I Live Here Now

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I have not missed it all this time and suddenly I want to be inside it, but inside it thirty years ago, back there. I walked there in the rain, warm yellow of birch and plane leaves, acid yellow of high vis jackets of the police guarding the barrier. I used to be always on the move, making regular 400 mile journeys by slow British trains to teach in London, at least once a month, on journeys to Russia, or even Siberia, involving arduous visa filling, and then the rushing about every school holiday to visit friends and relatives in Europe, England, Ireland. Many of the larger lumps had taken flight, descended to the pavement, and there were bare gaps where once there had been bouncy hillocks of green.

But I kept going, almost enjoying the pain and scratches, bending and wrenching the branches off with my bare hands as we marvelled at the abundance.The first summer of seven my daughter was three and her youngest child was four, now all but my daughter are taller than I am.

An old philosopher I knew in Moscow told me that his name was from the Ukrainian for tailor, Sukach, from the more archaic sukno, cloth. I think of the encumbrance of having a well-known surname, but of how this matters less in Scotland, and even less in the international collaboration of our Crown Letter, remembering how glad I was when Dettie first mispronounced my surname, the relief of remaining unrecognised, keeping me safe and hidden, distinct from my father’s name.I thought it was someone she knew, but it turns out the clip was widely circulated at the start of the war. But by the end of the night we were taking it in turns, improvising and playing along to each other’s tunes. As we joined the main road through the power station we found a bush so thick with fruit that we stopped for a last plunder.

Nadia, me, my children — to and fro and round about with the person opposite and the person by your side and then moving as a four, on to the next line. And yet she always addressed me by my full name and surname when writing to me privately about things that I had written, making me feel that this name was also my own. Down the corridor, smashed glass, the washing up still in the sink, a whisk in a milk pan, and below the window, a child’s toy hard hat on the floor with the real rubble.The first bush that we came to had only scant fruit, and we wondered if we were too late, or if the harvest had not been so good this year. Somehow we have to learn this knack of living between, treading water, of things being neither one thing or another, but a constant shifting.

The International Human Rights Observers were there, in pink vests and armbands, they are in the city to make reports on public gatherings. They are evidence of my lived experience moment to moment, the layering of marks recording the movement of my body when walking and the constant scanning of my vision as it alternates between a broad and narrow focus on all that I encounter. Initially, the main objective was simply to put a response – any sort of response – on the page and to get comfortable with the kinetic challenge of carrying a sketchbook, a handful of pencils, making a mark and at the same time, walking safely through a space in a particular direction. There is a Russian word that surfaces when I am writing to a friend in Moscow: Безвременье, Bezvremenye. This death coincided with the publication of an online journal article about the Crown Letter entitled Waves of Care.My surroundings felt very real and full of energy – the landscape and the space on the page felt powerfully connected and kept me very much in the present moment. The camera swings and swoops with the expansive runs of the keyboard, the player’s hands gaining force and confidence with the cadences that ripple out as the camera tracks a trail of rubble and destruction, in every room and down the stairs. I began to see the bushes everywhere — this rare bounty we had driven so far to gather turned out to be rife, pushing in from behind the crash barriers of the motorways that run into and loop through this city. We look down at the settlement beneath us as we climb, and across the sea to the indigo shape of Sligo before us, and at the fiddlers in front leading the way.