Secrets and lies

A womans quest to uncover her family’s difficult past reveals broader truths about the present conflict in Ukraine

- Blake Morrison

In 2014, Victoria Belim came across a strange Sergiy's I entry in her great-grandfather notebook: "Brother Nikodim, vanished in the 1930s fighting for a free Ukraine." Who was Nikodim? She had never heard the family talk of him. And why had he vanished? The mystery was made more urgent by Vladimir Putin's annexation of Crimea and the renewed fight for a free Ukraine. Having left at the age of 15, first for the US, then to settle in Brussels, Belim desperately missed her homeland. Now she had a reason to go back: not just to visit her grandmother Valentina but to discover the truth about Nikodim.

Valentina lived in a village in central Ukraine, where Belim had spent happy years as a child, and was delighted to have her granddaughter back. But whenever she was asked about the past, she shrugged it off: "We must think about the future." She avoided mention of the war, too, except to complain that it had pushed up food prices. Her one preoccupation was her garden, and she harassed Belim to help out.