On: Displaced Ukrainians risk home seizure under Russian law

April 12

The afternoon sun is weak, but it falls across my desk in a solid, dusty bar. I read a dispatch today, a few lines about property law. They are changing the registration, it seems, in places that are no longer theirs, for people who are no longer there. It is a very administrative sort of dispossession. One imagines the notices being posted on doors behind which the samovars have gone cold, the formal language of the decree curling in the damp. The owners, I suppose, are elsewhere now, discussing the weather in a different room, listening for a different set of sounds from the street.

It is the silence of the unoccupied house that stays with me. Not the drama of the seizure, but the quiet, bureaucratic machinery of it. A man reads the law aloud in an empty office. A clerk stamps a paper. And a home becomes a legal question, a matter of correct filing. The real tragedy, as always, is in the gap - between the deed on the table and the key in a pocket a hundred miles away, between the life that was lived within those walls and the line item it has become. They talk of registration, but of course, they are speaking of erasure. One does not need a cannon to break a string; a quiet change in the law will do it just as well.

And what is there to say? That it is wrong? That goes without saying. But the saying of it changes nothing. The law will not hear it. The house will not hear it. The people, in their separate silences - the ones who left, the ones who stayed, the ones who now administer - are all correct from their own side of the wall. Each is doing what they must, or what they believe they must, which amounts to the same thing. Tomorrow, the sun will fall across that desk in the empty office just the same. The clerk will stamp another paper. Somewhere, a dog will bark in a yard that is no longer, technically, its home. Life continues. It is all so terribly, terribly ordinary.