Colours and Sounds of the Occupation
Each colour has a sound, each sound has a feeling, each feeling has an effect.
TCX 19-3722 mulberry purple—the colour of love, of presence and pain
Tiutina has always grown in Luhansk Oblast. Only here did they use this name for the mulberry tree. It’s in the local dialect, which used to be spoken in the entire Don River region, in the land that once belonged to the Ukrainian Cossacks.
For me, tiutina always represented home. Although everybody always said that the symbol of Ukraine was viburnum, the kalyna berry, for me the ripe, purple mulberry, which we always ate in my childhood, came to be its main symbol. We would carefully climb up onto the highest branch of the tree and feast on the berries, because there they were always the tastiest.
Of all the berries, I always liked this one the most. It was purple, not too tart, very sweet, firm, and a bit buttery. I loved these berries, the juice of which would fill my mouth with the taste of childhood and a whole bunch of little seeds, which were then a pleasure to crunch. Many other people didn’t like mulberries, because they left their inky stains on hands, nails, on and around the mouth; the stains seemed to seep under the skin, and left behind permanent traces on clothing and on the pale soles of sneakers. While I write about this right now, I can feel how their ink has left traces on my heart forever.
A great number of genuine and heartfelt conversations in my life have taken place on the branches of maples, oaks, cherry and apricot trees. However, the most precious to me were the conversations at the top of the tiutina tree, at the end of the unremarkable Kachalova Street in the village of Milove, which you would never find just by chance.
When you climb up to the very top, you can always feel the freedom of the strong wind which ruffles your hair, and also the lightness, peace and security of being at a height where nobody else will climb. And also the presence of the little inky berries, which touch my skin one after another in order to remind me: “We are here.”
There was also a tiutina growing near my father’s house. The tree belonged to our elderly neighbour. He never stopped children playing next to it, hiding under its long branches, thickly covered in leaves and berries, which reached right down to the ground and which could totally hide you underneath. However, he always protected the tree, and would scold anyone who would break its branches or attempt to climb up. Sometimes the neighbour liked to play games with us. When he noticed that we were hiding, he would come up slowly step by step, like a cat stepping quietly on padded paws, behind the tree and would softly ask, “Now who is hiding here?” Sometimes this would scare us, sometimes it amused us. But the answer to his question was always the same: “Awwwww, Mr Neighbour!”
My neighbour, who was called “Mr Neighbour” (because I never did find out his name), spent his whole life building his large three-storey house himself. Each part of the building contained a little piece of his bright smile and his careful work. In his yard somewhere in the corner, there was always some combination of cement, tiles, bricks and some construction tools scattered about. Each time when I asked him why would he need such a large building, he answered without pausing or hesitating: “So that someday I can reach the stars.”
During the active part of the war, a Russian shell struck his house and destroyed the entire third floor, which the neighbour had been building with his own hands from the time of my birth right up to the beginning of the war. After this he stopped. Then he died three years ago, never having reached the stars.
The tiutina tree was hit by shrapnel as well; part of the tree dried up. It still blooms and bears fruit but it can no longer hide me from the gazes and the presence of the inhabitants of 13 Donetsk Street, or from the postal letter carriers, the strangers and the soldiers on patrol walking past. And the branches of the tiutina tree can no longer provide as many purple berries.
#96959D grey chateau—the colour of absence
28.09.2014. We return home, that is, my Mum, my sister and I. My step-father is somewhere else. In these times, that is normal. The apartment is empty and cold. Inside it smells of damp and of the eggs, fruit and vegetables rotting in the fridge. Even the pasta has gone bad. On the table there is a dried up and mouldy ciabatta with olives, which I always used to buy after school in the recently opened “Absolut Fermer” supermarket. There is no water, gas or electricity, but we do have candles. The first two days of the city’s occupation, my mother would also light a candle on the shelf with the icons, in the little angel figurine, which she had bought a year before the war.
After two days, my mother understood that living like this was impossible and started to look for other options. There was mother’s first cousin, Aunt Olesia, whose apartment was small, and she herself tended to be conflict prone. So, Mum decided to phone her friends, the couple Ihor and Natalia, who everybody called Huliky (the party animals). Each spring, summer and fall, while it was still warm enough, they would invite everybody for brunches and parties to their dacha in the pine forest in the town of Shchastia (the name of which also means “happiness”). Under the town sign of “Shchastia” in the summer of 2014, there lay a human corpse.
The party animals didn’t really like the idea of us living at their place, but my Mom convinced them: after all, during the active shooting they were living in the village with our grandmother and so their apartment stood empty and was unheated.
The first month and a half we lived in their apartment, which was located in a part of town with the Soviet name of The Heroes of Stalingrad, shortened to “Herstal”. The apartment was very dark and smelled of tobacco, because they often smoked at home. But there were some details of their home that brought me hope. There was a warm, round rug in light red and light brown colours, which was so soft and cosy, that each time when I lay down on it, it seemed that I was slowly sinking somewhere deep beneath the earth, and here I lay at the bottom of the carpet, engulfed in warm carpet pile.
The carpet was placed under the television, on which, a few years ago, I had watched Sponge Bob and the Ninja Turtles. At the moment they would only run news about the “Banderites” and other propaganda.
The groceries on the store shelves were by and large Russian, and the quality was much worse and they were more expensive than Ukrainian groceries. Quite often they had expired use-by dates.
What I remember most is the first week of living in that apartment, and in particular the food that we had. Mum went out and received some Russian humanitarian aid. In the package there was: 1 kilogram of rice, 1 kilogram of buckwheat, some apricot jam, a can of stewed meat, a can of tuna and 100 grams of crackers. The package was for 3 people. I wouldn’t say that we were poor, but at that time it was difficult to estimate how long our savings would last. My Mum’s business had been looted by Russian militia, and the building near the railway station, which she had been renting out as workshops, had been hit by a Russian shell.
A main meal at that time was this strange “salad,” as Mum would call it, but it was really more like a spread. It was made of three ingredients: eggs cut into julienned sticks; crumbled tuna, with skin on, out of a can; garlic, and mayonnaise. When I first tasted it, I thought that it had definitely been made from calamari, because the taste reminded me of dried salted squid, the sort that old guys eat as a snack when they drink beer with their neighbour on the bench out in front of the house.
The taste was strange and any notes of tuna were drowned out by the greasy mayonnaise, which mixed the notes of all the other foods, and in tandem with the egg slices created an artificial clam taste. We didn’t eat this salad very often, because even despite our problems with finances, Mum was always particular about healthy nutrition with no trans fats or sugar or store-bought sauces.
Sometimes we went to visit Aunt Olesia and her son Dmytro. They lived seven minutes away and were our relatives. Once we even stayed with them at their place, because at the Party Animals’ apartment the hot water heater had broken down and it was incredibly cold. At that time my Mum managed to phone through to her step-Aunt, who lived in Moscow. Her aunt told her about her small pension, her one-room apartment, for which she had saved 20 years, and then added that we were lucky. Because Putin had cleansed our land of the “Nazis and Banderites and other monsters so they will never poison our land” and that Putin will bring order and will raise the pension and salaries for everybody. Nothing like this has ever happened.
#HEX #5C3E29, antique oak—the colour of disassociation
My main solace during the occupation was the floor. You could always lower your gaze and not see anything that was happening around you. In my new school the floor was parquet. It was dark shades of brown oak, laid out in a herringbone pattern. The Luhansk Lyceum of foreign languages used to be the best school in the city before 2014, and in all of Ukraine it ranked in the top 100.
My Mum had always dreamed that I would pass the entrance exams and that I would have the opportunity to learn amongst the children of the most well-to-do of the city, because, in her mind, wealthy people invest money not in toys, but in education for themselves and for their children.
The parquet floor was particularly attractive in the history classroom, where the Principal of the Lyceum would hold his classes. The room was full of icons and prayer books but the main feature there was a portrait of Jesus, which covered the whole suspended ceiling. In reference to the fact that the classroom had been blessed by a Russian Orthodox priest, the principal said that: "Every word that comes out of the teacher's mouth in this classroom is holy and truthful before God.” All his speeches about “the rotting West”, “cannibalistic Ukraine, which is coming to the Donbas” and “shooting and slaughtering people like animals”, were made in this room of course, always having his answers prepared.
#3a3c40 HEX, cast iron—the colour of the street and of the descendants of the cast iron manufacture workers
It was getting near the end of 2015, and it was an evening in an occupied city. Night came. Outside the window you could once again hear the sounds of convoys of military equipment being moved. Almost every day and every night you could hear the noise from armoured personnel carriers and the grinding of scrap metal being cut up at the Foundry, which is the place where the history of the city started. I was tired of the noise, which wouldn’t let me fall asleep. I was tired of the drunk militias, who would constantly binge on “Rossiyskaya” vodka at the bus stop below my window, and then would shoot at each other.
I was also tired of the street low-lifes who were always looking for excuses to beat up a girl or boy who were walking down the street. In a year and a half of occupation, a lot of new reasons had appeared for beating up people.
Reason 1: Clothing. The local scum had a list of clothing brands, “shmot”, for which you were obliged to “explain yourself,” if they happened to pick on you in the street. The list included: Staff, NorthFace, Trasher, the Ukrainian brand Miaso, and many others. The local gopniks would usually either try to rip those clothes, or throw a green die on them, or beat the wearer to death. The only way to protect yourself was to fight back and to earn the title of best Gopnik Protection Thug, or to have friends like that.
Reason 2: Sexual Orientation. After the occupation, the local terrorist authorities reverted to Soviet laws, which forbade any other type of sexual relations other than heterosexual. Which is why all members of the LGBT-community were in danger of receiving a sentence of 10 years in a corrective penal colony. But most commonly, they were not victimized by representatives of the authorities, but by teenage street gangs, the kind to which my classmates belonged - “Russian Self-Defence in Luhansk” (RSL for short). Usually becoming a member of one of these gangs was voluntary, but the top guys would receive money for organizing riots and implementing the policies of the “Republic” (Luhansk People’s Republic). These organisations would hunt for members of the LGBT-community. They would create fake accounts on lesbian and gay dating sites, would chat with a person for weeks to lure them out on a date, and then try to inflict as much physical harm as possible.
The legacy and dignity of the ironworks and foundry workers, who had majestically carried large blocks of metal, working against a backdrop of molten metal, was destroyed by a handful of their young descendants, who were triggered by blond hair and words for haircuts like “undercut” and “crop”. The descendants, who wanted to kill and maim.
#RC100, Russian grey green—the colour of muddy dirt
It was November 2015. I don’t remember the exact date. I just remember how during the last lesson in school, they said that there would be no lessons the next day. Instead, we would all go to a celebration of the “Republic,” where there we would meet with “the President.” The same president, who only a month ago, on live TV, was trashing local MP’s (who they found, by the way, through Want Ads, and some of them were dvirnyks, or yard cleaners, before the occupation) because the assets of the Republic had been decreased to the count of two pig carcasses and three chickens. It was not possible to not attend this event. The head teacher of our school went around to each of the classes in person and threatened that “If you are absent, you will have problems. I personally will write you a reprimand, will call up your parents, and we will consider whether you will be allowed to continue attending our school. Have you all understood?” And our class teacher answered, “Yes, Natalia Vladimirovna, everybody understands. Everybody will be there.”
I remember the next morning being so bright, that the light was blinding. Although the sun shone brightly, the night temperature had been -3 degrees Celsius, so at 8 a.m. it was very cold outside. They gathered us together at the Avangard Stadium, where before the war, Luhansk football club Zorya used to play, and where two weeks before the war Okean Elzy played a concert.
I lived 10 minutes away from the stadium, so I went on foot. I went in my winter parka because my parents didn’t have enough money to get me a fall coat. On the way I saw a row of buses with signs of bus routes from occupied cities (in Russian): “Alchevsk-Lugansk”, “Krasnyi Luch-Lugansk”, “Stakhanov-Lugansk”. They were absolutely packed with children and teachers, half of whom had to stand for the hour-long journey. An order is an order.
Our class gathered near the entrance. Our teacher pulled out her list and started to mark us off: Ponomareva? Kaliuzhnaya? Zalogin? Rozum? Everyone was present, and only two managed to get sick notes from their doctor and didn’t show up.
There were 5 minutes of roll call and all the children of the “republic” went into the stadium, one after another, where the “president” was waiting for them. There was an exhibition of Russian military equipment the colour of mud, and huge screens which were running videos, where an elderly granny was beating cars marked “OSCE,” where “Ukrainian fascists and Nazis,” that is, Ukrainian prisoners of war, were being led through occupied Donetsk, where Russians were rescuing “the Holy Land of Donbass.” After an hour of speeches and of watching advertising for terrorism, we were told to stand, were handed the new anthem of the “LPR” on orange pieces of paper and were made to sing. For me, this was an epiphany: “So this is what propaganda looks like! It appeals to the emotions!” Having thought this, I sat down demonstratively, which annoyed my teachers and the supervisors, because 7 more students sat down along with me.
#15-6437, TCX grass green—the colour of freedom and elation
Milove is a small border village, where my grandmother used to run a hotel. The road from Luhansk to the village of Milove always took 3 hours by bus and went through pine woods, past lakes, small villages, fields of rye and sunflowers and the wave-form steppes, where lazy prairie dogs sunned themselves. These are the symbols of the Ukrainian east.
In 2014 Luhansk oblast was divided into two parts: the first part was under the Ukrainian control; the second was occupied by the terrorist group LPR and was controlled by Russia. That is why an ordinary trip to visit grandma turned into 2 border crossings, 7 hours through depressing Russian towns and down Luhansk roads, all beat up by tanks. Of course there were other routes, which didn’t involve entering Russia, but they were longer and took about 12 hours in one direction.
Nonetheless, the summer of 2015 became one of the best ones in my life. Here, on Ukrainian territory, life was completely different: I didn’t have to return home by 11pm; I could listen to and say whatever I wanted; and didn’t have to be afraid of being taken in “for questioning” or being expelled from school.
At that time Lera, a girl from Luhansk, who now lives in Kharkiv, was also there. We just happened to meet when we were outside in the street. Together with other children we were cleaning garbage out of a well that had gotten smelly, and where leeches lived (we called it Yarok).
Together we searched for and listened to Ukrainian music, which for us was like salvation during our life under occupation. Once we found a book on Black Magic at Lera’s grandma’s place and studied it and performed various rituals like “Invoking Bloody Mary”, invoking “leprechauns” or something like that. We had a routine of going out twice a week on trips into the local steppes, the hills and the woods. Early in the morning we’d meet at the end of the village and in the evening we’d return home.
My best memory is the day when I braved a trip on my own. I went out far into the fields, and found myself a spot somewhere deep in the metre-high feather grass. The silver leaves of the feather grass waved about fluidly in the air and gave off glimmers of gold and silver and blended in with the sunlight. This was the moment when I understood that green is the colour of freedom.
