Chapter 13 #2
“I have to see how things are when I go back,” Danilo said.
“I’m sure it’s an awful mess, but I feel safe working at the hospital.
Papa does. But it will certainly be a lot of very hard work in a country that needs every kind of help they can get, on every front.
There is some humanitarian and medical help from other countries.
I’ll let you know my plans when I know them.
You should think about where you want to be though.
You don’t have to wait for me here. You can go wherever you want.
” One thing she had been making clear for months, she was never going back to Ukraine to live, so that wasn’t an option for her, even after the war.
That had been one of the first clues to him that his parents weren’t getting back together, which didn’t surprise him.
He stood up then, exhausted after his two-day shift.
“I’ll be sad to see you go,” she said. “I’ll be too lonely without you. I have to figure out where I want to go. Maybe London or Paris, if your father can afford it.”
“That’s between you and him,” Danilo said, respectful of them both. He always kept a neutral position between them, which was the safest for him.
When he spoke to his mother about it two days later, she still didn’t know where she wanted to live, or if she wanted to wait for him in Spain.
“You don’t have to decide now, Mother,” he told her, and hugged her.
He left a week later, and he promised to call or text her from Kyiv when he could.
After they hugged and kissed goodbye, she stood watching from her balcony as he and his three friends got into a van to go to the airport, driven by another intern friend.
They were flying from Madrid to Warsaw, taking a train to the border from there, and driving after that.
They had a long trip ahead of them, and a big job.
For a minute she smiled and was proud of him, and then she went back to thinking about her own plans and worrying about herself.
She was considering Berlin or Vienna. Berlin was chic these days and had a very exciting, trendy art scene, and Vienna had always been a very elegant little city with a lot of aristocrats there.
She spoke enough German to get by in either one.
She wasn’t sure if she wanted to live in a big city or a small one, but they both sounded like good options to her, and she could easily get to anywhere Danilo was living, and he could visit her.
She had to speak to Anton first about the money he was willing to give her, but both cities sounded very appealing.
And now that Danilo was gone, she was ready to give up her mouse-sized apartment, leave Madrid and live well again, and have the life she felt she deserved, as soon as Anton sent her the money she needed to move.
He never said no to her. It was the price of peace for him.
—
Yulya went back to Kyiv the same way she had come nearly four months before.
She took a train to Przemy?l, and changed trains to go to Kyiv.
The train station wasn’t quite as crowded as when she’d left.
There weren’t thousands of people desperate to get out, but there were some trying to get in, for similar reasons to hers, looking for loved ones who either were trapped there or had disappeared.
There were a few cars at the station in Kyiv willing to drive passengers around.
She made a deal with one to take her to Irpin, the suburb where her parents lived, and were still staying in the shelter, as far as she knew.
Everywhere she looked, the ravages of war told the story of the last four months.
Buildings that had half collapsed, others that were piles of debris and twisted steel lying on the ground, charred houses, block after block that had been razed by missiles and bombs.
It was shocking to see it in broad daylight with people milling around.
There were army trucks everywhere, some from foreign countries.
There were Red Cross trucks and some ambulances.
Dump trucks for the debris that had once been people’s homes.
It was so much worse than Yulya had imagined it that she was silent in the back of the car.
All the faces she saw except the foreign military looked exhausted.
There were handmade signs put up by people who needed a place to stay, signs pointing to where some field hospitals were, and big signs that said “Food” in Ukrainian, with arrows pointing to the military mess tents that had been set up by various countries.
They were a country massively in distress and several nations wanted to help them, not just with arms, but with food and medical assistance.
It took twice as long as usual to get to Irpin.
There were bomb craters in the road, and areas where the car just had to bump over rocks and gravel to get to the next stretch of paved road that hadn’t been destroyed.
There were women carrying suitcases and bags and babies trying to find a place to stay.
Yulya wanted to help them all, and it made her heart ache to see them.
They finally got to her parents’ neighborhood, and there were either blocks of no buildings at all, or apartment buildings with their facades blown off and everything in the individual apartments charred black, and spilling down to the pavement below.
It was impossible not to feel sick looking at it.
It told you everything about what they had been going through and fought so hard to save.
She directed the driver to the shelter, and there were people coming in and out of it who were clearly still living there.
She paid the driver extra to wait for her, and disappeared inside, wearing her backpack, in case her parents needed anything she had brought in it.
She didn’t recognize any of the faces in the rooms she walked through.
People were lying on cots, in sleeping bags, many of them looking listless and dazed.
Others were busy with their children. She had brought photographs of her parents, in case they had moved somewhere else, hoping someone could recognize them from the photos and tell her where they were.
She went through the whole shelter twice, and even looked at sleeping people, and Oxana and Petro weren’t there.
She stopped to ask a woman with three small children.
Her hair was matted and her face was painfully thin.
She was dividing up ration packs that the Red Cross was handing out in all the shelters while telling them where the nearest food tents were.
The humanitarian groups were present and impressively well organized.
Yulya pulled out a photograph of her parents that she had enlarged on her computer. She had dozens of them. She asked the woman if she had seen them, and she smiled at Yulya immediately.
“Oh yes, they were sick for a while and they stayed in the hospital for a few weeks and now they’re better.
” She said Oxana and Petro were always sweet to her children.
They had left that morning and taken their things with them.
They went to Kyiv to stay in the tents the Americans had sent as additional housing.
She said the Red Cross had told them about the tents, so Oxana and Petro went to check them out.
The woman said that she was going to go too, but she had no way to get there and was waiting for her sister to come and help her.
Yulya thanked her for the information and went back to the car, and explained to the driver what they were looking for.
He said that the French, German, and American armies had set up big military tents to provide medical care and food and places for people to sleep.
He warned her that they were very big, there were many of them, and there were a lot of people lining up to get in.
“It’s okay.” Yulya smiled at him. “I’m looking for the American tents, if you know which ones they are.
” She realized too that her parents could have changed their minds if they liked one of the other military groups better.
She was relieved that the woman had told her that her parents were in better health than they’d been before.
At least there was medical help at the tents if they needed it.
Yulya felt like she was looking for the proverbial needle in a haystack, except that Oxana and Petro were fairly distinctive looking, and engaged with people, so anyone who met them was liable to remember them.
She wasn’t even trying to find Symon yet.
She wanted to find her parents first and do whatever she could for them.
She was cherishing the hope that she would be able to convince them to come back to Warsaw with her, so she and Olek could take care of them.
But her brother was right too, they were fiercely independent and didn’t like relying on their children.
They prided themselves on being self-sufficient, but maybe the war had changed that.
Maybe now they would be willing to accept some assistance.
It took more than an hour to get back to the city, and Yulya was shocked when she saw the military tents that had been set up.
It looked like a city and was the size of a sprawling airport, with the tents of each nationality set up neatly.
The tents were enormous and bustling with activity, with long lines of people outside, carrying their belongings, many of them with children.
It looked like all the survivors of the war were gathered at those tents.
Finding her parents in that mass of humanity was going to be an enormous challenge.
She paid the driver and thanked him for his help, and set off with her backpack and a handful of the enlarged photographs to show people.