‘A woman from Kharkiv admits that she vomited when she saw Russian tanks, right in the street’

She sits across the aisle from me. She’s fairly short and her hair is slicked back. She’s wearing a stylish black shirt loose over wide black trousers. She talks on the phone a lot. She is businesslike and energetic, her low voice confident. She reports on how things are going. She is promising someone that she will come back soon, and describes the contents of a fridge in detail. Then she instructs someone else, painstakingly and at length, how to care for a boxwood plant. Her tips are clear and precise. One bucket of water per metre of the shrub’s height.

The border guard is gathering the passports and confirming that every photo matches the face of its holder. The bus is invariably filled with women, if you don’t count the one teenage boy travelling alone to visit his mother, the five-­year-­old son of one of the passengers and the drivers. Up ahead are 10 more buses. Only women can be seen from the windows. They scurry back and forth, knead their numb feet, gather in groups or smoke alone. A line of women queues patiently for the men’s room.

The border guard flips through the woman in black’s passport.

“When did you leave the temporarily occupied territories?” he asks.

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A tense silence hangs in the carriage. No one budges, all napes and backs are still, but the suffocating air in the bus thickens. Curiosity, tension, anxiety.

“In 2014,” the woman responds. She speaks loudly, so everyone can hear. Everyone. She wants to show that she is not afraid of anything, that she has nothing to hide. Her voice contains a challenge.

What was on that photograph? It wasn’t for us to know. We could try to imagine the photo on the screen of the smartphone on which her children are suspended

“And when do you plan on returning?” The young man in uniform continues the interrogation, respectfully, with just a hint of irony.

Once again – silence.

“After the victory, of course,” she says, trying to reply in Ukrainian, speaking with a Russian accent.

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“After whose victory over whom?” The border guard mimics her pronunciation.

The silence intensifies.

“Wait. Wait a second. Wait. I’ll show you.” The woman’s voice becomes somewhat quieter, as if something has landed on her chest with a thud. She once again speaks in Russian.

She finds something on her phone and turns the screen towards the border guard.

“There you go,” she says.

The young man looks at it silently. His head has tilted so low that it looks like his chin is touching his chest.

“Do you know who they are?” she asks. The border guard does not reply. It’s as if he knows the answer and doesn’t want to voice it.

“These are my children,” the woman says.

Finally, the young man says, “Forgive me. Please.”

The woman has put her phone away already and sits quietly, turning her face to the window, seemingly calm. As if she has already forgotten about that young man in uniform. She is so deep in her own thoughts that she no longer hears him.

He addresses her softly, almost in a whisper. It’s as if he is trying to straighten things out, smooth over his own transgression.

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“Try to understand,” he says. “Recently, some lady coming from the same place as you tried to cross the border here. We took her aside for inspection. We found out that she was identifying places for rockets to bomb Lviv. You understand?”

The woman in black nods indifferently, not taking her gaze away from the window. The border guard completes his inspection of the passengers’ passports in complete silence.

What was on that photograph? It wasn’t for us to know. We could try to imagine the photo on the screen of the smartphone on which her children are suspended. Were the children smiling? Were they boys or girls? Were they little, or older? Which moment in their lives had this photograph captured? Was this a moment of life?

A woman from Kharkiv admits that she vomited when she saw Russian tanks, right in the street

What we did know was that we would never know the story of the woman dressed in black and her children. Also known, without words, plucked from the air itself and felt most certainly among us all, was that the children in the photograph were not waving flags, not smiling, not packing humanitarian aid in crates, not posing joyfully with their friends. That knowledge hung in a heavy, dark silence.

Usually, people never stop jabbering on these buses. They fill up with life stories, people sharing experiences of how and when the war entered their lives. A woman from Kharkiv admits that she vomited when she saw Russian tanks, right in the street; a woman from Dymer complains that she was just finishing renovating her house, it had taken years, she was putting up wallpaper when she was forced to flee her village; a young woman from Vinnytsia divulges that she is the only female member of her territorial defence group, and her boyfriend is very jealous.

Are these stories coming from women’s mouths different from those voiced by men? Most likely, yes. One can assume that the men’s stories would tell the impossibilities of retreating from one’s own home and what lies behind those impossibilities, about rapidly diminishing options, about sacrificing one’s own way of life in order to put that very life and one’s own body at risk. They would testify to changes in their mind and transformations of their ego, about redrawing the borders of fear, about the meaning of the words “bravery”, “dependability”, “dignity”, and also “hatred”, “cruelty” and “revenge”, about what it’s like to be a hair away from death, and about death itself.

Perhaps the women’s stories would be filled with longing for loved ones and would be saturated with fear for their children. They would talk about the silence of empty homes and the anguished, sleepless nights spent anticipating the sound of announcements, about rape and violence, about the difficulty and shame of talking about those things at all, and the frustration of rebuilding life within chaos and uncertainty. They would say a lot about love, even more about love and loss, including the loss of the life they once had. The women’s stories would also include bravery, hatred, sacrifice, and death, which is always nearby, and the men’s would also contain love, great love, and fear and indecision, and sorrow for everything lost. No theme belongs exclusively to women or to men. The words themselves can be similar. The only difference is the voice.

“I know that he is your only one. But believe me, when you have more than one it doesn’t get any easier.” If you could taste a voice, everyone who heard this voice would be stunned by its bitterness.

“When there are more of you and something terrible happens, you are all in it together, but it also multiplies,” she said.

I lay Lionia’s shirt and Sasha’s shirt out on the bed and breathe in the scents, their dear scents, hug them, lie down, cry, and fall asleep

“My oldest got depressed when he found out. He and Lionia always were very close, like twins. I knew that he was going to go to the enlistment office soon and that I wouldn’t be able to handle it. The other one, my third, I went to his workplace, he’s an ambulance nurse, and asked his bosses to give him the most difficult tasks, so he wouldn’t have any free time to think.

“I went there, to that cursed Lukashivka, to that hell. Such a nice village. I went up to people and asked around. They’d already got to know the young men. They told me many things, about how they fed the young men and helped them. They loved our guys, you know. You can go there and ask around. I want to go there again when I get back from my daughter’s place. I am drawn there. You want to go together? We’ll go and ask about Dima again.

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“Sasha is also studying to be a medic. Back in 2014, when it all began, he was studying for his entrance exams right there in the trenches. And he got in.

“You know, since I was sent their things, it’s been over two months, I haven’t washed their clothes. I lay Lionia’s shirt and Sasha’s shirt out on the bed and breathe in the scents, their dear scents, hug them, lie down, cry, and fall asleep.

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“I don’t want anything, I have no strength. I have two girlfriends in Kalush. They planted a garden for me and said: that’s it, now you have to look after the garden. And just yesterday they brought me limewash and we painted the walls of another room in the building. A commission is supposed to visit us next week. We’ve submitted documents so that we can take in a few kids that have lost their loved ones. Maybe it’s temporary, maybe their loved ones will be found, but let the children live with us in the meantime. If they’re not found, we’ll be their loved ones. I would really like that. I want to do this for my boys. You know, sometimes when I am grazing my cow I lie down in the grass and gaze. There a little insect is crawling along a stem: what elegant whiskers it has, what wonderful little paws. And I think to myself: no, it’s not possible that God has taken care of the tiny whiskers of an insect but has abandoned my children. That can’t be. He hasn’t abandoned them. He’s taking care of them.”

Translated by Mark Andryczyk

Ukraine 22: Ukrainian Writers Respond to War, edited by Mark Andryczyk, is published by Penguin