The village of Teteriv bears the name of the tributary river of the Dnieper. In Teteriv the last one left is called Valentyn Vasylenko, he is eighty-three years old. In this photograph, a Ukrainian soldier takes Valentyn away from his bombed-out house, away from Teteriv. The fact that the means of transport is a wheelbarrow adds an almost funny trait to the image. But there is nothing to laugh about; and I’d like to know something more about Valentyn, something about his life up to now.
But his adds to an impressive sum of lives that we will not tell, we will not be able to tell – lives marked and somehow dispersed. In another photo, which as in the previous sequence, there is Valentyn coming out of his house with the cane. His house, under a gray sky, has a broken roof, broken windows. A white curtain flies out, like a flag of surrender.
Now, without Valentyn, there is no one left in Teteriv. It will be a ghost village. The curtain will continue to wave, rain will come in from the roof. It made me think of a character told by the Ukrainian-born writer Vasily Grossman in the monumental volume that precedes “Life and Destiny” and which is about to be published by Adelphi for the first time in Italian with the title chosen by the author, ” Stalingrad “. There is a man who has to leave his house. “Vavilov wanted only one thing: to stay and live there”.
Leaving he would have meant dozens of “insignificant and very important” things, “things that would shape the concern for the house.” He meant the young plum tree that had to be protected from frost in winter, the potatoes to choose from and the stove to be repaired. He has his back to the house, he can’t turn around, like Valentyn in the photo above this photo.
He walked on towards the red of the dawn that rose on the earth that he himself had plowed. The cold wind whipped his face and blew the warmth, the very breath of his house, out of his clothes.