Trip to Kharkiv : From The Rooster House

The news of another Russian attack shook me, because it touched Kharkiv and claimed more than 50 lives. I couldn’t read the news without breaking down in tears. Kharkiv is Ukraine’s second-largest city, located in the northeast of the country. It’s about an hour by train by Poltava, and in my family’s geography, Kharkiv has a special place. That’s where my grandmother Valentina studied at the university, met her future husband Boris and had my mother. I wanted to give you our personal sense of this luminous city by sharing an excerpt from my book, The Rooster House. The scene describes our return to Kharkiv for Valentina to discover it after many years away and for me to discover yet another mystery.

Kharkiv was waking up to the rustle of the street cleaners’ brooms, the melodic whine of trams speeding down narrow alleys and the glare of the morning sun. Valentina and I took a bus from the train station, crossed a bridge over a muddy river and drove past old buildings draped in advertisements for manicures, beer on tap and legal help. The imposing blocks of the Soviet novostroiki, literally ‘new buildings’ that were no longer new, sidled up next to modern churches that aimed to look old.

Despite the changes the city had undergone since Valentina was a student, I could easily imagine what she must have felt on her first visit. Kharkiv had neither the splendour of Kyiv nor the bucolic charm of Poltava, but it had grandeur. The buildings were massive; the streets were wide; the monuments outsized. Kharkiv was also a town of memorial plaques. On every corner, a hero had died and a poet had penned a verse. I also noticed many blank spots where plaques had been removed. Some heroes were heroes no longer.

‘Do you want to have breakfast first?’ I asked Valentina when we reached the city centre. Our train to Kharkiv was too early in the morning for breakfast and my grandmother was so preoccupied with the trip that she had eaten very little the day before. We selected a cafe on Sumska Street in Kharkiv’s centre and sat down near a window overlooking the wide avenue. Valentina glanced around, pointing out the new buildings and lamenting the state of the old ones.

‘But at least the food is much better than in the days of my youth,’ she said, tasting the apple pancakes we ordered for breakfast. They were layered with fluffy mounds of soured cream and dusted with confectioner’s sugar. ‘When I was a student, this place used to be a diner, and you could get a sugar bun and a glass of kefir for a few kopeks.’

The pancakes were fragrant with cinnamon and vanilla, and ravenous after our train journey, we ate them greedily.
‘I met Nikolai, Nikodim’s son, here,’ Valentina said. ‘That’s how I learned of his father’s existence.’

My fork fell on the floor, splattering the tablecloth with soured cream. ‘I was still a high school student when I went to Moscow to visit my friend Aniuta. There I met her brother Vania. He was my first love.’ Valentina either didn’t notice my agitation or pretended to ignore it. I had not mentioned Nikodim’s name since our explosive conversation a year ago, and Valentina’s unexpected revelation blindsided me. I also didn’t understand what Valentina’s paramour had to do with Nikodim, and since I grew up hearing so much about my grandparents’ love for each other, the idea of Valentina being infatuated with someone else made me forget the original topic. ‘You had a first love! What
about Grandpa Boris?’

Valentina laughed and waved to the waitress to bring me another fork.

‘It was different. Vania and I exchanged letters, and when I was already a university student, he came to visit me in Kharkiv. Because he couldn’t afford a hotel and I couldn’t invite him to my room, he slept on a bench in the zoo. What’s more, I went to visit Vania in Leningrad, where he was studying at the Nakhimov Naval School. I sold a few cuts of silk that Asya had given me and bought a train ticket.’ Valentina giggled and savoured her own mischievousness. ‘And Asya never learned about it!’

Then the letters from Vania stopped. Valentina assumed that the young man became bored with their long- distance relationship and had found someone else, but she was too proud to write to him and ask for an explanation. ‘But something could have happened to him, or the letters could have been lost,’ I suggested.

Valentina and Boris, Kharkiv, 1957

Except fromVictoria Belim, The Rooster House, Virago, 2022. All rights reserved.

Photography by Bois de Jasmin