Today the 10th day of the full-scale war comes to its end. Actually I’ve already lost count of the days, I hardly remember what day of the week it is. Fortunately, this day and the previous one were a bit more quiet than usual. We even spend the majority of our time in our flat, not in the shelter. And when we hear the close explosions, we rarely go downstairs, just run to the communal corridor of our house. The walls of this building are quite thick, and we feel kind of protected. We always remember «the rule of two walls» that is being learnt by heart by all the Ukrainians these days. It means that you need to have at least two walls between you and the missile when it hits your house.

On the night of the Day 9 we decided to stay and sleep in our beds at home, but at 2 am we were woken up by very loud explosions. I don’t remember putting my shoes on and taking my stuff and running to the shelter, I know that I immediately fell asleep again there. I have no dreams these nights, neither good dreams, nor nightmares.

I miss the silence – the real silence of calmness, from which you do not expect something terrible to come out. Here we don’t trust the silence anymore. We don’t hear the explosions for long and we immediately start asking ourselves, if it is for good or not. I hear the sounds of explosions and sounds of approaching warplane in any sound – in a working air conditioner, in water pouring from the tap, in the noises from our neighbors that we hear in the corridors or in the yard. Sometimes my own blood pulsating in my head sounds like a distant bombardment.

Our basement is also silent though. Many neighbors managed to leave – by cars, by trains, by buses. Some of them went to the railway station and then came back, because they couldn’t catch the train, and after experiencing the nightmare of the crushing crowd, refused to try one more time.

Some new people arrived instead of those who left – relatives and friends of our neighbors who escaped from more dangerous areas. They spend some time with us and then leave to continue their sad trip to the west. All of them say that we in our basement have really luxurious conditions, compared to what they have had in their previous places of stay.

I noticed these people do not lie freely on our blankets, they sit still even when there is plenty of space around, even though I see how tired they are. I saw the child sleeping on her mother’s lap. They didn’t dare to lie on our blankets, though we offered them to everyone for sharing. I don’t know why, maybe they still cannot not believe they are safe now. I wonder if they will ever be able to believe in that.

I don’t know if I will. I feel so unprotected, so naked in my own home. I do not undress, even when I go to sleep, only take my shoes off. I am afraid to turn on the music in my headphones, to watch a movie, afraid to go to the shower or simply wash my face and brush teeth – because I’m afraid to miss the sounds of an approaching warplane or the sounds of the explosions that come too close. I prefer silence now – but if it lasts too long, it scares me even more.

After talking with Ms. Olia about her personal notes depicting the shelter life during this war in Ukraine, I got to know that her boyfriend was preparing to go to war as a soldier. They are planning to hold a wedding ceremony after his safe return.

The pebbles of poetry called «Shelter» are now to begin with Wago's reply letter to Olia’s notes from the actual shelter in Kharkiv, Ukraine.

Eleven years ago, just before noon on 12 March, Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant Unit 1 exploded. It was just a little after that time around in 2022, when I read Ms Olia's notes, written in Kharkiv, Ukraine, which was heavily bombed by Russian troops. My heart was shaken. The extremes of the tense air came back to me.

«I miss the silence – the real silence of calmness, from which you do not expect something terrible to come out. Here we don’t trust the silence anymore» , Olia writes. I remember 11 years ago, when we were threatened by more earthquakes, more explosions... in the silence between the aftershocks.

The day after the 12th of March, Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant Unit 3 exploded. The situation became even more decisive. The roads were jammed with evacuees and their cars. Announcements were made on TV and radio, «Please stay calm, everyone evacuating Fukushima». I realized that Fukushima would end.

It was raining on the night of 14 March. It kept raining with high levels of radiation. On the 16th, after my family had evacuated, I remained in my flat and touched the keys of my computer to let people know that I was safe on Twitter. I suddenly started writing a poem. It started like this: «The radiation is falling. It's a quiet night».

For the next three months, I remained in Fukushima, writing poems and publishing them on Twitter every night. I came to name these masses of words «Pebbles of Poetry». One tries to first grasp an unprecedented event from the drawer of experience. (I read the memoirs and retrace the past in my own way).

Fear and anxiety filled the quiet air. I felt like I was facing a large, unknowable face and its murmurings. I struggled to speak back. That inner correspondence actually helped me to keep going. I remember those days when I was locked up in a mental shelter, writing poems that I didn't know anyone would ever read.

Reading through Olia's notes, I try to understand the silence you are facing through my own experience 11 years ago. I was threatened by invisible insecurity and fear. As I read through the notes, however, I am witnessing the visible anxiety and fear, the flames, the smoke, the sound of the explosions.

Olia, I hope you are safe and sound while I am writing this. And I hope you have a peaceful shelter there, if only for a moment,for your body and for your spirit.

I think that your fatigue has peaked and you don't know when to sleep and when to wake up. In your notes, you described waking up at 2 am right after the bombing, putting on your shoes to evacuate to the shelter and not remembering the rest of the day. I am very concerned.

Olia, I was also constantly plagued by severe body pains, headaches and drowsiness in the days around this time 11 years ago. I felt like there was hardly any boundary between being asleep and being awake. I was also writing poetry at that moment, which made me discover that I was alive and awake, in the prison cell of my psyche.

«I miss silence», you muttered, and that «It scares you», too. Standing on the brink of being yourself, you listen carefully. And you are trying so hard to convey what you listen to with your life, writing it down in words, standing against the silence. All that we see in your personal notes from Kharkiv, Ukraine, are your ears, our ears and the ears of the whole world.

One day, one hour, one minute, one second,while I am writing this down, I wonder how you and the people there are staying. Since the invasion started, one day, one hour, one minute and one second, all seem so long. I’m praying for your safety, praying that the war-torn sky will soon close.

Dear Wago-san.

I’ve been reading your words about that day when Fukushima Daichi nuclear station exploded, about all those chaos that followed the sudden and mass evacuation, and how you’ve been writing your poems while the radiation was falling down with the rain – and it made me think about how vulnerable we humans are, though we often do not even understand it.

I remember myself hearing in the news about the Fukushima catastrophe back in 2011, I remember my shock, because I couldn’t ever imagine that something like Chornobyl could happen anywhere in the world again. As I’ve known about Chornobyl from books and from TV, I haven’t witnessed it myself and I haven’t got anyone in my family who could tell me about it – for me it seemed so phantasmagorical, something not belonging to me and to my reality. Though, so did the war as well, if I was told then that I would be witnessing these atrocities that are happening now in Ukraine – I wouldn’t believe it..

I also remember that I have always tried to imagine, how’s that – to be aware every moment that the nature may bring you a disaster, to prepare your house to the possible earthquake, to train the kids how to behave in case of a landslide, and to get used to the frequent but small ground shakes, like to the regular part of the reality. I couldn’t ever imagine that people could live their normal life in this state of constant instability, a state of permanent danger. I guess when you take some actions to prevent it and to minimize the devastation if the disaster is inevitable makes people feel more safe – but in fact it doesn’t make them less vulnerable.

When a disaster happens you just suddenly realize how weak is your power over reality and how phantom is your ability to control the things happening around you. At some moment you just find yourself amidst a giant sea storm where you barely can find anything to cling to. So the waves throw you back and forth, led by an unpredictable will of an Accident, and the only option you have – is just to flounder with all your strength, to keep your head above the water as long as you can, fighting for life and hoping for luck. And if you were lucky and could make it out from the storm – you just never trust the sea, the wind and even the air itself anymore, because you felt their power and how weak, how vulnerable you are every moment of your life, even if you feel like everything is under your control.

When you said that the first poem that you wrote then, in 2011, in the middle of the Fukushima Daichi catastrophe, began with the words «The radiation is falling. It’s a quiet night» – I had the feeling that I could understand you somehow. These days the whole sky above my country is poisoned with the menace – every moment the rockets and bombs may fall from it on your head, they are so fast and invisible for the eye, you cannot escape them and in no place under this sky you can feel safe. The silence is poisoned too – with this expectation of something horrible to come out of it, with the fear that each peaceful minute may be followed with the next series of explosions. And the most toxic thing – is the very feeling that you never know what to expect, from where and when. And that you can do nothing but try to keep your head above the water and hope for some luck.

The only difference between the natural disaster and the rocket sent by another human at you, I suppose, is the following - nature doesn’t really want to kill you, the human does.

Dear Olia,

In the midst of a vast ocean storm... the entire sky is polluted by the threat... With your letter in hand, I felt again how much tragedy is happening. Last night's news showed a sad video interview with a Ukrainian boy whose father was shot by Russian soldiers. That memory immediately crossed my mind.

It showed images of the bullet holes left in the wall. The boy's eyes as he describes his father's collapse. It came to me again strongly as I followed Olia's words.

The daytime news showed footage of people in a Ukrainian town being shot from behind by Russian soldiers who came out unexpectedly, unaware of what was happening. The footage cut to a scene where the trigger was being pulled, but immediately after I saw it, a cold feeling stuck to my back and couldn't leave. It still haunts me as the shadow of a small, sharp hole.

Everyone in the world now carries that bullet hole in the wall on their back. I feel that the words you wrote about in your letter, «the will to kill», are chasing me hard from behind.

My grandfather was interned in Siberia during the Second World War and died in the war. His remains have not been returned from the extreme cold land. Somewhere in my heart, I am strongly trying to replace and overlap my feelings about the recent invasion of Ukraine with my feelings for my grandfather.

Why did my grandfather have to die in Siberia? This has somehow become a literary proposition for me. It seems to me that the tragedy that is happening in Ukraine, the bombings, killings, deprivations and overruns, is identical to the absurdity of my grandfather's death, which I have been facing for a long time.

Homes, families and livelihoods are being taken away for no reason. We are living in the present of the world in the very essence of «without reason»... I feel an inexpressible despair. When I mutter your words «even the silence is poisoned», I can see the image of the bullet holes in my back opening wide.

I went out the other day near an area that remained a no-go zone after the explosion of the nuclear power plant and has still not been lifted. Looking at the landscape of the uninhabited town, I had the feeling that 11 years have passed. Houses that were completely leaning over, houses with dirty glass windows, houses with grass in disrepair. Houses, houses and houses.

The uninhabited town beyond the barricades was simply quiet. The houses standing abandoned in the silence. «Even the silence is poisoned'. I muttered your phrase to myself, and then continued unexpectedly like this. «Even the silence is neglected».

I am a teacher. One of my pupils was a young police officer protecting the area. When we were informed of the tsunami, we called for evacuation. I continued to guide him single-mindedly near the seaside, and eventually, he was snatched away by the black waves. The police car he was in at the time was later found. It was kept and displayed in the town's archive.

The police car of my student, which I was able to face, had only the lower half of the body remaining. Once again, I learnt the magnitude of the power of the tsunami. We were also shown the mud and sand from the seaside at the time, which came out of the body of the police car when it was being displayed. They said that they wanted to keep these as important documents and pass them on to future generations…

Many people were saved from the tsunami by the guidance of my pupil. One of them has not been able to see the car on display for a long time. He said it was because he couldn't stop crying. He said that even if he could get to the car park, it would be difficult to enter the museum... When I heard the story from the archivist, my eyes welled up.

My student is still missing and lying in the sea. Somewhere out there in the Pacific Ocean is the image of a young man who gave his life in exchange for the lives of his fellow inhabitants. In the world today, there is the image of a young soldier who is ruthlessly shooting good Ukrainian townspeople without any weapons, one after the other from behind for no reason.

Lives that defended other lives. Lives that take away other lives without a second thought. The word «life» is the same, but it doesn't seem the same. There is no way to compare «life» with «life».

I will never forget the history of the internment of disarmed Japanese soldiers as prisoners of war and the forced labour they were forced to perform in Siberia. I will never forget the harsh forced labour in the bitterly cold environment, without giving them satisfactory food or rest... and the deaths of some 58,000 unarmed Japanese soldiers after they surrendered. The lives of my grandfather, who remains unable to return to his homeland to this day.

The lives of those who defend life and those who take life unprovoked. The life that remains undiscovered, in the extreme cold and on the ocean floor. The mud and sand of the sea in a bottle that was with my student's life... was sad but still tender. Tears welled up in my eyes.

Every time I read your letter again, I think of you and all of you who are exposed to the horror of the bombing, to the cold muzzle of the gun, I see the eyes of the boy who got his father shot and the people who were given death behind their backs without even realising it, and I am again lost for words. The «will to kill» that only humans possess. The black hole in the back is madly baring the fangs.

I once had an intuition that the darkness of the universe was standing in the form of a giant. Its true identity was the shadow of the pylons around the nuclear power station in the dusk as night was falling, and the flicker of a huge electric light that was throwing itself towards us. I still occasionally recall the illusion of the terrifying appearance of a large human being.

«There is nowhere safe under the sky». Everything in the blue sky is frightening. O world, do not lock the world away. I pray with all my heart for the safety of you, Olia. And we hope that your voice, which never stops speaking, will be shared with many people.

How terrible it must be to be trapped for so long in the unknowable darkness of «the will to kill». To the lives that have saved lives, to the lives that remain undiscovered. I pray to the «thinking reed» as a human being, for their fragility and for their strength. May the night be a little clearer for you.

Warm regards,

Ryoichi Wago.

Dear Wago-san.

Absurdity – you write about it when mentioning your grandfather’s death in Siberia, and people shot from behind in Ukraine, human lives that are taken by the other humans for no reason. This strong feeling of absurdity, just impossibility of what’s going on has been chasing me for all this time. And even having left Ukraine, even staying in peaceful Europe – where there’s no sign of any catastrophe happening, where people live their daily lives and do the small things like enjoying takeaway coffee or sitting on a grass in the public park, kissing on the streets or cutting their house lawn on Sunday morning – I can’t get rid of this feeling. What an absurdity, what a horrible absurdity, that one person is dying from being shot by a bullet in their back and the other person, just a thousand kilometers (or even less) away is drinking coffee in the cafe, like usual, concerned only with their new electricity bills.

Absurdity. That word my friend Zhenia Laptiy was repeating when we met with her in Graz two days after my arrival. She is a photographer and she survived the Russian occupation. She was staying in her native village, the village where several generations of her ancestors lived and were buried, and she didn’t manage to escape when the Russian soldiers came. She was there for 20 days, hiding from the bombs in the cellar most of the time, and having old grandparents staying with her. She told how she was cold and she took her grandmother’s fur coat – which was in their family for years and was very expensive and valuable for them – to use it as an additional blanket in the cellar. And her grandma suddenly went very angry, she tried to take away her coat and – in the middle of an air strike outside – bring it back to the chest with other valuable things. Zhenia told that it was the first time she screamed at her grandma in her life – «I don’t want to die for the sake of a fur coat!», she yelled, then she took her by the shoulders and began to shake. Grandma gave her the fur coat back and for the next several days Zhenia slept under it in the cellar – like a prehistoric human in the cave thousands of years ago. Absurdity. Yes, totally.

Zhenia used her chance to evacuate and now she’s safe in Austria. She had to evacuate through Russia and she spent some time in Moscow, the place where she was staying was on the same street where the building of the main Russian security department is located. And when she was leaving her village, passing by the checkpoints – the Russian soldiers said to her «Please be careful and have a good trip!». They were nice and smiling – and after that they went back to their «work», to launch bombs at the civilian neighborhoods of Kharkiv, to kill adults, children and animals, to erase the houses and infrastructure. Absurdity. Unbelievable absurdity.

She also told me the story about how she went one day to receive humanitarian aid. Russians brought a truck with meat (actually it was stolen from some Ukrainian manufacture) – and she took a huge piece of beef which wasn’t frozen (the fridges didn’t work as the Russians damaged the electricity in the whole area) and thus was bleeding. Zhenia walked home with this piece of bloody meat and her path led through the village cemetery where many of her relatives were buried. She stopped by her grandfather’s grave – and she said that it was the moment when she imagined how she looks from the outside, and she immediately started crying – from this very feeling of absurdity, nonsense, surreality of what was going on. It could be a nightmare that you have when you get high or drunk with some bad alcohol, it could be a scene from a very bad (or a genius one?) arthouse movie. But it was the reality. She cried on her grandfather’s grave with the huge bloody piece of meat in her hands, saying through tears «Grandpa, how lucky you are that you died already and thus don’t see what is happening to your home now!». Absurdity. Yes… And then the Russians mined this cemetery. They put grenades and stretches among the gravestones and prohibited anyone from entering the area. Even now, when the village was liberated already, those people cannot visit their ancestors’ graves.

I am so sorry about your grandfather, Wago-san. Truly. How horrible it is, to die in the middle of nowhere, in the cold and unwelcoming alien land, and how much painful it is, not to know where lie the bones of your loved ones, not to be able to set a gravestone for them which you can visit on the Memorial Day and light a candle in an honor and gratitude. Ukrainian people have known this for a long time already – so many families still don’t have any idea where their relatives died and were buried. My grand grandpa’s brother was killed by a sniper during WW2 and for more than 30 years no one knew about his destiny, until his trace was somehow found – in a collective grave together with the remains of hundreds of soldiers. His brother, my grand grandpa, was in Siberia too, like your grandfather, Wago-san, but he was a rookie soldier who was sent to serve there… and it scares me so much, what he could have been responsible for… When he came back home, grandma said, his hair was completely white, in his early 30s. He never told what he saw and what he had to do there, he kept it secret until the very death. But all we know for sure is that he hated those who sent him there – quietly, carefully, but he hated them with all his heart. That also brings up this feeling of absurdity inside me – for what reason the life of my grand grandpa, his health and mind were broken, what was this forced sacrifice for? To make other people, like your grandfather, Wago-san, suffer, to take their lives? Life for life – but both lives are destroyed. What an awful absurd, again, again.

But I believe that strong people, who risk and sacrifice their lives consciously, for the sake of the lives of others, for the sake of their happiness and future – I want to believe that their deaths are not absurd. Yes, the war or a natural disaster when people die not when the time comes for them to pass away, but as a result of a cruel accident or of the violence of the other people – are absurd. But people like your student, who helped his fellow citizens to evacuate, people like Ukrainian soldiers who are now fighting not just for their own lives and the lives of their families, but for the very existence of a whole nation – they defend our really from a total, overpowering absurd, they don’t let nonsense overcome sense, don’t let death overcome life.

I want to believe in it, I want to believe that they will succeed, and I will try to make a small contribution as well. Absurd is scary - but this is what it wants from us, to be scared, our fear is his food, with which he grows bigger and bigger. I am scared, yes. But also I’m incredibly angry, angry that I am made to be afraid. And this anger gives me power, power to fight absurdity and power to win.

Dear Olia,

I recently heard that you were able to evacuate from Kharkiv. I was worried watching the daily news reports of the heavy bombing and the ruined city. As I watched the news, the shock I felt at the time of the earthquake was always awake in my mind. I felt relief, but at the same time I could feel the pain in my heart.

I can only imagine how much it must have hurt you being forced to leave the land of Ukraine. As I read your letter, it vividly reminded me of the scene 11 years ago when the nuclear power plant exploded and many people living nearby had to evacuate by bus in a hurry.

I was later told that as the bus approached a slope where the view of their hometown was disappearing, the people on the bus turned around and tearfully muttered to the mountains, the city and the sky that they would return. 11 years on, there are still landscapes that are waiting for those people to return. There are landscapes where people wish to return and keep thinking about.

Even after 11 years, there are still some places where people are not allowed to return, and even if they were allowed to return, less than 10 per cent of them have returned.

I often recall how people who have not been able to return to their hometowns from evacuation centres have told us with pain and regret that the landscape of their hometowns is themselves, their fathers and mothers....

I can imagine that, in your heart, there was a part of yourself that was also irreplaceable, in the wind, the soil and the life of the people of Ukraine.

No one has the right to take that away from you, no one.

I imagine that your feelings towards Ukraine are a mixture of inexpressible sadness, pain and anger, as if you had left yourself and everything behind there, and the strong will as an artist to give all of your life to continue delivering what's happening.

In the autumn of 2021, six months after the earthquake, I was once allowed to walk for an interview through an area that was off-limits to people within a 30-kilometre radius, wearing thick protective clothing . No matter how far I went, there was not a soul to be seen. This is the area where I once lived for six years. There was a bustling seaside life here. There was really no one here.

I felt like I had landed on a planet. The elusive silence was just raw.

I found the moments which still remained there, the moments when people rushed to evacuate the area right after the explosion of the nuclear power plant. Doors and windows left open, laundry left hanging out to dry, lights in back rooms left on... I got an intense intuition that time had stopped in this country..

Flowers were blooming in the garden. A persimmon tree was bearing fruit. It seemed so vivid. Ah, yet there is a living life, there is a season. That moment first of all made me realize intensely that we are living next to an uninhabited country.

I had the impression that in an empty, uninhabited town, or in the countryside, there were people living there, «uninhabited'. It was as if, at the bottom of the endlessly quiet air, the very idea of living life itself, had been cut off in the middle of the way, and the people had been completely erased from the landscape, and only silence breathed…

Radiation has the power to uproot time and home... Two years later, in spring, I had the chance to look up at the sky from a helicopter. The seafront, which had been badly damaged, was completely cleared up to the front of the no-go zone. From there, I remember that the landscape remained untouched.

On the seafront, the landscape remained untouched after the tsunami. Boats, cars, houses, fallen telegraph poles, scattered tetrapods on the waterfront... On the uninhabited houses and roads, animals with nowhere to go could be seen.

The tracks and station buildings were overgrown with grass. I felt again from above the sky that time did not exist from here onwards.

Eleven years on, many areas have been lifted off limits and are now looking much more organized. Trains have opened and a motorway has been constructed. Some people have returned, though it is less than 10 percent of the previous population.

However, some places are still inaccessible. The silence of the no-man's-land is raw, right next door. But quietly, on rails that are far away from the fact, it seems as if the monster of everyday life has somehow swallowed the pitch-blackness with impunity and is smoothly trying to glide along in the form of a train.

As you wrote in the previous letter like «In a town 100 kilometers from the battlefield, there are people quietly enjoying their coffee...», everyday life swallows people's tears, quietly and unobtrusively begins and ends like every other day.

«Radiation is falling. It is a quiet night»... Silence has the power to swallow up all absurdities. Is the uninhabited silence of an uninhabited town itself a figure of absurdity, a beast of the air that takes on an invisible appearance and bares its fangs?

Scenes of bombed-out ruins, images of large streets lined with bodies, testimonies of looting and painful sexual assaults suffered by Russian soldiers... Blood, sweat, tears, fists... Graves. One absurdity, several absurdities, all absurdities. It seems as if the silent body of the «uninhabited» is now beginning to take its long breath in the hearts of people all over the world.

He had continued his activities stoutly, but when we met him 6 months before he passed away, he said he was tired of being angry... I remember that.

Radiation uproots people and their lives. He said that he had been angry for a long time, but now he wanted to farm quietly on the land he had inherited from his ancestors. Crops grown in the village can only be sold at one tenth of the normal price in the market because of the reputational damage caused after the nuclear explosion. They can hardly make any money, but they still want to plant, grow and harvest their crops.

No one is coming back to the village and no successor can be found. He felt uneasy but he still wanted to cultivate the land. He didn't want the land to die. He wanted to continue farming until the end, and then he passed away quietly.

After his saying «I'm tired»... he added: «But I still have to stay angry. I will continue to be angry in my own way.» I thought I saw the appearance of Mr Hasegawa in the last sentence of your letter.

On the news, I saw people ploughing fields in the countryside, which was pockmarked with holes here and there, reminding me of the intensity of the indiscriminate and aimless bombing. In the footage, they were muttering. «We don't know when the bombs will fall.»

When asked by the interviewer if they were not evacuating, they looked firmly at the camera and replied: «This is my land, this is my field, why should we evacuate?» He then started planting seedlings again. I thought I saw Hasegawa's shadow in the sky overhead and on the Ukrainian land.

«They don’t let nonsense overcome sense, don’t let death overcome life.» Your words are very close to my heart. It's exactly right. And it is not absurd to fight against absurdity.

I have seen such strength in the Ukrainian people who continue to plant seedlings in the heavily bombed countryside. And I believe that those who have left Ukraine with many thoughts and feelings are also continuing to plant never-ending seeds in their hearts.

Those who remained in Fukushima and those who left Fukushima, leaving behind their thoughts and feelings... I have been watching the people living in Fukushima and those living in evacuation centres, who are trying their best to live «Fukushima».

To Olia,who is once again determined to live «Ukraine», with the thought of living in Ukraine...And to all the people who are living in Ukraine, who live «Ukraine», who continue to fight... Our prayers are with you from Fukushima. Please let me read your current thoughts and feelings..

Regards,

Ryoichi Wago

Dear Wago-san,

It’s already been more than 1 month since I left my homeland. I settled in Austria, in a nice city of Graz where I have been 3 years ago and made a lot of friends – they are all here supporting and helping me, also they established an organization which helps other Ukrainian artists to evacuate, and it has helped many of my close friends so far. So I really got a second home here. And it makes me very happy, to walk again by these familiar streets, to visit places that I have visited before, to see that my favorite cafes survived the pandemic and continue serving coffee and wine, like it used to be always. It gives me some sense of stability – the things here didn’t change so much, of course compared to how my favorite cafes in Kharkiv, its streets and my entire reality have changed after 24th of February.

Being in another country, in safety now feels like finally waking up from a terrible nightmare. I often think how wonderful it could be to fall asleep and then after I open my eyes to find myself in the morning of 24th of February, an ordinary morning with a cup of coffee and with no war outside. But then I think that probably I’m where I am supposed to be. I was strong enough to go through this, I suddenly found out that there’s a great power in me, the power I’ve never imagined I could have. And a great will and desire for life. It had to be a war for me to finally understand this, and that’s for sure quite a shame. Though I guess it happens often to the people. They just don’t see clearly the value of their lives, the quality of people around them and their own capabilities. The catastrophes are what pushes everything to the limit, bares to the bone both the best and the worst in people, communities, places and situations. It wipes out all the shades and leaves only black and white – pure and clear emotions, definite states. The anger, the rage was this pure emotion that helped me to survive, to get through this and stay sane, stay strong. I remember that moment when I spotted it in my soul, named it and released it, without trying to suppress it – and that was the best thing I’ve ever done for myself.

I am reading your words quoting what Mr Hasegawa had said – «I'm tired of being angry, but I still have to stay angry. I will continue to be angry in my own way.» This is exactly what I feel after evacuating from Ukraine, being under the sky from where I don’t need to expect any danger. Anger is like a fuel, it fills you and makes all your mechanisms work with great productivity and effectiveness. But this kind of fuel is not for very long trips, it is rather for sprints than for marathons. And I decided to leave Ukraine just when I felt that my inner resources had started exhausting, that my fuel came to an end, while my engine began to overheat. A personal tragedy that I’ve experienced – a painful break up with a person who has been my partner for more than 10 years – completely knocked the ground out from under my feet. I couldn’t stay in Ukraine with the overheated engine and empty fuel tank (which is quite a funny metaphor, because at the time we were leaving there was a terrible shortage of fuel in Ukraine and we had to queue for hours to get our car filled. Anger was a matter of survival in Ukraine – not just mentally, but physically as well, and without the sufficient amount of it I’d risk my own life and the life of my closest people.

I left and finally could fill in this empty fuel tank with some other emotions – relief, hope, joy, excitement. But like Mr Hasegawa, I don’t want to get rid completely of this anger - for sure because our fight, the fight of Ukrainians for their freedom, and my personal fight is still far from being over. And the anger is needed to drive this fight to victory. For sure it should be different - not the anger for survival, not the anger for destroying the enemy, but the anger to work for my country, to scream about it so that the world doesn’t forget about our sufferings, to live whatever it takes and live a full and joyful life, to spite those who wants Ukrainians dive into a despair and disbelief.

When I was leaving Kharkiv it was much quieter there than during all those three months before. Our army pushed the Russians away from the closest villages from where the city was constantly bombed, and it was such an unusual silence everywhere. In the neighborhood where my Mom lives people got used to a permanent loudness, it became a part of their regular routine, so hearing again the sounds of the streets how they used to sound before the war (only without many people and cars) was so strange for them. Then I believed that we were leaving Kharkiv in kind of a nice moment. I thought that we went through the main difficulties together with our home city, shared the worst days with it and gave hope to those who had left earlier, that the city is still alive and we’re alive along with it. My Mom and I were driving away in a good mood actually. But then soon the shellings resumed – and became even more violent and cruel. For an entire month already my city has been hit with the rockets that are launched from beyond the border with Russia – and it happens every day and every night. And being in Graz at this moment, not being able to share the pain of my home city anymore, I feel helpless, I wish I could protect it somehow, but I can’t.

Then a few days ago I remembered a story that occurred to me in the near past when I helped my parents to revise the documents that were left from my great-grandparents. Then among my great-grandfather's papers I found a tiny sheet with almost totally faded handwriting on it. It was a prayer for the protection of the house – not a traditional one, but rather a mixture of the Christian Saints and ancient beliefs. Now I immediately revise its text in my memory when I feel helpless or when I am shaking with fright at the sound of the thunderstorm above Graz. I send the photo of this prayer to you with this letter, dear Wago-san, as I want to share with you this powerful (and poetic) weapon that is only meant to protect, not to attack.

«I am going out the door – Nikolai (my great-grandfather’s name), the servant of God.

I am standing in the middle of the yard,

Saint Nickolas is beside me.

I’ll lock myself with the strongest lock,

On both doors two angels are sitting.

Whoever is riding – will pass, whoever is walking – will pass.

But if the robber enters the yard – he won’t pass.

His legs will become stiff, his hands will go numb, his eyes will darken.

Around my yard there’s a fast river.

High mountain and dark forest.

Amen.»