I remember a sign that says “Attention: if you drown in the sea, you will be banned from swimming”, in Nash Kutochok (Our Corner) on the Left Bank beach. It really is a corner, not only because of the linguistic landscape of the space, carefully outlined by inscriptions like “Being is beautiful, even if it starts with the letter B [as in bum].” The space is cordoned off by old piers from one side, and by a wall of tin huts that look like garages where locals hang out, from the other side, creating an impression of seclusion. Finally, the slag heaps.

Everything that preceded my move involved me describing my place in the world in terms like waste, ruins, debris – things in which you struggle to find form, things you might better discard. But this space on the Left Bank provided a different approach, it was a wonderful example of survival through transformation. It was at once familiar and unrecognisable: put together ad hoc, full of little details, bits of scribbled aphorisms and statuses, remnants of things, yet, ultimately – everything fell into place. Locals  warmly refer to it as Nash Kutochek, a Russian ‘e’ replacing the Ukrainian ‘o’ in kutochok, – little corner. You are warned already at the entrance: Visit once and you will be back.  Perhaps, even a mountain of unnecessary things could feel necessary here.

I’m somewhere else now – my legs are wrapped in a patchwork blanket by way of a sleeping bag, and, after a dozen failed attempts, I finally manage to focus on the speedway track on a hill, overgrown by weeds, for I still remember the times, almost a year and a half ago, when the city by the sea where I knew nobody, enveloped me in a sense of presence, that had nothing to do with the frantic upward climb from the bottom of the pit towards light. Instead, I think it helped me to float freely in this state. 

Something real looms behind my back, a half-circle of grey sky that could genuinely hinder me. Each dimly lit cloud reminds me of one thing only – Kuindzhi’s bush [Mariupol-born artist, 1841-1910]. I have in mind the painting where the bush, having stared at its own reflection in a swamp takes the shape of a rain cloud – this was the interpretation we once agreed on with a friend and Mariupol native.

Now the first thing I see, looking at the painting on a screenshot I took on my smartphone, is a mushroom-shaped cloud of smoke, as if from an explosion, and I sometimes regret not having found the time to come visit it, to check what it looked like in real life, to see it all in person:

X, [28.01.2022 23:02] It looks very much like the view from my window

         As if he painted it nearby.

Overall, very-very little from these chats has been salvaged (in fact, only the screenshots) – everything had to be purged in March, for reasons of safety due to the filtration [camps]. What was kept from Kuindzhi’s works in museums, has been taken to Moscow.

However, an incredible archive of old photographs, a whole collection of family albums, many testimonies of how locals lived in Mariupol, and traces of the city’s history that cannot be erased by aerial bombs and missiles is still preserved on the Facebook page of the metallurgy engineer Serhiy Davydovych Burov, where he has been gathering them for years. We started to exchange letters over the summer, dedicated to his memories of Mariupol’s cinemas (there were 11 of them in the city, in various condition and statuses, attracting guest of various types: unhomed people, teenage stalkers, zabroshka lovers, people from Avadon [a Mariupol-based grassroots initiative, which organised open-air raves, tea parties and film screenings], etc.).

For him, the history of the city was a hobby, he said, sending me a couple of essays in which he described, for instance, the ingenuity of the audience of the cinema Pobeda, known as Soldatenkino during the German occupation: ‘When the show was over and the doors of the cinema hall opened, the Polizei would be waiting for the audience by the entrance’. They checked everyone for registration certificates. If there were none, you could be shipped straight to Germany to forced labour or get into some other trouble. However, witty Mariupol teenagers found a solution for this. They would leave the cinema through a foyer prior to the appearance of the Polizei, about fifteen minutes before the end of the show.’ Serhiy Davydovych remained within the walls of the city he so loved until his last breath, his own and also that of his wife.

I wound up in Mariupol on 5 March 2021 – right away with my belongings. Before that my friends in Dnipro had to put me up for about two weeks – I had to work to earn the money needed to be able to rent a flat: as I was moving out of my Kyiv flat, I had to give all my savings to cover the cost of utility bills which, as it turned out, my flatmate and I had been not been paying correctly for a year. This meant that I didn’t even know exactly where I would live when I stepped onto the platform. In Marik [colloq. for Mariupol] I started to note down some things, for the first time in a long while. 

03/21. For some reason I thought that I would catch some kind of spirit of place, like in Odesa, where people trade things lazily, lying on deck chairs. But nah, not that. Instead: roses. The first sign that screams “you’re in Donbas!” catches you already from the flowerbed at the station in Volnovakha, where we had a long smoking break, the train stopped for 20 minutes. The red spots glow in the green light even brighter at night, they stand out against the long line of T-80s [battle tanks], that are being taken somewhere by rail. Surely to the East? In 2021 with its ocean of prophecies, I already have no idea where. 

A strip of snow lay between the sea and the land, I saw it already from the bridge above the railway tracks, and the first spot was a beach on Slobidka near the Yacht Club.

03/21. Lots, lots, lots of sun on the snow. Trees grow right in the sand, ohmmm. A suntrap with shadows on the sand created by thin branches. And I imagine the shade they’d throw in hot weather (which I hate) – I haven’t seen anything like this in any resort. A karahafu-shaped curved roof of what seems like an abandoned train station vaguely reminds me of my previous place of residence, Kyiv’s Zhitnyi market.

So, I settled in Prymorskyi district, on the hill above the sea, with a park with the same name, in the blocks right next to the Monument to the Victims of Fascism – those big metal hands clenched into fists, that stick out of tiles. There is a large square nearby (Hero-Liberators Square), the Illichyvets stadium and, across the road, an abandoned cafe-bar with a cone-shaped roof called Crystal, entirely painted over with graffiti, surrounded by thick fir trees. 

Despite this wide range of Soviet names, the district was sometimes jokingly called Brooklyn: next to a hairdresser called Zazerkallya there was a student dorm with many students from Africa, who studied with the intention of getting a job at the metallurgy plant. 

On my way home across the alley that connects Budivelnyky and Nakhimova Avenues (also leading to the dormitory), through the sports ground behind Gymnasium no. 2., you could always get a good view of their intense basketball matches. I learnt about the softer side of the competitors, their movements and lines, only on 16 February at the train station; judging by the number of people at the station, they were almost the only passengers who worried about the prospect of invasion that day. Yes, back in the day, we had a completely different date for the Apocalypse, indicated by American intelligence: 16 February, instead of the 24th. 

I had a misunderstanding with one of these students on the station platform – it wasn’t a big deal, but somehow I remember it as if everything around me froze noticeably. I was drinking coffee by the coffee stall on the platform, when I heard someone, a future passenger on the evening train. He came up to me repeating a single word over and over: “Elp, elp”. He pointed to the heavy kravchuchka trolley-bag on the floor, then to his shaven head, glistening in the sunset. Because of his accent I didn’t immediately understand what he wanted from me; then I decided I was supposed to drag the load to one of the carriages, while in reality, all he wanted was help to lift the bag up on top of his head. 

How beautiful his figure was, moving in the last rays of sun along the strip of the platform, receding towards the depth of the last carriages. I still see these frozen suave lines, his leisurely stride, in slow motion, walking away. Nah, he didn’t walk, he swam, swaying in the twilight with the kravchuchka trolley-bag on his head. A sticker with the Shakhtar emblem was stuck there too – the upper half looked like an African shield. Or a sun-drenched horizon. Or a rose in half-bloom.

09/21. How many types of roses were planted in the middle of fuck knows where, right in the middle of some wasteland, to the right from the Hero-Liberators square, but farther away from the centre, in a completely unexpected spot without any connection to the square itself! I wanted to boil down the rose petals and make a jam using my grandma’s recipe. Such a pleasant discovery in this area (Prymorskyi park has loads of bushes and thickets, offering a million chances to hide oneself away) – and, it seems, it’s not only me who thinks this way, as none of the locals dare to steal them for resale. For some reason I expected this to happen in the neighbourhood, but I never once saw it.

One evening a random guy started chatting with us in a dark alley: he wanted a lighter, and to rage against Zelenskyi. As he lit his cigarette, explaining how Zelensky was from from Kryvyi Rih, a kid appeared from nowhere, and asked him for a cigarette. The guy turned towards him slowly, took the last fag from his pack, crumpled up the empty pack, tossed it on the ground, and handed over the cigarette. The young guy took it, lit the cigarette, and, walking away, thanked him in Ukrainian: “Dyakuyu”. The man shouted after him:
‘And do you know how to say that in Russian’?
‘In Russian it would be spasibo.’ 

‘Oh, and where are you from?’ – I think he was hoping the kid would be from Kryvyi Rih. 

A pregnant pause.’From Ukraine’ – the guy answered, turning back for a second, and he disappeared  into the fog.
For a few long seconds, everyone was numb.
‘With feeling, with sense, with a pause…’ – recited the man a famous line from on old comedy in Russian, meditatively looking into the sky.

In the summer, walking through the city, my comrade and I took pictures of cinemas (and their remains). This was one of the most interesting experiences of rummaging through my memories, and (literally) living among ruins.

08/21. At first it wasn’t really that difficult to surrender to the perception of ruins, it involved me forming and absorbing certain romantic ideals, being fascinated by decay, detachment, boredom, desolation, and loss. 

It has become difficult to articulate anything, to put things into words – it’s as if I’ve been imprisoned, I keep using the same signs from buildings with peeling plaster, restricted to a set of temporary (oh, God!) clichés, worn-out quotes, and aphorisms. Like, how am I different from these collapsing, darkened walls that have become a dark shelter for those signs? Looks short, familiar, obvious. However, it’s not like that.

By now, I think I can say that the ruins have taught me something about myself, and, ultimately, I soon got bored of inspecting them like outdoor museum displays: they can’t immortalise anything, can’t formulate a clear vision of the future, as if they were mocking the modernists, they have become a painful sign of sorts of our current inability to Dream – to think up a bright future beyond the horizon. Instead, they are covered with fungi, they nurture moss, they grow green and mouldy. They reveal, undermine, and dissect the demonstrative, hygienic sterility and artificial “integrity” of the Image of the industrial city. This Image is a closed continuum of order that excludes residential districts drenched in the  smoke exuded by big business, with the sole aim of constructing an attractive Instagram zone for investors and funds. This means that ruins can potentially add a different logic and organising principle to our cities, bringing to light the suffocating interruptions of the objective order, the only existing reality and rational arrangement, and thereby act as reminders. 

And, vice versa, architecture can convey the centralised character of certain processes, traumatic real estate, fear when faced with the Other, harmful nostalgia, it can blend into dangerous blocks that primitivise life, reducing it to templates, instructions, clichés. 

If you’ve become (or felt like) a ruin, your walls don’t have any more capacity for Memory. Memory itself will operate in a different way, through reminders: no meaning tied to what used to be (nostalgia) can exist in decomposition, just as no reliable and verified plan can exist of how things “should” be, a plan for their future. “Rot is an active agent of ruination.” The fact that everything is being, and from what this process leaves behind,  the neat row of past, present, and future collapse is made. Layers of wet plaster peel away – it’s not a “stop” of any kind – there is no place for passivity. Suddenly, some layers are left uncovered.

In 2014-2015 a bomb shelter was set up in the abandoned Lenin cinema, which was used by the residents of the Left Bank district. In 2022, Savona, a cinema that survived on the Right Bank, the opening of which coincided with Ukraine’s Independence Day, was concisely described by a user with the alias 3141 3141, a member of the telegram group Mariupol Now, as a “Fortress that saved us”. I feel the same today, when I describe Mariupol as a refuge and a rehab of sorts, that it became for me in 2021: gratitude and tenderness.

01/22. Finding the time to run to the bridge. A final trick before leaving, something I loved to do both in Marik and Volnovakha, 10-15 minutes before departure. I made myself feel something this way (took some risk!) to rush with all my might up, above the railroad track: if it is daytime – towards the horizon, you ultimately run towards the horizon of the sea, on the other end of the bridge. At nighttime, in complete darkness, you still turn your face and know, by the splatter and the rush: the sea is surely there.