It’s about 10 am, and I’m cooking in my kitchen when I hear a loud bang. Too loud to be a car backfire, not loud enough to be an explosion. “Whatever,” I think. “Maybe it’s some sort of a military exercise. And I’m too jumpy about any type of loud noises anyway”. An hour later I learn that a local activist was shot dead in the middle of a busy street in broad daylight. The noise I heard was a gunshot.
It’s Demian Hanul. I kind of knew him, and I honestly had a lot of criticism towards him, and we even had a little online spat back in early 2022. He fought for the rights of Ukrainian speakers in Odesa, for de-russification. The criticism I had towards him was his methods. He’d take a hammer and destroy soviet memorials where I would prefer to fight for it through our legal system. He’d hunt down people harassing Ukrainian speakers or supporting russian narratives. He’d intimidate or even beat them up and make them record a video apology. Yes, I had a lot of criticism towards him, one of the biggest being the fact that he openly admitted that he had an unregistered firearm. He couldn’t get permission to own one because he’s an ex-convict, but he insisted on needing it for protection. “Yeah, we know and we can’t do anything about him,” a friend from the police told me when I showed those messages. Which is part of the problem with corruption in our city he himself was fighting against.
Well, not having a gun with him cost him his life yesterday, and I feel very conflicted about my opinions about him and my self-righteousness.
When 2 years ago we held a national vote on whether we should allow an easier process of getting firearm permits, I voted against it. Now I’clip a switchblade (a birthday gift from a soldier friend) to my belt and go out. I have to bring groceries to my art teacher and normally my route would pass the place where he was killed. It would be too hard and surreal to see a dead body in front of the coffee shops I’ve bought countless lattes from, the street corner where I’d always meet my friends when we would go out in that area… So I take a detour.
My art teacher hasn’t heard the news yet, so I tell her, we remember Iryna Farion who was killed a few months earlier in Lviv. She was fighting for the same things that Hanul was: the status of the Ukrainian language in Ukraine, de-rusification, de-colonization. “Natalie, you are not an activist, are you?” my art teacher asks and I hesitate for a moment before answering. Am I not? I might not be as loud as they were, but am I really not?
I remember the words of my mele class teacher (yes, I attend terrorism prevention classes in a military academy ‘for fun’): “If it were up to me, I’d give firearms to all you volunteers” and I think about maybe getting that permission after all while I check the news freequently following updates on the man hunt in my city.
There is a dead body in front of my favourite bakery, and there is a killer hiding somewhere in the streets, and it feels absolutely soul crushing.
At the bus stop on my way home an elderly lady asks me to help her read something from her phone. We start talking and she tells me she can’t log into her account to pay her bills. She cancelled her home Internet and is trying to cope with mobile Internet now. I help her log in, save her passwords on her device, show her which buttons to press. She’s very grateful, telling me she cried last night because she couldn’t figure it out. We get on the same bus, and I help her with some more questions that she had about her phone. She thanks me a lot and wishes me to find a good husband. I say I will when the war is over and good men come home.
I feel a little better after this simple human interaction. The sun is shining, the wind is warm, birds are singing loudly… An air raid siren starts wailing just as I approach my home. There are ballistic missiles heading north of Crimea, there is a dead body in front of my favorite bakery, there is a manhunt for the killer in my city. I think about what to make for dinner as I walk up the stairs.