Three Clocks
I’m selling my Kyiv flat to my ex-husband. He’s been living there for over four years. This is twice as long as the three of us lived there together. And twice as long as I lived there with our son, after we were already divorced. My ex-husband is living in a flat that he bought and that doesn’t belong to him. He says that this place is the only thing holding him together.
I’m selling this apartment not because I don’t need this home in Kyiv, but because he needs it. And at a lower-than-market price.
Photo from Kseniya Kharchenko’s personal archive, 2026
Our balcony is on the fourth floor—the only one on the front of the building not enclosed with glass windows. Our entrance is the second one, right next to the rubbish bin. There are beautiful big chestnut trees right outside.
This side of the building faces north, and it only gets sun in the summer, usually for an hour starting around five in the morning, and then again closer to seven in the evening.
The balcony is connected to the bedroom. In the winter, my son and I used to keep icicles there that we had found on the street. He would lay them out on the floor so that we had a good view of them through the glass door. In the summer, I kept flowers and strawberries in boxes, and hung laundry there. My mum always hung underwear on the clotheslines closest to the bedroom, so that it would be hidden by sheets or towels. But I never bothered about that.
On this balcony, my then still husband and the father of our young baby told me that he was sick of this new life and wanted to go to the Carpathians with his friends. They had already planned a several-day hike. We were sitting on the floor at the time, with our legs hanging through the bars of the balcony, eating watermelon.
I remember how I was scared to go right up to the balcony railing when I was holding my baby in my arms.
In autumn 2021, I didn’t clear out the dry leaves from the boxes and didn’t take down the solar-powered garden lights. I decided to put it off until the spring.
When spring came, I was in Kraków. Crocuses peeked through on clearings that were still covered with last summer’s dry grass. My son and I had left Kyiv on the 25th of February, a day after the start of the full-scale invasion. I had prepared for it as best I could: I had packed and sorted essentials and non-essentials. I had debated when to leave, and where to go. And the day we were woken up by explosions, there was no option to leave. On the 24th of February, the whole city was gridlocked and we stayed at home. I felt awful that I hadn’t got it together to leave sooner.
We made a second attempt the next day. The drive to the Zhytomyr highway from our flat in Syrets usually took fifteen minutes. This time it took over seven hours. At the last petrol station, which not long after was burned down, they filled an empty windshield cleaner bottle with diesel for me. We waited at the border for thirty-two hours. It was a very long journey with a final stop, it later turned out, in Vienna.
At the very beginning of March 2022, my neighbour in Kyiv called me. He shouted down the phone that the balcony was on fire. That no one was calling the fire brigade and that you couldn’t put out the fire from above. That some idiot from the floors above had chucked a cigarette butt down again. And could I finally get rid of those lights. ‘What are they, anyway? They’re bright as hell!’ my neighbour shouted in my ear. ‘Do you want us to get bombed or something?’
This summer, in 2026, my ex-husband is growing tomatoes in those boxes.
Photo from Kseniya Kharchenko’s personal archive, 2026
Over time, I brought a lot of my things to Vienna. Including a red metal clock in the shape of a keyhole. It’s now hanging in the hallway.
It’s from IKEA, 2009, Moscow. At that time, there weren’t any IKEA stores in Ukraine, and you had to order things through resellers or through friends. I was twenty-five. My closest childhood friend brought me this clock. She lived in Moscow and was coming to visit her grandmother in Kyiv. I asked her to get the clock for me and bring it with her. We were still friends then.
The red clock hung on the wall in the only room in the flat, where I lived at first on my own, then with my husband, and a little later, with our son. In the meantime, we bought the flat that I’m now selling ‘back’ to him.
So, my clock is seventeen years old. Now I know that it’s from the IKEA PS collection, created by the Swedish designer Thomas Ericksson and launched in 1995 at an exhibition in Milan under the slogan ‘Democratic Design’. I was only eleven at the time, and I had just learned what democracy was. I had no idea about the existence of IKEA.
IKEA opened in Ukraine not long before the start of the full-scale invasion, and in February 2022 it immediately suspended operations. A month later, it announced the temporary closure of all of its stores in Russia, and then later left the Russian market altogether.
In Vienna, IKEA has become such an everyday part of our lives. My son adores their meatballs and ‘bottomless’ lemonade, where you can refill your glass as much as you want.
I recently saw that the PS clock from 1995 is back. Now it’s blue. And my red one is on view in the permanent collection of the National Museum of Sweden.
My clock does not tick and does not chime. It doesn’t make any sound at all.
I used to say that I needed it to be like a coffin for me to sleep: dark, quiet, cool. Now I don’t say that any more.
Photo from Kseniya Kharchenko’s personal archive, 2026
My ex-husband’s grandmother died not long after the start of the full-scale war. Her grandson took her husband’s, his granddad’s, clock as a memento. A loud pendulum clock with Roman numerals. You can hear it ticking from the next room.
The love between his grandparents was always told as a separate family story, full of memories and wonder. Granddad is summer, fishing, riding a motorcycle with a sidecar, getting up to all manner of boyish adventures. When my then-future husband was introducing me to his family, he introduced me to his tiny and frail grandmother first.
When he was a child, my husband used to spend the whole summer with his grandparents. This wooden clock hung on the wall in the living room of their small two-room flat in Uman. The ticking of the clock used to calm the little boy, who slept in the other room. Now it calms the grown man who sleeps in the room next door to it.
This clock has been ticking all his life.
My now ex-husband is lying in Kyiv, in a flat that does not belong to him, listening to this same sound. The clock ticks during an air alert, and ticks when the skies are quiet. It makes no difference to the clock.
Photo from Kseniya Kharchenko’s personal archive, 2026
In Austria, I have fallen in love with another man. I call him my partner now.
He also inherited a clock from his grandfather. Shiny, with glass doors, and with a weight like a grandfather clock. It hangs in a prominent place in the living room of the house my partner built.
This clock chimes. Every quarter hour, every half hour, and at the top of every hour.
My son sleeps on the couch in the next room, which is also my partner’s home office. There are deer antlers, on which hang several shirts and a fox pelt. Near the door stands a green cupboard for hunting rifles.
On top of it are several electronic measuring devices that glow at night, so I always turn them off before bedtime. But the chiming from the other room doesn’t bother my son at all.
And so my son falls asleep to the chiming of a clock that belonged to an Austrian grandfather he didn’t know, and his father falls asleep to the ticking of a clock that belonged to his Ukrainian grandfather.
I cover my ears. I hate steady, rhythmic sounds at night. So I buy clocks that don’t tick.
My son now has three addresses. My partner’s house in the Austrian village, which is too fancy to be a real village. The flat in Vienna. And his dad’s flat in Kyiv, which will soon legally cease to be ours.
My son started school in Vienna. He learned to write in German before he learned to write in Ukrainian. His memories of Ukraine and his early childhood are romanticized: the village, his bicycle, a loaf of bread, our garden, ice cream in a cone. He likes all of these things.
During our trip to Lviv in February 2026, he asked why they don’t repair buildings and why the public transport doesn’t run on time. It was minus twenty degrees. We stood at the tram stop, and I read the Zhadan poem written on the wall of the building opposite out loud to him. He really loves the band Zhadan i Sobaky.
He was born on the 14th of February. After his next birthday he will have lived outside of Ukraine for more than half of his life.
You can stop a clock. You can not wind it up, and the weights will drop by themselves. But then you have to wind it up again anyway and set it to the time it is now. You can’t turn the hands back, the mechanism doesn’t like it. Everyone who has had this type of clock knows this.
Both of the antique clocks, and my new one, have little doors. Behind the doors on mine there isn’t a pendulum, instead there are used batteries, lightbulbs, wires. Everything that I will one day take to the hazardous waste disposal.
In autumn 2021, I put off cleaning up my Kyiv balcony until spring in just the same way.
In my clock, which is in the shape of a keyhole that you can’t put a key in, I keep rubbish. It seems to me I’ll always have time to throw it out, so I don’t have to carry it all around with me.