It’s hard to think of a good reason one would be a tourist in Novovolynsk. This remote town in the West of Ukraine can be new only to those who are moving here permanently. Still, let’s imagine that you decide to come and visit your family. The morning you leave the warmth of your bed, the smell of home detergent, and the comfort of your grandma’s food, you take a walk and stop by a new cafe everyone is talking about.
It should not be too busy at lunchtime– not at any time, indeed.
You obviously find the cafe not with Google Maps but by the name of a pet store that used to be there before. Usually, change is slow in cities like this, so the new name won’t matter for another year or two. Yet, as you sip your latte from an IKEA mug and fidget on a wooden pallet while waiting for your avocado toast, change is all you can think about.
Were you the one who left it all behind?
The pedestrian plaza where you used to chase after pigeons as a kid suddenly transformed into a remnant of modernist architecture—orthogonal in its shape and feel. The elevated granite pedestal with Taras Shevchenko’s monument is guarded by the typical three-story ‘stalinkas’. The same cracked mosaic of two pioneers rests on the buildings’ walls: “A significant post-Soviet remnant, a symbol of conformity and homogenization lingering through generations into independent states.”
Mindless cooing of pigeons.
People and pigeons here tend to mirror each other’s rhythms. In winter, they too roost on buildings next to each other, and now, in summer, they spread around, looking for adventures. Most adventures, however, await on market days. Nearby villagers and farmers, grandpas and grandmas with their meager harvest, the most outstanding merchants of European retail and homemade craft, bakers and woodmasters– all gather religiously to perform this ritual of hard work and gossip.
An elderly woman carrying a bag of carrots passes your table. People retire, you think, they get slower, and shift their social life to their TVs and gardens. Except this grandma with knotty fingers is not allowed to retire, she will not skip a single harvest, a morning feeding her chickens and a square meter of soil without planting a row of flowers. She can’t, you think, she has to survive. Both soil and these people need each other, and both refuse to part even with a gun pointing at their heads.
As a silent observer, you arrived with new ‘perspectives’ that try to explain the “complex historical and socio-economic struggles are shaping the home-front identity in western Ukrainian regions”. With the foreigner attitude, you don’t sense that locals are too tired of trying to leave the ‘red’ era behind, care about soil too deeply to quit growing their own produce, and are too excited about the market days to feel its disorder. They would rather you notice the small businesses, like this café, that have appeared in Novovolynsk like mushrooms after the rain or rather, after February 2022. Your IKEA mug speaks volumes—of migration, of shifting ideas and people, of investments that arrived instantly while hopeful city planning stalled in place.
Change, you see now, is fleeting, unmeasurable. It exists in moments, in moods, in passing glances. It happens here—with or without. you
From somewhere in the distance comes the sound of sirens. In a noiseless hustle, people gather alongside the road. The walkers finish up their last moves. The phone chatter stops. Everything shrinks in the face of the overarching, yet slow humming of siren.
This is the type of siren that makes the boys kneel by the road, old men take off their hats, and all the others freeze with their heads bowed. The street clutter pauses, and so does one’s heart.
The siren fades away when a convoy of cars passes the road. It was about two minutes, but the silence made them last forever. Their first steps pedestrians make indecisively. Walking continues but slower, talking follows but quieter.
The time when a fallen soldier is brought back to this town can cast a sullen shadow over a seemingly normal routine. Seeing kids get up from their knees reminds me of thick blood running through the city. The city beat gets heavier, duller, and more unsettling. These are two minutes that give one cold shiver. Yet again, all the world can see is two pioneers.
Silence and mindless cooing of pigeons.
コメント