James Meek · Every Field, Every Yard: Return to Kyiv · LRB 10 August 2023

There was a corpse on the street where I stayed in Kyiv, among the caryatids, 19th-century tenements and boho joints near the Golden Gate. It was an amiable June day, warm, fresh and cloudless, and most of the living wore bright summer clothes. The paramedics had covered the dead man in a dark grey plastic rubbish sack, cut along the seam to make a rectangle, but it wasn t long enough. His bony shoeless feet stuck out and his socks had holes. A trio of teenage girls went past, and I could see the sight of the body ripple through them, from one to the other: shock, curiosity and a laughing, embarrassed excitement. Relief, maybe, that the death had no obvious connection to the war. The lack of bloodstains, rubble, shrapnel or broken glass seemed quaint. And relief, perhaps, that it was someone else, putting a shiver of triumph in your own working limbs and heartbeat. The scene was an enactment of the world vis-à-vis Ukraine: we care, it s a tragedy, we ll send stuff, but we do have our own lives to live. It was also, in a way, an enactment of Kyiv vis-à-vis the war. The city is committed, indignant, defiant and, in respect of the Ukrainian troops fighting at the front, gnawed by guilt. An aspect of that defiance, and a source of guilt, is the refusal to renounce comfort or pleasure. The greatest source of resilience against the shock, anxiety and grief of invasion, Tatyana Li, a psychotherapist in Kyiv, told me, is the universal desire to live. She repeated this several times and laughed when I finally got what she was driving at, the double meaning of Everyone wants to live. Everyone wants to survive; but even in wartime, especially in wartime, the urge is to go beyond mere existence, to the point where you feel you have a life.

via www.lrb.co.uk

H/t Luke, who’s still in Kyiv.