By Anonymous
You might think that war isn’t a time for finding love. With all this death and destruction going on around you - Lviv was hit by a series of missiles or drones or something last night causing more deaths - people spend their time worrying for loved ones and relatives, particularly the men who may be on the front line where mortality rates are very high. So when people haven’t heard from their relatives frequently - and this can happen a lot when working on the front line, when there isn’t much cellphone contact and the masts can be down and you may not hear from loved ones for days or weeks at a time as they proceed to frontline positions and back again - with all this going on you’d be forgiven for thinking that their is only anguish and despair. Likewise, every time you hear of a civilian atrocity by the Russians where you have friends or relatives, there is a rattle and buzz of mobile telephones as people check to ensure that their loves ones are alright. People I barely know have sent me messages asking me whether I am okay when I am in the latest danger zone - and I am there a lot, spending much of my time tramping up and down the front line.
Nevertheless there is much love to be found in times of war, because the situation is so intense and the usual dating rituals and courtesies can be only be barely adhered to. People want to incur a semblance of normality in their lives and they want to enjoy moments of fun and frivolity and they want to dress up and fall in love and make friends and they do all of these things with an increased intensity of passion. So simple interactions turn into deep and romantic ones, between people who would never have met one another before, and no doubt that is one way Ukraine will repopulate and integrate itself into the European community of nations once this ghastly war is brought to an end.
So I’m not going to write about Donald Trump or the EU or NATO or anything like that and instead I’m going to think about the feeling of those first steps in falling in love amidst intensity in conflicts and getting ready for a date during an electricity blackout and taking a date to the opera and it was a well known operetta, Die Fledermaus, translated into a Ukrainian version in which the “bad guys” (there aren’t really any bad guys in Die Fledermaus; it’s a farce) were painted as Russians and the whole thing went out of control and turned into twirls of dancers which is what Ukrainians are good at but isn’t really what Die Fledermaus is about either. Also the operetta doesn’t translate well out of the original German and it was adapted to a juvenile Ukrainian sense of humour so the whole thing was completely ghastly.
Despite wearing my best James Bond white villain suit for the front row I had to put my foot down and said to my date that I wouldn’t be listening to any more of this crap and we left after Act II / III. Thank the Lord for small mercies that she agreed; the Opera House was having power cuts and it looked perilously like they were running out of bottles of cheap cognac to disburse to thirsty customers at the numerous intervals. Instead we thought we'd go out and get to know one another and that was much more successful than sitting in a concert hall powered dimly by noisy generators. And then I felt those first feelings of being in love. My date hadn’t been out much since the beginning of the war had interrupted her life but she has an educated liberal woman who had found her own coping mechanisms and I took her to a dirty, dingy dive of a bar where she was perfectly happy meeting all my strange friends and talking nonsense with me. And through the beer glasses and the unusual cocktails and my indiscreetly smoking an e-cigarette without letting any smoke emerge (warning: it's impossible), I felt the emotional chemicals in my brain flowing and I realised I was falling in love. These things can always come to an erratic halt in wartime, and I don’t mean to belittle all the suffering and pain that most people are going through every day in living through this ghastly conflict.
Nevertheless I had my moment of bliss as the feeling of love crossed my lips, and I fell asleep contented and calm, amidst the blare of air raid sirens as my wedding bells and the bombs and drones as part of the church choir. It is possible to find happiness even during war, and for a moment last night I was lucky enough to do that.