Chapter 7 #3
When Tatyanna got to the ballet school, she went to the classroom where she’d auditioned for Nikolai the day before.
It was the advanced students’ classroom.
There were fourteen dancers warming up, eleven women and three men.
And they all looked very professional. The teacher was expecting her.
Nikolai had explained Tatyanna’s situation to her, and she greeted Tatyanna warmly.
Tatyanna went to the barre and did warm-up exercises, and then took her place in the back row so as not to draw attention to herself.
And the teacher let her stay there. Nikolai had told the teacher what an extraordinary dancer Tatyanna was, and she was curious about her.
She was even remarkably graceful doing her exercises.
The pianist arrived and set her music up on the piano, and the class began promptly on time.
It lasted an hour, and a second one followed it, and Tatyanna stayed for that too.
She danced for two solid hours and the teacher had been watching her.
Her leaps were exquisite, she floated like a feather, and all of her steps were executed to perfection.
Nikolai was right, she had an enormous talent.
At the end of class, Tatyanna disappeared quietly, showered and changed and left without speaking to anyone.
But she was smiling and for the first time since the war began, she was truly happy.
The war had taken so much from her, but it hadn’t taken her talent away or her passion for dancing. It was part of her soul.
—
Petro and Oxana went for a walk every day in the morning, if there was no air raid in progress.
Oxana insisted that they do it to get exercise and fresh air.
There was an acrid smell of ash from all the buildings that had burned.
Sometimes they walked past the burned-out shell of their own building.
Scavengers had long since gone in and stripped the little that was left that might be useful.
Ukrainian soldiers went through the pockets of fallen Russian soldiers and did the same, taking knives, weapons, flashlights, food if they found any.
Food of any kind was worth more than gold now.
Petro and Oxana carried their weapons while they walked in case they encountered any stray Russian soldiers or snipers.
Petro had killed at least two of them, and said he felt no remorse about it.
They were a practiced enemy who had been led to commit war crimes every day.
He would have killed with his bare hands any soldier who hurt Oxana.
But so far they had survived the fighting unscathed.
Despite the lack of food, Oxana moved with her usual athletic agility.
She had played tennis twice a week with younger friends up until the war.
Petro was in good shape for his age. The heavy weapon he carried didn’t slow him down.
He was philosophical about what might happen to them.
They had led full lives, had many friends, their children were old enough to survive without them, and as long as he and Oxana died together, then he wasn’t afraid of dying, or of the Russian soldiers.
The Russian soldiers were so young that they looked like children, as they crawled out of their tanks and went looking for food.
They were running out of supplies too, as were the Ukrainians.
The Russians were trying to starve them out, blockading the trucks with humanitarian supplies, emptying the trucks into their own supply vans and making off with them.
Petro and Oxana were well liked in the bomb shelter where they were living.
It was solidly built, under a school, where a thousand people were sheltering.
Petro and Oxana were friendly with everyone.
They glowed with an inner light, treating everyone kindly and equally and respectfully.
Irpin was a suburb of Kyiv, so they were all city dwellers, some of whom had been important until a few weeks before, but no one was important now.
Life was important, and food, people and friends, family and children.
Their values were simple and direct. People in the shelter liked talking to Petro about his travels and experiences.
He didn’t brag. He shared the memories with them, and was always humble.
And more than anything, as long as he was with Oxana he was happy.
The others in the shelter marveled that they always came back from their walks safe and invigorated.
The residents of the shelter shared whatever information or tools they had.
Petro was good at foraging something to eat for each night.
He would have cooked for them if they still had a kitchen to use.
It made his architect’s heart hurt to see the destruction around them.
The years that had been wasted, the time, the manpower, the materials, the deaths of so many young people, children and civilians.
Rebuilding the cities that had been so fiercely punished would take years.
Years that could have been better spent.
The battles being waged were the great equalizer.
Who you had been at the beginning no longer seemed to matter.
How important people had once been didn’t count.
No one was keeping score. Who you were, what you believed, and how you treated others was all that mattered in the end.
When people saw how Petro treated Oxana, his kindness toward her and respect, there was no question possible about how much he loved her.
If the circumstances warranted it, he would have died for her, which was the purest measure of his love.