Four Different Love Stories

We crossed over the Dnipro in the dark.  

It was the third bridge we’d tried, because waiting in line at the other ones would take longer than driving to the next.  We were both excited, like little schoolgirls. “It’s like we’re in a movie, it’s as simple as getting from A to B,” she said when we passed Polish border-control.  

Once we were over the river though, things changed. We have to drive very slowly, and not at all during the day now, in case our eight-wheeler is spotted.  One lady my friend knows drove this route last week, and she got her tires shot out.  She had to keep bumping for another fifty miles before she stopped.  We can’t do that though. I crack jokes with her until three AM, then stop. Without getting out of the truck cab, we switch places so I’m driving. She looks again at the tiny security camera that lets us see the stacked vests and helmets in the trailer, like Frodo twisting the ring on his finger. The helmets are stacked like bowls. Hundreds and hundreds of upside-down bowls.  

“I’m hungry,” she says.  I tell her the black bread is under her seat, and we drive on.  

***

In the fighting today, someone knocked the spiky green letter ‘M’ off its pole above the stairs to the Metro.  I had always thought it was made of flimsy plastic, but it survived the fall unharmed.  The two teenage boys from the flat across the hall (the family who leave all their boots in an unsightly pile) carried it up eight flights of stairs.  They disassembled it on the concrete floor of our corridor.  

“What are you doing?  I asked them.

“Our flat looks onto the park,” they said, meaning the little square of green that is the focal point of our set of apartment complexes in Obolon’.  “We’re going to put Lyuba’s fairy lights inside the M and put it up in our window,” the brothers said.  I leaned back on my heels.  

“OK,” I said, “but remember to turn it off if you hear shots outside.”  They’re only fifteen, but I’m the scary neighbour, so they agreed to do what I said.

***

I gave my husband a haircut. We pretended he was coming into the barbershop for the touch-up he gets every two weeks, and I washed his hair with clear cucumber shampoo before leaning his head into the bathtub to blast it with warm water. I clothed his neck in a towel and started out with nail scissors, then the electric razor that sits in the back of the medicine cabinet next to the outdated paracetamol.

“It’s really not the same, is it,” I asked, using it to scratch some grey hair out from behind his ear. His skin is soft as candle wax.  

“No, it isn’t.”

***

I sat at the top of the stairs for three hours, waiting for the pork bones to boil in the pot.  I was hiding from Mama, because I was hungry. But if I stepped down the new rickety stairs, she would sit me down to do homework.  So I sat with no socks on, peeking through the slats in the staircase. The pot was boul’boul’ing, so Mama added onion, the carrot, the tomatniy sok and the cabbage. She was always cutting and adding, never a loose moment to stand around in with nothing to do but stir.  Potatoes went in there at some point, and beets-in-juice.  Fragrant steam floated up to me, so I lay back down.  The cat was sleeping, and I was so taken by his whiskers that I didn’t see Mama making garlic-bread. She presses the whole cloves against the hard bread, rubbing it like a cheese grater. I can imagine how she’ll take the salo tupperware out the fridge and let me spread as much as I like on the toast. I miss her every day.