Kherson is no place for ghosts

Kherson, from our correspondent. And you, why are you staying? It’s a question that seems inevitable on the streets of a city covered by a dense network designed to protect against certain types of drones, amongst buildings that have not escaped unscathed, on the bank of a river that looks straight out towards the Russian occupation. Viktoria bursts out laughing; she’s asked herself the same question, and to find an answer, together with her family – three generations gathered together – she called a brief meeting that ended quickly. They said to one another: ‘We’re staying in Kherson, because this is where we live.’ Viktoria laughs heartily; she laughs when she hears the sound of an explosion, pricks up her ears and says: ‘It’s far away, it’s far away.’ For a city on the front line, ‘far away’ is a relative concept, but it’s true that the endless explosions, repeating continuously and insistently, have different sounds, and sometimes it’s possible to take heart, not to look at your phone to check the location of the impact, but to let your ears determine the weight of your worries. You don’t come across many people on the streets, but Kherson is a city that’s alive, that’s on the move. It’s a city where people don’t hide away. Before the Russians invaded in 2022, it had a population of three hundred thousand; today, walking through the bombed-out streets and living in the damaged buildings, there are around sixty thousand people left. Some have been stranded; they didn’t choose this, they’re here simply because they have no other options, but Kherson is a city with character, and there are those, like Viktoria, who have stayed of their own free will. “Of course, it’s a choice,” she says, laughing with a full, hearty laugh, displaying a modesty brimming with irony as she clarifies: “We’re certainly no heroes; we just found ourselves here and we’re staying.”

In Kherson, Viktoria and her family went through absolutely everything. It was the first regional capital to be occupied in 2022; the Russians arrived swiftly, without much fighting, aided by infiltrators within the local administration. Citizens like Viktoria found themselves with the Russians in their homes from one day to the next. They stayed for eight months, and Kherson was drained of its inhabitants. Even those who were there seemed to be absent. The residents stayed indoors, cultivating their own little corner of Ukraine within their homes. “They wanted us to pay in roubles, but I carried on using hryvnias”; even the Ukrainian currency was a weapon in the struggle during those days of invasion.

Kherson has survived the occupation; it survives the daily reprisals carried out with glide bombs, missiles and various types of drones that are hurled at it, both because it is close to the front line – and therefore an easy target – and because Kherson has betrayed, welcomed liberation and sought it out; and so, in Moscow’s eyes, it deserves punishment, the barrage of bombs; it deserves to be consumed in the narrowing space between life and death. “My son only goes out with us; school is still online. My daughter goes out now and then; I tell her to keep an eye on the sky and to check her phone often. But she doesn’t,” says Viktoria, worried, as she waits patiently for her daughter to finally look at her phone and let her know she’s all right. Kherson is a patient city too; when the rain confuses the drones, it rejoices; when talking to neighbours, they compete to see who has the most dilapidated block or flat: it seems like a matter of status – the winner is whoever has the most broken windows; it seems nobody has a home left in one piece. Viktoria recounts that during one of the recent bombings, she had taken shelter in a room with her husband and their cat, clutching the cat – who, unlike her, perhaps fails to grasp the revolutionary significance of simply being there and, almost human-like, trembles at every boom. Once the attack was over, Viktoria began receiving phone calls, all asking the same question: ‘How are you?’. Viktoria replied as she saw fit – “fine”, “normalno”, which doesn’t simply mean “normal” but rather that, since everything is as it should be, all is well – but she hadn’t realised that by then most of her windows had been shattered: “My husband came in and said to me: ‘Sure, carry on saying everything’s fine, but in the meantime we’ve got no windows left’. Anyway, he repaired them – not with plywood, but with plastic – so we still have light’. Plywood is everywhere in Kherson. During the occupation, Viktoria didn’t even go to work; she waited for it to pass, her children were being taught at home, and everyone was waiting. It has passed, and with every passing day, it becomes increasingly senseless to leave this city, which is emptying but still carries on living. Every day in Kherson is a day of victory over Russia; leaving makes no sense. Viktoria fights simply by being there, lightly practising that form of warfare which so annoys the Russians: to live is to resist.

Not everyone laughs like her; there are those who cry but stay anyway, those who have been on holiday in Vinnytsia, on the banks of the River Bug, and found it to be another world where ‘there is no war’. Even war has its degrees, and for those who remain in Kherson, even Vinnytsia seems like a haven of luxury and tranquillity. There are those who are constantly arguing with their neighbours at the market. Larissa and Aleksander shout at each other; she accuses him of spending the day listening to Russian propaganda, “things that not even a child would believe, and he spends all his time talking about his Red Star, his Stalin, his Rusnja who does nothing but kill, rob and rape. ‘Not everyone there is bad, but…’ and Larissa’s ‘but’ hangs in the air, as she points as if to a specific spot on the map to this ‘Rusnja’ – a derogatory term for those in Russia who are waging, ordering and supporting this war. Aleksander, on the other hand, is a former soldier in the Soviet Army, a recipient of the Order of the Red Star, with his Navy uniform prominently displayed at home, not far from the portrait of Stalin. When the Russian invaders came to search his house too, they were left speechless at the sight of those mementoes: ‘They gave me a hug.’ Aleksander keeps saying that his Navy was incredibly strong; even the President of Egypt, Hosni Mubarak, said as much: ‘These lads today fight well, but we fought better.’ It could not be otherwise for Aleksander, who lives his life looking back. Larissa shouts after him; to calm herself down, she swallows two tablets – one taken from her red pill case, the other brought to her with concern by a lady who keeps repeating, “Don’t get worked up, don’t get worked up.” She does get worked up and recalls when the Russians entered her home: “They were looking for young men; they started staring at my three-year-old grandson – my heart stopped.” Larissa doesn’t leave; when she’s very tired and needs to sleep, she goes to Mykolaïv for a couple of nights, then comes back: “No, no, I’m staying. This is home!” Home with the bombs, with the barbed wire, with the tablets to calm her anxiety and nerves.

Kherson is free; to leave it would be to give it away. Larissa feels no nostalgia for the past, whilst Aleksander is steeped in it; if he weren’t afraid of wearing it out, he’d even go about in his Soviet Navy uniform, which earned him the respect of the Russian invaders: ‘I was like a varenik in butter,’ he sighs. Without any insignia, wearing a white T-shirt and shorts, he strolls through Kherson with a beagle, “Smilik – a bit of English, a little smile. He’s called that because it’s impossible to look at him without smiling”. It’s true, it’s impossible. Whilst Larissa shouts at him to shut up, to stop ‘defending the murderers’, to go back to his Rusnja, he rolls his eyes: ‘I do have to make sure I keep my mouth shut, but this is my home.’

No one walks the streets of Kherson by chance. Every step is a choice in this city that has survived the sound of bombs, where the sky is the colour of anti-drone nets, and where every citizen knows that their first weapon is to be Ukrainian and to stay where they are. In Viktoria, laughter prevails; in Larissa, angry tears and, at times, emotion as she thanks ‘with a mother’s heart’ those who are in Kherson not to stay but to tell the story; in Aleksander, a sense of stubborn nostalgia prevails, yet even he has no doubts: this is where he’s staying, in his half-destroyed home: ‘Do you know who’s shooting at me today? The grandchildren of those who once fought alongside me.” There it is, that nostalgia, shattering and turning to pain. Kherson is suffering; you can see it even when she laughs.