Anyone wanting to understand the geopolitical background of the current conflict in Ukraine will probably have found their head spinning at the complex history of occupation, independence and ethnic, linguistic and political divisions in this contested “borderland” region. As Victoria Belim writes in her memoir: “Ukraine, with its key position between Russia and western Europe, was always going to be a battleground for Russian imperial ambitions.” For Belim – half-Ukrainian, half-Russian, raised in Ukraine until the age of 15, when her family emigrated to the US – “making sense of Ukrainian politics was a thankless affair”.
But in 2014, with Putin’s annexing of Crimea, her feelings for her homeland grew into something more visceral. From her home in Brussels, Belim had watched footage of government forces shooting student protesters in Kyiv’s central square, where she remembered eating ice-cream with her friend as a teenager: “These bright memories flickering against the news of carnage in Ukraine were excruciating, but I sought them, conjuring up the minutest of details, the way one pressed a throbbing bruise to see how much pain one could bear.” As the conflict in Crimea escalates, she argues on Skype with her late father’s brother Vladimir, a staunch Putin supporter, and talks on the phone with her maternal grandmother, Valentina, who refuses either to discuss the war or to consider leaving Ukraine. Vladimir taunts Belim, asking, if she is such a “Ukrainian patriot”: “Why are you in Brussels and not in ‘your country’ with ‘your people’?” In the end, she decides that the only cure for the sense of dislocation brought on by the situation is to return to Ukraine in search of her family’s past.
Belim arrives in Bereh, her grandmother’s village, with a specific quest. In her great-grandfather Sergiy’s diaries, she has found one unexplained sentence, a reference to “Brother Nikodim, vanished in the 1930s fighting for a free Ukraine.” No one in the family will talk to her about this lost brother (her mother’s great-uncle), and her subsequent obsession with discovering the truth about what happened to him becomes a displacement activity: “The more I resolved to plunge into an unknown past to find Nikodim, the more my fears about the present faded.”
The Rooster House is part memoir, part historical detective story, though really it’s about the nature of memory and history in a place that has been subject to repeated attempts to erase both. Belim’s great-grandmother Asya (Sergiy’s wife) used to tell her “the past is behind us” when she begged for family stories as a child, and the author finds this attitude writ large in every bureaucratic institution she visits. Archive records of entire villages have been wiped out. “It’s as if they never existed,” she is told.
All this makes for a slow and sometimes frustrating read; Belim circles around metaphorical and sometimes literal dead ends in her search for repositories of information that may or may not exist: “I was in the post-Soviet version of the film Labyrinth and I despaired of getting out of it,” she writes, after one excursion to find the archives of the Security Service of Ukraine. All her fruitless journeys lead back to the same place: the Rooster House of the title, a building in the town of Poltava that housed, behind its elegant facade, the headquarters of the secret police in all its various iterations since Soviet times. Locals recall hearing screams coming from the basement, and as a child the author never understood why Asya would take a lengthy detour to avoid passing it.
When she finally tracks down the NKVD file on her great-great uncle Nikodim – a Ukrainian-language teacher arrested on counter-revolutionary charges – and learns his fate, she is blindsided by an unprocessed trauma closer to home. The search for her family’s distant past has been, all along, a circuitous means of facing her own much more recent history, just as digging into Ukraine’s hidden archives is an oblique way of understanding the trauma of Crimea’s present.
This personal journey carries even greater weight in 2023. “I sometimes wondered bitterly if we would be in this situation in 2022 had the world cared more about my country in 2014,” she writes in the epilogue. But her memoir stands as an eloquent tribute to the resilience and strength of the Ukrainian people.
The Rooster House by Victoria Belim is published by Virago (£20). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
