Notes in the Kyiv Scrapbook
Translators' Note:
Shortly after the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine and advance on her native Kyiv, Nataliia Bidenko — Dean of the Dentistry Department at Oleksandr Bohomolets National Medical University, a passionate local history enthusiast, and talented musician — joined the fight in her several vocations simultaneously. She became a member of Teroborona, the military reserve units of the Ukrainian Armed Forces. At the same time, she continued making sure that the basic needs of her students were met, and started documenting life during the war.
The selection included here is part of that effort, originally intended by the writer as more of a personal diary than a chronicle of historical events, but written at a time and place that must be recorded and remembered.
The excerpts that follow are only a tiny sample of a larger corpus of notes written in real time, covering every month of the war. Nataliia continues to write them, her unique voice conjuring the distanced, meticulous gaze of an observer witnessing the realities of war with the pragmatic mindset of a medical worker triaging the casualties. Among myriad characters, her beloved city of Kyiv is always present; it is breathing and pulsating with a tsunami of endless attacks, waves of refugees, the horrors of occupation — an emotional roller-coaster.
In the midst of chaos, Nataliia finds a way to preserve a sense of equilibrium. How she manages to do that is a mystery, and it is exactly what draws us to her writings.
Nataliia never imagined that her notes would be of interest to others, but they are. We hope the readers will listen to the various voices that reverberate within these excerpts. We also hope that the full text will see the light of day in the not so distant future.
— Oksana Rosenblum & Lev Fridman
(The effort to translate and render this work was aided by the careful eyes and creativity of Maya Chhabra, for which we are thankful.)
March 2022
“Why did you choose to remain in Kyiv?”
“You see, when I'm here now, I feel like I am embracing the whole City…”
- Overheard from an interview
Three Questions
First: why write? — Because I can’t not write.
Second: for whom? — For myself. Maybe for those closest to me — those who’d understand what it’s for.
Third: why not in Ukrainian? — I’m not sure why, but for me the language of this war is Russian.
Dandelion
I never did find out why they called him that. Tall, broad shouldered, bristly square chin and calm gray eyes. Tomorrow, he leaves for the front. Today he shaved, buzzed his hair (the guys had an electric shaver). He had dinner. Someone pulled out a backgammon board; they played a couple of rounds. The last few hours felt strange, time was dragging along. He packed his things. Okay, he said, I’ll make one last stop at home. He hugged everyone and disappeared into the night.
Night Watch
Deserted night streets. After curfew. The silence is deafening. Silence, yes, despite very audible explosions and gunshots. This anxiety feels endless. The Teroborona units¹ stand ready for combat, holding their machine guns cocked and loaded, scanning the darkness — tense, vigilant. Every rustle reverbrateslike thunder across the block. Or is the echo just in my head, in this pressurized ringing darkness, like a wild animal lying in wait before the lethal attack?
Nowhere…
Never…
Not with anyone
Have I heard SUCH silence.
University
But no one canceled my day job…
The morning roll call. Fifteen hundred students, two hundred teachers. Is everyone still alive, have they been in touch? Who’s been mobilized? Did they manage to evacuate? Do they have enough food, money? Who’s on hospital duty?? Is anyone volunteering? Who is in Teroborona? Who didn't show up for class? Who didn’t behave during online classes? Who’s on duty at the morgue today? How many students are spending the night in the dorm, and how many — in the subway stations? How many evacuees were brought to the dorm? Who is taking care of them now that the Red Cross bailed? Who took the disabled to the shelter near Bila Tserkva? Who flunked a student again, goddammit?! Who stole a bottle of vodka from dorm security? Where can we find lodging for three people and six cats who wound up on the street? A student’s apartment was destroyed, in Troyeshchyna — where should she go now? Where can we get insulin? We need to donate blood. Someone needs a doctor’s appointment for their child. Someone needs a pulmonologist. Roman, screw your haircut, I'll scalp you myself right now where you stand, you didn’t get in touch with the Department again! How many of our people left the country? Dozens of official letters. Two hundred hryvnias for a delivery person. Read the new recommendations by the Ministry of Education and Science, Ministry of Health, and the Cabinet of Ministers. Call every one of them. Submit reports, timesheets, statements. Get a virtual headcount. Every morning and every evening. Pass all the checkpoints on the way to the University. Everything I need is in my backpack — no idea where I’ll have to spend the night today.
City
The City, still and alert, stretched across its ancient hills. These clay slopes remember the Vikings, the Scythians, the Turkic hordes and Polish-Lithuanian warriors, the hundreds of fires that devoured this blessed land, and dozens of wars, uprisings, and revolutions. Hundreds of times, this City has risen from the ashes. It has been coveted for centuries, right on the frontier of the endless battle between the interchanging forces of good and evil, God and the devil.
Now, fires illuminate the sky on the outskirts of the City. Flurries of machine gunfire and explosions. Every day and every night, different parts of the city are being shelled. Street battles with sabotage units. The wreckage of buildings yet to be completely removed from the roads, utility poles that collapsed because of explosions. The City lives in tense anticipation of the next strike, bristling with anti-tank barricades, trenches, concrete barriers, piles of bags, sand, and metal.
And amidst the anti-tank barricades, through the smoky fog of the hushed City, spring wanders, lost and aimless.
Tragedy
It is in the sounds of explosions and gunfire, not that far away from you.
It is in the calls and text messages from relatives and acquaintances: in the village, the occupiers kidnapped a neighbor’s husband. They bound his mouth and hands with tape and took off. Someone’s family was shot in their car. Someone miraculously escaped from hell in the suburbs of the City; the bodies of civilians are strewn all over the streets; the Kadyrovites² are shooting up houses and basements.
It is in the calls and texts that no one answers, and that’s the most terrible thing.
It is in the news briefs: Mariupol. Kharkiv. Chernihiv. Bucha. Irpin. Hostomel. You’re gasping for air, can’t breathe...A few grim civil defenders make a point of keeping up with russian propaganda — you need to know the enemy’s delusions, too.
Balagan, one of the Teroborona members, came back from a special op completely drained. His unit was helping to evacuate a number of villages around Brovary. He got to know a driver. A few days ago, the man’s wife and child were killed while he was trying to get them away from shelling. He started evacuating children from the danger zone, by minibus. Says they’re all his kids now. He sleeps only one or two hours a night.
These calls, texts, stories are facts that journalists will not write about, and no one will post about them online. This is life, here and now.
Echos of 2014
Back then, in the days of the Maidan, you could take a ride to the war zone on the subway. Or on the minibus. Toss some food, medicines, and cigarettes into your backpack for the guys on Maidan³; get to the University, Arsenal or Podil subway stations, walk to Khreshchatyk, always on the lookout for the hired thugs, noticing the intensifying smell of smoke and fire. The sounds of revolution, random shots are heard, you hurdle over the barricades, winding between tents and busy field kitchens. You help in the kitchen, drag sandbags for the barricades, dress someone’s cuts, sit out another raid by Berkut⁴. And only then, having made sure that the day went more or less smoothly, you go home, taking a half-stranger, half-acquaintance with you to let them shower and take a nap. Then you spend half the night awake, trying to comprehend the irrationality of what is happening.
This time the war came to us all on its own. It’s everywhere. You can't jump on a minibus and get away from it. A barricade of sandbags won't stop another missile; all it will do is remind us forcibly of the possibility of impending street fighting.
Yet, you notice a nagging feeling that you’ve been through this all already, and this feeling is so misleading.
April 2022
Life is not about waiting for the storm to pass.
It’s about learning to dance in the rain.
- Vivian Greene
A Breather
The orcs⁵ have been driven away from the City, leaving scorched earth behind them. Kyiv oblast has been completely liberated.
The City sighed with relief. In numerous places, “hedgehogs”⁶ quietly crawled off the roads and hid along the curb. Some of the checkpoints were removed. The concrete barrier slabs were moved out of the way as well. The highways came alive again. Online, you now see tips on scrubbing tape off of windows.
Our guys accompanied the humanitarian aid convoys to the liberated cities and villages — Irpin, Bucha, Borodianka. Grown men with nerves of steel returned completely drained — there were vast swaths of destruction and death. Monstrous footprints of inhuman madness. Tired survivors with exhausted and yet calm faces patiently waiting for humanitarian aid by the church. Further to the south-east, Mariupol dies, slowly and painfully.
But here, the city dwellers who have just returned from western Ukraine take strolls in the park, haggle at the newly reopened markets, and crowd the bustling shops.
There is no way to understand, to comprehend this irrational combination of life reborn and all-consuming tragedy, an invisible but tangible shadow hovering over the City...
And another thing — over there, beyond Borodianka, our side is building defensive lines.
Return
Those who left the city in the first days of the war are coming back now, and their faces differ strikingly from the faces of those who made it through the last month and a half here. A volunteer, someone I know, jokes: “They come back and talk about their adventures — how they spent the night at the border, how they were met by the volunteers, how they settled down… but back here, there is nothing to tell — I lived, I worked, I was on duty...”
Those who survived the hell of occupation — city dwellers who tried to hide from the war in the suburbs, are coming back as well. There aren’t many of them. They’re not very sociable, and each of them has their own painful burden. Some of them go west immediately, moving against the crowds of the returnees.
Those who did not leave the city are also coming back. This homecoming is rather odd; it is the slow and difficult realization that the enemy has retreated from the City. Those who lived in shelters and inside the subway can now emerge, gradually. Those who did not leave their homes can now take their time when they stand by the window crisscrossed with tape. Outdoors, they no longer need to constantly scan the street for the nearest bomb shelter.
I have returned. In the hall, I put my backpack with the yoga mat on the floor. After redeployment, I do not have to stay at the base continuously, especially since it is nearby. The guys were rotated, and the shifts have become calmer. I’ll have to get used to that, too.
But the backpack stays in the hallway. The war isn’t over. The dreary sound of the air raid siren reminds us of that. Every night.
Music
What does the music of the war sound like?
It’s the speakers that the guys turn on in the evenings, after coming back from the patrols — from the old classic rock of the 80s, ranging from Nautilus Pompilius, Leningrad, BG⁷, even chanson — to contemporary Ukrainian sound.
It’s David who is, of all things, Georgian. He’s been imbibing the playing of a Ukrainian master of lira⁸, on his phone, on repeat.
It’s the flute — I have not touched it since the beginning of the war, and yet it lives in my backpack. It’s always with me.
It’s the posters on the empty streets of the city, advertising canceled shows that never took place
Chervona kalyna⁹ is heard on every corner, in all languages, all imaginable (and unimaginable) versions, including a cover by Pink Floyd.
It’s the dozens of new songs written in this new world — the amateur, the professional, the funny, the tragic, the primitive, the ones full of sheer talent, and all of them sincere.
It’s our National Anthem in the amazing rendition of a “comedic anti-glam-pop star.”¹ᴼ Becoming an instant hit, this song accompanies the tough images of war.
It’s the mild shock of having turned on the radio on the road, after long weeks of war, and not hearing a single news broadcast, just music.
Irpin
The bridge was blown apart, the cars lie scattered. The sky above has turned to lead. For some, this has become the road of death; for others — the road to salvation. Fences, walls, cars riddled with gunfire. Burned and destroyed houses. Blown out windows, ripped wires. Infrequent explosions — air defense and deminers at work. On the streets — municipal workers, State Emergency Services of Ukraine, heavy machinery; they sort out rubble, restore communications. A few locals are busy carrying water or dragging firewood, covering the broken windows with plastic, shoveling the garbage out from half-standing houses. The smell of smoke floats over the city; it isn’t from the fires anymore — those who stayed behind are cooking food over an open fire near the houses. The day is cold and windy — a deadly chill from outside is piercing the soul.
And when you stand in front of a burnt-out nine-story building with holes in the walls, the thought pulsated through your brain:
this
is not over
yet.
Geography
Well, the time has come when the smallest village, the most distant farm, acquires an almost universal significance in the context of the war. The names of the most insignificant settlements are remembered unequivocally. When sympathetic citizens of distant countries, sitting by their news screens, are often better informed about the neighborhoods of Ukrainian cities than the locals themselves. The next rocket will sternly replace the teacher's pointer on the map. It might underline something, but it cannot strike anything out.
Habit
A colleague left Kharkiv, a city that has been tortured since the beginning of the invasion, for the Easter holidays, moving away from the daily brutal bombings: “Today we made it to Vinnytsia. Yesterday, downtown Kharkiv was mercilessly bombarded. And here, the traffic lights are working, cars are on the roads...I want to go home!”
We have grown used to ignoring the air raid sirens. We do not flinch from the distant sounds of explosions, gunshots, and machine gun fire. We do not spend every second of our waking lives in the news feeds. We’ve learned to never relax, not even in our sleep. We don’t plan ahead further than one day or one night. We’re not surprised by the new trenches, dugouts, lines of defense, and machine-gun pillboxes popping up in the City. We seem to have even gotten used to something one can never get used to — the daily pain from the destruction and death that rocks the country.
We haven’t, however, gotten used to the periods of respite that feel so treacherously calm.
Text Messages
At numerous war museums, letters are part of the permanent exhibitions. Verbose treatises from the turn of the century. The triangular envelopes of World War II letters. Bits of news from home, crumpled up in army backpacks.
The text messages of this war won’t end up in a museum. But at this moment, they are a source of inner strength, the best medicine to treat hopelessness. “How are you?” has become synonymous with “Love.” These three words travel all over the Country. The universal password. The response is “Alive.” Its absence is tantamount to respiratory arrest.
The lifecycle of Love at work.
Humans and Beasts
Today’s reality — dozens of abandoned four-legged creatures on the streets of destroyed, now occupied cities. They were fed scraps of food under bombardment by the remaining residents, who were themselves going hungry in the basements.
Some pets go on waiting for their dead owners, faithfully guarding the entrances to homes that are already gone. Dogs keeping their wounded owner warm with their own bodies, in a freezing cold apartment. A burned and wounded cat from Andriyivka, who nevertheless survived and was renamed Phoenix. The green bandana of a dog named Bonnie. Her owner would tenderly wrap the dog’s head so that the pet would not be scared of the explosions in the frontline village. The horses that were killed at a stable in Bucha. And the horses who miraculously survived, and were miraculously transported by their owners to safety. A volunteer's curt answer to the question of what struck him most about an elderly, exhausted resident of Mariupol, who had walked for five days from the besieged city to Zaporizhzhia, “He carried his dog in his arms…” A cry for help, a plea by the employees of a Central Asian shepherd’s kennel near the City — please take the dogs, because caring for them or evacuating them is no longer possible, and no one can bring themselves to put these dogs to sleep. Fluffy Nicole, the dog of an evacuation train conductor. There was no one to take care of her at home, and now Nicole is working — she lowers the stress levels of the passengers. Patron, the famous photogenic canine minesweeper, taking a nap at the press conference where he was being awarded a medal by the President. A photo of a girl who had evacuated a dozen disabled dogs from a shelter in Irpin. This photo appeared in every media outlet. The eyes of an emaciated cat who had survived for two weeks on the seventh floor of a destroyed building in Borodianka. The cat was saved by rescuers, who had to bring heavy machinery from a nearby town, risking their lives every second.
Now, I cannot bring myself to call their faces “muzzles.”
No, these are not beasts. Beasts are the ones who broke into my country and carried out the slaughter.
Stories
With every passing day, war stories multiply. However, it is not the numerous catchy texts published online that are of importance, but what we accidentally learn from various people who have seen things, survived them, and come to a certain understanding.
An eighty-year-old resident of an occupied town put his wounded neighbor (who was his own age) on a wheelbarrow, and brought him… straight to the orcs.
“You put a hole in him — now you sew him up!”
And those orcs, having growled and threatened enough, concluded that they weren’t going to be left alone (and just weren’t in the mood to shoot anyone right there and then), so they called for a paramedic, who somehow managed to stitch up the wound.
In a small village in the Chernihiv region, the commander of the occupying platoon, a Buryat wearing rubber boots and a worn-out army coat, clicked his tongue:
“Some big town you’ve got here, pavement and all… I would buy a hut and live here.”
“For one night, maybe,” someone commented through clenched teeth.
When leaving the village, the commander stowed a sawed-out toilet bowl, a stolen bike, some dishes and pans in the armored personnel carrier. That was as close as he got to that hut.
In another village right near the front line, people lived in basements for thirty-six days. They cooked for the [Ukrainian] defenders who, in turn, signaled when it was relatively safe to take a peek outside, to get some air.
My colleague and his family miraculously escaped from Irpin on the day when most of the evacuees were shot up inside their vehicles. “We only had our phones on us, nothing else. Why? We knew that we would not need anything anymore, because we were certain that we would not get out in one piece.”
Irpin, again: the occupiers used the locals (who had been hiding in the basement) as human shields, lining them up in the courtyard of a busted high-rise. People prepared to be executed. “I put my wife and our cat behind me and told her to fall down right at the moment when they start shooting. Let them think that they killed her.” The locals could not bury their dead because of the constant shelling, and then quickly buried them right there, in the courtyard of their building. The same building where I was having a conversation with a resident of the city.
My friend from the suburbs sent his family away and was going to bike to the City the following day. The gunfire made him change his mind. Having made it out the day after, he discovered that everyone who tried to leave that day was shot on the “road of life.”
In the village, the occupiers rummaged through houses in search of any signs of military affiliation. They were looking for victims who were already on some tentative lists — mainly the intelligentsia. If they couldn’t find them, the house would be razed to the ground.
In the first days of the war, the cars of residents who were trying to get to the City along the Zhytomyr highway were shot up. The wounded survivors crawled through the forest, amid gunfire, finally reaching the summer cottages area, where they found shelter for the coming weeks — in cramped cellars that became infirmaries.
Families were fleeing an occupied village in the Chernihiv region. Men with a bare minimum of belongings, in cars, exposed to gunfire on the road. Women with children, walking ten kilometers through the forest, knowing violence and torture awaited them if they were detained at the ruscist¹¹ checkpoints. Such a fate befell dozens of women and children from that village.
In one of the apartments seized by the occupiers, the webcam kept streaming for some time. The owner observed remotely, in shock, as the mercenaries tried on her dresses.
War stories are becoming more common every day. And there will be so many more.
Sixty Days
Sometime in the future, when the war is over and a bit of time has passed since the last shelling, when the nights have become quiet, it will be difficult for us to believe that we lived through all of this.
Explosions in the predawn City on February 24th. The utter desperation of the first days of the war. Reports from the fronts akin to a horrible theater of the absurd. The inability to comprehend what is happening, the overwhelming irrationality of the new reality. And at the same time, a flash of understanding on the very first day — of how long and how difficult it would all be…
A huge traffic jam and emptied-out gas stations on the Zhytomyr highway¹² — everyone is headed West! Very little time would pass before the russian tanks would start heading along this route, mercilessly shooting up the roadside houses.
The paratroopers landing in Hostomel and Vasylkiv. Through the window, one can see the raging fires. The first building destroyed by a [russian] rocket in our City; the first civilian casualties in the capital. Street fighting in Obolon — that’s already within the City. The fighting on Peremoha Avenue — a ten-minute drive from the University. Explosions in Lukyanivka, that’s almost at the city center. Gunfire in the Government Quarter, at the very heart of the City. The enemy artillery is within firing distance of the center. Building numbers and street names have been covered with tape; billboards display appeals in harsh language addressed to the russian soldiers — this means that they are just a few steps away from the City. There is the threat of the Left Bank [of the Dnipro river] being captured, because the most important thing is to hold on to the Right Bank. That freezing morning we kept staring into the deserted Brovary Avenue until our eyes began to hurt — are enemy vehicles headed toward us already?
All the time we’re tensed up, expecting a shelling. We are besieged by monstrous rumors and creeping fear. Air raid sirens. We feel numb, processing what we’ve seen and heard as if in slow motion. The brain refuses to respond adequately to what is happening. The uncertainty is killing us. Phone calls remain unanswered. The atrocities and outrageous lies of the occupiers. Hundreds, thousands of dead civilians, children. Dozens of mass graves around the City.
And here is that moment when the red line of fear has been crossed. A lightning-fast understanding of one’s purpose in all of this. People forming lines in front of the military recruitment offices. The unreal courage of the military. The stunning resistance of fellow citizens in the war zone. The incredible Ukrainian sense of humor in the face of death. The amazing mutual understanding and connection between the People of this Country.
And the most perplexing thing is the immense expanse of Love at times of colossal hatred.
Orthodox Easter fell on the 60th day of the war. We were painting eggs with onion husks that we picked up from a box of vegetables in a Teroborona kitchen.
___________________
1 In Ukrainian: Teroborona, the Territorial Defense Forces, or the military reserve units of the Ukrainian Army. With the start of full-scale russian invasion, thousands of civilians volunteered to join Teroborona.
2 Paramilitary Chechen organization that protects the autocratic leader Ramzan Kadyrov.
3 A square at the center of Kyiv, where Euromaidan and the Revolution of Dignity took place in 2013-2014.
4 Special units of the Ukrainian police notorious for their brutality toward the Maidan protesters.
5 The Tolkienian term has gained popularity in Ukraine in reference to the russian invaders.
6 Anti-tank spiked barricades.
7 Popular Soviet/Russian rock-bands from the 1990s.
8 A Ukrainian variant of the hurdy-gurdy.
9 From Ukrainian: The Red Viburnum, Ukrainian patriotic song that was first published in 1875. It was banned during the Soviet times, and is still banned in the Ukrainian territories occupied by Russia.
10 Mykhailo Khoma, Ukrainian singer and songwriter.
11 From ruscism, or russian fascism: a term used to describe the ideology of the russian state during the rule of Vladimir Putin.
12 A major highway in Kyiv that goes all the way to the western border.
__________________
Oksana Rosenblum is an art history researcher and translator based in New York City. She was born and raised in Ukraine but calls NYC her home since 2003. Her poetry translations from Ukrainian, essays, and book reviews appeared in National Translation Month, Versopolis, Ukrainian Weekly, Asymptote, and Bracken. She co-edited a bilingual volume of the early poetry of Mykola Bazhan, an important and prolific 20th-century Ukrainian poet (Academic Studies Press, 2020), and co-translated Artem Chekh’s novel Who Are You? (Seven Stories Press, forthcoming in 2024).
Lev Fridman is a Speech-Language Pathologist based in New York City. He has facilitated translation projects and publications, and his own writing, translations, and reviews have appeared in various publications. He is co-editor of Quiet Spiders of the Hidden Soul: Mykola (Nik) Bazhan’s Early Experimental Poetry (Academic Studies Press, 2020). Most recently he was co-translator of Today is a Different War by the Ukrainian poet Lyudmyla Khersonska (Arrowsmith Press, 2023).
Nataliia Bidenko is a medical doctor, professor, physician, scientist, and educator, who has been teaching at the Oleksandr Bohomolets National Medical University in Kyiv for over 30 years. She is the author of over 200 academic articles and has contributed to the creation of more than 30 textbooks and manuals for medical students and doctors. She has traveled extensively throughout Ukraine with medical and archaeological expeditions, and is passionate about photography and music, in particular playing traditional flutes from various regions of the world. Nataliia continue to participate in musical projects that highlight the richness of Ukrainian culture. Notes in the Kyiv Scrapbook is her first experience of creating a lengthy diary that reflects on the tragic events of the present through the eyes of a participant and eyewitness.