The Orphanage – Serhiy Zhadan

On this day three years ago, a tyrant with the cold of death where a heart should beat invaded Ukraine again to subjugate its land and people to his rule of fear. He has failed. He will always fail, because these people value themselves and their integrity in a way he cannot grasp. This is the aggressor’s profound and permanent defeat. An intimation of his inadequacy keeps the bloodless worm of his brain awake at night. Where another people would have crumpled, the Ukrainians have resisted the second army in the world. They love their own and to them their land is family.
 
This war started in 2014 with the illegal Russian annexation of the Crimea and occupation of Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts of the Donbas region, where fierce fighting took place. That is the setting for this book. For many Ukrainians, especially those in the border regions who had grown up thinking of the Russians as difficult but viable neighbours, who spoke Russian and shared many cultural traits with them and decades of common history, the military assault was not just murderous and destructive, it was totally disorienting.
 
In Zhadan’s book, this confusion is reflected in the absence of clear references to Russian and Ukrainian sides. For a despondent mining town used to being under one form of onerous rule for so long, the occupiers are “the new ones” and the orphanage of the title is lost to a zone of battle that it cannot win. Pasha, the everyman hero of the novel, is a meek non-combatant, a teacher with a crippled hand, whose lone attempt to reach the orphanage-boarding school and bring home his nephew, Sasha, is the relentless subject of the book. 
 
Relentless because that’s what a war zone is. The destruction of house and home, school and store, everything people have worked for, everything broken down to abandonment, burning, fear, hunger, cold, rain and snow, muck and mutual distrust, pain, bodies and wild dogs. Page after page and through it all struggles Pasha past broken buildings, evading tanks and soldiers from both sides, “an empty school, a destroyed newsstand, a bullet-riddled obelisk, scraps of metal, burnt bricks, bloody clothes,” doubtful of himself always, imagining his nephew’s angry resentment for having been sent to the Internat in the first place.
 
“They can’t see the city, but long black streams of smoke are rising from over there. They have been since yesterday; it’s as if the ground has been ruptured and now something truly terrible is coming out from the earth and nobody knows how to stop that something, the worst thing, since nobody knows how it happened, how the earth split and released all its blackness…”
 
I was surprised that Zhadan presents the pitiful disarray and havoc as a kind of inhuman phenomenon that civilians and fighters of whichever flag are caught up in, and it seems a generous, nuanced and brave move to have Pasha and Sasha aided at one point by a civilian who is one of “the others”. Especially since the writer is such a stalwart supporter of his country (last year he joined the Ukrainian army’s 13th Khartiia Brigade). We all know that there is a very clear human agency behind the aggression with a name and a pasty face, but Zhadan prefers to push past the politics and centre on the misery that all people suffer on the ground in the midst of battle and carnage.
 
“The dark sunflowers, dried out by the summer heat, look like a scorched forest” and “the moon hovering over the crushed city is spreading the smell of a body chopped to pieces.”
 
When they reach the city defenders, uncle and nephew “walk down the street among the soldiers. There are more and more of them. Black pits under their eyes. The inflamed eyes, the parched mouths, and the screams—abrasive, loud, discontented—that they let out in an attempt to communicate.”
 
Only at the end do we hear Sasha’s thoughts, and in the shot-up streets of a neighbourhood that still stands, a kind of resolution rises from the meaninglessness of the war.