Part Six: Unstuck in Time

I’m coming home and I hope I leave the war behind me.

WARSAW, PL — The fog settles in.

It’s going to be a beautiful day in Poland’s capital. The sun will rise at 5:50 a.m. and cast a pink hue over the concrete city. It’ll be warm enough to walk around in a sweater or have a cup of coffee on a terrace overlooking the Vistula River.

Somewhere in Warsaw, refugees will begin a new life and somewhere in the city a stranger will open their home to children orphaned by war.

But the sun, the cool river breeze and the promise of a new day cannot lift the fog in my brain.

We know what trauma does to the mind of a survivor. It changes their brain chemistry, it pulses through them, accelerated by the slightest threat and makes them lash out like a wounded animal. They are a house on fire and they’ll destroy it one plank at a time just to stop the burning.

I know what trauma does to a person because it lives inside me. It feels like the wages of every sin you’ve ever committed coming due. I felt it come back to me when I crossed the border on foot Sunday, following grandmothers and babies, teenagers mainlining information on their smartphones, a young mother with a home pregnancy test in a grocery bag she carried into Poland.

I was the only fighting-age male in my group. The rest are off dying, killing, surviving and keeping the country’s lights on, as it were. I’m not a fighter, I’m a witness. It’s a living. At least that’s what I tell myself.

I felt the fog come to me then then and I’ve been shaking ever since.

We know what does trauma do to a person but what does does trauma do to a country? Or two countries? What does trauma do to democracy? To the rights we enshrine in our constitutions?

My mind is scattered like 1 million shards of broken glass. I have become unstuck in time to steal a phrase. I need something good to cling to.

***

A TRAIN STATION NEAR POLAND.

“Palyanytsya!”

The old man lumbered towards me like a mummy, his hands reaching for my neck. I was 60 per cent sure this was a joke. Ukrainian humour takes some getting used to. He said it again, this time guiding me through the pronunciation.

“Palya-ny-tsya!”

I gave it a shot: “Play-nee-tsa!”

Usually, Dan the interpreter would translate language and context for my Canadian brain. A few days earlier we had met with an Orthodox priest who made a big deal of showing me how his church had fallen into disrepair. Dan quietly explained that was his way of asking for “a small donation.” Fair enough.

But on the palyanystya question, Dan too was stumped.

“I think it’s some sort of codeword to see if you’re a spy,” Dan said. “I believe it’s a potato pancake or something. Palyanystya?”

The old timer, Roman, told us it’s a Ukrainian word Russians struggle with. So when Ukrainians suspected a Soviet agent was in their ranks, they’d test it on him. I passed but only because my pronunciation was so bad I had to be an American.

This was one of the first times a Ukrainian aside from Dan had taken any interest in me. In Lviv, a city of 700,000, Westerners are seen as something between a nuisance and a necessary but annoying part of daily life. We know only a few broken words in Ukrainian, we inexplicably smile at passersby and trudge around in combat gear even though the front is day’s drive east. They can see us coming from a mile away, sometimes crossing the street to avoid having one of us bump into them while we’re taking a picture of a cathedral.

But we write our stories, relay the Ukrainians’ messages to our governments and trade our American currency for the hryvnia (pronounced grunya).

So they put up with us.

In this Soviet-era train station near the Polish border, however, Roman seemed genuinely curious about the presence of a large-headed Canadian among the refugees and soldiers. Dan and I were waiting to interview the station boss and, possibly out of boredom, I started asking what every Cyrrilic letter on every sign meant.

“Wait, if that ‘N’ looking letter is really a P then why is there a ‘P’ after it?” I asked.

“Because the ‘P’ is really an R,” he said.

The word, правила (pravyla), means “rules” in English. Only the a is the same as ours. There are 33 letters in the Cyrillic alphabet and almost all of them confuse me to no end. Dan says it makes spelling easier because each of the characters make such distinct sounds.

By now I was darting across the old train station, jumping to point at letters on the marble walls so Dan could translate them. I scribbled down notes furiously. The women making sandwiches for refugees laughed. Roman cracked a smile.

“What do you call those contests of spelling?” Dan asks.

“A spelling bee?”

“Yes, we cannot have those,” he says. “Because if you can pronounce a word, you can spell it. So it would be very boring if we had spelling bees.”

For example, the symbol Ж — which looks like a an X having a midlife crisis — makes a “shz” sound. No other combination of letters make that noise. Dan didn’t tell me that. Roman did. I think he found my taking an interest in Cyrillic endearing.

“Are there differences between the way Americans and Canadians speak,” Roman asked.

“Many,” I said, struggling to think of anything beyond, “zed” versus “zee” and “cheque, please” versus “I’ll pay the bill now.” Globalization is a motherfucker.

“What part of Canada are you from?” Roman asked.

“Montreal.”

“Montreal Canadiens! Khockey!”

“Yes! They played the Soviet Union once. Red Army Team. They said it was one of the best games ever played.”

“Did they win, your Canadiens?”

“It was a tie.”

“They would’ve won if there were more Ukrainians on their team.”

Once this was a quiet border station. A few passenger trains bound for Poland, some grain freight bound for European markets and visitors from the west dropping off electronics and other consumer good that aren’t yet available in Ukraine.

Maria, a volunteer who serves soup and sandwiches to refugees fleeing the war, said buying goods in Poland and selling them in the village next to the station is a vibrant part of the local economy.

That was before the invasion.

When Vladimir Putin’s army crossed into eastern Ukraine three weeks ago, the old train station and border villages transformed into something much darker.

Sergiy Sydyrko was there when it happened. Sydyrko, the station boss, said it was like gates of hell had opened up. Thousands squirmed their way from the station to the platform, fighting for a spot on the train. Children screamed and in the distance you could hear Russian rockets colliding into the earth.

“The Russian army, they were trying to create a panic,” Sydyrko said. “Nothing will ever prepare you to see the panic in people’s faces as they flee war.”

Sydyrko has a face that looks like it was chiseled out of granite. He’s tall with a crew cut and broad shoulders. His eyes welled when he described the horrors of that first day at war.

But where there once was chaos, Sydyrko has helped foster a semblance of order. There are now 14 passenger trains running through his station every day, each packed with about 2,000 refugees.

When we visited, the platform and station were empty save for a pair of soldiers, some volunteers and Roman’s crew. A train’s hydraulic brakes hissed and a middle-aged couple stepped off with their daughter.

The man needed a doctor’s note for his military exemption so they asked for a ride to Lviv. Dan obliged.

The girl is maybe right years old, carrying a stuffed animal as she boarded Dan’s sister’s car.

“Does your bear have a name?“ I asked.

“It’s just a bear,” she said.

They came from Kyiv, which is still resisting the Russian advance but isn’t really a liveable place anymore. People still cling to the capital though, waiting for hours outside grocery stores in hopes of getting some cold cuts and bread. Some even have an app on their phone that rings an alarm when an air strike is imminent.

I know this because the father’s phone went off as we drove through the plains that lead to Lviv.

“Another missile strike. God help us.”

They made it safely to Lviv and planned on heading to Poland the next morning. Before they left, an air raid siren signalling a rocket attack blared over Lviv.

No one was hit.

***

I am coming home.

Writing that hurts. I feel the fog draping me in guilt and sadness.

One day this war will be over. More children will die. More mothers will mourn their sons and two countries that were once one will have to figure out how to live next to each other again.

That is, if they’re both still standing.

My hope is that the fog will lift when I see my daughter and kiss Marie-Pier. It always comes back but the kid helps keep the worst of it at bay.

I am coming home and I will try not to bring the war with me. This too is a luxury of living in the west.

I am coming home and that terrifies me.