Hotel California

She wanted to talk, but Lana had learned to stay quiet, at least for the first hours, when Vadym came back from the Zero. And, she knew to keep Dima, their two-year-old, downstairs with his baba, until the sniper had started to decompress.

She reminded herself of her policy as he unpacked his military backpack in the converted hotel room they lived in at her father’s property. The olive-drab stuff of soldiering came out, item by item. Muddy jumpers, torn t-shirts, balled-up underwear, toiletry bag, Kevlar helmet, comms gear, the bronik or body armour vest, leather-encased Bowie knife, the jellyfish-like Ghillie camouflage suit, mud-crusted spare boots, and more of his ‘tools of trade’. Finally, Vadym pulled out a package wrapped in much-used and crusty bubble-wrap: the three scopes from his sniper rifle. Whether with stitched-on patches or carved out with the knife, each piece of gear somewhere bore his nom de guerre, Scorpion.

As he dumped his stuff on the bed and she systematically put them in different piles for laundering or putting away, Lana observed Scorpion leave and some of Vadym slowly return. She now recognised the process, as it happened about once-a-month when Vadym was rotated out of his front-line combat unit — some 50 kilometres to the east — to their hometown. It was where her father, Artur, operated what had been a prosperous complex consisting of a hotel, a restaurant and function room, a mini-market and a gym. In the cellar, some knew that there had also been a few poker machines and a roulette table.

Before the war, atop the water tower on the hotel’s roof, cranes would build a nest every year. It was something that Lana treasured from her childhood. But this spring, there were only weathered sticks from the past and no birds. Maybe, the birds knew better, Lana thought to herself.

Since the war’s beginning, Artur had converted his complex into an ad hoc R&R facility for foreign correspondents and some of Vadym’s army comrades whose families lived further away, as well as into a refuge for families bombed out of their homes in occupied territory. Some of Artur’s staff and families had also moved in because ‘being together was better than being alone’, they said. A few ‘guests’ paid; others contributed by upkeeping the property like replacing windows blown-out by close-by artillery fire, or cooking in the kitchen; many relied on Artur’s generousity. The place was like a pirate ship married to a charity.

The Hotel California. It was obvious and stuck after a Canadian journalist serenaded Artur with his drunken cover version of the old song. Amid the constant flux, Artur only had one rule: everyone at the Hotel California must have dinner together in the function room at 1800 every night and there will be toasts. That included Artur’s regular posse, his extended family, and all the complex’s motley guests, be they there for a night or for the term of the war.

Vadym showered down the hall from the room that packed in all their possessions. Then, he changed into an Adidas tracksuit from his football team at university, where he’d studied to be a phys-ed teacher. He came over to the bed where Lana was silently sitting and took her head in his hands. He bent down and put his face in her long brown hair.

‘Pryvit, kokhana,’ he whispered. His first words. Lana held him by the back of his muscled thighs and asked: ‘Dinner?’. ‘Yes please — and Superman too,’ Vadym replied.

Without dirt and sweat, the skin under his full-beard was itchy and she saw him scratch at it. She thought the beard made him look like a Taliban and she hated it. But she also understood it in the circumstances of an existence spent in a barely-lit, dirt-walled underground bunker between their rounds of duty. Like giant sewer rates, she thought of the lads in Vadym’s infantry brigade.

And, once, after he’d come in drunk from the endless card game in the complex’s courtyard, Vadym had told her that the beard helped to conceal his face from the enemy’s counter-snipers. Just as he searched for their sniper hides, he said, they searched for the one from which he did his deliberate and deadly deeds. It’s what their intimacy now consisted of, Lana remembered thinking, and it was rare.

Dima ran toward his father across the courtyard which was enclosed from the street with a high, swinging metal door which men from Artur’s entourage took turns standing watch at.

‘Superman’, Vadym called and lifted the laughing child high into the air. Then, he took his son by his pudgy arms and spun him around in circles. ‘You’re flying like Superman’. With her mobile, Lana tried to get a photo of her boys spinning, but they were too quick to capture and there were only streaks when she checked.

The spin slowed and Vadym gently landed Dima on his blue Crocs. ‘Kick, Tato, kick,’ the boy yelled and ran toward a cheap soccer ball under the picnic table where his smiling baba was sitting and embroidering with red and black threads. Two older men at the table watched the screen of a mobile phone propped up on a half-full bottle of kvas. They spent all their time, Lana knew, watching videos of $500 drones destroying the enemy’s $500,000 APCs; it gave them some solace.

‘Of course, Messi,’ his father said. Time after time, the boy ran up to the ball with the purpose of a matador and wildly toed it. The more airborne and further off-target the ball, the more excited the pair got.

The Walrus, one of Artur’s off-siders who used to ‘provide security’ in the secret cellar, came out to the courtyard and loudly rang a big school bell. ‘Ladies and gentlemen, it’s 18 o’clock. Time to feed everyone and everything,’ he bellowed from beneath his massive, Kozak-style moustache.

‘Let’s go, Dimochka,’ his baba called, and everyone in the courtyard, as well as the complex’s beehive of rooms, started for the function room. About 40 people were expected tonight, Lana knew; while the kid napped, she’d worked several hours earlier in the day, breading and pan-frying rabbit cutlets.

‘Rabbit… Before the war, we were planning a cruise along the Croatian coast. Now, we’re eating rabbit,’ Lana thought to herself. But tonight’s servings, like every night’s, were heaping; beneath gruffness on greeting, hospitality was their country’s code. She helped the other ladies put out the laden plates.

‘First toast to The Walrus,’ Artur yelled out from his family table over the hum of people catching up on the day’s events, where the front had shifted, a naval drone attack on an enemy battleship.

‘Let us raise our glasses to our drone boys and their success today. Do peremohy. And smachnoho — good eating,’ The Walrus offered.

Lana noticed how Vadym made himself small during the toast and only quietly responded to the call to victory. Where other diners were performative, he was perfunctory. Vadym took the little boy from his grandmother and put him on his lap, helping the kid spoon mashed potato and mushroom sauce into his mouth.

At the table of western journalists, Terry, a veteran English freelance war correspondent refilled the shot glasses of his colleagues: Claudia, a stylish Italian videographer; ‘Snapper’, an Australian photographer with his camera on the table, and; David, a rookie American reporter sent to his first warzone by that country’s oldest masthead. The Aussie, who’d been in country since the start, held court on drone capabilities — ranges, payloads, diversionary tactics — in the hope of impressing the Italian woman.

‘Second toast to our journalist guests,’ Artur announced. As Terry got up to speak, the city’s air raid sirens went off. The young Yank put down his fork and looked to other’s for clues; the rest of the room kept eating, drinking and talking.

‘Well, the enemy is trying to shut me up, but in that they fail,’ Terry, who had been travelling to their country for more than a decade, said in their language to laughter. ‘With this toast, we salute your bravery and that of your armed forces such as Vadym and his comrades,’ Terry smilingly said and knocked back the horilka like a local farmer might at a village wedding. He had lost friends to the war and didn’t pretend at ‘objectivity’, and he liked making the young American squirm.

The third toast came at the end of the meal when the ladies put out platefuls of orange and watermelon slices for dessert. Ever the host, Artur always reserved the final word for the ‘VIP’ on the night, or someone he wanted to especially recognise. It was his currency of connection and care.

‘Let’s here from my son-in-law who has just come back from the Zero and who we thank for defending us,’ Artur said. ‘Boss, I vil drink to dat,’ The Walrus said in accented English and the journos chuckled. The air raid siren stopped its squeal. This time, there had been no missiles or artillery.

Vadym hung his head. Lana saw him slump and reached under the table to squeeze his hand. In war, it was even more important to keep peace in the family, she believed. Vadym looked up at her and slightly nodded.

She wondered if he had killed on this last rotation; she wondered if he kept count of how many men he had seen die at the crosshairs of his scopes; she wondered who he was now.

The sniper rose to his feet and carefully filled his shot glass from the bottle on the table. The Australian photograph picked up his camera, but then put it down as Vadym slowly shook his head in reserved remonstrance. Lana could see Vadym controlling his breath, as he would when fixing on a target. The room went silent as he started to speak.

‘Why do we fight? Why do boys keeping turning up for the front? It’s something I think about a lot and, much of the time, I don’t know the answers,’ Vadym softly said. He made no eye contact.

‘Yes, it’s for our country, but that’s easy to say. Yes, it’s because we have no choice, and that’s obvious.’

‘Yes, it’s for our families and future no doubt,’ he said and looked at Dima and paused.

‘But for me, it’s more simple…’, Vadym said. ‘It’s just to be normal again. Simple. Normal. So, here’s to normal.’

The guests drained their drinks. The soldier sat down. Lana put her hand on his forearm where the dragon of his unit insignia was tattooed. Baba, her embroidery beside her plate, wiped tears away. The young American tapped on his mobile screen.

Leaving dinner, Vadym had his mother to cut him a small piece from the textile she was embroidering on. He handed it to Lana.

In their room, Vadym put the kid to bed and told Lana he was going down to the courtyard to play some cards. Every night, under the hanging LED lightbulbs, the game went on. The players puffed on vapes and took nips from a bottle of Johnny Walker. A portable diesel generator rumbled.

Lana stayed in the room and, working around Dima on the crowded bed, continued sorting her husband’s things into what needed washing and what needed to be put away while he was with them for the next six days. Orderliness helped.

When everything was neat enough for her, there was only the package containing the scopes left. For a time, she sat on the bed with it in her lap. Then, Lana began to unstick and peel back the duct tape holding the bubble-wrap together.

She picked up the longest and largest of the scopes and held it in her hands. ‘Scorpion’ was roughly engraved in its black metal casing.

Lana held the scope to her right eye and looked through it at the mirror on the other side of the small room. Where she should see herself, she saw a blur.

Lana reached into the pocket of jeans and took out her mother-in-law’s cloth. She rubbed it on the scope’s glass lens.