Hector Abad Faciolince: in Ukraine, with luck on your side

Whoever picks up this book, Now and in the Hour , by Héctor Abad Faciolince (Medellín, Colombia, 1958), will be touched by the stupor of a man, a writer, who saw death at his side and recounts it as if he had not survived the cruel explosion of a bomb that Putin dropped on a pizzeria in Kramatorsk (Ukraine) at dusk on a June day in 2023. Héctor was sitting in one of the restaurant's chairs; he changed his seat to hear the conversations better, and his place was taken by a colleague of his, Victoria Amélina, with whom he had traveled to see up close, so he was told, the war that Russia has declared on the country that was once under Soviet rule.

The bomb exploded on the chair that had been Héctor's. Victoria Amélina fell dead. Héctor still experiences the stupor he describes in the book. From beginning to end, it is a sad recollection of a broken life: Amélina's. His own is now also marked by that event. It is not the only serious incident in his adult life. In 1986, in Medellín, where Héctor was born, Colombian guerrilla hitmen killed his father, Dr. Héctor Abad. His son was nearby. Twenty years later, as he does now in Ahora y en la Hora , he recounted the stupor that has never ceased to animate his life.

The Oblivion We Will Be recalls the tragedy that left him orphaned. Amélina and the deadly event covered in her new book are an embrace and a question about the past. Héctor Abad Faciolince 's answers are also questions posed at random and in the void, prompting their own questions about evil and horrible coincidences.

–It depends on when… As a child, I knew nothing; it was a green blob on the world map in my house. It was round, it was part of the USSR. When the Soviet Union collapsed, I frankly didn't pay much attention to which countries had remained in the USSR and which had become independent. And we know little about countries when they become part of world history; we only know when they suffer greatly.

–How did you get the invitation to go?

–Some publishers wanted to translate The Oblivion We Will Be into Ukrainian, and I didn't know that language existed. I imagined they spoke Russian there, period. Or that Ukrainian was a dialect. You tend to despise what you don't know. So they translated The Oblivion… in 2020, and the pandemic started, so I couldn't go. And Putin took advantage of the pandemic's end and invaded Ukraine. Book fairs weren't possible back then either. Among other reasons, because Putin really likes to drop missiles or bombs wherever there are crowds of people. And a book fair is an attractive place to drop missiles and kill as many people as possible.

–Then they asked you to travel.

–It was in 2023, the second year of the invasion, when they decided they were going to have a book fair again. And there they wanted to present The Oblivion We Will Be. They were girls under 30, they weren't afraid. And if they weren't afraid, I couldn't be either. I agreed against my wife's opinion, who didn't want me to go to that country under those conditions. Nor did my son. My daughter did want me to go; she found it interesting. And so I went, but at the same time, I had already written a lot about Ukraine, against the Russian invasion.

–When did you feel the risk?

–I felt it was a minor risk. And that if my editors were capable of being there, I wasn't capable of expressing my fear. It was just a trip to the capital. I felt it was a risk later, when they told me, once we were in kyiv, that we could extend the trip by going to Donetsk and Donbass. I told them I had only gone for the Book Fair. And Catalina Gómez, a very brave Colombian war journalist, explained to me that she had been there many times. “We're going to a quiet area, we don't have to wear bulletproof vests,” she explained.

–While you're recounting all of this in the book, at least this reader felt they had to warn you: “Don't go, Hector, don't go!” Did anyone warn you then?

–Yes, a dear friend, Gonzalo Córdoba, to whom I owe a lot. I went to the train station to change train tickets to return to Poland. And then Gonzalo called me. I told him I was going with Sergio Jaramillo, who founded Aguanta Ukraine. He said to me: “Don't you know that all the Jaramillos go crazy at 50? They're all incredibly intelligent, extremely cultured, extremely kind, but they all go crazy, don't pay attention to them.” At that moment, my wife, Alexandra, was listening to me on the phone. This time she said to me: “I know you're going to make this trip, but I want you to know that it pains me deeply and I don't agree with you doing it.”

–Your father appears frequently in the book. Sometimes in connection with what happened to you in Ukraine.

–It's just that we human beings don't fully understand what happens to us in life. So we start examining details. And I noticed, when I was writing, that Victoria Amélina was born in 1986, the year of the Chernobyl disaster, and that my daughter was born that year, shortly after, and that back then you couldn't drink milk because she was born in Italy when fresh cow's milk was contaminated by radioactivity. So it drives me crazy that Victoria is exactly the same age as my daughter and that Victoria has decided to get herself killed for a just cause, but all the men in Ukraine can't leave because they have to be ready for war. And the women go to the West, to Spain, wherever, to save themselves and their children. And Victoria doesn't. Victoria takes her child to Poland; her husband is still in the United States, and she goes to document the war, and she's my daughter's age. And it's unbearable to me that a person my daughter's age has to dedicate herself to being a hero. And I think about my age, 65, and that the age I am when I write this book was the age when my father was killed.

–A drama in all lives.

–And then I said to myself: “Damn! They would have killed me at exactly the same age they killed my dad.” And my son says to me, “Don’t you realize,” and my daughter says, “If they had killed you in Ukraine, even for a just cause, you would have condemned Simón and me, your children, to live like you and your aunts, like a madman for the rest of your lives. Mad because they killed your dad for a just cause, however just it may be, but mad for the rest of your lives.” All of this comes back to me as I try to understand the dimensions of the whole drama.

–Impossible to erase, impossible to seal memory.

–And what obsessed me most, at a certain point, was the image of fourteen-year-old twins, who were in the Kramatorsk pizzeria, who were among the dead. They came back to me when my daughter suddenly came to me, as I was almost finishing the book, and said, “Dad, I’m pregnant.” I didn’t have any grandchildren; twins were coming. These connections, these events that seem random, chance, immediately hit you like shudders.

–You started in Colombia, which until recently was a common place of death, as Tomás Eloy Martínez would say, and you went to death itself, in Ukraine. You've already written another tragedy, your father's book, and now you're delivering this one. How did you approach both?

–My father's story was like a thorn in my heart. I couldn't write it so soon, and it took me years to tackle it, because with a book like that, you have to dedicate yourself to reliving the pain and tragedy. You don't do it to heal; you write the book and you get sicker, and you're more screwed up, and it hurts more. In fact, when I was trying to write Oblivion... I felt so bad that I couldn't continue. And my children were children, and they had to grow up with the illusion that the world is wonderful and that life is wonderful; they didn't think that life is a disgusting thing, full of murderers and unjust and malevolent people. No, they're going to grow up, like I was raised, with the false, but necessary, illusion that the world and life are wonderful. I felt that book and this one were obligatory and necessary. I wrote the others because I felt like it, because whatever I was going to tell seemed literary to me. But with my father's work, written 20 years after his murder, sooner or later I had to give voice to my father and to that injustice, and denounce it in literary form, without resentment or rancor. And I had to write Victoria's work immediately, otherwise I'd fall into the temptation of absolute silence and never speak about it again, or I'd start to forget. I'm an expert in the art of forgetting.

–Two books in a time frame, similar anxieties. One about your father, the other about Victoria.

–As a writer, I had two paths. One was to not use my memory too much and let my imagination do the work. And I tried to tell my father's story with my imagination. The same thing happened with Victoria: telling a fictional life that seemed like her story and that took place in Gaza. That didn't work either. The books I had to write, the one about my father and the one about Victoria, were Forgetting... and Now... I wish one could rehearse life and correct it. That nothing of what I tell, then, ever happened. To go back. But life is never a rehearsal.

Now and in the Hour , Héctor Abad Faciolince. Alfaguara (ebook), 224 pages.