Lucky Breaks by Yevgenia Belorusets

War disarms? War takes away hope and meaning, makes everything grey, and sucks life out of the city and the street, leaving nothing?

What do you mean? War is a great help for us. It provides us distraction from ourselves. It absolves us from seeing ourselves close up. It's been some time now that we've been peeking into ourselves through war only.

In one story from Ukrainian writer and photographer Yevgenia Belorusets' Lucky Breaks, "The Transformations," a woman named Olga makes things transform: a pot of kasha becomes a flower; a tablespoon becomes an Easter egg. Sometimes Olga transforms objects intentionally and sometimes by accident, sometimes her powers fail her. These transformations have something to do with Kyiv in the summer months, when it "empties out"; Kyiv, too, is liable to be transformed. Are Olga's transformations merely a kind of change, or a disappearance--what happened to the kasha and the tablespoon anyway? Are they gone, or merely different? Could Olga's transformations represent the power of war to transfigure and erase--the war that rages in the distant provinces of Donbas and Donetsk? Or might we read Olga's powers as a hopeful gesture, of an incipient ability to make the world into what one wishes?

As Brent noted in his review, Lucky Breaks is all about disappearances, about refugees. Women disappear from their jobs and then reappear later as if nothing is happened; they are taken away because they are found standing in the middle of street screaming. The grand motions of war and dispossession, for Beloruts, find expression in small things: the discarded umbrella that a woman chastises as if it were a person, the mitts of the witch who catches babies in them, and who works other kinds of evil magic on her small town. Nearly all of the characters are women, and they live small women's lives. They are cosmetologists and florists, and the pointed ordinariness of their lives is not erased by the emergence of small and fantastic things, curses and omens, bits of magical realism that reflect, perhaps, the strangeness of life during wartime.

To be honest, I didn't connect much with Lucky Breaks. I liked a few of the stories, like "The Transformations," and another about a perpetually sick woman who is unable to handle the stress of being suddenly and consistently well. Others were enigmatic, too shapeless or slight, to hold my attention, but if I'm telling the truth, I probably ought to have read them at a time when I was feeling less sleepy. The photographs that appear throughout its pages connected for me not at all. More knowledge of the specifics of the war in Ukraine might have helped, too, but there is still quite a power in seeing the familiar names of the nightly news--Kharkiv, Donetsk, Zaporizhzhia--emerge as real places from which real people emerge, or disappear.

This is the first book I've ever read from Ukraine--which brings my "countries read" list up to 74.

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.