FRIDAY, JUNE 21, 2024
Crimea
Claudio Ferrufino-Coqueugniot
Fifteen years ago, more or less, we watched with Ligia, in Aurora, the Russian film Roads to Koktebel (Boris Khlebnikov and Aleksei Popogrebsky, 2003). Usual Slavic nostalgia, crossroads of life between past and future, misery or living with a certain decency. Nothing better for this than this small and beautiful corner of Crimea on the Black Sea coast, whose name in Tatar means “land of blue hills”, not far from a city that has always been mythical for me: Feodosia.
While in Odessa, going down the stairs, I walked through the Greek park and looked at the land on the other side of the sea. I know he was wrong, that it was neither Crimea nor Türkiye but dreams do not need to become realities. Coming from Istanbul at night, marveling at the Bosphorus from the sky, I landed at the modest airport of the “pearl of the Black Sea”, an urban conglomerate of tenements where Benia Krik hid, streets of Isaac E. Babel, my author favorite. The suitcases did not arrive and for a moment anger dominated; Then I calmed down, with my briefcase I had enough for a couple of days. Gray, as I remember, the primary color of that airfield. The taxi drove near waters shining in the darkness, wooded spaces until reaching the hotel on an illuminated corner. Under a lantern, in front, prostitutes gathered and approached the stopped cars and left in them towards the office.
Maybe midnight already but I went out anyway. I went down the avenue that descended to the center. Orthodox golden bulbs on the right side. Closed businesses, garbage cans on every block, it didn't give the impression of a dirty city. I returned to my large bedroom and slept very well. Anastasia would come at eight. Hotel Alarus, I keep small souvenirs, a soap, a card. It will soon be six years and not much has changed in silence. He said in a chat yesterday how much he thought about Ukraine. It wasn't just literature, not just history. Some lost gene out there has all this unambiguously present. I would be in the ships of Herodotus, heritage of Panaït Istrati... Someone would be grilling shashliks in the Moldavanka or drunk with imagination I would stagger. Pupils of epic, romance, pain.
The next morning the Euxine Bridge. Of course I was focused on Anastasia's red-haired beauty, and yet I was distracted, left and right, distracted. Her hair was a perfect garnish for the aroma that floated like orange blossom. As I said, the land on the other side: Crimea, Turkey, I didn't want to know more, nor to have my mistake clarified. Song of boatmen, sharpening of blades. Now that I remember and mourn substantive losses, I do not let the outlook darken; I am in Odessa, a dream port and I soak up its magnificent dew. I caress the bronze that represents Babel and I assume that I have begun another life, that I put orchids on my dead dead and cucardas on my living dead. Nothing will be the same, I have to return here soon, buy a house, fade into illusions, or feel that I am no longer. But the war began. Thunder of cannons, Mongol soldiers storming through the streets of Chernihiv, bombs around the statues, renewal of sounds present for a thousand years, martyrdom to which I am alien by birth and empathetic by reading. I was ready, I would move to Zhitomir, or to Kamenyets, to Poltava recently, but objects explode, they look like fierce yellow chrysanthemums in the middle of the darkness.
When I visited the country, Crimea no longer belonged to Ukraine, it had been invaded and ceded by the Western powers with eternal cowardice. Ukraine should never have abandoned its nuclear bombs. After the United States and Russia, before China, it was the country that preserved the largest number of them. He will have to rebuild them, he has plenty of technical capacity, and in the world that appears those terrible metal teeth will be the only ones to stop the infected slime of putines and other animal species.
I read almost daily the analyzes of an optimistic American general. Russia
is heading into the ditch, finally; For him Crimea is the key, it will be the breaking of the tin tsar's back. He's on his way to it. Koktebel has another name today, Russian of course. He is no longer the sand-sea that he dreamed of Marina Ivanovna Tsvetaeva, Osip Mandelstam and Andrey Bieli. Ilya Ehrenburg lived there and remembered her in his memoirs. He hid in his hills from the pogroms that ravaged kyiv. I suppose that from its beach you can see the Turkish coast. There are no tourists in Koktebel today. After ten years of the invasion of Crimea by Vladimir the Short and it becoming a Russian summer paradise, the wind of history has returned. May the war-wraiths of the Khanate rise to the mouth of the Sea of Azov and destroy the cursed bridge. For them, the Tatars, like the Ukrainians, Russia has weighed on them like an anvil. It must be sunk forever in the waters, to the bottom from which it will never emerge.
Nabokov says in his story The Harbor : “He dreamed that he was an officer again, that he walked through the Crimean hills covered with oak and milkweed bushes, cutting down the velvety heads of thistles as he went.” So will those with slanted eyes whose land it was, and the Ukrainians who fought them and allied with them for centuries too. Violence, carousel of bloody horses. A ship is waiting, I know, in next February or in March a year from now. Today he told Omar about trips from Odessa to Crimea, to the site of the Holy Gate, to Edirne (Adrinopolis) where Mehmet's armies are enlisted, to the gypsy industry of Bulgaria, to Romania, to that point through which one can penetrate to Moldovan magic and continue without rest.
I want to write about gutted Russians, about turtle-shell tanks that tiny drones penetrate and set on fire in hell. I wish with mad impetus to see the
rolling head of the tyrant but no, I prefer to engross myself in that coast that, seen from Odessa, I thought was Crimea. They were not blue hills; of indigo can be transformed if I want. For the end of the war. For Ukraine.
The Soviets shot the poet Nicholas Gumiliev, husband of Anna Akhmatova. Vladimir Nabokov writes to him:
“You have died with pride and clarity, as the Muse taught you. Now in the calm of Elysées he talks with you about the copper horseman and the African winds – Pushkin.” Like Nabokov, I am nostalgic for the Russia I loved. Like him, I sigh for “dark Russia.” For this reason I wish that it perishes, that from the Kharkiv border, looking towards Voronezh, the smoke of the end of the world will dissipate. Maybe then I can take a train to Tambov, go to Penza, to the green meadows as my friend Semen, Simon, described in 1993. I will invite the daughters to visit me, take them to the Crimea and tell them about history, about frustrated cavalry charges and beautiful Roksolanas kidnapped in Ruthenia to be sold to the sultan. We will watch the twilight while we pour local white sparkling wine, the famous Shampanskoye Krimskoye, into crystal glasses. I will open a book and on the second page I will fall asleep. I will listen to the sound outside when I wake up: the war is over. There is only the dark sea and ancient Greek sailors sing in chorus praises to Aphrodite.
06/20/2024