Hotel Polissya

Hotel Polissya presides over the main square the way it always did, eight storeys of modernist confidence with its name still lettered on the roof. Delegations stayed here once; in April 1986 its height made it a vantage point for those managing the catastrophe. Then it joined everything else in the long emptiness.

I stood on the plaza below it, snow to my ankles, young birches growing through the paving like a slow crowd. The building has the particular dignity of hotels: built to receive, still visibly waiting.

Of all the ruins on the square, the hotel is the one that seems most capable of reopening tomorrow, given staff and glass. That readiness is the saddest thing in it.