Sometime between February 24th and March 1, 2022
11:10pm. This is the fourth time today — or is it only the third? that Max, Britt, Zak, Andy and I are sitting in the basement of our cement block and brick apartment building. The Telegram channel alerts us and we grab our things and go. I packed a “refugee” backpack — the bare minimum of what I imagine I’d want with me in case we aren’t able to return to our apartment for some reason and have to run, be on the move…canned fish, dried fruit, water, flashlight, batteries, matches, basic toiletries, a change of underclothes and laptop.
The crowd is larger now than it’s been all day — feels like all our neighbors who didn’t flee the city or country are here. Only a few are missing. The younger couple, Anya and Bogdan, with whom we were chatting earlier today, aren’t here. Our next door neighbors, who’d said they’d follow us down, haven’t appeared. The radio news is far more staticky than it’s been all day.
March 1, 2022
What day is this…6 I think, of war. Yesterday was the hardest yet, because of emotional pain, the fear of (or already evidence of) misunderstanding and division in our relationships with our Russian friends and brothers and sisters.
I feel the need to want to share and connect and communicate on social media and yesterday I stopped feeling safe enough to do it. It was problematic anyway, time consuming and labor intensive, trying to choose words that are true, accurate, and offend no one. But this is war. It’s impossible. I am not willing to risk further damage to my relationships on both sides of this war. I believe with all my heart that we want the same thing. I don’t have faith that it’s possible to speak at the moment and not be misunderstood.
That was part of a prayer I wrote down on March first. By then, we had been living together for several days in the corridor of our kids’ three-room apartment: my husband Andy and myself, our daughter Britain and her husband Max, and four-year-old Zak. After a few days of running up and down from our apartments (we have a two-room on the ninth floor, the top floor, in the same building) to the “bomb shelter” in the podval (or basement: a dirt floor crawlspace under the ground floor that runs the whole length of our building) and spending one entire night down there, we decided together that quality of life would be much better (especially for Zak) if we just stayed in the corridor of the Yakovlev’s apartment during air raid alerts. With two thick concrete block walls between us and the outside of the building, if a missile hit, we reasoned we’d have a decent chance there, nearly in the center of the house.
