The Orphanage by Serhiy Zhadan, translated by Reilly Costigan-Hughes and Isaac Stackhouse Wheeler

This powerful novel, which has just won the EBRD Literature Prize 2022, is set in Eastern Ukraine some time after the outbreak of war in 2014. It takes place over three days, and tells the story of Pasha, a teacher of Ukrainian language, crossing a city in the conflict zone. He’s making for the orphanage where his nephew, Sasha, is living, in order to bring him home, to a safer place. The city, which is unnamed, has just changed hands. Different soldiers are controlling the checkpoints, familiar routes are now impassable, and Pasha finds himself teaming up with other people on the move, fleeing the city, terrified by the noise of continuous bombardment and flashing explosives lighting up the sky. And this in freezing January, where deep snow and ice impedes movement, penetrates thin footwear, and compounds misery.

The story is told almost entirely from Pasha’s point of view, and the identity of the different groups of soldiers he comes across, and remembers in flashback, is never explicit. To some extent, they’re all alien beings, and described in similar terms regardless of which side they’re on, these with their clay-smeared combat boots, others with dirty uniforms, smoke-stained faces, heavy, crusty deposits of earth on their shoes. It’s as if they belong to a different universe from the quiet, unassuming Pasha, fiddling with his specs, working out where they come from, and therefore their allegiance, from the quality of the Russian they speak, their accents, any sprinkling of Ukrainian, and the tattered flag they have flying from their tank.

This is a novel of displacement and Zhadan excels at describing both the collective fear and response of crowds, as well as the intimate details of individuals who’ve fled their homes at short notice with whatever scant possessions they could grab. So Pasha arrives at the train station en route to the orphanage and realises he’s being watched through the windows by dozens of eyes…They vigilantly track his every movement, his every step, watching through the unwashed station windows, transfixed and mistrustful. Pasha realises these are women seeking refuge in the station, like it’s a church in a besieged city.  He feels he’s just stepped into a women’s prison…somebody shrieks wildly in the corner and everyone looks over; the room freezes for just a second. Yet he’s equally good at the small details that bring individuals to life: there’s the mother hanging onto the arm of her daughter Annushka like an old winter coat. There’s Hoof Lady, her worn-down heels like two hooves stomping through the puddles, she’s fused to her fur coat, the only thing she has with her, no suitcases, no bags, no bundles. There’s the self-assured young blonde woman, one hand clenching a pack of cigarettes, the other loose on the handle of a wheeled suitcase. Later, when she tires, Pasha helps her by taking the suitcase and realises its empty.

It’s a novel of abandonment. There are many descriptions of buildings abandoned after bombardment in a war torn landscape. In the city Pasha and the group he’s led from the station hide out in derelict buildings to avoid random soldiers. In the countryside there’s the abandoned farmstead just off the route where Pasha takes Sasha to dry out. A direct hit means that half the wall has come away and the intimacies of the owners’ lives are exposed: above the table, last year’s calendar……faded wallpaper dangling loosely. The description of the black courthouse, the savings bank with boarded-up windows, and the pharmacy: the cold apertures of windows, the twisted bars……an empty school, a destroyed newsstand speaks to the destruction and obliteration of the community as a whole-and then its abandonment.

The theme of abandonment is also explored in the central motif of the orphanage. One of the most haunting scenes is when three girls appear in the hallway of the concrete basement they’re using as a kind of bomb shelter: the oldest girl, around twelve…that mistrustful glare…and more fear too. She’s standing there in her faded pink down jacket, hiding her hands in her pockets. Knitted socks and warm slippers. The slippers are too big-they probably belong to someone else. The second girl is mistrustful, too, and frightened: fair hair gathered in a ponytail, several boys’ sweaters one on top of the other, dull jeans, worn sneakers. And they all have this heavy look in their eyes, and the shadows under them are so black, so deep. It slowly dawns on Pasha that the girls are wearing thick make up—that these painted children have whiled away the hours putting on make-up, make up to disguise the fear they’ve felt all their lives, surrounded by adults, like their parents, who abandoned them like rabbits locked up in cages.

Along the way we learn that Sasha was handed over to the orphanage by his mother, Pasha’s sister, a single parent and train stewardess. (Clearly the orphanage here is a home not just for orphans but also for those whose parents are struggling to cope). Pasha feels partly responsible for this decision as he and his father did not agree with it, but were not quick enough off the mark to intervene. This slowness to react is typical of Pasha: it’s put to him that if he’d read the present situation better he’d have collected Sasha sooner and avoided the perilous situation they’re now in with the city in enemy hands. But it’s also part of a more general unwillingness to get involved, to take responsibility, which emerges as one of the central themes in the novel. In Pasha’s case it’s his insistence in the first part of the novel that the fighting is nothing to do with him. However a couple of scenes suggest that Pasha’s reluctance to take sides may be part of a more general malaise: when Nina objected to the soldiers taking down the flag at the orphanage, we’re told that a crowd looked on, but didn’t support her. And Pasha remembers looking on in the school yard while some older children attacked vulnerable Dimka with a spade. I should step in he thinks but doesn’t. And at the ensuing parent-teacher conference the teaching staff blamed everyone but themselves.

This novel is a tough read in many ways: the lack of place names, the disorientation of Pasha struggling through the city, his uncertainty as to which side the several groups of soldiers are on can make the reader feel similarly disorientated. But the language is beautiful: Pasha recalls his joy as a 15 year old at New Year, after several days of snowfall, you instantly feel the entirety of winter, just how much of it there is. Then the sky looks like a mountain of sheets piled outside the train stewardess’s compartment by passengers in the morning-heavy clusters of clouds all the way to the horizon, scattered and twisted inside out. And the experience of war is vividly evoked by the rich descriptive language, particularly potent when evoking the unique smells and noise of war: the burnt smell of people from the south, like they’ve been sitting by a campfire; the odd smell accompanying the soldiers-dirt and metal, tobacco and gunpowder; the terrible din of the deafened soldiers who’ve survived an artillery attack-the inflamed eyes, parched mouths and the screams-abrasive, loud, discontented.

Credit must be given to the translators-overall for this superb translation and its consistency of voice, but in particular for their inventiveness and panache when rendering the imagery. (There’s some playful imagery too: the telly in Pasha’s shabby but much-loved home, switched on day and night, like their very own eternal flame, the sofa whose springs protrude like twigs from a Boy Scout’s campfire—this made me laugh.) Not to mention their translation of Pasha’s nicknames for the people he teams up with—Arctic Fox, Hoof Lady, who becomes of course Vira, when he gets to know her better. I would have loved a translator’s note as in Eugene Ostashevsky’s translation of Yevgenia Belorusets’ Lucky Breaks to explain how they dealt with the mixture of Ukrainian and Russian which appears in the original—and often observed by Pasha—and also how they found equivalent metaphors that worked in English. But the main thing is that they do work—brilliantly—and the translators well deserve their share of the EBRD prize.

This is a great, many-layered novel, which now should take its place in the canon of world literature on war. It both deepens our understanding of what people in Eastern Ukraine have been going through since 2014, but also what Ukrainians in other parts of the country are now enduring. And in its exploration of responsibility, and what that means in war, its reach is surely universal.