It’s been five days since my Ukrainian grandmother, my father’s mother, told me over the phone that Russia has invaded Ukraine.
It’s Saturday morning. My Russian mother and I sit on a bench at St. Philip’s Plaza and sip our coffees. Cyclists walk their carbon fiber bicycles. Foothills matriarchs walk their freshly manicured dogs. It’s been five days since my Ukrainian grandmother, my father’s mother, told me over the phone that Russia has invaded Ukraine. Though my grandmother fled to Israel 20 years ago, my great uncle, her brother, stayed behind. From her I learn that my great uncle has been trapped in Kyiv without cell or internet service since Tuesday. He and I usually speak on the phone once a month. Yesterday and today, I have dialed his number a total of 17 times. Every time I dial, I get an automated error message followed by the hiss of static. Sometimes, I swear I can hear the warmth of his voice within the static, so I stay on the line for a few minutes listening, wondering if he’s trying to send me a secret message. It’s like those ghost hunting TV shows where the host asks if there are any spirits in the dark living room of an abandoned house. Sometimes, the mic legitimately picks up a human sounding voice. Other times, it’s clear that the “voice” is really just the sound of wind ripping through the old house. The viewer interprets that “voice” as human because they desperately want to believe in ghosts. I don’t know if I believe in ghosts. I know I’m not ready to believe that my great uncle is a ghost yet.
My mother tells me that dictators start to lose their minds after 20 or so years in power. At that point, she says, they usually have little to no opposition and begin to experience intense paranoia, which forces them to make rash decisions; i.e., invade sovereign nations. She tells me that state-controlled Russian media has been spouting propaganda regarding a Nazi-led genocide of ethnic Russians in Ukraine in an effort to garner support for the invasion amongst Russian citizens. The strategy seems to have worked. She tells me she has stopped using Russian Facebook (Одноклассники) because many of her friends and former classmates have been echoing the Russian media’s propaganda and calling for the slaughter of so-called “Ukrainian neo-Nazis.” This rhetoric makes her upset, she says, but she doesn’t want to argue with them over the internet because it’s exhausting and she simply doesn’t have the time.
Photo courtesy Misha Tentser.
I tell my mother that I haven’t been paying attention to the news, which is a lie. I have seen the images of orphaned children and animals. I have read the reports of African students studying medicine in Ukraine experiencing overt racism at the Ukraine/Poland border as they try to flee, subject to a “hierarchy” of women first, then children, then Ukrainian men, then Africans. I have listened to reports from Радио Свобода (Radio Free Europe/Liberty Radio, a United States government-funded news organization) about journalists fleeing Russia after receiving death threats alongside photographs of their children walking to school. I cry at the images. I cry at the reports. I cry at the broadcasts. But I don’t cry in front of my mother. To her, I am the good son who walks the dog and helps her make borscht. I am not the son who hasn’t showered for four days, following news updates obsessively, refreshing Reddit every 15 minutes, knots in my throat leading down my back, too anxious to sleep, too inarticulate to express my feelings to those who care about me most.
My mother says she doesn’t blame me for not watching the news. She says she has always believed ignorance to be bliss. She gestures in front of us. Look at all of these people in the plaza, she says. They are wealthy, dining in restaurants without masks, cracking jokes with one another, unaffected beyond the mild annoyance of higher gas prices. I think of the table I served last night at the restaurant I work at. I never tell people my name unless they ask. These people asked. When I told them, they asked if I was Ukrainian. Too exhausted to lie, I told them that I was. They smirked and told me that they wouldn’t be ordering any Russian vodka from me in solidarity with “the Ukraine.” Their faces were greasy and smug. I quickly turned to walk away from the table before I slapped every single one of those sunburnt, polo shirt-wearing assholes. I told my coworker I was taking a break and stepped outside to center myself. When I came back in, I asked my coworker to take over the table. This is another thing I don’t tell my mother.
My mother asks if I have completed any poems recently. At first, I tell her no, that I have been too busy with work to write and I haven’t felt particularly inspired. She says surely I’ve completed something—I haven’t shared anything with her in months. I crack immediately. I tell her I’ve been working on a poem about Ukraine but that it’s a draft and that I don’t want to read it. She says that I don’t have to read it but that she would like to see it anyway. I agree. I pull up the poem on my phone.
For My Homeland in Wartime
Over the phone, my grandmother says “Russia
has invaded Ukraine” and I feel my heart rip
as it pulls towards a homeland built
out of my father’s childhood memories.
When they tear us apart, will his memories
break into pieces or be swallowed by the sea?
On my way to work, I cry in the car
for my great uncle trapped in Kyiv,
bracing himself as tanks advance,
crushing orchids into chestnut soil.
When they tear us apart, will the birch trees
lining my grandfather’s grave in Kyiv still sway?
Over coffee, my father says “we’ve lived through
worse” and I wonder how to take inventory
of our bodies, splintered across continents,
eager to be made whole in unfamiliar land.
When they tear us apart, will they bury
us in Odesa so we can taste the sea?
My mother holds my phone gingerly and reads the poem quietly to herself while I bite my nails. Her mouth forms into one taut line. I look out at the plaza. A wide-brim-hatted woman is too busy talking on her phone to realize that her golden retriever is taking a piss in the fountain. College kids clink flutes of sparkling wine on one of the restaurant’s patios while a server tries to take their order. A leathery-looking man in a salmon polo ashes his cigar onto a patch of grass. I look back at my mother and see her take off her sunglasses and wipe her eyes.
I ask her if she likes the poem. She tells me that she does, puts her sunglasses back on, and changes the subject. Maybe she’s afraid to be vulnerable. She asks me if I have heard from my great uncle. I tell her no, that I haven’t, that I have begun to worry if he is safe. She assures me that he is just taking cover in the bomb shelter of his building, which he outfitted with cots and canned food and even a television. I ask her how she knows this. She tells me that’s the kind of person he is, a stubborn survivalist prepared for any situation. I tell her that I am worried because I don’t have any survivalist training, that all of my skills are impractical, like remembering customers’ faces, or chugging sparkling water without burping, or identifying watch brands in movies.
Photo courtesy Misha Tentser.
“I would be useless if a world war broke out,” I tell her.
“Just be grateful that you don’t live in Russia. You know men ages 18-60 are required to fight for Putin,” she reminds me.
“If I had to fight for Putin, I would desert immediately.”
“Why’s that?”
“I would rather be executed than slaughter innocent civilians.”
“What about your family? How would they feel about your execution?”
“At least I would die a noble death.”
“Don’t forget that you are half-Russian and half-Ukrainian.”
I take a beat.
“Why do you bring it up?”
“Because right now you are torn down the middle, like in your poem.”
The dam breaks. I start crying in the middle of St. Philip’s Plaza, keenly aware of the pissing dogs, the brunching boomers, the college kids all staring at me. It’s an absurdist nightmare. How can all of these people live as if the world isn’t on the verge of collapse? All I want is for the earth to open up and swallow me whole.
My mother touches my shoulder. I breathe and center myself. I tell her that I feel like one half of my heritage is massacring the other half. I tell her that she and my father are hardier people for having fled the Soviet Union, landing on their feet in the United States after so many years of struggling. I tell her that I am too sensitive, too soft, too American. I tell her that I don’t know what to do or how to cope.
“That’s one of the reasons why we make art,” she tells me.
I agree and we fall silent.
My mother tells me she has to get going but to call her if I need anything. I walk her to her car. We hug and she tells me to keep my head up. As soon as she drives off, I dial my great uncle’s number. As the line rings, I walk over to the bike path. It’s 7 p.m. in Kyiv. Cyclists zip past me as I lean against the iron rail separating the path from the dry ravine. This time, instead of the error message and then static, I get patched through to an automated voicemail asking me in Ukrainian to leave a message at the tone. I feel my palms start to sweat. I have to say something. What if this is the last message he will hear? The line beeps. I start speaking in rusty Russian, apologizing for not calling as often as I should, letting him know that his family is thinking of him, and praying for reunion. I realize that I am speaking in the language of the soldiers destroying his homeland, the language deemed “superior” by the Soviet Union, the language that my parents taught me instead of Ukrainian. The line beeps, indicating my voicemail has been recorded. I stay on the line listening to the warm hiss of static.
Misha Tentser is a Russian-Ukrainian-American writer living and working in Tucson, Arizona. His poetry has appeared in Back Patio Press and Crosswinds Poetry Journal. He is currently at work on a psychogeographical chapbook about Tucson.
Header photo, aerial view of the Kyiv, Ukraine, above Maidan Nezalezhnosti Independence Monument, by Ingus Kruklitis, courtesy Shutterstock. Photo of Misha Tentser by Mark Whittaker.
