by Ostap Slyvynsky; translated by Taras Malkovych
FISH, Halyna, Mariupol
I have never taken anything that was not mine. And then this man in uniform passes by saying, “They’ve just opened a grocery store. Take something for yourself.” So I did. All I saw inside was out-of-date poultry and people taking it, saying it will be okay if they soak it in water before cooking it. But I can’t. The smell of it makes me sick. So I look into the freezer and at the very bottom see a humongous fish, one from the sea and a good meter in length, and I dig it out of the freezer though my hands were numb with cold. Once outside, I carried it in front of me like a big log of wood.
Back in my apartment it is cold. Electricity is long gone. We tried breathing on that fish to get it to thaw but it just wouldn’t. So we took it outside, to the fire where we cooked our food. We held it over the fire for a while until its tail caught fire. We cooked it for a couple of days. And that’s how we survived.
LICENCE PLATE, Sashko, Kyiv
When bodies were being removed from the cars destroyed by the Russians in Bucha, they were often unrecognizable. Either these people carried no IDs or everything burned in the fires. And so after burying them, instead of putting names on the graves, they’d stick license plates from their cars on them so that they might be identified that way.
MUSHROOM, Oksana, Kyiv Region
While walking to the post office, I feel a loud explosion and turn around to see a black mushroom of smoke rising into the sky. Along the road, other people turn around too and just stand there looking silently at the mushroom. The mushroom keeps rising. The people keep watching. The mushroom is growing. The people are still watching. The mushroom starts dissipating. The people watch it dissipate. The mushroom turns into a cloud of black and grey which disappears behind the trees. The people turn around and go about their own business.
PRAYER, Halyna, Melitopol
When we were escaping our occupied city, I sat next to a Muslim woman and her child. We drove at night in total darkness. We knew we’d have to pass a couple of enemy checkpoints and worried what might happen to us. Someone said that the darkness was for the better because all kinds of things were going on in the fields and on roadsides that it would be best for us not to see.
We were scared. The Muslim woman would pray constantly. And then I asked her, “Can we pray together because I don’t know any prayer.” And so she taught me the “A’udhu billahi min ash-shaytaan-ir-rajeem”.
I still say it often nowadays.
PREGNANCY, Tanya, Donetsk-Vyshhorod
In Summer, 2014, we were on the run from Donetsk with our baby in our hands. After that, I have always been afraid of getting pregnant again. I thought, the moment I get pregnant, war will start.
It was my second month of pregnancy when we had to flee from Kyiv’s suburbs and then, when we got to Chernivtsi, my pregnancy stopped. The doctor told me that since the war started, one in every three of his patients carried babies who decided to leave this world before ever arriving. In thirty years of his practice, he’d never seen anything like it happen.