Polyotov

This is not a story about falling in love with an actress, not a book about Africa, and not a novel about 1993 as such. It’s a story about how a big history grinds people up, spends them, and then rewrites what happened as if it could only have happened that way. “Flights” is about a person who again and again finds himself right at the edge of a rupture: by the White House at the moment of the shelling; beside a girl who is struck by someone else’s bullet; near the president of an African country where power changes faster than laws can be written. He doesn’t perform feats and doesn’t carry out reprisals, he doesn’t save or betray—he simply stays close and sees. The role of a witness is the most useless and the heaviest at any time.

Here there are no loud declarations, no “right” and “wrong,” no final comfort. Instead—quiet conversations in the rain, behind-the-scenes deals without moral lessons, feelings that choke under the roar of events. Love doesn’t pull you out, memory doesn’t heal, and experience doesn’t bring wisdom—it just settles inside, layer by layer, like ash.

This book is for those who have seen too much to accept polished versions of what happens. For those who know: sometimes staying alive is harder than dying. And almost always—it’s more dangerous.