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I had decided to leave alone for the summer holidays that year, it would have been the last journey of my old orange Pripyat, a Soviet-style three-door car, produced until 1972 at the Kommunor plant, today in Ukraine.
It was not a family inheritance but rather a typical nostalgic caprice, something that frequently happens to people in their thirties, a smart investment that after ten years would have yielded up to four hundred percent of profits, much more than any bank deposit or pension fund. I always think about my future.
A month later, my town was exactly as I had left it. At 9pm on September 14th, the sun was setting on the horizon and I checked, as scheduled, the last point of my summer program: “remember to take the East road with the sun behind you”. It could be dangerous, my glasses weren’t polarized.
Thinking about my journey, it was a special one, maybe even a little nostalgic, but beautiful and international. I had pushed myself (in fact I literally pushed my car) to reach the ocean. Wonderful! Colourful! Powerful! I was camping in the wild, right behind the official surf camp where people were young and beautiful, blond, tonic, smiling and tanned. Never had the chance to approach them.
Every night around midnight I zipped the tent. Silence. From time to time just the breaths of a couple making love in the dark, on the sand.
In November the temperatures were still 10 degrees above the seasonal averages. I started thinking differently about those nights, with a sense of regret. Sometimes almost with anger.
Like many others, I was spending my days wondering why I’d come back to the city.
People were lazy and sweaty. At work, production fell by 45 percent and every provision was postponed to a date to be defined.
On December 8th the state of national emergency had been declared.
Christmas was the longest day ever recorded. Since Natural Christmas trees and light decorations had been banned, my mother just put a beautiful red tablecloth on the table. I drank two or three liters of vodka and lemon sorbet, I tasted just a bite of turkey. I spent almost an hour at the window picturing the building in front of mine : #Sergio Leone #Civil War #Christmas In The Far West #Clint #A Fistful of Dollars #family time #no filter #like for like, then I fell asleep, exhausted, before sunset.
On hotter days my headache exploded, I stayed lying on my back for hours looking at the ceiling. There were no other smells but those of moist and ionized air. There was no noise other than the fans, uncoordinated and persistent. Sometimes I thought about the south of France and cicadas. Everything became slow, temporary and postponed. Maintenance works ceased.
On cooler days I took advantage of the more human decibels to read the last chapters of all those books I had never finished.
February gave us a break, the wait was replaced by organisation and mobilisation. slowly, and with unexpected, grace people returned communication.
Phones started ringing again. The press went back to work. Everyone went back to work but me. I didn’t return to the office even when my case on biodegradable chips was reopened.
Then on March 20th, a bolt from the blue. Wind and fresh air. As soon as the temperature had returned to the seasonal average, suddenly the buzz stopped. I thought about the cicadas again. It was Spring. It caught us unprepared. The immediate damage was considerable, flooding, loss of electricity, structural failures.
They called it ‘the year without a winter”.
