You’ll Have to Learn to Live in a New Way

The night before

That night, Olena went to bed in the early morning hours. There was no need to get up to work, and she, a real night owl from a young age, wandered around the apartment, as women tend to, reaching for one thing or another. She did some laundry, put some things more neatly in the closet, washed a small pile of dirty dishes, dusted the silver-colored casing of the ancient Sony TV and its screen.

As soon as she satisfied her housecleaner ambitions, the woman with her now-cleansed soul brewed her favorite bergamot tea and took out a package of custard eclairs from the fridge. Many confectioneries in Ukraine produced these classic cakes, but not many of them were successful. To be more precise, only one was, BKK, and only with them would Olena deign to cheat on her low-calorie, albeit chaotic and sporadic diet.

The BKK brains had thought of packing each 60-gram eclair in an airtight package (and then putting 20 of them in a box), so they kept fresh and tasty for a long time. And they were a real temptation for a woman like herself trying to cut down on her food intake. When she was in one of the nearby grocery stores, she always inspected the display case with pastries, and when there was a promotion for these sweets, she took ten or so boxes of them and loaded a strategic reserve for a week, or even more, into the fridge.

And now she took out one oblong, sweet-bodied eclair from the fridge, removed its painted plastic wrap, put it to warm up a little, and brewed her half-liter cup of tea (it took a lot of fragrant hot liquid to wash down 60 grams of the delicate sweetness of that eclair so generously filled with classic custard cream).

To create the illusion of human company, Olena turned on the freshly dusted TV. She clicked through the channels, at first she wanted to stop at one of the music channels, but the pleasant song she came across quickly ended. It was sung by one of those tone-deaf and better-off-mute  “stars,” so she switched to one of the nearest “family” channels. There was a news broadcast, and again some political scientists or so-called experts pondered the topic of whether Putin would really attack Ukraine.

For more than a month the ugly Kremlin “mole” (as the unfortunate child of St. Petersburg’s proletarian slums was nicknamed by his classmates from the KGB school) had been grating the nerves of Ukrainians and many others in the world, conducting idiotic “training” in the south of that evil wannabe-empire, not far from the border of Ukraine. At first, the Ukrainians were tense about these “exercises,” so they started conducting an audit of their own military capabilities, and the conclusions were, to be honest, not too comforting.

Optimists tried to see the glass as half full rather than half empty, so they consoled themselves and their compatriots with our trademark, “The West will not abandon us to our own devices!” With “the world’s second-best army” languishing into its third month in the mud of Belgorod Oblast, everyone was tired of alarming forecasts to the effect of “attack-or-no-attack.” Life took its own course, Ukrainians celebrated Valentine’s Day, Women’s Day on March 8 loomed on the horizon. And among them, all “born in the USSR” casually mentioned Defender of the Fatherland Day of the previous era – February 23. Men who once wore epaulets with the letters of the Soviet Army drank glass after glass “for the occasion,” and their wives presented them with the traditional cologne and a set of socks.

Olena barely remembered the day commemorating the Soviet army and navy. Although as a child, as the head of her class, on the eve of this military holiday, she collected 25 kopecks each from her female classmates for postcards and gifts for the boys as future defenders of the Fatherland. Then she and a friend, the “deputy head,” would go to a toy store with the tinny coins they had collected and buy a dozen or so identical plastic cars.

And so yet another ordinary February 23rd in the year of the White Water Tiger came to an end, smoothly transitioning to the 24th; another long winter night passed, and Olena Savchenko in her rented apartment near her beloved Golden Gate found one reason after another not to get into the bed that had long been prepared for sleep. Either her biorhythms had gone completely awry, or some foreboding prevented her from relaxing and dozing off.

Glancing at the phone screen in passing, she realized with surprise that four hours had already passed. I should take a Sonmil pill, she thought, and try to finally fall asleep so I won’t stay in bed until noon. She punched the pill out of the blister, popped it in her mouth and headed to the kitchen for water – to wash down her placebo. When her soul was calm, the drug, of course, worked, but with her soul troubled, she’d need at least two, one for each eye.

She turned off the light in the room, felt for her earplugs and pushed them deeper into her ears. For several years now, she hasn’t gone to bed without them – the neighboring restaurant had equipped itself with powerful ventilation, which at night, in complete silence, sighed rhythmically, at times preventing Olena from falling asleep.

Alarm

She threw her bathrobe onto the chair next to the bed and pulled the blanket by the edge, preparing to sink into the embrace of the soft bed, but at that moment the room became brighter – the screen of the mobile phone on the table lit up. Olena looked sideways at the phone and realized that it was her daughter texting her on Viber. “Strange,” the woman thought. “Why is she awake at five in the morning? That’s not like her at all!”

Alarmed, she opened her daughter’s message. Alina wrote: “Mom, do you hear the explosions? It looks like the war has started!” Olena tried to catch her breath, her legs felt frozen in a huge block of ice. She almost threw up her Sonmil. There was a pounding in her temples: “War? What the hell could war be like in the 21st century!? Have the morons completely lost their minds?” She really felt that she might pass out right on the floor. The feeling of complete powerlessness gripped the mind like a vise. So this is how it spins – the wheel of history. With a crackling and screeching sound, her insides turned cold, and her brain was about to explode from a complete lack of understanding about what to do next. Where to run, who to ask for protection, for yourself and loved ones? Does Maharishi’s maxim “Do less and accomplish more” work in such a situation?

But she had to say something to her daughter, and something not completely stupid. Her daughter asked about the explosions. Olena listened – there were no explosions, the silence of the night reigned all around, only the rhythmic sigh of the ventilator under the tin hoods behind the fashionable restaurant. The confused woman picked up the phone and wrote: “I can’t hear anything. Where did you hear the war was on?”

“Online it’s full of photos of missiles, shelling, and explosions!” the daughter quickly pecked out her Viber text. “They’re shooting straight into residential buildings! It’s insane!” Olena understood that she had to turn on the TV. If indeed the Putinoids had attacked Ukraine, then they’re already talking about it on the emergency news. She belonged to the old school – she believed the TV rather than social networks, which were full of fakes on fakes chasing fakes.

The TV screen lit up, and a woman from Kyiv with ten years of experience saw the alarmed, stern face of Zelensky, who announced the attack of the Russian Federation on our country, the arrival of multi-kilometer armored columns of the army of that damned wannabe-empire coming from the north and south at the same time, not to mention the surprise attack from the LDNR. The President announced the introduction of martial law, the mobilization of reservists, the need for everyone to consolidate and protect the country from the terrible onslaught of the centuries-old enemy.

Olena was very sorry that she hadn’t gone to bed earlier, at least by midnight. She felt more and more tired, as if sand were sprinkled in her eyes, her head was buzzing and she almost felt dizzy. Adrenaline from the terrible news competed in her blood with the Sonmil, and the picture was quite strange – a defenseless woman has just been informed that her country was being attacked by a neighboring country, ten times larger and with five times the army, a lot of weapons, even atomic, and she yawns (even if she’s trembling from an unprecedented stress), she rubs her eyes and feels that if she does not go to sleep now, she’ll simply gouge them out.

Somehow you’ll have to learn to live in a new way, she thought.

Translated from Ukrainian by Stash Luczkiw