THE NON-LIVING AND THE DEAD
Since February 24, that accursed day, I’ve been muttering incessantly to myself: “Children, only children are alive, and we are dead, dead long ago.”
Nowadays, these two lines by Fyodor Sologub have definitely ceased being a mere poetic metaphor, having morphed into a medical diagnosis, a harsh assertion.
The very second the so-called president Putin gave his order to start the war against Ukraine was the end of Russia, and all of us. All of the Russian adult population died.
Many of us, far too many, ignore or simply choose to ignore it, busy having fun at restaurants and cafés; dreaming of summer holidays; obediently putting up the Nazi ‘Z’ in public places; growling at sons and daughters who get their feet wet stepping into spring puddles; making love; grimly staring at each other in the morning subway . . . . Nevertheless . . . . Should you take a closer look, you will see that all of this commotion is a general inertia. Impulses, sent by a dying brain to the dying limbs, get the people moving, twitching, as they try their damnedest to emulate life. While the truth is that all of us are “dead, dead long ago.” Similar to a chicken, with its head chopped off, making a few desperate steps across the yard before dropping dead down on the wet, muddy soil.
This is not a slip of a tongue or a show-off when I say we instead of them, I deliberately choose to do so, because even those Russians who express their outrage in their kitchens, who gather up all of their courage to post a daring text on Facebook or Telegram, or even myself, typing these words on my computer—we are all dead, we are dead fully and irrevocably. Because they (we!) lack the courage to take to the streets, justifying this weakness with taking care of our beloved ones (oh, how will they do without us!), while in the meantime, this very moment, our cowardice, our way of taking care of our families (of ourselves, to be honest!) culminates in bloodshed, in Ukrainian cities being destroyed, in people being killed, in the triumph of death and decay over life.
What is there left for us to hope for? Those children who are still ‘alive’? Nonetheless, childhood, as Platonov had once grieved, cannot be rigid. One day children will grow up to become us, the zombies, the dead acting as alive and flourishing people, to the astonishment and terror of the whole world.
Translated by Snark