Chapter 6
Symon had been on a heavy detail, shoveling debris into a truck from one of the collapsed buildings.
Twisted beams of steel, the burned-out facade, apartments exposed with the charred remains of people’s homes and lives.
It all had to be disposed of. He got the night off afterward, and he went to his house to get his car, to check on Petro and Oxana.
He tried to visit them whenever he could so he could reassure Yulya about her parents.
He tried to call her too, but most of the time he didn’t have service in many areas, and his parents-in-law no longer did in Irpin.
They were cut off from the world in their own private hell.
The air raid sirens were blaring when he got there, as they were almost all night, every night.
He knew the shelter a few blocks away where they sought refuge, and he went to look for them there.
He had to squeeze through narrow passages, and step over people, in several dimly lit areas, while looking for them.
He finally found Petro and Oxana in the last room, where a child was crying and someone was singing.
His parents-in-law were sitting on the floor, leaning against the wall, with their weapons next to them.
He approached carefully, not sure if they were sleeping, and softly said their names.
Their eyes opened immediately, and Oxana smiled at her son-in-law, but Petro looked too tired to make the effort when he spoke.
“Nice of you to come,” he said, looking years older than he had a few weeks before.
The stress and fatigue were taking a toll on him, and Symon hoped that he would survive it.
“What news of the war? We don’t know anything here,” he said, as Symon sat on the floor next to them.
There were people pressed all around them, with no hope of privacy or peace, the smell of filth and bodies heavy in the air.
“We’re holding our positions,” Symon told him.
“They’re no closer to Kyiv than they were before.
And they’re targeting civilians everywhere, houses, apartment buildings, shopping malls, a hospital yesterday, schools, churches.
The same shit they’ve been doing since it started, and then claiming they’re not.
The supposed peace negotiations are going nowhere.
They won’t stop until we surrender, and we won’t.
They bombed the school where I work yesterday.
They destroyed it.” The bulletins weren’t cheering, but no longer surprising.
“Yulya and the children?” Petro asked, as his wife listened intently.
“They’re fine. Olek is taking good care of them. They met a girl on the train and she’s staying with them.” Symon didn’t know who she was, and Yulya hadn’t mentioned her name. He had no idea it was Vlad’s girlfriend. There were so many coincidences and chance meetings in the war.
Symon sat and talked to Oxana and Petro for half an hour, and then he wanted to get something to eat and go to bed.
He had to report for duty at four the next morning, to try to clear away another bombed-out building.
He embraced both of them, and then he made his way back down the narrow passageways filled with people and left the shelter.
It felt good to breathe fresh air for a minute afterward.
He walked to where he’d left his car, and drove back to the heart of the city.
He drove past the burned, twisted skeleton of his old school.
It looked like a dragon that had been burned alive, or something in a science fiction movie.
He remembered the time he’d spent there, and was sad to see it.
There were so many buildings like it now in every city, all civilian targets, most of them apartment buildings, which accounted for the ten million people without homes now.
He put his car in the garage under his building in his usual parking space that came with his apartment, and had a weird déjà vu of all the times he had come home at night, after tutoring or a sports event or practice at school when life was still sane.
It felt normal for a minute. And then suddenly the air raid sirens were shrieking, and he heard a plane overhead and felt the ground shake under his feet as he got out of the car, and then he heard a massive explosion and he was thrown backward against a wall.
There were huge crashing sounds somewhere above him, followed by a series of explosions, and he could see a wall of flame come toward him across the garage.
He put his arms up to protect his face and turned away from the flashes of light from the approaching flames.
There was tremendous heat all around him, and part of the ceiling caved in ten feet away, and then from the lack of oxygen or the heat or something that hit him on the head, Symon felt himself slipping into darkness, and rolled under a cement staircase next to his car.
After that, everything went black. The building was coming down above him, but he was in a faraway place of total blackness by then.
—
They were finishing dinner in Warsaw at the time.
Yulya and Nina cleaned up the kitchen, talking about their day and news of the war.
Nothing had changed. Nina spoke perfect Ukrainian, and Yulya could manage in Polish.
Olek was fluent in both. The bombing was continuing.
Olek had gone upstairs to help Tomas with his science homework.
Bogdan and Pavlo were playing video games, and Tatyanna took Daryna upstairs to put her to bed.
The house was quiet, and the three women sat back down at the kitchen table to talk, when Tatyanna came downstairs.
Tatyanna loved talking to Yulya and Nina.
It was like having older sisters, which was something she’d never had.
But she had been surrounded by peers in the ballet dormitory for her entire life, and she missed that.
She was flattered that Yulya and Nina treated her like an adult, and one of them.
They talked for a long time, and eventually the boys finished their video game and went upstairs, with Max trailing behind.
The women got up, and Nina turned off the light in the kitchen.
They went upstairs and said good night and Yulya went to her room.
Her cellphone rang as soon as she got there.
Her heart gave a leap. She was hoping it was Symon.
She hadn’t spoken to him in several days, and he had texted her he was going to try to see her parents that night.
She was startled to see on the caller ID that it wasn’t Symon.
It was their neighbor in Kyiv. His wife and daughters had been among the first to leave, and he had stayed to fight.
“Yosyp, how are you?” she said, speaking loudly. There was static in the connection, but she could hear him. They hadn’t spoken since his family left and he joined the voluntary army.
“I’m well,” he said. “I went to the apartment tonight to get something, and there was a direct hit, several of them. The building caught fire, and it collapsed an hour later. I thought you should know.” From the way he said it, she could tell there was more and she braced herself for it.
“Someone saw Symon drive into the garage a few minutes before it happened. Several people got out in time, a lot of the families are gone, and the men are in the army, so I don’t know how many people were in the building.
No one saw him come out. The people on the lower floors made it out in the first few minutes, the ones upstairs didn’t.
I’m still here. We’re keeping an eye out for Symon, but we haven’t seen him yet.
I wanted to let you know. The fire trucks are here, and the army.
They’re still digging people out. I told them there could be a man in the garage.
” She felt breathless as though she’d been in the explosion herself as she listened.
She could guess that Symon had gone to park his car if he’d been to see her parents, but the timing was disastrous.
“Thank you, Yosyp,” she managed to choke out. “Thank you for calling me. Let me know if you hear anything else.”
“Of course. I’m sorry to call you with bad news, but I thought you should know.
” Know what? That Symon was dead and she was a widow?
It was hard to be grateful for bad news, but she wanted to know if something had happened to him.
She just had to pray that he had made it out of the garage.
The timing made perfect sense, if he’d gone to Irpin that night.
They were one of the last buildings on their street that hadn’t been bombed.
And an event like this was why Symon had insisted she go to her brother in Warsaw.
And now it had happened, and she wasn’t there, but he was. It was a hideous irony of fate.
She called Symon the instant she hung up with Yosyp, but Symon didn’t answer the call.
It went to voicemail, and she left a message saying that she was calling to make sure he was okay and she’d heard about their building.
She’d been nervously pacing the room with the phone in her hand while she spoke to Yosyp, and after she left the message for Symon, she sat down on her bed and tried to catch her breath.
She tried not to overreact to the report.
They had lost their home and all their belongings, which was devastating, but all she cared about now was her husband.
That was all that mattered. Symon’s life. The rest could be replaced.
She sat on the bed for a few minutes and then went to knock on Nina and Olek’s bedroom door.
Her brother opened it. Nina was sitting on the bed, watching the late news on TV.
It was full of the now familiar images of horror in various Ukrainian cities, bombed-out buildings, charred hulls of what had been people’s homes.
Yulya wondered if hers looked like that now too. It seemed likely.