Vova stopped killing the geese

Volodymyr remembers his mother plastering the walls of their house with clay. The house isn’t that old. Reliefs of the wolf from the Soviet cartoon Nu, pogodi! and the bear from the 1980 Moscow Olympics sit on the grey façade — both pierced by fragments of an artillery shell. The window between them is still covered with plastic sheeting, most of the others are too. The explosion happened three years ago, but only now has Vova received compensation. After three inspections, the committee awarded him 198.000 hryvnias (almost €3900). This summer he will finally put in new windows and repair the roof.

He will get old-fashioned wooden window frames that open only partway. He is not  conservative, but he trusts only what he has tested himself. He once worked in landscape design in Kyiv and Moscow, painted a turquoise, flower-patterned ceiling in the local church, and for years worked as an arborist, pruning and tending trees. He knows exactly how he wants to fix the house and he will do it with his own hands.

On the porch are century-old millstones he found on the outskirts of the village. Vova says they carry good energy. He wants to wall them  in beneath the wooden veranda he is planning to build. The walnut timber is already waiting. Inside the veranda, colored glass panes will scatter the light like a kaleidoscope, casting  reflections on the snow-white walls of the corridor. Above the front door he will place a line from Ukrainian poet Taras Shevchenko: « In one’s own house — one’s own truth, one’s own might and freedom. »

Who is Vova? He is the owner of a flock of geese. He starts every morning by feeding them; every afternoon he drives them back into their shed. Sixty mammoth geese, brought from the Donetsk region, spend their days on the beach at a bend of the Inhulets, the river that winds through Velyka Oleksandrivka. This is the most beautiful place in the village. Couples meet here for dates, boys train, people of all ages swim in summer, and in winter villagers plunge into the icy water for the Epiphany. It was Vova who restored this beach: he brought in tons of sand and tidied what had once been a dump.