It told the story of my first months in Germany after leaving St. Petersburg, and of my attempts to grasp the reality of a war that had just begun.
Through that text, I tried to gently immerse myself in my own past, to peel back the layers of what I had lived and remembered—hoping to uncover meaningful markers I could use to rebuild something new.
I wrote that piece in a hotel in Bonn, not leaving my room for hours, rewriting sentences, snacking on quark and apricots, taking repetitive pictures of the view from my window. The images were nearly identical—but not quite so. Finding the differences was endlessly fascinating. Was the train passing or not? Were clouds moving, or was the sky still, a steady blue? Had a massive construction crane appeared outside, or was the hotel still the tallest building around?
In the evenings, I would walk along the Rhine or head into town to discover new bars in the former capital of West Germany. Some days, during the UN climate talks (held in the old Bundestag building), I’d step out from conference halls—each filled with the national symbols of different countries arranged alphabetically—into the inner courtyard’s green lawn, facing the same river. I’d speak to old and new acquaintances in an atmosphere of total disorientation.
Why was I there? Why did I stay so long? What were my goals? These wandering days, seemingly aimless at the time, turned out to be crucial—a quiet kind of groundwork, perhaps even a starting point.
I returned to Bonn in June 2024.
1.
One evening, all hotel guests are evacuated. A siren blares over the intercom, instructing us to leave our rooms immediately—there’s talk of some danger. I exit via the emergency stairs; by the fountain in the garden, a crowd has gathered. Some are wrapped in towels, fresh from the pool (not a situation I’d envy). A group of colleagues is drinking wine with ice cream and strawberries, still unaware of what’s going on. I relay the bits of news I picked up inside. Police arrive. There’s commotion indoors, people peering through windows from the outside. We wait. What could be happening? False alarm, it turns out. Just an unexpected turn of events that evening. Elsewhere in the world, this might have meant something very different.
At some point, a man in a wheelchair appears at our table. He asks about what is happening inside. My colleagues offer him wine. He is lively, joking in bright English. The police never come out. No one’s allowed back in. Everyone wants to go inside—it’s the start of the UEFA Euro 2024, and people want to watch the match in the lobby, on the big screens, to cheer together.
Our guest laughs and slaps his knees.
I look at him and can’t believe the coincidence.
Two years ago, I had written this:
Late at night, by the hotel entrance, I ask a man in a wheelchair for a cigarette. When he finds out that I am from Russia, he starts talking to me in Polish. Actually, he is from Qatar. He is engaged in the development of Paralympic sports and he came here for a few weeks to visit the International Paralympic Committee. He learned Polish because he likes the language. He was in a car accident 20 years ago and has been unable to walk since. We talk a lot about the war, he keeps patting me on the knee saying that I must be strong, I can be strong, I can walk, and I can make a future, a different future.
And now, here he is again. He doesn’t recognize me. He seems a little flustered. He wants to go back inside. I hand him a glass of wine and begin to speak. I tell him we had met here two years ago, I tell him he works in Paralympic sports, he speaks Polish, he had been in an accident. I tell him his story. He is stunned. He listens in disbelief. He doesn’t remember our meeting.
I excuse myself and go back to my room. The hotel reopens. The police have gone. It was, after all, just a false alarm. “Maybe someone lit a cigarette,” one staff member says.
I haven’t told him the most important thing, I think. I need to go back down. I do —and I find him in the lobby, half-asleep to the sound of the match on TV. I gently touch his knee.
“Listen, I wanted to thank you for your words back then. They meant a great deal to me. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. It was really, really important to me.”
He takes my hand and rolls toward the bar. I walk beside him.
“Gin?” he asks.
I nod.
The bartender speaks to him in Arabic. He doesn’t want to serve us.
My companion insists.
The bartender gives in and asks for my room number in German. My companion tries to charge the drink to his room, but the bartender refuses. He doesn’t seem to approve of us drinking that night.
I charged the gin to my room. The bartender doesn’t serve my companion anything.
I take just a sip—enough to taste the ice and bitterness—and discreetly passed the glass to my friend under the bar. He looks drowsy again.
He says he is beginning to forget things.
I nod and thank him again.
Time to leave—again. To ride the glass elevator up, watching the floors fall away beneath me. To step into the long, lamplit hallway that always looks the same, day or night, timeless. To return to the room. To glance out of the window as a train passes by.
Something is over.
Let us go then, you and I, When the evening is spread out against the sky Like a patient etherized upon a table; Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets, The muttering retreats Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells: Streets that follow like a tedious argument Of insidious intent To lead you to an overwhelming question ... Oh, do not ask, “What is it?” Let us go and make our visit.
At the Kunstmuseum Bonn, in June 2024, there is an exhibition titled Aufbruch in die Moderne – A Break into Modernity. Early 20th-century artists, particularly from the Rhenish Expressionist circle, are shown alongside wall-texts describing the political, social, and technological transformations of those decades.
Following the exhibition’s chronological layout, we see how the decades gave rise to inventions, how they accumulated and replicated. A new infrastructure emerged—railways, electricity, automobiles. Everything grew, everything expanded. One station claimed to be the world’s largest—until a bigger one was built. Ships, planes, electrified streets.
Everyone and everything is transported by the untiring railway. Countless locomotives convey an unbroken succession of raw materials, goods and people into the city; in the opposite direction, a few persons make their way to summer resorts—they travel to lakes or up into the mountains.
… In contrast to preindustrial travel which, in following the course of rivers and mountain ranges, nestled up against the natural contours of landscapes, railroads cut like an arrow through spatial contexts with their disrupting tunnels and bridges. [1]
Then come the disasters. A tanker sinks. A passenger ship goes down. A railway bridge collapses. A power station explodes.
Such preindustrial catastrophes as storm floods or lightning flashes were natural phenomena, whereas catastrophes unleashed by humanity or technology are of an entirely different kind—a cigarette casually tossed away, a train that jumps the tracks. Here technical apparatuses and machines turn against themselves and engage in self-destruction.
The way people live and work begins to change too.
The increased burden of work and the monotonous, clock-driven labor in factories requiring punctuality and advance planning accelerate the pace of life on the one hand and drain the worker’s energy on the other. The ensuing paradox of agitation and exhaustion expresses itself in sensitivity to light and to noise, to weather conditions and to other persons; it leads to sleeplessness and a lack of appetite, to nervousness and a general loss of energy.
… Here the splitting into multiple personalities can mutate into an act of liberation.
I think about today, and now. I try these stories in our present —the 2020s. What are we inventing now? What disasters are we experiencing? How are we managing—or failing?
I ask ChatGPT. I type: What will 2024 be remembered for? The answer comes back in neat phrases: major geopolitical shifts, technological breakthroughs, climate catastrophes, global cooperation on sustainability.
This answer is about us, about our lives today. About what is happening in the war, about the arrests of people we know, about the desired, forced, or orchestrated movements of large groups of people across the world, about torrents of water destroying cities, about trees dying from drought, about the loss of our former lives, the loss of who we used to be.
How do I find new meaning in what I do?
What matters right now, in this whirlwind of the recent past crashing into the present?
Small, useful acts of care for others?
Big new ideas for a better future?
Daily practices of attention, care, stillness, acknowledgment of what is?
Archiving, mapping, documenting this moment—for a future library that may never be built?
The dense commuters come, Repeating their morning vow; "I will be true to the wife, I'll concentrate more on my work," And helpless governors wake To resume their compulsory game: Who can release them now, Who can reach the deaf, Who can speak for the dumb?
All I have is a voice To undo the folded lie, The romantic lie in the brain Of the sensual man-in-the-street And the lie of Authority Whose buildings grope the sky: There is no such thing as the State And no one exists alone; Hunger allows no choice To the citizen or the police; We must love one another or die.
To lose your keys. A hat. A glasses case. A single-page, but important document.
To lose it at home and search for it for days—maybe eventually finding it.
To lose it in the street, and post about it in a neighborhood group—someone might reply.
To lose it on a train, file a report with the lost and found, wait for a message.
To lose it at a party—then return six months later, find a glove rescued in the lost-and-found box, pick yours out from a pile of others.
To lose contact with a friend—just stop talking, drift apart, no time to write, no time to call either, always something else, other people around.
If someone dies far away, it’s almost impossible to grasp or truly understand—after all, in recent years they were already far away, how can they disappear? It just feels like they’ve gone even farther.
To lose your home.
In dreams, you sit in the apartment waiting.
Others show up, you talk about what matters.
You have that feeling of warmth or closeness.
You still have the key, but take it out rarely.
Sometimes you wander through online maps, looking at streets, intersections, buildings— Were the curtains drawn in summer 2016? What about autumn 2020?
You walk down the street—last image from 2021—then click into the courtyard: suddenly it’s 2018. What was I doing that month?
Who walked out that door and was caught on Google View —do I know them?
What was the view from my window four years ago? What does my photo archive remind me of?
Is there anything useful still in that apartment? Should I bring it to my new place —or let it stay where it is now?
Maybe I’ll get there again. Stop by.
I won’t go back really. “Return” is a big word, more suited for the past.
Environmentalists say some ecosystems will be lost forever—forests, coral reefs, islands. Entire species disappear. But what did we ever know about them?
In the summer and fall of 2024, we visit many apartments in Berlin. In one of them, in a 1960s-era building, there’s a massive stone cellar—more fitting of a castle. It turns out, the basement has been there since the early 1900s. The upper floors were destroyed in bombings during the Second World War and rebuilt in a new style. Only the cellar holds the memory of the old house.
In Bonn, June 2024, I find a bar where I spent a lot of time in the summer of 2022, writing down thoughts for my previous essay. Now it’s filled with soccer fans, I can not find a vacant seat.
I buy ice cream and stand across the street, looking at the open window of the bar —I see men in team jerseys, I see players darting across TV screens.
I try to remember: do I recognize the young man behind the counter?
No one notices me.
An hour later I’m in a semi-underground music club. People dance and drink beer to a cover band of serious-looking, middle-aged men in oversized black blazers.
One guest joins us outside, telling us about her sister in South Africa—she needs to call her, urgently.
She talks about changing jobs. About corruption scandals in her local district office.
Everything all at once, all mixed together.
We don’t reach her sister.
She keeps walking behind us, talking.
We disappear into the subway.
On the day I leave, I see her again—at the train station, with a man.
They’re sitting on the floor in the waiting area, two backpacks between them.
Now she says her sister is in Canada.
She’s trying to figure out which train to take—but it’s unclear.
The man goes to buy beer.
For a moment, I think of staying with her, asking her for further details, trying to understand what’s really happening in her life.
But I have a ticket. A reserved seat. I need to be back home by this evening.
She walks me to my train, waves goodbye, invites me to come again.
I try to imagine her life as the train begins to move, the suburbs of Bonn sliding past the window, faster and faster.
Life has become somewhat hyperreal. Destruction and suffering are now visible and tangible; they can no longer be concealed by the charm of magical stories that once led you, evening after evening, from one bar to another, then to a dark house, then to the banks of a dim sparkling river – into something captivating, where you could feel like the heroine of a painting, a novel, or a film. Reality looms behind it all.
A new fantasy is needed to draw sustenance from. A new story of discoveries is needed – one where there’s no way to stop and return to the train on time, because the ball/concert/international meeting at the castle has already begun, and all that’s left is to find a dress and do your hair, to keep opening door after door, running away from the fractured reality where everything that was, fades away —and you run in the opposite direction, roll downhill, away from the urge to bring back what once was, and who once were.
All the people we used to know They’re an illusion to me now Some are mathematicians Some are carpenters’ wives Don’t know how it all got started I don’t know what they’re doin’ with their lives But me, I’m still on the road Headin’ for another joint We always did feel the same We just saw it from a different point of view Tangled up in blue
I wrote this text in evenings at the office, after everyone had left.
When, beyond Badstrasse, across the Panke river, the sun would slowly set—as it tends to do here during the summer months—painting the sky and buildings in shades of red, then purple, then golden light. Sometimes storms would come, clouds would gather, and heavy raindrops would beat against the windows. Below, people ran, covering their heads with plastic bags.
I stood by the window and thought that I should write something funny. Something that would invite us to smile. Something that would help us distract ourselves from the frightening, hopelessness, and loss.
For example, all the funny stories of a new life — stories about dealing with bureaucracy, conversations in cafés, with random passersby. Stories about how a vegetable seller started asking me about the grammatical genders of different vegetables in German, and on the fifth one I made a mistake — that’s when he realised German wasn’t my native language either. We laughed for a long time, and he offered me some tea.
Or the story of that Heine quote running along the corridors of Westhafen station—about how, when he too moved to France for political reasons, his name kept changing and changing until it became Monsieur Rien — Mr. Nobody. At some point, I also began introducing myself as Ang(zh)elina DavydÓva — it's just easier, simpler to remember that way.
Or all the daily life stories and jokes here about gnomes. The elevator at Deutsche Oper fits five people — or nine gnomes, say your companions. It’s the gnomes who operate and turn all the invisible underground mechanisms that run (and delay) the trains or pump water into our apartments. It’s gnome crews who bring construction equipment to the streets and parks, where it stands for years — repairs are rarely completed — and only to begin again somewhere nearby. One mustn’t see the gnomes — in Cologne, there’s a monument to a woman who went down into the underworld with a lantern to look at them — after which the gnomes took offense and stopped helping people: brewing wine and beer, baking bread, working as carpenters.
At night, I often peer into the darkness of the street’s near and distant layers — but all I see is a skinny fox chasing a cat. The cat manages to escape, and the fox lies down in the parking lot next to the cars, stretching her snout over her paws and staring straight at me, replacing the courtyard lights — which went out from lack of movement — with the glint of two small round eyes.
Something unexpected.
At a meeting with Russian politicians and human rights defenders who ended up in Berlin in August 2024 following a prisoner exchange between Russia and Western countries.
Oleg Orlov, 71, says: “While I was in prison, my colleagues were working. My colleagues were working, and I was sitting. Although, in my own way, I was working too.”
“We’re often asked whether people should send postcards! Yes, postcards are very much appreciated in prison. Even from strangers. Even with pictures of the sea, beautiful cities, or whatever else.”
You can smile.
Du, laß dich nicht verhärten in dieser harten Zeit. Die allzu hart sind, brechen, die allzu spitz sind, stechen und brechen ab sogleich.
Du, laß dich nicht verbittern in dieser bitt’ren Zeit. Die Herrschenden erzittern - sitzt du erst hinter Gittern - doch nicht vor deinem Leid.
Don't let yourself be hardened / In these hard times of ours / The hard ones break so easy / The sharp ones sting so easy / And then are dead in hours
Don't let yourself be bitter / In bitter times like ours / While in a cell you're sitting / The rulers will be fretting / Though not for you of course Wolf Biermann, Gunnar Eriksson, Ermutigung/Encouragement
5.
What are we doing? What will we do?
We’ll try to endure, we’ll attempt to survive.
We’ll walk for miles and then some more.
We’ll look at the almost-full Moon and say – it’ll grow. And then we’ll miss the full Moon, but that’s okay, there’ll be another.
We’ll not take in, or pass on this destruction or this Schadenfreude – knowing it’s somewhere around us, far or near, looking it straight into its eyes.
We’ll simply calm down, for now, for a while.
Being happy is a difficult task, every single day.
