THENEWYORKER,M AY9, 2022 53
bored with my life,” he recalled, with
rueful irony. Looking around at the col-
lapsed buildings, the charred husks of
vehicles, and the mountains of wreck-
age, he seemed unable to process it all.
“I feel like I’m in a video game,” he said.
An hour later, a market a few miles
east of us was shelled. I went there and
found firefighters hosing down a burn-
ing complex of outdoor stalls. Nothing
that might have been mistaken as a mil-
itary target was anywhere in sight. I was
filming the damage when another mor-
tar landed, a short distance away from
me. The blast and shrapnel wounded a
woman who, bleeding from her abdo-
men, was quickly loaded into an am-
bulance. Such “double-tap” strikes had
been common in Syria, where Russia
and the Assad regime had systemati-
cally targeted first responders to de-
moralize the population and terrorize
it into submission.
The same strategy was clearly being
employed in Ukraine. That day, the
Russians also bombed a theatre in Ma-
riupol where civilians were sheltering.
“children” had been painted in Rus-
sian, in huge white letters, over the park-
ing lot. Hundreds reportedly died. The
next afternoon, in Kharkiv, one of East-
ern Europe’s biggest markets was
shelled. Thousands of people had
worked there before the war. A raging
inferno consumed the complex, and
tar-black smoke darkened the sky.
The following morning, I was eat-
ing breakfast in the lobby of our hotel
when a huge explosion shook the build-
ing. Its glass façade warped in and out
as we all jumped from our chairs. The
target had been a government academy
for civil-service employees. It wasn’t far,
and we arrived there at the same time
as a team of rescuers. A whole section
of the institution had been reduced to
smashed slabs of concrete, bent I-beams,
and twisted rebar. A dead man lay next
to the building. Another man, caked
with dust, was climbing out of a ground-
floor window.
Nearby, a firefighter, in a white hel-
met and flame-retardant coveralls, heard
shouts emanating from a narrow crev-
ice. “Can you hear me?” he yelled. “Do
you have air to breathe?” Another res-
cuer pointed a few feet away. “He’s
somewhere down here!”
A Territorial Defense soldier who
belonged to the same unit as the trapped
man managed to reach him on his cell
phone. He’d been brushing his teeth,
in a bathroom below street level, when
the building came down. The soldier
gave his phone to the firefighter, who
asked the trapped man, “What’s your
name? Are you standing or sitting?”
He then instructed him, “Go to a load-bearing wall, an exterior wall. Sit next
to it and pull your knees to your chest.”
“We have to lift the debris piece by
piece,” someone announced. Climbing
on top of the rubble, the rescuers took
turns with sledgehammers and power
saws. A crane was sent for. No sooner
had it arrived than a soldier yelled at
us to vacate the area—another attack
was expected. Everyone started run-
ning. Firefighters, searching for cover,
struggled to kick down the locked door
of a building across the street; a man
with a crowbar tried and failed to pry
it open. The second strike never came,
and eventually the rescuers resumed
their work, using the crane to pull away
furniture-size chunks of concrete. It
was getting late, and we decided to head
back toward Kyiv.
On our way, we stopped in a small
town whose secondary school had been
levelled by a Russian air strike the pre-
vious morning. In the yard, a group of
teachers surveyed the wreckage. “I heard
a plane, and then an explosion,” Yaro-
slava, an English teacher who’d once
been a student at the school, told me.
She said that there were no Ukrainian
soldiers in the vicinity. Some of the
teachers were sifting through a demol-
ished classroom. “We’re saving what we
can,” Yaroslava said.
I later learned that the man trapped
beneath the government academy had
been successfully extracted. A Hospi-
taller from Kharkiv knew him, and
showed me a video on his phone of the
man walking away from the rubble,
eight hours after being buried alive. In
the clip, blood splotches his face and
jacket. Someone asks him how he’s feel-
ing. “Better than ever,” he answers. “But
I could use a cigarette.”W
hen I rejoined the Hospitallers
at St. Michael’s Monastery, on
March 20th, their fleet of ambulances
had grown from four to more than a
dozen. Each vehicle had been spray-
painted dark green, and black tape cov-
ered their tail-lights. Anastasia was
heading to a stabilization point in an
abandoned maternity hospital a few
blocks from the sanatorium where I’d
met the civilian snipers. The fighting
had dramatically escalated across the
northern suburbs. The medics being
relieved by Anastasia’s team had justPOMPEII
Presence of an absence, absence of a presence,
which was it? Strings on a broken harp.
How eager the earth is to have us in its debt—
dusk on loan from its library of hours.At dawn our clattered knees are chariot wheels
turning in the amber air, our numbered days
a whizzing pinwheel zodiac: the sycamore,
the dog, the lobster trap, your long-dead mother’stale of Pliny at Pompeii—grief, or madness
to want the sky to fall and cover our blent
bones with ash? This morning in New Haven,
the bleached moon blotted by the rain, then lightpressing its claim against the window, dawn
threading itself once more through time’s needle.—Cynthia Zarin