Darkness in Bucha
Late at night a knock came at the door. A woman with wild hair entered, claiming she had made a reservation. We don’t take reservations. We have no idea how she found us.
She walked in rather nonchalantly and looked around. She said she had arrived from Bucha, a suburb of Kiev. We only had one bed available, a top bunk with no clean sheets, and whose pillow had already been appropriated by another tired traveler. She said something to the effect of “Are you kidding me? I’ve just spent three weeks in a bunker.”
She settled her things and then took a shower. Despite the late hour and her obvious exhaustion, she came back out to sit down with us and tell her story. Her name was Zoia.
When the war started she thought it would be short, and she didn’t want to leave. Only when the electricity and gas went out on March 3 did she become afraid. She was alone except for her dog, a lab. Her neighbors left and asked her to take care of their lab too.
The weather turned bitterly cold and began snowing. She was without heat or gas and only cold water in the pipes. Her local shop had given away all its food to residents before Russian soldiers could steal it, and volunteers were bringing food by at their own risk, but because of the stress she didn’t want to eat.
Worst of all she had no idea what was going on – cut off from news of any sort, she described an intense “information hunger.” She talked to a neighbor about when the best time to run away would be, but the neighbor knew nothing more than she did. There was no light; there was no word. Zoia was in the dark.
Then one day the soldiers took one of their neighbors, dressed him up in a Russian military uniform, and strapped him to the top of a tank. They were using him as bait to draw out the locations of Ukrainian snipers. Three shots bounced off the tank but missed him, and after a while the Russians got bored. They told him he was lucky and let him run away.
Finally some information came through text messages being circulated throughout Bucha about how to escape, and she boarded a bus with the two labs which took her to a train into Kiev. From there she took the dogs to her daughter’s house in Ternopil, almost to Lviv. From Ternopil, normally a six hour drive, it took her three days to reach Krakow, where she now sat with us. You can see the attached 43 second clip of her story that’s been subtitled in English.
The terror of it, she explained, had been the total darkness: both inside and out an unrelenting black broken only by the blood orange glimmer of fire on the margins of her world.
The sweatshirt Zoia wore that night reads “Too Cute to Care.”
