Anya

by Anastasiia Ovcharova

Translated from the Ukrainian by Dmytro Kyyan

Anya came to our department in 2012, a month after I had started working there. She arrived from Khmelnytsky with her husband, who was a state border guard deployed to the Luhansk region. I remember our first meeting well. I was washing my hands with ice water in the procedure room when she came in to get acquainted, asking what language would be more convenient for me to speak. I replied that I understood both Ukrainian and Russian ​​very well, “So, you can speak what suits you better.” It is thanks to her that the phrase “It makes no difference to me” entered my vocabulary. 

Anya got pregnant in the summer of 2013. Every living soul in the surgical department considered it their duty to touch her belly and rejoice for the young couple. I remember that our whole department was happy for Anya and her husband Vasya. I was filled with excitement that they planned to name their daughter Nastusya, as if in my honor.

And in early March of 2014, after celebrating her 21st birthday, Anya had to go to her parents in Khmelnytsky because it was dangerous for her and her baby to stay in Donbas. She had to protect her child and leave her husband in the area where the fighting was about to erupt.

May 2014

When you work daily, you must be able to shut down in any unclear situation. If it is possible to sleep – go ahead, sleep. Although there is no lunch or rest for the nurses on duty, they are humans and they can’t work non-stop. This is less a concern for yourself than it is for the patients whose lives you are trying to save; you need to master the skill of getting some rest at any possible moment.

None of the medical staff of the Stanytsia-Luhanska district territorial medical facilities had had any sleep for several shifts in a row. At night, militants stormed a border checkpoint in Stanytsia-Luhanska. It seemed calm that evening and I went to bed to take a nap for half an hour.

I opened my eyes fifteen seconds before everything started. Maybe, my intuition warned me of the danger, just a little late. It was so quiet that I heard the clockwise movement in the common room. Fifteen seconds after, I was already running to the nursing unit, as I knew there would be victims after the explosions. The windows in the old wooden frames rang so loudly that it seemed they would crumble into thousands of small pieces if touched. That’s how the fates of people who got drawn into this damned war against their own will were being destroyed.

That night, there was only one wounded person, a civilian, who was brought to the surgical department. You could think that was good news, but in fact, the old elevator for transporting patients wouldn’t stop until morning. It went past the surgical department located on the 4th floor and as we used to say, "up the hill" to the intensive care unit or it went down, in the morgue.

As a doctor, I shouldn’t divide the victims into those who are "mine" and "others". I was taught to heal people. No matter who they are. Maybe, I'm a bad doctor and a bad person but the good news for me was that the badly wounded militants and not the border guards were brought to the hospital that night.

Anya called me around 6 a.m. In a strangled voice, as if there was a lump in her throat, she asked if Vasya had been brought to us. He had called her at 1:30 a.m. but she heard only the screaming and explosions, not a word from her husband. She didn’t have the courage to hang up and so the girl kept listening, the 10 longest minutes of her life – explosions, shots, cries of despair – and she silently begged him to answer. He had to answer.

For the first time in my life, I regretted that someone did not come to us, that someone didn't come to us with injuries, you see? In that case, I could reassure Anya and say ‘yes’ to her that “maybe, your husband is wounded but he is alive.” Instead, I only had to answer in that tone, dull and full of sympathy, that I was sorry but I didn't know anything about him.

It was hard for me to even imagine what she felt at that moment:

Anger – because the man whom she loved above all could probably have been killed defending the borders of those people who were ready to give the land, tied with a red ribbon, to the enemy?

Powerlessness – because there was no way she could help him?

Was it pain – pain so unbearable that it couldn’t be stopped even with the strongest opioid analgesic?

I think it was some kind of emotional Molotov cocktail.

After talking to Anya, I came up to a colleague and told her about the call. It was hard for me due to inability to help her and I sought support from others.

"She called me too and I don't even know what we can tell her. I kind of sympathize with her but... he is kind of a nazi."

I recalled again how our whole department was happy that Anya gave birth to a healthy girl and how that same colleague ran first to see the mother and her newborn. And I pondered the question if my colleagues already knew they were happy about the birth of another ‘nazi’? If she really became like that?

Take the other border guards at that base, those guys who may have gone to the same school with them. At what point did they become fascists and invaders?

Later on, Anya told me that Vasya had accidentally pressed a phone button in his pocket and called his wife. That happened just at the moment a grenade fell at his feet, which he managed to throw out the window, saving himself and his brothers in arms. They couldn’t return fire on the separatists because those freaks were sitting in a residential area using their position as a "human shield". He was able to call her only the next day because the detachment had to leave the base and retreat on foot through the woods, with weapons and ammunition so that not to leave a single bullet for the bastards. And those hours when she didn’t know if her husband was alive lasted like an infinitely long and agonic death for her…

And this tiny girl who had once asked if it would be convenient for me to speak Ukrainian almost lost her lover, who was defending the land of those who considered him a "nazi" and "invader" of the cursed "Russian world".