Chapter 14 #2
“How long do you think you want to stay?” his father asked him.
“As long as they need me here,” Danilo answered.
“That’s a life’s work,” Anton warned him. “Be careful, that’s why I’m still here. And they need us even more now, since the war isn’t ending yet and everyone is exhausted.”
“I’d like to work with you one day,” Danilo said. Anton was deeply touched to hear it.
“I’d like that very much.”
They reached the head of the line then and went off in different directions to get their breakfast, but everything that mattered had been said. Anton had been honest about Sasha. And he was honored that his son wanted to work with him.
“Thank you,” Sasha whispered to Anton when she came back with a yogurt and a banana.
It had been an important step, telling Danilo how he felt about her.
With Iryna wanting a divorce, they had a clear path to the future, and Danilo wasn’t presenting any obstacles.
Sasha couldn’t have asked for more. It was all the reassurance she needed.
What had started as an affair with a married man had turned out to be a life commitment after living through a war together.
—
When Yulya left Tatyanna, she started her search for Symon, hospital by hospital.
There were five major city hospitals in Kyiv, and two important private ones, and maybe twenty small infirmaries.
She had her work cut out for her, although more and more she realized from what she had been seeing how unlikely it was that he was still alive.
The stories were so horrifying, the damage to the country and its citizens so great.
So many had died, many unidentified and buried in mass graves.
There would be many people whose stories would never be told and bodies that would never be found. Most likely, Symon was one of them.
Yulya went to the police station in their neighborhood between two of the hospitals to find out if anyone remembered seeing or finding him that night, or if his name was on any list of victims. She showed the photographs to the officers on duty.
No one recognized him and his name wasn’t on any list. There was no trace of him.
She left a set of the photographs and saw that they had a wall of missing persons, men, women, and children.
She went to the Red Cross field tent for missing persons too, and left a set of photographs with them.
She was thorough and methodical. By the end of the day, she had seen all of the city hospitals.
She would go to the private ones the next day, but she was losing hope, and beginning to resign herself to the fate she dreaded.
But at least when her search was over, she would know that she had done everything possible to find him.
As her father said, if he was there somewhere, she would locate him.
But it wasn’t looking hopeful anymore. After she saw the two private hospitals the next day, she would go to the small infirmaries, and then it would be over, and she would know.
—
Yulya met her parents back at the field tent for displaced persons.
They had put in their request for relocation, and had been told about a young couple with a farm in the west of the country, near Lviv.
They had a cottage on their farm, and were offering to house two people for a year. Petro and Oxana had applied for it.
“A year in the country will do us good. Your mother can paint, and I want to plant a vegetable garden,” he said, and Yulya smiled.
She was exhausted by her search that day, but she was happy for her parents.
The Red Cross had a phone line that worked, and they had been able to speak to Olek and Nina, and all four grandchildren.
Yulya joined them for dinner in the American mess tent, but she wasn’t hungry and didn’t have the heart to eat.
She spoke to her mother about Symon on the way back to the main tent.
“You had twelve wonderful years with him,” Oxana said gently. “That’s more than a lot of people get. I’ve been very fortunate with your father, but I think we get the time we’re meant to with the people we love. Sometimes it’s less than we want, but love is always a gift, however long it lasts.”
“Thank you, Mama. It’s hard to let go, especially not knowing what happened to him.”
“I’m sure it is.” They held hands on the way back to the tent.
Yulya slept in her sleeping bag on the floor that night, and in the morning she started again.
She was braced for more bad news. Before she came, she had felt sure that she would find him, or some trace of him, but she hadn’t realized until she got there how vast the damage was, how entire cities had been leveled, and how bodies had piled up in the streets and had to be buried quickly.
The enormity of the damage hadn’t been real to her until she saw it.
Building after building charred, or an empty crater where homes and lives and apartments had been.
Finding one man, or discovering what had happened to him, was harder than looking for a needle in a haystack, it was like finding a single grain of sand in the ocean.
An ocean of tears and grief and badly injured people who had been left behind by their enemy.
And the most painful part of it was that the enemy had done it intentionally, with total disregard for human life.
The number of children who had been killed and the schools and children’s hospitals and maternity wards that had been bombed were testimony to it, as well as the men and women who had lost their lives.
Symon was only one, even though she loved him so much, and there were so many lost souls like him.
—
Anton and Danilo and his friends and Sasha had dinner together that night, and afterward, Anton asked her seriously what her plans were now, and where she wanted to be, to stay in Kyiv while the war continued or leave the country.
He told her he’d had offers from hospitals in Warsaw, London, and Vienna, all of which were interesting and very flattering.
Sasha had had a very good offer from Germany, from an old friend of her father’s.
And a less interesting one in Warsaw. Medical institutions from all over the world were offering Ukrainian physicians positions in case they wanted to leave the war zone, which would be disrupted for a long time.
“Does any of that appeal to you?” Anton asked her. She thought about it before she answered. She had debated about the job in Germany and decided against it.
“Not really,” she said. “I think I’d rather stay here and keep helping the war victims. What about you?”
He smiled when she said it. “That’s how I feel.
It’s not easy. Danilo seems to want to practice here, with me.
I like that idea a lot, although his mother won’t.
She hates this country more than ever now, because of what she lost here.
She lost a home and most of her things, but not people.
Other people lost their whole families and all their loved ones.
I’ve been thinking,” Anton said cautiously.
“We can’t live in this broom closet forever, although it has served us well,” he said, and Sasha laughed.
“When the war ends, I’d like to find a house for us, and if he’s still here, maybe Danilo could live with us, if he wants to. ”
“It would be exciting to be part of bringing the country back to life one day,” she said, trying to envision that day.
“We haven’t left so far, because people have needed us. They still do. I still want to be here,” he admitted, and kissed her. And they needed each other too.
“So do I,” she said softly, which answered his question. They both wanted to stay in Kyiv.
—
Yulya started out early the next morning.
She had no success at the two private hospitals, the Lutheran Community Hospital and the National Emergency and Trauma Hospital, where she thought they might have brought Symon if he was badly injured.
They were sympathetic and very kind. They were getting inquiries like that every day, from people looking for their lost loved ones.
But Symon wasn’t on any list in the time frame she’d given them.
Then she worked her way down the list of infirmaries.
She had four more to see when she went to a small one she had never noticed in their old neighborhood.
They had fifteen beds, and when she showed them the photographs they shook their heads.
There was no one there who looked like him, but they invited her to look around.
The men were in two wards, one for the severely injured, and the other for men who were recovering from injuries or surgeries or severe burns.
They said that some of the men had been there for most of the war.
During the nightly bombings, the larger hospitals were so full that they couldn’t take more patients, so they kept the men in the infirmary.