Flaws: Vedmykiv

[17] Not the Only Thing I Did

IT WAS STILL DARK. The sun was an hour or two behind the horizon. "Time to go," the gunman said. That hour of shuteye did nothing for me. I ran to the house and packed up the leftover blinchiki and a few cabbage rolls the women of the house had left for us. I wrapped them in a cloth and stuffed them in my backpack. I had never been so cold in my life, so when the country woman and her daughter got up to see us off, I couldn't help but hug them both.

The deserted dirt road between the steel mill and the sunflower fields was calm, like a familiar feeling, like an old memory from my childhood, as if I had been there before. It was home.

"Soon, these will all be battlefields," the soldier said.

"Let's get out of here first."

The hike was long. We cut across semi-abandoned villages, fields covered with winter dew, wild grass, and oak trees. The few people who came out to see us didn't seem to care. We were not a pack of wolves but a school of different colored fish swimming among dead coral, or rather, through the long dry grass and wild herbs of the Ukrainian steppe. Silence and fatigue blurred the rural landscape and the austere reluctance of the country dwellers. I wished I was on a beach. Wishes didn't wash away the residual fear of having faced certain death over and over again, as if it was calling my name. As if she was calling me. For a moment, I felt like my life was turning into an apocalyptic nightmare, not just a huge mistake. It was around five in the morning. A man was plowing his patch of land. His old lady was throwing seeds at their pigs. The hard-working children of the black soil were dressed in leather and wool in solid colors: white, red, blue, and yellow. No one cared about the darkness. No one cared about the cold. No one cared with so much else to do.

"This is where we last saw them," said the agitated soldier. His voice cracked like a boiler spewing steam out of a little hole.

In the dark, the separatist patrols were far more careful. It was easier to hide, but they also preferred to get closer, and at point-blank range, lousy aim or not, those Kalashnikovs punched. We had found a dirt track behind some cherry trees back to one of the hare trails.

"Why are your hands shaking?"

His prediction became true not long after that. Footsteps and chatter came from the trail. We took cover behind a wall of towering trees, right at the top of a gully, like one of the many I crossed in the wildest parts of the hare trails. The insurgents screamed and howled like wolves, intimidating the wild animals, the frightened journalist, and his eclectic escort. They didn't know we were a few yards away.

I suppose I should have been glad their shouts were not the same battle cries extinguished by a Russian Empire, Nazi Germans, or the Bolsheviks of the past and resurrected once again. They were just the shouts of kids with guns playing on their cell phones.

"They are my age, maybe younger," I whispered.

"With stolen equipment," said the other gunman. He was right. The rebels guarding the far end of their controlled territory were not the little green men my companions were eager to confront but a group of kids in blue jeans and black jackets so deep in the nothingness that their nearest safe haven was an empty dirt road leading nowhere. My escort salivated. I wondered if they would feel differently had the enemy been camouflaged in green or worn the black bulletproof vests and metal shields that patrolled the streets of the industrial city, like the professional militiamen without badges led by the sadistic eyes of a certain captain. One of the armed boys wore white sneakers in the mud. He couldn't be older than me.

"That's what they want you to believe," whispered the lead gunman. "The city arsenal, ni? They are not police guns. Those arms crossed the border."