I Love Russia by Elena Kostyuchenko

Author:Elena Kostyuchenko [Kostyuchenko, Elena]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2023-10-17T00:00:00+00:00

* * *

—

I cut off all contact with Lyana.

I wandered Rostov for two days, not talking to sources, not doing interviews, not making plans, not going out to the border. I was afraid to spook the people hiding the bodies. I couldn’t leave. I ate berries at the market, dodged children on skates, there were thunderstorms.

In the roofless remains of the Paramonovsky warehouses, springs had broken through the foundation, and teenagers dove off the walls of the building into the water, then lay on the girders to dry.

Men at an antique stand were saying that even after Petro Poroshenko’s inauguration, they kept getting slammed. They said it was like a rat getting eaten by worms after it grows sick and weak. “That’s how it’ll be with Ukraine, just like Darwin said.”

Refugee women from Slavyansk, each with a child in her arms, on a city bus, “When I talk to my mom on Skype, I keep hearing this buzzing—bzh-bzh-bzh—and that will go on for sixteen hours straight.”

“Your house is high up, it’s just how the sound travels.”

“No, it’s because they’ve gotten all the way up to the gas station.”

“Who?”

“The people shooting. They’ve blown up the gas tanks.”

Women in church said the stars were in Putin’s favor for two more years and that America knows that for two more years, it won’t have the power, so they are giving Ukrainians weapons and bulletproof vests but no money.

Two days later, I learned that they gave Zhenya’s body back.

He was buried.

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