Evac

The old man disappeared into a back room of the small house.

“Where the fuck have you gone,” screamed Anatoli from the front door where he was watching the street and the paddocks at the village’s edge. He couldn’t see the shells yet, but he could hear the orcs’ arty working.

It was only inevitable that fury would follow sound and the village would start getting nailed as the enemy adjusted targets.

“Come on, dyadya!” he yelled. “Just take your papers and come or we will all be mince meat. Fuck!”

Anatoli had been evacuating sick and elderly people from the gray zone towns for nearly two years. He still didn’t get how these people wouldn’t leave until the last possible minute and even then they basically resisted. It was some mixture of pride, shock, habit and, maybe, ignorance, he thought. Or, maybe, they just wanted to die where they had long lived.

Just then, an orc shell smashed into the post office some two hundred meters away. Brick rubble flew. The shock wave shook the frail, timber windows of the house. Anatoli registered that the old man had probably built it himself. But his main realisation was that the orcs had found their impact point and would start spreading the fire zone.

Anatoli ran into the house to physically drag the old man out. His heart gunned; it was like being high on amyl and “horilka”. He got to the back room; the old man was tying four puppies into a gunny sack. A sepia-coloured, glass-framed photo of the old man as a young man in a Soviet Army uniform lay crushed on the floor. They had to get to the van where Sasha and the photographer were, and go. Now.

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It was Anatoli’s job to go into the houses and farmyards, and get the old out. It was Sasha’s job to keep them alive.

She pushed her Kevlar helmet up so she could put her phone to her ear. Whenever he was inside, she was outside at the steering wheel of their van — looking, listening to where the orcs’ fire was falling, talking to friends in nearby units about what was happening at the zero, about which tree line the orcs were trying to take. She constantly scanned; she constantly identified risk and danger; she constantly scenario planned. A girlfriend called it hyper vigilance and said it was part of her PTSD.

Sasha just called it survival and knew no other way to be now. It was her decision on when “they had to get out of Dodge” — either with or without evacuees and what they carried.

Shopping bags, old icons, their IDs, jars of pickles they gave to their rescuers. Whether it was winter or summer, the oldies always wore woollen caps, Sasha had noticed. It was how she’d come to keep track of them on a mission: red, blue, orange…

Just as she saw a shell hit the post office, Anatoli pummelled the old man into the van. Sasha registered “green” for his hat and the bedsheet gunny sack that was squirming at his feet. Puppies, she wondered.

Then, there was the rapid fire of the shutter clicks from the photographer’s camera from the back seat. This one was a woman from Italy who made her body armour and combat boots look chic. Sasha was used to them — the snappers, as an Australian had called himself and his breed — and made sure they got the shots to share in Sydney, London and Rome. A war on all fronts, it was.

“One down, two to go,” Anatoli yelled, as more shelling resounded. “Hold on, dyadya.”

Sasha hit the accelerator and the van’s sliding door slammed shut. She knew why Anatoli did this work; he’d lost some of his own people in shithole villages like this. As she gunned the van past a church, its crushed cupola hanging down its side like a giant drop of water, Sasha was less sure of her own reasons.

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The gunny sack at the old man’s feet, in the cluttered back seat of the van, was squirming and twisting, she could see through the camera’s lens. Then, Angelina heard it give a little yelp.

She thought about asking Sasha, the driver, to ask the old man to open the sack so the pups were visible. That could make The Shot. But she didn’t because for The Shot to be The Shot, it had to be “real”.

That’s what Angelina believed in. Whether it was here, or Syria, or Afghanistan — it was all about The Shot. When everything came together — light, composition, emotion, subject, context, angle — for that single instant and was perfect.

Perfect was rare. Thousands of snaps, kilometres and conversations to get to one that counted. Indeed, most of the time, it was the war photographer’s grind of finding fixers, spending bumpy hours on bad roads, eating plastic-wrapped sandwiches from petrol stations, and pretending that there was no immediate danger. Everything outside the equation — from slog to Shot — was equivocal. Angelina could not and did not count on variables and vagaries.

Another shell hit close by. She had done this enough to know it was the piercing crash of heavy artillery and not the whoomphing thud of mortar fire. The other one on the evac team — Anatoli — had jumped into the front passenger seat. She snapped the sweat leaking from under his helmet and on to his thick neck. He yellled something out and the girl smashed down the gas pedal.

As the door slammed and the van jolted, Angelina checked her equipment bag from habit — making sure all the lens, batteries, cables and other “digitalia” were still okay.

As they sped out the village, more shells landed a few hundred meters behind them. She fired away at the broken and burning buildings. There was a market for ruin porn among her journalistic contacts.

She then turned around to the old man again. There were frayed strands from his green woollen cap hanging down by his ears. It reminded her of hobbits. She saw he had lifted the sack onto his lap and was calming its contents with his worn, leathery hands. His eyes were closed and his lips were moving, as if he was praying. She pressed the shutter button. That was her only act of faith.

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The puppies’ mother had been blown up by a mine in a field beyond Ivan’s house. There were four of the tiny things and, now in the back of the rescue van, he could feel them squirming and crawling over each other in the sack on his lap.

A young woman — black hair coming out from beneath her helmet — was pointing a camera at him, and there was shelling. It had been coming closer to the village for weeks and now it crashed down on top of it. So, Ivan closed his eyes to it all.

There was no knowing what God held next for him. So, Ivan thought only about what his blessings were.

For one, he was getting out before the Russians came in. His cousin further east was under them now and had told Ivan that they didn’t give out food or medicines to those who had the Shevchenko picture on their wall.

The van bolted forward and he had a memory of his father who had led the collective farm choir — how he somehow made sure they could sing some songs in their own language too.

And it was good too, Ivan thought, that he had managed to gather and bring the dogs, and, in one of the pockets of his ripped parka, wrapped in a handkerchief his dead wife had embroidered, his ID and 1000 Hryvnia.

In the other pocket was a set of rough leather work gloves — one glove stuffed inside the other and a small hole cut in the bottom of each of the fingers. And, two plastic Coke bottles filled with warmed up cow’s milk.

When his rescuers would stop, Ivan would try to pour the milk into the gloves. Hopefully, the dogs would suckle and survive.

As the van sped toward the safety of the next village, Ivan realised that was the one task that God had put in his path.

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