A man waves goodbye to his 2-year-old son and his wife at the Kyiv station, Ukraine, on Thursday, March 3. The man, Stanislav, is staying to fight while his family is leaving the country to seek refuge in a neighboring country. Associated Press file
Ukraine, Feb. 28, 2022. There are stories here, that will —I promise you — become novels, plays and countless movies.
I am an old man, and I may not live to write them or see them, but they will be written and filmed, and if you live long enough, survive the virus and the next and the next, you and your children will.
Peace, I’ve learned, produces sweet beginnings, happy endings and colorful musicals. But war historically produces great literature, full of blood and anguish and, yes, the stories of our lives.
What is happening today in Ukraine is not new; it has happened down through the ages.
As I said, I’m an old man now, and I’ve read the dispatches and stories of pain and death, betrayal and survival, penned by Ernest Hemingway and Irwin Shaw, John Dos Passos, Kurt Vonnegut, Joseph Heller and Henry Graham Greene, and there’s no new colors I could add to their pictures.
Unlike the newsreels of World War II that came to our movie theaters in black and white, short and brutal, our home screens today are saturated with the red color of blood and the tears of mothers clutching their children to their breasts, as they wait to board trains and buses. We’ve been here before.
My years of reading and watching tell me that among the heroes with guns, there are young men and women on those trains taking notes, interviewing the riders.
There are hundreds, thousands of stories in those crowds, waiting to be written and turned into literature.
There is a young Vonnegut trying to survive in a basement in Kyiv, and he will remember the new fires.
George Orwell, before “1984,” wrote of the Spanish Civil War fighting Francisco Franco’s fascists. I promise you that there is a young Orwell in the streets of Odessa and alleys of Kyiv.
In the cafes where they are now making Molotov cocktails out of empty vodka bottles, there is a “Roberto” Jordan, moving among the tables, planning for his escape from the city to climb the mountains, where he will meet his Maria and blow up a bridge. Again, he will hold his young lover Maria and tell her, “A man fights for what he believes in,” and recites again Hemingway’s words, “The world is a fine place and worth the fighting for, and I hate very much to leave it.”
In Ukraine’s streets and farms, forests and alleys there surely are many Robert Jordans and Marias.
There it is for all of us to recite once again, as we seem to do every time a shell hits a city, an ancient rifle is fired in a distant field.
Shakespeare wrote, “Cry havoc! and let loose the dogs of war.”
Regrettably, acts of war move so quickly, that by the time you read this, the dogs of war loosened in the Ukraine will still be barking, but those heroic fighters will be remembered, like the victims of Warsaw and Franco’s bombing of Guernica.
There are stories here.
J.P. Devine is a Waterville writer.
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