THENEWYORKER,M AY9, 2022 61
no more. He looked sombre and ex-
hausted. Older, too.
“How are you?” I said, when the rit-
ual had ended.
“Angry,” August answered.
He and Orest, the arborist, had spent
the past two weeks fifty miles east of
Kyiv, in Nova Basan—another town
from which Russian forces had with-
drawn. Civilians had been executed
there, too: “They were just left in the
street. Many old people—grand-
mothers and grandfathers.” When the
Russians left Nova Basan, August said,
they took several young girls with them.
He had met with their families, who
had no idea what had happened to
them or if they were alive.
As if in consolation, he took out his
phone and showed me a photograph
of himself standing over a dead sol-
dier. “Good Russian,” August said. But
the joke failed to amuse even him, and
he quickly put the phone away.
T
he day before the ceremony,
I’d gone back to Ivana-Franka
Street. The burnt corpses were gone.
All that remained was a patch of
scorched earth.
A white van was parked outside Iryna
Havryliuk’s house. On the dusty rear
doors, someone had used his finger to
write “200”—a military code for fatal-
ities, which I had learned from the Hos-
pitallers (“300” signified injuries). The
van belonged to the team that had col-
lected bodies throughout the occupa-
tion, bringing them first to the morgue
and then to the church. The volunteers
were all large, sturdy men who looked
accustomed to heavy lifting. One of
them, Sergey Matiuk, had been a pro-
fessional soccer player in Ukraine. He
had a shaved head and broad shoul-
ders; a pin attached to his colorful wind-
breaker was emblazoned with the Bucha
town crest above the words “i love my
city,” in Ukrainian. He estimated that
he and his colleagues had picked up
about three hundred corpses, at least a
hundred of which had had their hands
tied behind their backs. “A lot of them
were tortured,” he said.
One of the volunteers had known
Iryna Havryliuk’s husband, and as he
and Matiuk bent over to lift Sergey’s
body the volunteer said, “They even
took his gold tooth.”
Matiuk, focussed on the task at
hand, said, “Let’s go.”
Havryliuk was at the house, but she
avoided the back yard. While the vol-
unteers carried body bags to the van,
one at a time, she roamed the prop-
erty, searching for her missing cats. At
one point, she froze and looked down
at her hands.
“Everything is dirty,” she muttered.
The van was half filled with other
bodies, and Matiuk had to climb into
the back in order to haul Sergey and
Roman onto the pile. Then they pro-
ceeded to the yellow house, and car-
ried the teen-ager out of the basement.
From there, they brought their cargo
to the local cemetery.
I stopped by the cemetery the fol-
lowing afternoon. Dozens of bagged
corpses were laid out in rows and
stacked in piles beside a brick shed
that Matiuk and his team used as their
office. Matiuk was wearing the same
colorful windbreaker and pin. An an-
tique knife with a jewel-embedded
handle was sheathed on his hip; he’d
found it at an abandoned Russian
checkpoint and had kept it as a tro-
phy. He said that the bodies were to
be transported to Kyiv, where medical
professionals would attempt to iden-
tify them, using DNA samples. In the
coming days, more than a hundred and
ten corpses would be exhumed from
behind the church.
“I’m very tired,” Matiuk said. “We
haven’t slept.”
“Since the Russians left?”
“Since they came.”
I asked what he planned to do after
the war, and Matiuk said that he’d ac-
cepted a job with the cemetery, as a
gravedigger.
“My place is here,” he said.A
nastasia completed her rotation
with Artem and Mamont the next
day, April 7th, and I met her at the
apartment she had rented on Andri-
yivsky Descent. We walked down the
cobblestone road, past the monument
to the opera singer Vasyl Slipak, and
continued to the banks of the Dnieper.
Restaurants, shops, and cafés were re-
opening. The afternoon was warm and
sunny—the first good weather since I’d
arrived in Ukraine—and several jog-
gers passed us on the quay. An islandin the river had a sand beach, and An-
astasia smiled as she recalled concerts
that she’d attended there. “In the sum-
mer, it’s amazing here,” she said.
Anastasia told me that, according
to Yuzik, the Hospitallers would soon
be sent east. The Russians, having
given up on Kyiv—at least for now—
were shifting their focus to the Don-
bas. Their stated objective was to seize
the entirety of the region and then
push southwest to the Black Sea,
thus creating a land bridge to Crimea.
Mariupol, which stood in the way of
that projected corridor, was already
shattered; the last Ukrainian hold-
outs, including members of the Azov
Battalion, were taking refuge, with
their families, in the tunnels beneath
a steel plant, which the Russians would
soon blockade.
The second phase of the war would
involve more heavy weaponry and ord-
nance than the first—as well as in-
creasingly willful cruelty. In mid-April,
Putin awarded an honorary title to the
unit thought to be responsible for the
depravity in Bucha, in recognition of
its “heroism and valor.” The day after
Anastasia and I walked to the Dnieper,
Russian cluster munitions struck a rail-
way station in Kramatorsk, where hun-
dreds of civilians, mostly women and
kids, were awaiting trains out of the
Donbas. More than fifty were killed.
On the quay, when I asked Anasta-
sia if she would go east, she said, “I
have to think about it. There is a high
chance of being killed.” She was re-
turning to Paris for a week or two. She
had an academic article to write, and
wanted to pursue various ideas for ad-
vocacy and fund-raising. In the past
month, she had sometimes struggled
to readapt to the military culture, rou-
tine, and mind-set of the Hospitallers.
She’d been one of the few medics who
had refused to carry a Kalashnikov. In
contrast to August, Yuzik, and Ma-
mont, Anastasia was not fascinated by
war or temperamentally suited to it.
Like many Ukrainians, she had simply
declined to run from it.
After going to Paris, Anastasia went
back to Ukraine. When we last spoke,
she was visiting her family in Kyiv.
The Hospitallers were moving out of
St. Michael’s. She planned to join them
in the east.