my war
NoonApril 12, 2022 – 08:21
from Eduardo Cicelyn
Nadia from a small town in western Ukraine. Her children live not far from Lviv. When she separated from her first husband, a bad guy, she moved to Naples to support the family. She comes to my house three times a week to do housework. After a long time, about fifteen years or so, a certain confidence was created between us. I consider her a family person. I cannot forget that it was she who removed the wedding ring from my wife’s ring finger on her deathbed, placing it in my hands with a very natural gesture, like an affectionate duty, without emphasis, without awe. I thought that this blond, stout, sweet-eyed woman was familiar with the things of life far deeper and more serene than I could have ever hoped to achieve. She comforted me. When necessary, I worked hard to solve some bureaucratic or health problems.
The morning that came to me out of breath, in tears, shocked by the news that I had heard on television and that it had reached her like a surface-to-air missile from her children in Ukraine, I realized that her war concerned me closely. For the first time, after having listened to the sounds and seen the images of so many conflicts for more than thirty years now, I realized that I was sharing feelings of fear and anguish with a real person, bombed, invaded, worried about himself for the her.
Since that tragic 24 February every morning, when Nadia arrives home, I do not fail to question her by participating in her moods and trying to be helpful by reasoning in a positive way. Her son, a computer scientist, was immediately co-opted to join a kind of digital militia, the daughter with a small child displaced in the countryside, while the son-in-law joined the army. Having overcome the initial bewilderment, Nadia, decidedly anti-Russian although she does not like Zelenskii very much, of whom she suspects a certain subjection to the USA, showed herself full of warlike spirit, animated by an authentic patriotism.
A couple of weeks after the outbreak of the conflict she explained to me that she had been trained as a girl in the use of weapons and that, if they called her back, she would not hesitate to return home to take up the Kalashnikov. Then the new husband left as a volunteer from Naples and Nadia was left alone to navigate between work and volunteer work, increasingly anxious, increasingly at the mercy of the images of death that come to us and to her like deadly splinters. Meanwhile, as time goes by, I am realizing that the ferocious news he reports to me from time to time are identical to those available to us in the newspapers, on TV and on social networks, yet I do not see in his sweet eyes the signs of terror that I would feel. if, living thousands of kilometers away, I knew of atrocities perpetrated in my home, indeed it almost seems to me that you are getting used to thinking that the war will not stop, that we will have to resist for a long time, that the reasons of your people will sooner or later win.
Nadia is as if hardened. Maybe I’m wrong, I don’t know, but I understand that from the point of view of the real people involved it is much clearer that this policy too. Ugly and dirty, but still political. And I begin to wonder if instead of igniting too many propaganda fuses, we Western Europeans try to understand the reasons and feelings of the bad guys, putting our hands where it hurts the most for everyone, Russians and Ukrainians, we shouldn’t stop playing fans for be more rational and perhaps more useful in resolving the conflict.
I consider Nadia and the Ukrainians to be European people, but I think the same of the Russians. I wonder how there can be an idea of Europe that does not contemplate the homeland of Dostoevsky, Malevich, Stravinsky. To begin with, I would say that this is not a war against Europe, but a war within Europe. As was the one in the former Yugoslavia, in which we happily participated, bombing here and there.
For some days I have often talked about it with Nadia, who does not entirely agree. And I understand it. But I persist in thinking that pacifism without ifs and buts in the current historical conjuncture is only ideology, that is, a bad conscience. As Giuseppe, an intellectual friend of mine stationed in the Jerry bar in Pollica, says, here we seem to have gone from the “No Vax” to the media persecution against the “No Pax”, who are the intellectuals infected by the Russian influence. Among other things, Nadia is not a pacifist. she is a fighter. You have political will and ideas. And I am sure that there is also a Nadia from some Muscovite province who is equally warlike and motivated. Here we can only imagine it because she took us nasty against Putin, who is not really nice, but we continue to know nothing of the real Russians, those who are svangano living normal lives. On the other hand, we are very busy hunting down four runaway oligarchs, because they make the news full of money and women as they are.
In short, there is the suspicion that the war will not stop agitating the West even when it is understood if and how we can do without the raw materials imported from Russia, many in the hands of the government and its courtiers scattered here and there. It will stop for a while perhaps, but only when the Americans are fed up with their propaganda booty and the new energy contracts they will feed on us. Eventually, Nadia will continue to do housework, her husband the plumber, her son the computer engineer and her daughter will come home with her baby, so I want to wish. Ukrainians and Russians, however, will insist on giving them a good reason. The only hope, I repeat, that Russia will stop thinking of itself as a separate universe and that Europe will take its own destiny in hand, realizing that it cannot do without that great, fantastic world that has been separated for too long. Sooner or later I’ll ask Nadia for her opinion. She certainly matters more than mine today.
April 12, 2022 | 08:21
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