Bombs are falling here

I get into a taxi and end up in the war. Well, I’m exaggerating. Actually, it was a Uber and I just went to Alcântara, in Lisbon, but the talk I had with the Ukrainian driver, what he told me with his words and silences, transported me to the hardship, the reality, the presence of war, yes. The driver, who was the image of a divided man — I only saw the back of his head and, once in a while, his cut out eyes in the rearview mirror —, was not young, but looked fine. He had been living in Portugal for two decades. He had grandsons here, but he also had a lot of family in Ukraine. His sister had died recently. “Her heart burst”, he told me.

He explained that he used to be a truck driver and that he had started driving this Uber car after his retirement. A bit later, in the same conversational tone, he told me that his family younger ones were there, in the war, fighting. That impressed me more than tears and lamentations. The sadness in that: the war as an everyday pain. Not an epic moment, prone to heroics and great lines, but a chronic, continuous suffering.

Later, reading the newspaper, I came across a photo of Kharkiv during a Russian attack, that showed, in the background, a bombed residential building, burning, and, in the foreground, a young man, in profile, with his hand on his head. That amazing photograph by Tyler Hicks, in the New York Times, shows us something that we can’t read in the headlines, nor in the tragic numbers — how many dead, wounded, how many prisoners, how many displaced or missing people —, which is the fact that the war is also an individual, interior, psychological, permanent aggression. That man, pacing with his hand on his head — as if trying to hold his thoughts while seeing his neighborhood being attacked —, is a mirror of the conflict between the safety of daily life and the absurdity of the invasor’s violence.

Meeting this Uber driver made me think that the Ukrainian people’s strength comes in no small part from this audacity. The audacity of everyone getting on with their lives. Resisting and fighting, while you’re taking your kids to school or driving Ubers in a safe country.

The trip wasn’t long, but it felt like our conversation lasted years. The driver was from the Galicia region, and I immediately remembered the great Joseph Roth, who was born in Brody. (One of the places I would like to visit, one day.) In every book of his, in any opened-by-chance page, there’s some sentence, some word that can help us seeing things better, in this very difficult moment for Europe. I open his essay, “The Auto-da-Fé of the Mind” (translation by Michael Hofmann). It’s 1933, and Roth warns: “The European mind is capitulating. It is capitulating out of weakness, out of sloth, out of apathy, out of lack of imagination.” This time, dear friends, we cannot commit the same mistakes. We can’t just shrug, we can’t capitulate.

With this trumpist USA — that backs down on transatlantic commitments, mistakes values for money and says amen to Putin —, Europe must take the leap. Solving the security issue on the East border cannot be made through some sort of temporary patch; it must really involve the creation of an European military force. As to the European Union, this leap must also require changes in the decision mechanisms and in its communication process, in order to become more agile, transparent and efficient. And changes, too, in its overall attitude, like getting over budget dogma and looking more into the future. In the medium term, it should also constitute a democratic leap, revising the treaties in order to build a strengthened European democracy, in which citizens would have a greater voice than the interests of member states’ governments.

On my way back home, I go walking. I follow along the big wall on 24 de Julho Avenue, I turn up to Janelas Verdes Street, I keep going on the sidewalk looking at the bright-colored buildings, at the open windows, at people passing by, and I imagine Russian bombs are falling here. That’s what’s happening, really, if Europe exists. A taxi goes in the opposite direction, and it occurs to me I didn’t ask the Uber driver if he knew Brody. “Good luck”, I said as I got out of the car. But we need more than luck, goddamn. We need the spirit and imagination Roth talks about, and a clear, strong, unwavering European voice.