Voices of friends from Kiev. They tell the night of Europe populated by well-defined monsters. The painful pang that immediately separates as a fault, and it is a fault, who looks from behind secure railings from who is immersed in war, from who can die. They talk and the inexorable, harsh distance between us gets longer. I know. I know that, unfortunately, they have entered what is the true dimension of the war of our time, the urban war, the war that passes over cities like a plow and isolates and deforms them. The city that is the antithesis of war, the human challenge to disorder, the dimension of a rationality made up of streets, squares, well-arranged stones. When the city loses its time, it no longer has, in space and in its days, a beginning and an end and everything is fiercely entangled. I know: the months, the years that were those of Aleppo. For example.
When I heard that Kiev was trying to resist, that it resisted, and that the Russians were not quickly planting their flags with fine writing, I thought that the terrible odyssey would begin for the inhabitants; and all those who were there, female fighters old children, would have fallen into a dimension that will force them, little by little, if they want to live, survive to carry fear with them like dirt under their shoes and to enter another human race. : that of the hostages of urban warfare. It would be wonderful if those who hold the threads of that war in their hands accepted the holy proposal of the Sant’egidio community, to proclaim Kiev an open city. And not because it holds treasures of stone and stucco but because its treasures are those who live in it. But that won’t be the case.
There. It begins: with the sirens cutting off the head of Time, of the previous one. Because you can no longer do calculations … when the bombs will arrive … if they really do arrive or if it is just luckily a false alarm … You will measure the time of day from now on between one and the other , outside the normal time. You will use those mournful sounds to stick things, memories, things done, pains suffered. Then, if the battle is long, well! then you will see that the sirens will be silent, they will no longer be needed. Because the missile or the bomb will become so everyday, eerily normal that no one would pay attention to it.
And then there is the cellar, the basement, the refuge. It is a key step. The size of the city is overturned, no longer the above the surface where people walked, ran, met people; but its bowels more or less safe, the subway but upside down because it is no longer a means of moving quickly but asylum and prison. Where being a group, a mass, being close is no longer a hasty crossing of strangers but a painful community of victims. Where you are born and die, as if it were normal to be born and die like this underground, in the underworld. The news in the cities at war immediately becomes myths that spread, of uncertain origin. The ability to absorb experiences of a normal man is limited, even when he passes through them they flow away, they do not penetrate him. In the city where war and violence have taken control, on the other hand, it multiplies, expands, deforms you. How stupid to say that in war one is alone, reduced to oneself: the expansion of one’s being, the removal of the anguish that normal life allows us to fall, causes an extraordinary sense of identity to flare up with others, with strangers.
Even in noises, war manifests its growing power. first it was airplanes and artillery, then it was the turn of machine guns and rifles. They advance. The agony will begin when even the isolated rifle shots ring out in the void like roars. It is then that Aleppo died … And you live that agony, you die with the city you notice in the sound breath that approaches: the suburbs then the neighborhood next to it, then the alley the avenue the river that seemed, just the day before !, impregnable and reassuring trench and it is already bypassed … I’m here …
Then comes the deformation of everyday geography, the battle cuts the map of yesterday’s city like a blowtorch. Before they arrived, everyone had his own mind map, an automatic map that guided him like a navigator in the car: here was his favorite street, the shop, the friends’ café, the cinema, the school. And now nothing, no longer needed, the horizon narrows and gets confused. There it is you can no longer get there, they shoot, there the neighborhood is on fire. A street. The fragment of the city where you can move and the invaders are not there, that becomes your progressively final world. There your life and your death will be at stake.
At the beginning you feel suffocated, you compare yesterday and today, you regret what is no longer possible for you. Then inexorably the first disappears because you no longer have time to think about it. Because it is a useless gesture. In the city at war you know that you have to reduce gestures and thoughts to the essential, you cannot waste energy, you cannot make mistakes. You also have to breathe your thoughts slowly because you need everything to resist until a moment longer, when they will disappear. If they disappear.
That miniaturized and distorted geography is not immobile, it oscillates like a mirage back and forth with the shifting of the countless fronts and trenches of a fragmented battle, made up of a thousand metastases. You leaf through the atlas every day, the space to survive that sometimes is reduced to the horizon of a row of buildings, a few hundred meters away. The city becomes chaos again, a forest full of snares, iron monsters, enemies. It takes courage to go unarmed, you can’t get lost if you don’t want to die. This constant tension, it seems incredible, does not make you frantic or upset. It makes you calm, meditative as if everyone, even the little ones, had suddenly matured. War lays bare the bones of character. It struck me in Aleppo, it is the same calm that I hear in the voices of friends from Kiev.
And then it’s the turn of the buildings. At the beginning they are few, they are photographed as an absurd symbol. Then they become two tens, whole streets, buildings shamelessly cut in half and the entrails are the stairs the rooms the life of those who lived there, reduced to smashed, exposed objects. And the city becomes neighborhood after neighborhood monstrously horizontal and the puffs of smoke and dust mark the progress of the battle like sand raised in a desert by frenzied winds. Then a wave of pity assails you. But it’s too late.
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