Lucky Breaks by Yevgenia Belorusets

Here, where I live now, nobody understands any of it. There’s no one I can explain to what it’s like for the lights to go out every day in a small village. How we sat around as if inside a bunker, warning ourselves by a bonfire when we managed to light one. How we were next to one another knowing that, in time, all of us would go our separate ways. We huddled against each other by the fire, but later we forgot who we sat next to, what kind of children they were, what kind of people.

To be a refugee is to live in fear of disappearance. Writer after writer--Kundera, Hrabal, Sam--speak at length about the disappearances around them, whether people, buildings, ideals, even history itself. To be displaced is to be reshaped against your will, and the ultimate act of resistance, futile as it may be, is to resist this involuntary transformation, to build new shrines, find new ways to communicate, preserve the real history by scratching it into stone, if necessary.

Not all of the people in Belorusets’ book--is it a novel, a short story collection, an experimental work?--are refugees, but all of them have found themselves displaced, either in their home country of Ukraine or out of it, by the seemingly endless aggression of the empire-mad leaders of their neighbor, Russia. Of course, everyone is talking about Ukraine now, with the current invasion ongoing, but there aren’t many dates here, a sobering reminder that what’s happening now has happened before, and will likely happen again.

The residents “interviewed” here, in these short, fictional pieces, don’t talk much about the big picture, about the endless loop of siege and unsettling peace. They’re focused on preserving what they can, or at least surviving whatever’s next. An umbrella, a trip to the cosmetologist, a meal around a campfire, a romantic liaison (one that might include the unnamed interviewer). Some of the tales here are fanciful, like the woman who can change herself into a variety of inanimate objects, or the much-feared neighborhood witch, but most are grounded, first person narratives of normal people, mostly women, caught in the endless churn of displacement.

In addition to the interviews and the somewhat obscure framing story, there are also photographs here, images that chronicle a city in decay. There are two or three sequences, and it’s often difficult to know which series each photo belongs to, by design. Sometimes even what’s depicted isn’t entirely clear--is this one a man napping in a field or a dead body?--and in that sense, the photos serve both to disorient the reader and ambiguate the interviews themselves. While the introduction, written in character by the narrator, claims there is no connection between the stories and the images, the brain makes connections anyway, places this smiling man in this sad story, this dilapidated building in this park. The stories and images both refuse closure. They stand as a concrete witness to experiences, to times, that may well disappear, be rewritten, presented with the full realization of their inability to say just what they mean.