Seeing the River

By Nicholas Crane Moore: 

The first river I loved was the Truckee, which my family floated every summer for years. It spilled gently out of Lake Tahoe, clear and cold in the heat of August. From my uncle’s raft, much was visible to astound a little boy. I could see tiny pebbles on the bottom through four feet of water. And small fish, brown and rainbow trout, flitting in and out of the raft’s slowly moving shadow. I could see my feet, magnified somehow by the water as they dangled in the river. But there was much that I could not see. 

The river, then, was nothing more than a highway of water coursing through the mountains. It was just a current towing us across a summer afternoon. It was a feeling. A sensation of sun and water splashing on bare skin. A memory of joy with cousins. It was not yet the centerpiece of a watershed, a catchment for runoff and debris. It was not yet a reflection of the environmental conditions around it.

Even as a child, the presence of a road alongside portions of the river seemed strange, somehow out of place, though I was unaware that oil and particles of car exhaust make their way into the water. Or that the paved roadway increases erosion by transforming rainfall and snowmelt into fast flowing sheets. There was a road, and there was a river. They were separate things. The influence of humans on our habitat was not yet something I understood.

Sometimes I miss those days, when I knew less about the harm we inflict on the natural world. Sometimes I wish I did not know, for instance, that the EPA classifies the upper Truckee as impaired based on sediment volumes that degrade aquatic habitat, largely a result of development in the watershed. That the river’s endemic fish, the Lahontan cutthroat trout, survives today in only a small remnant of its former range is something I have wished I could forget.

As an environmental lawyer, it is part of my job to know, and to learn. I have had to acquire a great deal of information that is painful for one who loves nature to bear. Knowledge is power, indeed, but it can come at a cost. Of this price the naturalist Aldo Leopold wrote, “One of the penalties of an ecological education is that one lives alone in a world of wounds.” One lived alone because others, he sensed, did not share his understanding of what he called the land organism; ecology in the late 1940s was a burgeoning, niche field. That is no longer the case, but there is an enduring truth to the notion that most of us are not equipped to discern the subtle evidence of a compromised landscape. Quite simply, as Leopold wrote, “Much of the damage inflicted on land is quite invisible to laymen.”

In many ways, the modern world is not arranged to promote a deeper understanding of human effects on the environment. Our economic system depends on a certain level of obliviousness to the byproducts of consumption. Businesses in the Lake Tahoe region, for instance, find it in their most immediate interest to speak of the lake and its outlet river solely in terms of their stunning clarity and hue, their restorative qualities. The EPA’s qualms about sediment do not find their way into the brochures of ski resorts and boat rental outfits. Given basin waters are safe for swimming and drinking, I cannot really blame them. It would detract from the tourists’ experience—and perhaps the amount they are willing to spend—to learn that in escaping the grime of Los Angeles or San Francisco they have fled not to some pristine vestige of Eden, but to a beautiful place in which human habitation has similarly altered, to a lesser but still significant degree, the delicate balance of life. To know that one is contributing to that disruption, however insubstantially, would presumably dampen the vacation mood, if only for a moment. I know at times it has for me.

One of life’s challenges, I have found, is accepting that we have hurt someone we love. There can be an instinct to look away, to deny, to assume that everything is fine. But I have learned the hard way that it is only through seeing the pain, understanding its causes, and acknowledging our role that we can begin to heal the wound. I think the same is true of the landscapes we explore and inhabit, which are as infinitely complex, and as sensitive, as any person.

Judging by trends in social media, advertising, and travel, it is a common desire today to find a connection with the natural world. If one is to develop a meaningful relationship with a mountain, or a valley, or a river, I believe it is imperative to engage with that place by learning more about it. Not only about the way it works, the way its dynamic balance is achieved (which can be immensely satisfying), but about the ways in which it has been degraded, and made susceptible to further harm (which can be sobering). By doing this one can begin to love a place in an active, real sense—not in the way we say we love a TV show or a restaurant, but in the way we love a friend. Because protecting ourselves from knowledge of the damage we have caused does not protect either the people or the places that we love. It only leaves them vulnerable.

This is not to say that every road near a river should be torn up, or that it’s reasonable to demand utter purity from every water body. Humankind cannot live on this earth—not in anywhere remotely close to the quality of life and health that we now enjoy—without substantial impacts on its lands and waters. But I think we should at least know what those impacts are. We should understand the trade-offs. Laws like the federal National Environmental Policy Act and its state equivalents, which require disclosure and analysis of the environmental consequences of an array of public and private endeavors, embody this goal. If nothing else, they are triumphs of transparency in an opaque, often sugarcoated world. Combined with the amplifying power of the internet, each of us now has at our fingertips more information than Aldo Leopold could have ever imagined. One need not live alone.

Though my visits to the Truckee are rarer now, they still fill me with wonder. The rich blue of the deep pools, the grace of water as it slides over boulders, the pull of the current coaxing my body downstream—phenomena that can be explained in a scientific sense—evoke a mystery that no amount of scrutiny can dissolve. When I swim in that clear, cold water, I am still a little boy. And yet the river is more to me now than it once was, layered over with learning and meaning. It has become a reminder to look for what is not easily seen, and to accept whatever I find. I love the river more than ever.

***

Nicholas Crane Moore is a writer and public interest environmental attorney in Anchorage, Alaska. His writing on the environment has appeared in Edge Effects magazine, the Revelator, Environs, the Daily Journal, and the Daily Californian.

Out of Place No.02: 'The Vagabond' by Colette

Out of Place is an irregular series about movement and place, and the novels that take us elsewhere, by regular contributor Anna Evans. 

‘Nothing keeps me here or elsewhere.’ Freedom and writing in Colette’s The Vagabond

It is true that departures sadden and exhilarate me, and whatever I pass through – new countries, skies pure or cloudy, seas under rain the colour of a grey pearl – something of myself catches on it and clings so passionately that I feel as though I were leaving behind me a thousand little phantoms in my image, rocked on the waves, cradled in the leaves, scattered among the clouds.

In the dressing room of the Empyrée-Clichy, a café-concert in Paris, Renée Néré is preparing for her act. She contemplates the mirror, from behind the mask of her stage make-up: ‘my painted mentor and I gravely take stock of each other like well-matched adversaries.’ It is a cold night, and the dressing rooms are unheated. She can feel the floor vibrate from the chorus and the dancers, listening to the creaking iron staircase and waiting to go on stage as the minutes crawl slowly by. This is ‘the dangerous, lucid hour,’ the time when thoughts and doubts creep in. A restless crowd has gathered in the dark and dusty, smoky auditorium. From the moment the first bars of music strike up, a mysterious discipline takes over and Renée has the sensation that all is well, that she no longer belongs to herself. On the stage she feels ‘protected from the whole world by a barrier of light.’ 

Published in 1910, La Vagabonde, which translates as ‘the wanderer’ was something of a turning point for Colette. This story of life in the music halls of Paris in the early twentieth century was drawn from her personal experience, travelling around France performing as a dancer and mime. As Renée reflects upon solitude and independence, the conflict between a sense of liberation and security, the book mirrors Colette’s own struggles to find artistic freedom. 

The encounter with the mirror image, a self-portrait in disguise, is something that recurs in Colette’s writing and suggests a way of framing her work. As she writes in her 1928 novel, Break of Day: ‘Are you imagining, as you read me, that I'm portraying myself? Have patience: this is merely my model.’

Written in a personal style, The Vagabond is a novel that breaks new ground suggesting that Colette was already beginning to explore the possibilities of a shifting style of writing, moving between fiction and memoir. In her work she mixes genres and different modes of writing in a way that feels distinctive and radical. Colette’s form of writing was based around her own life, but carefully crafted and shaped; constantly reinvented. From the start, we are in the company of a voice that feels fresh and immediate. The Vagabond is written in a first person, present tense that makes it feel ageless and undated. The tone is full of energy and sparkle. She is playful and inventive, witty and disparaging, yet also compassionate and sincere. 

Written in three parts, the novel mirrors aspects of Colette’s life and the events following the end of her first marriage to Willy. Married at the age of twenty, Colette’s life was transformed from the quiet solitude of her upbringing roaming the countryside, to a Parisian woman of society. Willy wrote popular novels, or more accurately employed a production line of young writers to produce the work which was unpublished under his own name. It was during these years that Colette began to write, later she would describe this as her ‘apprenticeship’, and became a ghost writer, publishing the Claudine series of novels under Willy’s name. The Claudine novels were incredibly successful, and the couple became well known within Parisian society. Not only did Willy keep the rights to the books, but he also sold them for an enormous sum of money in 1909. After their marriage and divorce, Colette began to publish under her own name.

Renée too is a writer whose books have had ‘an unexpected and extravagant success.’ The name Renée connotes rebirth, it means to come back to life or re-emerge, to be reborn. In the mirror she sees the image of ‘a woman of letters who has turned out badly’ in the eyes of the world. The book is about finding an identity in writing. As Renée tells us: ‘And that is where my story ends – or begins.’

The Vagabond describes these years of marriage as painful and humiliating - the discovery of her husband as serially unfaithful – and as a time of self-effacement: ‘I was made to understand so well that, without him, I didn’t exist.’ These past experiences haunt Renée when she meets a new admirer and begins to confront the central dilemma of the novel. Torn between finding love and companionship and letting go of her solitary life, and the sense of empowerment and self-sufficiency she has worked so hard to find: ‘On my good days I joyfully say over and over again to myself that I earn my living.’ 

For Renée, the music hall provides a way of securing financial independence, a way for her to survive outside the constraints of marriage, which for Colette represents a form of entrapment for women: ‘He offers me marriage as if he were offering me a sunny enclosure, bounded by solid walls.’ The conflicting needs of independence, work, and love are themes of Colette’s writing, and Renée feels ‘an active passion, a real need to work, a mysterious and undefined need which I could satisfy equally well by dancing, writing, running, acting, or pulling a hand-cart.’ 

The Paris of The Vagabond is Montmartre and its surrounding areas. She writes about the street girls of the quarter: ‘slowly dying of misery and pride, beautiful in their stark poverty … they belong to a breed which never gives in, never admits to cold or hunger or love.’ With Colette as a guide, the Parisian dance halls and café-concerts come alive. The Empyrée-Clichy is a fictional theatre perhaps based on the Théâtre de la Gaîté-Rochechouart. She draws portraits of the music hall artistes. The star of the show is a singer from the streets, raw and untamed: ‘She sings like a sempstress or a street singer, and it never occurs to her that there is any other way of singing […] The public adores her just as she is.’

Behind the perception of the music hall as a place of dubious morality, Renée finds a comradeship among her fellow performers, while acknowledging the precarity of their lives: ‘my silent sympathy goes out to them without any preferences.’ They live an uncertain, wandering life, unrecognized, disparaged, little understood. In her eyes, there is a dignity to the insecurity, the sadness and pride of their lives away from the stage: ‘Who will condescend to wonder what you do […] when darkness has swallowed you up and you are hurrying, towards midnight, along the Boulevard Rochechouart, so thin you are almost transparent.’

Within this life, there is a truth about living. Renée has chosen a life of chance. She is aware that freedom comes also with loss: ‘I attract and keep the friendship of those melancholy, solitary persons who are pledged to loneliness or the wandering life, as I am.’ She tries not to look in the mirror too closely for there she sees the solitary life she has chosen and ‘the realisation that there is no one waiting for me on the road I follow, a road leading neither to glory nor riches nor love.’

On reading The Vagabond, I am struck by Colette’s great love of language and attentiveness in observing the world around her. She is a writer of the senses, concerned with feelings. Her writing is elegantly constructed, absorbing, written with exquisite timing and an extraordinary clarity of expression. The book describes the act of writing, ‘the patient struggling with a phrase until it becomes supple and finally settles down, curled up like a tamed animal, the motionless lying in wait for a word by which in the end one ensnares it.’ Colette’s descriptions are vivid, dreamily poetic, and intense. She writes in a way that seems to map feelings onto the world around her, blurring the boundaries between internal and external experience through memory and reflection.

Colette is a writer of place and landscape, and she has written often of her memories of the countryside where she grew up, Puisaye, an area of northern Burgundy. In The Vagabond, she talks about finding a refuge in the past through writing about memories and places: ‘Every time I touch the fringes of it, my own country casts a spell on me, filling me with sad, transitory rapture; but I would not dare to stop there. Perhaps it is only beautiful because I have lost it.’

Renée’s long self-examination and the central dilemma of the book concerns this sense of being torn between freedom and solitude: ‘I escape from myself, but I am not still free of you, I know it. A vagabond, and free, I shall sometimes long for the shade of your walls.’ These moments of reflection and melancholy contain a realisation that she holds the key to her own destiny, and that sometimes this means ‘the right to be sad’ and to exist in her interior mind, to become ‘neither darker nor lighter than the shadows.’ 

‘Call it obscurity, if you will: the obscurity of a room seen from without. I would rather call it dark, not obscure. Dark but made beautiful by an unwearying sadness: silvery and twilit like the white owl, the silky mouse, the wings of the clothes-moth.’

The Vagabond echoes its title in summoning a writing that is all about movement, and the conjuring power of words. Renée describes herself as an exile, a wanderer, a solitary. She feels a draw towards departures and a yearning for travel: ‘to move from one place to another, to forget who I am and the name of the town which sheltered me the day before, scarcely to think, to receive and retain no impressions but that of the beautiful landscape which unfolds and changes as the train runs past.’

Part three of the novel is the tour itself, written partly in letter form, full of glimpses, details, and images of the places they visit along the way. Colette writes beautifully about the passing landscape, the feel of travel, and of letting go, of seeing the changing scenery unfold. There is real life and feeling to this writing: ‘Half asleep, like the sea, and yielding to the swaying of the train, I thought I was skimming the waves, so close at hand, with a swallow’s cutting flight.’

There is a sense that this freedom is also about writing, and that the book mirrors Colette’s own path towards finding an identity through writing: ‘What are you giving me? Another myself? There is no other myself.’ For Colette, writing The Vagabond could be seen as a turning point, of belief in herself as a writer, and her quest to express what matters most to her in the world. Within the perfect moments of travel, and glimpses from the window of the changing landscape, comes a realisation: ‘as if the one dominating anxiety in my life were to seek for words […] In that same hour an insidious spirit whispered to me: And if indeed that were the only urgent thing? […] If everything, save that, were merely ashes?’

***

Anna Evans is a writer from Huddersfield who lives in Cambridge, with interests in place, memory, literature, migration, and travel. She enjoys writing about landscape – nature, cities, and all the places in-between. You can read more about Anna and her work on her website The Street Walks In. You can find more of Anna’s contributions to Elsewhere here.

The Knowledge

By Nicky Torode:

“I can’t BELIEVE we’re leaving the EU,” my 6-year-old wails like he’s jammed his finger in the electric window as we ride, back seat, in a black cab over Croydon Flyover. The taxi driver twists his head, to double-take the young oracle, and veers, fleetingly, to the left. Good job we don’t drive on the right, my inside voice says, not ready just yet, though, for cabbie knowledge. 

Wales’s gone, England too. The early morning Brexit referendum results come on the radio, in and out, sleep to waking. We slow down at the lights on the Wellesley Road dual carriageway, slicing East from West. Jake turns to stare at the higgledy-piggledy queue curling outside Lunar House. A Union Jack droops from the staff on Lunar’s identical twin, Apollo. God of twenty-two floors of grey carpet and filed prophecies, ready for second-class dispatch. Two men in high vis vests, clutching clipboards, spit out the building’s revolving door, smiles long gone. 

I smile at Jake, squeeze his hand. We’ll look back on this moment, I’m sure, when teachers will ask me when it was that I realised Jake was so special. It was this taxi ride out of East Croydon station, en route to Gatwick, gateway to the world. Well, to Guernsey, at any rate, a hometown of sorts. It was this moment, this ride, through streets edged with shiny high rises, criss crosses of tram tracks and swinging crane arms. Ding! Ding! go the tram cars. Tuk-tuk! Tuk-tuk! go the chorus of pneumatic drills. Digging for a better future. 

How you gonna make a dream come true? Sensible sang, Croydon listened. Brutal turned pastel, beanstalks shot up even taller. Toblerone-shaped Saffron Tower, with windows of pinks and lilacs, glints in the morning sun. A giant crocus blooms again in Croh Denu, the Crocus Valley of old. 

I lean back into the padded, smells-like-new leather cab seat. Croydon, home for now. Tuk-tuk! go the drills. I stretch out, sigh. My breath on the window throws a ghost-like shroud over Fairfield Halls, South London’s South Bank. Grey walls of halls on land that’s been blessed by wayfarers to the fairs and markets of old. I’m so London, I’m so South, belts out Stormzy from the crackly radio. 

We rise up the trunk road, pass the two IKEA chimneys, long-established shrines of Valley Retail Park, and look down on a tangle of Scalextric roads at their feet. Really going up in the world. A smugness warms my chest, like I’ve backed a winner down William Hill’s. 

“Muuuuuum,” Jake says.

“Yes, love?”

“What’s the EU?”

The taxi driver, I swear, laughs inwardly. I see you, cab driver, peeping at me in your rear-view rectangle. The Palace furry dice, hanging from the mirror, bounce and bob in cahoots.

My shoulders start jiggling up and down too as we join a tailback on the A23. 

***

Nicky Torode is a born-and-fled Guernsey girl who lived in and around Croydon from 2009 until December 2016. She currently lives with her son in the lively coastal town of Hastings UK. She loves writing tales of place and has had a few shorts published (fiction and creative non-fiction). And the ink has just dried on the first draft of her novel These Are The Places.  She’s a career and entrepreneurial mindset coach and facilitator of journaling circles.

The Short Line

Der Bahnhof vom Stadtpark aus gesehen by Axel Mauruszat is licensed under CC BY 3.0 DE

By Alexander Daily:

In the southeast of Berlin’s inner ring there is a gentle ravine that stretches between the hearts of two of the city’s more bourgeoisie quarters. This depression, carved out by long gone glaciers, is of considerable length but not very wide. Its ground being too soft to build on, the decision was made at the turn of the last century to cultivate it into the People’s Park. Trees line the edges of the ravine and further seclude the sloping lawns and playgrounds nestled between them. A curious feature, for a park, is the Berlin subway station Rathaus Schöneberg. This teutonically neoclassical station is truly in the park. The tracks of the subway exit one side of the ravine and delve into the other, sheltered by the stone structure of the station, forming a bridge under which one cannot cross.

As a non-native transplant from the US, I first experienced this curious edifice running at night along a path that follows the curve of the ravine. I became aware of a long, squat cathedral with the gleaming windows of a glass palace. It seemed to mark the end of the valley and I could not guess its purpose. As I drew closer, behind the bright panes the unmistakable mustard-yellow form of a Berlin subway train rolled into view. I chose to continue my run, but I was excited at the prospect of experiencing the station from the inside.

This was a familiar pattern of my early time in Berlin, for there was much to see that divulges the unique character of the city, and making plans comes easy to lonely new arrivals. For a person with no business at or around the Rathaus, however, the chances of riding through the station are slim. The line that services it, the U4, is curiously short. The primary function of its 2.86km and five stations is to connect the quarter of Schöneberg to the wider Berlin network. The days passed, I traveled other routes; moved to a different part of the city. Schöneberg became the only word I had to go on, a clue that stymied me, as another station carries this name. Passing through the busier, almost homonymous station one day, I noticed it is nowhere near as nice from the inside, nor located in a park. Time continued to elapse, but this trip allowed me to eliminate one of two potential candidates from the subway map.

Having narrowed things down, I headed to Innsbrücker Platz, the southern terminus of the U4. Consistent with the diminutive nature of the line, the trains that service it are only ever composed of two cars and depart every twenty minutes. One waited at the platform, the color and length reminiscent of the school buses of my home country. I boarded, and a few minutes later the train lurched and stuttered out of the station. As we rolled into Rathaus Schöneberg I was able to finally experience, with a certain sense of triumph, the low-key sublimity of sitting simultaneously in a Berlin park while in the Berlin underground.

The many parks of Berlin are dependable places to find natural recuperation. It is an understated quality of this city that most every flat has some bit of communal green near it, or a subway station within reach to get there. In their number and variety, the parks of Berlin are also sources of great adventure and mystery. Each has its own quirks for connoisseurs to discover. A sunny day poses a hard question: stick with a reliable known quantity or venture to some new verdant expanse.

***

For the past decade, Alexander has been exploring the more curious corners of Berlin. In addition to trains and parks, the part he likes most about the city is stumbling upon something previously unknown to him.

Portraits of War: Anastasiya

This is the seventh in a series of portraits from our home city, of Berliners affected by the war in Ukraine. You can see all the portraits as we publish them here.

By Jacob Sweetman:

As Anastasiya Volokita and I walk back towards Friedrichshagen station from the Müggelsee, we are talking about her Mum, her sister and her young niece, all of whom have managed to settle in a small Polish town, having escaped Ukraine. Her Mum, she says, used to be a bank teller but now cleans posh apartments for a living. It's okay, says Anastasiya, she likes it there and it's better than nothing. 

It's better than war, she says.

But then a cat crosses our path. The cat is a mess, its mangy fur is patchy at best, its ribs poking through. It limps sadly, like a drunken old man trying to get back to his empty home, far too late.

Anastasiya's got a cat, named Mushka Mukhich, that a friend brought out of Ukraine via Czechia to  to Poland. Anastasiya picked her up from there. Mushka Mukhich is a well travelled cat. She loves cats, and the state of this one floors her. We stop, she asks about where to find an animal shelter at this time of the evening; I've no idea, it's Friedrichshagen, it's May and the sun is already starting to set. She worries, asking two teenage girls passing if they can help. 

They can't.

A woman with a zimmer-frame comes slowly past, but she stops only to say how she loves Anastasiya's hair, intricate long plaits tightly, precisely woven with Ukrainian blue and yellow thread. 

And I too have to go. Anastasiya says it's fine. She'll take care of it, somehow.

She is wearing a black hoodie that she has zipped up, and pulls over her hands when the wind gets up as it does over the Müggelsee at this time of year – at any time of year. She has a pair of blue jeans that a friend gave her, and simple white toed trainers that were bought for her by a guy she met when she realised that she would be stuck in Berlin for a long time yet.

Because she'd never meant to stay. Anastasiya Volokita had just come to Berlin on the 22nd of February to celebrate her birthday three days later. But the most recent incarnation of the war in Ukraine broke out on the 24th, and she's not been back to Kyiv since.

“I just came for five days, for a change of mood, to have some fun, to take some time, to clear my head to prepare for the next festival season of work,” she says.

And though it might not seem much, it's the little things that have started to chip away at her confidence, at her sense of self. Anastasiya used to be, as she describes herself, “a fashionista”. Her wardrobe in Kyiv was full, she shimmered her way through the scene, but she says she doesn't really know who she is any more. Her brother will send some clothes from Kyiv soon, but she's already donated many of them to people there, people who have lost everything. 

She pulls at the sleeves of her hoodie again. At one point she giggles with a charming lack of self-consciousness when she says that she thought “it was always important to be important”, realising that maybe it wasn't.

She's a busy woman, Anastasiya. Or at least she used to be. From her first days at the design institute she moved to Kyiv to study at, her and her friends had made money by embroidering, decorating clothes for fashion designers and pop stars. She says they could do anything by hand and my eyes are drawn again to the eternal plaits in her hair. She went on to work for a designer, travelling to exhibitions, that sort of thing. But then, around 2014, she realised that she didn't need a boss who, as she says, didn't listen to her, and nor did she want one. So she struck out, alone.

“I just jumped onto the water and started to swim,” she says.

Her boyfriend was a producer, so she started managing, doing PR, helping spread the word and putting out fires, she became a promoter, a spokeswoman, the public face and internal engine of Comic Con Ukraine and the White Nights and the street food festivals. 

She misses the constant whirr of action because she's always been able to get things done, to use her contacts, to find solutions to problems. If there was a crisis then she would work it out, it was her job.

Her skills are well honed, for in Kyiv in 2014 there was a fundamental crisis. 

Kyiv's Maidan square - at the heart of the city both geographically, and spiritually, she says, as the point where the big concerts and the parties, and the fayres and events would take place - was occupied, ultimately, by tens of thousands of people, protesting against the pro-Russian president, Viktor Yanukovych, and the corruption and abuses inherent in his regime. 

It was a movement that divided the country in many ways, but also brought much of Anastasiya's generation together. In the protest's earlier days she was a regular visitor. She says there was something about the atmosphere, what she calls the revolutionary mood of the time, that couldn't help but draw her in. 

She felt she could do something important.

So she started doing what she did best, organising. She was letting volunteers stay on her floor or on her sofa. She and her friends set up flea market stalls to raise money to help. She sold off band merchandise at hers, anything she could, plectrums and drum skins and records autographed by big Ukrainian acts because she knew them all. 

And when Russian troops invaded Crimea she and her friends – and every tailor she knew - used the skills they had again. They made bulletproof vests and sent them to the volunteers going to the front. Anastasiya sourced the fabric and the materials for free, she arranged a studio to manufacture them in someone to pack them and someone to deliver them. 

But she can't do much here, in Berlin. She can't even speak the language, it's frustrating as hell. She's staying in the guest-house of a man who works in TV. She knows she's lucky, she's got enough space that friends can come to visit, but still.

“Now after three months... I don't understand who I am,” she says. “In general, I feel like like there's a big wall up, and I can't go back home, I don't know how to go back home.”

But, while at other times she is defiant, bullish almost, she says this plaintively. She says the word 'home' like it's a tennis ball being tossed in the air, her tone goes up and down. She almost howls it.

Kyiv is a cool city, she says, and she'd dreamed of it from the first time she went as a kid. Even when she was at the heart of a scene around a club in her home town of Dnipropetrovsk called Torba - which means either an old bag or to get pissed, depending on who you ask - where she knew all the musicians and the DJ's, she focussed on leaving. 

There's clubs that rival Berghain easily, there's districts that look more like Dubai than Berlin, she says. The effect of Comic Con Ukraine, for example, has been international, and she talks proudly of 'geek culture' and its importance to a generation who might never have connected in person without it. She talks of YouTubers and bloggers and of people being drawn there, when before they'd have otherwise ended up here.

She's in full flow. I ask if everyone in Ukraine is like this, talking and talking and talking, openly and honestly and endlessly, flitting between subjects the way a hummingbird does blooms, her sentences drawing themselves out, stretching over clauses and parentheses like the blue and yellow cotton spun through her plaits, but she says not. She says that in fact she's quite shy, but I don't believe her. 

At least not at that point.

The Müggelsee behind us is choppy. I drink a beer, Anastasiya a lemonade, and we are sitting down at a cafe table. The wind blows across us, whisking the ash out of the superfluous ashtray, and I worry about it blowing across the microphone on my recorder. 

So I push it closer to her at one point, only to withdraw it, unconsciously, a little as she talks of Bucha, where many of her friends had bought apartments because they were cheaper than in Kyiv, and where she had had an office before. Where she'd worked on a project setting up children's playgrounds. 

She says she knows that soldiers had ransacked those very offices, but that was the least of things, because she also knows of rapes and of murders. She says people she knows, colleagues and friends, died in the horrors that engorged the district in April, but she doesn't want to ask who. Her eyes are red, I ask her if she's okay, and she says she is. 

And then she tells me she can give me an “exclusive.” She says this with a nervous giggle that isn't entirely convincing, and one that makes more sense when I think of the way she pulls her sleeves over her hands, and the way her eyes are reddened, and how she seems so determined to convince me that she is okay with all of this - that she'll find a solution, because that's what she always does, despite the fact she's been stuck in the city she came to for a five day holiday four months ago, because her home country has been invaded and is currently at war.  

Anastasiya tells me then that she is also pregnant.

“Yeah,” she says, realising how weird it sounds to say out loud to a stranger.

She says that this is how men and women are in times of war. Men are drawn to fight and women to motherhood.

“I really think that when the war started, and I was like naked nerves, I needed a man who can relax me. It was a surprise, it's just happened, and we didn't talk a lot, we didn't know each other a lot, and we have just started to communicate. He has a lot of his own problems - I am in shock, I don't know what to do,” she says. 

“Life is changing so fast” she says, smiling again.

I tell her this is great news. “Congratulations” I say, and I mean it. I tell her having a baby is easier than you imagine, that the joy outweighs the struggle, which is true, but here and now as I say all this out loud the only thing really clear is that I don't know what the fuck I'm talking about. For at  least my kids were born in a country of my choosing. 

She carries on though. She always has.

“But, no, I will find a solution. What I need to do - I have free time right now, and not so much work to do - I have time to learn German.”

She also says she wants to train to be a psychologist, she says she knows that it'll help, that it'll be needed in the aftermath of all of this. She's making plans already. She wants to go home desperately, but it's not just her any more. She also says the baby's father is serious, he wants to be there, he's talking of them buying a house in Ukraine when this is all over. He's the one who bought her trainers. But she's being pushed and pulled at from all sides. 

“Space”, she implores. “What's space doing with me?”

But then space had one extra little hurdle to throw in our way in the form of that battered old cat, sloping off to curl up somewhere for eternity. Later she tells me that the cat had limped away while she was asking in a restaurant for help, and I know she went back to the guest-house of the man who works in TV that she is currently living in to worry all about it.

***

Jacob Sweetman is a writer and sports journalist, at home in Berlin. His work has appeared in 11Freunde, The Guardian, The Berliner Zeitung, Wisden amongst others. His writing about 1.FC Union Berlin can be mostly found here and he has a website here

Emily Sweetman is an illustrator, at home in Berlin. She is a genius, and her work can be seen here

Combustion

By Erin Ruble:

We walk from the airport into smoke. There are mountains all around but you cannot see them. Roads end, not in horizons, but in brown smudges of indeterminate distance.

Light looks different, pulling the luster of sunset forward into mid-afternoon. Actual sunsets are religious affairs. Exercise is dangerous. Clouds become suspect, especially those that plume at a single point on the horizon.

This morning we watched the sun rise over Vermont’s Green Mountains before lifting off from an earth lush with water. As we flew west the land flattened and broadened like the vowels of those beneath us. By the time we passed the Mississippi, Kelly green had faded to sage and then to tan. Irrigation created strange geometries, perfect circles, rectangles, and stripes across an otherwise sinuous landscape. 

Evidence of water is everywhere here: in the ripples of sandstone, the crooked paths of coulees, the cumulous clouds that stack in the sky. Water is visible in everything but itself. Step off the plane and your skin will crack and dry. Blow your nose and you will find dust and blood. 

My husband and children and I return to Montana every year to visit my parents. This summer, as a hurricane drowns Houston, wildfires have spread across eastern Oregon, Idaho, and Montana. The smoke is thick enough to touch. People follow the Incident Information System, InciWeb, like news junkies watch CNN. 

Grass crackles under our feet, brittle, brown, thin. My mother reports that the Ponderosa pines in the pastures hold less moisture than kiln-dried lumber. I’m not sure how anyone knows this but I do not question her. 

Combustion is my parents’ favorite summertime conversation. Too frequent school fire drills have spooked my seven-year-old, though, so I ask them not to talk about it. But after a few days at my family’s vacation cabin my husband and I, coming back from a hike, see a billow of dirty white down the valley. The cabin is surrounded by mountains on three sides; the only road out is somewhere near that fire. We head back along the ridge in order to keep track of its progress. As we walk it jumps over the top of a hill and starts down the other side. Now, faintly, we can see flames. 

This is a familiar threat. My sister and I used to sit in the bay window during summer nights, watching lightning pulse through clouds. Just half an inch of rain fell during the entire summer of 1988, as Yellowstone burned; by the end of August, ash capped every fencepost. Everything smelled of quenched campfires when the clouds finally broke. When I was twelve I drove our pickup through our rocky back pasture, peering over the windshield for tracks to follow, shuttling firefighting supplies to my parents and neighbors so they could fight a blaze that the city fire department refused to address. The year before my son was born a fire roared through the valley that holds my family’s cabin, missing it only by the grace of a sudden change of wind. 

Now my mother calls the sheriff’s department. The fire began only an hour ago but the powers that be have learned of it already, and are sending helicopters, earth movers, even a slurry bomber. The forest service is adopting a let it burn policy when they can—lodgepole and grasses and all kinds of organisms depend on fire, and it’s too expensive to obey Smokey the Bear’s edicts anyway—but a few years ago a lightning strike just down the road burned over 200,000 acres and cost $22 million, so today they’re taking no chances. 

We pack up the kids and drive down the county road to where the fire eats its way downhill. We pull off and park. Expensive ranches line the river, sagebrush bluffs giving way to emerald pastures. Someone has let their horses out and a black and white pinto trots over to us. 

Helicopters drop what look like thimbles of water on the fire. Each time they seem too small to make difference, but after a moment, the orange glow dims. Bulldozers crawl over a ridge I’d swear was too steep for a horse. 

My parents and son stare at the work. My daughter draws a picture in the car. I pat the pinto. A neighbor stops to pass on news. Everyone seems very calm, and in fact, by evening they will have put out the fire. When we drive home the next day, we will see miles of black stripes across the tan hills, the red stain of retardant like glowing coals. 

Soon another summer will be gone.

***

Erin Ruble’s essays and short fiction have appeared in Boulevard, Green Mountains Review, Tahoma Literary Review, and elsewhere. Originally from Montana, she now lives in Vermont with her husband and children. You can find her at erinruble.wordpress.com.

Portraits of War: Yuriy Seredin

Illustration by Emily Sweetman

This is the sixth in a series of portraits from our home city, of Berliners affected by the war in Ukraine. You can see all the portraits as we publish them here.

By Jacob Sweetman:

Though in exile in Berlin since the start of the war, Yuriy Seredin is still in his position as a professor at the Lviv Conservatory. He's teaching remotely. The building itself - with its warm, storied rooms, flanked by pictures of, and played in by disparate figures such as Chopin's disciple Karol Mikuli and the pop star Rulana – sits empty, waiting to be filled with music again.

The carved figures of two muscled, loin-clothed men flank its name on the faded sky blue and pale mustard yellow coloured facade. A stone bandura, the 36 string instrument that stands as a potent symbol of Ukrainian musical nationalism, is below. 

It was Seredin's dad who introduced him to music, who showed him his first chords on a piano, and who realised the young man's perfect pitch when his age was still only just in double figures. He could pick out a melody without trying, there was something natural, an intrinsic musical sense about him. 

But that sense was honed by Eugen Filin, a teacher, pianist and prodigious composer, who'd previously studied and taught at the fabled Moscow Conservatory. Later, Seredin would go to boarding school for young musicians, but it was Filin who was the formative musical influence.

He talks about him with a certain awe, its as if he's in the park with us, off in the trees, listening in to the conversation, somehow. He taught the young man about Orlando Di Lasso and the Flemish school, about the history of polyphonic composition, and he gave him the courage to trust his own instincts. 

Seredin says that Filin changed his life. Though one is in Lviv and the other in Berlin, they're still in touch.

“He basically taught me how to improvise, not like in jazz, but how to play in different styles of classical music. And also he showed me how to play expressively on piano, like when you choose any two sounds and you can play them endless amounts of times, every time differently, emotionally. It's like psychokinesis... the human brain can do amazing things with that.”

It is as a jazz musician that Seredin is best known. His father had bought him a Louis Armstrong tape; it had the hits on it, 'Hello Dolly', that sort of thing, but then came another one, the greats of jazz piano with Fats Waller and Chick Corea and Dave Brubeck. Seredin then discovered Oscar Peterson and Erroll Garner, and, despite a time when he focussed purely on classical music, his fate was largely sealed. 

The first track on Yuriy Seredin's breakout, award winning 2018 album, 'Asylum Search', is called 'Krasne', after the village his Grandmother lived in. A little way east of Lviv, it's tiny and rural, nowadays dominated by the silos of the grain production plant, and cleaved in two by a railway. She was, he says, like a second mother to him, though he remembers the poverty that lead to him spending much of his childhood there. 

His memories drench the composition, and he describes the way they permeate his work.

"I live through this euphoric state when improvising; and at the same moment I am in real time, living through visions. It's like I'm fantasising, and playing that into the instrument... you know, living life through music"

The opening stabs of tenor and alto saxophone are rooted in the traditions of American hard bop – tonally it sounds like 'Eventually', the opening of Ornette Coleman's 1959 masterpiece 'The shape of Jazz to come' – but they are soon underpinned by Seredin's vast, swelling piano parts.

I had thought the record's underlying message was of unavoidable exile. It is called 'Asylum Search', after all – and it was recorded in Berlin, not Lviv or Kyiv - but he says not. He says it's more about the search for solace, for internal peace, a place to be.

"When I was recording this my father was about to die, and what I was playing in the studio was all about this. Thoughts and memories... it was a really personal record. Asylum Search is about looking for a place where you can feel an asylum for your soul, your home in the highest meaning, you know?"

But his search for asylum is no longer metaphorical, internal. He's sat in Berlin watching the war at home. It took a while to adjust, to train his focus, and he says that his relationship with his music has changed. He pours his energy into his piano when he's on stage, he calls it his thirst to express. 

But Berlin's not his home, no matter how he says he does like it. Even if the jazz scene is better than Kyiv's. Even if, as he says, the players are better and more numerous here. 

And he doesn't know how long he'll stay now. He says it depends, depends on the war, and on what's left when it's over. He'll still need to be able to play. He's resigned to being away for a while. 

“Time will tell”, he says.

Yuriy Seredin thinks a lot abut the composition process, and it dominates our conversation. Especially, I think, because it's so much harder to come up with much new material since the war began. 

“I'm still in this position where it's really hard to get into this euphoric state to compose, because all this background stuff is fucking it up”, he says. 

He's polite, and answers all my questions, no matter how stupid they may be. It's the first real day of sunshine Berlin has seen for months, and we are sat in the Tiergarten as birds around us regain their voices and schoolkids give continued exercise to theirs. Police in short sleeves drive lazily around the gravel paths looking for something to do, someone's day to interrupt. 

But there's a sullenness to Seredin, something looming over him, a weight bowing his back. We sit in the shade. He has a thin puffer jacket which he zips up halfway through our conversation. His skin is pale, his hair dark and thick. Though he's probably two metres tall, he reminds me a little of Andrea I Appiani's painting of Napoleon, somehow. His nose is inquisitive, it pokes out of his face, but he points it at the ground between his feet a lot.

His voice is low, and he talks of mental health issues he's faced before the war in his home country began. 

Seredin is happy about the path he now treads (though he's careful to say he's not proud, because pride stunts development), the one that winds between playing and composing and teaching a new generation of Ukrainian musicians at the conservatory. He felt let down by at least one of his professors when he studied there, who barely seemed to care about his charges and their musical development at all. It was as if he was just killing time, dining off his reputation.

He takes music seriously. This is more than being just about melody and arrangement. Shit, he says, he's hardly in it to get rich, and in this he probably has a point. 

But he also knows of music's inherent political power, as embodied by the contemporary recognition of the blind peasants who played the bandura, that strung instrument embossed in stone on the conservatory's front, wiped out under Stalin in the '30s. 

Or by the ideas of its founder, Mykola Lysenko, himself.

Lysenko, who died in 1912, was a composer whose life's work was dedicated to the pursuit of creating a purely Ukrainian canon. He wrote the music for the hymn, “Prayer for Ukraine” still played across the country today, and described as Ukraine's 'spiritual anthem'. There is a story about how Tchaikovsky wanted to stage one of his works in Moscow but the state wouldn't allow it to be sung in Ukrainian, and Lysenko refused to have it translated into Russian. 

So when Yuriy Seredin talks to me of a nascent new project, adding orchestral music to traditional Ukrainian folk songs, he is again following in Lysenko's footsteps. Lysenko published seven volumes of them in the 1800s. 

But there is something unsettling in the darkness Yuriy feels, at the destination his desperation has lead him towards as we talk. He is embittered by the war, and when we speak he is clearly being dragged through the mires of his emotions. It has made him, as he says, “at different moments, disappointed, desperate, sad, bitter and depressed” – justifiably so, of course - but he's closing himself off. 

"After last April I realised I needed to get rid of the influence of any Russian info-space. Because I was a big fan of Russian literature, of Russian music. Of course I speak Russian to some Russians here because they don't speak Ukrainian, and these are people who I know, that I'm quite sure about their okay position regarding the war. I understand from human point of view Russians, who are against war and suffer from hate. For that I pity them. But the thing with collective responsibility, I guess, also remains. But I'm trying to avoid... I stopped reading Russian books for sure, listening to their music. I just want to distance myself from that.”

We moved on after he said this. We talked about composition, about jazz and about Berlin, but I couldn't shift it from my mind. It drew me back again and again.

“I decided that I will never play with any Russians 'til the end of my life, it's just my civil position after what Russia did. It's like... I'm not... I know many people are against the Putin regime and I have friends there, but... like... at least what I'm thinking now, its my - how do you say - not to say my tribute to the victims - that's the wrong word - but in memory of the victims I don't ever want to play in any Russian band or one that contains Russian musicians. I think that's not right.”

Aside from the obvious tragedies of this war it strikes me that this is one of its most pernicious and devastating, and long-ranging effects. The closing off of cultural exchanges, doors slamming shut on other worlds. And I suppose I really just hope at some point he will be able to change his mind.

***

Jacob Sweetman is a writer and sports journalist, at home in Berlin. His work has appeared in 11Freunde, The Guardian, The Berliner Zeitung, Wisden amongst others. His writing about 1.FC Union Berlin can be mostly found here and he has a website here

Emily Sweetman is an illustrator, at home in Berlin. She is a genius, and her work can be seen here

A time of hopeful anticipation

By Ruth Bradshaw:

The park is deserted at this hour, the café closed and the playground empty. The dog walkers and joggers are still sleeping. It is that time after the coldest, darkest part of the night has passed but before the sun has risen. A faint glimmer appears on the horizon and my nervousness at being out alone in the unpeopled early morning is gradually replaced by a sense of anticipation. The darkness will soon be gone. Dawn is here and the sunrise I’ve come to see will not be far behind it.

The only sign of human life is the faint sound of distant traffic and even that recedes when I reach the top of the hill where there is more tree cover. Here it is tranquil but still far from silent. The birds make this space their own with a rush of notes that feels more of a competition than a chorus and, as the light slowly increases, they grow louder still. It is impossible for my inexpert ear to distinguish most of the individual voices, but I recognise blackbirds and robins and hear the occasional cawing of crows accompanied by the shaken cloth sound of their wings flapping. I can only guess at the rest, but I decide that today it matters not what all these birds are, only that there are so many of them singing. 

As it grows bright enough for me to make out traces of the hilly fields and meadows which the park replaced, it is not difficult to imagine that a line of taller trees could mark an ancient boundary. I walk over and lean back against the nearest of these with my eyes closed. It is a mature lime tree, its bark ridged and furrowed with age and experience. The sound of the wind in its leaves is so like gentle rainfall on dry ground that when I open my eyes, I expect to see a soft rain falling.

At this time of half-light, half-night, nothing is quite as it first appears, and the past feels closer. It is the time before this landscape was farmland that I can sense most strongly. In the twilight it is possible to replace the parkland limes and chestnuts with the woods of coppiced oak and hornbeam that covered this part of London for centuries. I think of the sights, sounds and smells of that woodland - the calls of turtle doves and cuckoos, the rich scent of wild garlic, the orchids and helleborines growing among a multitude of other plants - all long since lost to this place.

If I were a visitor in one of those earlier centuries, it would have to be necessity rather than curiosity that brought me here at this hour, something that made me desperate enough to risk the dangers of the woods at night. For even after the wolves, bears and lynx were gone, there was still the threat of robbery or worse. Perhaps I am here to search frantically for firewood to heat food for an ailing relative? Or maybe it’s to find the herbs I need to cure that relative using a knowledge of plants taught me by my mother just as she learnt it from hers. I’m sure I would know that when I find the right plants, I should take only as much as is needed so plenty are left to grow for future use. But would I stop for a moment to appreciate the wildflowers and birdsong on this fine Spring morning? Or would this experience be so commonplace and my fear so great that I would hurry home without paying them any attention? 

The high-pitched screech of a ring-necked parakeet returns me to the 21st century. I am thankful that my survival is no longer dependent on what I can gather from the woods. But I am sad too that I do not have the knowledge needed to do this anyway and sadder still that I will probably never experience a springtime woodland with quite such a variety of sound and beauty as that earlier visitor. My greatest sadness is that I live in a time and a society whose untamed desires have so changed the world, that the future of many species, including my own, is now uncertain. Even now we understand the damage we are doing to the world we don’t seem to be capable of taking only what we need. We must always have more. 

As the light grows, I think of what the future holds for this area. This is not as easy as picturing its past. Not because I cannot guess the impacts of the storms and droughts that already arrive with increasing frequency but because it is too painful to contemplate the uprooted trees and withered plants they will leave in their wake. I know I cannot ignore those threats but, as a new day starts, I focus instead on how green and vibrant the horse chestnut leaves look when backlit by the rising sun. 

***

Ruth Bradshaw works in environmental policy and has been a regular conservation volunteer for over a decade. She is currently writing a book about the value of urban wildlife which draws on both her professional expertise and her volunteering experiences. Her essay ‘Stories of Co-existence’ was recently shortlisted for the Future Places Prize and her creative non-fiction has also been published in a variety of websites and journals including Canary LitMag, The Clearing and The Selkie. When not writing or working, she can often be found in the woods near her home in South London and occasionally on twitter @ruthc_b