by Alexander Motsar
translated by Sarah Vitali
The English translations of the excerpts were made possible thanks to the support of the WE EXIST! Foundation
June 12, 2022. Pentecost. I enter my home for the first time since the evacuation, after a three-month absence. Before me lies the harried chaos of the final minutes leading up to our departure, our evacuation. Things haven’t been left here, they’ve been abandoned. A book lies open, Maximilian Voloshin Remembered—I’d been reading it right up until our abrupt departure, our decampment. The table is strewn with bits of skin from potatoes we’d baked in a fire. I take in the walls, the wallpaper coated with a light film of dust and paint that was shaken loose from the ceiling when the building was rocked by explosions. The windowsill, once lined with living flowers, is now an herbarium. But not everything has dried up. “Only cactuses survive in war,” I think, watering their sleepy prickles. I can’t think of a better phrase to start my memoir.
Unfortunately, I have certain memories I probably won’t ever share, but I hope that what I write down here, these memories, will stay with me. Here is the city of Bucha, near Kyiv, under attack.
Silence
A man traces circles in the sky with his finger, then furiously beats his fists against an imaginary earth. This is how the deaf-mute man shows me the shellings that he can only see. Broken glass beneath our feet, abandoned objects, the chaos of war.
A man’s corpse lies beside a shot-out car. About a week ago, some people covered his body with a blanket to keep the dogs from getting at it. From time to time, the wind blows it away, and a passerby covers the dead man again. Snow and ash fall on his frozen, gray, haggard face. The wheels of the lifeless car are still intact.
Tires
Some of our neighbors remove the wheels. My brother and I help roll them back to our building. They need them for their tires. As soon as the fighting started, somebody went around slashing the tires of expensive cars. At first, the locals chalked it up to saboteurs, but later on, a hard-faced, worldly man suggested it might be the work of criminals. The broken glass and ransacked vehicles seemed to support this theory. Our neighbors change their tires and get ready to evacuate.
Evacuation
Cars crowd together into columns; flying white flags and ribbons, they make their way out of the city in anxious fits and starts. The sides of the cars are marked “People” and “Children.” Weary faces gaze indifferently at the people staying behind. They, in turn, don’t pay much attention to the people leaving. Everyone has their own reality, their own worries. Campfires have been built next to buildings, people are cooking, laughing, listening to the news, helping each other, sharing medicine and food. People are surviving yet another monotonous, ash-covered day. A Red Cross evacuation has been announced for the next day.
A few thousand people have gathered outside of city hall. Many are in a festive mood, despite the vehicle with “200” on the windshield making its rounds in plain sight. This car picks up corpses from the street. Here I should note that the streets aren’t awash with dead bodies, but, still, there have been losses. People regard the soldiers with genuine curiosity. An old woman, unable to walk, has been wheeled here in a grocery cart; sighing heavily, she gazes at the sky. She is surrounded by her grandchildren, her children.
Children
A mail truck unexpectedly pulls up alongside the column of refugees. The word “Children” is written on the side. In a loud, assertive voice, the driver declares that he will only take women with children. Brushing aside this humanitarian appeal, a group of broad-shouldered, heavy-set guys climb into the truck. Only a few women manage to make it inside. The driver makes a helpless gesture and climbs into the driver’s seat. The ‘children’ depart to the sounds of laughter and whistles: “Our heroes,” the women chuckle, “poor little orphans.” And they’re gone. Everyone else will have to wait a few more hours for Red Cross transportation.
The buses appear suddenly, at the point when people have already started saying that it might be impossible to get out of Bucha. Genuine joy, boisterous embarkation, March sunshine. We slowly wend our way through the city. There is evidence of combat, devastation. Road blocks. From under their heavy helmets, the soldiers watch us go.
Soldiers
They unexpectedly appear before us during the peak of the February strikes. An armored box van screeches to a halt, disgorging camouflaged shadows with careful, watchful eyes. Brimming with confidence, they saunter over to my brother and me. Ask us to take our hands out of our pockets. They move to search the backpack of a random cyclist, who skids to a haphazard stop. Alongside us are the building’s last remaining residents, just a handful of people, who fall silent at the sight of the soldiers. Also on the street, next to the building’s emergency shelter, stands a grill whose sides mimic the M-shape of the Kremlin walls and Spasskaya Tower. This construction could be enough to discredit our entire group, but, although the soldiers see the grill, they appear unconcerned with our cooking habits. Brooking no argument, they inform us there will be a building inspection. The locked apartments of residents who have fled will be broken into. We remain silent. We answer their questions and return to watchful silence. A machine gunner with an asiatic face approaches me. “How can you live here?” he asks, bewildered. “It’s very dangerous.” He shakes his head, adjusting the strap of his machine gun. Nearby, the roar of artillery resumes.
Battle
A Russian armored vehicle rolls up to the building and fires several volleys. The people in the courtyard quickly disperse to their apartments. Quick, heavy footfalls on the stairs. A neighbor says they were shooting at a Territorial Defense vehicle. According to a witness, one of the TD fighters jumped out of the car wearing a woman’s coat, employing evasive maneuvers in an attempt to dodge the fire—and apparently, it worked. That evening, a smoky oil lamp fashioned out of a flattened heavy-caliber shell casing appears in the basement. In the flickering half-light, someone reminisces about the war films of their youth. Everyone agrees that they can’t imagine all of that happening again. We’re falling back into the bottomless beginning.
The Beginning
Out on the street, a man embodying the role of intellectual-turned-souse glances back and forth between me and the war. Against the backdrop of artillery fire, he theatrically observes: “Ah, but I’m a dyed-in-the-wool civilian, I just might shit myself.”
Our unexpected new reality has not yet become fact. Tiktokers on skateboards film videos in front of the Ukrainian army’s battered convoys. There is still communication with the outside world, and many believe that this whole thing will blow over soon, or even that it already has. Farfetched rumors and optimistic plans for the future. To the sound of Bach’s partitas, we watch through our windows as helicopters attack Hostomel Airport. Then come the airplanes and artillery. Explosions. The power goes out. The water is shut off.
Water
Residents of the high-rise apartment buildings are going out to the suburbs to fill their plastic canisters with water. My brother and I think this is strange, as there’s a public well with potable water close to our building. We grab our containers and head there. As we get closer to the spring, we’re surprised by the lack of people on the path. By the time we reach the well, our surprise has turned into unease. Nerves taut, we draw water from the well in silence, which suddenly explodes into a firefight, with automatic weapons and grenades. The flare-up isn’t especially intense, but still, we hurry away from the well, our canisters only half-full. Out of harm’s way, we crack jokes about our situation and our prospects. Such firefights have not yet become background noise, part of our everyday life.
Everyday Life
Power, water, heating—it’s all been cut off. Then, on the morning of March 1, it snows. The temperature in the apartment keeps dropping: 15, 14, 13, 12… The days are cold and monotonous. People cook over campfires. Our bomb shelter is nothing but a semi-basement. The building’s residents, our neighbors, often come across each other for the first time around these campfires. After ten years living in proximity, we are finally meeting each other. There are also precious encounters with people you do know. A neighbor greets me: “You haven’t left, Alexander Vladimirovich?” I shake my head. “Anything that happens might happen to us,” she pronounces, glancing at the droning sky before going on her way. A social hierarchy quickly emerges within the group around the bomb shelter, and the people who enjoyed the highest status before the war are now left on the sidelines. The ones rising to prominence now operate according to a different playbook: these are the folks who give orders, good or bad. All this is predictable, natural. The capacity to give or follow orders is now in demand. For many, this state of affairs has a soothing effect. Individuals transform into a group, whose combined powers have the ability to absorb stress. There is freshly boiled water, food, night watches with an ax by your side. An abandoned bulldog with shrapnel wounds weaves in and out between us. We all call him Bullet.
Animals
Before leaving the city, people set their dogs and cats loose on the streets. The dogs run around whining, searching for their masters. The cats huddle under the remaining cars, regarding their new world with frightened eyes. Noble, pedigreed beasts look to the people lighting fires on the streets for protection. Under the black, smoky sky, these people look like abandoned, homeless creatures, too. Some pets have been left behind in locked houses and apartments, as if they were house slippers. We can hear the heartrending cries of cats going out of their minds with hunger and thirst. There’s nothing we can do to help them, it seems. Our neighbor Andrey unscrews the peepholes from some of the apartment doors and attempts to use these openings to feed and water the cats desperately scratching and wheezing on the other side. Later on, he abandons this enterprise. People are fearful of looters, who strip apartments under the guise of saving animals.
Looters
On the second day of war, my brother and I notice a strange, festive mood on the streets. Outside some of the buildings, puffy-faced residents are having quite the party. A bit further on, we run into a man lugging bags full of cider and beer. Upon seeing us, the man becomes visibly frightened and starts babbling: “It’s all been picked over, but you can still have a look.” We walk on, perplexed, until we come across a ransacked beer kiosk. Soon they start breaking into stores. Later on, staff will take it on themselves to open up the back rooms that haven’t yet been looted. The city’s supply logistics are shot. We no longer have access to medicine or emergency services. Snow, broken glass, and a sky black with soot from the oil depots burning nearby.
Claustrophobia
A confined space isn’t a structure, it isn’t a room, or any other kind of cell: it’s your consciousness within the borders of a war. There’s an explosion in your sightline. It will take a few seconds for the sound to follow. I count those seconds. And so the day passes. At night, my brother and I go to the shelter for our watch. The watch mostly consists of showing up and chatting. Volodya is a simple man, he could carry on forever about the shelling he’s survived. The building doesn’t have windows anymore: without thought, without concern, without emotion, Volodya tells us why his building doesn’t have windows anymore. He falls asleep sitting down, then jolts awake as if from the explosion and repeats the same story over again. Alla exists solely in a stream of bracing, victorious news stories, stubbornly unaware of the reality around her. We live in a similarly confined space: the four walls of our apartment, the stairwell, the shelter with its fire and its people. The fire is affectionate, like a cat. It licks our cold hands. A few times, we go out onto the roof of our ten-story building. Our gaze butts up against the flames and caterwaul of rocket artillery and the gloomy, crimson-black glow. The explosions are constant, and the rare, unexpected hour or two-hour stretches of silence feel disquieting, unnatural. You start to strain your ears hopefully into that silence, but then another explosion brings you down to earth. Still, there is a way to escape this state of resignation. Here, to help someone else is to help yourself, too.
Postscript
In my last days in the city, I don’t take any photographs or videos. War has descended on us and become our normal state. A cardinal change has occurred in the information space, and not just in news media. Our ideas about mercy and morality have been thrown into havoc. Everything has changed, including our beliefs about people. Everyone is adapting to the constant stress in their own way. Discontinuities between one reality and another appear on a regular basis. Against a backdrop of mortar fire, a girl who used to speak politely even to animals is telling a lively, upbeat story about her niece. When the fire subsides, her face changes and she slumps down, shouting in sudden hysterics: “Fuck, when will this fucking hell end?”
A road lined with burned-out equipment, ruined buildings, shot-out cars. In the bus we’re riding, a tense silence reigns. People are sitting, standing, silent, their foreheads glued to the dirty glass, their minds on their own concerns. Our phones suddenly start working. We’ve left the blocking zone. Beside me, an elderly woman says—to her son, I think—that she’s okay, before nervously adding, “I don’t want to talk about it, I want to forget everything.”
We are in Kyiv. I have conversations with Volodya and Liza Zhbankov, Polina Lavrova, Olga, and Varya about unrelated topics. In the morning, the sun shines unexpectedly on the empty city’s boulevards.
February 24-March 12, 2022
Bucha—Kyiv
…
Sun in My Eyes
“Whoa, cartridges,” I whispered excitedly, before taking off after my friend, who’d just shown me a fistful of old, corroded shell casings. “Quick, let’s go, Dimka found a helmet over there!” he shouted, already on the run. One of my sandals slipped off my foot; I started shaking with annoyance, but also with impatience to see the helmet, Dimka, the shell casings, and the other earth-shattering discoveries that my friend Oleg had only just started to report.
Soon we were making our way down into the ravine. It was a natural valley not far from our building. We lived on its edge, and were constantly being drawn there by one enticement or another: some uncovered secret, or ripe apples, pears, and plums. This time, it was a helmet and shell casings. We were certain something else would turn up at the dig site; I was secretly hoping for a pistol.
We are ten years old. Forty years have passed since the war. It is the beginning of summer. Summer vacation. Infinite expanses and discoveries. Spotting us from afar, Dimka lifts up the helmet. Shielding my eyes with my palm, I gaze intently at my friend’s silhouette. I want to examine his find right away, as soon as possible, but I can’t make out anything from here. The sun is in my eyes. I hesitate. The thought that the helmet might turn out to be fake, not an army one at all, disturbs me.
I unexpectedly falter, recalling how a friend and I had found a mine last fall. We built a fire over our dangerous find and hunkered down behind some trees nearby. We waited for an explosion, a fountain of earth, sparks, an experience. Our impatience gradually turned into disappointment. To avoid slipping into the tedium of disenchantment, we invited some other boys to join us. Their fresh interest restored our confidence that, any moment now, the mine would go off and there would be a bang, an explosion. That soon, any moment now, our mine would go flying off in a hundred different fragments that we could collect and exchange for something useful. We could hardly wait to see the massive crater the mine would leave behind—a crater we could, in turn, show our friends.
Dashed, these hopes receded into memory, reduced to funny recollections. Much to our childish disappointment, rather than a deadly wartime relic, the mine turned out to be a saucepan lid that had become embedded in the ground. Our friends’ laughter quickly reached the ears of the adults. We were made an example of and strictly forbidden to visit the hazardous area. This prohibition wasn’t unreasonable. A long time ago, two boys from a neighboring building had actually found a grenade in the ravine. Our parents had told us about it. We, in turn, told every newcomer who came into our yard. It was the two boys who had found the grenade, but a guy walking past who had died.
The helmet turned out to be real. We began digging furiously, spurred on by our wild hopes of finding something else. And luck was with us. Again and again, we turned up spent shells in the hot, sparkling sand. At first, each of these finds was met with envy and parceled out between us, but the fuller our pockets grew with our found treasure, the more quickly we lost interest in it. The helmet was a different matter. It was unique, in a class by itself. The whole thing was Dimka’s alone, which struck us as unfair. In the end, to bring together all of our finds into something indivisible, an integral whole, we scooped all of the shell casings we’d found into the helmet; squinting with pleasure, we regarded our spoils. The sun shone bright over the entire world, the sky, the cosmos. We took the helmet full of cartridges to the nearest water pump and doused our treasure with its sun-sparked coolness. With this new twist, our spirits soared even higher. We took out the chilled casings one by one and immediately placed them back inside the helmet. We all agreed that the effect was beautiful, heroic. This punctured (in our imagination) soldier’s helmet had been filled with the final rounds of ammo pooled together by a group of wounded soldiers so that someone—namely, us—could see them safely to the field hospital. Without even noticing it, we had begun playing at war.
In our imagination, war was a heroic thing, tragic to be sure, but a heart-pounding, joyous occasion as well. Finally, here and now, we were fighting with the Germans, the fascists, just like in the movies. At this point, I should say that we never agreed beforehand that we would fight at a particular time in a particular place. War isn’t like soccer, it doesn’t have rules, it is its own spontaneous exigency. There was also no agreed-upon division between ‘our side’ and the Germans, at any rate, not in the apartment block where I lived. Nobody wanted to be a German, a fascist, so in the end, the two opposing sides would both call themselves the Red Army, which made their foes the fascists. The war was always over quickly, as it was, essentially, a pointless exercise. It was hard to tell who killed or wounded whom, and childish arguments—over who shot first and therefore actually landed their shot—would bring a swift end to the hostilities. One day, when the fighting was over, we came together once more, and, exhausted from the day’s events and the sun’s glare, decamped to the shade to shelter from the scorching sun. There, amid the fruit trees’ peaceful rustling, stupefied with heat and fatigue, we quietly chatted about our own trifling matters.
We were approached by a boy from a neighboring block. Before, his appearance wouldn’t have made the slightest ripple, but now he represented an audience who could enviously—surely enviously—appraise our finds. We were gratified by the dazed look on his face as he regarded the helmet and casings that lay scattered before him. He sat down next to us on the grass, and, collecting himself, reported that he and some other boys had recently found casings themselves. We smiled suspiciously. His gaze now filled with something like contempt. He delivered a crushing piece of news: “Yeah, cartridges. But not like the ones you’ve got here, ours are from a German machine gun.” This was a blow. In our confusion, we didn’t even notice the boy run home to grab a few of the unfamiliar-looking cartridges to show us.
But what I found more upsetting was where he had found them. They had found the German cartridges on our side of the ravine. Which is to say, on the side where our building now stood. This meant that the German, the fascist, the Gestapo officer attached to that machine gun… No, I couldn’t get my head around it. The idea that our building could stand on German-occupied territory threw me for a loop. Later on, after much reflection, I concluded that the machine gun must have been captured by our partisans.
The boundless sky with its uniform palette shone through the light of the first summer greenery. Birds. Birds mean peace and quiet, too. A ladybug lit on a casing, but nobody offered her the rhyme that would guide her back to her children. We were weary with our victors’ glory. We removed our battered headgear and emptied our pockets of the remaining cartridges. Together, we decided that our finds ought to go to a museum. Someone suggested continuing the search, figuring that, the way he saw it, our side’s trenches were deep, and way down at the bottom…
Now, in my memory, we are once more cresting the sandy edge of the ravine, once more picking up our search. The hot sand and rust of a bygone war are trickling through our fingers. Droplets of sweat cluster on our eyelashes, transforming the world around us into a crystalline glow.
I lift my hand to shade my eyes and gaze into that far-off day, with its discoveries, anxieties, conversations, and plans. I can barely make any of it out, just the hazy silhouettes of children. The sun is in my eyes.
