File - Марина, 229-12-04

• Ukrainian
• English

English translation (unedited):
"This house was built by my grandfather. My father, me and my younger brother were born here. I remember how on the Green Holidays of some Soviet time my mother used to spread aloe vera, young wormwood and linden flowers. She spread those herbs with her thin fingers in the newspapers, pushed them closer to the window. There is a lot of sun outside, but the light in the room is diffused, scattered from the sharp edges of young grape leaves. Grandfather took care of his vineyard, planted three cherries for three granddaughters with our names. "These are herbs, so it put the dead to visit and rejoice for us, the living," - really shocking grandmother's eerie explanation of herbs. I did not sleep that night - I was waiting for the spirit of the house and when the dead came to smell wormwood and lovage. The roar of the night trains was calmer: people were being transported to big cities, freight cars were carrying something factory and smelly, life was spinning to the beat of the wheels only on the railway tracks, and someone's bright dreams were concentrated and petrified in small transparent units. glass balls, many there on the roads.
This is a house between Severodonetsk and Rubizhne, South-South, an industrial neighborhood that you know from Zorya - "Boykivsky Zavod", Luhansk patrimony of the Party of Regions, it is defined by a fragrant forest and deep lakes. The house of three generations was my father's pride, and my children once had to inherit it. As knowledge of why the herbs lies on the floor and windowsills. When the Russians hit a nitric acid tank in April, the explosion was so powerful that it destroyed the entire quarter. Houses fell like matchboxes, barns exploded like dry reeds. The dead remained under the rubble. A relative from a nearby street, ninety years old. My grandmother used to take seedlings from her every year, and while there was an exchange of plants and news between them, the post-war veterans, I collected flower petals to make the ants wings. Startseva's grandmother died in her cellar because her daughter had been poisoned by the Russian regime and did not consider it necessary to flee from Russian missiles. On the eve of the Trinity sent parents a fresh photo of the destruction - there are locals who go to the declared addresses of the occupied cities and take pictures of the remains of someone else's past life. My parents' house was called the safest in that part of the suburbs, such happiness, only the roof was torn off, the windows were broken and the yard was dug up. The summer garden for strawberries, mustard, dill and basil salads is now lined with red poppies, the whole yard in poppies, which has never been there. It is said that Russian shells smashed the southern cemetery where my grandparents, younger sister and other relatives are buried, and while I covered the windowsill with fragrant herbs in Khmelnytsky, our yard was covered with otherworldly herbs, covered by our dead during our lives. Grandparents grow grapes, green sister-cherry.
This is much better than what happens to my mother's apartment. Even the windows seem to have survived, but Russian soldiers have settled there. I hope they caught a strong blow to the groin when they saw the Ukrainian flag in the corridor."
Marina --
25.06

Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0) https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/
Із Зазначенням Авторства — Некомерційна 4.0 Міжнародна (CC BY-NC 4.0) https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/deed.uk