Chapter 2 #2
“I think I’ve been shot,” she said, and closed her eyes, and Tatyanna shook her gently, and told her to stay awake.
She looked at Vlad. They had to get her to a hospital quickly.
There were no ambulances around. Others who had been shot were lying on the ground, and some were dead.
The line was mostly women and children, and a woman was screaming that her son had been shot, while another woman held her baby covered in blood.
There was a hospital near the bus station, and Vlad picked Yana up in his arms, Tatyanna grabbed their bags, and they ran to the hospital.
There was a sign saying where it was. Vlad ran as fast as he could and Tatyanna almost flew beside him.
They got there in minutes and rushed into the emergency unit, carrying Yana, who was in and out of consciousness. “Am I dying?” she asked Tatyanna.
“No!” Tatyanna shouted at her, while Vlad set Yana down on a gurney and Tatyanna went to find a nurse.
There were other injured people all around them.
Some had walked from the bus station, others were on gurneys.
A team of medics came to Yana quickly, and began working on her immediately, and then they took her away.
Vlad and Tatyanna were left to wait among a crowd of injured people, and the people who had brought them in.
Tatyanna was crying. Vlad held her tight, and they waited.
—
When Yulya had made breakfast for the children that morning, she left the room to talk to Symon. His school was closed and she had called her boss and he told her not to come in. Symon told her he wanted her to leave with the children immediately.
“What about you?” she said, trying not to panic. “I can’t leave you here.”
“You have to. The men have been told to stay to fight the invaders. It’ll be over quickly. You can stay with your brother in Warsaw.” Most people felt sure that the Ukrainian army would stop the invaders quickly.
“I can’t leave my parents,” she insisted. “I have to go and check on them. The radio says there was shelling in their area.”
“If they continue shelling, I want you and the children in a bomb shelter today.”
“I have to see my parents,” she said, feeling desperate, and pulled in all directions. She wanted to get her children to safety, stay with her husband, and take care of her parents, and she couldn’t do all three.
She insisted on going to see her parents.
Symon argued with her and finally agreed to stay with the children.
He knew he couldn’t stop her and was sick with worry as soon as she left.
She had her cellphone with her and he called her every few minutes.
Daryna and Pavlo were frightened. They were quiet, worried about their mother and grandparents.
Symon reassured them, although he was as frightened as they were and sorry he had let Yulya go.
Yulya drove to see her parents, taking back streets and not main roads.
She saw bombed-out apartment buildings and destruction along the way.
When she got to her parents’ apartment, they were calmly having lunch, although they could hear gunfire and bombs in the distance.
Yulya begged them to come to Warsaw with her, to her brother’s home, and they wouldn’t.
They wanted to stay in their home. She argued heatedly with them, and told them that Symon wanted her to leave with the children.
“You have to come with us, Mama, Papa, I can’t leave you here.”
“We’ll be fine,” Oxana said calmly. “We’re not afraid. We want to stay in our home.” Petro nodded agreement.
“They’re bombing buildings like this one, Mama,” Yulya pleaded with her, with both of them. They agreed that Yulya should go with the children, but they wouldn’t go with her. They were unmovable in their determination to stay in their apartment.
After a tearful, emotional goodbye, Yulya eventually went home and told Symon her parents wouldn’t leave.
Symon promised to look in on them every day or as often as he could, once he was in the voluntary military.
“But you still have to go. You have to take the children and go to your brother in Poland.” Yulya broke down in sobs, torn between all the people she loved, her parents, Symon, and their children.
She didn’t want to leave Symon. And what if he was killed?
If she never saw him again? But he told her it was her duty to get the children to safety.
They spent the night in a bomb shelter, wide-awake and holding hands as their children slept beside them.
Yulya was aware that it might be their last night together, forever. She cried all night as he held her.
—
At the hospital, Vlad and Tatyanna had been waiting for hours for news about Yana.
Anton had operated on her, although they didn’t know him.
He finally came to tell them that Yana had died.
He was kind and tried to be gentle when he told them that the damage from the bullets was too great.
She had lost too much blood and the internal effects of the bullets couldn’t be repaired.
The surgeons had tried. Tatyanna and Vlad looked so young when he told them, and they clung to each other and cried for their friend.
She was one of the first casualties of the war.
Anton asked about her family, and they explained that they had all been killed in the bombing on the first night.
He told them that the hospital would arrange for burial, if they wished.
As he spoke to them, a woman was standing by, patiently waiting to see Anton.
It was Sasha. She had come to help in the emergency unit in her off-duty time.
She stepped forward and comforted Vlad and Tatyanna, who were devastated about Yana.
It was all too real. When they left the emergency room at last, Vlad turned to Tatyanna.
“You have to take the train to Poland. I want you safe.” She wanted to stay with him, but he was going to join the volunteer army and he didn’t know where he’d be sent.
She didn’t want to stay in the city alone.
The other students at the ballet school had either gone home by then or were in shelters.
Vlad and Tatyanna went to stand on line in the freezing cold at the train station.
They hadn’t eaten all day at the hospital.
They held on to each other, shivering in the icy wind at the station, which was crowded with people, pushing and shoving.
It seemed like thousands. They took turns for a little time indoors, but didn’t want to lose their place.
Vlad told her to wait inside but she wouldn’t leave him for more than a few minutes, nor did he want to leave her.
She took a few things out of Yana’s suitcase, which was bloodstained.
Yana had taken her toe shoes too, and Tatyanna kept them in memory of her, and put them in her suitcase.
They spent the night in and out of the brutally cold weather.
Drones and planes flew overhead, but they were bombing elsewhere, in another town.
They heard sirens and ambulances all night.
And all they could think of was that Yana was dead and it was their last night together.
—
Yulya, Symon, and the children left the shelter where they were before dawn, and walked to the train station in the freezing cold.
It was snowing and there was ice on the ground.
Pavlo had Max on his red leash, wearing the sweater that their grandmother Oxana had knitted for him for Christmas, and he whimpered when his feet touched the ice, but his fur kept him warm.
The crowd at the train station was so dense people couldn’t even push their way through.
It was a wall of humans, mostly women and children, and in many cases their husbands and fathers and brothers who had come to make sure they got on the train.
People jostled each other, and no one wanted to lose their place.
But the crowd was mostly quiet, still in shock that they had to leave their homes.
No one wanted to go, they wanted to turn back the clock to only a few days before, when life was normal and they were doing ordinary things, going to school and work, having dinner with friends, going to the movies, and Ukraine was a civilized place, full of friendly faces and people they knew.
Now planes were bearing down on them, spraying them with bullets, killing their children and setting fire to their homes.
It was a punishment beyond imagination, a familiar world turned into a nightmare.
Tatyanna and Vlad waited for the train all day, and it never came.
The agent in the ticket booth said that a bomb had blown up the track four or five hours away, and he had no idea how long it would take to repair.
Some of the people left for the bus station then.
But Vlad had bought Tatyanna a ticket and she didn’t want to waste it, and she said she couldn’t go back to the bus station where Yana had been shot the day before.
So they stayed at the train station. He went to buy her a loaf of bread and it was two hours before he came back. There was still no sign of the train.
“Sorry it took me so long,” he said to her when he finally returned and found her in the crowd.
She had been afraid that the train would arrive while he was out scrounging for food, and she wouldn’t get to say goodbye to him.
She didn’t want to leave him, but the constant bombs and shelling had convinced them both that it was too dangerous to stay.
“You won’t be gone long,” he reassured her.
“This will end quickly, they’re just trying to scare us.
” But they had done a lot more than scare Yana and her family.
Countless civilians had already been killed.