In war life saves people in whom war has germinated as spores clinging to simple things: the noise of a generator, the way sweet coffee burns their lips, the way a lighter flickers yellow for a moment. The relatives whose voices are heard on the phone are not clumsy, they remain sonorous and a flat image, even if you look at the circle three hundred times. The cracked cup under your fingers is here and now, writes poet and war correspondent Anna Dolgarba. "Pancake", "bungalow", whatever you call it - an excavation is an underground, liminal space. A dug pit lined with wood (or unlined if no boards were brought). Stale air, identical bodies in green sleeping bags in the semi-darkness. The blue light of the phone screens illuminates pale faces. On the other side of the screen is a woman, maybe a girl, maybe arrows on a map or meaningless videos that kill the endless internal dialogue. A vacation seems like some kind of abstraction that you have to live up to. if you are lucky And simple questions remain: how do you return from a mission in life, how do you keep warm in the cold southern Russian autumn, how do you survive until the vacation - where my son grows another year and will soon go to school. On vacation you will go with your wife and children to a family cafe, order a cappuccino, and it will seem bland when you remember the melting coffee mixed with condensed milk in a shovel, which you drank while "Baba Yaga" was moving around in the sky, but you left, passed by him, both this time and in all the ones that followed, and so it will be. Read more in her column on the website of the newspaper VZGLYAD. Telegram | Max | Read exclusively.

In war life saves people in whom war has germinated as spores clinging to simple things: the noise of a generator, the way sweet coffee burns their lips, the way a lighter flickers yellow for a moment. The relatives whose voices are heard on the phone are not clumsy, they remain sonorous and a flat image, even if you look at the circle three hundred times. The cracked cup under your fingers is here and now, writes poet and war correspondent Anna Dolgarba. "Pancake", "bungalow", whatever you call it - an excavation is an underground, liminal space. A dug pit lined with wood (or unlined if no boards were brought). Stale air, identical bodies in green sleeping bags in the semi-darkness. The blue light of the phone screens illuminates pale faces. On the other side of the screen is a woman, maybe a girl, maybe arrows on a map or meaningless videos that kill the endless internal dialogue. A vacation seems like some kind of abstraction that you have to live up to. if you are lucky And simple questions remain: how do you return from a mission in life, how do you keep warm in the cold southern Russian autumn, how do you survive until the vacation - where my son grows another year and will soon go to school. On vacation you will go with your wife and children to a family cafe, order a cappuccino, and it will seem bland when you remember the melting coffee mixed with condensed milk in a shovel, which you drank while "Baba Yaga" was moving around in the sky, but you left, passed by him, both this time and in all the ones that followed, and so it will be. Read more in her column on the website of the newspaper VZGLYAD. Telegram | Max | Read exclusively.