Slobozhanske. The Last Carbonara

The saddest day of my life was the one when I finally realised that it wasn’t just going to be two or three weeks. Life would never be the same as before. Whatever ‘before’ even means?

My life as a nineteen-year-old was as bright as all the colours of the rainbow. I had just celebrated my birthday, and passed my last exam of the semester on the same day. I was just enjoying the carefree life, typical of most students: I lived in a dormitory, attended classes, and visited my hometown to hang out with my friends. Every week was like that.

Now, even if the war suddenly ends in an instant, and Ukraine wins, and all the territories are re-taken, my friends and I won't gather again to have the most delicious half-burnt kebabs near the Donets River. Because the riverbank will stay strewn with mines for a long time. Not all of my fellow-students will be there to meet up again at our favourite "smoker's spot" near the university, where we’d deliberately come half an hour before the start of the classes, just for a chat. Some of us have already started a new life in another country. We will never have a carefree walk around our beloved Kharkiv again because the scars left by the war will constantly remind us of the times when the words "peace" and "security" were considered impossible luxuries.

I’ve often heard people say that they don’t remember the first days of the war at all. I remember everything. Everything that happened to me and everything I felt. I remember my mom waking me up and saying: "The war has started. You are not going to Kharkiv today." I remember how I didn't believe her because I knew how gullible my mom was. I said to her, "Oh, it's not true, it's just panicky Telegram chats. I'm packing and I’m going to the dorm." However, it turned out that my mom was telling the truth.

I stayed in bed and read the news for the first few days of the war. I wrote to everyone. To relatives, friends, acquaintances, fellow students. I checked if everyone was OK. As much as it was even possible. I can’t say I was very scared. It was much quieter in Slobozhanske than in Kharkiv, only at night we started hearing missile strikes in the distance.

Then I went out for the first time, because I needed cash. The only thing everyone was talking about was that bank cards would stop working. So I needed an ATM, and food. I decided to go to the store with a friend. We agreed to meet at my place at nine o’clock. A little later, my friend Ruslan and I were already in line-up at the checkout counter in the ATB supermarket. There were some elderly ladies, ahead of us, with their shopping baskets laden with packets of sugar and cereals that they greedily grabbed, out of fear of supply shortages. Behind us, the line was growing at such a speed that one couldn’t see the shelves through the crowd – only people. I looked at my companion and asked him to get some bacon. I didn't yet realise that in a week, regular sausage would make me happy, but then, in the first hours of the full-scale invasion, I wanted to make carbonara. A couple of minutes later, Ruslan was back with a pack of sliced bacon. It cost as much as two chicken fillets. We kept standing in line but it barely moved. On the way home, I endured another line, this time for an even more useless purchase – parmesan. Because what kind of pasta is it without parmesan?

An hour later, my friends and I were already busy in the kitchen. One of us watched the pasta, another one grated the cheese. I made tea for everyone, and those two friends who never help made sure we were not left without their very relevant advice even for a minute. No one was afraid. Many of us didn’t believe that war would be a reality. Neither in the previous eight years, nor in these few hours.

We jokingly mentioned our only friend who had been walking around all pale for the last month and talking about nothing but the beginning of the war. Now he sat in a bunker, with his girlfriend's family, feeling proud that he was right. And we sat in my room, into which we had dragged the kitchen table, and ate carbonara. So delicious, but so out-of-place that this absurdity was the only thing that warmed our hearts. Back then we didn’t know that the next time we’d meet like this would be in the winter.

In recent years, my mom and I have gotten used to living together in a three-room apartment. On the first evening of the full-scale invasion, my sister, her husband and my two nephews moved in with us. Our apartment is the closest to the basement, and it’s on the first floor. The two children whose combined age wasn’t even ten years old couldn’t understand why they had moved to live with us, and why everyone would sleep together in the hallway at night.

We heard the first explosions that evening. Something was banging non-stop somewhere in the distance all day, and it sounded very scary, especially for a person who still didn’t realise that the war had begun. Yet in the evening, aircraft noises and loud explosions could already be heard all over our town, and I understood: another kilometre and a shell may be in our yard. Everyone in my apartment building panicked.

When my nephews and I walked out of the building, there was already a line of frightened old ladies who had rushed outside in a split second in front of the basement. My nephew's first words about the basement sounded like this: "Why is it so bad here? Why hasn’t it been renovated? Will we live here all the time now?".

In a few days, a small town in the Chuguyiv District was cut off from the world. There was an open field on one side, beyond which Balaklia was located, the city Russian troops would soon invade. On the other side there was a river, with the bridge that had been blown up so that the enemy couldn’t advance further. There were no buses to Kharkiv, commuter trains didn’t run, and the only things left in the ATB were shelves fully stocked with bags of chips from Poland. That’s pretty much the only thing that kept being delivered once a week. Eventually, the chips became so precious that we would line up for them at the store at 5 a.m., despite the curfew. The ATB staff would walk along the line and scribble numbers indicating our places in line on our palms, so that people could step out. And so, after standing in line for several hours, I bought that pathetic bag of royal-cheese-flavoured chips, and felt amused at the ridiculousness of the situation.

Eventually, life began to get back to normal. The Zmiiv Thermal Power Plant, in support of which our town was built, unexpectedly became our shield. "Why bomb the plant if it can work for us?" the Russians must have thought, because while they were in the area, only one shell actually hit the town itself. Food trucks started arriving via bad country roads, making a 50 kilometre detour each time. Several months later, food was no longer in short supply.

Slobozhanske, a small town of 14,000 people, 60 kilometres from the regional centre, didn’t have a particularly interesting life before the start of the full-scale invasion. There are only five decent establishments where you could take a girl to on a date, three proper shops and two schools. It’s easier to restore the daily life of such a small patch of land than, say, one of the typical bedroom suburbs of Kyiv, Kharkiv or Odesa.

Every evening, as soon as it gets dark, both sides start shelling each other. I look up and see dozens of lights rising into the sky and flying towards Kharkiv or Balaklia. And we are just somewhere in the middle, hoping that none of them falls on us. There are still people left in the town. People who don’t want to live under occupation, people who need only one country - their own. Even those people who had stayed understood: the enemy can reach us at any moment. All they need to do is go across a ten-kilometre field. Till the end, even the Ukrainian military, when asked "Will they take Slobozhanske?" answered: "Who knows? They might. But we are also doing everything possible not let it happen."

My mom, besides being the best person in the world because she gave birth to me, is also a nursery school director. It took her 20 years to get there—my whole life. Before I was born, she worked at the school and was one of the best teachers. Everywhere she studied, she graduated with honours. This is a woman for whom learning was no longer love, learning was her life.

And then I was born. Small, very weak and allergic to everything. Because of me, she quit her job at school and got a job at the nursery school to personally monitor her child, who was also diagnosed with asthma at the age of four.

Now she is a mature and strong woman who, even during the war, didn’t abandon her post and her duties. And although the nursery school has not been filled with children's laughter for over a year now, it keeps functioning. Along with other volunteers, she spent the whole summer in the town hospital, which has become a military hospital. In this place, a dozen ordinary people, side by side along with doctors, fought for the lives of hundreds of our defenders. I have never seen my mom as tired as when she came home after a voluntary 24-hour shift. Even random Ministry of Education inspections of the nursery school didn’t exhaust my mother as much as the screams, blood and all the horror that she and the hospital staff had to deal with on a daily basis.

Every day she came home, went to bed, woke up and went to work again. A few months later she would hear the happy news from the military personnel who had become her friends: "Kharkiv Region has been completely liberated."

It’s been relatively safe in Slobozhanske, as in the entire Kharkiv Region, for the past six months. The brave soldiers of the Ukrainian Defence Forces drove the invaders out of the Region, liberated Kupiansk, Balaklia and Izium, and most importantly—made it possible for Kharkiv to live and flourish. Hundreds of thousands of residents who love their city and for whom it’s the best, have already returned to Kharkiv.

They remember the terrible nights in the basements. They remember the attempt to raze Saltivka to the ground, they remember that terrible hit on the government administration building. Thanks to our military, who re-took these territories, people were able to come back home, breathe new life into the city and begin its reconstruction.

I really hope that every occupied region will do the same thing—regain their lands as they did in Kharkiv. I also hope that every Ukrainian will be able to gather with friends for a carbonara or something else. This time—to celebrate our victory.