Guest, Host, Ghost

A Dinner Party in Kyiv

It had rained. As the September day evened into night the surface of the cobblestones glistened with the remnant sunlight. I had been working in hotel rooms and bomb shelters and was glad for the downhill walk, but glad also that it was short: curfew brings a second nightfall, manmade by the proximate authorities who want to keep you alive, and by the distant ones who want you dead.

I rang the bell at the unmarked door, and creaking floorboards invited me into a home. My hostess's work is to explain war, and I had met her once before; and I have seen her since that evening, on an island in the Baltic Sea. There she was wearing a necklace with hammerlets of Thor, as people did in eastern Europe a thousand years ago: "it makes me feel stronger."

Ours is not a hospitality culture, and I feel awkwardly in debt to friends who have made me feel at home in other countries, who exemplify internalized generosity regardless of the external situation. During this war, when Ukrainian friends have come to visit, they invariably bring a gift for my children: something they took trouble with, carried with them on the long overnight train ride to Poland (no flights in Ukraine, remember), and then on whatever other journeys brought them into my house.

Hospitality is a mystery, touching upon honor. You are brought into something new and made by your hosts to feel as if it were familiar, the alien becomes yours. The Ukrainian word for "guest" sounds like "host," recalling a world of routine reciprocity, and for that matter a history of language that we share with Ukrainians. "Ghost" comes from the same source as "guest" and "host," on the understanding, a much older one, that we acknowledge the presence of the past, of those who have passed.

The overloaded table was lit by candles. As the flames moved this way and that, I discerned, one at a time, the unframed canvases that climbed the high walls of the small room. My hostess was wearing a dress that resembled one in a portrait; my host was in uniform. The labor of war brings together people who would otherwise never meet. The apartment was full of a love that was both risky and mature. In candlelight the lip-reading that accompanies conversation in another language is harder. We had started in English and switched to Ukrainian, in part so that I could hear from a soldier back from the front.

I will call him Serhyi, since that was his name. He had been on active duty since the first Russian invasion, in 2014. He had been in the Donetsk airport and in Debaltsevo, two of the most desperate battles of that initial stage of the war. Since the full-scale invasion of 2022, he had led special operations, including rescue missions. My host asked him to answer my questions. Serhyi spoke matter-of-factly, in an even tone, about acts of stunning physical courage, about the center of the largest war the world has seen since 1945. He was modest. He was doing the things he had to do, and that night one of those things was to talk to me.

Serhyi was killed a week ago, reportedly by a Russian missile strike. Russia's war on Ukraine is based on the lie that Ukrainians are not a people. And so much of it is fought from a distance, by missiles launched from a position of malevolent safety. As a soldier Serhyi had the courage to put his own life at risk in the closest of quarters. It is terrible that this war must be fought at all. It is terrible that he and so many others have been killed. But there is a special evil in the ballistic complicity of distance from death and lying about life.

Serhyi was married and had children. He had comrades and friends. This is their loss. He had a country that he served. This is Ukraine's loss. In another sense, though, his death is a loss for those of us who do not notice. By resisting, Ukrainians have helped to make the world safer. They have held off a larger war in Europe. They have deterred China from adventures in the Pacific. They have made it less likely that other countries will develop nuclear weapons. They have defended what remains of a world order based upon law.

Honor is a mystery, touching on hospitality. Ukrainians have made a strange world more familiar, a threatening world less dangerous. They don't speak much about this, though, any more than a host or hostess demands a return invitation. The gift is there, for us to acknowledge. I fear that what we do, is to take the efforts of others for granted. Or, worse, we acknowledge them only in scorn, in a dismissal of others' courage meant to make us feel less cowardly. Too often Americans want to be thanked for showing up, even when we do not, in fact, show up.

I don't mean to say that no American is doing anything in Ukraine. Americans have fought. Americans have reported. When I was at the front in Kharkiv oblast I saw an American flag left as a token of friendship; when I was in Kherson oblast visiting farms on de-occupied land I saw combine harvesters funded by American donors. Thousands of you have contributed to campaigns to fund drone detection, mine removal, and armored evacuation vehicles. I do mean to say that, as a country with a government, we are failing at the level of policy. If we do as a people recognize the courage of others, that recognition is not represented by our government.

Americans have the power to ensure that Ukraine wins this war. The policies involved would incur no meaningful cost to us, would save hundreds of thousands of lives, and would be very much to our own benefit, on any account of our own security. Simple measures could ensure that the geopolitical generosity of Ukrainians, the security gains provided by their resistance, could endure. This would be sensible, and it would be honorable. But it takes some courage to acknowledge the greater courage of others. To help others we must acknowledge that they have helped us, and it is there, on that slippery surface of reciprocity, that we fall down.

I left that dinner party just at curfew, hurrying back uphill on cobblestones, now dark as well as wet. This was an earlier stage in the war, when Americans were doing less than we should, but far more than we are doing now. The stakes of the war have not changed: they have only grown greater. Its character remains the same: Russia can only win if we allow it to win. Now Russian leaders see us now as the people who are doing so.

Russia bears the blame for this war, the premise of which is the denial of Ukrainian sovereignty and nationhood. As we join in that dismissal, however, we begin to share that responsibility. When we do not acknowledge the courage of the living and the dead, we wrong others, and put ourselves in danger, and not just in the physical sense. The underlying hazard is moral: the virtue we ignore in others we cannot embody ourselves.

Guest, host, ghost. It is too easy, more than three years into this terrible war, to call to mind dinner parties, academic conferences, weddings, where memory folds and unfolds to admit a shadow, because someone who was there, and who should still be with us, has been killed. A poet I read, I will call him Maksym because that was his name, is his name, will always have been his name, said that "when they ask me what war is, I will answer: names." Death is a mystery, touching on hospitality, and on honor.

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