The other night I dreamed of my native city of Kharkiv—bustling, sunlit and utterly peaceful. I was walking along the embankment of the unnaturally wide and glistening river when, suddenly, my mobile phone rang. The face of my mother, who passed away in Australia in 2006, appeared on its screen. I heard her voice asking me to come home, and realised with horror that I could not remember where home was.
The block of flats in which I had spent my early childhood, my university and my former school have all been hit repeatedly by Russian bombs. That is probably why I now find memories of my Kharkiv years painful (dreams are different, for we have no control over them). Until recently, however, I cherished the reveries of Kyiv, just an overnight train ride away from the city of my birth.
Kyiv to me was a “moveable feast”, like Paris was to Hemingway. I used to visit it often. My first love lived on what was then Red Army Street. Unbeknown to my parents and to our Kyiv-based relatives, I would travel from Kharkiv to see her and, not being able to afford a hotel, would sleep on a hard wooden bench at the railway station, from where a drowsy night militiaman would periodically shoo me away. I was 18, and my dreams were in Technicolor, even when I was sleeping on a station bench.
My other Kyiv-based passion was Dynamo, the local football team. Once I came specially from Kharkiv to see them play Bayern Munich in the European Supercup. Dynamo won 2–0, and the whole city went mad with joy for several days. Fans were hugging and kissing on every street corner, as if the victory signified the start of new and happier lives for themselves. Little did they know...
Normally, when not on a clandestine romantic (if rather innocent) tryst, I would stay with my relatives in October Revolution Street (formerly—and presently again—Institutskaya, named after the pre-1917 Institute for Noble Maidens, an equivalent to university for ladies in tsarist Russia) in the very centre of Kyiv.
By Soviet standards, their abode was unique. It consisted of two apartments, joined together and occupied by the families of two siblings: Auntie Lena, now 93 and a war refugee in Marseilles, and Uncle Dima, now deceased. It resembled the warm and bustling house of the Turbins, the protagonists of Mikhail Bulgakov’s novel The White Guard, set in Kyiv at the time of the Russian Civil War.
I was used to a rather spartan Kharkiv lifestyle, so their house felt like a permanent party venue. Auntie Lena, a well-reputed Kyiv journalist—one of the first to expose the truth about Babi Yar, the site of a 1941 Nazi massacre of Jews in the outskirts of Kyiv—had friends and fans all over the Soviet Union. The house was always full of them, as well as actors, comedians and artists from Moscow and Leningrad. That never-ending do was normally presided over by Auntie Lena’s husband, Uncle Valya, a retired Navy officer and an amateur philosopher, always willing to deliver a protracted table speech or a poetic toast.
I felt as if nothing could disrupt the “moveable feast” of human camaraderie and cordiality in that house. To quote The White Guard, “... despite the events, all was well inside the Turbins’ home: it was warm and comfortable, and the cream-coloured blinds were drawn...”
In Bulgakov’s 1918 Kyiv, drawn blinds “despite the events” signified the ongoing war. And so they did again in Kyiv in February 2022, when Russia’s full-scale invasion began. The blinds in my beloved house in Institutskaya Street remained firmly drawn right until New Year’s Day of 2025, when the window panes were blown out by Russian drones.
Luckily, my relatives were no longer there. Russian-speaking and ethnically Russian (like so many in Ukraine), they had fled their home, their city and their country. They fled to escape from the unexpected and unjustified Russian invasion, aimed, allegedly, at “protecting Ukraine’s Russian speakers”!
Thus, the last remaining radiant memory lane of my Ukrainian childhood and youth was turned into a sunless cul-de-sac.
“A house is made of brick and beams; a home is made of hopes and dreams.” I wonder who it was who came up with that doggerel. Well, under the piles of bricks and beams of my ruined first life home, it is only the dreams that have survived. Hope usually dies last, but there isn’t much left of it either.
Despite the seemingly endless and fruitless negotiations, the only surviving bit of hope I can see for Ukraine is a faded and rumpled flag, still drooping—albeit mournfully—from the roof of a small dental clinic in my Hertfordshire town. It is the last blue-and-yellow banner flying, where a couple of years ago they were hoisted above every other house.
As I walk past, I wave to the tired piece of cloth to cheer it up.
Slowly, as if reluctantly, the flag waves back.
