To read the names of the liberated cities is to press the pain points on the skin of the memory. Bucha is the city where my uncles Lisa and Paša live, where I cried in the kitchen because I was seventeen and had to start university in a big city of three million inhabitants and before I had only lived in a small village of 200 people. I was afraid. I watched Bucha from the seventh floor of my aunt’s apartment, a city that was expanding to become on a human and family scale, close to the capital and with parks and houses, with schools and stadiums.
My other aunt Tanya, Uncle Vasya’s wife, was pregnant with my cousin and was making us coffee. Soon Bòhdan Bohdàn was born, to distinguish the name from the surname one had only to shift the accent. I greeted them and took the train to the capital. Sharing the fear made me feel calmer, pampered by my aunt who is only nine years older than me.
What can you call the feeling they all felt in that month under occupation? Fear? I do not know. Like I don’t even know how they managed to survive.
Aunt Tanya and uncle Vasya, together with their cousin Bohdàn, fled from Bucha. Aunt Lisa stayed with her husband and son Stas in a wheelchair. Have they decided not to risk it? To read the testimonies, getting around by car was impossible. Pushing the wheelchair of my cousin who is 25 years old perhaps even more impossible. The Russian soldiers seized and broke my uncle’s cell phone and did nothing more. Did they feel sorry for my cousin in a wheelchair? But they felt no pity for so many teenagers found with their hands tied.
How to call this selection? Fortune? Grace of God? Then luck is racist, because obviously Bucha’s 410 victims did not deserve it. What was their fault? Did they pray to a wrong God?
I do not have the answers to these questions, because the only news that comes to me is that they are alive and that for a month they cooked food in the courtyard on a live fire for a month, while to keep warm at home they brought in the bricks heated in the courtyard fire. In the courtyard of that little house they recently built brick by brick. My aunt had a small event agency, she threw parties in Bucha together with a group of girls who sang and danced. Will there still be parties in Bucha after this massacre? Are my aunt’s girls alive?
In Velyka Dymerka they found the bodies of naked women on the street. It is my grandmother’s native country, the one that is still alive. The one who was with her son, my mother’s brother, while the Russian soldiers knocked on his door and wanted to shoot because no one would open it. The neighbor’s voice came from beyond the fence, where an elderly lady lives, maybe she didn’t hear and they decided to leave. Fortune?
In Rahivka, the town where we used to go to school concerts, where there were the most beautiful discos in the area, where my first boyfriend lived, the boys carrying bread were blown up on a mine. Because the Russian soldiers, by withdrawing, have strewn the streets with mines so that death can last a long time, even after their withdrawal. And the trauma even more.
I don’t know how I will have to talk to my uncles, because all the words seem to have lost their meaning and then I open the internet and read the news that the Russian propaganda accuses the Ukrainians and their allies of having orchestrated the theater of hell in Bucha. Ukrainians are denied physical existence and even pain, mourning and the right to mourn their dead. Almost a hundred years ago her grandmother was forbidden to cry for her father, who was shot by the NKVD for trying to feed his family. She was labeled “the daughter of the enemy of the people”, she was wrong, her father was wrong and her pain was wrong.
A hundred years have passed and history repeats itself, they make us feel wrong just for trying to mourn our dead, to mourn. They want to ascertain whether we orchestrated it all. They want to examine our pain to see if we are suffering enough and whether our pain can be trusted, whether it is genuine or not, whether we have been faking it for more than a month.
The web of pain spreads all over the map of Ukraine: Mariupol ‘, Volnovakha, Rubizhne, Kherson…
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