Chapter 3 #4
Vlad and Symon were often assigned to missions together and sometimes separately.
Vlad had proven to be an efficient sniper.
He was powerful and fast on his feet, young and moved quickly with his ballet training.
Symon was strong and agile too, although Vlad had moved like lightning when he had to.
Symon was often assigned to the tanks, or to details trying to pull people out of the rubble, able to move large stone blocks and cement to reach them, although more often than not, those he uncovered were dead.
But there were some victories, most recently a baby whose entire family had been killed when the building collapsed.
Miraculously, the infant had survived. It was taken to a hospital in Kyiv, which was later bombed, and the baby was saved again.
Vlad and Symon were on the same mission one night, and Vlad slipped silently into the woods.
They could hear Russian soldiers nearby.
He approached with stealth, his gun in hand to shoot them, when he sensed a movement.
He saw one of them dart out of the trees.
Vlad fired the weapon he had at the ready, and just as swiftly, three soldiers hidden behind him opened fire on Vlad, and he fell to the ground, instantly dead.
Symon and two of the other soldiers went to retrieve his body when the Russians left the area.
He had been shot cleanly in the head, neck, and chest, dead at eighteen.
Symon held him for a moment with tears in his eyes.
They took him back to their unit to place him with the felled soldiers of the night whom they were able to bring back and would bury in the morning.
Vlad’s brief and talented life, with so much promise, had ended with a hail of bullets.
Even Tatyanna’s deep love for him couldn’t save him or keep him from sacrificing his life to the country he loved.
He was just another boy who had died, a wasted life in the war, one of so many of the young Ukrainians who had lost their lives.
—
The ballet school in Kyiv, the Kyiv Choreographic College where Vlad and Tatyanna had lived and studied, was hit that same night and badly damaged.
Symon and the others were sent there to help pull survivors out of the rubble.
His heart was aching over Vlad, who felt like a younger brother or an adopted son to Symon.
He was crying as he helped take people out of the basement of the ballet school.
A kindergarten and lower school was hit that night too.
Families had been sheltering there, and they had painted on the roof the word “children” in Russian.
The enemy bombed the building anyway. At least a dozen of the children had died, and their bereft parents carried their bodies out of the wreckage.
The agony Symon was seeing every day was endless, and now Vlad was gone too.
He had retrieved Vlad’s cellphone when they took him back to their unit, billeted in a military tent, and he sat down on his cot with the bloodstained phone in his hand.
He knew that Vlad’s ballerina girlfriend was named Tatyanna.
The phone was unlocked and he sat staring at it for a long time.
He found her phone number and address easily, and he thought she deserved to know what had happened to Vlad and that he was dead.
The volunteer army would notify his parents in Moscow, especially since they were both well-known at the Bolshoi Ballet, but he guessed that no one would tell Tatyanna.
She was just another young girl who had fled the country with no family, since she was an orphan.
With a heavy heart, he wrote out a message to the girl he didn’t know.
“I am so very sorry to tell you that your friend Vlad died a hero’s death tonight, the victim of enemy sniper fire.
He didn’t suffer, and was very brave, defending his homeland, and he loved you very much.
My heartfelt condolences. He was my friend.
” He didn’t add his name when he sent it.
She didn’t know him anyway, and he turned the phone in to the unit, to send to Vlad’s parents, if they could.
Tatyanna found the message when she woke up the next morning.
She sat and stared at it for a long time, too heartbroken to even cry.
She couldn’t imagine a world without Vlad in it.
Her world was shattered, and had come to an end.
Yulya found her sitting on her cot, deathly pale, and guessed immediately.
“Vlad?” she asked her in a whisper, and Tatyanna nodded, speechless with grief.
The world as they all knew it was over. Yulya sat down next to her on the cot and put her arms around her and held her as the tears came and wouldn’t stop.
Vlad was dead, taking with him all her hopes and dreams and her broken heart.
She felt broken forever as Yulya told her, with tears pouring down her cheeks.
She was all too aware that it could have been Symon. No one in Ukraine was safe.