Departures – an excerpt from the novel ‘Shut Mouth’

It was a year after the war began in Donbas that Maya officially met Orest, though he was not a stranger to her. She had seen him a couple of houses away raising his umbrella in the rain, picking a flower, and scooping a stray cat into his arms.

“You like them too,” she said.

“They bring me so much joy,” he said at a time when joy was almost forbidden.

They started a shelter in Maya’s basement though it was not for the humans that swayed with need, like branches in the wind. It was almost inadvertent, the way they gathered there. Sometimes they descended underground during air-raid sirens. At first, they descended separately, then together.

The shelter was for the animals that were left behind in the war. Since Maya wasn’t going to school, she spent the days nursing the cats, their bodies walking circles around her, brushing against her. They had decorated the space with paintings Orest had done of the amusement parks he liked to imagine.

“I’ve seen so many people leave,” Maya said.

“I have dreams in which I can only see their backs, their arms gripping suitcases.”

Among the sounds of the cat’s meows, she had conversations with him. When he told her his name, it was as if she had known it all along. He was so skinny that she noticed his boney wrists. He liked to play with the cats and had scratches up and down his arms. Sometimes they scratched harder when they heard a loud noise from the outside, a boom, an explosion.

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Sometimes she recited the poetry that she had learned from her grandmother to him, Taras Shevchenko and Lesya Ukrainka. The cats listened too.

Maya and Orest spoke of the past with nostalgia. Maya grew to like moments she once felt uncomfortable in. She remembered standing up in front of the classroom and reciting a poem. Her memory had almost always come close to failing her, but then there was the moment, she relaxed in front of the staring faces. She became herself speaking someone else’s words.

When it was time to go the United States to join distant family members, she left the cats behind. It was easier to leave him, though he seemed to step out from their circling like a superhero.

She remembered someone singing a song. The words swelled in her heart, but it had never happened that way. She had never really heard the song. It was all in her imagination.

She thought of a song she had played over and over on cassette. She remembered the lyric, “She would sit alone,” and she knew she would recreate that feeling in the Midwestern United States. She thought of the sound of rewinding as she listened to the cassette again and again.

Now when she looked at the war, behind her in some way, she thought of all the cats and her heart ached. It was a story that she told her new friend, one in which her new friend filled in the details. Maya was a complete person before she met her friend, caring for cats, loving a friend when she knew she would leave the moment she met him.