Dolce Vita 14:22

22

Olena and Serhiy moved to Druzhkivka in the winter of 2023. By that time, their yard in the native Chervone (a village near Chasiv Yar in Donetsk region) had turned into a hodgepodge of frozen earth, broken furniture, and the remains of a barn.

The woman gives a tour of her new house, telling how she left her home.

— It first hit on the outskirts of our street. Somewhere closer to the lakes. Then they started shelling our neighbors. One woman was killed, another was injured, so I looked after her dogs. And then when that bomb exploded in our yard… Well, no matter how much we loved our house, we couldn’t stay, it was already the boiling point.

Behind the gate is a blue OKA car with a single seat—the driver’s seat. The woman promised to explain the functionality of the device later. Behind the gate, I immediately notice a variety of strange, as if from the savannah, bushes, carefully whitewashed trees, flowerbeds, and beds. When the couple moved into the house, there was nothing around except weeds. Now the garden gives the impression of a plot that has been passed down from generation to generation in well-groomed hands.

At first, Serhiy recalls, they didn't have a wish to do anything around the house — they believed that everything would soon be over and they would be able to return home.

We pass through a group of strange bushes and come across the first ceramic friend, a Cossack piggy bank.

“This is so that everyone who comes to visit can see that we are from Ukraine. It was my mother’s Cossack,” Olena added gloomily.

In the backyard, there is a gazebo, hung with thin fabrics, clothes for the apiary. On the table are three cups of tea and a samovar that belonged to Olena's late mother. The couple evacuated her from Chasiv Yar a few hours before an air bomb fell on the house. Since then, they have lived together in Chervone.

In the summer, when I came to visit them with foreign volunteers, the old woman took a liking to Florian, a twenty-year-old red-haired German, to whom she endlessly told about her youth, how she traded in the market and dreamed of learning French. At the end of our humanitarian mission, she gave each of us an artifact: a large wooden fan to Florian, and an Icon to me. It still hangs in my kitchen in Kyiv.

As we talk in the gazebo, Olena occasionally adjusts the teddy bear.

— This was mom's favorite toy. When we evacuated her, she first said, "Take the bear away". Her apartment was already destroyed, with no windows. There were several pieces of shrapnel in the room. And when we brought her to Chervone, they looked at the bear, and there was a piece of shrapnel in its head. He had saved Mom. We don't even know in which hit it happened.

Olena's mother was eighty-five, and when I came this time, I couldn't hug her anymore.

14

Chervone

The couple met twenty-three years ago. Olena and her mother sold fabrics at the market, and Serhiy sold fish nearby. One day, he invited the lady to go fishing with him, and so it started. Olena helped the guy set up nets, choose fish from them, and then she changed the market counter and stood next to her future husband.

Later, they began renting ponds, engaging in large-scale fishing and fish breeding. They traveled together almost all over Eastern Ukraine. They bought a car, a house, and started a family. Later, they developed a passion for apiary. Back in Chervone, ​​at our first meeting, Olena picked up a honeycomb from the hive and said, “Scoop it.” Is it worth saying that that portion of honey from the honeycomb was the most delicious thing in my life?

The couple lived among the same people who earned their living by farming. They worked in the morning, and in the evening they would go out to sing. Olena and Serhiy's children had left for different cities, and now they were left alone.

"It's not that we were rich, no. But we had a house, a car. We knew that we would go to work in the morning, and in the evening, there would be money. We knew that we would be able to buy groceries, some cookies. In the summer, we always went somewhere to rest," says Serhiy. "With the beginning of the war in 2014, the authorities limited fishing and forced us to rent land around reservoirs. Since then, the industry has declined, the ponds have dried up, and the fish have died. All that remained is an apiary and a temporary part-time job. It was difficult, but you can still live."

22

With the beginning of full-scale war, the couple, like all the residents of Chervone, ​​were left without a job. The village was located nine kilometers from the front line. Then, humanitarian aid packages were saved. Those who had cattle could still go to the nearest cities to sell milk. Some residents tried to leave, but always returned. They could not find IDP support programs or opportunities to find work outside the home.

All they had at that time were neighbors who supported each other. Every day, they would gather in someone’s yard and discuss the news they had learned. It happened like this: someone would take a phone and go to the hill closest to the village, right in front of the open slopes. There, in ten minutes, having caught the Internet and set their memory to ultra-concentration mode, this person would memorize the most important things and then would quickly run to the company and retell it. An adventure novel written by the residents of the Donetsk region themselves.

The only way to spend the days was to work on the plot. That's why it was so strange for me to see flowerbeds of previously unknown flowers next to a pyramid of debris that neighbors collected in their yards. The silence of the rural hinterland was filled only by a swarm of bees and the whistle of flying missiles. The couple's life was based on the mother, who needed constant care, neighbors who always helped, news from the hill, bees, and their house. And now, standing on a rented plot without noisy neighbors behind the fence, I ask myself: "What have they left?"

"Now, to be honest, I'm ashamed, so ashamed... I started selling my mother's dinnerware and various other items. Because what do we need from those cups and plates now, if we don't have anything to put in them? Yes, we've already reached this point... If I have to sell the apiary again, God, then I'll..." A few tears stopped Mrs. Olena's monologue.

The woman takes out her phone and shows a video of her dogs. They all stayed in the village of Chervone because there is no place to move them to the new house yet, and they need to be fenced off so they don't bother the neighbors. Olena goes to feed the dogs in the village, which is now just a few kilometers from the contact line.

"How can I leave them? Well, look," the woman seems to be trying to pet her pets through the screen, even though it's just a set of pixels. "This one is on our temporary care, the white one, taken from Chasiv Yar. This shepherd is a neighbor's, who is injured. And these are my two little ones. Look at how they jump, children! And when we drive away from them, they start crying! Tears run down their fur."

"But we won’t leave them," confirms Serhiy.
"No, no, never," sighs Olena.

The blue OKA is a transformer of Eastern technologies. If you cut out everything superfluous and leave the seat and pedals, you get a wonderful beehive transporter. With this car, Serhiy transported all the bee dwellings to a new home. When asked if his friends stung him on the way, he only smiles and nods his head ambiguously.

"Let’s go," Olena says, "take it more."

Happy, I’m going to the bee metropolis between the burnt-out greenhouse and the rows of strawberries.

"Has this been here before?" I ask Olena.

"No, I’m telling you, there was nothing here! We did all this. We live here, everything should be fine, it’s for ourselves. I ran hoses here, made water, and covered everything. I’ll let you know on WhatsApp when there are strawberries, come for tea."

The apiary is really the same. I greeted a few familiar bees. Serhiy takes out the honeycombs. Buckwheat honey. Among the striped crowd, I find a place for my finger. I poked around and licked my finger.

The property that the couple had accumulated over twenty-three years was left somewhere at the turn of the decades in the village of Chervone. Serhiy and Olena are sitting next to me in a rickety gazebo and drinking tea without the slightest idea what tomorrow will bring. The stability that their farm gave them has been replaced by completely spontaneous survival. And now all these people have is this rented paradise—cleared of weeds, planted with strawberries, and an apiary. And the locals don’t think about what will happen tomorrow until tomorrow comes. If, of course, it comes.

We created this material as a member of the "Recovery Window" Network. Learn about the rebuilding of the affected regions of Ukraine on recovery.win platform