Excerpt from My Women

Yuliia Iliukha
Translated by Hanna Leliv

A woman who learned how to live in the homes of strangers lost her own home twice. It all started in 2014. Weird thugs with tricolors; mad old women with golden teeth, tugging her clothes and spitting on her. She quickly wiped their spit away as if it could seep through her skin and poison her.

Then the first blood was shed. The woman fled through backyards, tucking the Ukrainian flag into the inner pocket of her down jacket. She felt like the flag was on fire and would burn a hole in her clothes any minute. Back home, the woman knocked back half a glass of cognac and coughed. She was shaking. Cognac kicked in when she was standing under the hot shower. The woman was sobbing, waterproof mascara smudging onto her face.

A month later, they warned her she had one hour left. After an hour went by, they would come to get her. “Run,” they urged the woman. “But what about my apartment, my business, my life?!” the woman felt like screaming but clenched her teeth instead and swept things from the shelf into her suitcase in one big swoop.

The woman left her home and did not look back.

Another town gave her a bad welcome. It was like a cactus: prickly, bristled, hostile toward the woman and the address indicated in her passport. Only eight years later, peace was reached between them. The woman had a home again. It was not like that first one, but still, it was dear to her heart. A place she wanted to decorate with lovely trinkets. A place where she wanted to grow flowers on the balcony. A place where she wanted to live.

February uprooted her again. The red glare was creeping up closer and closer to the woman’s new home. This time she did not wait for a warning—she just threw her things into her car and sped off while the roads were still there.

The twice-homeless woman did not look back that time, either.

℘

A woman who recognized her son in the video of POWs posted on a hostile Telegram channel bit her teeth in her fist to keep from howling.

He was a late child. By the time her son turned five, she was already in her fifties. The woman tried hard and toiled away so that he would want for nothing. But her son still felt that his father was missing.

“Dad left you because you are old and ugly!” he cried once, as his voice and body were broken by puberty. The woman burst into tears and grew even older. Her son apologized and grew older, too.

When he finished school, the woman did not want to attend the graduation ceremony. She feared that his classmates would laugh at him and his old, ugly mother, but he insisted. He was still ashamed of the remark he had tossed off in a moment of pain and anger. The woman bought a beautiful dress and did her hair and makeup. No one said a word about her age that night, because her son had grown up so strong and sharp.

When her son decided to join the army, the woman did not even try to talk him out of it, because she knew he would do it his way. In May, the connection with him was lost. Over the next two months of uncertainty, the woman withered and turned black. She searched for every lead she could hold on to, every mention. For the tiniest shred of hope.

In the video, her son looked emaciated and exhausted, but he looked so much like her. The woman never confessed to him that he was not her own son.