part 1
The location of almost all my dreams is my home in Luhansk.
I have many memories, but three of them are my favorite.
The second floor was my room. It was an attic my grandfather had rebuilt, with a cone-shaped ceiling. All made of wood. On the walls hung my mother’s student works from art school: a macramé with a poodle, engravings, some geometric compositions. And in the corner stood an old vinyl record player where they would put on The Blue Puppy and Scarlet Sails for me.
My first favorite memory: lying down where the ceiling meets the floor, touching the ceiling with my nose, and freezing like that. As if in that moment you break the laws of physics and exist in two dimensions at once. In two countries. With your nose pressed to the ceiling.
My second memory is the windows.
The windows in my room were stained glass, each pane a square with its own color. On sunny days, the sun painted colored hopscotch squares on the floor of my little attic, and in their weightlessness, like atoms under a microscope, dust would hover. It was an astonishing theater of “dust and sun.”
I had a favorite sweater — pink, wool, with flowers and a zipper at the neck. That is my third memory. It was my favorite because when spring came, it was the first thing I was allowed to wear instead of a coat. The perfect thing for that season of weather-uncertainty. I remember how I sometimes tried to put it on and slip outside unnoticed, sneak through the gate, and run to my friends under the poplar. But someone always saw me — and if no one commented on my outfit, it meant spring had arrived.
That sweater stayed there. I can even imagine exactly which closet it’s still lying in.
I left Luhansk four years before the war, and returned a few times for holidays. Besides the sweater, so much of me and my family is still there — literally everything: the drawings, the trees, the curtains, the fireplace, the stones, the snowdrops, the rosehips we used to brew winter tea from, the woven wicker chests filled with treasures, the porcelain dolls, the clay pottery with Petrykivka painting, and even the railway tracks that ran right beside our gate.
I was used to the way the whole house swayed a little when a train passed, and for a long time after that I couldn’t fall asleep without it at my parents’ place in Kharkiv.
My spring is pink, woolen, covered in flowers, with a zipper at the neck.
It is big — and although I was eleven the last time I wore it, I remember clearly that both of us will fit into this spring. When the war is over, we’ll put on that spring and watch the performance of dust and sun. And touch the ceiling with our noses.
We’ll freeze and whisper about dreams. And we’ll fall asleep to the lullaby of freight trains.
I dreamt this from Wednesday to Thursday,
and that means —
it will come true*.
*In Ukraine, there is a traditional belief that a dream dreamt from Wednesday to Thursday will come true.
part 2
I haven’t been home in ten years.
The last time I went there I was about sixteen, and at that time my aunt and her family were living in the house where I grew up. Even though they had done some renovations and restored parts of our little castle on Bacha Street, building five, apartment two, the second floor still held all the smells and textures of my childhood.
The dark-skinned doll Sarah Marabou, brought by my parents from Germany.
A folder of drawings from art school, and an old battery-powered toy railway with wagons — perfectly enough to supply the little inhabitants of the entire second-floor country.
And the cassette tapes. With cartoons and movies.
The record player and the vinyl fairy tales whose slightly crackling sound had a special charm of its own.
Sometimes I imagine arriving there and maybe not having the keys anymore. So I’d have to climb up the apricot tree onto the roof like some kind of burglar.
The roof where my friend and I used to climb at night. We would buy all sorts of forbidden junk — Coca-Cola, chewing gum, fizzy candies — take mosquito repellent, put on warm knitted socks, wrap ourselves in blankets, and sneak out, “secretly” from the adults, to look at the stars.
And so I imagine myself climbing onto the roof, onto the second floor, the left window.
I imagine how I’d break open the little vent window that smells of resin and creaks loudly.
I wonder how our garden is now.
How the pear trees are doing, and the viburnum, and the apple trees; how the blue spruces are; how the rose garden is; how the raspberries are.
Probably the raspberry bushes have taken over everything and soon you could open a raspberry jam factory there.
Would the trees and bushes even remember me if I ever returned?
I would like to come there with my husband one day (the one I hope I’ll have). Because I’ll be very afraid to return, even after the war ends. And even better — with my husband and friends. I’d bring my friend Daria, who is a filmmaker, to film a documentary about this meeting between a person and her home.
It would be best in summer.
I’d bring my friends; then we would fill up the pool and maybe even try to turn on the fountains.
It’s pleasant to imagine my friends sunbathing, lying on the edge of the pool under the sun.
Just like we used to lie there as children — small and naked with my childhood friends.
And then I would teach my friends our family tradition:
when a train passes by (the railway was right behind the fence — the main line), you wave to the passengers while standing on the pool’s edge.
It was a game: the winner was the one who managed to catch a happy look from a passing passenger or even get a wave back from the conductor leaning out into the corridor.
We would cut bouquets of jasmine.
Make coffee and sit on the veranda steps in the morning.
Look at the garden, walk barefoot on the paths my grandfather once laid down.
Maybe we could even set up an art residency there — a place where you could read the endless number of books from my grandfather’s library.
Where you could play the piano, light the fireplace, paint, and hold exhibitions in the garden — and artists from all over the world could bring a piece of their art and leave it there, exploring the place.
I feel like my home will be happy to see me again, because it misses me too, and it will surely remember me when I return.
And my people will like my home. And my home will like them.
Maybe, when I meet my home again, I will stop
feeling
so
homeless?