The Story of a Girl

[croissant] 

Recently — during a phone call with a friend — I recalled a detail about the arrest that I had never mentioned before. I don’t usually think about that event. Several years of intensive therapy, ongoing self-healing practices, professional training skills, a supportive environment, and, of course, a huge number of other traumatic events — together with an absolute distrust of the authorities and justice system in my country — have all quite effectively, even professionally, overshadowed, displaced, and partially healed that experience. They’ve made it possible to go on living — to live well, as far as that’s possible in the midst of a Third World War. I know we don’t call it that yet, but we will. There was a time people called Russia’s war against Ukraine an operation, and now they often refer to it as a conflict. I have a conflict with the guy from the apartment next door who often passes out drunk in the stairwell, blocking the entrance to my rented apartment on Rusanivka. But this — this is a war, not a conflict. Though the international community finds it very inconvenient to use such a word, because its severity interferes with economic contracts and impotent geopolitics. 

The smell of urine in the stairwell bothers me too, so I have a conflict with Taras Stepanovych. One morning, we spent time together in a bomb shelter. I had just moved from Berlin to Kyiv and went down into a shelter for the first (and last) time. We sat there, just the two of us. Taras Stepanovych introduced himself and offered me a croissant, you know, with that slightly hungover kind of gallantry characteristic of people from post-industrial towns. A few days passed, and during one of our conversations, a memory suddenly slipped out — a kind of mental floppy disk with a memory of captivity. 

For those of you suspecting that floppy disk is something from the age of ICQ and Volkov Commander, you’re absolutely right — it’s an ancient digital storage medium with a very small capacity. I started looking around my memories for a floppy drive (that’s what the disk reader was called) to view this unexpected archive. 

I’m standing in the bathroom of my friend’s apartment, the one I managed to reach after escaping, holding a small plastic bag with crumbs and poppy seeds in my palm. There was a bun — a croissant? Did I eat it? I don’t remember. That morning, when I sat in the front seat of the minibus, someone passed this poppy seed bun through the window. I vaguely recall the sun rising, I remember looking at my hand holding this… pastry in a bag. I remember blue onions and dried fish strung along the roadside. I remember knocking on Dasha’s door and telling her, “Don’t ask anything.” I don’t know exactly how long I hadn’t eaten. Food was the least of my concerns then. I was terribly thirsty. They brought water into the cell several times, poured it into a mug right in front of my face, and then placed it on the table. I never thought thirst could be such a treacherous bitch — the kind that can turn you into someone you don’t recognize at all. 

[sisterland] 

Let’s start from the very beginning, because cities you’ve never been to don’t press on you with their occupied ruins, and people you don’t know simply don’t exist for you. I was born and raised in a mining settlement in Donetsk region, on my grandmother’s homeland — the one I call mativshchyna or matusivshchyna (motherland derived from the word mother), because my father’s homeland is in Bessarabia. When I was twelve, my father moved to Crimea, so my teenage summers were spent under the warm Yalta vibe. I don’t know whether my parents were officially divorced, but my dad would return to spend the winters in Donbas, and from time to time, we would visit him by the sea. I studied in Kharkiv, which, I think, shaped me most actively as a person — that’s why over time Slobozhanshchyna became my sisterland and brotherland. 

That modernist-underground energy of Kharkiv suited me perfectly — a city constantly in motion, experimenting, making mistakes, and forgiving. Since childhood, I was both brave and vulnerable, curious and stubborn. In boys, these traits were usually appreciated; in girls, this often translated into “she has a difficult personality.” For years, I truly believed I had this mysterious "difficult personality." And perhaps it was the war that helped me realize — it’s not about a "difficult personality." It’s just a personality. A presence of it. 

Like everyone in our generation, my great-grandmother passed down to me a transgenerational trauma — the trauma of violence, wrapped in the sickly distorted notions of tradition. She left me and my mother the trauma of war, of collectivization, and of three Holodomors — although we only ever talk about the second one. My mother’s generation became the generation of avoidance, of silently enduring trauma. The generation of silence. 

Ten years ago, I was 27. The values of the transfeminist revolution, a new communication ethic, emancipation, the hope for justice and visibility — all of that was just beginning to filter into the reality of my generation. And ten years ago, when I was 27, the Russians attacked us, and the war began in my country. But that was so long ago, I barely remember what exactly I believed in before the war, or what uncomfortable transgenerational legacy I was preparing to inherit. 

[the lighter] 

I know for certain that the calendar of dates and events became densely packed after November 21, 2013. The realization came quickly: the country you don’t know doesn’t look like the one you want, and under extreme conditions, you rapidly understand who is who. 

November 30th — a rush of hormones in the blood that keeps you awake. Trains to the city center. Cold nights spent in the same places as in 2004. Then came February — the 18th and 19th — a jolt of sudden maturity. 

Over the years, with every town and village wiped from the steppe, there was less and less space left in memory. But the body remembers. It reminds you through phantom sensations — the scraping of a broken lighter against the tip of your thumb. 

Almost completely amputated: the memory of frostbitten, pricked, weathered palms; the smell of sterile bandages, wax, and gas. After the first spots of someone else’s blood on your jacket, after the first — still very shallow — understanding of the evidence of mass death, people began bringing flowers and candles. Later, at night — photos and personal items. 

The subconscious resisted despair however it could: sorting, lighting candles that kept going out, straightening bent carnation petals, relighting the candles, moving flowers, building obelisks from paving stones. Sorting again. Lighting again. The candles going out again. 

It wasn’t that stopping was impossible — it was just unclear why you would, what would come next, and why that next even mattered. 

Light rain, a gentle wind, a lump in the throat. Unsuitable clothing growing heavier with moisture. A dull ache in the back. Fingers stiff. Someone came up and gently took the flint lighter from my hand, replacing it with a piezo one. 

At that time, I had just started speaking Ukrainian, but some words were still local. We called the lighter zazhyhachka — a Russian root with a Ukrainian suffix. A bit like my life. 

I lit candles and thought about that word. Thought about the new words in my personal vocabulary, or the materialization of old meanings. Thought about bruschatka and translated it in my head and with my hands into brukivka (cobblestone). Thought about chrysanthemums, moved them from candles to portraits. 

By night, my thumb had stopped obeying. I began pressing with the index finger of my left hand. The paving stone bubbled up from the bottom of my imagination. There was a sense that nothing worse could happen to us anymore. 

On the morning of February 20th, the war began. The Armed Forces of the Russian Federation illegally crossed the Ukrainian border in Crimea for the first time. 

[rosary string] 

I don’t often talk about how I was detained — not because it’s unbearable pain, but because it’s just one of the heavy links in this ten-year-long rosary chain. 

For the first few years after the arrest, I didn’t talk about it with anyone. I didn’t go to law enforcement. I didn’t share it with loved ones. 

I think my soul-sister, the one I went to in Kharkiv after I was freed — though she lived in Lviv at the time — understood a lot, but didn’t ask. I deeply value that silent non-asking. 

When we buried my mother two years before that, many women came into the house and silently began to clean, cook, carry things, wipe, chop, wash, fold and unfold. 

I’ve never been able to describe that mute, steppe empathy — such a stubborn, active energy. Without phrases like “You can always count on me” or “Reach out if you need anything.” 

Just coming and doing — without waiting to be invited, without expecting gratitude. Silently, sternly, effectively showing care. 

Maybe that’s why we became such close friends — me from Donetsk region (half from western Odesa region), and Dasha from Poltava (or, as it turned out recently — from Cherkasy). 

Because she embodied that sisterly, action-oriented compassion. 

And though I was often irritated by the lack of conversation, the absence of analytical communication, the inability to ask uncomfortable but necessary questions — that day, too, she didn’t ask. 

She simply stood beside me and became a quiet backbone, a source of support. 

The pandemic was the happiest time during all the years of war. It was then that space finally appeared — to grieve, to mourn the death of my mother, the loss of my home, the loss of friends, the partial loss of the right to memory itself. There was finally room to look closely at my cracked reality. 

Self-healing practices, long conversations with soul-sisters, and working with a psychotherapist began to untangle that messy snarl into separate threads of experience. Gradually, it turned out that the most terrifying parts weren’t trying to reattach torn-off legs to bodies in the August steppe, not the torture during detention, not even burying the person dearest to me under shelling in a hastily dug crooked grave. 

The most terrifying day of this ten-year war, for me, remains March 1, 2014. Everything that happened then had a colossal impact on the present. And everything that didn’t happen that day — has had an even greater one. 

I’m angry that the significance of the Kharkiv, Sievierodonetsk, Kramatorsk, and Donetsk Maidans hasn’t been adequately documented, and that their — our — Heavenly Hundreds haven’t been properly honored. But that’s a self-reflective kind of anger, because I, too, didn’t do enough to make those stories heard, investigated, remembered. 

At first, we were afraid to speak out — because activists were being maimed in hospitals, and trusting the Kharkiv police was outright reckless. Time raced forward: after March came Maidan April in Donetsk, the transformation of the cultural center Izolyatsia into a torture chamber, the emergence of the first volunteer formations — and we had to grow up so quickly, so intensively, that there was no space left to process any of it. 

At the Kharkiv Maidan, they kicked us, dragged us by the hair across the square, doused us with brilliant green antiseptic, spat in our faces, broke our ribs, desecrated flags, burned books, forced us to kneel “to unlearn the love for everything Ukrainian.” 

But the effect was the opposite. Yes, it was terrifying. So terrifying that every subsequent experience of war and occupation still tries to filter through that early-March sieve of comparison in my mind. 

But that fear eventually turned into resilience — a weary maturity and anger. And now, I like being angry. And having a "difficult personality."

Not a confused and frightened girl, but an angry, stubborn, inconvenient girl — even if one with a cracked rib. 

The closer I come to accepting that, the better I sleep. 

Only two things keep me awake at night. The first — thoughts of home. I picture its corners, walk through each room with my eyes: the glass of millet left on the table, covered with a plastic lid with a hole for a candle to keep the mice away; grandma’s embroidered pieces framed under glass on the walls; my father’s paintings, his portraits of our family. 

But especially, the spring landscape of the house with a blooming pink viburnum bush, hanging above the old refrigerator that, in the years before the occupation, wouldn't let me sleep. It would roar to life in the middle of the night like a poorly engineered fighter jet, about to explode and scatter into aluminum-nickel shards. 

I hope that old, rusty Donbas (that’s what my grandma called the fridge) is now keeping at least one of the occupiers awake — the ones who moved into my house. I hope it woke them up during those bleak February nights in the burning frontline Donetsk region. I hope it’s choking them in their sleep and crawling into their minds with nightmares of severed limbs. 

Now, home is beyond the ribbon — behind the front line. And for the first eight years of the war, it stood — like hundreds of others — along that gray-zone rosary string. 

Each time I visited, the house would ask me to take the family photo albums with me. Years of wandering through strangers’ apartments, cities, and countries forced me to repeat to myself: 

“Lena, just a bit more work, let’s save up, buy at least a tiny home of our own — and then we’ll move everything: the photos, the paintings, the embroideries…” 

Every late night, every heavy morning — even before I open my eyes — my home comes to me beneath my eyelids: through the embroidered curtains, the chipped mug of my cousin with the tacky font saying “I ♥ Simeiz,” the old sewing machine my grandmother used to teach me how to sew aprons — and later I used it to stitch balaclavas; the cotton fluff from the poplars in July, drifting into the corners of the veranda; the painted flowerpots with parched soil, still for some reason holding the withered stems of long-dead violets and hibiscuses. 

The second thing that keeps me awake at night is the smell of spit. 

That first Sunday in March, when we — activists of the Kharkiv Maidan — were being dragged out of the Regional State Administration building, alongside the beatings and humiliations, the pro-Russian local activists and the temporary residents bussed in from Russia spat on us. 

After Kharkiv’s infamous former mayor, during a Maslenitsa celebration speech, incited the pro-Russian crowd to storm the administrative building, they smashed windows and doors and began pulling out the activists. Sadly, there were very few of us that day — not enough to resist. 

We, a group of women volunteers, first hid on the top floor of the building, trying to burn our badges and lists with personal data. But the enraged anti-Maidan crowd broke through the doors and started chasing us down the stairwell. 

They drove us like cattle — yelling, cursing. And then, as if following an order, they spat. 

Each of those men would suck in air loudly and hock rotten mucus straight into our faces. They aimed for our eyes and mouths. Their movements were synchronized, rehearsed — like a well-directed performance. 

Some of them yanked our heads back by the hair or by the hoods of our jackets to spit more accurately. 

We ran down like a volunteer rosary chain, not yet knowing they had built a corridor of health nearly a kilometer long (and that’s when, for the first time, I regretted that Kharkiv’s Freedom Square is so notoriously the largest). They dragged people on their knees, hurled stones and trash, beat them, mocked them, and spat on them. 

I was lucky — we were taken out not through the central exit, but the side one, and our corridor stretched only about a hundred meters, to the left toward the steklyashka. In front of me walked a student I had once taught theater history at the Academy of Culture (sadly, I don’t remember her name). When one of them grabbed her by the neck to spit at her, she broke free — which only enraged the creature further — and he struck her in the back, between the shoulder blades. 

I thought I heard something crack. That sound drowned out everything else. 

Later, when they herded us into a circle and forced us to kneel, I could barely hear the roar of the crowd. My ears were ringing with that crack. 

A woman in a cream-colored coat — about my mother’s age — was kicking me in the stomach with a twisted smile. Some people were already drenched in green antiseptic. Blood was pouring from someone’s head. 

[Crouching] 

Someone next to me whispered: “Don’t kneel. Sit in a squat.” 

I remember the trembling young voice to my right, and how I slowly pulled my legs out from under me, whispering to myself: “Lena, into a squat, come on, quietly now, don’t be scared…” 

Later, lifting my head slightly, I whispered to the next person on the left: “Squat, squat, don’t get on your knees.” 

Someone began quietly whispering a poem, and I picked up that murmuring rosary. We softly chanted the national anthem and Chervona Ruta. 

My generation — we are the grandchildren and great-grandchildren of those who survived the Second World War, and in reflecting on it, we repeat: “Never again.” 
 
But my generation is also the generation of witnesses to wars in Afghanistan, Yemen, Burkina Faso, Libya, Iran, Syria. 

My generation — it’s also me, and us — who didn’t respond strongly enough to the occupation of Ichkeria or the war in Sakartvelo. 

That’s probably why kneeling in the middle of a European square, surrounded by the university buildings of intellectual, underground Kharkiv, felt like the ultimate abstraction of the impossible. 

But not for everyone. 

Later, as I engaged in social and artistic projects, communicated with researchers, read more, I began to see the continuity — the sick imperial urge of Russians to restore their empire. I began to see the connection between the miners’ protests of the late '80s and the desire to break away from the Soviet Union and demand independence for the Ukrainian SSR — the connection between those protests and the student Revolution on Granite, the Orange Revolution, the Tuzla conflict — and, in the end, the killings during the Revolution of Dignity. 

The price of maturity turned out to be high. Among other things — burning out the sense of inferiority, turbulent self-education, changing one native language for another native language, cutting all family ties, betraying the grand narrative, and embracing total loneliness in which the self was forged like iron beneath a hammer. 

By the age of 27, I was ashamed of my origins. 

Being a person from Donbas always meant trying harder, watching your behavior, speech, and reactions — so as not to give others yet another excuse to confirm our "lack of Ukrainianness."

In many ways, it’s like being a woman in a patriarchal society. 

To be accepted as equal, you always have to do more and do it better, make no mistakes, be smart but not too smart, well-groomed but not too pretty, wise but quiet when your wisdom might threaten someone’s authority, resilient but not too tough, feminine but not too stubborn — but also not spineless, not annoying, with a good sense of humor, but not too noticeable; stand out just enough — but not overshadow anyone with your "difficult personality."

The war helped me understand that, despite my mixed heritage and the beliefs I acquired throughout life, I am a child of Donetsk region — and I finally began to feel proud of it: of my “steppe character,” my directness, the simplicity often mistaken for rudeness, my quiet sternness, and the fragility that is often invisible to others. 

I’m one-eighth moskalka (ethnically Russian), but from years of fury, everything Russian within me is now burning out and scattering into ash. 

I love my shelterbelts and spoil tips, my fields pitted with craters where no grass will grow for hundreds of years. I love my black, starry nights that will reek of smoke and howl with the rusted rebar of shelled cities for decades to come. 

I don’t remember much from the summer of 2018. Because those who held me didn’t allow breaks — they beat me lightly but almost without pause — some episodes have vanished from memory, others have blended into recurring nightmares. 

They kept repeating the same questions: “Do you like Russia? Do you like Putin? Do you like Ukraine? Do you like Aksyonov? Do you like Yatseniuk? Do you like Crimea? Do you like Poroshenko?” over and over, dozens of times. And each time, one of them would hit me — in the face, in the ear. Not hard, but methodically. 

There were no serious physical consequences. The only thing is that sometimes, when watching a movie, I ask my friends to turn up the volume. And now and then, one ear or the other rings. 

It didn’t matter whether I answered “yes,” “no,” or “I don’t know.” I tried all kinds of responses: longer ones, off-topic ones, rhymed ones, responses in other languages — I tried staying silent. 
“Try again. Find the right answer.” 

All answers were wrong. And when one of them got tired of hitting, another would start shoving his fingers into my ears, my nostrils, my mouth — sometimes after touching himself inside his pants, sometimes after fiddling around in my shorts. 

I don’t remember most details well, but I remember the smell of spit — vividly. The same rotten smell as four years earlier on Freedom Square. 

But that was later. That was the summer when the world — and sadly, a part of Ukrainian society — began to forget that we were at war. They started calling it “the conflict in Donbas,” something they were “tired of.” 

I often wonder: If the Russians had attacked Kyiv or Lutsk in 2014, would we say, “there’s a war in Volyn” or “a war in the Kyiv region”? 

I don’t think so. We would say: “There’s a war in Ukraine.” 

So why did “in Donbas” happen to us? How did it come to be that I thought I lived in the southern steppe of Ukraine, but when disaster struck, it turned out that for many, my home was seen as a distant island? 

It’s a rhetorical question, and surely there’s a lot of pain in it and not much calm acceptance of nuanced factors — yet still, the question circles in my head from time to time. 

Over the years, my passport was very often opened to the page with my place of registration. At the Kharkiv Maidan, in order to lessen the severity of the beatings, I had to show that I was “from Donetsk” rather than a banderite. That would confuse people, sometimes even leave them stunned: “How’s that — seems like one of ours, but with nonsense in her head.” 

In Lviv, in 2017, a woman refused to rent me an apartment because of my registration, but she did compliment me on my good Ukrainian pronunciation. By that time, I had already been taking paid individual Ukrainian lessons for two years. 

During one interrogation, one of the illegitimate border guards kept turning my passport over in his hands and then suddenly stood up and said, “Ah, so you’re local! And why are you such a traitor?” He switched places with the other man and started hitting me in the stomach harder. It became difficult to breathe. I crouched, he pulled me up, hit me again, and each time he repeated: “You betrayed your native home. You betrayed your home. Get up, get up. Bad girl. You betrayed your home.” 

At that point, the war had already been going on for four years. For me, it began in the spring of 2014, about a week after that infamous first of March. At the border with Russia’s Belgorod region, near the Hoptivka checkpoint, Russian forces began concentrating military equipment. 

In mid-March, three activist friends and I drove out at dawn to see the soldiers for the first time. We already had some idea of how to build barricades, make Molotov cocktails, and quickly prepare sandwiches, but we had no real understanding of what was needed on the front line, and we only vaguely guessed at things like drones or thermal imaging scopes. So we brought sweets, canned food, warm socks, and cigarettes. And somehow, instinctively, I felt we needed to sew and bring flags. 

That was the morning we rode for the first time in a convoy with military vehicles. It was also the first time we began reading about what military units our country even had. At the border, it smelled like fear and courage. The boys’ boots were in awful condition, their handshakes were awkward but warm. The flags were taken faster than the cigarettes. 

None of us knew exactly how to behave, but we all already understood one thing very clearly: the war had begun. 

Next in the cycle: displaced people at train stations, supplies for the front, evacuation, searching for schools for relocation, failed attempts to be useful at the front, projects about the unheard and uncomfortable refugees for the mainland part of the country, burnout, moving, damn fireworks on Kharkiv’s City Day, damn fireworks on Kyiv Day, damn fireworks on New Year’s Eve. 

[chestnuts] 

Right now, we live in an endless leap-year February, and the life of the first years of the war was like a continuous autumn: lonely, windy, and drizzly. Or like a sweaty August of bloody cauldrons. Before the war, autumn was the happiest time of my life: I was born in October, and my personal year began and ended amid the gold of maples and the twisted, brown, sickly-spotted chestnuts of Donetsk region. Now autumn is the saddest time of my life. 

You died on my thirtieth birthday, and my personal year now ends and begins with a memorial dinner. The body had to be transported through several checkpoints. I was wearing your coat and, for some reason, near the morgue, I picked up two chestnuts from the ground and put them in my pocket. The coat pockets were very deep; I felt inside with my fingers your hairpins, buttons, old tissues, rolled-up hair, a screw, matches. At the first checkpoint, a Ukrainian soldier asked, “Who is this?” I said, “Mom.” He said something else. I clenched the chestnuts in my pocket, and one of them cracked. I felt the roughness of the crack and started to scrape it with my thumb, like two years ago — a lighter on Maidan. Now, as I write this, I think that we still stubbornly keep pressing the lighter’s button with the frozen right palm using the cold and tired left index finger to spark the fire for everyone who is on the shield. But without illusions that the previous night was the darkest. 

All the way to the cemetery, I twisted the chestnuts in my pocket. I hid you under the shelling and twisted the chestnuts in my pocket. You were loved and respected a lot, but almost no one came to say goodbye. Russian weapons were flying over us from Volnovakha to Dokuchaievsk. I wasn’t angry at anyone because I was scared too of what was happening. The earth near the grave looked red and clayey. There isn’t much black soil in Donetsk region. I was only angry with contempt at the relatives who didn’t come. Angry at your own brother. Maybe it’s for the best that they didn’t come. Before the full-scale war, we at least communicated a bit, checked if everyone was alive, called on birthdays. But for the last two years, we don’t talk. And it doesn’t hurt me anymore. And I’m not angry. It’s like dropping sandbags from a hot air balloon when descending because the heat in the sail runs out, and outside it’s too cold. Sometimes you can hear the echo of a dull thud but not see the actual fall through the layers of clouds. My nephews, my sister, with whom I spent all my childhood at grandmother’s, my uncle, whom I admired as a child, older sisters — all infected with Ruscism and all landed as rectangles filled with sand, somewhere far enough, outside my reality, outside our shared future. 

Months passed, and I transferred the chestnuts into a warm jacket, then into a spring blazer, and finally into a summer cardigan. They were with me in captivity; I walked with them in my palms across the Syvash. I didn’t run. I thought — they would shoot. But they didn’t shoot. I kept the chestnuts in my pocket at every border, at every checkpoint, and held them when I returned. But now I am letting them go. I know that trees will no longer grow from these chestnuts, but they take with them into the rot, the earth, the ashes a lot of fear, doubts, and pain. Thank you, my chestnuts. War has been living in my home for ten years already. Everywhere I repeat this: not two, but ten, ten, not two. It crawls through my gardens, sleeps with dirty bodies in my bed, eats with a rotten mouth from my plates, and defecates on my jasmine bush under the mulberry tree. War is stuck like a tangle of unexploded shells in every fifth yard. I have respect for the economic, political, and social problems of other countries or individual people. I understand some reasons why the world found it hard to recognize that for eight years, with the silent consent of societies, Russians were killing and torturing Ukrainians. But sometimes I feel we apologize too little to each other, to one another, one to the other, for all the unheard stories, for the old and new fatigue from the war, for loving freebies and for having at least once taken or given bribes. I often ask forgiveness from my body, from my memory, from my psyche for my carelessness, my shortsightedness, for betraying my own beliefs. Now, if you don’t speak openly, consider that you are silent. It seems to me that this is the key characteristic of our era. 

[tenderness/buds/AR-15] 

When mom passed away, dad started getting sick more often, and after one phone call I thought: “Good thing I was wrong.” But then I decided to go to him in Crimea. There was no official ban on traveling there, but I saw it as morally wrong behavior — and I also condemned it — when Ukrainian citizens visited the occupied territory, thereby legitimizing the occupation. At that moment, I believed so. But my fear of losing him again was stronger than my own convictions. And I still don’t have clear answers. I only know that this final, almost otherworldly journey outweighed reason — to see it all at least once, even if it was just a burning house; to take in the scents with my skin, to hear the familiar crack or creak of the gate or floor. To return. To return home. I made a bad decision. But I made it and went to my father. And when I crossed the illegal, illegitimate border between Ukraine and the Crimean peninsula, I was illegally detained by illegitimate officers of the illegitimate border service of Russian-occupied Ukrainian Crimea. 

When I try to concentrate in one sentence on our losses, to describe to myself what exactly the Russians took from me in these ten years, I think it is a space for tenderness. The tenderness itself remains. It continuously flows from rage to grief, then back to tenderness and around in a circle — to rage. And the space is gone. Yes, deep, measured anger is the gift of the free, able to transform guilt, pain of loss, and anger into effective responsibility. But the smell of dead bodies in groves without surviving trees and the microscopic dust of concrete ruins of destroyed cities settle too thickly on the lungs. And there is no space left for tenderness. I think that once, in my youth, I had the privilege of pacifism. Today, I try to hold an AR-15 and hit the target. It’s hard, but I need to learn. 

That sticky summer of 2018, at the start of interrogations, when I still had remnants of assertiveness and boldness, I said: “Fight the military, not girls like me.” Several unbearably long hours of pressure and humiliation passed. I tried to guess why exactly I was detained: perhaps for activist activities or for actions supporting prisoners. I kept repeating to myself: “What do they want? Why me? How will I survive this later? If they rape me, I won’t cope, I won’t survive this.” At some point, one of them hit too hard, the second stopped him and began touching me, adding: “Girls like this don’t need to be beaten, girls like this need to be re-educated. Girls like this are worse than a whole army. Girls like this must be broken.” 

I have a habit of eating young buds from bushes and trees in spring. I’m fascinated by the history and rituals of the ancient Slavs and I study our heritage, which is sadly almost completely erased by Christianity. I feel a kind of warm injustice in the fact that we learn about ancient cultures in schools and universities: Thessaly and the Peloponnese, the secrets of ancient Hellas, Hellenic architecture and drama, Athenian democracy, Roman urban planning. We listen to the advice of Demeter, Apollo, and Aphrodite as interpreted by Sophocles, Aeschylus, and Aristophanes, yet we know very little about Lada, Yarilo, Kolyada, and Zhiva, the traditions of the Southern Ulichs’ common veche, or Queen Amag who saved Tauris Chersonesos. 

Every time I traveled home, I tried to stop for at least a few minutes at the Seven Winds of Kreminna, to be with the Polovtsian warrior women, to lay my palms to the sky on my belly in their thousand-year silence, to stand facing east. 

After the interrogation, one of them opened the door and said, “You can go left. I don’t know what’s there. But you can go right.” I walked through the night and across the Syvash. I didn’t know why they let me go. I’m not afraid of the dark. But I’m afraid of being inattentive to details when my eyes cannot take in the space. I’m afraid of my numbness — numbness to something specific. A kind of scarred sensitivity beneath tripwires, beneath the scar of a cut-open belly. I know I am attentive to people, to their voices and traumas, but only up to a certain limit. Of course, this doesn’t apply to rudeness — then it’s clear: you either ignore it or, if you lack balance and resources, you react, spilling your energy. It’s more about dark spots, or even light spots in this darkness, like a veil or a blur on the eye. Where it’s burned, it becomes invisible. And I fear this numb blindness in myself. But it’s precisely this numbness that helps me understand where inside myself I need to shine a light. Also, I fear the mines in the darkness of our forests. But I fear mines during the day too. 

At first, I walked very slowly. My mind played a cruel game, urging me to mentally say goodbye to everyone and thank them for life, while flashing scenes from movies—what if it hits the head, what if it hits the chest. Now, when I walk slowly in the dark (even around my apartment), sometimes I feel I can smell the salty air of the Syvash and hear the loud chirping of crickets. 

Later, when I realized no one was following me and I had gone far enough, I started to run a little. I moved clumsily, like a newborn calf — thirsty and tired. I approached our border guards and began to explain what happened, but they interrupted me and said it was my own fault, that I “went there on my own.” I know I’m not guilty, but responsible — yet I fell silent. For several years. I needed to take a long journey of self-support inside myself. Somehow, I’m managing. For these 10 years, I’ve been on a mental, intellectual, and physical border — one that destroys, supports, tears apart, builds, heals, shatters, betrays, waits, growls, forbids, supports, stays silent, and peers into the spine from within. 

For eight years, the war line ran through my garden — the border between Ukraine and an illegal entity. On my family’s dining table, a trench has been dug between my personal civic choices and the beliefs of most members of my large family. Over these years, I’ve moved through dozens of cities, many countries, and spent hundreds of hours at borders. Hundreds of lonely hours. 

I like to think that I survived then, that I crossed that wild steppe because I carried my own Amaga inside me. I like to think this is the story of a girl who endured several (for some, unbearably many) traumatic events; a woman who is slowly learning to honor her scars, to grieve and mourn her losses; a woman who failed at many things but succeeded at many others. A woman who never carried a child under her heart but carries two broken ribs. A woman whose ribs don’t ache, but something like conscience — or rather responsibility — presses and pushes her toward actions that, to those who think she has endured unbearably much, might seem reckless. 

This story is about a girl who lost her loved ones, her home, and her mother tongue. About a girl who found like-minded souls, discovered a new reality, and embraced a sisterly, brotherly language. It’s about a girl who barely remembers who she was and what she dreamed about before the war, who knows things will never be as they were before, and that there’s a lot of work ahead. This is the story of a girl rolling up her sleeves. 

Now, I am heading into my last youth on my borderland, holding a few kilograms of metal to defend our home. Of course, there are very few sources about our ancient customs and rituals, but some mention that ancestors often cleansed and renewed their bodies in spring through fasts — what we now call fasting. One of the practices was eating young buds: to take in the strength of the earth, the power of spring, to absorb its youth in every cell. 

Near the occupied towns of Yasynuvata and Volnovakha, west of my village, lies the Velykoanadolskyi Forest — one of the largest artificial forests in the world. There, near the forester’s school museum, stand stone statues of babas in a circle. Around them grow alder, hawthorn, blackthorn, and oaks. 

Today, I exhale deep anger with iron, together with others in one direction — to reclaim the space for tenderness stolen from us. The tree crowns on the front line have been charred and standing for the tenth spring now, as if someone on the other side of the land still hasn’t learned how to draw, and from fatigue and irritation keeps stabbing sharpened pencils of scorched graphite into the steppe sky. 

Maybe not this spring, maybe not the next, but the harsh winter will end, new buds will sprout, and I will come back to my steppe babas, find a blackthorn tree, and eat from it. 

Text by Olena Apchel; Translated by Kate Tsurkan; Photo by Katia Lisova.

The article was first published in Ukrainian and Polish and is the result of the collaboration between the IWM and the Polish online magazine Dwutygodnik.

Olena Apchel is a Ukrainian theatre director, performer, screenwriter, curator of art projects, activist, and volunteer. From 2017 to 2019, she served as the chief director of the Lesia Ukrainka Lviv Academic Drama Thearte. She has taken the oath and currently serves in the Armed Forces of Ukraine.