In 2014, Victoria Belim came across a strange entry in her great-grandfather Sergiy’s notebook: “Brother Nikodim, vanished in the 1930s fighting for a free Ukraine.” Who was Nikodim? She had never heard the family talk of him. And why had he vanished? The mystery was made more urgent by Vladimir Putin’s annexation of Crimea and the renewed fight for a free Ukraine. Having left the country at the age of 15, first for the US, then to settle in Brussels, Belim desperately missed it. And now she had a reason to go back: not just to visit her grandmother Valentina but to discover the truth about Nikodim.
Valentina lived in a village in central Ukraine, where Belim had spent happy years as a child, and was delighted to have her granddaughter back. But whenever she was asked about the past, she shrugged it off: “Now we must think about the future.” She avoided mention of the current war, too, except to complain that it had pushed up food prices. Her one preoccupation was her garden, in particular her cherry orchard, and she harassed Belim to help out.
