A New Wedding Ring
by Iryna Tsilyk
Translated from the Ukrainian by Tetiana Savchynska
Apart from everything else, it’s also a matter of scale: Ukrainians have been dying on the battlefield for eight years. It's not the first time Russians have committed cynical crimes in full view of the world while we suffocate from anger and pain. However, these days, the circle is narrowing too fast. My Facebook feed mainly consists of obituaries: it’s not just professional soldiers who’ve made the ultimate sacrifice but also intellectuals, artists, journalists, activists, and other colleagues and friends who had to take up arms. It all makes me howl with grief.
Instead, I silently pour myself another glass of wine. We are standing on the balcony of our Kyiv apartment, watching joyous flocks of carefree swifts soar overhead. “You have to be prepared for my possible death. When joining the army, I had to accept this possibility. And you have to be prepared, too,” my husband says suddenly, drawing on his cigarette. “You smoke too much,” I respond awkwardly. No, I don’t want to think about the possibility of your death. I would much rather think about life and some distant dreams, holding on to them as if clutching at straws. Quit smoking and watch your health, because we still have to get old together, write new books and shoot films, travel this peaceful and colorful world, build homes, plant trees, and probably not raise any more children… Even if we wanted to, “the clock is ticking,” and our youth is flying by in the dark years of uncertainty and insecurity. This war is long, far too long.
And yet, here and now, we are finally together, celebrating my husband’s birthday. We hadn’t seen each other for over a month and returned to our home as if it were the point of intersection of our now very different coordinate axes. In mathematics, this point is often marked with a zero. Absolute zero… This is the title of my husband’s book about the other “zero” and his first combat experience back in 2015-2016. Back then, he—a rather well-known Ukrainian writer—had served in the Ukrainian Armed Forces for eighteen months. On the inside, however, he probably never truly became a military person, even though he had diligently performed his duty to the army and his country. After returning home, he took off his military uniform and, much to his relief, put it away forever–or so we thought, until one morning we woke up to the new reality of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
And just like that, my husband became a soldier again. I take in his dark tanned hands, weather-beaten face, and the somewhat absent, hollowed-out look in his eyes. Suddenly, I’m struck by a strong sense of déjà vu. Once, in another life seven years ago, the greatest challenge for our family was not the war but a sense of alienation, when all those months we had spent apart gradually grew into a high wall between us. When people find themselves in different dimensions, it’s natural for them to grow distant. Knocking down that wall is hard work in its own right. We managed, but I still remember that time as one of the most painful periods of my life. I already know that war not only kills. It also changes those who survived, and on very subtle levels, too.
It’s all because of the inability to understand the other person, stemming from the incompatibility of personal experiences. This goes beyond just the military and the civilian divide: the combinations are endless. For instance, it’s impossible to understand the pain of a refugee if you have never experienced displacement nor crossed the point of no return. It is impossible to imagine the day-to-day life of people who live near the frontline if you have never spent endless days and nights in the basement under shelling nor buried the bodies of your neighbors in the frozen earth of your backyard garden. It’s impossible to trace the bottom of the dark grief of a mother who sings the last lullaby over the coffin of her dead son, a soldier who died in the war. It is impossible to understand the experience of another mother, the one who, under bombardment, grabbed her children and pets and made her way over the border, only to endure reproaches that she now “enjoys her coffee in peace somewhere in luxurious Europe.” But we know nothing about that coffee if we hadn’t walked down the same road in this woman’s shoes. I, too, cannot truly understand my husband because I have never experienced combat. And, once again, I don’t know how to tell him about my life without him.
What is there to tell? My life as a filmmaker and poet seems to be very mundane. It now mainly consists of never-ending talks and meetings with foreign audiences, even though, in reality, I feel utterly voiceless and useless in a world where films and literature don’t protect civilians from Russian bullets, rockets, and medieval forms of torture. I keep taking up more and more work so that I can donate to the Ukrainian Armed Forces, but the threat of burn-out is catching up with me, and doctors are already voicing their unpleasant diagnoses.
I’m having a hard time coping with our son: a teenager at an impressionable age, he protects himself from the outside world with aggression and cynicism, while I lack the wisdom and patience to smooth things over. Right now, I am anything but smooth. I have trouble sleeping; I cry a lot and always feel tired. The mere thought of loading the dishwasher makes me exhausted. Recently, I went on an extended business trip to Europe, where, apart from work, I also met a lot of interesting people, tried good food, and even engaged with art. But you know, my dearest, when looking at the ancient statues without limbs in the Louvre and Musée d’Orsay, for some reason, I thought of mutilations and prostheses, and when swimming in the turquoise sea near the Côte d’Azur, I once again wept inconsolably. In my emotional pit of despair, I no longer feel anything except a deep black bitterness towards the war that is stealing our peace of mind, our youth, our intimacy, our time, and our life in general.
What am I supposed to tell him? Ça va? Ça va… “Happy birthday,” I say instead. My husband doesn’t like his birthday, but nevertheless, I got some presents for him. This year they are quite unexpected: a military thermal imager and a new wedding ring. The reasoning behind the former is clear: to save and protect, and to give an additional superpower—it’s an understandable wish for everyone whose loved ones are fighting. Gifting a wedding ring after sixteen years of marriage to someone who doesn’t wear any jewelry might seem like an odd gesture. However, this gesture is also about protection. And, if I’m being completely honest, about my deep-seated fears.
I have a recurring dream that has been haunting me in different variations for many years. In it, two people are walking side by side across a vast and snowy field. They carry backpacks (or rather, emergency go-bags) including all that remained from their former peaceful lives. The woman walks ahead of the man, and his big footprints cover hers so that it seems as if just one person has made their way across the field. Or, conversely, he walks ahead of her, paving the way in the deep snow, and she carefully treads behind him. Sometimes, the culmination of the dream makes me wake up to a sense of blind, bone-chilling fear. Looking down, squinting and hiding her face from the biting blizzard, the woman from my dream belatedly realizes that the traces in front of her suddenly disappeared. She lifts her head and sees that her companion is gone, and there’s only white emptiness surrounding her…
I once wrote a few poems and later made a film about this couple from the dimension of my anxious dreams. Travelers, outcasts, rootless individuals without a past or present who hold on to each other and carry inside of them the memories of their normal past life that they will never be able to restore. Who are these two? Why do I dream about them? I found at least one possible answer: In the 1930s, my great-great-grandfather and great-great-grandmother were repressed as kulaks and deported to the Solovky prison camp. The details got lost to history, but somehow, my great-great-grandmother managed to escape and come back home. Later she picked up her daughters from the neighbors, decided to stay in Kyiv, lived through the Second World War as a medic and had a long life. She was finally left in peace. But she never again saw her husband, for he died in the Solovky prison, and I know nothing about his time there.
Fractured and scared from traumatic experiences, our grandparents quietly stand behind us. I can’t stop thinking about the millions of those who were crushed, separated, and forever mutilated by the meat grinder that was the twentieth century, about a collective feeling of insecurity and homelessness, about traumas and fears that had been passed from one generation to another. It seemed like we, the people of the twenty-first century, were supposed to break that vicious circle a long time ago. But no, the process is ongoing, and only at this very moment are we writing a new history, albeit at a very heavy price. You can’t make an omelet without cracking the eggs, and I—not that strong of a woman—am standing in the middle of a white field and screaming, overcome with fear, or rather, with multiple fears, because I don’t want to prepare myself for losing those I love.
Roma died…Meanwhile, my Facebook feed brings another piece of impossible, unbearable news, knocking the wind out of me. The son of a fellow poet, an intellectual, a noble warrior, a social activist, and a charming Adonis with the face of a Greek god will now forever be twenty-four. The news shattered my husband and me; we are sitting side by side, reading the news in silence. I choked on my tears.. It was not supposed to be like this. No, not him. Or him, or her…Those who were seemingly children just yesterday grew up and didn’t even get a chance to have children of their own, but were already dying, dying almost every day for Ukraine. Bright minds and fearless Cossacks, who one day had to tell themselves and their loved ones: we have to be prepared for my possible death.
But we have to be prepared for possible life, too. “My worst fear is to survive this apocalypse,” said a friend of mine with a bitter laugh a couple of days ago. For the past eight years, she has fought tirelessly in this war and taken on different roles, a soldier among them. Well, it would be a different kind of challenge: We would have to learn how to live again after all those losses, the Rubicons crossed, the dull pain and despair, the numbness and powerlessness, our estrangements from those dearest to us, the forever abandoned plans, the children that weren’t born when the time was right, the trees that were never planted, the important words that were never uttered… Moreover, we would have to learn not only how to live but also how to feel joy. Otherwise, what was all that for?
That’s why, my dearest, I will be walking behind you, stepping into your footprints, all the while mumbling, “Quit smoking.” And, as dramatic as it may sound, I will walk for as long as each of us has left to live. I’ll walk for as long as we always have that intersecting point of our different coordinate axes–our zero point, as round as a new wedding ring with the inside engraving and a quote from one of my poems: “I am your home.”
This original Ukrainian version of this text was first published on Dwutygodnik.