We set out for the East, like all the volunteers, determined to get as many provisions and other vital things as possible to our boys in the hot spot of this wickedly frozen war in the middle of winter. We squeezed urgent little things into the overloaded car, which slipped out time and time again, so we pushed them back into all the crevices and fought for another couple of hours for expensive space at the exit from the city. I was placed in the middle of this restless urgency, which throughout the hours of the journey, fell on me from all sides, pushing, not allowing me to sleep. The strangest of all the exotic orders, as I was told, in the entire volunteer epic in this war, was primarily determined to fall on their heads. Because already on the way out of the city, to my naive question on the phone of the combatant – “What do you want so delicious, the very thing?” And the bass with a hoarseness from the tube over the loudspeaker suddenly brought all my companions into a state of shock: “But we have everything! Yes, honestly! .. Well, maybe one thing … My boys … um, maybe some Coca-Cola, um – and hamburgers! … On everyone! The best gift for the boys. They missed this job.” “Yes, combat!” I blurted out. And immediately, I bought an order with makchikenami in chicken boxes, and they squeezed our bus under the ceiling. The pizza was especially unspeakable, falling out alternately with helmets. But everyone survived, and nothing exotic was harmed. My companions were “lucky” with laughter.
And how happy the boys returning from the front, from the night shift to all these cold machines in the morning! No persuasions “to warm up, that’s it!” – were not considered. DUK, for a moment, forgot about the war and became childishly happy. The forgotten life looked through the crack into the baptized life.
However, we were also rewarded. We were immediately taken with them to protect “Sky”! This is an almost destroyed tower, 300 meters high opposite the wreckage of Donetsk Airport, still a strategically important point. These places are fired day and night. Even getting to it is unrealistically difficult. You have to run across an open area at the crosshairs of Russian snipers, right in front of the mortars and among other enemy iron. For the guys protecting “Sky”, you need to manage to climb to the height of “Sky” in hundreds of meters every God’s morning under aimed fire so as not to make your enemy hungry for every death happy. And so – every morning and every evening.
We passed our baptism of fire “in heaven” – “on earth”. The battle was not long, but after it I began to understand better why this matter – the defence of one’s heaven and earth – is taking so long.
In the middle of the day, mortar rain began from howitzers and hail, and we fell into the basement. It wasn’t scary, it was more fun, the boys – some were having fun, laughing at the enemy’s blunders, their squint with crooked hands, some were half asleep, some were not without curiosity looking into the camera lens, remembering their strange stories. They told stories and were proud of their DUK resident, a Dutchman, a beautiful photographer and a Right Sector volunteer, dark-skinned and young. Once he stayed, he did not go to Holland. But, as he says, he became a member of the Right Sector in Bandera. Well, how can we not remember the fables of the enemy TV channel with ancient locks about foreigners exiled to the ranks of dills and what is essential – blacks! And fun. From what the Dutchman says, the soldiers do not understand anything except for one statement that he is a true “son of the regiment” of the PS, and he is very proud of it. I took a short interview with the Dutchman when suddenly, as a joke, it turned out that he is for peace in the whole world and here – only as a chronicler. And, in general, against any war. And then it suddenly turns out that they all think so here, all for that long-seen and unheard-of peace. And after all the conversations with the fighters, it became clear that the true PS fighter is the best. The one for peace in the whole world… Here, where everything seems unreal, a toy, and at the same time, so real that, apparently, only eternity remains.
Among such bright, kind, beautiful people, inspired and so alive, who, I’m afraid, are nowhere else and in no corner of the world where I have not been taken – I know for sure! – I haven’t seen it, and I won’t see it, I won’t find it anywhere. My favourites: “Gonta” and “Angel” are as bright and lively as two fighters who are together, as if they are “Siamese twins”. Their brightness and life so overwhelm them that they sprout into you, remaining forever your family. Humanity goes so far that you want to be pinched because you are 100% sure – this is the fantastic world of Andrii Platonov. These are his heroes, with their bright depths, with a burning purity that stings the heart and burns the eyes, with chevelure spacious souls, powerful, weighty, with biblical “pit” life, light and dense humanity in everything, in words, smiles.
In another small house on the very edge of this world of ours, close to the line of contact with the wall of fire of the Russians, two boys – “ghosts” of the Ilovaisk “cauldron”, who passed that “road of death” and Russian captivity, the winter of holding the enemy at the Donetsk Airport, I guess they didn’t understand my naive questions. “And how long does it take to remember after seventeen “airport frosty days” those who were “forgotten” there on the day of the rotation, with a long-standing concussion “? “Rambo” – the “ghost” of Ilovaisk and DAP – answered as if he was thinking about something else: “They don’t come back from there. Because when your “brother” dies next to you, it can never be accepted. That is, the fact that he, wet from the morning shower, will never again, laughing, look into your dugout, will not secretly pull a cut sausage from the table, and then will not chop firewood for everyone. With such a cavity in your life – it becomes different – alien to you, just as you are to yourself. If you don’t come back from there, you’re not you anymore. Somebody else. It’s useless to treat it.”
By the fireplace, “my ghosts” remember those “cauldrons”, each on their own way from there, captive, their “questions” into the space without answers. The boy, who has barely turned 18, is busy with his favourite business. Day and night, he assembles and disassembles his powerful arsenal, mortar, and other heavy toys. I ask: “Did you also stand in line on the “road of life” and rush like everyone else? Why?” With a sunny smile, he answers without letting go of the “toys”: “So who didn’t rush there”! And he just as easily gives me his cosy place for the night. And here he is, already running to fix “toy” mechanisms to lubricate them in the morning.
It was actually strangely comfortable for me there, in a volunteer sleeping bag, listening all night to the cannonade of those lullabies from “Hail” and howitzers, counting: here near the village, the house, near, near, near the airport, further, far away. Suddenly I catch myself with an incomprehensible feeling, listening to this symphony – that it is something so important, almost grandiose, perhaps – like approaching the place where God stopped and settled. No, not the One from the Old Testament, who is near Sinai, no – He is now here and ours, His, as it were, “brother”, already too close, completely native.
In the evening, by the fireplace of someone’s abandoned country house, I again clearly understand that in the midst of this everyday life – in fact, there is no longer any everyday life, this is existence. People with biblical souls, ghostly from their own light, confidently live in the liturgical time. Inside, in its core, they do not leave there. In any case, that’s how my vision captured them, those voices, actions, impulses of the heart, instant decisions. It’s like listening to “in the middle of the deep silence of the night, eternity draws a thick, ancient bass note.” This is how one master of sound content with perfect hearing, who was well versed in the sound field – shades, Pyotr Tchaikovsky, wrote about something similar.
I knew one thing. In a few days, these boys will go along the new “road of life” to the icy catharsis at the edge of the earth, to the one made of humming metal, where there are no doors or windows because the frozen one stands in the watershed of being and non-being, good and its hollow reflection. There they will fend off the powerful blows of elite Russian special forces from Mordor, forgetting in the icy wind that their fingers have already grown into metal. And the toes don’t even tingle because you can’t feel anything, where the body has lost its usual sensations. All these paper shoes and clothes are not for the hurricane cold, where there is almost no use for a small bag. In the world of a flurry of ice and other shards, bursting sniper, and ricochet whistles – a phantom dream is already beyond the limit of the mind, and therefore it seems that you are sleeping. From the lobes of the ears to the lobes of the fingers – I am sure that life has not flowed for a long time. The prudent arrow of life has stopped.
And then two young fighters hoist a flag over this icy peninsula of existence. The enemy gets so angry that he directs all his firepower there. The guys laugh, snapping their fingers: “Yes, a grenade launcher at us, an RPG, a MANPADS with a howitzer? You would have sent fighters to the flag! Well, did you miss?” In response – Russian good-natured cursing and solid – “Allah Akbar”, and a new mortar round.
The next day. One of them receives a wound that is not compatible with life. The second carries him on himself, risking to remain open to a sniper, and pulls out his “brother”. But still loses.
In Volnovas, I met a zampolit completely by chance, who immediately caught my eye for something. Maybe, in a thick beard and all “contaminated” by gunpowder, it probably got under the skin. When I filmed him on camera, he sparingly told his story, smiling sincerely and as if embarrassed by every breath of life. He rejoiced at one first-aid kit that fell into his hands from us – one for the entire howitzer brigade, as a Christmas tree gift from St. Nicholas himself. But again, he smiles madly beautifully while saying: – Well, if we had known in advance how it was here, we would have bought felt boots… – “Do you need felt boots”? – “Well, you can’t warm up in the dugout after shifts because there”…No longer knowing what else to pull out of the empty car, I convulsively grope for a bag with meagre sweets, guiltily hold it out: – “It’s with nuts, it’s good for you”… And in response, on a machine, as if in the image on a Byzantine fresco of virgins of the 19th century, where a prosphora lies in one outstretched palm, and in response to it – a kiss, the affection of the heart, the yearning for its warmth… This is how I recognize the priest’s father in his zampolit. To my question with a trembling voice: – “And how did you find the golden mean in this: there are no special conditions and exceptions for “do not kill”, it’s difficult, isn’t it?” – “But it’s difficult. But I am delaying this terrible hour as much as I can, I just hope: today I will be spared the choice.”
This man, full of so much love and kindness and so handsome that you can’t take your eyes off him, looked like a child – STANDING – and getting wet in the rain. As if a job, who would stand all the time, like Jacob, would fight in the night until: “You bless” all of us. This is how Moses would stand when he took off his sandals. And then, sitting in the car, as now, almost every day, I pray for such a simple thing: may the test of choice, for which in his love for heaven and the human soul, he will never be ready, pass him by even today.
At that time, I still did not understand why I liked all kinds of sounds of the night of the military parade and its streets, which it is not desirable to cross because there is a sniper at the other end. And don’t go to the yard without your eyebrows – the night is soaked with an icy sieve, lead bursting, ricocheting blows and whistles. My room is in the risk zone, in the line of fire, because it is on the side of the terminal. And “grads” are not quiet with “carnations” and “pinnacles”, or with “nones”. But in the morning, our RPGs will pull back. And fire positions will disappear. Our response to the elite Russian special forces will be harsh to all that is allowed under the City Agreements. And then 200 of those who were not invited to our land, who came here not to “drink a seagull” will be escorted to Rostov in a group of more than two hundred units. I would like to ask – why was it necessary to go so far, get cold, to return like this? But it’s late.
Our commandos from the fire-covered point, where they were stuck for a long time, still returned. They stayed there for 17 days. They are also former Ilovai “ghosts”. All are confused. They came out of the fire in their “leather robes” – in “ghost clothes” burned to the skin. They were covered with grenade launchers, RPGs, and anti-tank guns. Today, after 14 days, with all the same concussion, the “ghosts” go to a new point.
Until I understood many things, but she quickly learned one thing: our boys need fur mittens, felt boots, powerful diesel-powered stoves, honest and humane clothes from us, transport, and fuel – to even take the wounded out of the battlefield, we just need our humanity.
And so that those who should return them would no longer forget them there, those in the headquarters and in warm, tanned fur coats would take them out.
These are “days of silence”. The mass media assure us – it seems that fewer people die in our country. And the death of my beautiful angels in that ghostly truce remains unnoticed. I want to shout out their names, everyone whom I will not see again, who remained to lie in the ice desert, looking into the sky with their piercing blue and brown eyes. So that they never become forgotten by someone, “ghosts”…
