On: Ukraine's attack on Saint Petersburg 'brings war back to Russia'

Thursday.

They say it brings the war ‘back’ to Russia.

Back. As if it had ever left. As if a war is a parcel that can be returned to sender, postage due. The trapdoor opens here: the war was always in Russia. It was in the mothers who get the wrong kind of official letter. It was in the empty chairs at dinner tables where sons and fathers used to sit. It was in the silence that follows the state television being switched off. It just hadn’t, until now, been in the architecture.

That’s the thing about empires. They export the violence but keep the picturesque facades. They build grand cities like stage sets, forgetting that eventually, someone in the audience might throw something onto the stage. Saint Petersburg was always a beautiful idea hammered into a swamp by a tsar who thought geometry could defeat nature. Now it learns that geometry does not defeat ballistics either.

Zelensky calls it ‘fair’. FAIRNESS is another of those CAPITALISED ABSTRACTIONS, like GLORY or DESTINY. It’s what generals and politicians invoke when the arithmetic of grief becomes too complicated for human hearts to calculate. One rocket for your hundred dead, two for our fifty. Fairness is the language you use when you have run out of everything else, including hope.

And yet.

The humanist reversal, always. Somewhere in Saint Petersburg tonight, a man is sweeping up glass. Not a soldier, not a strategist. A man with a broom. His back aches. He’s thinking about where to get a pane of glass replaced, and how much it will cost, and whether his cousin in the hardware trade will do him a favour. The war, for him, is now a problem of glaziers and dustpans. It has become domestic. It has come home.

That’s the real ‘bringing back’. Not the symbolism of striking a famous skyline, but the simple, dreadful mundanity of conflict arriving in the hallway and taking off its boots. It’s the same hallway, everywhere. The same dust.

We build monuments to forget the people. Then the people, through their awful, persistent habit of existing, remind us what the monuments were supposed to be about in the first place.