Mirrors

After the red alert came in, Lieutenant Colonel Svetlana Portnikova quickly packed her backpack, put on her fluoro vest, and got ready to go.

She wedged in the usual tools of trade that she took to sites. A Thermos filled with milky, honeyed tea. Stress balls. A couple of fluffy animal toys for kids. Three powerbanks and some spare cables for re-charging mobile phones. The enthusiastic young Captain, who liked to share her smiling selfies from Türkiye and Egypt from before the war, was joining her on this call-out.

These were the physical devices that Portnikova and Yustyna carried in their Department-issued “psychologist’s satchels” to the bombed apartment buildings, shattered shopping centres and wrecked train stations of her targeted city. She and her Police psychologist colleagues would use them – together with emotional devices – to give care and comfort to those who had been blown out of their homes or livelihoods or families by the killer missiles and kamikaze drones of a familiar neighbour turned enemy.

’What do we know so far? Shelling or bombing?’ Yustyna said, as she started the Police car to drive to the scene. The younger woman was always keen to anticipate what they were specifically headed toward, whereas Lieutenant Colonel Portnikova knew it was better to be prepared for anything – because it was usually worse than could be imagined.

’We’ll know when we get there, Captain,‘ Portnikova said. To maintain Yustyna’s morale, she added: ‘It may have been a Kinzhal that has hit a high-rise.’

”Kinzhal” meant dagger in their enemy’s language – a hypersonic dagger designed to destroy aircraft carriers, but now used to blast old pensioners and their cats and young families and their prams from their flats. Rather than defending themselves from Washington or Bonn or Beijing, their enemy now sought to flatten the Soviet-era apartment buildings of a city’s suburbs into an unliveable urban desert of concrete rubble and twisted metal.

As they drove from their base with their blue lights flashing and siren sounding, Portnikova recalled the missile’s range – up to 3000 kilometers when launched from a MiG fighter jet – and its cost – up to $5 million US dollars.

She kept many cold facts about the weapons of the war and the means of murder stored away. It was important, Portnikova believed, to rely on the rationale where chaos and confusion sought conquest. Beyond the factual, rational and clinical lay turbulence and terror. And, there amongst them, the tipping point where a person can no longer process the present and, in turn, merges into malaise or madness.

That was the job in Portnikova’s view: turning people away from the tipping point. It wasn’t about kindness or compassion per se for the victims at the emergency scenes they were sent to together with first responders; it was about directing emotional and spiritual traffic away from the cliff of self-destruction.

‘That would be the third one, Kinzhal I mean, this week,’ Yustyna said. ‘So awful.’

Portnikova understood that her teammate was trying to make sense. Sometimes, she wondered if Yustyna was mature enough for the work. She undid her seat belt, re-tucked her shirt, and tidied her uniform as they pulled up to the site.

The building – or what was left of it – that had been struck was a 12 story high-rise of the independence era. The kind of building that young couples, like IT start-up types, who were doing well liked to settle their families, or give their mums a nice place after lifetimes of toil. But it was across from a complex of old Soviet era low-rises which looked like loaves of mouldy bread. The past was never far away in their country.

The Kinzhal had hit the high-rise vertically and sliced through from the top floor to the bottom. Leaving a half-circle indentation along the length of the building, the entire front had been scraped off and a pyramid-shaped pile of rubble lay at the base. The interiors of each flat on each floor was now exposed. The lives and choices of its inhabitants were now on view.

A baby grand piano squeezed into a small bedroom on the seventh floor. Half-eaten breakfast on the third. A neatly-made bed with a pink blanket above that. Framed black-and-white photos of family members elsewhere.

Some three dozen fluoro-clad first-responders – firemen, paramedics, and Police – and many more civilians stood on the pile. Sirens were wailing and more staff were arriving. From a section where the effort was concentrated, chunks of rubble were being lifted and passed down.

”She just moved her fingers! She’s alive,” a sweating young firefighter at the start of the line cried out.

As she walked toward the scene, Portnikova noticed the blue nails of a manicured hand sticking out of the detritus of destruction. The pace of removing material became frantic in the attempt to save the buried woman.

Experience told Portnikova that, while attention was focussed on the rescue, there was work to be done. She scanned the situation before her, looking for survivors and starting to mentally triage them. Who was physically injured; who was in shock; who was experiencing one or some of the typical emotions like fear, anger, or sorrow; who was with their kids, pets or elderly relations and who was alone. Specifically, she was identifying those that most needed attention and those that were mostly likely to have an impact on the rescue and recovery operation that was getting underway.

“I will take the angry first and you focus on the sad,” Portnikova said to Yustyna.

She spotted a balding middle aged man in a white singlet and Kyiv Dynamo tracksuit pants raging at a commander of the fire and rescue service; poking fingers, he was demanding to be listened to and for more men to be despatched to another part of the blast site. Yustyna walked over to a weeping young mother, hugging a toddler daughter to her leg.

Approaching the man from his side, Portnikova inserted herself in the exchange. At first, she stood quietly and leant in as the man yelled out his concerns for his wife. Then, during a small pause and with firmness, she placed her hand on the man’s forearm.

’It’s best we talk,’ Portnikova said in a command voice. ’The faster we get organised, the faster we get to all possible survival pockets. Are you well enough to help?’.

Anger could not be dissipated; it needed to be directed into activity, Portnikova held. It was like the laws of thermodynamics that she had learned back at school when they still wore red ribbons in their hair on May Day. Namely, that energy can’t be destroyed – only converted.

‘You see that car? Go to it and get the water bottles in the backseat. Distribute them to the men digging,’ Portnikova ordered.

But they had just stopped digging and removing rubble. The young firefighter squatted closest to the now uncovered blue-nailed lady. He took his hand away from her wrist.

‘She didn’t make it,’ he said.

As the angry man moved away to his assigned duty, Portnikova looked for others to ‘convert‘. A woman sat silently on a half-shattered and upturned credenza. Her hair tie had come out and bloodied strands hung down over her forehead. Softly, Portnikova took off her backpack and sat down beside her. The psychologist said nothing, but simply tried to match the rhythm of the woman’s strained breathing. She was in shock.

Portnikova took an emergency “space blanket”, a plastic mug and the Thermos from her backpack. Around the woman’s shoulders, she recalled how Yustyna once oddly said it reminded her of shiny Christmas wrapping. She handed the woman – staring at an unknown horizon and mumbling – some milky tea and asked her name.

‘Yana.’

One woman’s hand touched the other’s, and the woman started to speak. Words flowed like a stream in flood, as Portnikova expected. How long her family had lived in the flat. How it had been their dream to buy it. How her husband, a mining engineer, and her son, a university student, were at the front. That her poodle – Rambo – was missing since the missile hit.

Around the woman’s bare feet, there were the remains of broken tea cups and plates, and dozens of sharp pieces from a shattered full-length mirror.

Trauma is like a broken mirror, Portnikova had once said when her Police commanders had asked to give a talk. Some people try to put the mirror back together and, in so doing, they can cut themselves. Others pick up an individual piece – a razor-edged triangle or an improbable parallelogram – and look for their reflection, but only get a partial view. And, others still, they walk away from all the pieces, untouched by the experience. Yustyna had told her, after the talk, that there were much more contemporary and more academic models. ‘Evidence-based,’ she had said.

‘But, what I really wonder, my colleague, is: do you pick up the pieces or do you have no need to?’, Yustyna had said to her.

‘Bozhe Mylyi. Dear God,’ Yana now said. ‘There’s Baba Slava. She kept birds on the roof. Her sons always complain about it when they come to visit her.”

Some hundred meters from them, there was an older woman who had just sat up amid the crushed concrete. Smeared blood and pale dust covered her face. She started to wipe it away with her heavy floral scarf. There were the rags of a ripped Adidas tracksuit where her lower legs were meant to be. Some ten pigeons walked around her – bobbing their heads and cooing.

Portnikova made to move. Then, she saw Yustyna sprinting through the tangles of waste towards the babushka.