In all the 28 years that I have lived in Berlin (and actually also in the 20 years before that in Kharkiv), I have never experienced such a storm.
It was 7:30 p.m., I was sitting at my computer at home and was working on the new songs for the SkovoroDance album, which I will be recording with the musicians in Kharkiv next week. The lyrics for this come from the book “The Garden of Divine Songs” (1758) by the philosopher Hryhoriy Skovoroda. They are being translated into modern Ukrainian by my colleague Serhiy Zhadan, who is not only a poet but also a translator.
All of a sudden the cell phone reception was gone
If there were any warnings, I didn’t let that distract me. Suddenly it got dark outside and very loud. I could hardly see anything through the window, the rain was so intense. Flower pots flew from neighboring balconies and other objects that I could not identify so quickly.
I was worried about where my son was at the moment – hopefully not on his bike, I thought and sent him a worried WhatsApp message. Then something crackled nearby and a tree to the right of my window came crashing down. “Wow, a tree fell here,” I texted Boris, noticing my cell phone reception was gone.
A few minutes later, the monitor on my computer went out – the power was gone. After fifteen minutes the rain stopped, the wind died down, the clouds moved on. It got quiet, but the power wasn’t back. I decided that I would stop working for today and wanted to make myself a cup of tea; but of course this was not possible without the electric kettle. A perfect reading opportunity, I thought, and pulled out “Art Sex Music” by Cosey Fanni Tutti, which I bought a few days ago. Since it was too dark in the apartment, I went outside with the book.
Memories of the Second World War
Only once a year does my street look this chaotic: on January 1st, after the firecracker marathon on New Year’s Eve. That evening people were not responsible for this mess, this time it was nature alone. The fallen tree had hit the power box, an electrician was already working on it. A police car was parked in the middle of the road, and the police cordoned off the places where larger branches had fallen.
I stopped in front of the front door. It was still reasonably light here, I opened the book. It occurred to me that I would have perceived it differently ten years ago – especially the passages in which the author, born in 1951, describes her childhood in Kingston upon Hull, Great Britain: the bomb craters, which at that time served as playgrounds for the children, the ruins that are still standing around , destroyed in the Second World War… Today, almost 70 years later, I can’t shake the feeling that the realities of post-war Ukraine could also be described in this way.
In the meantime, more and more neighbors came out – it was obvious that there was also a lack of electricity in other houses. While the electrician worked on the power box, the residents bought beer in the dark Späti next door and watched him full of hope.
I experienced my last power failure last year in Kharkiv. Since the start of the Great War in February 2022, power outages lasting hours and sometimes even days have become the norm in Ukraine. When I checked into a chic hotel in the center of Kharkiv on a sunny December day, the friendly receptionist explained to me with a big smile that the electricity in this district is switched off between 2pm and 5pm every day.
In addition to hospitals, schools and libraries, the targets of the Russian shelling also include the power plants. If one of these is hit, it may take a little longer to restore power. The liberators from the neighboring country, the representatives of the brother people, as they like to call themselves, have invaded Ukraine, apparently to free their citizens from the electricity. But they won’t even do that.