A Time for Irises

by Myroslav Laiuk

Translated from the Ukrainian by Daisy Gibbons

For me, Kyiv’s advantage over many European cities is that it lives distinctly in accordance with the seasons. In spring people bring berries and flowers from their private smallholdings in the towns and villages surrounding the city. In summer one can find all sorts of fragrant peaches and pears at the outdoor markets. In autumn these are replaced by bulbous brown borovyky mushrooms and lysychky girolles, by peppers and pumpkins. In winter there’s jam, jars of salted cucumbers, and prunes.

This year one of Kyiv’s oldest markets, Zhytnyi Rynok, looks poverty-stricken, because the city’s surrounding towns and villages are Bucha, Hostomel, Borodianka, and Irpin, towns where bomb craters cover fields once full of blackcurrant bushes or asparagus, where bare tree stumps stand in the cherry orchards. Yet like every year, the market traders have been bringing in narcissi, hyacinths, peonies and irises from somewhere, as per the calendar... In Ukraine, the time for irises has recently come to an end.

Deep-blue, tiny, wild irises grow in the wet valleys; golden, robust irises grow in thickets near lakes; giant, special varieties grow in every yard, every urban flowerbed in cities from West to East. It was at precisely this time of year I went to the arts festival in Mariupol, and I remember seeing in my hotel there a vase with a mammoth bouquet of pink, yellow, and white irises.

It was a fun festival. They made a good gin and tonic on the seafront; they’d learnt how to brew nice coffee in the city centre; there was a lot of good music. One the events was a performance running along a street that led right up the temporarily occupied Ukrainian territories towards Donetsk. The event was called ‘The Road Home’. Mariupol is a city that in 2014 the Russians failed to occupy, a city on the shores of the Azov Sea near the border with Russia. This street performance was held outside of the city on the clean steppe, which gave off the smell of bitter wormwood and fresh mint. The setting sun was a golden thread on the horizon, and Ukraine was beautiful. Somewhere on the other horizon one could see the fires in the occupied territories, there where they sell counterfeit alcohol, where people are afraid to walk the streets, where children are dressed in red Pioneer ties and are made to sing songs about Lenin. We, on the other side, had great music, laser shows, and singing and dancing.

As we witnessed lately the hatred with which the enemy laid waste to Mariupol, the cruelty with which they persecuted its locals, a thought immediately forced itself into our heads, that this city was being punished for becoming a better place by having chosen Ukraine; by having chosen visa-free travel to Europe, arts festivals and coffee houses with delicious cakes, support for small businesses and freedom of speech.

What of Mariupol today? Ashes and graves. The relatives of some of my friends barely managed to escape the place. They now elect not to speak about what happened. What happened is unspeakable. Unspeakable Kramatorsk, unspeakable Bucha; unspeakable razed churches, children murdered before their parents’ eyes; unspeakable rapes. A great problem now is that the victims do not want, and perhaps cannot, speak to therapists about rape. After all that has been seen and heard, throats close and bodies freeze up when they attempt to speak. We still find it too awful to hear stories such as these from the Second World War. But knowing that this happened in 2022? For sure, the real problem for therapists at the moment is trying to start the conversation. But every attempt to speak, to reflect, whether through poetry, social media posts, or simply through telling loved ones and incidental passers-by about one’s experiences, is a step towards life.

It’s strange, but whenever we now recall something beautiful, it shall forever be associated with a traumatic experience. For people who have lost their home, family celebrations at the dinner table will be associated with a table and a home that are no longer there. For people who have lost their loved ones, another person’s smile will be associated with the daughter or the husband that are no longer there. And a flower will be associated with a seaside hotel which might still be there, or it might not –either lost to ambiguity, or certain darkness.

One acquaintance of mine recently wrote on social media about how beautiful last summer was in Mariupol, and he wrote that it will never be like that again. Several people were angered by the post; several said that now is not the time for nostalgia and for gleaning memories of past beauty, that now is the time for mobilisation, to do everything one can to retake the city.

Whatever the case, all that is lovely will become a trigger; all that is lovely will be levelled and swallowed by horror. In Ukraine we still have not learnt how to talk, for instance, about the brilliant works of the twenties and thirties of the twentieth century in mere terms of their brilliance/as merely brilliant works; we invariably bring up their setting of the Stalinist terror, during which so many authors were either murdered or so intimidated that we only recall with horror all the wonderful things they managed to write before they were forced into socialist realism in their creative work.

The German-speaking poet Paul Celan was born in the Ukrainian town of Chernivtsi, and it was there he saw the beginning of the Second World War and where he lived through a great part of the event that, after which, as Adorno supposedly said, ‘there can be no poetry’. His most significant book about these events was called Poppy and Memory, one of the central poetry books about the Holocaust. The context of the work’s title is unexpected, erotic:

My eye goes down to my lover’s sex
we gaze at each other,
we speak of dark things,
we love each other like poppy and memory

This book is framed by a broader context of smoke rising from the crematoria in the concentration camps, of women’s shorn plaits and rotten bodies in ditches. But what lies at the centre of Celan’s poetics is the private, the passionate, the beautiful and the non-fleeting; the things you clutch in your fists as you climb out of the rubble.

I decided to search for something that Ukrainian poets have written about irises. The first quote I came across was, ‘My joy is as lonely and lost,/ as the colour of an iris in a bulrush.’ This is a verse by Volodymyr Svidzinskyi. He escaped murder in the 1930s due to his practical obscurity. He was an ‘internal migrant’ in the USSR; he translated the classics of antiquity and read negative reviews of his poetry by representatives of ‘official’ Communist critique. In essence he was deprived of his voice at a time when poetry was really a cry out to the undereducated proletariat who demanded only ‘correct’ slogans and simple amusements. While living in Kharkiv during the Second World War, his silence finally aroused the suspicion of the Soviet powers. During one of the evacuations, he was taken out of the city limits, marched into a barn and set on fire alive.

How does our memory work? What does it choose? How do associations arise? How is trauma born and how does it mature? People will be going to therapists and psychiatrists, and even now Ukraine doesn’t have enough specialists in these professions. But first and foremost, each person will have to answer this question alone; many times; late at night. Psychologists say that many people, even those who aren’t suffering from severe PTSD, will feel the consequences of these things for many years – forever…

To finish with, another association: the poem ‘The Wild Iris’ by Louise Glück. It’s about how, after life and death, in a metaphorical sense, there can be rebirth. If we follow Glück, that, sometimes, the inability to speak is a sort of death, then receiving and restoring our voice can be the condition for rebirth:

I could speak again: whatever
returns from oblivion returns
to find a voice:
from the center of my life came
a great fountain, deep blue
shadows on azure seawater.

Irises will always flower at the beginning of summer. Irises will flower in Kyiv, in Chernivtsi, in Kharkiv and in Mariupol. They will flower, and we will speak of them.