Before 24 February 2022, writer Oleksandr Mykhed, then 33, and his wife, Olena, had an enviable life. In 2018 they’d bought a three-storey townhouse in Hostomel, a suburb of Kyiv. On Saturdays, they’d go out for brunch – poached eggs for him, cottage cheese pancakes for her – and walk their dog, Lisa, in the forest. Their weekend ritual involved cleaning the house, and for Mykhed, that often meant being pleasurably distracted by one of their many books. Life was full of things to look forward to: tickets for a Nick Cave concert; his new book, on classic Ukrainian authors, nearly finished. On weekend evenings they’d cook something delicious. Olena was perfecting her shrimp curry.
Just over two years later, I meet Mykhed at a Georgian cafe near Kyiv’s central railway station. He’s late because of an air raid alert: when the siren’s sour notes rise through the rush-hour bustle, Kyvians, as usual, look at their phones, discover it’s just planes loaded with ballistic missiles taking off in Russia, and by and large decide to get on with life. When Mykhed arrives, wearing a hoodie and cargo pants, he looks pale and tired, his once floppy blond hair shaved to a scalp-revealing military buzzcut. He volunteered for the armed forces as soon as the full-scale invasion started. He’s not allowed to tell me anything about his service, except that he’s just back after an exhausting 40-day training exercise. What he can tell me is that his old life is irretrievably lost. “I live with the feeling that I don’t have a past. I live with the feeling that I don’t have a future. I feel like my memories don’t belong to me,” he says. He doesn’t even know how old he is, he says – 36, officially. The war has made him feel both way older than that, and way younger.
