What it means to be a city whose peace has been stolen

You will never hear it. What it feels like to be a city whose peace has been stolen. To open its dark dungeons to murderers and torturers. To let them in, as one lets poison into the body. And then carry the bodies of your people inside you like an unborn fetus.

You will not hear this pain because you do not yet know the language of the cities. The language of their long sirens. The language of drones whistling over the heads of their buildings. The language of dark silence, where everything is canceled out, and only sound and touch remain. The language of screams in the apartment on the floor below, which has become a torture chamber. The language of trembling walls, grains of dust falling from the ceilings when the last notes of the shock wave shake the glass of your windows. The language of houses turned inside out, cut in half by enemy missiles and human silence forever.

“Cities have learned to speak, or maybe scream, in silence, darkness, with their broken walls, fragments of a time that will never be. There, in their depths, among the thicket of tree roots, they keep stories that no one else will tell”

Cities have learned to speak, or maybe scream, in silence, darkness, with their broken walls, fragments of a time that will never be. There, in their depths, among the thicket of tree roots, they keep stories that no one else will tell. They give them a last refuge, warming tea for those who still have a name but no longer have a life. There, in the basements and underground hiding places, in the labyrinths of ruined corridors, under the ruins of spike buildings, is a place of eternal pain, an unstitched wound, an unhealed abyss. Cities know their secret language. They forever guard the islands where people gave away the warmth of their bodies.

The cities, mute, silent, plunged into darkness, have learned a language, their own, quiet, dark, damp, inexorable.

They will keep everything. They will not forgive anyone.

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About the author. Volodymyr Yermolenko, writer, head of PEN Ukraine

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