I Will Die in a Foreign Land, page 11
They grab her. Despite her strength, one puts a bag over her head. It’s dark, suffocating. She kicks, tries to scream, but she can’t break free. She can’t. She hears the doors of a vehicle open and she begins to cry.
Get inside, get inside.
No, she screams. No—
JOURNALIST DASCHA BANDURA
REPORTED MISSING
FEBRUARY 20, 2014
Ukrainian journalist, Dascha Bandura, has been reported missing and was last seen at 5 a.m. near Shovkovychna Street where she was staying at the home of a friend.
Bandura has been reporting on a number of events at Maidan and published a short film on the Automaidan just weeks before her disappearance.
Any information on Bandura’s whereabouts should not be reported to local police.
THE HEAVENLY HUNDRED:
LIST OF PROTESTORS KILLED DURING THE REVOLUTION OF DIGNITY AT MAIDAN IN KYIV, UKRAINE 2013–2014
Vasyl Aksenin
Reshat Ametov
Georgiy Arutiunyan
Oleksandr Badera
Serhiy Baidovsky
Oleksandr Baliuk
Ihor Batchinsky
Ivan Bliok
Serhiy Bondarchuk
Serhiy Bondarev
Volodymyr Boykiv
Oleksiy Bratushko
Valeriy Brezdenyuk
Olha Bura
Volodymyr Chaplinsky
Andriy Chernenko
Victor Chernets
Dmytro Chernyavskiy
Viktor Chmilenko
Serhiy Didych
Ihor Dmytriv
Antonina Dvoryanets
Andriy Dyhdalovych
Mykola Dziavulsky
Petro Hadzha
Ustym Holodnyuk
Ivan Horodniuk
Maksym Horoshishin
Eduard Hrynevych
Roman Hurik
Bohdan Ilkiv
Bohdan Kalyniak
Oleksandr Kapinos
Serhiy Kemsky
Viktor Khomyak
Artur Khuntsaar
Zurab Khurtsia
David Kipiani
Volodymyr Kishchuk
Andriy Korchak
Anatoliy Korneyev
Ihor Kostenko
Mykhailo Kostyshyn
Yevhen Kotliar
Vitaliy Kotsyuba
Ivan Kreman
Volodymyr Kulchytskyi
Anatoliy Kurach
Dmytro Maksymov
Maksym Mashkov
Artem Mazur
Pavlo Mazurenko
Volodymyr Melnychuk
Andrii Movchan
Vasyl Moysey
Ivan Nakonechny
Volodymyr Naumov
Yuriy Nechiporuk
Serhiy Nigoyan
Roman Nikulichev
Oleksandr Khrapachenko
Roman Olikh
Valeriy Opanasyuk
Dmytro Pahor
Mykola Pankiv
Yuriy Parashchuk
Yuriy Paskhalin
Volodymyr Pavliuk
Ihor Pehenko
Oleksandr Plekhanov
Leonid Polyansky
Vasyly Prohorskiy
Viktor Prokhorchuk
Andriy Sayenko
Oleksandr Scherbatyuk
Mykola Semisiuk
Roman Senyk
Ihor Serdyuk
Serhiy Shapoval
Oleksandr Shcherbaniuk
Vasyl Sheremet
Liudmyla Sheremeta
Viktor Shvets
Yosyp Shylinh
Maksym Shymko
Taras Slobodian
Vitaliy Smolinsky
Bohdan Solchanyk
Serhiy Synenko
Ivan Tarasiuk
Mykola Tarshchuk
Igor Tkachuk
Roman Tochyn
Volodymyr Topiy
Oleksandr Tsariok
Andriy Tsepun
Oleh Ushnevych
Bohdan Vaida
Roman Varenytsia
Vitaliy Vasyltsov
Yuriy Verbytskyi
Vyacheslav Veremiy
Vyacheslav Vorona
Nazar Voytovych
Yakiv Zaiko
Anatoliy Zhalovaha
Andriy Zhanovachiy
Volodymyr Zherebniy
Anatoliy Zherebnyh
Mikhail Zhiznevsky
Vladyslav Zubenko
Volodymyr Zubok
SUPREME COUNCIL OF UKRAINE,
VERKHOVNA RADA, REACTS
SUNG BY KOBZARI
On February 21, 2014, the Heavenly Hundred are recognized by the Ukrainian Parliament.
We honor their deaths, singing in union a Lemko folk song:
My dear mother, what will happen to me
if I die in a foreign land?
Oh, my dearest
you will be buried by strangers.
The dead rest in caskets and we lift the caskets through the crowd.
We light candles, holding them with cupped hands, protecting from the wind.
From above, it looks like a mirror of the night sky. A pool reflecting the stars.
We hold a vigil and the photos of the lost are lined with flowers, notes, rosary, ribbons. We carry our brothers in caskets. We carry our brothers. We lay our brothers in the street. We lay our brothers in the earth.
President Yanukovych flees Ukraine to seek asylum in Russia. Our constitution is restored. We begin to pack the tents. We begin to remove the barricades. We lie sleepless in our beds.
Ah, ah—
No, no, my friend. It’s not over.
You will see.
PROCESSION OF THE SAGE
Aleksandr Ivanovich watches Katya tend to Misha out of the corner of his red, tired eyes. He sees their hands clasped together tight like a bud. Aleksandr wants to reach out. To fold his hands over theirs as if he were a priest. But he cannot reach.
Katya leaves. It is only Aleksandr and Misha. Misha comes close, takes his hand. Aleksandr Ivanovich closes his eyes.
The Buddhists teach: to avoid suffering, let your thoughts be clouds, passing by—
Aleksandr Ivanovich remembers the augurs of spring.
AUDIO CASSETTE RECORDING
END OF SIDE ONE
I returned to Moscow a criminal in my own mind.
Nedezdha met me at the train station alone—our daughter at home with her baba. It was cold and the winter had arrived. Her freckled cheeks reddened from the cold, my Nadia kissed me, and I fell at her feet.
Sasha, she cried. Are you okay?
I kissed her gloved hands and she knelt with me in the snow as onlookers passed, watching.
What’s happened? she whispered.
I told her about the woman on the bridge, the officer, the order. I told her I was a coward—that I had betrayed her. She wiped the snow from her face and pulled me up.
Come, Sasha, she said, without gentleness. I followed her to the car.
You’ll never do that again, she said, turning to me after the doors were slammed closed.
I promise, I said.
No, I mean out there—and she motioned toward the station. In front of those people—you are a Soviet soldier, Aleksandr Arkadyevich Ivanovich. The greatest army in the world. You will not ever disgrace me like that again.
I must have looked shocked, stunned stupid. I felt it.
You did what you needed to do, Sasha, Nadia said to me. With the Czech woman. You followed your commanding officer.
I started to protest, but she said to me, It was your work and your duty. To the State. To us. And all of us.
When I said nothing, Nadia turned on the car. She smiled at me and said: Wait until you see all that has changed.
FEBRUARY 26, 2014
MORNING
Not long ago, Slava sat in Misha’s apartment’s open window, smoking. She wore only a t-shirt and underwear and she didn’t look at him. She looked outside at Kyiv, where she had rebuilt her life. At the time, she had considered moving to France with FEMEN.
“Will you wait for me, brother? Will you wait for me, my love?” she asked. A sardonic smile. She remembers feeling beautiful in this memory.
But Misha didn’t say anything. He watched her from the bed, fell back and away, stared at the ceiling. He didn’t say anything, she realizes now, because he knew she would not go.
Now, she begins to pack. Unsure of whether she will ever return to Kyiv, she brings only her favorite clothing. She cleans the kitchen, the bathroom. She dusts and sweeps. She waters the plants above the sink where Dascha rinsed her hair. She folds the stained pillowcase, lays it carefully in her bag. She calls for a ride.
She does not contact Misha until she’s in Odesa. She leaves him a message. She calls her father to tell him that she is coming to see him, but he does not answer. She texts Adam to confirm he will meet her there.
She’d called Dascha nearly a hundred times in seven days. She felt unable to eat, unable to stay awake. It felt impossible—the suddenness and vastness of her vacancy. Slava paced around the apartment, curled into herself. She felt like a skeleton. She felt already dead.
She longs to be dead.
When she thinks about death, she calls Dascha.
Dascha says, Zalyshte meni povidomlennya—
Leave me a message—
The last time Slava calls, she is in Odesa. Slava whispers into the receiver:
я тебе люблю—
I love you.
Loss, when it occurs, has memory stronger than the mind, stronger than visual recollection patterned in the brain. It’s something the flesh knows, the muscles know, like a dancer reciting a step done hundreds of times, like a musician playing a song or a scale after decades without practice. It’s something the body knows, something the body is aware of while the mind adapts, responds, reacts.
When she gets off the train in Odesa to meet the American, Slava pulls the collar of her coat up to warm the chill on her neck.
In the cold, near the spray of the sea, Slava thinks of her mother.
PART II
ЧЕРНОБИЛ
WORMWOOD
And the name of the star is called Wormwood:
and the third part of the waters became wormwood;
and many men died of the waters,
because they were made bitter.
—Revelation 8:10-11
THE EXCLUSION ZONE
encircles the land around Chernobyl. This is where Reactor 4 burned for ten days, where Vera’s father died instantly, where thousands of people were evacuated from their homes in 1986.
The area is approximately 1,000 square miles or 2,600 square kilometers. Five thousand employees still arrive in Chernobyl, working fifteen days in, fifteen days out, to keep the radiation in their bodies leveled. Tourists stay in Soviet-style hotels nearby, getting tours of the power plant from guides.
On one of these tours, a man asks the guide to take the group to the most contaminated spot. He kneels, offers a ring. She covers her mouth. She cries and embraces him. The witnesses clap, whoop, and smile.
Life, they say, goes on.
PRIPYAT, UKRAINE
MARCH 20, 2014
The air smells clean, Katya thinks, window cracked, the air doming Chernobyl, rushing in. Misha drives. It’s been nearly one month since the protests have ended. It’s raining. It is a beautiful evening.
She looks at the passing trees, barren. She looks at Misha, who glances at her. He forces a smile. He looks afraid, she thinks. Or at least nervous. She thinks about reaching out to hold his hand, but she is still technically married and it doesn’t seem right. So she doesn’t touch him. She leaves him to comfort his own thoughts.
Ezra, when Isaac died, wanted to fuck out his misery. He would reach for her in the night and she’d let him. It never relieved her, not in the way it relieved him. The distraction wasn’t the act—they rarely had sex after they had a child, and it seemed unnatural to have sex only because Isaac was gone. She resented Ezra when she thought this, when he reached out for her in the evening. She twisted a narrative that said, he’s glad he’s dead so now he has you all to himself—so he can fuck again. Katya would turn away from her husband after he came. And then when she returned home from the hospital, she began sleeping on the couch, so as not to disturb him.
She loved her husband, still. Katya knows this, watching the trees pass. The world a storm. The world underwater.
“Are you nervous to see her?” Katya asks Misha, who studies the road.
“Is it silly if I say yes?” he says.
“No,” Katya says. “I would be nervous to see my mother, too.” She smiles at him. A bad orphan joke.
“What would you do if you found out who your birth mother was?” Misha asks. “Would you go find her?”
“It feels like cheating,” Katya replies. “On my mother.”
“What about your father?”
“I suppose it would be the same. Though my birth father didn’t carry me, didn’t birth me. I wonder what it was like, for a mother to give her child away.”
“Are you angry with her?”
“Can I tell you something crazy?”
“Yes.”
“I am angry with everyone.”
Misha reaches for her hand and holds it. Tight.
They pull up to a sentry post and a tall guard examines her and Misha, before speaking in Russian to Misha. The rain pours. Katya reads the warning signs, in Ukrainian and English:
CARE!
Radiatin effected area
Chernobyl zone
Restricted territory
Unothorized entry
BANNED:
Tresspassers incur
administrative penalty and
criminal responsibility
pertinent to the
Laws of Ukraine
Katya notices a tour bus driving toward the gate. Chernobyl Tours, it advertises. Misha argues with the guard. She takes from her wallet the hryvnia she withdrew from the ATM. The U.S. dollar goes a long way in Ukraine. She touches Misha’s arm and he looks at her. He shakes his head and tells her nyet in Russian, waving her away, before turning back to the guard. Katya opens the passenger door and approaches the guard, rain falling hard.
“Passport?” the guard says.
She removes it from her coat. He opens the passport under his umbrella. The bills are folded inside. The guard looks behind him, at the guardhouse, and holds the bills between his fingers. He holds up the passport picture and tells Katya to take off her glasses. She raises her hands to take them off, her hair soaked, sticking to her neck. Misha, aggravated, gets out of the car and tells the guard to quit with the game. The guard laughs, pats Misha on the back. He gives Katya back her money, her passport. He apologizes to her and opens the passenger door of the car.
“Rich Americans, always thinking the dollar will solve their problems. Sometimes, yes. Bribe here, bribe there. Helps a man make a living. But more than money, is family,” the guard says to her in Russian. “Misha is a brother to me.”
He kisses Misha’s forehead. The guard waves them through.
“He checks in on my mother,” Misha says. “He lost his father, too. His mother is still alive. Lives down the street from mine.”
“What were you arguing about? I couldn’t hear.”
“He was upset I hadn’t told him I had a girlfriend. And he scolded me for not calling my mother while I was at Maidan.”
“Am I your girlfriend?”
“You know I can’t answer that.”
They both fall quiet. Misha pulls the car over to the side of the road, parks. He turns to her.
“We can turn around,” he says. “Anytime. Now would be best—the further we go on, the more radiation there is, the closer we get to Pripyat.”
“I want to go. I want to see where I was born. Where my mother adopted me. The last place my birth mother was, the last place where she saw me.”
Misha keeps his eyes on hers. “Going there—it will not bring her to you. It may only disappoint you. You understand?”
“I’ve lost my family,” Katya says to Misha. “I’ve lost them all.” And that is all she can manage.
Misha turns toward her. He leans into her, and touches her face, wet from the rain. He pulls her bangs from her brow, away from her eyes. He whispers, “I don’t trust people who have never felt loss.”
When he turns on the car, Katya looks at the road ahead, darkening from the setting sun.
MAY DAY, 1986
SUNG BY KOBZARI
We evacuated our homes, holding bundles. Our men collapse like horses. It is not the first time.
On May Day in Kyiv, there is still a parade. Women smile, flowers in their hair—ribbons and posters, raised arms. Everywhere, Lenin.
We watch it on television while rubbing the backs of our children as they vomit paste into a bucket.
Our husbands shoveled the reactive waste, their skin blackened, faces puffed.
The cracked skin, pink flesh peeling like split fruit.
Tastes like metal, our children say while treated for cancers.
Some of the old ones return home, tending familiar soil, eating mushrooms, canning jams.
They live for decades. They flourish.
What’s so bad about it? the old ones ask. Water is just as fresh. Berries just as sweet.
We, those who have moved away, in anguish, say:
Not even the famine killed us—
Not even the war—
And oh—now we will die alone
in a foreign land.
PRIPYAT, UKRAINE
