Pockets of light

Kharkiv’s people find their light - even amid the darkest nights.

Central Kharkiv

My friend messages to say he is so sorry he can’t meet up: ‘last night a missile hit near our building - I am okay but I am now busy installing windows and doors’. This is the kind of message you get from friends in a city less than 20 miles from the Russian border. Instead, I got a lift to a new coffee shop in Izyum, a badly damaged city on the road from Kharkiv to Sloviansk. Dima Kabanets, from Makers Coffee, managed to build the site in just three days: it is a cool and beautifully designed space next to a men’s clothing shop with some chairs and tables set out on the pavement to catch the last of the late summer sun. It happened to be the second anniversary of Izyum’s liberation, when Ukrainian soldiers freed the city from Russian occupation - later finding the horrific evidence of the occupiers’ war crimes. Izyum has been left scarred and battered by the long and violent months of fighting. A block of flats on the way into town has been riven completely in two by a Russian missile strike, walls are disfigured by shrapnel and fire, long-ago shattered windows gape into the dust and darkness of what once were people’s homes.

Makers in Izyum

We pulled up outside the Makers Coffee shop, which was bright and clean and busy. It became even more busy after Dima’s dad Serhii unloaded the car, with boxes of new supplies fresh from the cafe in Kharkiv. A queue quickly formed for slices of Basque cheesecake and warm chocolate croissants and large sticky buns filled with creamy frosting and sour cherries. Two young women with an energetic small boy sat at a table in the corner, sharing a plate of buns. A group of young men lined up for iced coffee tonics and takeaway cups of flat white. There was a small exhibition on display called Next: I Will Get My Life Back; photographs and verse by the poet and soldier Maksym ‘Dali’ Kryvtsov, who was killed in battle in January this year. The images, which were curated a month before he died, were all about light, sunny days and golden rays, even amidst the violence of war. Light never ends, said the text alongside the photos, and it begins inside the human heart. 

Cool and modern

I had just finished some cheesecake and excellent filter coffee at Makers, but Serhii wanted to show me his favourite spot in town. ‘You like pies?’ he asked. ‘With cabbage? Follow me.’ We walked across the main road to a group of corrugated iron clad buildings, and found a door hidden around the back. ‘The best pies around’ he said, ushering me into a small, narrow canteen full of people eating at a row of tables, with a chalked up menu on the wall behind the counter. There were many soups, buckwheat and meat dishes and all kinds of pies, nothing more expensive than 40 hryvnias - equivalent to less than a pound. Serhii ordered a selection and we walked back to the car, eating thick flat pies filled with savoury potato, and pampushky rolls brushed with herbs and garlic oil. A proper Izyum lunch before the long drive home, past the block posts and across the temporary bridge and around the bumpy detour through the woods, past the signs warning of the danger of mines. There are mostly military vehicles on the road, ambulances with lights flashing, driving at top speed.

Potato pies!

We did not visit the other Makers a few miles north in the besieged city of Kupyansk: shelling ripped a hole through it just a couple of weeks ago and Ulyana, the barista, suffered what she called an acute stress reaction. Not that it stopped the team there reopening again as soon as they had cleared up the mess. Unbreakable people.

What to say about Kharkiv? The air alarm has sounded at least a dozen times today, for hours at a time, but nobody even registers it anymore. We are eating an early dinner at an Italian place, sitting at an outside table, when another siren starts up, but the skies are quiet and it seems the missiles are heading elsewhere in the region. There will be people in a bathroom or a hallway who will hear a screech overhead that is impossibly loud and unnervingly close, clutching cats wrapped in blankets, cuddling children close. Or like my friend, woken abruptly at three in the morning by a missile falling across the street, shattering his windows and doors. It was heartbreaking to see the video he posted that night: he should be posting about hope, about life, about building things for the future, about comfort and laughter, not a battered room littered with broken glass.

Alternative drive-thru

The city is unnaturally dark at night without street lights and with so many empty homes, but there are pockets of light where small groups of young people have gathered. They crowd around tables outside a couple of coffee shops, or sit on the steps leading down to underground bars. McDonalds has not reopened for business in such a risky place, but behind one shuttered branch my friend sees lights and goes to investigate. Some food trucks have set up where there once was a McDonalds drive-thru, and now you can buy bubble tea and sushi burgers and sit in the car park on a folding chair. At least there is life there, and young people who have gravitated like butterflies towards the bright pool of light.

Near the apartment, we walk down one of these enticing staircases into a bar, because my friend wants a cocktail. I order herbal tea, which is served in a thermos flask so that it will stay properly hot. The waitress asks me ‘are you not scared to be here in Kharkiv?’ ‘Of course,’ I say, ‘anyone would be’.  I drink the hot tea, my friend has her cocktail, and we head home in good time before the 11pm curfew. It is profoundly unsettling in these pitch black streets, while GPS is scrambled to confuse Russian drones, and if I was on my own it would be impossible to find my way. I message my other friend, the one with the damaged flat: ‘if there’s anything I can do to help, let me know..’  and check Telegram again. ‘Отбой’ it says in Ukrainian - all clear.