by Alexandra Krashevskaya
translated by Sarah Vitali
The English translations of the excerpts were made possible thanks to the support of the WE EXIST! Foundation
Dream 1. Where is the gun pointing?
A thousand shall fall at thy side,
and ten thousand at thy right hand;
but it shall not come nigh thee.
Psalm 91:7
As it turns out, war moves fast. On March 3, the power goes out.
On March 4, for the first time, something happens that would be unthinkable in the context of our normal lives: glass starts raining down from the sky. We live on the first floor. Kilograms of glass go flying in a sort of thick, heavy slush. Afterwards, you feel the building thrum. This massive, hulking nine-story building is shaking. You still don’t know what’s going on, don’t know what to do, how to be. I grab my son and run into the hallway. My mind swirls with half-remembered information: seek shelter between load-bearing walls, keep two walls between you and the outside… I fall to the floor in the hallway, call for everyone to join me. The deafening pounding continues. A thought flashes through my head: “What if the building collapses?” What about go bags? Clothes for the children? If the shelling has already started, where can we go?
Your hands tremble. Later on, you’ll get used to all this, but for now, you slowly collapse into a panicked, paralyzing sense of hopelessness.
In the building next door, an apartment is on fire, flames devouring the living space. Half of the building’s windows are gone, and a crater has appeared in the center of the courtyard, surrounded by mangled gazebos and trees… I stare out the window unblinking; I can’t believe my eyes. How could I, my family, ordinary parents, ordinary babies, normal, everyday US, how could WE have ended up in this position? And what were we supposed to do now?
Now we would have to think about how to survive, preferably without losing our minds.
Still, you’re not ready. You’ve been told that war is when they cut off power, water, gas, heating, when they blow out the windows to boot. So we’ve lost power, so what? That’s happened before. We keep the candles over there, there are lamps… Water? Well, we’ll find a spring, or, I don’t know…a water pump. There’s no gas? So maybe an electric stove? But wait, we don’t have one of those either. Well, then…a campfire? That would be trickier, but surely it won’t come to that, you think. Can you imagine, an open fire in 2022, in a major seaside city? Somehow, this will all blow over quickly.
And, to be fair, matters did progress very quickly.
The water dried up almost as soon as the power went out. On March 6, my husband and my seventeen-year-old brother set out for the one open store to see what they could find; on the way home, they would check in on our grandmother, who lived not far from there.
Stores were taking liberties with prices, and lines wound like fat caterpillars across half the neighborhood; here and there, the first, timid looters had begun to emerge. You had to get in line early if you wanted to buy anything at all.
The morning they went out, my mom and I stayed at home with the children. We noticed a chirring, a hum. It was getting louder. It made the walls shake, the floors, the glass, our hands. Our eyes twitched and our hearts ached.
Iron and blood have a similar smell. On the morning of February 24, mingled with the smell of the blood of the fallen, I sensed something else, too: the heavy smell of metal.
Tanks.
Before that day, I had only seen them in parks, mounted on plinths.
When you’re walking past one of those tanks as a kid, you look up at it and feel a little bit frightened. Frightened of this imposing hunk of metal, of its power. Is it a real tank, or just a model? What if it’s been in battle? Children clamber onto it, laughing, have their picture taken. You’ll often find them running around it, shrieking, swinging on its gun…
A real-life tank. A real-life war. Real life. This is my real life.
They circle our narrow building. Their fat, chirruping caterpillar treads leave trails beneath our windows.
Now I know what it’s like to have your hands shake in mortal fear. Two tanks come to a stop, one on either side of the building. They whine, their engines chirring unpleasantly. About an hour passes this way.
Another tank appears. I crawl along the floor to the hallway, where we’ve put a mattress and the kids’ toys. My mom opens the front door to ask the neighbors where the gun is pointing. We can’t see it from our windows.
A woman pokes her head through our door: “Please give me some water, my husband is ill.” I bring out a cup of water, and they all drink from it: the woman, her husband, and an old man sitting nearby. “Can you spare some more?”
I can’t. Water is worth its weight in gold. I’ve been giving the last of the clean water to the children, and there’s nowhere to buy more. There aren’t any springs or wells in the area, and it’s unclear where else to look.
A single cup of water. I still remember how quickly, how greedily they gulped it down.
So many people have flocked to the first-floor entryway that it’s difficult to open the doors. Some have brought mattresses and bedding with them, some are drowsing or simply sitting in the dark, staring at the walls. Two women lean against our door; one has a child with her. I’m sitting on the floor in the dark with my children, my head full of the chirring tanks. Where is the gun pointing?
My son wakes up and smiles. In the semidarkness, I grope for the pan of cold porridge.
“Where’s the gun pointing?!” The shouts come from every floor. People are making their way downstairs, fearful of an attack, of a fire.
With a shaking hand, I lift a spoonful of porridge to my son’s mouth.
It’s cold in the apartment; my daughter is crying, but I can’t hear her over the rattling noise.
I am emotionless. I’m in basic, animalistic survival mode.
Where is the gun pointing?
For some reason, I put my son’s hat on his head. Put on my shoes. Sit there. If the tanks open fire, we can run into the street. But then what? In the distance, the roar of explosions grows louder. Something is being bombed, who knows what. One of the most excruciating aspects of war is the lack of information. You don’t know what’s going on, you haven’t got a clue. Who’s firing? Where? What should I do? How long should I wait? And for what?
You just sit there and wait. For fate to show mercy, I guess. But where are my husband and brother? Maybe they’re already gone?
Explosions, one after another… “God, help them. Help us.” But a traitorous inner voice pushes back: “It’s too late for prayers. There’s nothing but hell all around you. Nothing to do but sit here and suffer.”
But then our men come rushing in, stepping over our neighbors in the dark, squeezing their way inside. Agitated, their eyes bulging.
“Did you manage to buy anything?” I ask automatically, still trembling. “No,” they reply. “The store is gone, and grandma’s gate, fence, and windows are, too. She’s a bit worse for wear, but everything’s all right, we’ve tucked her away in the one room that didn’t get damaged.”
You stand in the hallway, attempting to process this information. Your brain can’t keep up. And they just keep talking, on and on… “So we’re standing in a long line, chatting with this ancient old man; meanwhile, the store’s still shut. Some looters pulled up, they were carrying crowbars, there was a whole car full of them, and then, from out of nowhere, a single police officer showed up and fired into the air, everyone was shouting… But we stood there for another hour, then two, until finally, we said to the old man, ‘All right, we’re leaving, we’re not waiting any longer.’ And we’d barely left before a missile hit the store. And the explosions were deafening, and all you could see were the body parts flying everywhere.”
This is the kind of monologue you usually come across in books, the sort of thing theater students use for their recitals. What do you do when it becomes your reality?
Denial, anger, bargaining…what are the other ones again?
“And we ran, and all around us the bombs kept falling, one after another. We took shelter behind a kiosk, crouched down, then made another run for it… We ran to grandma’s house, there we were in her yard. There was the house—but we didn’t manage to make it inside before the windows started splintering, the gate went flying, little pieces of shrapnel were flying everywhere…” But grandma had seen them run into the yard and went out to meet them, so the glass went flying behind her. And that’s what saved her that day; she escaped with light injuries, only a little worse for wear.
Where is the gun pointing… That question still swirls in my head, even half a year later. Where is the gun pointing?
When war comes knocking, when death becomes part of your everyday life, the gun is always pointing at you. It might never fire, it might just sit there, chilling your skin with its breath, but it’s still there, pointing at you. It creaks, periodically turning in other directions, but, one way or another, it will come to rest on you again. Because war is an utterly personal tragedy and, at the same time, a plague on the whole world. And it’s only a matter of time before the gun will be pointing at you.
…
Dream 3. Basements and Familiar Whispers
There is no sleep, only drowsing. And even that only comes when you haven’t slept for a couple of days in a row. Your body gives in and shuts down of its own accord. Bombs fall day and night. Morning. Whenever… You live out of a suitcase packed with your documents and some necessities; you sleep in your clothes, your pockets crammed full of matches and children’s toys, also a flashlight, tissues, batteries.
You run to the basement, knowing that everything around you might be destroyed. And you accept that. You go down once—you come out, and the building across the street is gone. You go down again—the roof of another building has been ripped clean off. Once more, and an acquaintance’s foot has been blown off, and her husband is running around pleading…for what, exactly? There aren’t any hospitals anymore, no medicines or doctors. You just sit there, listening to him shouting on the street. You come up from the basement again and the doors and the walls are bristling with razor-sharp fragments of something or other. Some men dig the pieces out and store them in a garage.
Our neighbor from down the street has taken in some people from the city center whose homes have been destroyed. There’s a woman whose eyes are completely red: all her capillaries have burst. Tears continuously leak onto her cheeks. She says it’s because of the dust from the explosion. Another woman who came here with her is constantly sick to her stomach. She has a concussion, but all they have to offer her is water. So they give her water and hope for the best. This is the state of medical care in the twenty-first century, in a city with half a million people.
You get tired of running to the basement: there’s no respite, and you get to the point where you don’t care anymore. You’ll just stay home. But what about the children? And what if you’re left disabled? People’s arms and legs get blown off in a matter of moments…
By now, you know how to judge the distance of the bombs that fall in the night. Roar—hit. That one’s pretty far off, you can keep dozing. Roar—hit, and the doors fly open of their own accord—then you’ve got to run. Hastily, my husband whispers, “If the building starts to collapse while you’re out there, shelter with the children underneath that arch,”—he gestures toward a doorway—“It’s wide, the walls are thick. Don’t go to the basement. Just stay there, don’t move.” And I nod, I get our child dressed and nod.
I am capable of standing in that doorway if our building collapses.
I am ready for that. I never would have imagined it was possible to be ready for such an event, but, as it turns out, it is.
It’s pitch black. I remember getting the children dressed, lugging something to the basement; we crowd together, shouting, calling to each other, as missiles whiz past overhead; meanwhile, my daughter goes back to her mattress on the floor and lies down, pressing her palms to her face to make everyone leave her alone. We don’t immediately notice her disappearance. We descend into the basement one by one, handing the children down to those already inside; it’s only then that we notice she’s missing…
You race through the building in the dark, searching for her, while she, bundled up in all her clothes, lies there in her mittens, curled up on the floor, covering her face. How many times have we made this journey underground? The children cry, they don’t understand why they can’t sleep anymore.
The children cry often. But you don’t. I didn’t cry at all, I could only cry once I reached safety, and even then, not right away. I couldn’t manage to weep: I was constantly filled with a mix of manic cheerfulness, despair, and studied optimism. I think this was less for the children’s sake than for my own sanity.
My husband’s forays into basements were more varied. Once, an attack started while he was out looking for firewood with our landlord. There was a little ruined store nearby with an enormous basement where they took shelter. His most vivid memory of the space was of the bags of blood they found there. Some were empty, but others were new, unused. Apparently, this place had been used as a medical station.
The basement was huge and very solid. They retreated further inside and watched as the entrance was pelted with branches and chunks of asphalt from above. As always, their thoughts were consumed by the ones they’d left behind: had they survived? What was going on out there? How long would the shelling last? And what would come next?
Sometimes, the men would go out in the morning and return only as it was getting dark, and for all that time, we, the women, were left waiting: there was no communication, no certainty, no nothing.
Once, on the way home from yet another trip in search of water or humanitarian aid, they came across a military vehicle that had been battered with shrapnel and debris. It was barely crawling along on its half-deflated tires, which were partly held together with tape, and the windshield was spattered with blood from the inside.
With a crazed look in his eye, the driver turned the wheel, periodically jerking out his hand to wipe at the smudges and spray on the glass so that he could see the road.
And that’s how we lived.
Day and night you’re on the run, crooning lullabies to your son as you pace back and forth in the basement. You hum softly in his ear as the shock waves assault your ears from above. Sleep, my little one, sleep… Mama is rocking you while mama is being rocked by the city, which is slowly dying to the sound of the missiles’ lullaby.
Ultimately, I am sitting and listening to death. Have you ever heard its whisper? I heard it once in the hospital, whispering to me in the beeping of monitors. After my accident, I lay in intensive care, my blood pressure dropping, as doctors gathered around me, gazing at me expectantly. “Will I go now, right here on this hospital bed?”
“Will I go now, in March of 2022?” I think, listening to death once more, but in a different key.
There is an oil icon lamp in the basement. It’s more economical than candles. Behind it stands an icon of Saint Nicholas; it trembles slightly when the earth vibrates.
We’re often forced to stay underground for long periods of time. The children doze, cry, get hungry. And so you wait for a silence, for the slightest break in the bombardment, and go up for food. You hastily grab what you need; meanwhile, your head is filled only one thought: a strike is coming. It will hit now, right here in the kitchen, they’ll all still be down in the basement, and you’ll be struck down, flattened, torn apart… Any second now, and it’ll be the end. There’s no time to heat food, you just take the porridge to the basement and feed your child in the dark. He smiles at me through the darkness, chewing, and I smile back. Through the explosions overhead and the basement’s thick gloom. The children are happy as long as they’re with their mother; they don’t care where we are, or that death is breathing down our necks, together with the icy March air.
When our son heard an airplane as he was trying to fall asleep in the warmth of our room, he’d look at me and point rapturously at the ceiling. And I would stroke his head and whisper, smiling: “It’s an airplane…ooo…there’s a man flying up in the sky. Way up high.” I would say these words trembling, thinking: should we start getting dressed so we can make a run for the basement? Where will the explosion be? Where is the man in that airplane headed? What is he thinking about? Does he know that, at that very moment, hundreds of little children like my son are listening to his airplane and looking at the sky?
Where are you flying to, man in the sky?
When you hear the bombers at daybreak, where can you put your trust? Maternal prayer has long since become endless, mechanical, rote. The only place where people pray like they’re at war is in the hospital; there, too, people pray fervently, their supplication bordering on resignation and despair.
In the basements, these prayers are at their shortest and strongest. I sit holding my son; another mother sits beside me with her daughter. There are six women and four children in the basement. And you whisper over and over again: “Blessed Mother of God, grant us your protection.” As the shelling gets heavier, the prayer gets shorter. This whisper is my dialogue with death. You repeat: “Protect us, protect us, protect us, save us.” The fragments rain down even harder, flying down from above, slicing through the heavy iron doors. You repeat the same phrases over and over again, as fast as you can, as if you’re rushing to be heard. As if no other words exist.
And it doesn’t feel like no one’s listening. It feels like you’ve been dropped into a giant meat grinder called ‘life.’ You might survive it, but then again, you might not; all you can do is to patiently dig your way up to the surface.
