Chapter 6 #2
“Something wrong?” Olek answered, and she nodded.
“I just got a call from our neighbor in Kyiv. They bombed our building tonight. It caught fire, a second bomb detonated, and the building collapsed.”
“I’m sorry, Yuly,” Olek said, sympathetic, and hugged her. “Thank God you and the kids are here.” She nodded and found herself choking on her words.
“Someone saw Symon drive into the garage seconds before it happened,” she said, feeling a sensation of being breathless and not being able to get any air.
“He texted me earlier that he went to see Mama and Papa tonight, he must have been bringing the car back. No one has seen him at the scene. They’re still digging people out.
He may turn up in a few minutes and call me, but for now, they haven’t seen him, and they know he was there.
If the building collapsed and he was underneath it in the garage, he may be buried in the rubble.
” She knew what it looked like now when a building collapsed, with steel beams and broken concrete everywhere and unrecognizable debris.
Mountains of it. Symon could be under the rubble of the entire building, dead or alive.
“Don’t give up yet,” Yulya’s brother told her gently.
“He may turn up in a few minutes, or if he’s under all that, they could find him alive days from now.
You just have to wait and see what happens.
Lots of people have climbed out of the wreckage of those buildings.
The beams could have fallen in such a way to protect him from getting crushed and give him an airspace until he’s found.
” Olek made it sound hopeful, but Yulya was in too much shock from the call to hear him clearly.
All she knew was that their building had collapsed, and Symon might be under what was left of it.
She went back to her room a minute later, and spent the night in a chair, sitting upright, waiting for a call that never came, either from Symon to say that he was fine, or from someone to say he had been found, was in a hospital, and would recover.
Those were the only two calls she wanted, and she got neither. She got no call at all.
She was still sitting in the chair wide-awake at six in the morning, when Nina slipped into her room with a cup of tea and saw Yulya sitting there, wide awake.
“Did you get any sleep?” she asked softly, as she set the cup down on a table next to her. And Yulya shook her head.
“Not really. I called Symon five or six times, the line went through a few times, but he didn’t answer.”
“He could have left his phone somewhere, or maybe it’s off, or he dropped it.
There could be a lot of explanations.” Or Yulya could be a widow.
Symon could be dead. The thought of it made Nina feel sick, dizzy, and nauseous, all at once.
“You just have to wait and hope,” she said, and Yulya nodded and squeezed her eyes shut as tears rolled through her lashes.
The idea that Symon might be dead was unbearable.
Nina sat next to her and held her hand. Finally Yulya opened her eyes, gasping for air, while Nina told her to breathe slowly in and out.
This was the hardest moment of her life, not knowing if her husband was dead or alive.
She went through the motions of cooking for the children before they left for school. She didn’t tell them what had happened. She didn’t want to frighten them since she wasn’t sure.
The commanding officer of Symon’s volunteer army unit called her that morning, and told her that Symon was believed to have been killed during the collapse of the building where he lived, but no body had been found, and they were digging through the rubble now for bodies and survivors.
He said he would keep her apprised. Her information was in Symon’s files.
She thanked him for calling her. There was no further news that day.
No information, no calls, and when she called Yosyp, the neighbor, he knew nothing either.
He said that Symon’s body had not been found, but the area was a complete mess, and another building near it had been bombed and collapsed as well.
He said the pile of rubble of the two buildings combined was huge.
A week later, there was still no news of Symon.
He hadn’t returned to his army unit. No one had heard from him, but his body had not been found.
They had dug through the still smoking debris of the building very thoroughly, and several bodies and two survivors had been found, none of them Symon.
Yulya refused to believe that he was dead, but she had told the children what had happened.
The house had been painfully quiet all week, as they each mourned Symon.
It seemed inevitable now that he was dead.
—
A week to the day after Symon and Yulya’s building had been decimated, Petro and Oxana’s building in Irpin took a direct hit and was destroyed.
The whole facade had blown off and they could see each apartment, severely charred.
It looked like a dollhouse that had been set on fire.
It had happened at night when they were in the shelter.
In the morning, they went to their address and observed the hull of their building, charred black and ready to fall, like so many others.
They stood looking at it, with Petro’s arm around Oxana’s shoulders.
When the building had cooled down and the fires were out, they borrowed picks and shovels and sifted through what was there, since they had lived at garden level.
There were twisted forks and spoons and other objects that had melted, charred bits, broken glass, burned books.
Oxana had been carrying Petro’s poems in her backpack since the bombing started so she hadn’t lost them. They were her most precious possession.
There was a church group distributing clothes and toiletries to people who had lost everything, and they gave Petro and Oxana a bag of jeans and sweatshirts, a warm jacket for each, a toothbrush for each, toothpaste, the bare essentials.
They had nothing now except what they’d taken to the shelter the night before.
They had no cell service but they could text.
They texted Yulya that they were all right, and that they felt sorry for their neighbors.
“They’re incredible,” Yulya said to her sister-in-law. “They think about everyone but themselves, and they never complain about anything, even now. This is so hard for them. To lose everything and have to start over at their age, and they had such pretty things and beautiful art.”
“I should be there with them,” Olek said, profoundly depressed about all of it, his brother-in-law, his parents. He was in shock over Symon’s death, and desperately worried about his parents.
“We need you here,” Yulya said bluntly. “You can’t do anything there, and Mama and Papa don’t want to leave.
I texted them about it a couple of hours ago, and they said definitely not.
We can’t decide for them. They are functioning adults, more than I am sometimes.
” Olek looked dark and brooding, and Tatyanna had tried to stay out of everyone’s way and not intrude on them, ever since Symon had disappeared.
She kept the children busy, which made things easier for Yulya.
She had been withdrawn and distracted ever since she had gotten the first call.
Symon’s commanding officer called again, to say that Symon was presumed dead and that he was very sorry.
Yulya refused to believe she was a widow, but it looked that way.
He would have been located by now, if he were alive.
—
Anton and Sasha had never worked so hard in their entire careers.
Sasha’s job was harder than usual. In normal times, deliveries that turned out badly were the exception.
In the current circumstances, there was a steady stream of disasters due to the war.
Babies born too prematurely to survive, or in desperate need of incubators that had been broken during shelling of the hospital and couldn’t be used.
Mothers who had been traumatized by losing full-term babies that failed to breathe at birth.
Mothers who had been shot and so badly injured that the babies couldn’t be saved, or mothers who died, and whose babies simply didn’t survive the Cesarean sections after their mothers’ deaths.
Infants in utero were shot as well. Countless mothers who did survive, and whose babies didn’t, wished that they had died too.
At least half of them had lost their husbands in the past months before they delivered.
The births were rarely joyful now, with mother and baby alive, uninjured, and doing well.
Sasha treated each one like a hopeful event, but more often than she could bear seeing, something terrible happened before, during, or after the birth.
More than ever before, they were vigorously massaging newborns to get them to take a first breath.
When they succeeded it was the happiest moment in the mothers’ lives, cause for jubilation and tears of joy in the delivery room.
The doctors, nurses, and midwives cried too when it went well, and even more so when it didn’t.
Mothers who had nurtured babies for nine months in anticipation of the birth were being shot, murdered, and their babies with them.
There were horror stories that were hard to believe of enemy soldiers murdering new mothers and their babies in the hospital, or raping women, nurses, patients, anyone in their path.