We see a girl with a Russian passport in an airport passport control queue. Her nails are painted yellow and blue. An old Italian hangs a Ukrainian flag on the balcony in glamorous Positano. There is an inscription on a wall with graffiti that the local punks think about Putin in dirty Naples.
Everyone who speaks Russian has heard where the Russian warship should go. While those who do not speak Russian now find a particular pleasure in learning Russian swear words, instead of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky.
In Amalfi, we get on the bus and start to circle the coast of the most beautiful place in the world. Steep cliffs hide picturesque towns and pastel-colored villages. This splendor is not just to behold. I want to breathe it into myself and not let go. Then I hear a worried female voice next to us, Hello, Andryusha, are you still in Kyiv? How is it? Have we already been bombed a lot? You know, they tell them on their TV that there is no destruction in our town! We make eye contact with her before leaving. I fold my fingers into a “V” and say Glory to Ukraine! She looks surprised and then thanks us. We get out of the bus and desperately look at the sea. The views are still breathtaking.
I would really like to write about Italy, which everyone loves so much. I can write sentences about refined Italian elegance, pasta, limoncello, palazzos, museums, and churches. I understand that it would be easy to splash out all this in one breath. I could have done it lightly before the war, but now you can’t hide from it. In whatever country you go on vacation, you can’t take your head out from the news and endless fortune-telling about when and how all this can end. What will happen to them? What will happen to us? Wherever we live, now the time will be divided into “before” and “after”. And although the last three painful weeks have been so long in this “after”, one must think that the time after the war will definitely come. We will also go to post-war Kyiv and Kharkiv. We will see that buildings and cities can be rebuilt again (word of an architect). However, repairing broken relationships will be almost impossible. How are we going to do it? In different ways, but we will surely try. Also, we will definitely travel again. We will continue to explore the world. We might be doing it differently. By learning about other people and cultures, we cease to be afraid of them and are less susceptible to rumors and myths that kindle enmity and suspicion. We tend to think that we only want relaxation, entertainment, and pleasure, but there are our travels, advice, and stories about them that help make this world more accessible, transparent, and safer. We need to get over this despair as soon as possible, do at least something to stop the war, and think about where we will go next time.