Afterward it was difficult to understand why an airplane exploding in the sky spurred me into motion to approach the family. The Russians shot down a Malaysian airliner in July 2014, and this event led me to begin recklessly visiting the dog park. These things should have had no connection. I was in Helsinki; the plane went down in Russian-occupied eastern Ukraine, and no one I knew was on board. But its wreckage dropped in an area I remembered all too well.
When I heard the news, I was washing the kitchen counter in the home of a certain retired gentleman. I noticed the sound of the TV increase, and at the same time my phone began to buzz in my pocket. I glanced at it. Mom. I didn’t answer. As I picked out individual words from the news reader’s dry narrative, they pulled me forcibly toward the living room. The old man stood up from the couch, looking back and forth between me and the television, and then asked if I was from Ukraine. Returning to the kitchen, I downed a glass of water and then watched the water flow from the faucet. I turned the tap to the right and to the left, from cold to hot, and focused my thoughts on the fact that here we drank water straight from the faucet without any complicated water purification system. Here you wouldn’t find a gas hot-water heater in the bathroom. Children who grew up here didn’t even know what that was. If they visited Ukraine, they wouldn’t recognize a water kiosk. They would think that the purified water vending machines that appeared on the sides of buildings were selling soft drinks and would drink the tap water out of old habit and then be surprised at the expressions of the locals if they were seen doing so. I focused my attention on the drop of water clinging to the side of my glass as if nothing else mattered, even though the monotone voice of the news anchor bored into my head with the insistence of a drill and my phone buzzed in my pocket. I didn’t want to know anything about the people who lived in eastern Ukraine. I didn’t want to hear about anyone who had bodies or body parts, heads or hands, rain down on their yards. I didn’t want to hear about anyone who had a burned Dutchman fall through her roof. I didn’t want to hear about the people who would have to move into their cellars and whose children would have to walk to school past pieces of airline seats, and I didn’t want to know how it would affect the course of the war. The Russians blamed the Ukrainians, and the Ukrainians blamed the Russians. No one seemed to know what had really happened.
The world had never heard anything about the hamlet of Hrabove before that Malaysian airplane exploded over it. Suddenly every country who’d had citizens on board—283 passengers and 15 crew members—was involved. For a moment I thought that this would stop the war, that outside forces would immediately put an end to it. But the moment passed quickly as I swallowed this childish fantasy with another glass of water and understood that none of this would matter in the slightest. The war would continue. There would be more corpses, headless or burned or blasted into nothing, and maybe more airplanes falling out of the sky, and no one would ever be held accountable.
The old man crept into the kitchen, keeping one eye on the television screen. I shifted my weight from one foot to the other. I took a deep breath. Squeezing the glass, I stared at the water droplet as it struggled against its surface tension. Soon the old man would start to ask what was going on and whether Putin had gone crazy, and he wouldn’t stop his pestering until he received an answer that he couldn’t get from the news. He wanted something more genuine, something that he could pass on to his children.
The headlines about revolutionaries gathered in the Maidan changed the atmosphere at work, or perhaps it was the escalation of the situation. After President Yanukovych sent his troops against the citizens assembled in Independence Square, people woke up, the newspapers took notice, the reporters came out of their stupor, and every Finn I met started to look at me with new eyes, as if it had just dawned on them that their cleaner was from a country where things happened. Where an uprising was taking place. Where new revelations were appearing daily about the president. Where the president was a Moscow puppet, a certified asshole. Before that, they’d probably thought I was Russian, and that was why everyone lamenting the news first wanted to make sure of where I was from. I told them I was from Kyiv, not eastern Ukraine, and after hearing that, the Finns would breathe a sigh of relief and express their regrets. If I had been invisible to them before, the revolution made me all too visible, and soon the war being waged turned me into a sort of exclamation point for them.
At first this frightened me, until I understood that it was just a question of sympathy. I remember how one time I had a falling-out with a Russian cleaner from whom I used to buy Analgin and Corvalol from over the border because she traveled to Russia more often than my mother did to Finland. Over the years, we had become a good working team. I’d even attended her birthday party. The war changed things, though. The elderly man whose windows we were washing came to watch our work and finally asked about the situation in Ukraine. My companion flew into a rage, accusing the Ukrainians of being bloodthirsty fascists, and I threw my bottle of cleaning fluid at her. The incident ended up reaching our boss’s ears. I thought I would be fired. However, the Finns mounted their own sort of protest, and many informed the company that they didn’t want any Russians in their homes. That resulted in me being given the Russians’ shifts, along with a warning that there was no reason to talk about Putin during work hours. No one wanted their homes or strawberry fields or any other workplaces turned into political battlefields when their staffs were made up of Ukrainians, Russians, and representatives of other nationalities that were involved in one way or another. Apparently, the same agreement was made elsewhere. In the press, they called it the Strawberry Peace.
Finns asked me for advice about the safest way to send aid to the revolutionaries. Some began reminiscing about the Winter War, and a year after the fighting began, the older people began to wonder if the war would eventually spread here. As a result of the economic sanctions imposed on Russia, cheese meant for the eastern market was sold in Finland for a song, and people started calling it Putin cheese. They bought it by the cartful, and they joked about it all the time. It was a real hit. People gave it to me as a gift when I went to clean their homes, and we laughed about it together.
After the plane went down, I didn’t want to listen to the radio, watch television, or read the news online. My mother was visiting me just then, and she wanted to go home. I didn’t let her. The war might spread. The border might close. Anything could happen. At the end of my workday, I was greeted by an apartment that had become a Babel of news channels. My mother tracked events in Ukrainian, Russian, English, and Finnish, even though she only understood two of those languages. I turned off all of them, once even interrupting a broadcast during the Ukrainian national anthem. But my mother would sneakily turn them back on. We continued this for weeks. I held my tongue when Mom said that the pain was always worse for those who were away. Unlike my mother, I no longer thought about the airplane, the body parts falling from the sky, the Donetsk refugees who had filled Dnipropetrovsk, the businessmen who had transferred their money from Donetsk to Dnipro, or how rushed you must have been. I thought about the family living in Siltasaari and how close to them I dared to sneak. My mother’s talk and the voices of the news reporters were like rain falling against the window, which I saw but which didn’t touch me. It was as if I didn’t understand what the water pattering on the glass was, where it came from or why.
Maybe the change came because the airplane blew up right over Snizhne, just a few kilometers from the house where my father’s parents had lived. But the same feeling hadn’t been caused by the Russian troops taking control of Snizhne, nor by the flags of the Donetsk People’s Republic now waving above the area, nor by the stream of war refugees from Donbas, nor by any other war news. Nor by any of the bodies. Nor by the missing, the imprisoned, or the lines of wounded. Nor by the pictures of the lines of trucks loaded with weapons driving into Donbas from Russia, whose Russian drivers claimed they were delivering humanitarian aid. Nor by the pictures of the bombing of Snizhne and its aftermath, of the people who had moved into their cellars, of the bodies wrapped in carpets, of the bundles along the roads, of the ambulances, which were the same ones we used to call tabletkas because they looked like pills with round headlights for eyes. Nor by the videos where an old local accused the Ukrainian army of being fascists who were killing their own citizens and begged Putin for help, nor by the fact that the same woman could be seen in other videos playing a local from somewhere else, whether it was a mother of small children from Odesa, the mother of a soldier from Kyiv, or an anti-Maidan protester from Kharkiv. Russian television devoted generous interview time to this hireling. Once she spoke in front of a collapsed house in Snizhne, sounding like a political commissar and waving pieces of shrapnel in her hand. Behind her, the entrails of the house spilled into the yard. According to the Ukrainian army, its planes hadn’t been flying during the time of the bombing, and Russia was accused of trying to use the attack to make Ukraine look guilty. There were plenty of eyewitnesses to the Russian tanks. None of these news reports surprised me, and I also wasn’t surprised when it later turned out that the Russian crew who transported the missile that brought down the Malaysian aircraft had driven their vehicles through Snizhne in broad daylight, even stopping to rest next to the Furšet supermarket. Maybe they’d been hungry. Maybe they had bought a bag of sunflower seeds as a snack or maybe something more filling like chicken wrapped in lavash bread. I thought of Lenin Prospekt, where the shop stood covered in daffodil-yellow corrugated metal, and of the men standing holding shawarma wraps, drinking beer from two-liter bottles with sweat on their foreheads. Or maybe they wanted ice cream and water. July was so hot in Snizhne. Maybe the men had cooled themselves with the same plombir ice cream I had, holding a softening waffle cone in my hand and wondering how to get out of this backwater. That market with the yellow sides hadn’t existed then, but maybe the soldiers thought the same thing, cursing their mission to this remote district and dreaming of their next leave. Then they wiped their mouths, threw their trash on the ground, flashed a V-sign at any passersby, and went to blow up an airplane.
My father’s parents’ house had been very pretty and well kept. Maybe now a separatist family lived there, and maybe that family was digging our coal. Representatives of the new authorities had taken over the kopankas and were making money on them. My mom thanked the Holy Mother of God that my grandparents weren’t around to see the destruction, the greed, and the looting. It galled her but not me. I had thought the place was getting what it deserved. As far as I was concerned, every inclined shaft and pit mine could explode, every blast furnace could be snuffed out, and every building could collapse, but now I felt ashamed of having had those thoughts. Just a stone’s throw from our former home there could have been hundreds of thousands of Russian soldiers. Seventy-five percent of Russian citizens were in favor of war against Ukraine. The size of that percentage and the number of boots on the ground hit my consciousness with a force that made my ears ring. I couldn’t ignore it by shrugging or calling the opposition vatnikes, idiots who slavishly followed Putin. They really and truly wanted to kill us.
I had always hated Snizhne, the whole area, but suddenly that felt wrong. Just as wrong as having left the city that could have become my home. I found myself wondering what would have happened if we’d stayed in the house Dad got for us and I’d never run off to Paris. Would I be just as happy as I had been in Kyiv after finally getting control of my life? Or would I have been eager to build the family business? Would I have joined my father’s enterprise, would I too have belted Vopli Vidopliassova in my car in Snizhne, or would I have sung something else? Would I have fallen in love with a local guy, married, and taken my children to the family graves with a basket of paska Easter bread? And would that all have fallen apart because of the war, and would burnt pieces of bodies have flopped down on my dinner table? Would my sons have collected shell casings and shrapnel as they played, and would my husband or father have negotiated with the separatists about the mines, the kopankas, and coal deliveries? Would my mother have resisted and my resourceful father adapted? Maybe he would have gotten along with the new overlords. Maybe he would have grown rich.
Or maybe he would have received a bullet to the brain, and in any case we would have fled either to my aunt’s in Mykolaiv or with the other refugees to Dnipro or Zaporizhia, making our home in a shipping container, and I would have prayed every night that the new residents of my grandmother’s home would meet a bullet or a land mine or a pack of dogs, and relished the thought of how hungry the dogs left behind by the refugees would be, because they would be completely wild, even wilder than the wild dogs of Chornobyl.
But we had left Snizhne long ago, and I hadn’t participated in the revolutions, not any of them, on any side. I hadn’t joined the separatists or the Ukrainian army, which also allowed women into its ranks, or any of the other things I might have done if I was still in Ukraine. Instead, I watched the progress of the war from a city where such things were merely headlines in the newspaper, and for some reason my mind returned to the lines of Yevgeny Yevtushenko. They repeated in my mind as if I had just now understood what they said.
I am
each old man
here shot dead.
I am
every child
here shot dead.
Nothing in me
shall ever forget!
The words pounded in my head like an uninvited guest who refuses to go home. I woke up to them at night. I found myself writing them down even though I intended to write my shopping list, and I caught myself muttering them aloud while sweeping floors. They left me in peace, though, when I built up the courage to venture to the dog park. The park bench became a soft movie theater seat I could sink into and empty my mind. There I could watch the family live their life like a story that could have been mine if everything had gone differently.
The first time, I ventured into the dog park under the merciful cover of darkness. Creeping along, I approached the bench where one family member often sat. I sat down cautiously, as if the slats were glass, and then took in the landscape, their landscape, imagining what their life must be like in a country where dogs had their own parks, better maintained than the public spaces in Ukraine. I circled the park tree by tree and traced the fence of the dog enclosure, counting how many steps it would take to get to the street if I was caught. I practiced until I was out of breath. No one appeared other than a head I glimpsed once in the distance, which probably belonged to a homeless person. No one came wondering what I was up to. In daylight, the situation would be different. Still, I decided to try. The next time I would come during the time the family walked their dog. I would disappear if anything suggested I’d been recognized, even a lingering glance. Then I would never return. I would dye my hair, find an apartment somewhere else, maybe in another city, and look for a new job. The family would just think they had been mistaken. For a while they would be more watchful of their surroundings, but soon they would forget the whole thing and conclude that their imaginations had been playing tricks on them. If that didn’t happen, the agency would be able to calm them down. My former employer was used to dealing with paranoid clients who called after thinking they’d seen their children’s features in a stranger. No one in the office would take them seriously.
After gathering my courage for a week, I went to the park in broad daylight. On the way, I checked how I looked in my hand mirror. My jacket had a hood, whose drawstrings I tightened and loosened repeatedly. Sweat made my sunglasses slide down my nose, and my library books weighed on me. I’d thought to grab them after realizing that I couldn’t afford to appear idle. Poisoned dog treats had been found in the park and its vicinity, and people were on the alert. I had prepared well, and yet the feeling still ate at me that I wasn’t good enough to enter this family’s sphere, not even the park they frequented. The collapse of my standard of living had made me the embodiment of my new profession. Nothing in me resembled the person I had been. My skin was becoming leathery, the pores gaping open. I had traded lipstick for Vaseline, hundred-euro pantyhose for thrift-store rags. I carried a backpack just like the locals here, and it hadn’t felt at all ridiculous. Nothing remained of my previous self, and that was precisely as it should be. They wouldn’t recognize me. Even so, I was embarrassed to appear in public like this. I feared seeing contempt in the boy’s eyes for this undesirable if he happened to glance at me. Did my fears stop me? Of course not. I couldn’t stop, not anymore.
When I finally saw the family in real life in front of me, I clung to the armrest of the bench, sure that their dog would sense my intentions. It was so sharp, so alert to its surroundings that it could not fail to understand the danger I represented. When the schnauzer charged at me, the mother would run over. She would shout and defend her pet, which never behaved this way, and then she would recognize me.
The dog didn’t stop to sniff me, though, let alone wag its tail.
The woman watched the girl romping with it.
The man focused on his call.
The boy stood by the gate and didn’t seem to notice what was happening around him.
He was concentrating on his phone.
Slowly I stood up and walked toward the boy, sure that soon the woman would shriek and rush at me, scratching me with her manicure-hardened nails, tearing at my hair and dragging me away without the man attempting to stop her. Someone else would call the police. The man would hurry away with the children and call my old boss.
I stopped for a moment a couple of meters from the boy. He didn’t look up from his phone; his fingers continued tapping. He didn’t see me. The dog running in the enclosure didn’t interrupt its play to stiffen and growl at me. The boy’s nose was still my father’s, but the sheen of his skin was mine.
I realized that my fear of recognition was my own vanity, a remnant of my previous self, who had been awfully sure of her own irreplaceability. I should have known better. The family wouldn’t know me even if I still visited a hairdresser regularly and the leather of my handbags was as high-quality as before. People like us were invisible. The memory of our faces melted like snow from their minds because none of our clients wanted to remember our existence.
One frigid day, something unexpected happened: the woman approached me herself. Reading on a park bench wasn’t plausible in the winter, so I had adopted a new habit of circling the area as if out on a walk. I saw the woman open the gate of the dog enclosure. Speeding up, I began to cross the street before she could reach me. However, she remained standing by the fence, and when she noticed me slip between two cars across the street, she set off after me, seeming to try to catch up. I was sure I’d been caught. She had remembered. I stopped. What if I just let it all happen? I closed my eyes, waiting to be struck. But no. The woman said hello, apologizing for the interruption and assuring me she wouldn’t keep me long. At first, I didn’t understand what she was saying. Then I caught on. She was hoping I would take a picture she could use to make a Christmas card for her relatives, and there was no one in the park she could ask to help. The day was so remarkably beautiful that she didn’t want to miss its waning light and the untouched surface of the snow.
I captured the winter landscape and their moment of radiant family bliss in a way that only a person who lacks such a dream can do.
After this episode, the woman nodded to me when she passed. The rest of the family followed suit. A smile, a nod, a greeting. The dog wagged its tail and let itself be petted. The girl made more lively contact, the boy less or none at all. He didn’t even look at me, let alone smile, as the girl did, eagerly following her mother’s example. Still, I was hopeful and began carrying treats in my pocket. I would sneak them to their pet, and that would make us friends. I trusted in the dog’s memory and convinced myself that the situation was sure to repeat. The woman would need the help of a passerby when the weather was perfect or a cloud pattern or sunset was unusually photogenic. Gradually the brief nod would deepen into chatting, then into more genuine conversation, and with the treats on its mind, the dog wouldn’t want to stop playing with me, and then the boy would stop and say hello as well.
That never happened, though.
The slight nods ceased.
The dog wagged its tail at other people but not at me.
I was surprised at how seriously I took it, how much a small nod had meant, how much I’d expected the situation to develop in a different direction. In the evening, I emptied the bottle of horilka Boris had distilled and Mom had brought, and assured myself that I’d found what I’d gone looking for: the certainty that the family didn’t recognize me and evidence of the parents’ good qualities. The woman was the mother she had claimed to be. The man was the father I had imagined him to be. I was only visible in the boy as whispers in his features. I’d succeeded in stealing a slice of their life at a moment when they were still spending quality time together as a whole family, and that would have to be enough. Within a few years, the boy would stop coming to the park, and the woman would long for the days when he still sucked the ice that had soaked into his mittens. In the blink of an eye, the boy would be going to high school and later perhaps to university, and if he did, he would receive decent financial aid instead of living on sacks of potatoes his parents mailed. If he served in the army, he was unlikely ever to fight. He wouldn’t crawl into a kopanka after school to dig coal tainted with ash and sulfur, and he wouldn’t turn his hockey sticks into weapons by pounding nails into them. He wouldn’t learn to make Molotov cocktails out of light bulbs. A war wouldn’t divide his family any more than a revolution would. His car wouldn’t be set on fire. His phone calls wouldn’t be listened to. He wouldn’t buy a dashboard camera in case a police officer who pulled him over tried to shake him down or someone claimed he was guilty of an invented accident. No one would wrap him in plastic and dump him in a landfill. He would be able to open his door to strangers without worrying. After graduating, the boy would buy an apartment where he wouldn’t need burglar alarms, and he wouldn’t hoard electric space heaters in case Russia shut off the country’s gas lines. He wouldn’t know anything about social orphans like Boris, who had never been allowed into school and who would be forgotten in institutions for the rest of their lives unless a relative like Ivan happened to rescue them. If the boy ever visited Ukraine, it would be on holiday, and he would act like all the other Western tourists. He would take photographs of the air conditioners hanging from the exterior walls of the apartment buildings and laugh at them but fall in love with the old women who sold flowers on the roadside, adding carrots with bushy green tops to their selection during harvest season and becoming berry sellers as the summer came to an end. The boy would find something authentic and genuine in the stooped grandmothers. There was a word for that, poverty, but he wouldn’t recognize it. He wouldn’t cry to the same songs as my mother and I did. He wouldn’t laugh at the same jokes. He wouldn’t speak the same language. He wouldn’t learn the same customs. He wouldn’t offer his hand to his girlfriend as she climbed out of the car, and he wouldn’t take her gently by the elbow on the stairs. He wouldn’t long for watermelons, apricots, chestnut flowers, or murals on the walls of buildings. He wouldn’t feel a vague homesickness, because he would have a home to return to. I imagined all the unpleasant things he would avoid because his home was here, repeating them in my mind so I wouldn’t think about all the good things he would miss, the ones I was missing.
I drank all night because the decisions I made were the right ones, despite the fact that you and I and our son could have been like the dog park family and spent all our free time together. I would have had a new trench coat every spring, with my hair blown out at the salon, and on idle mornings you would have woken up to a breakfast tray laid out by our son’s sticky hands and in your pockets found building blocks, rocks, and the maple leaves he carried around in the fall.
All that would have been possible if I’d told you about Snizhne and Daria as soon as we met. Then maybe nothing would have gone wrong. You would have forgiven me for the minor embellishment. Someone else would have received my promotion and advanced in her career, but I wouldn’t have been forced to leave you or run away.
I also should have shared with you the news about our son, Olezhko, and I should have done it without delay when I realized I was carrying our child. I intended to. I thought, if everything went wrong, you would believe your child’s mother above the others. And if you didn’t, you would still help for your son’s sake.