A teacup with a pink cat on it. A small tetrapod painted with Ukrainian national motifs. A Philips food processor. A white H&M sundress. A light blue laptop case. Three bookmarks embroidered by a friend’s mother. Two Soviet-era badges with the signs Azovstal and Ilycha on them. Business cards from the Head of Sociology Department at Mariupol State University and the director of the Ilych Factory Museum. My cat carrier. My cat.
In my Manchester home I come across these objects, walking around like a sleepwalker since February, and they feel like a revelation, the only tangible reality I can hold onto in an implausible present. I started to notice a triumphant feeling when picking up one or the other, without fully understanding what it meant. Then one day I saw a Facebook post about a soldier who died in the fight for Mariupol, and his cat was rescued from the city by volunteers. When I saw the same blanket that I had in my apartment at Prospekt Mira 67 in that photo, and I thought of the black hole left in the place of the apartment, I realised why these objects matter. They come from rooms that don’t exist anymore; where shelves had held them once, now there is nothing.
Every morning I’m drinking from my cat cup against a background of emptiness. The city was razed to the ground and disappeared from behind.
I bought the teacup with the pink cat on it in the big Silpo next to the AC-2 bus station, a couple of days after I moved to Mariupol, to celebrate the fact that I had finally got a cat. I got her from a breeder in the Left Bank, and named her Zaika, inspired by a drunk man on the Kyiv-Zaporizhya train who called me by the same name in a less cute context. I was gravely unprepared: I didn’t know how to care for a tiny creature that constantly wanted my attention, I didn’t know how to stop her eating my flatmate Kolya’s houseplants or attacking my feet at bedtime, and I felt guilty for both locking her out of my bedroom at night and leaving her alone during the day.
We lived in Primorsky district in a pinkish-orange stalinka with beautiful ornaments, in a three-room apartment whose owners, retired sailors, had moved to Odesa long ago. The first morning after I moved there, I went to the big Silpo to buy some basic things for the house. I left the window in my room open and worried all the way that Zaika would climb up and escape, but she was still too small to do that. On the way back, waiting for the marshrutka, I saw a row of green military trucks passing through the M14 highway in the direction of the city, and I wondered if I had made an irresponsible decision coming here without any safety plan. Will the Russians come back? Kolya said I needn’t worry, the ATO forces were standing in high alert all the way along the city’s borders. “Mariupol is the safest city in Ukraine at the moment!”
Indeed, I hadn’t heard any explosions, unlike the previous summer, when I had lived in Vostochny and had woken up to the sound of detonations every morning. That year, I only heard the sound once, when I was standing in AC-2 waiting for a bus. It was August, and my friend who stood next to me wondered: was it just thunder? It couldn’t be fireworks, they had been banned since 2014. The rest of the passengers were standing on the platform in silence, all of them looking up to the sky.
I got the tetrapod with the Ukrainian national motifs from a friend for my 28th birthday. They had been selling them in Café Hleb du Soleil as a new type of local souvenir since the start of the war. The real, life-size tetrapods at the military checkpoints, aimed to stop the Russian tanks at the borders, had become a symbol of Mariupol in the last few years, painted with vyshyvanka-motifs, a couple of them scattered around the central squares of the city as a reminder that Mariupol was standing strong. Four and a half years later, a resident who didn’t evacuate during the siege wrote on her Twitter from the public wifi Russians provided next to a former supermarket: “The tetrapods didn’t protect us from the tanks. They didn’t save the city.”
The food processor I bought from Epicenter, also in the first days after I arrived. It was already mid-September, but the summer heat of Pryazovia was still unbearable, and the regular headache from Azovstal fumes, which welcomed me every time I came to the city, had lasted three days already. I was standing in the parking lot that had melted into an infinite landscape consisting of nothing but fields, and felt defeated by all this corporeality. Trying to furnish a new life every year is sometimes a luxury and always a tragedy. Old sheets never fit new blankets, and when things finally fall into place, you have to leave them behind. I learnt this in a piss-infused corner of the underground luggage rooms of Kyiv Pasazhyrsky where I had to leave a hardcover history album of Ilych Steel and Iron Works and other heavy objects. The residents of Mariupol learnt it in much harder ways.
In a couple of months, I found my place in this new environment. I used the food processor multiple times a week in the kitchen of my new apartment at Prospekt Mira 67, baking brownies or walnut cakes while listening to Ekho Moskvy without understanding most of it. On the evening of 23 February 2022, I was baking brownies using the same food processor in Manchester. By then, I understood almost every word they were saying on Ekho Moskvy. They said that Putin’s announcement about the recognition of the separatist republics the previous night had “effectively and irreversibly ended the world order we had been living in since the end of the Cold War”. I wished I had not understood. I packed the brownies in a bag for the next day with a desperate hope for order, went to bed, and woke up to a text from a friend five hours later that Russians were bombing Mariupol.
I bought the laptop case and the white dress in Port City, the most exotic heterotopia I’ve ever visited. Port City was the only real neoliberal shopping mall in Mariupol, standing on the edge of the city, at the start of the Zaporizhzhia highway. If one wanted a sushi bar, an escalator, a multiplex cinema, and air-conditioned chain stores, this was the place to be. But the stores were from chains I had never heard of, and there were never more than a couple of people wandering in the cool corridors, so I always felt I had stepped into a familiar non-place of globalisation the rest of Mariupol was far removed from. Still, it was not quite familiar. The H&M dress was not from H&M, but an outlet that sold global brands, previously discarded in some unspecified regional market. It was light and staggeringly white, and I walked the shores of the Azov Sea all summer with the white wings of that dress flowing behind me in the breeze.
In March 2022, my footsteps in Pischanka beach were replaced with landmines, and Port City, my favourite non-place, was enveloped by another layer of unreality, when desperate residents pulled out anything they could move from the broken shop windows on supermarket trolleys. By the end of the siege, Port City and its surroundings had become a new centre of Mariupol life: people evacuating in cars and on foot crossed the Zaporizhzhia highway in large crowds, embarking on a long trip with a highly uncertain outcome. Others who stayed walked hours every day to the nearby Metro parking lot, where occupying authorities distributed water and bags of buckwheat as humanitarian aid. Shopping trolleys quickly started to dominate the landscape over blue trolley buses with signs on their side that once said “Mariupol is the city of the future”.
Now it is August 2022, and I am drinking tea from my cup with the pink cat while my own cat, a true Mariupolchanka, is curled up in my lap. We are undoubtedly real, but our reality is now forever compromised. My friend’s mother who made the bookmarks survived the siege, Azovstal and Ilycha didn’t. The Head of Sociology Department died in March, the director of Ilych Museum has gone missing. I am looking at Silpo, Hleb du Soleil, Epicenter and Port City on the map obsessively, but Google Maps says they are temporarily closed. “Information about this place may be outdated. Always pay attention to real-world conditions, which may be rapidly changing”.