Translated into English by Hanna Leliv
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The woman who betrayed her husband and her home country lived in a nice apartment and enjoyed delicious food.
Now she held public office, and far from one of low status in this war-torn town. Her new so-called husband happened to meet her in line to receive humanitarian aid. It was hard to miss her—her body with its stigma of war still turned heads magically, and her body, even if half-covered by an oversized down jacket, promised pleasure to its new owner.
The woman could not afford to miss this opportunity. She smiled, and her smile disarmed the high-ranking officer. He melted away. He lost his head like a boy. And the woman… The woman did her best, fulfilling his every whim. She pushed away the thoughts of her actual husband, who had gone to war and left her, so maladjusted to reality, in this cold and hungry town, which turned into her trap.
The woman’s former friends were still lining up for meager humanitarian handouts, while she had everything. A free dinner at a restaurant, a new brand-name dress, stolen jewelry, a brand-new car she could not even dream of—her so-called husband provided her with everything.
In the morning, on the way to her new job in the back seat of the car, the woman watched faint life still flowing in the arteries of the once bustling town. She wrapped herself even tighter in her mink coat, glad to be on the other side of the window. She wanted to live. She just wanted to live, like she had lived before the war.
They were blown up together in the car as they were on their way back from another restaurant. He was killed instantly, while she lived on for a short while. Her beautiful face turned into a mask of violent, convulsive pain.
When her actual husband received the news of her death, he cursed and lit a cigarette. He no longer had a single photo of his wife in his phone.
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The woman who was breathing with her shot-through lungs in a small white car on the bypass had no right to die.
“You’re nuts,” people said when they heard where she was going and twisted their fingers at their temples. The woman waved them off angrily and, smoking, called everyone on her contact list. Her voice rustled, on and on. It begged, coaxed, threatened, and promised, but no one could help her. The woman smoked again, then cried and kicked and screamed, and then calmed down and picked up the phone again.
That February split her in half. The halves tried hard to reach each other, but they just could not reunite. A few days before the war broke out, the woman had taken her children to their grandmother in the countryside, but now it was impossible to get them out of there. The village had been occupied, the children were trapped, and the woman was on the verge of insanity.
In the end, another madman helped her plan a route that could theoretically get her to the village alive, but at the last minute he refused to accompany her. The woman did not blame him and was grateful for his help. At dusk, without turning on her headlights, she crept along the muddy dirt roads. Meanwhile, her children and grandmother were supposed to be walking towards her through the forest. But when she finally reached the place where she was supposed to pick up the children, no one was there.
She thrashed about the black forest until she heard crying. Her children were sitting on the frozen ground, shoulder to shoulder, sobbing. Their grandmother was nowhere to be seen. The woman’s oldest daughter, who was seven, explained, choking on her sobs, that her grandma had exploded and they had run away in fear. The woman pushed the frightened children into the car and drove back following the same route.
This time she was not so lucky. However, she was the one to catch all the bullets, and her children did not get any. And most importantly, they slipped through.
Wheezing, the woman stomped her foot on the pedal and thought that she had no right to die with her children behind her back.
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The woman who saw the war no longer felt guilty.
The war did not affect the woman personally. Her adult son lived abroad with his family; she had divorced her husband a while ago, and his traces had faded into the distance; and her parents had long been dead. The woman lived a quiet life in a small, neat house deep behind the frontline of the country bleeding with war. Her town was so small and so uninteresting to the enemy that they never even targeted missiles at it. There were no explosions, and only rarely were men in camo seen in the streets. The locals lived their usual lives: they went to church every Sunday, gossiped when choosing salo at the market, tended their gardens, and were glued to the TV in the evenings.
The woman suffered. Her soul ached from this slow-paced life that used to be so familiar and dear to her. The woman felt guilty for not having seen the war, not having heard its sounds, not having sensed its smells. She blamed herself for living as if nothing had happened, as if that February had not divided the life of the whole country into a before and an after.
The woman could not sleep at night. She lay in her bed in her neat house and stared into the darkness with inflamed eyes. Thoughts raced chaotically through her head. The woman had already made a decision she was too scared to admit to herself. She waited until the decision was ripe and fell into her consciousness like a ripe fruit from a tree. The decision ripened one night when the rain rustled outside and the wind whooshed.
After the sun rose, the woman cleared all the groceries from the convenience store she was running and loaded them into her old van. She put on black fleece sweats, crossed herself three times, got behind the wheel, and drove to the de-occupied territories.
A few days later, the woman fell fast asleep for the first time in months to the sounds of explosions, wrapped in a dirty sleeping bag in a cold basement.
She became part of the war.
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