Chapter 9
When Tatyanna went to class in the morning, there were twenty other dancers already there.
Most of them ignored her, a few nodded in her direction.
There were six strong-looking young men in the group.
The class started promptly, and when she handed the teacher her introductory papers, the teacher nodded and pointed to a place in the front, where she could observe Tatyanna.
The teacher was thin and taut, didn’t smile, and looked about Yulya’s age, in her early thirties.
Tatyanna could follow her commands because French was the international language of ballet, and the names of the steps were all the same.
Halfway through the class the teacher paired her with one of the male dancers, and indicated what she wanted them to do while the others watched.
He was taller than Vlad, and a little stronger.
He lifted her easily and carried her, and his leaps were high.
The teacher didn’t comment, only nodded, and told the others to dance again when she had seen what she wanted.
She spoke to Tatyanna at the end of the class, in French so she didn’t understand, and then pantomimed that she had done well, and that she wanted her to leap higher.
Tatyanna nodded understanding and agreement.
She still wasn’t back to her full strength after not dancing for so long, except for the recent classes in Warsaw.
Her schedule was grueling, with classes and rehearsals every day, and the teacher she’d been assigned pushed her hard.
She was used to that from Madame Natalya, and Tatyanna expected a lot of herself too.
By the end of the first two weeks, she was dancing better.
She was beginning to learn a few words of French, and there were several Russians in her group, including three of the men.
She had no feelings about their being Russian.
Ballet was a neutral world in her mind. They had nothing to do with the war.
She spoke some Russian, and was able to have simple conversations with them. They only spoke about the work.
The teacher corrected her regularly and was a hard taskmaster, but Tatyanna liked being pushed to her limits.
One of the Russian men had been chosen as her dance partner, and they worked well together.
Dancing kept Tatyanna’s mind off the war.
She had spoken to Yulya and the children twice on the phone.
They all missed her and she missed them.
She had no time to herself. It was like being back at school in Kyiv, and a little more intense.
Tatyanna danced her first performance at the opera house two weeks after she’d arrived, a strong secondary role in Sleeping Beauty, and she danced well.
She danced five performances, and the reviews in the newspapers were excellent.
She had fallen into a good routine, with a heavy schedule.
It was like getting lost in time when she danced.
She forgot everything else. She hadn’t made any friends in the company yet and hadn’t tried.
The language was a barrier, and they were all intent on rehearsing for their performances.
After her first performance, her partner, Andrei, told her in Russian that he thought that they had done well, and thanked her, and she agreed and thanked him.
But she didn’t see any of them outside of class.
They had a job to do, and just as it was anywhere in the world, ballet was all-consuming and replaced everything else in one’s life.
It was a passion as well as an art, and Tatyanna had found her passion again.
It had been dormant ever since the war began, as survival and the people she loved became more important.
But now Tatyanna could concentrate again.
She felt as though she was on a desert island all by herself when she danced, thinking of Vlad.
Tatyanna had found a newsstand near the opera house where she could buy newspapers with news of the war.
She bought the international ones in English.
There was a Ukrainian paper that only appeared erratically now, and she could see the photographs in the French ones, and checked for news on her phone.
Mariupol was completely decimated, Kharkiv and Kherson severely damaged and nearly destroyed.
Kyiv had resisted the Russian army and driven them back.
The suburbs of Kyiv were demolished and were the scene of fierce fighting.
Lviv, near Poland, was experiencing brutal battles as well, causing the Polish army to reinforce their borders.
Entire cities had been leveled, thousands of people had died, many of them women and children.
The Ukrainians were refusing to surrender or fall back, and the Russians, unwilling to admit defeat, just became more vicious as their military bungled the job.
The Russians made up for it by bombing hospitals and schools, and leveling entire residential neighborhoods.
Petro and Oxana’s neighborhood in Irpin was one of them, and they were fully living in one of the bomb shelters now and had been for some time.
It was impossible to get supplies through, so food, water, and medicine had dwindled alarmingly and were running out. The Russians were starving the residents of Mariupol to death.
Oxana and Petro tried to keep up some kind of routine.
She got all the food she could lay hands on for him, and often gave him her share without his knowing, and pretended that she had eaten earlier with one of the families living in the shelter with them.
She could see Petro growing frail, and he seemed confused at times, from lack of water and food.
He still looked dignified and determined when they went out for short walks.
She wanted him to get exercise. They were living on cabbages and potatoes when they found them, and thin, watered-down soup.
They had gotten water from melting snow in the early days of the war, but as spring advanced, they had to rely on rainwater and there was never enough.
Oxana’s lips were cracked and dry. Petro’s skin was thin and pale from dehydration.
They talked about their children and grandchildren and wondered if they would ever see them again, but pretended to each other that they believed they would.
Petro had almost accepted the fact that they would die of thirst and starvation, but they were dug in for the duration, and did everything they could to keep their spirits alive, as their bodies were failing.
—
Almost all the patients Anton and Sasha were seeing were suffering from malnutrition.
Skeletal bodies, many of them dehydrated, with festering wounds and untreated injuries when the victims couldn’t manage to get from wherever they were sleeping to hospitals for treatment.
Whoever came to the hospital, Sasha tried to treat them as best she could, and give them whatever food they had available at the time.
She ran IVs into their arms to hydrate them and kept them as long as she could for their injuries.
The military hospitals were treating most of the injuries, but many of them came to Hospital No. 8, where Anton and Sasha were working.
The food and water shortages and trauma from the constant bombing were affecting her maternity patients too.
Babies who should have been born healthy failed to breathe and they lost them.
Others failed to thrive after delivery, with mothers who were too depleted to nurse them and sobbed as their babies faded away in their arms. Pregnant women had been shot recently, adding to the file of war crimes, and there were women whose homes had been bombed, injuring them and their children and often the unborn ones they were carrying.
Every delivery was high risk now, with mothers in poor condition, and only a handful of women were spared and had normal deliveries.
When one did, everyone in the delivery room treated it like a major celebration.
Sasha had been delivering babies in the dark, with no heat, during electrical failures when the generators weren’t working, and during bombings all around them, while she struggled to save both mother and infant.
Anton only had one patient to save during each operation he performed, always with major injuries while he tried to beat the odds and sometimes did, but not always.
The conditions he was working in were too primitive.
But Sasha had two patients at each delivery, mother and child, and the odds for success were no better for her, with all the complicated factors involved in every birth now.
And sometimes the babies took direct hits when the enemy bombed the hospital.
But it was still up and running after a fashion, with almost every technical feature the staff relied on no longer working.
They just kept winging it, and praying for the best outcome they could get in the worst possible circumstances.
They had to come up with ingenious, creative solutions to every problem, and so far they had done well.
But the number of patients they lost was astronomical compared to normal.
And most of the severely injured never got to the hospital.
“How long do you think we can get away with this?” Sasha asked Anton, as they stretched out on her cot in their private broom closet where she lived now.
Ever since his house was bombed, he was living in the supply closet with her.
Her building had been bombed and destroyed several weeks before.
There was nothing in it she cared about, so it wasn’t a disaster for her, but nine of the other tenants had died when the building caught fire from the bomb and collapsed. It was a familiar scenario now.