“Have you seen the numbers?”
“I try not to focus on those. But there are thousands, yes, certainly.”
The walls at the edge of the corridors glowed in the fluorescent light. They had been painted in pale colours: pastilles, greens, yellows, blues. The contrast between them and what they contained was not intentional; it was a twisted kind of accident.
Trolleys that were not trolleys but were not beds lined the halls, with soldiers at varying stages of movement. Some breathed weightily, noisily; others lay still beneath the plastic tubes and gauze wraps that would save their life. These were not the wounded you saw in the photographs. These were nothing to do with Florence Nightingale, they were nothing to do with history. These were the modern wounded. They were not wrapped in cotton, there were no lights at their bedside. There was only cold, blue plastic. The blue that was too sharp to be the sky, and too sickly to be the ocean. The medical blue. And the whites that turned to red, and then, after hours had passed, turned to brown. They did not match the walls.
Amvrosiy was in his fourth month. It was a shock at first - no arms, no eyes, and a new face that he would never see. But it was life still. They had not got him. This was not the end. It was only another challenge.
At his bedside was Kateryna, his wife. She was beautiful. But there was something strange about her now, as she sat with her hand resting on Amvrosiy’s leg, something that could not be grasped. They were exchanging hushed conversation, just out of earshot. They would laugh together, quietly. And nobody could possibly intrude. It was as though her beauty had been towed away, locked in a distant world that the eyes had never understood. It was no longer just her beauty; it had become theirs. And between them a gentle music flowed that you could not listen to.
“My wife is incredible. She is my hero, with me one-hundred-percent.” It was this way. And for the others who had not been able to finish the war, small rings of wheelchairs would gather outside the entrance, a dimly lit semi-circle of cigarette ends and memories.
“There was a tripwire. I think I stepped on it - my friends were trying to get me away quickly after that.”
“I remember almost nothing. I woke up here and my first thought was: I am somewhere.”
“Me too,”
“When this is over, we will not be the only ones like this. For Ukraine, this is how it will be now, us.”
And they would puff their cigarettes in the early hours of the morning.
But beneath it all was still the war. The wounded arrived each day to the hushed rhythms of the hospital ward. It was what the doctors did now; they were well practiced, there was no chaos. The soldiers cried, but they did not cry in pain. The reason was the war, which was here but not here, which they were in but not in. The war was underneath all of it, still. This is what they felt in their chairs and on their trolleys and with their wives and behind their cigarettes - the war. It had not finished them, but they had not finished it.
And this is where they came, to rebuild their bodies, to rebuild what they could remember, to sit and wait for what they could not envision. An end to all of it. Recovery. There they sat, waiting, breathing, crying, smoking - living - as they wheeled their way to the operating theatre and its nursery-coloured walls.
Link to the original story (BBC News).
The views expressed in this publication do not reflect the views of the author. The stories themselves are based on imagined events. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is fictitious and should not be taken as representative.
Good to see some writing again 👍