Born in Kursk, a Russian city that lies on the Ukrainian border, Alonya, 37, grew up spending time crossing the border visiting her Ukrainian relatives; aunts, uncles, grandparents and great-grandparents. As a single mother of twins, her plan was to visit her family in Athens in January to avoid the brutal winter, before returning to Kyiv at the end of March to reunite her children with their father, who is Ukrainian. That plan did not work out.
“Today I cried for the first time in about three weeks. Before that I cried every day, an uncountable amount of times. I follow a Ukrainian musician on Instagram who is in the army now. We have a lot of mutual friends, but I don’t know him personally. Today he posted a story that one of the dead Russian soldiers’ helmet had ‘born to kill’ in English written on it, and he thought it was a reference to Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket. And I replied something like, ‘No way’. I though a Russian who is familiar with Kubrick and watched Full Metal Jacket wouldn’t join the army and wouldn’t go to war with Ukraine. Most of these soldiers are poorly educated 20-year-olds coming from dysfunctional families from ‘somewhere in Russia’, probably far from Moscow and St Petersburg.
“Messaging him, I realised that I just wanted to share how I feel about it all, with a person I barely know, because it’s hard to talk to people I know. Recently I’ve naturally felt a lot of rage, something a teenager feels, and
a lot of flashbacks from my teenage years. I’ve had dystopian dreams, visions and feelings and I sent him a quote of Holden Caulfield, ‘Anyway, I’m sort of glad they’ve got the atomic bomb invented. If there’s ever another war, I’m going to sit right the hell on top of it. I’ll volunteer for it, I swear to God I will,’ and also a screenshot of an atomic explosion from Akira, another pop-culture reference I often think about and feel like. And he replied to me with a picture of a page from The Catcher in the Rye with that same quote. He said that he had the book in his hands when I sent him the quote, and that it’s the only personal thing that he has on him right now. That’s when I cried. He also finally got a personal helmet for himself, and he wants to write ‘Meat is Murder’ on it.
“Somehow I’ve become everything I dreamed about as a teenager and young adult. I am the catcher in the rye – I literally catch my children playing in the rye and sometimes some other children too. And that’s why I can’t sit on top of that bomb any more. I would switch places with my friends in the army, my ex-husband in Kyiv, all my relatives and friends in Lviv, Dnipro and Luhansk. But I can’t, because I have to catch those children and there’s no one else to do it for me and I am very busy doing it every day.
“My life, a beautiful and fragile bubble I’d built for us in Russia, has ended. Would I have the strength to face this fact if it wasn’t for the war? In a way I’m grateful that my eyes are now open, being torn apart between three very different worlds – Russia, Ukraine and the EU. And I don’t belong anywhere and probably never will. I was on a boat today, looking at the sea surrounded by mountains, and I couldn’t see the horizon. I feel restrained when I can’t see the horizon. I liked Russia because it’s plain and you can see the horizon almost everywhere, at least where I lived. But then I thought, why am I thinking about all these locations in terms of countries? It’s just Earth and nature, and it’s beautiful in its variety. And I saw an image in my mind of a warped space that was only sea and rocks.”
