58 THENEWYORKER,M AY 9, 2022
and stylish, their white sneakers immac-
ulate; they wore makeup and jewelry. A
police officer accompanied them. One
of the women, in a polka-dot sweater
and black jeans, crouched beside the
man with the T-shirt on his face. Her
name was Iryna Havryliuk, and the man
was her husband. The corpse by the
fence was her brother.
Later, Havryliuk told me that, when
Russian troops descended on Bucha,
she, her mother, and her brother’s son
had fled to Kyiv. The soldiers were shoot-
ing at any moving cars, so the family
ran for two miles, amid deafening ex-
changes between tanks and artillery,
until they arrived in Irpin, which the
Ukrainians still controlled. Someone
there gave them a ride to the destroyed
bridge, where they joined the mass of
displaced civilians whom August and
Orest had helped traverse the river. A
bus on the far bank took them to the
railway station in Kyiv, and they caught
a train to Zakarpattia, in western Ukraine,
where they were put up by friends.
Havryliuk’s husband, Sergey, a forty-
seven-year-old private security guard,
had remained in Bucha, refusing to
abandon their two dogs and six cats.
Her brother, Roman, stayed with him.
After the Russians sabotaged Bucha’s
power plant and began confiscating
people’s phones, Havryliuk lost con-
tact with the two. She had learned only
yesterday that they were dead.
Havryliuk confirmed Sergey and Ro-
man’s identities, and the officer took
photographs. Then Havryliuk lifted the
T-shirt over Sergey’s face. His mouth
was ajar. A bullet had pierced his right
eye, leaving a gaping hole.
“Maybe it’s not a good idea to do
that,” the officer said.
Havryliuk returned the shirt.
The other woman was her best friend,
Olena Halaka. As they left the back
yard, Havryliuk told Halaka, “My hands
are trembling.” Her tone was calm, al-
most subdued, much like that of the
woman at the maternity hospital who’d
said, “My husband was killed instantly.”
Following a path to the front door, which
had been left open, Havryliuk stopped
at a wheelbarrow and raised her palm
to her brow. The wheelbarrow contained
one of her dogs, a pit bull named Valik,
also shot dead.
She and Halaka continued inside;
seeing a bloodstain on the floor, Havry-
liuk said, “This is where they shot Valik.”
She went into the kitchen, opened the
refrigerator, entered the pantry, and rum-
maged through cupboards and cabinets.
It was not clear what she was looking
for. Russian forces were said to have
rigged some houses with booby traps,
and Halaka, a member of the Kyiv Po-
lice, was worried about explosives. “Stop
fucking running around, you’re scaring
me,” she told Havryliuk.
Havryliuk wasn’t listening. In the
living room, she began removing dresses
and shirts from an armoire and placingthem in a plastic bag. Recognizing her
friend’s need to apply herself to a prac-
tical task, Halaka set aside her security
concerns and helped her.
“Do you want Sergey’s clothes?” she
asked.
“Let me think,” Havryliuk said. Then:
“Yes, take them.”
Empty shoeboxes were heaped in a
pile. “They stole my shoes,” Havryliuk
said. Her lingerie, perfume, and jewelry
were also missing. Finding a box of
chocolates that she’d stashed away for
a special occasion, she gave it to Ha-
laka. “Here, for your kids,” she said.
Halaka eyed the box. “Do you think
it’s poisoned?”
The two women climbed a staircase
to the bedroom, surprising a small bird
that had become trapped inside. It flut-
tered wildly, banging into the walls and
hopping across the floor. Halaka opened
a window, and, for several dreamlike
seconds, Havryliuk chased the bird
around until it flew away. She then low-
ered herself to her knees and withdrew
an old leather-bound book from un-
derneath the bed. It was a collection of
poetry by the nineteenth-century writer
Taras Shevchenko. Widely considered
the progenitor of modern Ukrainian
literature, Shevchenko had contributed
as much as anyone to the development
of a Ukrainian national identity, dis-
tinct from Russia’s. “My Testament,”
one of the poems in the book, had be-
come a kind of anthem for protesters
during the Revolution of Dignity. It be-
gins, “When I am dead, bury me/In
my beloved Ukraine.”
“What’s this?” Halaka asked, hold-
ing up a zippered pouch.
“Ah,” Havryliuk said. “His coins.”
She was smiling. She opened the
pouch to reveal a cache of foreign cur-
rency that people had given Sergey
from their travels to Cyprus, Singa-
pore, the U.S., Indonesia. He’d been a
collector. A dozen miniature beach
chairs were arranged on a shelf, and
Havryliuk explained that it was an in-
stallation Sergey had made for his de-
funct cell phones, each of which had
occupied a chair. The Russians had
taken the phones.
As Havryliuk gathered items from
other rooms, a woman in a long coat
and glasses stopped by to express her
condolences. She’d been in Bucha for