THE DESTRUCTION OF MY FATHER

My father is for the war. Amidst the sea of common grief that my country has unleashed on Ukraine and the rest of the world, including its own population, there is also my personal grief: my father, a frail old man of eighty-two, is for the war.

He is a good man and I love him. He taught me to ride a bike, to steer a kayak, to work with a saw, a chisel, and a bench plane. He is a wonderful craftsman who has been making sets for theaters and exhibition halls all his life. He is loved by my children because he plays with them and repairs their broken toys. All his life, he loved my mother tenderly and touchingly took care of her for the two years that she was dying from brain cancer.

And now he supports the war, and we practically do not talk to each other. I only ask him if he has taken his medications on time.

When my mom died ten years ago, my father was so distraught that he locked himself in his room and exited it only to eat or to go to the bathroom. He barely left the room, no more than twice a day. And there in the room, he would spend his time alone with the television.

I worked as a journalist on the Dozhd TV channel, which has now been shut down; I appeared on the Echo of Moscow radio station, which has now been shut down; and I wrote for Novaya Gazeta, which has now stopped its publication. I told my father that he should not stuff his mind with the aggressive nonsense that the official channels were transmitting. But my dad answered that he practically did not watch the news and political talk shows, but was mostly watching football and programs about animals.

I think it was not true. My dad slept poorly, and the TV was practically never turned off in his room. I suspect that in addition to the results of football games and details of the lives of whales and penguins, the TV also kept telling my father about the evil Nazis who came to power in Ukraine, the insatiable NATO that has been encircling Russia ever tightly with its military bases, the transnational corporations that have bought up all of the Russian oil, the dollar that prevents the ruble from becoming a worldwide currency, the traitor-journalists (and I was one of them) who spread lies about President Putin and his policy of returning Russia to its status as a world empire—all of this.

Several months after my mother’s death, when the pain of loss had dulled somewhat, my father started leaving his room and coming to visit us, hosting us at his place, playing with his grandchildren and talking to me. Generally, we talked about mundane things, but every once in a while, my dad would mention propaganda clichés: “the pressure from the West,” “aggressive NATO,” “values that were foreign to the Russians,” “the fifth column . . .”

“Dad, I am the fifth column!”

“You can’t be, you are just a fool,” answered my dad, disregarding the fact that his son, a famous journalist and writer, the source of his fatherly pride, is laughing as if trying to turn the brewing argument into a joke.

It seemed to me that by pronouncing these propagandist clichés my father was testing me, probing whether or not I would agree to dilute my oppositionist views with rational conformity. I did not agree, and my father retreated to the carefully prepared positions of a kindly grandfather who did not care for politics, and the only thing he cared about was fixing his youngest grandchild's broken toy car.

And so we lived until February 24, 2022. And then the war started.

In the first week, we did not talk about the war at all, as if hoping that it would end, like a bad dream. Then I started writing a book about the refugees, and upon returning from my trips to visit them I would come to my father and tell him about it. I would do it very carefully, telling only human stories without any political conclusions. I told him stories about people who have lost their homes, about the old woman who fled Mariupol in the back of a refrigerator truck, about the boy who lost his brother. My father listened to me, would feel sorry for my protagonists, but would stubbornly retort with propagandist arguments: “yes, but haven’t Ukrainians been at war in the Donbass for the past eight years?”; “yes, but hadn’t NATO surrounded Russia with military bases?”; “yes, but doesn’t the West want to force values on us that are foreign to the Russian people?” He spoke like that, and I continued telling him my stories. I hoped to touch him with human stories of suffering, to dispel the darkness of propaganda in which he lived.

Then Bucha happened. I met with a refugee from that town, where four hundred civilians died during the Russian occupation, and wrote down her story. But as soon as I began telling my dad her story, he immediately jumped up from his seat and started shouting. He has never screamed at me like that before in my life, not once in all my fifty-two years,

“How dare you! How can you even say that! How could you even think that a Russian soldier is capable of killing children and women!”

He screamed, and I was afraid that he would fall down and die from a heart attack. And it dawned on me—he understood everything that was going on. A person who does not understand and is confused by lies, in his conversations with those close to him, is still more or less inclined to ask questions, to be curious, to doubt, to present counter-arguments. But my father was screaming on the edge of despair. People behave this way when they understand the reality but cannot accept it, because accepting it is worse than death.

We are the aggressors; this is the reality. But if we are the aggressors, then what should an eighty-two-year-old man do, when he was brought up and also brought up his children to always remember the bravery of the heroes of the Second World War who went to their deaths to stop the aggressor? What does it mean “to go to your death in order to stop the aggressor,” if we are the aggressor? This means committing suicide.

My father was screaming, shaking, and dropping objects all around him, because he understood everything but could not accept the reality, for accepting that reality required either his immediate death, or a complete destruction of his identity, all of his values, all of his moral principles.

I sat in silence. And thought to myself, “God, he understands everything, God.” Then I got up, took my coat, and left the old man alone. Since then, we just call each other and talk exclusively about whether he has taken his medications.