‘You are all refugees now,’ said a female border guard officer in Poland returning the woman’s passport. It was about eight o’clock in the evening. We stood in the queue outside from eleven o’clock in the morning. We were cold and tired, or rather exhausted. Judging by what was happening around, that was the current reality for us indeed.
We were refugees. But my mind still refused to try this concept on for myself.
When my mum tried to get on a train in Zaporizhzhya, travelling alone only with her dog, and nearly fainted in a huge crowd of people pushing at the station. When I prayed like never before in my life, and 15 minutes later I received a text message from my mum, ‘I am on the train. Everything is ok.’ And tears were rolling down from feeling endless gratitude, ‘Lord, thank you for hearing and helping!’
In the overcrowded Kyiv-Lviv train where people slept on the floor and there was only one toilet for three cars. When at two o’clock in the morning a 70-year-old woman who fell unconscious was given first aid, and with the help of a friend from the press service of Ukrainian Railways (Ukrzaliznytsia) I tried to call an ambulance to the nearest train station.
When at the Polish border my back went out of whack, and then my frozen numb feet did the same, and I kept singing to myself the Troubadour’s song:
‘The night will pass, the rainy time will pass, and the sun will rise.’ And the sun did come out for a minute indeed. I looked at the sky again and thought, ‘Thank you for hearing me!’
When I wrote to my friend, ‘There is no time for the heaviness of heart. I turned it off on the first day of the war. According to Maslow's pyramid, it is not the time for emotional torments. We need to brace ourselves and try not to die.’
When on the bus at the border a boy opened a pack of cookies and I read the name and thought, ‘My favourite. I wonder when I can buy it again.’ I almost fell into a feeling of honing for everything that was left behind along with those cookies. But I managed to balance on the edge. I just decided I would deal with this later.
When after 24 hours on the road, I got out of my brother’s car at dawn in calm Germany, not even able to feel tired because of the fatigue.
I still could not say to myself, ‘Oksana, you are a refugee." And I still cannot now.
I know it is all there. I see it, I feel it, and I am part of it. But here and now it is much easier for me if I take it as a movie series, and if I take myself just as an actress in it.
It was created by a screenwriter who had an attack of sadism starting from the fifth episode. He decided to plunge his main characters into an epic *uck-up. And I don’t watch movie series like these ones at all, not to mention the fact that I was not going to take part in them! I like beautiful stories about nice human relationships. But okay, let’s take this as a mandatory requirement under the principles of dramaturgy.
However, I myself decide how exactly I play my role. That is why, all these days I smiled and joked, I was friendly and composedly reacted to other people’s tantrums, anger and rudeness.
I endlessly thanked all the people who helped me very, very much on this way! They received me at their homes, supported, shared their advice, gave me food, found travel options for me, and took care of me as if I was their family member. They were rather guardian angels, not people
I don’t know how soon it will end. But I know for sure that my friend was absolutely right when she said, ‘When you cannot say that everything will be fine, you can still try to remain a good person.’
This is a pivotal thing that we can now rely on in ourselves and in each other.
As soon as the next day after arriving in Germany, I realized why some of my friends do not want to stay in one country. They register and keep moving somewhere further.
To onlookers it may seem that people are looking for a more comfortable country, higher social benefits, and something else like that. Perhaps this is really so in some cases, but there is one more point that I, for example, did not take into account. These are questions.
The moment you stop shivering, driving, running, crossing borders, looking for a place to live, and you halt, a floodgate opens somewhere in your mind and a bunch of questions fall out upon you.
And you either don’t have answers to those questions because you are in the middle of nowhere, or you do have them, but, softly speaking, you do not really like them.
I thought I was coping with all of this quite well. Both with the questions and with answers to them. That I am an utter strong fighting spirit and I don’t allow myself to go off my nut.
Then, a week later, I was down with the coronavirus. Notably, I have never been sick like this in Ukraine, when at the same time you have the symptoms of sore throat, bronchitis, sinusitis, vomiting and pain in the bones and muscles as if a tram ran over you.
I don’t know what psychosomatics says about this, but I think that in this way my body simultaneously protested everything that was happening, wept out what was not wept out before, cried out the unspoken and went into a deep mourning for the past, the present and the future, which will never look the way it was planned previously.
I know it will be different. This is obvious.
If we are alive, then we will come to our senses, brace ourselves and will again begin to build our lives from the point where we find ourselves. The main thing is not to freeze in a stupor
But one way or another, in order to make room for something new, you need to free everything inside you from the old. Need to stop holding on, with all your strength, to a picture that no longer exists. This is painful, but it is inevitable – to recognize the reality that has the new input data.
I am recovering.
I am getting ready for my acceptance phase.
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