else, I got up and went out onto the balcony, hoping for fresh air.
I leant on the railing, staring out into the Odesa sky; dark, starless. To the east, the Black Sea stretched away to the horizon, where points of light marked cargo vessels carrying grain to Istanbul. But there was no sea breeze; the air was flat, overheated and stale. I looked down at the traffic trundling up and down Frantsuzky Boulevard eight floors below; white streaks in one direction, ruby red in the other, under a double row of orange arc lights. The boulevard was still paved with the cobblestones laid a hundred years ago, and the tires of the passing cars made a long grating sound, like waves drawing back from a gravel beach. As I watched, a tram clanked into view, heading along its silvery tracks towards Arcadia Beach.
Trams ran along this route all day and well into the night. Some were modern, with pneumatic doors and comfortable seats; others had been in service since Soviet times, sheet metal panels welded into the general shape of a tramcar and sent out to ferry workers to the factories. Late at night, and again at first light, I heard the rumbling of their steel wheels from the street below as I lay in bed. But far from disturbing me, the sound was reassuring. It spoke of regularity, predictability, order, like the night-watchman’s rattle of former days, shaken to let the sleeping village know all was well.
Zina and I had been back in Odesa for a fortnight now. We had left here on the first day of the war, more than two years before.
I still remembered – I knew I would never forget – that February morning, when we were woken, around four, by a shuddering explosion somewhere nearby, setting off all the car alarms in the street below. I came out onto this same balcony to stare out over the darkened city, trying to grasp what had happened. Zina appeared beside me, wrapped in a thick white robe against the chilly air. We looked at each other; then, just as we were hoping it might have been some kind of accident, something that could be explained in the morning, there came another powerful blast, shaking the ground. It could only be a missile.
So it had come, what had been rumored for weeks, but what we didn’t want to believe; the Russians were invading us. Hung over, still not fully awake, I tried to decide what best to do, but Zina had no doubts.
“It’s war,” she said. “We have to leave.” I couldn’t argue. We didn’t know where the next missile might land, and we’d heard the Russians had planned an amphibious attack on Odesa. For all I knew they were already on the beach, splashing through the shallow waves five hundred metres down the hill from us. We dressed hastily.
As we stood on the threshold of our apartment, about to lock the door behind us, Zina turned to me.
“You realize we may never see this place again?”
I knew it was true, but I tucked away inside myself the belief that, somehow, someday, we would. As we drove through the outskirts of the city, it was just beginning to get light.
That was two and a half years ago, two and a half years of wandering around Europe, waiting outside chilly government offices, applying for residency permits and to have visas extended. And now we were finally back in Odesa, basically from homesickness. “Welcome to Ukraine,” said the smiling border guard at Siret as she stamped our passports. A hundred metres beyond the border, we stopped the car and got out to kiss the black earth.
We found our apartment undamaged, just dusty and gloomy, but that was soon set right. Then we started to let our friends know we’d returned. I’d wondered whether people might have been so changed by the war, or found us so changed, that our old friendships wouldn’t make sense. Or perhaps people would resent us, for having left when things were darkest.
But if the city had altered superficially – there were camouflage nets over some buildings, and the statue of the Duc was covered with a huge green tarpaulin, so that it resembled a giant sea-slug perched at the top of the famous steps – it had not changed in essence, and people were much as we remembered them. They talked in the same way, often about the same things, and they generally lived in the same arrangements with each other as before. I thought Zina and I had been markedly affected by everything we had seen and done during our exile, but people reacted to us just as they always had.
Some of our friends had left, and were living in Germany or Poland or Canada. And some had died. I knew Ukraine was at war, and in war, people were killed, soldiers and civilians. But still I was shocked to learn that Vanya was dead. He’d volunteered, and had been killed last spring near Bakhmut. I remembered Vanya’s face, his speech, even his favourite Miles Davis T-shirt; it seemed only a short time ago I’d visited the jazz club he ran. And now he’d died fighting to preserve Ukraine. When I was told, I felt unworthy to say anything.
I heard the door behind me open, then Stas was leaning on the railing beside me, lighting a cigarette. I liked Stas. He played good swinging piano, and we’d done a few gigs together in the old days. He was a sharp-faced guy with crisp black hair – actually, I’d noticed tonight it was flecked with grey – and a dry sense of humor.
Down below us an electric bell shrilled. The tram had come to a stop behind a black Volvo parked across the tramlines. The bell rang again, impatiently, then again, sounding shriller each time, but the car didn’t move. As we watched, the tram driver climbed down from his cabin and walked toward the car, hefting a hooked metal pole in one hand. Just then a man in a tracksuit jogged down the steps of the Georgian restaurant on the corner, carrying a plastic bag. He climbed into the Volvo, did a swift U-turn across the double white lines, and sped off. The tram driver returned to his place, and with a final indignant shrill of its bell, the tram proceeded on its way.
“So,” said Stas, gesturing down toward the street, “our Odesa is still the same.” As he spoke, the air-raid siren wound up its long, hoarse moan. Its vibration seemed to fill the night air, like the cry of some giant, wounded prehistoric bird. ‘Except for the rockets,’ I said.
“Except for the rockets,” Stas agreed.
Zina put her head round the door. “Listen, I’m going down to the shelter,” she said, sounding strained. “It’s okay, you don’t have to, Natasha is coming with me.” I was relieved. Since we returned, Zina had insisted on going down to the bomb shelter beneath our building every time the sirens went off, even in the middle of the night, and even if the lifts weren’t working. At first, I went with her; I didn’t want her down there alone, or worrying about what might happen to me upstairs. But I’d noticed there were always a few mothers with their children there to keep Zina company, and anyway by now I was tired of going to the shelter.
It wasn’t bravado on my part. The rockets and drones were real, and sometimes they got through the air defenses, destroyed homes and killed people, ordinary people like us. I had no wish to be killed or maimed by a Russian missile. But I’d decided I couldn’t accept the bastard Russians dictating that I had to run down to the basement several times a day. They’d already chased me out of my home once, and now I was back, I didn’t want to let them chase me around any more.
Stas hadn’t moved; he was still leaning on the balcony rail, drawing on his hand-rolled cigarette. He and his wife Varya had been going through this for two and a half years now.
“How’s the winemaking?” I asked him. Stas made quite drinkable backyard wine from the grapes on his allotment.
“A bad season,” he told me, shaking his head. “Last year, spring came too early, and it rained in summer, just at the wrong time. The grapes were pretty tasteless. But listen, have you got time to help me with something? The cherries are good this year, and I have to pick them next weekend, six trees worth. If you could come out to the dacha with me, we can do it in a day.”
I hadn’t planned to spend my weekend picking fruit, but this was the kind of cement that held friendships together, and it seemed right to lend a hand where I could. I said yes, sure, and we arranged where and when to meet.
The all-clear sounded. Stas and I went back inside. Shortly Zina and Natasha appeared, Natasha red-faced and puffing; she was a full-figured woman, and with the lifts out, she’d had to climb eight flights of stairs. Over the next hour, our guests drifted away, and we cleaned up a bit before going to bed. Zina didn’t like getting up to a messy kitchen in the morning.
The next night, about ten, when the sirens went off again, Zina decided to sit in the bathroom rather than go down to the shelter. I sat with her. Nothing happened for a while, and I was just wondering when the all-clear might come when a loud, deep bang reverberated through the apartment. A Russian rocket had gotten through. From the sound of it, the impact was close, maybe down at the port. There weren’t any more, and a little while later the all-clear sounded. Zina looked pale, but shrugged.
“All right, now we can go to bed,” she said.
We learned the next morning it was a ballistic missile. It had hit a residential apartment block, killing three people and injuring seven others, including two children. “It could have been this building,” Zina said. “Next time I’m going back down to the shelter. You do what you like, but I’m going.”
We had resolved to come back knowing very well that there would be rockets hitting Odesa, and we’d agreed that we were prepared for whatever risk was involved. After all, we said, people in cities like Kharkiv have it much worse, and they get on with their lives. But if Zina was going to be perpetually anxious and fearful about these air raids, we wouldn’t have any happiness here, and we would end up having to leave again. There were other places we could go, perhaps even still in Ukraine, but it would mean abandoning everything we’d looked forward to, all the time we were away. I didn’t want to leave Odesa again, but I couldn’t compel Zina to live in constant distress. Every time the sirens went off, I cursed them for upsetting Zina, and threatening to spoil our plans, even though I knew very well they were sounding to save lives.
The next morning, I went to the Privoz market. The Odesa Privoz is like nowhere else. It’s not just what’s on sale – fruit, vegetables, meat, dairy products of all kinds, mounds of marinated carrot and cabbage and cucumbers, honey, beeswax candles, pomegranates, dried fruit, nuts, halva, fish of all sorts, pigs’ heads, knives and pots and pans and Georgian bread, Chinese tracksuits and contraband cigarettes. Nor is it just its smell, the mixed scents of curdled milk and spices and dried fish, overripe fruit and frying food and sweat, which must have pervaded all markets since the beginning of time. No doubt the markets in Babylon, in Persepolis, in Nineveh, smelled just like the Privoz.
No, more than all that, it’s the energy, the concentrated energy of the crowds of Odesans buying, haggling, arguing, talking to friends, looking for something to buy or trade or possibly even to steal, or simply drawn to this swirling press of humanity by the age-old human instinct to go to market. And the draw of the stallholders there, the last masters of the old, part-Yiddish, Odesa dialect, holding court on their one remaining stage. “Odesa without the Privoz is not Odesa,” a friend once told me, and it’s true. It’s the heartbeat of the city, and I loved going there.
I completed my purchases and went out the front to the tram stop. A man walked past, just a regular guy in his early thirties, wearing a baseball cap, looking at his phone. But his left leg below the knee was a shiny new metal rod, ending in a shoe. He was just one of the many in this city who’d lost a limb at the front, from a Russian mine or shell. That’s how he’d be for the rest of his life, it struck me.
The next Saturday morning Stas picked me up in his battered yellow Fiat van, which always smelled syrupy. It was another hot, sunny day. It felt like there should be a storm in the afternoon, but every day for the last week had felt like that, and no storm had come. The radio was playing Ukrainian dark metal; normally I don’t listen to that style of music, but today, the words seemed exactly right, looking out at the lovely, crumbling old streets of Odesa; ‘It’s our land, we’ll defend it, it’s home, it’s ours.’
On the edge of town there was a checkpoint, marked by big metal girders welded crosswise to make tank traps. Two soldiers, scarcely more than teenagers, checked our identity papers, glanced in the back of the van, and waved us on.
The last buildings fell behind us, and we were surrounded by fields, mostly planted with sunflowers, their big, sun-angled crowns still green. Another few weeks of this Ukrainian sunshine would turn them yellow.
So far, we’d driven in silence, listening to the radio, and I’d become absorbed in watching the countryside, the sunflowers, and the ranks of birch trees that ran beside the road. But then Stas cleared his throat and spoke.
“This war, I hate it, we all hate it, but you know, it had to happen. We had to have a final break with these Russians. Under the Soviet Union, we were brainwashed into thinking we had something to do with Russia. But it’s a lie, we don’t, they are utterly different from us. They’re Asiatics, for a start, and we’re not. Yet lots of people still believe the brainwashing. It’s insidious. We’ve got rid of the statues of Lenin, sure, but every city in Ukraine still has streets named after Bunin, who wrote that Ukraine didn’t exist. Only now, faced with this invasion, this war, are people starting to see.”
“But the war’s a tragedy for Ukraine. So many are being killed, and so much is being destroyed,” I objected.
“Of course it is a tragedy, don’t misunderstand me, it’s a real, bitter tragedy, and every single person in Ukraine ought to visit the cemetery in their home town, to see how great this tragedy is, how great the sacrifice is. When you see the graves stretched out for acres, spreading further every week, and see the photographs of the guys, our guys, whose lives have been cut short, it’s terrible, heartbreaking. And everyone should see it, because we have to remember every day, this is what it costs to be allowed to live in our own country, in our own homes.
But it had to be, do you understand? This war is like a cleansing fire for Ukraine. Without this cleansing we will never be free. It’s not just about getting rid of Russian sympathizers, which we’ve still got here in Odesa, even now. It’s much more, it’s about Ukraine getting rid once and for all of the Russian mentality, their serf mentality, or I should say, their slave mentality. And all that goes with it, the brutality, drunkenness, corruption, theft, the lies about everything. The Russian church, which preaches mass murder and mass sacrifice. Their fucking patriarch, Kyril, he blesses rockets to be fired at schools and hospitals here in Ukraine. Yet people still go to the Russian cathedral here in Odesa, and hear prayers said for him. It’s insane. And it means we’re still, even now, not ready to be free. There’s still more cleansing for us to go through.”
“People get angry when I say it, but it’s true; we had to suffer this war. And we have to win it. We will win it. Only this way will we be free. It’s not about joining Europe, that’s irrelevant, we probably shouldn’t anyway. It’s about being free within ourselves, being Ukrainian, being our own people. The point is, there is no other choice but to fight, absolutely none. Russia started this, but it’s better we defeat them now, and get it over with.”
Again I felt guilty for leaving when the invasion started, even though I was nobody’s idea of a soldier. I said something like this to Stas. “Well, you came back,” he said. “We each have to do what we can with what we’ve got, to help Ukraine.”
The sun was beating down from the high blue sky by the time we arrived at what Stas called his dacha. It was a fenced allotment, maybe three acres, set amongst a collection of similar allotments. We parked on the dirt road. He unlocked a rusty metal gate, once painted pale blue, and, carrying armloads of plastic buckets, we went in.
There was a small house, just more than a hut, with a broken-down armchair sitting in the shade of its veranda. Behind the house ran rows of grape trellises, with clusters of small, yet-unripe grapes. Near us stood a group of cherry trees, their trunks whitewashed. They were rooted in the rich black Ukrainian earth, the soil around them heavy, in thick clods which clung to my shoes. The trees were laden with cherries, in improbably dense clusters. Every branch was weighed down with their abundance. Stas brought two stepladders from behind the house, and we got started.
There was so much fruit that after half an hour, I’d only cleared a couple of branches. Bucket after bucket was filled. Bees hovered around us as we worked. Despite the heat, the air was clean, full of oxygen, worth dragging in in big lungfuls. I began to enjoy the work, my movements becoming more practiced, one handful after another and then another, despite the sweat stinging my eyes and the crick in my neck from looking upwards. I could hear the rustling of leaves where Stas was working. I finally cleared one tree, and, pleased to have completed a definite part of the task, moved on to the next.
We worked on and on, stopping only for an occasional gulp of water, collecting this fruit that grew so richly and heavily on these trees, and on the trees of the allotments all around, in this generous earth.
We kept picking until the sun was low in the sky. Cherries still hung on the topmost branches, but Stas said we’d done enough, the rest could be left to fall. I was happy to agree, and to straighten out my back and neck. My hands and shirtfront were stained deep purple-red. I washed the sweat off my face, but that wasn’t enough, so I put my head under the tap. The lukewarm water was immensely refreshing.
We drove back to town leisurely, talking idly about music, watching the orange sun sink below the horizon. We didn’t speak any further about the war. But it seemed to me that Stas had proved his point with our day’s work; it was this soil that Ukraine was fighting for, our rich black earth, and good, clean things like this, harvesting a crop and taking it home to family and friends.
As we passed through the outskirts, with the streetlights just coming on, I thought for the first time in hours about Zina; had there been an alarm in the city? Would she be even more anxious and distressed, there on her own? I knew I had to make a decision about our future, but I was no closer to knowing what best to do than yesterday.
I arrived home with two big plastic buckets brimful of cherries that Stas had pressed on me, glad to find the lift working again. My shoulders were sore, and I could feel my face tight with sunburn.
Zina was in the kitchen, cooking. The cherries, plump and red, almost overflowing their buckets, seemed to glow, radiating all the hot summer sun they’d soaked up. Zina stared wide-eyed, when I planted the heavy buckets down on the kitchen floor. “Oh, great, now I’ll have to bottle them all.” But she was smiling. “You know, I always bottled the fruit from Papa’s dacha, when I was a teenager,” she told me, not for the first time. Then, still smiling, she started to cry. I hadn’t seen her cry the whole time we were away. She sobbed for a moment, burying her face in her hands, then looked up at me. “I’m so happy,” she said, sniffling and laughing at the same time, her eyes shining, her cheeks pink and wet with tears. “So happy we came home.”
Peter Newall was born in Sydney, Australia, where he worked variously in a Navy dockyard, as a musician and as a lawyer. He has since lived in England, Japan and now Odesa, Ukraine, where he fronts a local r&b band. He has been published in England, Europe, Hong Kong, Australia and America.
Arcturus 