Golden Dome
There were always more forms to fill out.
It was as if the Army believed Misha’s arm would grow back by having him fill out another form. Another form with his remaining left hand that he could barely scrawl his name with, or clumsily adjust the F stops on a Nikon of his former profession.
Misha got off the Metro at the Golden Gates station, travelled up the seemingly endless escalator to the exit, and walked toward St Sophia’s. The office to drop off the form was across the squares that sat outside the ancient churches in the centre of the city.
Nowadays, he usually avoided this part of the capital. Too many intense memories of the time on the Maidan with his mates. It was just easier to stay in his parents’ flat on the other side of the river and scroll his phone all day.
But he certainly remembered how so alive they were that winter on the cobblestones; they burnt with hope and heart even as piles of tyres flamed and smouldered around them.
So many of those mates were now dead. Yevhen — his best friend since grade school — who had gone from throwing rocks at the black-clad, drug-fuelled security force thugs to flying kamikaze drones against the enemy on the eastern front. Yevhen — who had died in a Grad barrage last May.
As he walked through St Sofia’s Square, Misha checked his coat pocket with his left hand to make sure the form was still there. This form was to start the process for getting a prosthetic device from German donors. It would no doubt be impeccably engineered. Sleeker than the Porsches he’d once hung posters of on his boyhood walls.
“They give us fake limbs when we need missiles and Howitzers,” he thought to himself.
It was March and still cold — more than a year into the full-scale, and four months since shrapnel ripped through and took his arm off in the south. Some days, he rolled up his empty shirt or jacket sleeve and pinned it in place; other days, he let it slackly hang by his side.
Some days, Misha wanted people to see the sum of his service; others, he resented their glances and clumsy sympathy.
Today, Misha had tucked the empty sleeve into the outside pocket of his heavy military parka. ‘Winter’s will be better for hiding it’, he’d thought to himself. Or, rather, the lack of it.
He crossed the street outside the fancy hotel where the overseas journalists and visiting dignitaries stayed. From the rooftop bar with its Mojitos and cigars, they reported on the war, or at least what little they saw of it in their Twitter and Telegram feeds. The politicians used it as their base as they “stood in solidarity” surrounded by security details with earpieces and hidden Glocks.
Ahead, Misha saw a commotion. A column of black cars, local police vehicles with their patrol lights flashing blue, vans with photographers. He saw the lenses on their cameras and professionally assessed their set-ups.
Like so many clowns piling out of an old Lada in a Soviet circus, they were all unloading near the display that the city authorities had set up on the next square he was approaching — outside the sky-blue walls of St Michael’s.
The display was of “trophies” — enemy tanks, armoured personnel carriers and other equipment that had been destroyed or captured and now parked for the city’s residents to take selfies with. He saw a hipster in his twenties trying to balance on the cannon of a rusting T-90 while telling his pretty girlfriend with a nose ring and iPhone to get ready. ‘Wolverines’ was spray painted in fluoro yellow on the tank’s turret.
To the right of the display area where the visiting VIP delegation was starting to circulate, on the external wall of St Michael’s Monastery, Misha knew was the board of remembrance. Where all the war’s dead were commemorated. Each person’s name, dates of birth and death, hometown, and an uncomfortable photograph. Some in military uniform; some in civilian gear on their national identity cards.
He wondered about the photographers who took the shots, the conversations they would have had with their subjects when they were posing under some studio light. What they thought of their lives and futures. What they said about their day so far. Whether they supported Dynamo or Shakhtar. Whether they were saving for a holiday in Egypt.
That had always been the core to him. The connections. It wasn’t so much about the pictures produced as it was about the connections commenced. Hearing other people’s stories took Misha outside his own.
Ten years of dead. The board now stretched down the block of the church complex. It was the complex they had run to safety from Berkut’s batons in the early days of their very modern revolution; the priests had rung the bells for the first time in hundreds of years to alert the city.
Misha didn’t want to go past the board. Yevhen was probably there, but he hadn’t looked yet and didn’t want to now. He saw that he had to cut through the mob near the trophies to get to the form office.
As Misha tried to skirt around the swell and swill of the media mob, he saw two men break away and step toward him with purpose. They had probably spotted his worn-out military garb.
The smaller one — their leader — wore an olive drab sweatshirt with a small trident on his chest and dark circles under his eyes. The other had on a blue business suit with wide pinstripes and was topped with a shock of blonde hair like the golden domes around him. The first was smaller than on television, almost like a meerkat; the latter bigger and louder. Like a rock band stepping on to a stadium stage.
‘Golden Dome’ began to approach him and barked the greeting — ‘Slava’ — in an accent that sounded like the BBC series Misha used to watch to learn English. The leader skipped forward behind him.
The boisterous Brit dramatically extended his right hand at five metres and began to close on Misha. The shutters of the cameramen went off like a swarm of locusts.
