a war diary’s haunted, half-real time
Dazed by the constant coverage, I have turned instead to the daily war diary of Yevgenia Belorusets, a writer and photographer who lives in Kyiv. Co-published through a small magazine press, Isolarii, it is a plain and plaintive record of her days. She writes of being threatened for photographing empty streets, talking to people in stores, taping her windows so they won’t shatter. She writes of being searched by four men in the street; she writes of drinking a cappuccino. The data journalism of the Times may be a feat of reporting, but Belorusets’ account has a haunting quality that lingers far longer than news of the next airstrike, the next sanction:
A well-known teacher, eighty-six years old, spends most nights in the basement of a school that is next to her house. Today she recorded a video. In a distinct, almost forgotten, and noble Kyiv accent, she addressed the women of Russia: they should not let their sons go to war.
It is snowing, the air is damp and cold, and it seems to me that I can no longer get close to my own city, the place where I live, whose events I witness. I resist the violence more than I used to, I resist acknowledging that the war is going on, that it is allowed, that it has been allowed.
All diaries, I think, share a kind of disbelief that gives them form. They are first drafts from the receding moment: unconfident and brave, unsure of what exactly to put down, given to small scenes and bursts of thought rather than long arcs of meaning. Belorusets writes: “I orient myself in the present because the days offer little structure.” And a week later: “Sometimes, these days, it’s hard to grasp tomorrow. Tomorrow seems an eternity away, as if it were happening on another planet. One can imagine tomorrow in theory, but not as a moment in one’s own passage of time.” In times of crisis, the diary is an act—at times a costly one—of witnessing and recording. But it is also the ongoing struggle of creating a structure, an idea of “one’s own passage of time.”
Begun in time, the diary gathers meaning gradually. Through repeating, persisting, observing. Through being read and reread. It is the inverse of the notification, which burns bright with fact and then fizzles out. For if the livestream comes in “real time,” the diary’s time is half-real. But more haunting, more human:
The city is sinking into spring fog, but it is still cold. Since yesterday, here, in the center of Kyiv, you can tell a story about the war on every street corner. Almost every intersection is guarded day and night by armed members of the Territorial Defense. There are more groups of saboteurs in the city, more violence. I look with relief into the eyes of the men and women of the defense. In one of the faces yesterday I recognized with amazement a barista who was popular in our neighborhood because he painted particularly beautiful swans on the milk foam of the coffees.
ben tapeworm