In my land, the smell of death on a summer afternoon

LYSYCHANSK, Ukraine – There was a mass grave that it housed 300 people, and I was standing on its edge.

The chalky body bags were stacked in the pit, uncovered.

One moment I was a different person, someone who has never known how the wind smelled after passing over the dead on a nice summer afternoon.

As of mid-June, those bodies were far from a full tally of civilians killed by bombing in the area around the industrial city of Lysychansk in the previous two months.

They were just “the ones who.” they didn’t have anyone to bury them in a garden or courtyard, ”one soldier casually said.

He lit a cigarette while we looked at the tomb.

The smoke obscured the smell.

It was rare to have such a moment to slow down, watch and reflect while reporting from the eastern Donbas region of Ukraine.

But that day, Ukrainian soldiers were happy after delivering packages of food and other goods to local civilians, so they offered to take reporters from New York Times on another site they said we should see: the common grave.

After leaving the site, I naively thought that the palpable presence of death in the air could not follow me home, on all the roads and checkpoints separating the graves in Donbas, to my loved ones in the western part of Ukraine. .

I was wrong.

I was back in the capital, kiev, in the small apartment I had rented, and was cleaning the smoke and dust from the front line of my clothes when my best friend, Yulia, wrote to me:

He had lost his cousin, a soldier, who fought in the east.

I would have to be next door soon another tomb.

It was a familiar experience for many Ukrainians.

Five months after the start of the full-scale Russian invasion, the front lines of the war mean little.

Missile attacks and reports of deaths and casualties have tarnished almost every part of the countryIt’s like poison.

Yulia’s cousin Serhiy was serving in a mobile air battalion around the city of Izium to the east.

A few hours before he died, he sent his last message to his mother, Halyna:

a bouquet of flowers emoji.

He then drove to the fighting at the front, where he was found by a Russian machine gun.

In the Donbas, these tragedies form the backdrop to everyday existence, piling up in numbers that seem inconceivable even when they completely surround you, an inescapable reality that feels like air in your lungs.

There is no catharsis for people living in frontline regions.

Instead, they seem overwhelmed by the sheer magnitude of what is happening around them, as if it’s too much of an existential threat for them to do anything about.

So they wait stunned for what often seems to be the inevitable outcome, hypnotized by indecisionforgetting that they are directly in danger.

It looked different in the West, away from the front lines.

In the Donbas, almost all of the sudden strange noises were exactly what you suspected them to be:

something deadly flying nearby, looking for the living.

On the contrary, kiev was almost peaceful.

With running water, gas, electricity and the Internet, it was far from the medieval conditions of destroyed Lysychansk.

People played Frisbee and walked their dogs in parks, without the physical stiffness and sense of dread that comes with the threat of sudden death.

The series of midsummer missile attacks on cities far from fighting to the east and south had just begun, turning the daily news of killed civilians into a nightmare:

unsuspecting people, including children, torn to pieces or burned live in shopping malls and medical facilities. in broad daylight.

It left us with knots in our stomachs, but they still hadn’t turned into something almost genetic, a terror that would be transmitted to offspring for survivors of this war.

Another, private nightmare was contained in Serhiy’s coffin, closed to prevent the family from seeing his wounds.

It heralded the arrival of war in Lishchn, a postage stamp from a village in northwestern Ukraine where Yulia’s family came from.

There was no dull thud of artillery or the cry of a missile, only the silent drone of a funeral procession.

Because soldiers like Serhiy fought on the front lines, the villagers still had present and future, war-distorted, but protected.

So that Saturday morning, hundreds of them came to Serhiy’s parents’ yard to share the weight of their grief and take a long farewell walk with the family.

As the priest read the prayers to the crowd, a flock of swallows maneuvered high above us:

a series of peaceful black dots crossing the blue sky.

One of them flew up and sat on a wire just above Serhiy’s mother, who was crying next to the coffin, propped up on a pair of kitchen stools outside the house.

I’ve seen these ceremonies on reporting duty before, but emotionally it definitely gives the distance of a stranger.

But that day, there was Yulia, trembling in the wind

So I put my arm around my best friend, closer than ever to a person’s raw pain.

Hours later, when the prayers ended, Halyna could no longer cry.

He simply talked to his son in a low voice, as he did over 30 years ago when he was a baby, his face in the crib as small as the face in the funeral photograph of the smiling man in uniform holding a rocket launcher.

Finally, we took the long walk to take Serhiy from the family yard to his grave.

Hundreds of people walked with Serhiy’s parents through their hometown.

There was a shop where he could buy his first cigarettes and a lake where he probably swam after leaving school with his friends.

Serhiy’s life experiences seemed to be hidden in every corner of his village.

Made the excursion unbearably long.

My steps that day coincided with the pain of a family, but only one.

There are so many more in this war that it seems far from over.

It was hard to keep my thoughts from wandering through the cornfields of Donbas to that huge mass grave in Lysychansk.

There was no one present to mourn them there.

After the Russians took control of the city in the last days of June, the 300 body bags with identification tags affixed by the Ukrainian soldiers were probably joined by many others, without a name.

But I thought someone somewhere agreed mourning in silence for each of them.

Now, as I write this, others are walking the same paths of memory and loss across Ukraine:

on city alleys and cornfields, on rubble and broken glass, through eastern steppes, western forests, liberated villages, trenches and bleeding cities on the fringes of the front line.

Later on, there will be a sunny afternoon for some of us to stop, hold the hand of someone we love, and let go of everything and everyone we lost in the war.

But how long does it take to get there?

c.2022 The New York Times Company