In the dark

Sitting at the table in front of a steaming cup of coffee, Olga, Liud, Svetla are talking animatedly. They invite me to sit with them. Although a few months have passed since their arrival we can understand each other in Italian. Olga has her husband at the front in the Donbass area, she has been living for months attached to the news that arrives via the internet. Liud prefers not to know, being unable to do anything from here. Svetla says that before the war the Ukrainians did not feel like a people, now they do, everyone feels responsible for the fate of their country.

Everyone plays the part of him: the children sell cakes and toys to support the soldiers, the elderly women knit socks, scarves and woolen hats to send to the front; the younger ones prepare food to send to the soldiers in the kitchens of abandoned schools. «Before, volunteering hardly existed in our country, now they are all volunteers. There are those who collect wood from the rubble to heat the underground shelters, those who bring hot meals to the sick and the elderly, those who meet to assemble aluminum cans, cardboard and wax to produce emergency stoves, to illuminate and heat".

The three women are very worried about the onset of winter. «In Ukraine, the temperature will soon drop to -20°C - says Svetla - and there will be a massacre among the elderly. Our cities are immersed in darkness and the houses lit only by candles". Listening to them, I realize that the absence of electricity does not only lead to a lack of light, gas and heating but also of water. Olga shows me a video in which people dig deep holes next to apartment buildings that can serve as latrines. She tells of her sister that every day she waits for hours in line to collect water from the fountains; the neighbors instead preferred to leave the city and join relatives in areas where there is still electricity. But rolling blackouts have been imposed across the country to ease the load on the electricity grid. As I listen to them and make their anxieties and worries my own, my thoughts turn to the young people at the front, in their early twenties, on both sides, who in the space of a few days passed, without understanding why, from the having a cell phone in your hands, lying on the sofa at home, shouldering a rifle, in the mud of the trenches, among the rats, at 20 degrees below zero. My thoughts go to those who are afraid, to those who feel like they have no way out, threatened in equal measure by friendly and enemy fire.


Simona Pagani
NP December 2022