In September 2022, a few days after Russian forces retreated from the Ukrainian town of Izium, I was standing outside an apartment block that had been split apart by a missile. Fifty-four residents had been killed in the Russian attack, which had taken place six months earlier. Purple and yellow wild flowers were growing in the rubble that filled the chasm between the two parts of the block.
“It is not the houses. It is the space between the houses,” I thought. “It is not the streets that exist. It is the streets that no longer exist.” The words of James Fenton’s 1981 poem A German Requiem, about selective memory in the second world war, came to me when I could no longer find my own.
