August
By Kateryna Zarembo
Translated from Ukrainian by Kate Tsurkan
She took the children to her mother’s place and then headed back home. She enjoyed the drive, relishing that she was behind the wheel. She hummed along to a song playing on the radio, a hit from her youth. Ukrainian songs on the radio, Ukrainian everywhere–well, almost everywhere. She had become so disaccustomed to it and missed it so much.
Parking the car near the house, she entered, picking up scattered toys along the way. She made herself coffee and went out to the terrace. The warm air enveloped her body gently, like a warm bath. This only happened in August when the sun no longer burned but caressed the skin. She could wear shorts and a T-shirt for a few more weeks, not worry about her appearance, and feel seventeen again. Especially when the kids weren’t around, bless her mother’s health.
She admired how the plum branches entwined, how the apple sides displayed their golden hues. A bit farther away, lavender bushes tinged with purple. “God, why do I have all this,” she thought gratefully. She pulled out her phone and aimed it at the apples, capturing them in portrait mode.
The fact that this house still stood and life continued within seemed nothing short of a miracle from the Lord. Across from their home, only the foundation of what was once a luxurious log cabin remained. The caretaker said, “They asked me which one to burn: this one or that one?” They laughed. Eventually, they burned the one that would burn better. They’d also fired shots at her home but missed. The shots shattered windows and damaged the fence here and there, but overall, it remained intact. Glass littered the floor in small and large sharp shards, along with fine dust. It was all the more strange to venture inside and see everything untouched in the kitchen cabinets: bags of flour and grains, oil, and spices.
As soon as the craftsmen installed new windows and fixed the damaged water and electricity, she blessed the kitchen so that no foreign foot would ever step into her home again. She baked a large, delicious-smelling pie using that same surviving flour. She generously added cinnamon and measured the sugar, sprinkling it with vanilla powder while still hot. It wasn’t thriftiness but her own act of resistance, to continue living despite everything.
With a cup of coffee, she circled the house. She sat on the edge of the sandbox–it used to annoy her placed right by the entrance, but now she loved it, like she loved everything that had survived. She scooped up handfuls of sand and watched it slip through her fingers. She ran her hand over the wood. Her fingertips smelled of resin from the untreated cracks.
Here, everything seemed unchanged—calm and quiet, as if worries, haste, and war were nonexistent. All you had to do was overlook the remnants of the burned down house across from theirs and the furniture marked by debris, not to mention the occasional air raid alerts on the phone.
It was her citadel where nothing was scary. But she would probably be afraid to walk in the forest for the rest of her life and wouldn’t let the children go there, lest they step on a landmine.
Kateryna Zarembo is a researcher in social sciences and writer. She is a non-residential fellow at Central European University and an associate fellow at New Europe Center. Her non-fiction book about civil society in Ukraine’s eastern region, The Rise of the Ukrainian Sun, was shortlisted for BBC Ukraine’s Book of the Year 2023 Award.