The Life That Was Stolen From Me

Evening. Summer. Rain. Thunder. The air was filled with freshness. Dark clouds covered the sky. Dark blue shadows cloaked the ground. The grape leaves at the vineyard collected the first rain drops. I hear mom shouting in the yard: “Dinner is getting cold." The delicious smell of mom's goodies fills the entire yard. Individual droplets start to fall faster and more heavily.

Bang. Bang. Powerful sounds of thunder spread throughout the neighbourhood, making the ground vibrate slightly. A second later, the thunder rumbles even louder. It sends powerful sound waves through the wet air. A cold sweat runs through my body. Another clap of thunder—this time so loud that I stopped breathing. I take a step, lightning flashes before my eyes, the ground shakes. A loud bang. Dad's voice: "Into the basement, hurry up!" I see him quickly open the old wooden cellar door. The blue paint had faded in the sun long ago, the dry, peeling pieces that dad touched were blown away by the wind. With the speed of light, mom, dad and three nephews find themselves in a damp, semi-dark room. Moisture is everywhere. There are racks with jars of home preserves attached to each wall. Drops of water fall from long-rusted shelves.

There’s a window in front of me. I am standing at the doorstep of the house. My niece, my brown-eyed little sunshine is by my side. We all know the two-wall rule: try to protect yourself behind two walls from the outside. I take a step back, squat down, touch the door frame with my back. My thin body barely covers her. We are being shelled. Artillery shelling, is one manifestation of the "rescue operation". The barking of dogs pierces the ears. A voice from within: I must save her. I hold her closer; I feel her whole body tremble. My elbows cover her head, her blond hair gets into my eyes. I whisper in her little ear: "Sunshine, calm down, I'm right here, everything is fine." I hear dad’s voice, as if from a distance: "Over here, faster, over here", although they are just two meters away from us, in the basement.

Unexpected silence. I count to three and understand that it's now or never. My niece's life is in my hands. A moment later we are in the basement. The eyes. The brown eyes were staring at me, filled with fear. Holding her tight, I kissed her forehead with my cold lips. I myself had no idea what happened. My wet flip-flop reminded me that we had just covered the distance from the house to the basement. I didn’t notice how I stepped into the mud, my foot was wet up to the ankle, water was running down my toes. Thank God we were all together. In the corner, under the rack along with my mom’s prized pickled tomatoes, three frightened boys sat on a broken wet wooden potato box, mumbling to each other. Dad was standing and trying to bring mom out of her stupor on the other side. This happened to her a lot lately.

I am a cadet, I was in my second year at that time, so I knew how to behave in extreme situations. I acted first—and only afterwards did I think about the consequences for myself. The lives of others were a priority for me. My mother is a strong and intelligent woman. After enemy planes started flying over our house almost daily, my mother seemed to become a different person every time. She didn’t know what to do, her body seemed to be paralysed, and she seemed to lose her mind. During such moments, I would hug her and say: “Calm down, it's just a plane”. Even very strong people can lose self-control. After listening carefully to the voices of the little ones, I heard their conversation. They were talking about the war. So young, yet the conversation was not childish at all. It was at that moment that the first tear ran down my cheek. The rain began to ease off outside. Only the barking of the dogs never stopped. My stomach rumbled and reminded me that my stomach was empty, yet I didn't feel hungry. We had been cut off from all communications for a long time now, so we didn’t understand what was happening outside.

I don't know how long we sat in the basement filled with jars of pickles. The rain stopped completely. There was silence everywhere. Listening closely, you could hear the last drops rolling down the old broken slate that covered the basement. It was getting dark. We decided to look outside. The neighbours would be the only source of any information. Consequently, my mom and I left the yard and went outside. People came out of almost every yard. Everyone was in shock. That evening, shrapnel wounded a boy, my nephew’s classmate. It hit him in the head. He didn’t survive. His mother and he were on their way home from the river, and he didn’t make it. It all happened before his mother’s eyes. He was a very cheerful boy, his green bicycle always with him. He and his bike were inseparable. The grief of a mother who sees the death of her child is hard to imagine. Terrible grief.

A couple of weeks earlier, Russian troops came to our village. We couldn’t understand anything at first. There was a terrible roar for two nights in a row while enemy vehicles entered the village. They left the the vehicles in pine tree plantations, near the river, wherever there were thickets. They covered them with camouflage nets and green branches, they dug in.

There is a professional agricultural lyceum in our village. The invaders settled in the lyceum’s dormitory, the village traitors offered it to them, and the lyceum director gave the go-ahead. The person in charge of the dorm swiftly changed sides and accommodated the invaders, giving them the rooms of the students who would never be back there again. The Russian invaders told everyone: we will not stay long. They walked the streets as if they were at home, trying to bribe the civilian population with goodies from the store. Some people would deliberately stand near the store and wait to receive some free delicacies. They were traitors who sold their village for a cheap ice cream. A day before that terrible evening, the invaders informed everyone that they would be leaving tomorrow. Indeed, the next day, around noon, they took the equipment and left the village.

And in the evening, the main strikes were made on the dormitory and the pine tree area near the river, exactly where the invaders used to be based. Do you understand what happened? It wasn’t the first time, that the Russian invaders would stage everything in such a way that people would gradually start losing confidence in the Ukrainian authorities. We didn’t have any communications for a long time. Television and radio would broadcast Russian propaganda non-stop, trying to feed us that vomit of the Russian authorities.

The rays of the sun no longer woke me in the morning. The potted plants began to wither. The grey plaid blanket that warmed me in the harshest winter nights has been preventing me from seeing whether it’s already morning outside the window or not. The dark rooms inside the house gave a feeling of peace. I was afraid to go outside. There was no Internet. I wasn’t able to study. I was afraid that someone would report to the newly appointed authorities that I was studying as a cadet. They were looking for people connected to the Ukrainian authorities all the time. They would take them "to the basement", they would beat them up so badly that they were taken from the basement straight to the hospital, barely alive. My parents were afraid for me, so I hardly left the house.

Constant searches. We couldn’t evacuate. With the beginning of the war, my parents stopped receiving their salaries, and my family didn’t have any significant savings. I began to withdraw into myself. I lost interest in everything. I no longer found comfort in raising my little nephews. The lack of connection and communication was starting to eat at me from the inside. So I borrowed old tattered CDs from my aunt and watched long-forgotten movies. I was glad that I had an old laptop that had a DVD-drive. A TV cartoon channel was always on—the only channel that didn’t broadcast the events from outside. I started reading books. The shelves in the store were empty, yet local businessmen never seemed to get enough, increasing the prices of food that had long passed the expiration date. We had it easier than the city folks. We had a garden. There was enough food. I withdrew deeper and deeper into myself every day. Every now and then, the university management would get in touch and demand that I leave as soon as possible. I felt dizzy. I began to lose more weight. My mom heard from a friend that there was an evacuation trip to Ukraine. I was afraid, but I couldn’t stay in the village any longer. We collected money for my trip; we harvested a lot of strawberries that year, and mom and dad decided to sell them at the market, to have at least some money.

The decision was made suddenly. On Friday, July 15, 2022, after asking who knew anything about getting out through the bombed-out dam in Pecheneg, I began to pack my black travel bag on wheels. The suitcase managed to get dusty over the five months of occupation. I knew I had to take as little luggage as possible, just what I could carry. On Monday, July 18, we were already waiting for the carrier near "The Family", the supermarket on the square. I sat down in the bus. I felt some relief. Mom and dad were standing outside and waving at me. Like me, they didn’t know when we would meet again. I could contact them only after I was in the Ukrainian-controlled territory.

It was a hard road. 17 enemy checkpoints. Fields. The routes not plotted on the map. My heart would skip a beat every time the driver stopped at another roadblock. And what if someone finds out that I'm a cadet now? I left alone, without acquaintances or friends, I was most afraid that something would suddenly happen and my parents would lose track of me. I had heard a great many of these stories.

And there I was, carrying a bag with a laptop over my shoulder, pushing a bag on wheels with one hand, and holding a plastic bag in the other. My mom made me sandwiches in the morning so that I wouldn't be hungry, but I didn't feel like eating.

Miraculously, finally, we arrived in the unoccupied zone, at our destination. We were safe. There were volunteers on the other side of the Pecheneg dam, whom I had contacted before leaving. A guy in a dark blue t-shirt and a helmet took my bag and loaded it on another bus. We were taken to the checkpoint, where a search dog, a control of the Security Service of Ukraine, and a lie detector were in force. And then I had the feeling that I was at home.

College. New life.

It’s been a year since we last saw each other. My parents are still in the occupied zone. I'm here. All alone. I’ve been living someone else's life, because the countdown of my own life stopped that very night, on February 24, 2022.