Remembering Kharkiv
by Olga Breydo
My childhood memories are crowded with sunflower seeds. Roasted, funneled into a cone-shaped newspaper container, smelling of smoke and dust and streets.
Late at night, I sit outside after everyone's gone to bed. So dense is the darkness around me that nothing exists except the iPhone screen and whatever I type into it. It is the summer of 2020, and I’m drafting an Instagram post about how I liked to chew on sunflower seeds back in the USSR and how I abandoned this habit, along with my childhood, when I moved to America in 1989. I write about missing my home in Kharkiv, Ukraine, not knowing that two years later, the same city will endure under near constant Russian artillery fire.
To illustrate the post, I choose a picture of sunflowers, their heads bent over the rim of a ceramic water pitcher. When a friend brought them earlier that day, I held their thick stems, a little hairy and rough to the touch, my eyes pausing on the golden petals that circled the grid of brown blossoms. At that moment, I felt a flood of memories arrive, the past being summoned to torment my multi-hyphenated identity. Ukrainian-born, Soviet-raised, Russian-speaking, immigrant-American. I suddenly saw the blue rectangles of street signs posted on Kharkiv’s dusty facades and the cool archways that led into secluded interior courtyards. The mysteriously dim Garshin cafe, where I ate chocolate cake truffles while my mother and her artsy, melancholic friends spoke in hushed voices, blowing out clouds of cigarette smoke. The brutalist slab of the Opera theater, which was forever under construction but inspired my lasting fascination with architecture. And the tanned, creased faces of old bazaar vendors who would dip their tumblers into bags of sunflower seeds to empty them right into my pockets.
These visions stayed with me as I rummaged through the kitchen for an impromptu meal. They popped out of the toaster next to the slices of bread or clung to the knife as I dipped it into the tub of cream cheese. They scurried from under my feet as I stepped on the uneven pavers, carrying provisions to the outdoor table. And as though knowing that I would indulge them later, they idled in view while I spent the afternoon chatting with my friend. We spoke Russian because she was an expat from Moscow, and I was from an era when Ukrainian was a second language nominally required in Ukrainian schools. Her speech was commanding and fluid, inflected with foreign-sounding, post-Soviet melodies. Mine was timid and antiquated, a relic of surviving in the diaspora.
Ruminating over that conversation, I notice how often I stumble in search of the right word when speaking Russian, and I realize that I’m failing at the language I’d worked so hard to retain. I vow to practice it more, incapable of foreseeing that one day this language will be used to decree the spilling of Ukrainian blood, and that the very sound of it will become a trigger for unspeakable trauma.
The cicadas begin their song as my eyes acclimate to the inky night. The sunflowers appear like watercolor stains floating above the pale form of the pitcher. And the images of my childhood are here, too, flashing and fading like space-time fireflies while I continue writing. I would eat the seeds while walking, I say. Cracking them open between my front teeth and leaving a trail of shells to mark my path from the school. Thirty-three years ago was the last time I walked that route in Kharkiv. My mind still holds the sight of my five-story apartment complex with the playground where my friends and I spent our afternoons. It was a space overgrown with trees, their lush canopies shading the benches reserved for neighborhood gossip and lazy cats. Mornings there began with the swoosh of the janitor’s broom. The acapella of parents calling their children home signified it was time for supper. After sundown, windows dressed in lace curtains glowed their warm, soothing lights, and I loved imagining the people who lived behind them. My elementary school is another place I remember well. The stripped classical building stood not only as a warning of the austere Soviet pedagogy awaiting inside but as the center of our miniature universe. From here, a two-minute walk in one direction took me to my best friend’s house, where the lobby always smelled of fried potatoes and the stairs were too tall for me to climb. A block away in the other direction was the corner ice-cream shop, where the cashier still used a huge wooden abacus to count out the change. Nestled on the side was a community garden with an enormous hill where we lined up with our sleds during the long winter months.
If I think back to those preadolescent days, running to or from class with my pencil case rattling against the books in my backpack, I can follow the precise sequence of turns that connects these neighborhoods. But entire patches of streets in between are gone from my memory. And I ask myself, as I’m writing, why didn’t I soak up all the details of my beloved childhood city when it was still possible? Why is it that I remember the broad figure of my father leading me home from dance practice, the crunch of snow under my boots, and the solemn downward gaze of the caryatids illuminated by streetlamps? Yet I have no idea what my dance studio looked like or where it was located... And why is it that I can picture the wide streets of Saltivka, its nearly identical high-rises featuring rows of glass-enclosed balconies, and the neat layout of our friends’ apartment, but not the long metro and bus commute I endured to visit them? Expecting my surroundings to be there the next day—was that a consequence of being a kid? For more than three decades, the plan has always been to go back and fill some of these memory gaps. Expecting Kharkiv to still be there when I finally return is a consequence of what, I will soon wonder.
About a year before the pandemic, an itinerary of a visit to my homeland began to take shape. I settled on going to Lviv, Kyiv, and Kharkiv with my kids. I penned lists of everything I wanted to see, compared hotels, marveled at whimsical pictures of cobblestoned Lviv online, looked up Kyiv designers on social media, and made notes of stores I wanted to pop into. Mostly though, I fantasized what it would feel like to finally return home. To find the tree that I used to climb in Kharkiv’s Shevchenko Garden. To chew on sunflower seeds and wander the streets, mentally reclaiming every lost corner and passageway. To hear the comforting song of a pigeon as I looked up to the second-story window, where the kid version of me stood on the sill, palms pressed against the glass, awaiting my parents on their way home from work.
It would make sense to assume that the pandemic thwarted my long-anticipated homebound journey. But what held me back, instead, was my reflexive preference for the Russian aspect of my family’s heritage. Since my husband was born in St. Petersburg, I debated why the kids, who hadn’t been to either country, shouldn’t visit Russia first. Years of suppression of Ukrainian culture by Soviet and post-Soviet Russia had made their impact, and I backpedaled: we decided that Ukraine would have to wait until the following summer. Like many people who grew up in the former Soviet Union, I had been conditioned into thinking that Russian cities were more beautiful, their museums more important. Wasn’t Russia the land of Tolstoy, Chekhovb, and Nabokov–writers whose literature we wanted our kids to read someday?
The pandemic did, indeed, suspend all travel for us and the rest of the world, so going to Russia never happened. But what I couldn’t envision was that my decision to choose Moscow, with its warheads already pointed at my native Kharkiv, would eventually break my heart.
And so, I carry on writing, reminiscing about the time I played in a field of sunflowers. I’m not sure what the occasion was, but the day was ending, and a stray dog barked nearby and I was picking seeds right out of the flowers, marveling at their surprising texture: slippery and cold, and smelling of water and sun. I am aware of how romanticized these recollections seem against the fact of the many limitations that defined my life in Soviet Ukraine. Exotic fruit, fashionable clothes, international travel, and freedom (of speech or religion) existed elsewhere, while there was so much that I could not eat, wear, do, or say. I tasted my first bananas when I became a refugee in Italy. I wore only what was available for purchase, not what I might have wanted. The first time I crossed the USSR border was the day my family gave up the right to ever return. And I could only criticize my government or be a Jew—openly, proudly—inside the protective walls of my apartment. But these less favorable impressions of my childhood don’t rise so readily to the surface. They are like pages of an outdated textbook, stuck together after years of disuse. Instead, my mind skips to the new Ukraine I love from afar, the one whose hard-earned freedom will soon be in danger, whose fields of sunflowers will burn, and whose people will die.
Distant headlights slice through the memory-laden darkness as the caption I compose nears its central question. What would have happened had I stayed in Ukraine? Would I be in my Kharkiv apartment right now, typing an Insta post in the middle of the night and chewing on seeds, shells littering my sheets? Here, I realize that every day as an immigrant takes me a step farther from the answer. The thing about leaving, I write, and doing so permanently, irreversibly, is that you are robbed of a future your past self was meant to have.
What I do not know at the time, however, is that air raid sirens and shattered windows will become a part of that future my past self was destined for. That I will wake up from the nightmare of rockets hitting my house only to realize they’ve hit what could have been my house. That the reassurance of my personal safety will bring me immense shame. I do not know that I will argue with the same friend who once brought me sunflowers, defending the slogan to close the Ukrainian sky, because how can we watch another sovereign nation come under attack and be unwilling to fight? I do not know that fascism will return, leveling Ukrainian cities to the ground. Murdering, raping, and stealing. Except this time, it will speak Russian.
What I do not know during that summer of 2020 is that nearly two years later, I will revisit this paragraph with regret for remembering Kharkiv instead of returning there when I had the chance. For imagining instead of experiencing. Planning instead of doing. And then I will write something again, but this time it will be a longer piece. In it, I will resolve that I must see what remains of my homeland the moment it is safe to do so, and that restoring this safety is as much my responsibility as anyone else’s. Because my past self needs a future, and millions of innocent Ukrainians need it more.
If you’d like to support volunteer initiatives in Kharkiv, the Ukrainian Charity Alliance delivers food, medicine, and other supplies to people in need throughout Kharkiv region.