I have a prejudice about the Russians, naturally, unfounded. I think they are very intelligent people. The kind of people who know everything, who write very long books, solid as bricks, people who can order reality into categories and play the violin at the same time. I think the Russians all play some musical instrument, another prejudice, you see. Maybe that’s why, when I met Sergei a couple of weeks ago, he seemed so smart to me. I made my first Russian friend in a park in Madrid. We met watching our daughters play, who are super friends. And it seemed to me the most logical that once his natural talent had been activated, he would know what was going to happen with the war in the Ukraine.
My new friend decided to leave Russia because he wanted to experience other ways of life, other cultures. He didn’t run from anything; he simply left. He decided it when he finished his medical degree (in Russian, of course) and it occurred to him that it would be good to take the MIR — an impossible exam in your own language — in a language he had never heard. So he dedicated a year to studying Spanish and another to preparing a suffocating exam for all those who dare to face him. Today he is a neurosurgeon in a public hospital in Madrid, thanks to the fact that he got one of the best grades of that class. My prejudice swelled like a sail unfurled on the high seas as Sergei humbly told me his story in barely accented Spanish. Evidently, the second afternoon that we coincided, I couldn’t avoid asking what was already then —a few weeks ago— the question of the year. What will happen to the war in Ukraine?
My Russian friend looked at me in surprise. “Nothing’s going to happen,” he informed me. “What happens is that the European media is obsessed with Russia, but it doesn’t make any sense. My parents and my family are calm, none of this appears in the news there. My friends from Ukraine are not worried either. Russia does not want to be a superpower, it is all like a movie, but those times are over. Don’t you think? So I got very scared, which is what happens when prejudices collapse. The first reaction is never relief but fear. If a person as intelligent and rational as my new friend Sergei had no idea, not only what was going to happen but what was already happening, we might be living in the worst possible scenario. So I spoke to Sergei de Berna Gonzalez Harbour, the journalist who announced in this newspaper on January 20 that we were already (almost) at war. Also from one of the covers of the same month of the magazine The Economist, which consisted of an illustration of Putin sitting on a large throne with a Kalashnikov on his knees. “Mr Putin will see you now” was the title of the announced threat. The background of the cover was pink as bubble gum and the war seemed then an almost pop issue. Sergei didn’t flinch. “Time will tell”, was his sentence. So I thought of an old joke to console myself or perhaps to exchange one prejudice for another. The joke, which I did not tell Sergei, goes like this. “Three men in a KGB cell ask themselves: ‘And you, why are you here? For criticizing Klaus Amseck; the other: for praising Amseck, and the third: I am Klaus Amseck”. Just 15 days after our bland conversation, the worst has happened. Because not only a war has broken out but the worst possible war, one where all analysts feel like Klaus Amseck. The words “escalation”, “punishment”, “nuclear”, “collapse”, “firmness”, “dead”, “missiles” are chewed in editorials around the world. And intelligence, reason and even history are powerless to build any predictable scenario, as insufficient and useless as Sergei’s powerful intelligence when thinking about the future of his own country.
War and intelligence only have a self-serving, shallow relationship. I guess Albert Camus was right Plague. Again. “When a war breaks out, people say: ‘This couldn’t last, this is too stupid.’ And surely a war is too stupid, but that doesn’t stop it from lasting. Stupidity always insists,” Camus wrote. Once again this title on the table, once again reality has become opaque, black and indecipherable. Again the terror of uncertainty. Again accept that no one can know what is going to happen. Once again to bear the “I don’t know” sewn into our identity and our world. Again this fear and this horror. Not only compassion and empathy with those who are dying, with those who take refuge in terror in the tunnels of the Kiev metro, but also (even above all) the fear of not knowing what is going to happen, unarmed in the face of arbitrariness.
That is why Putin’s attack exceeds what is happening in Ukraine and sows war throughout the world. Because his attack breaks the predictability that we thought we had established and dynamites our system of global affability with the heaviest symbolic artillery: the sense of reality either has madness or it is not a sense of reality. Putin has managed to get Europe to say out loud “I don’t know”, so that those three words can be heard as an echo in Biden’s speech. We don’t just want to cry. Also, and above all, we want to understand. What is going to happen now? We ask newspapers, politicians, friends, analysts. And we all have to put up with the answer: “I don’t know.”
We do not know. And our bewilderment is a weapon for Putin. He plays with the biggest prejudice of the West, false like any other: believing that life is predictable and that we can project the future. We can only put up with our “I don’t know” and surrender once and for all to the evidence that language and human action have opaque zones.
I am in Madrid, safe. I tuck my daughters in at night and everything seems safe in this corner of Europe. So, one says: “Do you remember when in 2019 they said that the covid bat was never going to reach Spain?”
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