‘The war has become the background of life’ — Andrey Kurkov on Ukraine two years on

I had a strange dream recently. A younger me was standing on the street in Soviet Kyiv with my classmate, Leonid Shterenberg, who, due to the antisemitism of that time, later took a more Ukrainian-sounding family name. In my dream, Leonid is busy with something. He has a shovel and I’m standing next to him on a dry road, but I feel water filling my boots. I take them off, pour out the water and put them on again. My feet remain dry and yet, time and time again, water appears in my boots.

For two years after serving in the Soviet army, I kept wearing my military footwear. Perhaps I thought it was fashionable, or perhaps it was some kind of psychological inertia — I was still in the army’s grip, although already at home and living as a free person, as far as that was possible in 1980s Kyiv.

This dream brought to mind others I have had recently — all startlingly graphic and all imprinted in great detail on my daytime memory. They may not be about the current war, but I am sure it is because of this that I remember these dreams. My sleep is different now — unstable, anxious and intermittent. I seem to be listening to the silence, and if I hear an air raid signal I get up easily. I go into the hallway and sit down on our small upholstered bench. I look at the clock to decide whether I should put some bedding down on the floor, or wash my face and make coffee.

I am not alone in experiencing powerful dreams these days. Even if our bodies have not been captured by the enemy, our minds have been. “In a recent dream, I ended up in a filtration camp in occupied territory,” my friend Oksana Tsyupa told me. Oksana was not exposed to Russia’s gruesome methods of uncovering pro-Ukrainian civilians in the occupied territories, but she is from Irpin, one of the towns on the edge of Kyiv that were controlled and ravaged by Russians at the beginning of the war. She escaped just in time, along the road that a day later became a killing field.