I end my breakfast with coffee. A flat round cup fits a palm. Holding the cup by its thin handle, I take a sip. A stripe of a simple yellow and black ornament girdles white porcelain—a reference to traditional patterns of the Carpathians, the mountains I see from the window as I drink. 

All of my mornings here in my grandmother’s house begin like this. Yet I have not developed an attachment to the cup. 

My grandmother would normally keep the cups in a cupboard in the kitchen. She would arrange them by four on top of a pile of saucers. “We would treat the tableware like backpacking mess kits. We knew it was temporary,” my grandmother told me. They did not care much about acquiring and keeping the items. “As we moved, we would pass it on to those who stayed,” she proceeded. The family lived a nomadic life following my grandfather, a military man. A dream of their own space was palpable yet unspoken. A repeating ornament of coming and going would someday end with a handle to hold. But when exactly, they did not know. 

They often shared apartments with other families. The kitchen would be a common space. “We dined separately. We were two housewives in a kitchen. We co-existed and compromised,” my grandmother said. The two families would sometimes eat together when there was a holiday or anything particularly tasty on the menu. 

Was there a moment my grandmother could own for herself in the morning while drinking from a cup she knew was there temporarily? Was there an isle of privacy in those rented and shared spaces? My fingers remember the solid walls of my cups at home. The ones I chose and enjoyed. Did she picture her cup in those stolen moments? Did it have a particular color and shape? 

My grandmother and her mother moved from the picturesque harvesting steppes in south-central Ukraine to the eastern part of the country, which was industrialized by the Belgians, French, and other European nations in the 19th century. The facilities were later seized by the Soviet state. My grandmother’s family traveled there to follow her father, my great-grandfather, a World War II fighter sent to a Soviet work camp there after being released from Nazi captivity. Seen as a labor force, he was made to work in a mine. At times the family had nothing to eat. They were lucky to flee to western Ukraine after years of struggling with poverty and scarcity. 

Houses of dark bricks leading to a place where an abandoned soda plant is visible from this height, spring sun touching the branches of apricots in bloom. I visited the city decades after my great-grandmother would sell soda that she clandestinely collected at the plant for additional income. Did I step on the same path that my grandmother took on her way to school or to see friends? Did my great-grandfather pass these streets lined by rows of Belgian houses on his way to the mine? What hopes did the apricots blooming in spring give my grandmother as she gazed up at them? 

The architect of this displacement is one and the same throughout the years. The same one that time and time again tries to erase our memory, cut off our roots, eliminate us. Sometimes there was so little choice, I think to myself, putting the ornamented cup on the oilcloth-covered table in my grandmother’s kitchen, kilometers westwards of my home. Sometimes the choice was between staying to struggle—possibly to perish–and leaving to survive. Leaving your place, your roots, your skin–as a university professor from Kharkiv who fled the war to Poltava writes in a column, abandoning your self to survive. 

My other grandmother had the best cups and plates stored in a cupboard over a glass door. I hardly remember an occasion that would prompt her to take them out. I could not hold them in my hands, explore, touch, feel their weight–all sorts of things one can do to own something. Neither could she, I later realized. She had a beautiful Jewish name, but everyone knew her by a different name, the one she took to conceal her origin. For a major part of her life, she felt displaced inside herself. Did she speak some Yiddish to herself? I never heard her do so to anyone around. 

My grandparents got their own apartment when my mother, the oldest child of the two, was in the last year of high school. My grandmother can still remember the smell of varnish and paint in a three-room apartment–their apartment–they came to see with my uncle, the youngest child. I can picture them standing in a fresh, empty room as the light comes through bare windows. They now have their kitchen. They can buy tableware that will be with them to stay. 

Decades and centuries of struggle made us grow into people that make their own choices, that are free to choose. We are not supposed to become another generation of displacements. We don’t want to. That is not what we choose. 

As I end my breakfast, I pour steaming coffee into my cup, one of the two–a blue and a pink one, no handle, that I brought from a trip to Italy–that I continue to enjoy and use daily. Looking out of the window I see people, cars, and trees wrapped up in summer. The scenes can get pierced by an air raid siren at any moment. The siren may come and go, or call us to leave our place again entirely. 

A colleague shows me pictures from her trip to the suburbs of Kyiv where there was a war theater this spring. Windows with no glass are now carefully sealed with plastic film. People come back home, even if that home no longer has windows or walls. I think I understand why. 

*“Walls of algae and grass” (Будуй стіни з водоростей і трави) is a translated excerpt from Serhiy Zhadan’s poem that begins with the lines «Як ми будували свої доми?» (How we built our houses).