What I felt? You fuck off, that’s what!

The journalist Shura Burtin spoke with dozens of Ukrainians who lost their loved ones and their homes. They described how the proximity of death forced them to see life anew. This text is an initial stock-taking of long months of war. The names of persons mentioned here have been changed.

Valya and I exit off the Kharkiv-Kyiv highway and end up in the painfully familiar provinces, the very same villages with their boarded-up clubs, the same soldiers under the poplars, the grannies with their granny carts. Kremenchuk, too, looks like Kursk, Voronezh, the main city of any Russian oblast. We drive up to the Amstor—a huge shopping center the size of an Ashan or Ikea. It’s black, with tongues of flame flaring up here and there inside. It was hit by a cruise missile four hours ago. I see a bare-chested guy covered in soot, his t-shirt wrapped around his face as a makeshift mask. He says he ran over as soon as he heard the hit and helped the firefighters. 

            “Wasn’t it scary?” 

            “It’s fine, as long as you don’t count the dead people. They burned up completely in there, just the spine left. Well, there was one little girl who was all there, like, all her clothes burned up, it was like she was baked, but she was all there, and her sneakers were still on. She was in this position, like she was crawling…” 

There are about fifty people in front of the entrance to the hospital, standing in groups or sitting on the curb. Some have tear-swollen faces; others have simply gone numb from the stress. The wounded from the Amstor were taken to the emergency room, but nobody knows yet who survived and who died. 

“Have you seen her today? What was she wearing? I think it was a white blouse. No, it was a tank top. Shorts or long pants? She usually wears shorts, black ones.” 

“At the guard post they told me ‘Come back tomorrow.’ They’re totally fucked up.” 

“We went out onto the balcony and saw it wasn’t the oil refinery that was burning, we couldn’t get through to mom on the phone.” 

“As soon as I saw it, I grabbed some bandages and ran to the hospital, I know the doctors here don’t have anything.” 

“They’re not letting anyone in, they’re not telling anybody anything.” 

A man and woman, forty-five or thereabouts, are standing by the front steps, their faces porcelain. “Who’d you have in there?” “Our son.” A sunburned blue-collar type in a Metallica t-shirt can’t bear it, sinking down onto the curb and starting to sob. A man of around fifty is completely dazed; he’s crying, but doesn’t realize it. His teenage daughter is speaking agitatedly, even excitedly, like a Young Pioneer: “There’s no information at all, but we’ll keep hoping!” He nods frequently. Every one of these people are at the edge of the abyss now. The guy on the curb knows his daughter is burned up, she doesn’t exist anymore, and his life doesn’t exist anymore. But they haven’t said it to him yet, so maybe nothing happened. There’s still an illusory hope.  

A doctor comes out and says something. People rush inside. I follow them in. It’s a run-down district hospital. Through the half-open door I see doctors operating on a guy right on his hospital cot. The emergency room’s packed. I go into a random hospital room. On a bed lies a woman whose swollen face is composed entirely of fresh scars. She’s staring at the ceiling. I ask her what happened. 

“My husband’s siren went off. But we stopped in anyway, we went to Comfy,” the woman says, trying to remember. “There were five or six people standing by the checkout counter. There was a woman with two kids walking by too, she was turning around, and one small child. Then I’m flying, and my whole body’s being pounded, pounded, hit by debris. And when I snap out of it, two slabs are lying on top of me. My husband starts moving, and I shout, “Help me!” He starts to lift, but my arm just flops and hangs there. The wall and roof were already gone. There was a little girl in a yellow dress lying there, he lifted her up. And there were four guys in green t-shirts lying there. And then that little girl fell down again, she’d gotten her foot caught. And it was already pouring with really, really thick smoke…”  

I see that the woman isn’t here. She’s talking to me from some kind of subspace. She doesn’t care I’m a journalist; I’m just another person. And the words she says aloud aren’t what she wants to tell me. She just saw death, and she wants to tell somebody what that is. 

The next morning we go to the shopping center again. Grimy firefighters who haven’t slept since lunchtime yesterday are clearing the wreckage. Investigators are taking pictures of the debris and shrapnel. The powerful steel trusses of the building framework are twisted from the explosion. Inside, there’s an unbearable, suffocating smell of burned meat in certain spots. We find a watch. The watchband is buckled, but torn. It had been on someone’s wrist. 

 Valya has seen a lot on the front and is by no means prone to nationalism, but his face goes blotchy. “Well, what can I say,” he manages. “Your compatriots are some real terrorists…”  

 

 

The beginning

 

“At first, when the shelling started, it was hard to believe it was shelling,” says Kirill, a cardiologist from Kyiv. “The first reaction is you go numb, you sit there. What ran through my head was, they’re most likely going to kill us all, so no need to get all worked up. Just need to get dressed. Mom also got up, we started making breakfast in a frenzy, we ruined all the food. The rice burned. That’s how we spent that morning hour: pointless cooking, getting dressed, and sitting around. In our coats, for some reason. This sense of being in a daze coupled with an attempt to keep up appearances. From the outside it probably looked hilarious. Dawn came, and this terrible yellow smoke started covering our neighborhood, because the military supply depots by Brovary had blown up. 

“It was interesting to look out the window at six in the morning and watch people running out of their buildings in a panic with their things and their kids and taking off in their cars and driving on these narrow little streets at top speed. Where to? All the bridges were stopped, all the roads were backed up, military vehicles were moving around. People were desperate. But mom and I were like on the Titanic, drinking whiskey in top hats and tails while we sank.

“Then that day began. Mom spent it calling people, I spent it in a state of numbness, of perpetual apprehension. I really wanted to cry, naturally, the way you cry when you’re little because there’s nothing you can do.

“The car’s out of gas, the fridge is empty, the stores are closed. The process of getting food began, and it provided a little bit of distraction. What was amazing was that people behaved quite normally in stores. My mom and I went to one: the shelves were completely bare, no groceries, no people. We were just standing there, dazed, and a guy comes up to us: “This is for you.” A whole loaf of bread! He probably saw our eyes—these people frozen, gobsmacked, because there’s nothing there—and he gave us his loaf. 

“I got a call from one of my friends, an energetic Putin supporter. He was in a panic trying to escape Kyiv. We had a very difficult conversation, he was despondent, crying, and he goes, ‘So we’re probably not going to be talking anymore, there’s no way you’re going to be able to forgive me for this.’ A lot of people cried in those first days, both men and women. People’s reactions were very different. Some of my coworkers were going to stay, but then they all heroically up and left. But a doctor in this kind of situation always faces a dilemma: don’t you have to stay with your patients? Lots of people were saying, ‘We’ll defend ourselves.’ One woman I know said pompously, ‘It’s my honor to die for this city.’

“You sleep in your clothes, you don’t each much, you collect water in the bathtub because you figure the water will be turned off. During the day you’re walking around like an animal searching for food. It takes a lot of walking. You try to go through courtyards, not walk along the streets, because planes are constantly going by. There was a military hysteria, they started looking for spies, coded signs, enemies—it scared me. And then the air raid sirens, and those long trips eight times a day down to a dusty basement packed with old people and crying children, with one light bulb, where it smells like a sewer. 

“But people started coming in from the villages, bringing stuff in and selling it at the market, which saved the day. We were coming back from the market once when a plane flew past really low, in the clouds. It’s the kind of sound that makes everything in you go taut. There was a family walking along, a man, a woman, and two children. The man shoved his kids and his wife face-first in a puddle and threw himself down on top of them, he covered them, the kids start crying. But my mom and I just crouch down. My mom has thin hands, but she grabbed my arm so hard I could feel the bones. Then the kids stand back up, all dirty, in that puddle. And I tell my mom, ‘That’s what we have to do next time.’

“You get into a routine, the calls gradually stop, life becomes bleak, boring, you can’t go anywhere. Your neighborhood, your neighbors, that’s your entire world. Gradually the women and children start disappearing—you can tell from the bomb shelters—but the old people stay. Then the old people stop coming down too, because the elevators aren’t running and it’s physically hard on them to do it ten times a day.

“My mom was constantly talking. She went on and on, not about anything, just a stream of consciousness, you have to set the fork out like this, and the dish like that. I started to worry, to be honest—was something psychiatric going on? I wondered that until Bucha and Irpin. That was when she went quiet for a very long time. When I saw my mother’s face after the scenes from Bucha, it was no longer the same face. Now it was primal terror. For those whole three months she hadn’t cried once. It negatively affected her health. But she’s a doctor too, so—iron maiden, Soviet Union, and so forth.

“At some point we started feeling like Kyiv would be taken and we’d be occupied, that Putin’s portrait would go up and I’d walk around underneath it with my hands in my pockets giving him the finger. The loneliness was immense. Talking on the phone didn’t help, it just made things worse. 

“At first we felt sorry for everyone. When the reports on Russian soldiers killed started coming out—you couldn’t understand those numbers, a hundred, two hundred, a thousand, every day. I was always trying to see it from their perspective, put myself in their shoes. Why are they going out like that, to get slaughtered? It’s just kids out there, eighteen years old. What for? He’s not defending his home, his mother, his girlfriend. All those questions were pulsing in my mind. I even had some pity for Russian soldiers—but after Bucha I had absolutely none left. I feel like Bucha was the beginning of the war for a lot of people. We did get shelled, but they came in and left again. Whereas this was the red line. Because Bucha’s basically a neighborhood of Kyiv, it’s not “somewhere way out there.” A lot of people cried, or just sat outside on benches. People drank really hard. A lot of people I know developed an utterly savage hatred for all Russians, not just for Russian soldiers. People were saying they wanted all Russians to die. That was also shocking. 

“I was about to have some kind of nervous breakdown, lose my mind. I called my girlfriend. For years I’d been going to Moscow to visit her, we’d walked holding hands, we’d hugged and kissed. ‘Why are they doing this!?’ I made one hysterical phone call, just one that whole time, where I shouted, ‘Why are they killing themselves and killing us!? Tell me!’ But she had only one thing to say in response, like the typical good Jewish mother: ‘All we have to do is survive, our task is just to survive. Come stay at our dacha with us, we have a generator and a lake with water.’ Just to survive—and then what? And what for? To live with that?

“But at the end of March I was able to get across [the Dnipro] to the Right Bank. I felt as though I’d gotten out of prison and found myself in the big city. I was struck by how clean and empty it was, no litter, no cigarette butts. Only the occasional car driving past; the only people walking around were old people, pedigreed Kyivan natives. That made me feel good, because I remembered my younger years when Kyiv was unpopulated and there were these summer evenings… The hospital was in a state of permanent military emergency, the windows covered in sandbags, the emergency room moved to the basement. There was a sense of complete meltdown. The hospital had deteriorated. It was hard to get home, the doctors lived in the hospital.”

 

 

* * *

 

“Everybody called everybody that first day,” recalls Sasha, a Kyiv musician. “People I hadn’t talked to in 20 years call me, ‘What’s up? How are you?!’ It used to be complicated to call somebody: how’s he gonna react? I have a number saved in my phone for this one totally random guy, I ran into his bumper way back when and gave him 500 hryvnia to get it buffed out, and I go, ‘Let’s exchange numbers, just in case.’ So I even called him: ‘How are you?’”

 

 

* * *

 

“I went to bed at two-thirty, and at five oh four—vooo-OOOO,” says Viktor, a Kharkiv bartender. "But my dad’s just sleeping away. I’m standing there trying to think how to break it to him. Tsyrkuny’s already burning bright. So in this voice, like, as calm as possible, I go, ‘Pop, wake up, it’s time to get ready, probably, so let’s go, seems like there’s some shelling…’ He sits up bolt upright in bed: ‘But Vitya, that’s thunder…’ I didn’t expect him to tell me, ‘Go back to bed, sonny,’ in such a reassuring voice, like I was five years old. So I’m like inhaling a big lungful of air, so I have enough for two sentences, and then there’s such a huge fucking wham that his bed shakes. He’s all, ‘Nuh-uh…that’s not thunder…’ 

“All the gas stations are shut down. I go outside to bring in food, some potatoes from the shed, and boom! ka-boom! And some homeless guy at the trolleybus stop starts crying: ‘They’re killing us! They’re killing us!’ Explosions, a building’s burning next to us, wires hanging down. I’m walking; no point running. ‘Run! Run away!’ the homeless guy yells at me, while he’s just sitting there on that bench at the trolleybus stop.

 

 

* * *

 

“You keep busy with some momentary thing, just so you don’t go fucking nuts,” explains the sculptor Vasily from Irpin. “At one level you’re thinking about groceries, but at another level you’re thinking they could kill you any minute. You think, ‘Am I scared of dying? Well, no, not really.’ But when a plane flies over your building, now that’s very scary, because it’s unbearably loud, and it dips down really low, so you can see every fucking detail.

“My relatives from Russia called. ‘What’s happening out there? It’s quiet where you are, isn’t it?’ ‘What do you mean, quiet…’ ‘Well don’t you worry. They’re just doing military stuff.’ I couldn’t even respond. You tell them what’s really going on, and they answer you with words from television. And sure, there’s propaganda over there, but that’s plain fucking rude! So I just cut them all off. 

“I see in Telegram that tomorrow they’re evacuating women with children on the commuter train, get there by nine am. We have to take advantage of it: there’s no gas, the bridges have been bombed out. We get to the train station in the morning, there’s a ton of people, there’s people with guns, kids are crying their eyes out. That right there is where the war began for me. Things flying around didn’t make the same impression. But here it is happening directly to you, your family is right here. I waved goodbye to my kids, from the pedestrian bridge, and they walked off. And I think, ‘Will I ever see them again?’ It’s like you’re a character in a movie or something, you’ve seen it all before, war, evacuation… except that you’re in it, you can’t change the channel.

“You’re constantly expecting the worst. You think about what you’ll do if they come for you. I tried to find some kind of gun, but that’s just ridiculous. I tried to set up a bunker in a cellar, dragged a bunch of rugs down there. We sit there for about three hours, it’s chilly and damp, and I go, ‘Fuck it, Yulya, let them kill me straight off.’ I went into the house, and then Yulya comes in, ‘Damn, it’s unbearable in there.’ By the next day we’ve already lost phones and electricity, we’re sitting there, it’s getting dark, Yulya is reading Dante aloud to me while something blows up somewhere. Then she goes, ‘Damn, the neighbors’ house is on fire!’ It’s their roof burning, we start looking for garden hoses and spigots. We hook up a hose and this little thin stream dribbles out. And their house burned down, just the walls are still left. 

“We went into the basement. We’ve got pre-fab housing right next to us, I collected a bunch of refuse and styrofoam. I’m lying there in the dark, remembering the past day, and all of a sudden I realize how calm I am right now! Because I know there’s no way we’ll be hit by something so big it could kill us. Turns out – I hadn’t consciously realized this – that for all those days I’d been living with the expectation that I could be killed at any moment, even while I’m sleeping. But now—oh, damn—regardless of the discomfort—it’s dark, there’s no toilet—you realize you’re safe.

“In the morning, I go, ‘Yulya, we’ve got to get the fuck out of here.’ She goes, ‘But what about the cats?’ She also called her gal pals, whose word is law. and got their advice. It’s my parents’ house, there’s a whole life there, it’s a shame to abandon it, cause it’ll burn down, and that’s that. I found my departed mother’s granny cart. I stick the cat in my shirt, I get the dog, a backpack, and we head out. I take a look and see the wheel’s squeaking and wobbling, and I go, ‘The granny cart’s not gonna make it.’ We’ve got around three kilometers to walk. We’re walking along and these three guys grouse, ‘We’ve been walking away from Bucha since first thing this morning.’ Then a car comes up behind us and the guy says, ‘Everybody get in the car!’ ‘Can you open the trunk?’ ‘I don’t know, it’s not my car, mine was blown up yesterday.’ And then there was a horrific explosion: that’s apparently when that family was killed, eight people, out on the street, right by where we were driving. 

“We get in and the car drives up to the bridge. Somebody shouts, ‘There’s a woman over there, help her! Help her!’ A granny is climbing over the tall guardrail. She’s got a suitcase and a little sack of food tied to it, there’s ground beef from the supermarket in there, I buy the same kind myself. She did a shit job tying it on, it keeps falling off. We start dragging her over the guardrail. And then there’s a shout: ‘Get down!’ I go, ‘Just ditch the vittles already!’

“Everyone’s running bent over, hauling their luggage. But over there they go, ‘Come on, hurry! They’re shooting!’ I step onto the board across the river, but Gerda fucking twists her head out of her collar and races out into the soggy riverside marsh. I toss my suitcase and shout, ‘Gerda, Gerda, come here, girl!’ And she’s all, you fuck off, and starts going around from bush to bush. But that’s where the embankment ends, it’s all tiled in paving stones there by the river, there’s modern sculptures. And there’s this guy walking along, completely calm, with a little dog there next to him. Our dogs start sniffing each other. And then—fshhhh, pshooom, there’s nonstop shelling, the ground is wrecked, as though it’d all been dug up with shovels. And I realized why they were shooting when civilians are being evacuated. The river’s narrow, right, and there’s a fuckton of space under the bridge, so the soldiers are hiding there and there’s no freaking way you’re getting them out from under there. But when civilians are being evacuated, the soldiers are exposed, and the other side shoots the fuck out of them. I think to myself, I’m just going to get killed right now, I’d better go, she’ll follow me. And whaddaya know, I go, and she follows me. I go out onto the beam, you literally have to walk like three meters. And then everyone’s all, ‘The bird’s not ours! The bird’s not ours!’ They’d seen a drone and started shooting at it with their automatic rifles. And then Gerda goes completely fucking nuts. 

“We cross over and walk to the bus, and there’s an English woman there, a journalist: ‘How are you doing?’ [The italics indicate words in English. – Trans.] And this guy goes, ‘Well, I just took a hit, so it’s better now. But where are you from? From Britain? You’re legalize over there, yeah?’ And then the shitshow hits—a fucking huge explosion! A soldier died. But everyone’s like, ‘Let’s get out of here, huh? Let’s go!’ And then there’s a second explosion…

“We arrive and my friend Timofey picks us up, feeds us borshch, gets us high, and we watch Pirates of the Caribbean. It’s some kind of weird former life, people in Kyiv still don’t get it. I say, ‘Get the fuck out of here, dammit! There’s no need for civilians to be here, they just fuck things up for the soldiers.’”

 

 

Volunteers

 

Tolya, an artist, delivered food to checkpoints and makeshift barracks in Kyiv when it was under siege. 

“Now my life has begun. Before the war I was worked up about all these hurtful things, about the difficult relationship with my ex-wife, about not having my own place to live. Me and her broke up not long before the war, and from morning till night I went over it and over it in my mind, thinking, ‘Why’d it turn out this way? What could I have done differently?’ All just a bunch of cheap glitz that became irrelevant in one fell swoop. Because you wake up in the morning—fucking great; you have something to eat—delicious; and the weather’s good, it’s not cold, it’s a good day when nothing comes down on you. If you took a shower because there’s hot water, that’s fantastic! I didn’t think about anything, I just drove. Today it’s potatoes: you just deliver 20 tons, and that’s all there is. The past has disappeared, and so has the future. The little hurts of the past also disappeared—that ‘oh you offended me, so now I’m not going to help you’—that doesn’t exist now. If you can help, you help. 

“At first you deliver food somewhere within artillery range, and it thunders and booms, it’s scary. And then the threshold of fear goes way down. That is, the actual feeling of danger doesn’t go anywhere, but at first you’re completely merged with it, your body goes taut, it doesn’t want to move anywhere. But eventually you just separate that feeling from whatever it is you need to do.”  

 

 

* * *

 

“It was crucial, absolutely, that people stayed behind,” says Nikita, a Kharkiv cameraman. “‘You stayed too? I’m so glad. Need any help?’” The most common topic is some guy posting, ‘I need a car.’ Immediately, total strangers reply, ‘There’s a car in such-and-such a place, here’s where the keys are,’ you just take it and go. Everyone knows what you mean before you finish your thought. Our lives so often consist of little squabbles, of ‘how do I say this so he doesn’t take it wrong.’ But now it’s question and answer, done. You call somebody: ‘Can you do this?’ ‘No, I can’t.’ And I’m not going to be like, ‘Come on, please, I really need you to…’ These days, everyone understands the limits of their own strength—and that’s the main currency now.”

 

 

* * *

 

“Two-million-plus people without a single working traffic light. It took me fifteen minutes to drive from one end of the city to the other. Windows rolled down, heater blowing full blast, hitting 130 kilometers an hour in the city, you stop quick, you start quick…”

Oleg and I are driving around the Kharkiv commuter suburbs delivering food bags. Oleg works on high-rise construction crews. He was moonlighting in Poland before the war.

“My family tried to convince me: ‘Stay there, it’d be better if you earned up some money for us, got a place ready, just in case.’ Before the week was out I sold all my tools and came here...”

The grannies generally meet us at their building entrances. Oleg gives them the food bag and takes a picture of them for record-keeping. 

“I have so many phone pictures of these little grannies—for some reason I don’t erase them,” Oleg says. 

“The harder a neighborhood’s shelled, the more decent the people are; when you make a food delivery, they’re so happy. But whereever the shelling’s not so bad, they like to get into politics. But I had zero interest in discussing that. And sometimes you make a delivery and it’s ‘But where’s the sausage? Where’s the vegetables? What’s this you brought? Is this for a dog, or what?’ There was a church there that assembled them.

“There was one guy, I waited for him for 10 minutes, and he comes down, he stinks real bad, and he’s got this big cross hanging off him. So I give him the food bag and leave, and half an hour later I get a call from an unfamiliar number. ‘This is Vitalik, you were just at my place. I forgot to tell you to bring me an electric shaver next time, and shaving cream. And for you to find me some work…’ I blew my top then, for the first time: ‘Are you out of your fucking mind, Vitalik? You’re thirty-five years old, you’re a huge strong guy, but here I am fifty years old and I’m delivering you food!’

Oleg drives us back volunteer-style, ignoring lanes and not slowing down for turns. And it’s this movement, even more than peoples’ stories, that conveys to me the conditions Kharkiv lived in for the first few months of the war: horror, stress, and freedom.

“You keep asking what I felt,” he says. “You know how I really want to answer that question, ‘what I felt’? You fuck off, that’s what!” 

 

 

* * *

 

After escaping occupied Bucha with her kids, Yana registered her boyfriend’s apartment as her place of residence. They’d met at a conference, he had some pompous job in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, he was really nice: witty, educated, cultured. By the time the war started, they’d already been dating for about a year and were planning on getting married. “He was the ideal man.”

“When you’re over forty, you want to take it easy, including in your relationships. I really wanted a family, I dreamed of my own home, of baking bread in the yard, of making borshch for everyone, so our families could come—my kids, his kids—and there’d be dogs running around. I won’t be sitting here with three kids like an idiot, I’ll have a man. To be completely frank, I even thought, ‘a great guy, a trophy husband,’ emphasis on the word ‘trophy’…”

From the very first day, Yana rushed to volunteer, going underground to get food into occupied villages and coordinating endless supply chains. Yana’s boyfriend observed her frenzied activity ironically. He was working remotely, so he’d do his job for ten minutes a day and lie around on the couch watching TV shows. He was a big Ukrainian patriot and knew the language fluently, but he’d say that even without him, there were plenty of people fighting. He was upset she paid no attention to him, he thought this was the perfect time to just be together: “Come on, Yanochka, why are you off doing your own stuff? Let’s watch a movie! Seeing as how we have the opportunity…” She couldn’t tell whether he was joking or serious.

For several weeks she’d been wearing the same light-blue jumpsuit she had on when she fled her home. For all those weeks, which had blended together into one day, she had barely slept. She felt like a zombie. Her beloved gave her a skeptical glance: “Lord, what is that you’re wearing? Couldn’t you maybe buy yourself a dress?” They hadn’t lived together before that, they’d mostly seen each other on dates and trips. All her clothes had been left behind in Bucha, she’d only bought herself cotton panties with little hearts on them. Her boyfriend laughed his head off: “Yana, what is this?! Have we been married twenty years, or what?” And then he gives her this jolly lecture about how unless a woman’s in a trench, she has to wear lace panties and always be desirable, not waste time on bullshit and volunteering.

One day Yana saw that as her boyfriend was getting ready to go to the supermarket to pick up some pasta, he putting on his military uniform—all Ministry employees had received one. 

“Why are you putting that on?”

“Well, the country’s at war…” he smiled. 

And Yana, relieved, got her things together and left him. 

 

 

Volunteers

 

“The first time I was taken to my position, I thought, are you fucking kidding me?” says Borya, who works in Kyiv in advertising and volunteered to fight. “It felt exactly like the set of a WWII movie. Wet, really crooked trenches in the cold, damp earth, dugouts quickly cobbled together from boards and plastic sheeting, terrified new recruits. Experienced senior fighters, tiny little lady field medics, and huge, hoarse, bellowing battalion commanders. Katyusha rocket launchers shooting over your head. Anti-tank hedgehogs. Generals surrounded by guards well-wrapped in body armor—unlike the volunteer militia members. A really grim atmosphere.” 

 

 

* * *

 

“People in Kharkiv expected them to break through completely,” says Anton, a journalism student. “A day or two, then we’re fucked. Terrified. When you have to bite the big one, then all that national identity stuff—that's not a construct you can really latch on to. But running off’s, like, not what a man does. Some kind of gangstery street-type attitude going on. Everybody was walking around with this very definite sense that, shit, they’re going to kill everyone now… so okay, boys, let’s go.”

“When I went to the military recruiting station to sign up, I took the bus. I didn’t pay for a ticket, which put me in a way better mood,” says Anton’s friend Timur. “The final hours of my life—why should I pay? I looked around, at the people who pay, and I thought, ‘What idiots.’ And everybody was headed to work. And also they were all really pissed off: some guy tries to push his way onto the bus and they all start screaming at him. I had this really firm belief that I’d most likely die—but screw it. It seemed like, give it two or three hours, and Russian tanks’ll be in downtown Kharkiv. But I didn’t want to appear weak in my own eyes. I went, I made up my mind and did it; means I’m not as bad a person as I thought I was.

“But as soon as I found my friends, all my fear disappeared. We started joking that we’re all gonna die soon, or else that we’re all gonna come back heroes, and we’ll be able to ride public transportation for free, and we’ll get into university no sweat, and we’ll be honored, and what chickenshits our classmates are for not going.”

 

 

* * *

 

“Right away, Pyotr and I went to our boss and said, ‘We won’t work without each other,’” says Mikola, a medical student. “He’s all, ‘Sure, fine, no worries.’ Back then, absolutely nobody cared how you greet a colonel, whether you shake his hand or turn around and walk away.

“But that evening the battalion commander comes up and says, ‘So, we fly out in four hours.’ And just those words, ‘fly out’—I’m standing there, Pyotr’s sitting right across from me, and I see that he’s literally gone white. ‘We’re assembling at two am, full combat kit.’ But we’re not combat medics, we have no clue what to take. Aspirin? Antibiotics? We arrive just outside Kyiv for take-off. Three big cargo helicopters. Behind me I’ve got a “looter’s friend,” one of those giant square zipper bags made of checkered plastic; in front I’ve got a backpack; and on my left I’ve got a box, completely stuffed. We take off and see that there’s only two helicopters in the air. One of them simply caught fire during takeoff and the guys were still pushing it away.

“We were flying over Russian positions, really low, we were literally skimming the tops of the pines so their radars wouldn’t see us. We land in a field and they toss us out, we have a mounted machine gun and 200 liters of gas, and it falls on me, and I think, it’s gonna crush me! All our things are in the muck, our sleeping pads and sleeping bags. Then some people drive up, we have no clue who they are, the guys establish a perimeter defense, we’re all looking at each other, and everyone’s starting to release their safetys, I’m thinking, oh crud… And then the other guys raise both hands and go, ‘Guys, we’re with you, territorial defense, we came to get you.’ We get a call: ‘Did you make it okay?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘Well we’re headed out to collect the pilot, cargo 200.’ [“Cargo 200” is code for dead soldiers. – Trans.] In other words, the other helicopter was shot down. And I’m like sitting there, thinking, ‘Guys, whaddaya want from me, I’m twenty years old…’”

 

 

* * *

 

My friend Valya recalls, “There was a day when the Russians broke through into the city, so over in Obolon we were passing out automatic rifles like candy. Because this is Russia, you know, a serious army. Seemed like we didn’t have much of a chance. But if they kill you, that’s a split second. I was probably more afraid I’d get my leg blown off and I wouldn’t be able to ride my bike anymore. Because I’ve been riding bikes my whole life.

“I saw some people in uniform. ‘What are you, territorial defense?’ ‘No, we’re a volunteer battalion.’ ‘Can I sign up?’ ‘Sure you can.’ Two days later I find myself in uniform and on duty, holding an automatic rifle. We went to mess, had something to eat, got some sleep in a basement, it was really gloomy, all dark and dusty. It was okay for the guys—we’re kinda defending our motherland, but we’re also kinda just sitting here without being bothered. But as for me, I was bored, freaking done. I did manage to read some books. I was reading Limonov, thinking, ‘Oh man, nobody better see me.’ The most stressful was waiting for departure. In the army it’s always either really boring or really dangerous, somehow there’s nothing in between. You wish you had, like, a dial, so you could adjust the level of danger. 

“And then they come up and go, ‘So, you up for the front line?’ I hadn’t thought it’d be so blunt, and I’m also coming down with something, I’ve got a fever, I feel like crap, I’m as unfit for battle as I can get. But you can’t say anything, because they’ll think, well, that guy decided to bail. They got us together and loaded us into one of those bogdanchiks [a nickname for a Ukrainian Bogdana self-propelled howitzer. – Trans.] and hand us this great big clunky stockpot, a sack of dry toasted bread, a couple of bags of buckwheat kasha, and ammo. I remember going down that road, looking out the window—there’s people walking around out there, little shops, some grannies, and I think, ‘Where the heck am I even going?’ We all crammed into some building and we’re sitting there and then there’s this huge explosion! Not our building, but the one diagonally across from us. Boom—and the whole thing flies apart. I think, ‘God, this is the worst disposition ever, there are so many of us here, now they’ll adjust their aim and we’re done.’ But they couldn’t shoot straight, thank god. 

“And there’s nowhere to sit, it’s a concrete basement, damp and cold. There’s a ton of people, lots of commotion, disagreements with another squad—we’re more or less cultured, but their guys are all, ‘Let’s fuck up the russkies!’ The situation is completely incomprehensible, the commanders keep changing, we’re hungry. We lie down to get some sleep, we’re huddled together, water’s dripping on me. And in the middle of the night a huge explosion—ka-boom! ‘What do we do?’ And this one guy says to me, ‘Put on your helmet and go back to sleep.’ I wake up and there’s a hole in the ceiling, right over our heads.

“In the morning I have some cookies, then somebody tells me, ‘There’s still some room in the vehicle, you’re skinny, climb in there…’ We’re going down the street, the driver’s nervous, all the cars have bullet holes. We stop and get out, but the street’s empty, the buildings are in ruins, everything’s charred crisp. ‘What are we doing?’ No idea. People from different squads split off in random directions; we’ve got the machine gun, but they’ve got the ammo… Your fate is decided when you decide which car to get into. Everybody assumed there’d be some kind of structure, some clarity, but it’s just a muddle, we don’t know where our guys are, or what direction to run, or where the shooting’s coming from. Our commander goes, ‘Well what’d you think? This is how it is.’ We thought we’d see the enemy, people with guns who we’re supposed to shoot. But there are no people, just constant explosions, and we can’t tell where the shells are coming from. One guy just says to hell with it and starts walking toward Kyiv. 

“I was shocked that the Russians were going around breaking into every apartment. That they would stoop to that level, of taking the time to go through every floor of every apartment building with a crowbar. They emptied the stores of alcohol and walked around drunk, robbing apartments. Bottles everywhere. And all of it in some kind of drug-addled haze. Like in the Middle Ages, that was the association, some kind of horde. Because how could they have broken into so many apartments without the officers knowing? It was obvious there were no limits. I think those people were traumatized, maybe they were beaten as children.

“Corpses lying around. An old guy who’d been riding a bike when a shell hit, he’s just lying there as he fell. You go into a building and there’s the porter, a little old granny, with a hole in her head. What did she ever do to them? Well, she probably panicked, and screamed, everybody’s nerves are shot, I can picture the situation pretty clearly. There’s two bodies over there, there’s some over here—obviously they’d just mowed everyone down. Somebody ran past and they killed him without even looking to see who he was. Because there was resistance, right—they thought they were wanted, but nobody welcomed them. They saw a spy in every local resident. There was this one corpse, of a Russian, hanging in a tree, it’d been blown up there in an explosion. You look at it and you think, this is good and truly fucked, it feels senseless.  

“But we’re sitting there, holding the position. We’ve already introduced ourselves to each other and picked out a commander. Whoever has a watch gets to be commander, since nobody’s phones work but we’re on guard duty. I think, ‘We need to stretch our legs, look for food.’ You walk along a floor of a building and all the apartments are identical. It’s one and the same room, but they’re all different: some of them are neat as pins, everything is white, but others are a fucking mess, the kitchen’s covered in grease, but you walk in and you think, the cooking oil’s gonna be right there—and there it is. They’re shooting at us, but I see a cupboard with canned meat. I crawl on my stomach for that meat. 

“I made a little stove using sunflower oil. I found a Turkish coffeepot. A little coffee, some cookies, somebody’s using one cigarette to light another, and then – fyeeewww – a shell. We all fell to the ground from where we were sitting, and piled up on top of each other, but I kept hold of my cigarette, and I’m lying there with my cigarette, and the guys go, ‘What a chump…’ Later they started lobbing phosphorus bombs at us. The whole building’s burning up. It’s pandemonium, everybody’s running around, drones are flying, apartments are burning, and they tell us, ‘Stay put, we’re holding this position.’ I sit down on a stool, there’s a door over there that’s completely burned up, and our guys are sitting over there, but they’re no longer alive. And we’re over here with a pile of shells, so I know if we get hit, that’s it for us. 

“The cold was the hardest. The drafts. In one wardrobe I found this sheepskin coat from the fifties, like in the movie Operation Y, and put it on: ooooohhh. Then a dog showed up, this great big German shepherd. I run over and hug her. I slept with that dog. But one day a shell went right through her, and she died, we buried her there. 

“One time a huge shell exploded right next to me. And time condenses to the point that I manage to see the flash of light and react to it, jump away, and even to think, no gloves, I’m gonna get sliced up here no matter what, but fuck it. That’s in a fraction of a second. Then I go deaf all at once, like somebody hit me over the head with a two-by-four. So I can’t hear anything, but I crawl away through broken glass, and I think, ‘Okay, at least I can see.’

“We had this one commander, a typical village guy, easygoing, really funny. He walked around mumbling to himself all the time—he was literally from a small village, and he acted like it, too. I stop in to see him and he’s laid everything out: he’s got his little icon, and his daughter’s stuffed animal, and his son’s toy car. And we each have a little nip of brandy, cause what else are you gonna do? And this guy really loves sprats. Once he’d stood watch a whole day and had just lain down to sleep when heavy shelling starts and we have to take shelter in the basement. He’d caught cold, too, he was coughing, he was in a pretty poor state. But I see a can of sprats in the basement. ‘Look!’ I say. And he was so happy: ‘Wow, sprats!’

“Later on we’re on duty, standing watch. Out the windows is the forest, where they’re attacking us from. He brings out those sprats and opens the tin and spills the oil, and I shout at him, ‘What’d you fucking bring them here for!’ But he goes, ‘Go on, have some, no sense standing here hungry.’ ‘Fine, hand them over.’ I pick up a sprat with my fork, but it falls on the floor. I bend over to get it, and in that moment a shell shoots right past us. We’re just sitting there by the window holding our forks. He goes, ‘And you didn’t want any sprats…’

“The degree of trust there is the highest you can have. You depend on a guy like he was your right hand. There near the end I couldn’t hear very well anymore, and it always felt like something was going to happen and I wouldn’t hear it. You’re watching to the left and he’s watching to the right, and if he zones out, you’re both dead. You don’t know these people, you’ve never seen them before, but you know them immediately from how they behave.

“I was standing there one night and my assignment was to listen for tanks. If they have thermal vision goggles, you’re dead anyway, but then everyone would hear. So that’s why you’re out there all by yourself. And you stand there. And everyone stands there. There wasn’t a single guy who ever acted cowardly in any way. There was a genuineness in everything, you could feel it in everything. We divide everything equally, the others think about you, remember that you’re standing there with no food. There was one situation where a shell blew up nearby and a guy shielded me with his body, he just plain fell on me. He could’ve fallen over to the side, but he understood that maybe I’d at least have a chance. He was just a regular village guy.  

“I think that’s the biggest thing the war has given me. You live a long time and you think, ‘But could it not be just normal?’ And then you see how the social structure affects people, that they usually go on behaving the way they’re used to behaving. But how capable they are of behaving differently. Say you have a warm coat, but somebody else doesn’t. You know he’s freezing out there on duty and will zone out and then you’ll die yourself. So here you’re thinking of other people basically the same way you think of yourself. And I know that now it’s not just me, but thousands of people, who have this same experience. It really changes the way you see life. I know why people go back to war: they need this sensation of life without all the formalities, when you want to ask something but you don’t know how. 

“One time we were standing guard at a position in a building entrance. It’s absolutely dark, you can’t see your hand in front of your face. I’m standing there with my rifle and I hear it: crunch, crunch. There’s broken glass everywhere: somebody’s walking around. Who is it? A spy of some kind. He’s walking along, but then, wham!—he stops. I think, ‘Now he’s definitely going to come over here and throw a grenade. But if I shoot, there’ll be a flash, he’ll see it.’ Me and this one guy are standing there, and I hear the guy’s heart pounding.

“Another time I was standing watch at night, and my relief doesn’t come; he slept through his shift. But I still had a little brandy left, so I just keep taking little sips. In the morning it starts up, their mortars: boom-boom-boom. And I hear ours, shooting from Grads, fshooo-fshooo and then from out there, ka-boom. And then silence. And it was that kind of morning, foggy. And you hear the target has gone quiet; we blew those mortars away. And the nightingales are singing. I imagined them flying around in the pines, with that mortar there, and the ground, and the dew on the ground. I remember how glad I was: finally, our guys hit them. 

“We also found a guitar. We had this one guy who played well. We’re sitting in a building, and the other side’s close, maybe five hundred meters away. And he starts playing and singing Chervona ruta [A famous Ukrainian song. – Trans.] Everyone joins in at the top of their lungs. And they hear us and start shooting, and I go, ‘We’ve won a moral victory.’

 “There was one neighborhood of single-family homes, and I see a gypsy walking along with a kettle. And it doesn’t make a bit of difference to him. Our position’s there, and out of the goodness of his heart he’s just offering us all tea. It’s all the same to him; when the Russians were there, he offered it to them, too. And he made us porridge. One time he invited some guys from the territorial defense to his place; they ate up all the food he had, then stole his spoons. I was so ashamed when he told that story! 

“The local Irpin territorial defense—those people are the whole reason the Russians didn’t enter Kyiv. That local territorial defense was exactly what broke them. They came into Irpin, but the guys there, they know all the little back alleys and byways, they all have automatic rifles—around 200 men held them back in that first moment. Normal men, just regular guys.”

 

 

Kharkiv

 

Next to the Kharkiv train station, is a neighborhood of antique two-story buildings. There’s a heap of bricks and broken beams where one of the buildings used to be. One wall is still standing, with squares of wallpaper left on it from the various rooms. A man in an undershirt, track-suit bottoms, and winter boots sits in a chair on the little lawn in front of it. The guy’s face is red as a crab and he’s holding a bottle of Martini vermouth. He’s smiling in a way that’s relaxed and dissociated, the way a champion does at the finish line: he made it. The guy’s surrounded by a constantly changing crowd of gawkers and little boys. 

“What was it, uncle? A bomb? Can I take a picture? Who all died?” 

For the tenth time the guy tells how late at night, when he and his wife were getting ready for bed, a cruise missile hit his building. 

“We didn’t hear it coming, just—bam, we’re covered in debris. We come back to our senses, see we’re alive. One of my hands could move, so I tried to dig myself out. And I feel something familiar in my hand – my phone!”

Next to the man is a pile of socks, shirts, and other strange gifts given by the neighbors. His mother walks over and joins in telling the story. 

“At first we ran to the firefighters. I tell them, ‘Help us, it’s your fault we got hit!’ Those sons of bitches—they come out and take a look, then walk away! They should’ve been the first to come running, it was meant for them!”

There is indeed some sort of Ukrainian Armed Forces office across from the ruins, and the fashionably-dressed, well-muscled fighters outside it are indeed not paying any attention to the civilians, as though they were a cosmic attack force from some other reality.

“Never mind, mother, the main thing is that we’ve got booze,” smiles the guy. 

 

 

* * *

 

The wounded and dead are removed very quickly. By nightfall, the city crews have usually already cleared the streets of rubble and covered broken windows with panels of OSB. After six months of this they’ve got it down to a science. It’s all pretty unbelievable: life goes on as usual, accompanied several times a day by explosions nobody reacts to. 

“Kostya, over there—his dad was killed. Ask him.” 

Kostya is a thin 40-year-old guy, a mechanic at the Kharkiv Tile Plant. 

“Can you tell me about your father?”

“What do you want me to say?” 

“Well, how he died.”

Kostya stretches and speaks indifferently, looking off into the distance. “I sent them to Lysa Hora. People there didn’t even know there was a war. You go into a store and everybody’s smiling, there’s kids playing everywhere. Anyway, he goes outside to smoke. He’s sitting there and a neighbor lady comes up to him and goes, ‘Misha, let’s go buy some of that herring they just brought in.’ ‘Take a seat while I finish my cigarette, and we’ll go buy some.’ ‘I’ll head on over there, you catch up.’ As soon as she goes around the corner of the building, it hits. Mom called and says, ‘Dad was killed, he’s lying by the building entrance.’ I go, “Maybe he’s still alive? Go out and look.’ ‘The door’s jammed.’ The neighbors helped her get out. I went out there and he was still by the entrance, shrapnel sticking out of him... Don’t know what else to tell you…”

I’m in a daze. I’d been on the verge of tears, but Kostya’s taking about it as though some of his laundry blew off his balcony. 

“Can you tell me about your father? What kind of person was he?” 

“He was a driver for the Kharkiv meat-packing plant, then he drove a taxi, then he drove for the candy factory by the central market. He never skipped work, he’d have a fever but still go. ‘Dad,’ I go, ‘The war, how can you work…’ ‘What’s with the joking around, what war.’ He didn’t believe it up until the end. I don’t know what else to say…”

“Do you have any memories of him?”

“He seemed nice, he never did anything bad to anybody.”

“Any particular episodes you remember?” 

“There were no episodes. We used to go on vacation, we always went to this one place. He taught me to catch crayfish, I can dive down and get them all day.”

“What was he interested in?” 

“Mushrooms, crayfish, fishing.” 

“Did you ever have conversations?”

“Before his death he sensed he was going to die. He has a brother in Moscow, he’d call him every day and say ‘I’m not going to be around much longer.’”

“What did his brother say?” 

“‘You’ll be okay, hang in there,’ he goes. People just don’t understand what’s happening.”

“What about your mom?” 

“She’s okay.” 

“What does she say about your father?”

“She didn’t believe it for maybe a month. ‘He shouldn’t have smoked,’ she says…”

 

 

* * *

 

I get to Northern Saltivka after the Russians were pushed back past the ring road. Now the artillery hardly ever hits all the way out here. We see a stream of hunched-over ant-people with carts flowing along the main road past burnt-out shops and supermarkets. 

Apparently the most breakable parts of a Soviet-era panel building are the stairwells. When a shell hits, the stairs fall like dominoes, top to bottom, leaving an empty space where the stairs used to be. In other buildings the panels fell like leaves, so you could see the insides of apartments. You could see the owners’ lives. Everything was exposed and relatable. There stands a chair with a pair of pants hung on it; the wall was destroyed, but those pants are fine. Here’s somebody who lined their balcony with wood paneling and installed a little cupboard. Everyone gave themselves whatever little bits of comfort they could. All this looks so pitiful and futile compared to the war that has swept over the country. 

A dog’s latched on to us. There’s a huge number of abandoned animals here. Dogs follow anyone and everyone. Flying debris has shredded concrete lampposts like reeds. The huge heating pipes that teenagers usually hang out and drink on are broken off like dandelion stems. Cars are burned out and holey as sieves. An explosion tossed a metal trash dumpster onto somebody’s balcony. Like a ghost haunting a house, a miserable cat keeps a lookout through a window with no glass. 

My friend Grisha nods, indicating a dark spot on the asphalt. “This is where there was a direct hit on a car.” 

He shows a video: the camera approaches a burning car. Two people engulfed in flames are lying on the reclined seats. Their clothing has burned up, and at first glance they’re just black pieces of meat in a campfire. But then in the bubbling flesh on the passenger side I discern a breast. The girl’s head gradually turns white; her skin is burning away, revealing the skull. The car was pointed toward downtown. They’d been trying to leave. I can’t understand how Grisha, a good man, filmed all this. 

It's very quiet in the neighborhood, no cars. Here and there the sound of glass being swept up can be heard through the windows as people try to shovel out their apartments. 

“There are a lot of dead pigeons,” Grisha says. “The blast waves kill them.” 

In many sections of many residential buildings, there’s no access the apartments anymore. The residents get in by climbing over the balconies of neighboring apartments, then use ropes to lower down bundles of their stuff. A woman stands watching as her husband and son try to climb on top of the little portico of their building entrance to get into their apartment on the second floor.

“Our neighbors got hit.” A woman points at some black windows on the third floor. “Some deaf-mutes lived there. Magpies keep flying in…”  

“Before this I’d just heard the words ‘dead,’ ‘wounded,’ but I had no idea what it was,” says Grisha. “The first I saw was two fingers lying on the asphalt, and a section of intestine. People were standing in line for humanitarian aid at the post office and the line got a direct hit. Out of everything I went through, those fingers made the most horrific impression. I also remember the people I saw in the hospital. There was a woman there whose brain had been hit by shrapnel. She was squeezing a ball with her hand. That was the one function she had left. Her dad and sister had been standing next to her, but she was the one who’d been turned into a vegetable. This woman was forty and change, but her life was over. And her sister is there crying, peering into your eyes, looking for some kind of compassion. Even the corpses are easier to bear than that. I don’t understand people who can want war in any way…” 

 

 

* * *

 

Grisha drives me home and we walk up to some high floor of the building. He turns on his phone flashlight and sets it on the table so we can eat. Kharkiv’s under blackout orders. The huge city outside the window is absolutely dark, with bright stars shining over it. Grisha gets his dinner for one out of the fridge and gives me half. While we eat, he tells me how he and his wife split up during the war. 

“Whenever I call, she switches to video call right away and hands it to our daughter. She doesn’t even say hello to me. She said that all men are with their wives in this kind of situation. I tried to tell her it couldn’t be all men, because who’d be fighting? Although she recently wrote me, when there were big explosions here, and asked how I was. She said it’s hard for her there in Hungary, she said she’s surviving there. To be honest, we’ve been trying to get divorced for many years. But the final break happened because of the war, of course.”

Grisha puts me to bed in the closet where he usually sleeps. That’s safer: “the rule of two walls.” [This rule says that it’s safer to be behind two walls than one, since the first wall will take the brunt of an explosion and be destroyed, while the second wall will deflect shrapnel and debris. – Trans.] Grisha goes to sleep on the bed in the room. As I fall asleep, I hear him talking to his daughter on the phone. 

“Dad, do you love mom?” 

“I don’t know…” 

“Come on, do you love mom?” 

“I don’t know, honey. Why?” 

“Why do you keep saying ‘I don’t know’ all the time!” 

Over the past several weeks in Ukraine, I’ve heard a lot of stories about families and relationships falling apart. The war broke everything that could be broken in a single day, like a hurricane. All the complicated constructs, ones people couldn’t change for years, blew apart like straw. And there’s not a thing you can do about it. 

 

 

* * *

 

Tsyrkuny, a big village outside of Kharkiv, was occupied on the first day of the war. The Russian military columns were burned up on their way into Kharkiv, so the village was where the Russians dug in. Now Tsyrkuny has been freed. I’m talking with a big family that lived through the occupation. 

“We spent for two and a half months in the cellar. We put a bench there and the older girls, Nastya and Katya, sat there and listened: 11, 17, then 35 launches. ‘Grandma, don’t worry, those are Grads.’”

“Grandma’s ninety-seven. Tanya carried her down into the cellar, but how’s she supposed to get back out? We pulled her down there, got her lying down, and they’re bombing. Who knows what we should do. We dragged her back into the house. And the next day there was such an explosion right by the house that it burst all the windows. Grandma goes, ‘Galechka, did Vova come to fix our roof? What’s that banging noise?’”

“And we planted our vegetable garden under Grad fire! Because we had to, we had to plant it and do everything. A whole lot of people died that way. Our neighbor was killed by shrapnel—hit him right in the heart. Sasha was having a wash, he was standing on the porch, and goes, ‘Natasha, bring me my coat.’ His wife goes to get it, she comes back out, and it hits at that exact moment. He died right there in her arms, all he said was, ‘Natasha, take care of the children…’”

This isn’t the first time I’ve heard a story of someone dying in someone else’s arms. And every time, the dying person says, “take care of so-and-so, take care of such-and-such.” I think they just don’t know what to say.

“Those DNR-ites—that’s no army, they’re the worst. All they did was look for ways to get drunk. A bunch of punks. Eighteen years old—they’re children! They reach us, my husband’s mother is sitting there, and this kid walks up. His automatic rifle is bigger than he is. If I knew he wouldn’t shoot me, I’d’ve asked, ‘Who did you come to free me from? You’re Ukrainian yourself!’ We weren’t exactly swimming in money, but we weren’t poor, we ate what we wanted. We did something for ourselves, we put effort into it!’

I heard that note of genuine outrage many times, especially in villages: “Come on, are you a complete idiot? Don’t you get it?! We worked and worked to make all this, and you blew it to bits!” The outrage of regular people living their own everyday lives, poured out on the exact same kind of person, who’s got to understand, after all.

On a cot in the hospital surgery room I find an old woman whose arm was torn off. She’s the mother of Sasha, the neighbor who was killed. At her feet sits a dazed woman—his sister.

“You go out to feed the dog and get some water from the pump—and bam, and that’s it, you’re missing an arm. It’s sudden, it comes out of nowhere, you can’t hide, you can’t duck. We barely managed to bury my brother. People are buried in vegetable gardens, flower beds, some in sheets, others in carpets…”

The woman doubles over and starts sobbing, her whole body shaking. 

“I’m afraid of living now, don’t you see, half of me is gone! We’re all afraid, the neighbors say, ‘Don’t talk to journalists!’” The woman is hysterical, shaking. “Don’t say anything about me, please!” 

“But now—what could you be afraid of now?”

“That they’ll come back!”

 

 

* * *

 

At the beginning of the war, Mitya and his friends set up a bomb shelter in the basement of a children’s art studio. 

“We had a pretty random group: a mother with an infant, a grandma with some type of schizophrenia. She kept telling everyone, ‘Sit down already! You think you’re the big man here?!’ One guy also started losing it: he wouldn’t say anything but ‘We’re fucked, we’re fucked, we’re fucked.’ And there’s the constant booming. One guy’s sleeping, somebody else just got in and he’s having dinner, dishes clattering, the coffeemaker burbling. Kids sleep during the day, and wander around at night in headphones stepping over everyone. There were these teenagers, all lovey-dovey: ‘We’re going off to sleep somewhere else!’ And the girl’s mom goes, ‘Marina, I don’t need this from you right now!’ But in any case there’s nowhere to lie down, there’s dust everywhere, boxes. But the boy grabs a broom and swish-swish-swish, and they make themselves a little nest and start necking. But her mom keeps going over there and saying, ‘No, come on now, Marina, come with me…’

“People were unbelievably paranoid. We have this guy Doctor Komarovsky, a famous blogger, he wrote a post about what you need to do in case of a nuclear explosion. And the mother of that little baby read that at something like three in the morning and runs over and wakes me up: ‘Mitya! Mitya! Do we have iodine?’ And I realize I have to calm her down immediately, find her some iodine. We dug up some vial of something and gave it to her.

“But I flipped some kind of switch where I walked around smiling and asking everybody ‘Are you comfortable? Would you like some tea?’ like some kind of butler. People kept asking me, ‘Don’t you know what’s going on? What’s wrong with you?’ And I’d go, ‘I don’t know.’ ‘So why are you acting like this then?’ ‘Well, somebody’s got to act this way…’ But afterward when we were leaving, they all thanked me. That idiotic behavior of mine had been some kind of crucial anchor. 

“When you live under the threat of being blown up, something’s always weighing on you. It was easier for me in the sense of being in a conspicuous position, playing a part. I didn’t feel the need for personal space. Only at night, when there’s nobody around, you step out to smoke a cigarette, and it hits you: war, you can’t smoke…”

 

 

* * *

 

My second night in Kharkiv I wake up from a powerful explosion. It sets off the alarms of the cars in the courtyard. I’m aware that someone has just been killed. In the morning I find out that a school was hit and a woman died. The school is one of those typical seventies buildings, the kind we’ve all spent time in. Its main section is gone, only the sections on the sides are still left. Broken chunks of concrete fill the courtyard. I examine the ruins, fascinated: this is exactly what I always wanted to do to my own school. The wall is gone, but in the coatroom a forgotten pair of indoor shoes dangles from a hanger. Among the rubble I find a notebook, brush it off: an essay on Pushkin’s poem Ruslan and Lyudmila.

A dozen or so people are climbing around the ruins. Schoolchildren’s parents and local residents try in vain to clear the rubble. They pluck chairs out of the debris, ficuses still in their pots. “Irina Igoryevna, but when am I going to take my vacation?” some guy asks the school director. 

All the local residents say there were no soldiers in the school, neither that night or before. Why did Russia waste a cruise missile on it? I talk to some people and figure out that the people in the school at night were a watchman and four women who came here to sleep in the bomb shelter. The watchman, wounded, is in the hospital. People say that the woman who died was called Liza and that she lived in one of the neighboring buildings.

The next day I meet with the daughter and niece of the woman who died. They’re Kharkiv middle class, well turned out. They’ve come back from evacuation to take care of the funeral arrangements. They’re both completely calm as they talk to me, as though it had happened to a stranger. 

“She was a good person. She worked in the police station as a cleaner. We convinced her to leave and took her out and literally the next day a missile fragment flew into her apartment. After that she kept wanting to come back here. She was really worried about the apartment sitting here with no windows, she longed to be back in the building. She came back and cleaned up. She used to say, ‘I want to get everything put away, so nothing reminds me of that.’ There was debris, and a hole in the wall between the kitchen and bathroom. And as soon as it got dark, she’d say, ‘I feel uneasy here, agitated, I always want to be talking to people, be with somebody. I’ll spend the night in the bomb shelter, there’s people there, I feel a little better…’ I understand her; you know, our apartment was robbed once. And then we come home, and it seems like everything’s fine, but it was scary to be in it because of that feeling, that a stranger had been there. That’s what she was like…”

I suddenly grasp why these people don’t leave. It’s very simple: for them, their home is the only thing that belongs to them. The external world is something foreign. They only have this small personal space. But now it’s been violated, too.

“There were four women in the school,” the niece continues. “She got there and she wasn’t herself, she was very upset, she took a sedative. We’d just installed a siren app and she did exactly what the warnings said: ‘I absolutely have to know when to hide.’ She wanted to go to the bathroom in between sirens, but the women wouldn’t let her, they said, ‘We came up with a toilet for ourselves, go here.’ But she was shy and didn’t want to. They went to bed, and she pretended to go to bed along with them. They woke up from the explosion and she wasn’t there. She’d gone to the bathroom, but that time the siren had kicked in a little late. It’s really sad that the war brings these not-so-great moments into people’s lives…”

The women speak calmly and dispassionately, like puppets. 

“You’re probably not yet used to the idea that your mom is dead?” 

“I’m taking meds because it’s a huge responsibility to get everything taken care of. I can’t fall apart…
            It strikes me that in running away from her fear, Liza did exactly what it took to get her killed.

 

 

Love

 

When the war started, my friend Valya fell in love. He already had a girlfriend, they’d been living together for seven years, but they’d barely seen each other since the war started. When Valya told her he was joining the territorial defense, Masha didn’t react at all, and that hurt him. ‘Okay, sure; you go if you want to.’ The mutual lack of understanding that had been gradually ripening for a couple of years came to a head now. He ran around to all his friends looking for ammunition, he didn’t have a bulletproof vest, or a sleeping bag, or thermal underwear. Masha just did her own thing. 

He went to see Lilya about helmets. She’d somehow ended up with two helmets, everything was all mixed up in Kyiv those days. They’d met a few months earlier, but hadn’t talked, but this time he felt the connection immediately and he wanted to write her again. He wrote Lilya, she replied that she was really glad, and they started writing each other in a rush, the way it happens when you first fall in love. If it hadn’t been for the war, Valya would’ve suffered the pangs of conscience, felt he was behaving badly. But now he didn’t have any strength to spare for that. The situation was hopeless, it was understood they were going to their deaths. There was no way he could not follow up on his feelings. And what if this was the last time in his life he’d fall in love? How could he not act on that? Everything had become simpler, no procrastination or preconceptions. He used to not be able to find the right words, he used to try and figure out how to act, how to approach a situation, worry that it wouldn’t be appropriate, that it wouldn’t be taken the right way. Now he just went to Lilya and said he loved her. She said she loved him too. 

That first week, before he was sent to the front, he stood with his automatic rifle at a checkpoint in Kyiv and thought more about her than he did about what was happening. At that point Lilya had by some miracle found him a bulletproof vest—in those days you couldn’t buy a bulletproof vest in Kyiv for any price, but she got one. She tore a thread from it and tied it on her wrist to ward off Valya’s death. He didn’t have a sling for his automatic rifle, so Lilya gave him hers, and Valya stood duty at his post for a week with his rifle on a purse strap. If there were a couple of hours when he didn’t need to be on duty, Valya ran to her, ignoring curfew and risking being shot by a patrol. He constantly sensed her thoughts and support, and he wasn’t scared.

The worst thing in war is waiting to be sent to the front. In those ten days, Valya drove himself to exhaustion: ‘Tomorrow, tomorrow, tomorrow.’ Finally they were called into formation, a general came, a priest came—seemed like they really were being sent to die. Somebody gave a patriotic speech. Valya thought, “Dang, I brought this on myself, signing up!” The general walked down the line. “Who here has fought?” A couple of hands. “Who here’s done army service?” A couple more hands. The general sighed. Everybody had the sense that they had no chance, but they had to go. Without standard equipment, without body armor. And at that moment he caught sight of Lilya, who’d brought him his bulletproof vest. She was standing at some distance, crying, looking at that uneven line of men. 

After a week on the front, as he was going through his things, Valya found a crumpled note Lilya had tucked away for him in his cargo pouch. It talked about her wishes and plans for the future. Their phones had been turned off all month because the Russians use phone data to aim their missiles. That whole time, Lilya had been writing him letters on his phone. “I’m writing and I know you aren’t reading, but I’m writing anyway.” She wrote that she was sorry she only had two photos of him, they weren’t enough for her to really know him. She wrote that she couldn’t express her feelings, that she knew how meager the words “I’m thinking of you” are, but that so much of what she’d like to say was concentrated and sublimated in them, “like in a bouillon cube.”

When Valya got a concussion and he was laid up in the hospital, all he could think about was getting back to the boys as soon as possible. But by the time he was released, they’d already been transferred east. He decided he’d go the next chance he got and lost himself in Lilya’s arms. But love hit him so hard he didn’t want to tear himself away. All the more so since their unit was soon disbanded—several guys had been killed—and there wasn’t anywhere for him to get back to. 

When he left the hospital, he went to Masha and told her everything. He was amazed to find out that she felt the same way he did. When the war started, she saw that he couldn’t care less about her, she felt no attention or support. He’d thought it didn’t make any difference to her then, when in reality she’d been in despair, horrified. He’d gone away without saying a word, and now, after so many years, he was leaving her for good. “You took all my best years. I’m thirty-seven, who needs me now?” Valya saw she was depressed, but he didn’t understand it. 

He started volunteering, delivering ammunition to soldiers. One day when he was supposed to be delivering the guys bulletproof vests, he stopped in to see Lilya, saying he couldn’t stay, he only had an hour. “Well, you can stay for an hour if you’ve got three hundred dollars,” Lilya replied. She responded harshly to his absences, to any mention of Masha, and Valya could tell she was starting to get messed up. One day Lilya told him she was afraid she was pregnant. The next morning, Valya and I left for Donbass. There, he got a letter from Lilya that she wanted to break up. “Dang, I don’t get it, how can you shut off this closeness just like that? What for?” He had to get back to Kyiv to talk to her. We hurried to get back to Kyiv, but on the way I read about the attack on Kremenchuk and turned off the highway. Valya grew despondent but didn’t protest. Several days later I asked him whether he’d been able to figure things out with Lilya. “Yeah, she left me,” he said sadly. 

 

 

Attitudes towards Russians

 

“My mom’s brother and sister used to come see us in Odesa and we’d spend the vacation together,” recalls Yana. “Back then grandma and grandpa were still alive and we were a family, a supportive, cultured family. We all sat together at one big table, talked about art. And while we were evacuating, my mom’s younger brother calls from Voronezh: ‘Yanochka, what happened? Your mom’s not picking up, is she okay!?’ And it just makes me furious.”

“‘What do you mean, ‘How’s mom?’ Mom’s building was blown to smithereens!’”

“‘Just try to get through it, it’ll be over soon…’”

“‘Get through what!? What’ll be over soon!?’”

“‘Hey, Yana, stop, quit it! We called you in peace, you know—with love. We’re really worried about you, you’re family. Come stay with us in Voronezh, we’ll give you our house here for you to live in.’” 

“‘There’s something I don’t understand here, uncle Yura—do you mean you think I can come stay in the country that’s bombing mine? The only way to take that is as an insult, do you understand? You came to take our country, you’re the ones who bombed mom’s building.’” 

“‘Yana, come on now, don’t, what are you saying! We didn’t attack anybody, how dare you say something like that!’”

“And then I just got carried away! I went outside, to the playground, and people tell me I screamed and shouted, cursing a blue streak, and the moms led their children away. ‘And fuck you! How do you not fucking know? What are you, idiots!?’ I yelled my head off about how we don’t have anything left, not a single building, because everything past Hostomel was occupied. Later I realized, ‘What’s the use of yelling? Maybe propaganda really has poisoned them that bad,’ and started sending them pictures. Then they cut me off.” 

 

 

* * *

 

Millions of Ukrainians had conversations like that in the first days of the war. Many, of course, heard on the phone that ‘it’s all faked’ and ‘you’re being bombed by Nazis.’ But for the most part, dazed Russian relatives called and offered to let their friends and family come stay with them. This sincere offer generally provoked fury in Ukrainians because of how utterly inadequate it was. The Ukrainians felt it was precisely this feeble inadequacy that was the reason Russian planes were bombing their homes. The Russians’ exact words didn’t make much difference. What caused the fury was that the Russians couldn’t feel what it was like to have your whole body tremble and go taut when a military jet flies over your home with an ear-splitting roar and you’re just waiting for it to drop a bomb. The Russians who called with words of support, or to curse Putin, or who wanted to transfer money also got an earful, just because they were within reach.

 

 

* * *

 

“Of course, the question ‘How could they?’ wouldn’t stop going through my mind,’” says Kirill the cardiologist. “I spent my childhood in Moscow, every summer, tons of friends, mom’s coworkers, exhibitions, get-togethers, the theater. On February 24th I realized it had all been for nothing. We shouldn’t have even bothered. There was this grave crisis, the internal break with Russia. Like divorcing a husband who beats you. The tragedy of feeling that it won’t, it can’t go on like that. Just cross everything out. 

“There was a growing sense that we’d just been manipulated by Russian culture. They said these lovely words and then came to kill us. That childhood, those films and books, Pushkin’s fairy tales before bed—all that triggers a gag reflex now. First you get Pushkin’s fairy tales, then you get a bullet to the head. So you develop a mode of self-defense. There’s already been such a quantity of evil spewed out that there’s no energy left to figure out who’s good and who’s bad. 

“This is what happens when the person you love destroys you,” says Mitya, a drawing teacher. “It hurts. I loved my Anya so much, but I had to cut her off to survive. I did some drugs, looked for a chance to fuck somebody, just to not remember. I tried to evict her from my heart, so it wouldn’t hurt so bad. We have three kids, but there’s this sort of barricade you can put up.” 

“But what’s the point of fighting against a culture?” 

“In Kherson the first thing they’re doing is putting up billboards of Pushkin. So why the fuck read him? Best to just forget something if it hurts you. Not fight it, but just do what you need to do so it’s not there. So it doesn’t remind you. I’m not saying Pushkin’s bad, I mean, dang, I love Pushkin. “To Ovid” is one of the best poems on the whole planet, in my opinion. I’m not saying my ex-wife is bad, I just don’t want to be reminded of her now. If I had, like, a button to press… I’d just forget…” 

I think that if the Poles had attacked Ukraine, they’d have been hated a third as much as the Russians. The widespread hatred of Russians is, first and foremost, the sharp pain of betrayal. 

 

 

Separatists

 

In Kharkiv, Grisha gives me the key to somebody’s apartment in the middle of downtown, right over Pushkin Square. Twice a week, I wake up to the clamor of a huge crowd of people under my windows. On the square there’s a line for humanitarian aid, a couple of thousand people. They come early in the morning, and some get their place in line the night before and sleep on the square on benches. The only stores open are the occasional supermarkets (for some reason they’re bombed now and then; two of them, Klass and Vostorg, were blown to bits while I was there). You walk down the streets along an endless series of empty shop windows. The economy’s paralyzed. A city of a million people is living off of humanitarian aid. 

I walk through the crowd, asking people about their situation. Everyone’s out of work. Instead of going to work, they all go every day to wherever aid is being distributed and get in line. “Yesterday I got buckwheat kasha and condensed milk…” Volunteers working at frenzied speed distribute humanitarian aid from Poland, shoving two cans in everyone’s hands, one of tinned meat and one of some kind of summer squash in squash pate. 

One cultured guy, an engineer by training, is cheerful and good-natured as he says openly, without trying to hide it, that he’s waiting for the Russian tanks. 

“Yeah, sure, I’m a vatnik [From the term vata, cotton, slang for blindly patriotic, pro-war, pro-Putin Russians. – Trans.], I’m pretty much for everything that’s going on. I want us to be taken over already. Why? Well because all that Europe over there, it looks good on the outside, a pretty picture, they say the right things, but it’s all a lie, just to pull the wool over everyone’s eyes. No one thinks about what’s fair over there. Whereas in Russia, they don’t know how to talk nice, but at least they’re honest…”

“Listen, I’ve lived in both Russia and Germany. And Germany is a way more socialist country.”

A gaunt man standing in front of us turns around and starts shouting, “Socialism!? What’s wrong with that? Did you see the gulag there?!” That fellow didn’t know what I was talking about, he just heard the word “socialism” and went off half-cocked. I suspect they weren’t the only ones like that in that line. The engineer and I talk for a long time and I begin to understand the separatists. They believe that Russia is the USSR and that there’s socialism there. Maybe intellectually they know it’s not really like that, but they believe it in their heart. Ukraine, for them, is closely associated with capitalism. They believe that here in Ukraine everything is ruined, but there in Russia everything’s the same as it used to be. 

I entertain a cruel thought: the volunteers feeding this city are Ukrainian-speaking patriots, but all you folks can do is curse the West as you stand in line for Polish humanitarian aid.

“But doesn’t it bother you that Russia’s bombing Kharkiv?” 

“Ah, but who drove them to it?”

He knows all about the powers-that-be in Kyiv: lies and corruption. And everything they write here about Russia is, according to him, defamation and distorting the truth. 

“Listen, man, you’re just deluding yourself,” I tell him. “In Russia there’s nothing even close to social justice. Over there, three percent of the population owns half the country’s property; over there, you have to pay for your education, trade unions are outlawed, workers are jailed for going on strike…”

While I’m elaborating this, the engineer hides his eyes. I can tell that if he agrees with this now, he won’t know how to go on living. 

 

 

Serhiivka

 

All the dead have already been removed by the time I arrive in Serhiivka. The first missile hit the children’s camp; the second one, a minute later, gets the building supply store attached to a nine-story residential building. From one side it looks like a normal residential building. From the other side, it looks like construction hasn’t been completed yet, just the bare concrete slabs with no covering. Those of the residents who are still alive, and who aren’t in the hospital, are gathered around the benches in the building courtyard. 

“There were a bunch of bodies here, we saw them carry out eighteen, and then Misha was found in a store. The blast had blown people in there.”

“They couldn’t find Maxim’s head. They said, ‘To bury him, don’t we need to find the head?’”

“They were carrying people out of here, and I don’t even know—some of them had no faces. We were pulling Vera, the neighbor, out of the rubble. She had no arms, no head. And another woman with her head half gone, her brain sticking out there for all to see. It was really hard to identify them, people even got it wrong, they thought it was one person, but it turned out to be somebody else.”

“Irina Stepanovna calls, crying—‘Our door’s blocked, my husband was killed.’ She’s my coworker, the assistant principal. And we kept calling out for the neighbor lady, and then Sasha started digging out the storage cupboards and that’s when we found her.”

“I know somebody on the sixth floor, I see her husband and go, ‘Where’s Nina?’ ‘She’s lying over there.’”

“They’re still little, the children, but they did such a good job, they did just what they were taught: as soon as the siren comes over the phone, they pitter-patter over to the vestibule. Four years old, what a good little man, we’re walking to the elevator and he’s there reciting poems to everyone, so quick-witted.”

“His daughter was in the health camp, I heard they dug one and a half kilograms of glass, nails, and screws out of her.”

“The grannies in the two-roomers there all died. They were old people, what’s it to them, they were actually sleeping.” 

“The way he was lying there, he looked like a sieve. His legs were all like that, like a frog’s. Anechka was shouting, ‘Help! Papa can’t breathe!’ But he was still alive when she ran out of the apartment.”

“There were a lot of dogs on the second floor, and they’re all okay, but the woman’s a corpse.”

“I feel so bad for that little girl, she kept expecting her mom and dad to come for her yesterday. After the first explosion, her parents were able to get her out the door, but for some reason they both went back in. Her dad went to turn the TV off. Her mom was found holding an envelope with three thousand hryvnia in it—everything they had in the apartment. My coworker brought the little girl over to the school. She just sat there, waiting: ‘When are my parents going to get here, when are my parents going to get here.’” 

“I was in bed with my head to the window. And then there was the explosion, and I jumped up right away, but something fell on me, but turned out it was the flowerpots. I had just wiped down all those flowers, and the windowsill, earlier that day. I yell, ‘Lyo-o-osha!’ And he goes, ‘Don’t yell, calm down.’ But the dog starts running around like crazy. And then the second explosion hits. And then everything goes sky-high, and we’d just remodeled last year…” 

“And I remodeled this year, Nadya!” 

“All the doors were blown out, the radiators were tossed into the middle of the room, and the boiler, the fridge. I started calling for my husband, he pulled me out, I don’t remember how, got me out through the vestibule, the neighbor lady was there, pools of blood, Anechka was shouting, ‘Mom and dad are in there! Mom and dad are in there!’ We barely managed to get out, and we walked toward downtown, we even tried to go to work, we actually did.”

The women, shaking, interrupt each other to tell about Misha, Anya, Sasha. They’re in shock and don’t understand that I don’t know these people. They show me videos of what it was like here last night: people drenched in blood from head to toe, screaming in despair. I walk into one of the building entrances. The space is filled with rubble from the walls, from broken pieces of furniture and refrigerators; the blast wave mixes everything up inside the apartments like in a giant blender. 

I check my phone and read what Peskov said about the strike: “I’d like to remind us of the president’s comment that shooting at civilian targets—that’s not how the Russian army works.”

So this is how the Russian army relaxes, maybe?

 

 

* * *

 

I go into the district hospital. All the patients look like winos, faces puffy from a multitude of cuts from broken glass. I ask if there’s someone I can talk to. 

“Look in that ward, Vitaly’s in there. His wife was killed. But he doesn’t know… we don’t think…”

A sixty-year-old man lies shirtless on a bed. His swollen body is riddled with scars. He’s staring at the ceiling. I ask him to tell me what happened. His voice is flat. 

“Last night my wife and I were sleeping in the bedroom. Something came down heavy, blew out all the glass. We went into the kitchen. I don’t know why… then there was another hit. Then I couldn’t find my wife. I ran outside, where a guy I know helped me because I was covered in blood. I looked for my wife, then the ambulance brought me here.”

“Mister, will you have some cabbage soup? A little cabbage? No? Are you sure?” 

Vitaly shakes his head no without taking his bored gaze from the ceiling. I don’t know how I can ask him about his wife. He doesn’t know where she’s gone because he’s simply not capable of knowing it.

 

 

Mykolaiv

 

I’m in Odesa for a couple of hours on the way to Mykolaiv, where the trains don’t go anymore. It smells like a resort town here, total chill-out, like in Kyiv, not a trace of the war. People walk like they’re strolling on a beach. At the Privoz market I find my bus. A woman pokes her head into it and asks the driver, “Are you leaving now?”

“Yes indeed—a kiss farewell, a shot of vodka, and we’re off!” 

I thought they only talked that way in the movies, but evidently an Odesan is always performing. 

Mykolaiv’s not far away, but the people are noticeably more direct and the atmosphere’s different. The city’s shelled daily. Early this morning a missile took out three floors of a khrushchevka [A Khrushchev-era, five-story apartment building – Trans.] on Karpenko street. When I get there, rescuers are looking for the bodies of those killed, while the relatives and friends stand around the crane. A girl is crying as a soldier hugs her. At a nearby building entrance a crowd of women is distributing humanitarian aid as though nothing had happened. 

“I wrote down the Viola, they give one tub per family. They’ll give something, anyway, Ten kilos of flour for the girl. Did you write me down?” 

“The father was apparently smoking on the balcony, all they found was his legs and an arm. He was such a good-natured person, hold this on the wound. His son had half his head blown off, his arm was lying around somewhere.”

“The cat’s there if it’s still alive. I left for the industrial bakery at fifteen to six, and it hit at six.” 

“Uncle Vanya, why are you spitting down on us from the balcony?! What do you mean, no I’m not, it landed on Natasha, you deaf old stump!” 

“Last night I said hello to the guy who worked with the Red Cross. He even said, ‘I’ll definitely wish your son happy birthday, I’ll bring a treat for him. So yeah: Vova, expect a present from me.’ And now the guy’s gone…”

Slavka, a guy of around thirty with a simple-hearted mien, tells what happened in a hoarse, excited voice, clearly for the tenth time: “I went to make grandma something to eat, she was in the main room. Her foot was amputated, diabetes. And then everything falls down, and I shout, ‘Grandma!’ And then I hear coming up from down below: ‘Slava!’ I wasn’t in time, I ran out shouting and yelling, that’s why I’m hoarse. Yelena Andreyevna Yurchak, everybody knows her, she’s a kind person, she’s the last elderly person left in our building section. If you want, that’s her, with the little dog. We don’t have anybody, just me and her. Even at 83 she could make pirozhki, varenyky, borshch…”

Slavka really wants to talk. He goes up to everyone in turn. 

A heavy young man in a Red Cross t-shirt sits on a bench. He says he’s waiting for them to find his best friend’s body. It’s obvious that, unlike Slavik, this guy hasn’t spoken all day. 

“What did your friend do?” 

“He was a barista, he really loved coffee, he repaired coffeemakers. We owned a coffeeshop together before the war.” 

“Can you tell me a little about him?” 

“That’s really hard right now… He didn’t have a mean bone in his body, he really loved his daughter, she’s ten. I introduced him and his wife. His parents couldn’t leave, they had elderly godparents and refused to leave, that’s why he stayed with them… I was the first to arrive, there wasn’t anybody around. I called Valik’s sister, I dialed her number immediately and said, a missile hit your apartment. Then I called his wife… that little girl probably doesn’t know yet…” 

It's hard for the guy to get the words out. I imagine that little girl finding out today, and for some reason that moment, the only time in two months, is when I start crying too. 

As I approach a demolished building entrance, I see a small body covered in black plastic sheeting. 

“We found that girl, the girls in there, the renters, weren’t from around here, they worked at the market for the Azeri guy, they were students, they were going to leave this morning…” 

I want to go over and look at her, thinking that in her face I’ll see the truth I came here to find. But for some reason I can’t bring myself to do it and I just wait until she’s taken away.

In the trolleybus a gangly guy sees my press card and starts up a conversation with me. He says the world is run by the long dollar, and that maybe Putin’s no great gift, but at least he’s better than those faggots.

 

 

The “Austrian lady”

 

The Donbass Hospitallers' base is in an old building that used to be a school or vo-tech. In between the apple trees around it, guys dig in the engines of “ambulances” painted green and riddled with bullet and shrapnel holes. The Hospitallers are a volunteer battalion of combat doctors and paramedics. Any person who joins is required to work for free. There’s no pay, just food. 

Inside, it looks like a hiking cabin from back in the day, the walls covered with wall newspapers, group pictures, and home-made flags. A tattered couch, a long table with several people eating at it. It’s clear from their slow movements that this is a lull after a period of extreme stress. 

The “Austrian lady” sits with a mug of coffee and a shy, sleepy smile. She’s just woken up after a three-hour nap, the first time she’s slept in two days. She’s a very pretty girl and at first it doesn’t click that she’s a full-grown woman. She obediently agrees to an interview, though she’s still not really herself yet. She too gives the impression of someone who is open and candid, who speaks very simply, telling it like it is.

“I actually do live in Austria. My husband’s Austrian, we have a clinic, I’m a maxillofacial surgeon. He’s a pretty cautious person. I sat there for a while and started thinking up ways to leave. ‘I’ll go and bring humanitarian aid…’ ‘I won’t let you.’ I said I was just going to visit my parents. I lied, I joined the Hospitallers and started rotations. He found out. The first day he cried, the second day he threatened me: ‘I’m going to call the embassy now and you’ll be deported!’ The third day he drank. Then he cried again, and then he started talking, and then he got the kids in on the act, my parents, everybody…”    

The “Austrian lady” laughs. Clearly she likes that her husband wasn’t letting her go, but she won out. 

“Who sticks in my mind? A boy with a very serious injury, fragments in his spine, twenty years old. On the way I kept getting worse and worse readings, to be honest, I thought I wouldn’t get him in alive. And then he goes, ‘I have a fiancé.’ [The words in sans-serif font here indicate dialogue in Ukrainian. – Trans.] He gives me her phone number. ‘She’s a little older than me, but I’ll get out, this will all end, and I’ll get married.’ I call her up: ‘Do you know this guy so-and-so?’ ‘I don’t know the last name, but the first name rings a bell… oh, yeah! He ate in our cafeteria a few times.’ Turns out it was just a young woman who works in the kitchen somewhere over there. She’s not a fiancé at all, they just talked a little, but he’s already played out this scene in his mind and he’s living for it. He’s an orphan and clearly he just wants so badly to belong to somebody; he has someone to cling to life for.

“You worry so much about each one while you’re riding with them. I have had so many guys die on me over the course of this. Even though I’m a doctor and I’ve had to get used to a lot of things. But when they die on the operating table… Because I see it: they bring a guy in, and he’s conscious, because he doesn’t go under the anesthesia immediately, right—you talk with them before the operation, and you really like them a lot, they’re young, they’re attractive. I remember my first 200 in this rotation, a guy who looked so much like this one friend of mine, it was wild, he had really lovely tattoos. And he was dying, and I’m actually not a believer, not in God, not in anything, but I’m actually shaking his arm, ‘Come back, dang it!!!’ But he didn’t come back. So yeah…”

It upsets her that the soldiers are going hungry. “They’re just hungry! They’re brought in and I’m ‘When did you eat last?’ ‘Yesterday. We split a Mivina instant ramen three ways.’ I’m upset that we left our wounded behind in a trap. I’m upset that people aren’t evacuating. Three days ago we were evacuating patients, there were civilians there from Chasiv Yar. One girl was suuuuper heavy. People were lounging on a beach that was under fire! The whole city’s without water, the front line is getting closer, but the city’s packed with people. Because they’re waiting for the ‘Russian world.’ In Lysychansk we pulled a child with festering wounds out of a basement. We’re working on the child, and then we come under fire, and the dad goes, ‘Whoa, our guys are shelling the fuck out of this place!’ We get them out, and the surgeons get no rest because of them…” 

We only talk for half an hour. The “Austrian lady” says they have to go, she’s on rotation this week so she’s got to get home, and she still has a lot to do before that. Three days later she dies as she’s rushing to get the wounded out. I’m probably the last person who asked her about anything. As I decipher my recording, I think about what she said: this person had just been right here, this lovely person who talked, and drank coffee, and worried about other people, and was alive.

 

 

Tolya

 

In the bus from Odesa a wiry village guy in a baseball hat sits next to me. He’s fumbling with a letter from the Ministry of Defense. I ask, “What is that? Your draft notice?” The guy says no, it’s his discharge papers. He’s headed home with nothing between Mykolaiv and Kherson. 

“Can you tell I did E?” the guy asks. “I took a bunch of E so I wouldn’t drink. Whoever comes back drinks. You have to relax somehow, get all that stuff out of your head. I don’t want to drink.” 

The guy says he’s a fisherman from someplace further on along the coast. He signed up to fight as a volunteer on February 25th. “I had a broken collarbone, I just sawed the cast off. They didn’t check anything back then. ‘Any medical conditions?’ ‘Nope.’ ‘Okay, get a rifle and a bullet-proof vest, and go.’ I broke it again when I fell down, ran around with a broken collarbone. But fuck it.”

“What do you need to get out of your head?” 

“The deaths. People don’t know how many are dying. Because we took them by sheer numbers, we just plugged them up. And it’s good people don’t know, because then the flow of new soldiers will stop and the other side will get farther in. I told my people right away that if I disappear without a trace, don’t look for me, don’t make a fuss. Everyone there agrees, pretty much: we don’t need people to know. I always have a grenade with me so I don’t get captured. But what mother is going to understand that? They’ll look for you anyway. Five hundred men in a barracks were wiped out by a rocket, and their relatives are looking for them to this day, still hoping, asking everyone.” 

The guy shows me his phone. In his chats are hysterical, agonized messages from the wife of a soldier who’s missing: We don’t know where our men are, because two men from their unit were found near Izium, taken prisoner. Nobody tells us the truth. At first they tell us things, then they stop answering our calls, then they threaten us. And we’re really afraid you’ll go missing too!

“Nobody will tell them.” 

“Is there a lot of lying there?”

“Of course. They form a battalion of 1300 men, and 300 come back, but they don’t issue the official stamp; if they have to, they’ll say the guy’s missing, so no benefits. It’s all about the money out there. I came down with TB, but they didn’t release me for a month, so I’m sitting there infecting the guys. Then I find out you have to decline the money and land. I wrote the note and they let me go immediately, the next day. I lost my sleeping bag, and it’s pay ten times what it’s worth or buy one from the sergeant. And he’s sitting on a gold mine, he’s got everything: sleeping bags, bullet-proof vests, rifles. If you don’t grease his palm, you can’t fight.”

“Can’t you complain to his bosses?” 

“You can’t change the system, see, he’s got to pass some up to his commanders. If you’re a squeaky wheel, they’ll make you a separatist real quick, throw you to the Ukrainian Security Service, and you’re in for fifteen years. The first wave was completely different, the people that went were like the directors of companies, there wasn’t any of that crap back then. The system itself, it’s stayed the same as always. My friend wanted to volunteer for the front, they go, ‘Sign a contract for two years.’ Like fuck I need your contract, I want to win and go home, I don’t want to serve in your dumb-ass army.”

“So why did you go?”

“To keep them from getting any farther. One time we were stopped and there was a bus of refugees. I didn’t even raise my rifle, but they come out and put their hands over their heads. We didn’t have any identifying marks, that’s the way it has to be out there, and they’re all shaking—and I just felt so sorry for them. And when you see that, then it doesn’t matter to you whether you’ve got a gun or not, you know what I mean? Our mission is not to let them come any farther.”

A young woman walks up to the front exit of the bus, ready for her stop. She’s wearing a dress with an open back. 

“I miss girls so freakin’ much. The girls who are out there in it, they get it, they’re willing to love. They write things on the humanitarian aid, they write, ‘Soldier, you’ll hand this can back to me personally; take good care of your wiener because I need to make Cossacks.’ But in Odesa you’re trying to get a taxi, signaling with your hand in the air, holding money, even, but nobody stops: ‘Ah, let that soldier go fuck off.’ And I don’t want them to get any farther, but sometimes you think, ‘Fuck, we need them to get past us so people understand what’s going on.’

“I’m not going to drink now. When I get in I’m going to study, so I know how to use my weapon. There wasn’t any time there, we learned from YouTube. You can get a gun if you want to and volunteer. I already know a few things. When it’s young guys, the loss ratio is higher. I need to heal up some, then I’ll go back…” 

This guy is pouring this out in a frenzy to me, the first person he came across. He’s obviously got a case of PTSD. I can see that he doesn’t give a toss about the corruption and lies in the army. It doesn’t matter to him who steals what, or what people say on TV. The only thing that’s important is for them not to get any farther. He, Tolya, is personally responsible for this.

 

 

August 23rd

 

The night before I got to Kharkiv, Russian artillery shelled the neighborhood of the August 23rd metro station. Nine people died, including a five-month-old baby. They couldn’t find the baby’s body for a long time. The neighborhood is so-so, everything nauseatingly familiar: vo-tech college dorms, locals drunk first thing in the morning, garages, beer-drinking teens, terrible music blaring from cars. 

A shell exploded in front of a five-story residential building, all the windows are blown out, everything inside the apartments is all scrambled together. By the building entrance I come across the family that found the baby. A woman with frightened eyes and a man who has a whiff of prison about him. 

“We were running out of the building because smoke started pouring in from all the windows,” says the man. “This lady comes running toward us, covered in a ton of blood: ‘Where’s the baby? Where’s the baby?’ Then somebody started raking up the glass and the men were boarding up the café there, and I ask, ‘You guys board up the second floor for me?’ I set a ladder and climb up there onto the roof of the building entrance. I look over and see a doll lying there, of the little girl who lives next door, our neighbors’ girl. But then I see the blood flowing, the little fingers, and I can’t do it, I don’t want to do anything…”

I go to the hospital and the baby’s mother has already been released, but the surgeon writes down her phone number for me. I find her in Telegram, a picture of a pretty blonde. She calls me back and says, “Yes, I want to give an interview.”

“It was more or less quiet and we came back to Kharkiv. A friend offered me a job at a hair salon. We tried to start living somehow. We thought we were so great, that in spite of the war we’re working, making the world prettier.

“That day my husband called me from home, ‘Can you get home yourself or should I come get you?’ The weather was bad, there was a strong wind and there were some explosions. I say, ‘I can get home myself, but I’m dressed lightly.’ Right away he said he’d come get me, and he was there in twenty minutes. The explosions were loud by then and he left the car and took the baby and came running in to the office. And then we got a direct hit on the second floor, all our windows shattered, everything came falling and sprinkling down from overhead but nobody was hurt. The little guy was crying hard, his little ears probably hurt a lot. We ran outside because it was scary to be in there.

“I used to always correct my husband, and we always made all our decisions together, but at that moment I relied completely on him. There was a little basement shop nearby and we tried to hide on the stairs. A girl who was a customer in there was really scared. He could tell right away that I wanted to comfort her and said, ‘Give him here.’ I hugged the girl tight, really hard. She hugged me the way nobody’s ever hugged me in my life.

“Further on we could only go right, toward the building entrances, or left, toward the balconies and the street. My husband went left and I followed him. That’s when the second hit came. I was thrown down and I was bleeding, I thought I was going to die. I look around and see that the girl, the customer, is lying on the shoulder of the road all twisted, curled up, but not like her stomach hurts—she’s curled the opposite way. Nearby’s a backpack and my husband’s shoe. I turn around and four steps away from me there’s a body laying there, all black. I see that it’s my husband, who’s lying there with no shorts, shoes, or underpants, in a jacket and t-shirt. Blood is bubbling from his mouth. I try to turn him over, but he falls back over the way he was. His arm dangles, it’s broken. Later they taped it back on. And that’s when I remember: ‘Where’s Petya! Where’s my little boy?’ I don’t see him, I don’t hear him screaming or crying.

“Some boys ran up and said I had to hide. And I just follow them mechanically, I say, ‘My husband, my baby, I don’t know where he is, I have to go back.’ But I keep walking. They took us to a place in the basement where I stayed for about twenty minutes. I kept asking them to let me out so I could find my son. Then the ambulance came and got me. And they didn’t tell me that my son was found on the roof of the building entrance until four hours later. I’m saying all this now without even needing medication…”

The girl speaks calmly, the way people give testimony in court. Right now she doesn’t care who’s listening. She’s saying this to all of humanity. 

“Our little boy was incredible, calm, my husband called him the Director because he was so earnest and serious, he had to look attentively at everything. You couldn’t carry him facing in, he had to see everything. He’d let anybody pick him up, he was such a little love… I dreamed all night of my husband Vova, we were talking about something, I just was with him all night, I could feel him holding me. I wake up and realize it’s all a dream, and I close my eyes, I want to dream of him a little more, but that’s it, I wake up…” 

I sense that the young woman is in some kind of trance. 

“People send me money, my mom says to stop wasting money like this, but I want to help everyone so badly. My aunt is in her fourth month, she’s going to have a girl, I went and bought her a bunch of tasty treats and some colorful toys. I thought maybe her son needs a phone. We went to buy the Ukrainian Armed Forces guys some clothes, I really, really want to help, I mean, I wasn’t left alive for nothing. I’m supporting the daughter of a friend who died, I’m supporting his wife…” 

The girl goes silent. I recognize that she’s in a state of psychosis, it’s imperative for her that she’s continually talking with somebody, doing something, helping somebody—anybody she can, fixing something—anything at all.

“I still have the car he called ‘Little Gem,’ he really took good care of it, called me a dirty little pig throwing away my heat stick cigarettes in the side door pocket. Now I’m going to take good care of it, I’ll keep it forever, even when it’s a piece of junk. I’ll never give up his last name, it’s mine, it’s our last name. I know it won’t change anything… I need to do something… Now I just need to figure out what…”