“If you hear loud “puh”, and then hollow “buh”, it means that the shoot was from our side. If the “buh” is loud and windows are shaking – we are under a fire. If St. Peter is standing right behind you – you had been hit”. “LNR’s” kindergarten teacher tells me this new saying.
“The worst thing is that children aren’t afraid. They see war as something ordinary. One of my boys lost a grandmother and others knew about it by accident, and a five-year old girl was very concerned where his parents will take money for funerals. She said that funerals were expansive: “You have to buy a coffin, flour for piroshky (pies)…”
Those are popular conversation topics in our kindergartens today.
Last spring at the beginning of the conflict, when no one presumed that it could go so far, one young man of 4-year old made a present for me. He came with his mom, who told me that her son wanted to present me something but felt very shy. The boy gave me a plastic kaleidoscope toy. “Ignat says, that if you will hear shootings and you feel frightened, you have to look into it”, — boy’s mom explained. I remembered that moment very well. And I felt frightened then, not once; when we were hiding with my mother in the basement in our dacha (country cottage) and were listening to salvo fire from the surface; when we were trying to leave the territory, but we couldn’t; and when my mother passed away.
It was in August. We had no electricity, no phone service, no water or anything else what modern people accept as their due, but we with next-door neighbors were awaiting as a godsent.
My mom had tender health because of a whole bunch of diseases, the last month she wasn’t strong enough to get up. “When I die, angels will come and see what is going on here. Maybe then it will stop?” – my mother thought. When we were out of meds and my mother was losing her powers day by day, she told me: “The God can do nothing about it. When people do such things, the God has nothing to do with it. ”
Neighbors were visiting us in evenings. They were sitting around mother’s bed talking. Sometimes they were singing or reading books aloud.
At nights I was dreaming about children from my job. I was looking for them in some kind of labyrinth in the basement of my house. I didn’t know how many kids were there and where I could hide them.
Woken up from another nightmare I saw that my mother had passed away. Itwas adawn. We were bombed again. Anxiety and hysterics were floating in the air. My mom was lying on the bed with a whitewash flaking off the ceiling. I came closer and put my palm over her eyelids. She passes away in her sleep, her eyes were closed and it seemed to me she was having a rest for the first time.
Later I closed her face with a sheet leaving a hole for her nose. I understood that she was not breathing, but I couldn’t help it. Then I set in the chair near her bed and took the kaleidoscope. I looked into it. It was ringing in my ears because of blasts and breaking windows, but I was watching magic glass patterns. I was frightened, lonely, but also easy of hopelessness. That moment I realized that will never leave the city.
Neighbors helped with funerals, resolved all bureaucratic obstacles (I found out that they are the same in a war time) and supported me all the time. Strangers, who have been living next door for twenty years suddenly got faces, names, characters, became my friends. We hold together, we needed each other. We put tank for a rain water on the roof. We were cooking everything on a fire in the yard, together were “not friends” with the house number 4 (I don’t remember why, but I didn’t like them too – out of solidarity), played with tiny Mariya, who was born by my neighbor from the first floor in the basement of the maternity home.
I asked Mariya’s mother why didn’t she go to relatives to the “Mainland” (we call that way the territory beyond the ATO zone). She answered: “Where will I go from you? Who will be my daughter’s kindergartner then?” It’s scary to hear such words from a person, who I know for a couple months. But when you help to build a “sound insulator” of pillows for a newborn child, when you hold hands in the dark basement, when you tell your inmost thoughts in a whisper, realizing that any word can be your last – time stops.
My school friend called me in winter. I told her that I haven’t left Luhansk, that I worked here in a kindergarten (getting ration instead of money). She called me “otmorozok” (a lamebrain).
I know that I’m a lamebrain. I have only this city left in my life, and my buried mom. Here are my kids in the kindergarten, whose fates have been ruined already by war, and the plastic kaleidoscope, which I take when I feel lonely and frightened”.
O for the Informator.lg.ua