Chapter Seven

After one week and a day since the war began, I heard that the invading soldiers had encircled our city, and all our soldiers had fled from defending it. My mum and I started weeping. I tried getting in touch with my dad and my brothers, but they weren't available. Which made me weep the most. I hadn't seen a year as bad as this one. My mum's eyes bulged out due to the tears she had been in. The constant air raid siren and the missiles sound couldn't allow us to sleep well. Whenever 1:30 a.m. rolled around, I woke up from my sleep and prayed for God's protection. My mum and I slept on the same bed, wrapping our hands around each other. Sometimes, whenever I slept, I woke up after thirty minutes due to my mother's cry. Things were getting tougher for us. Eatable items we had in the house store were almost finished. In fact, my mum had to risk her life going outside to get some salt, despite the constant shelling by the invading force. I waited for her to arrive for about thirty minutes, but there wasn't any sign that she was coming. When I waited for one hour and didn't see her, I opened the gate in my mind to drag in horrendous imaginations for myself. I pondered if she hadn't been killed by an invading soldier or a wandering bullet. Perhaps she had stepped her legs into one of the mines dropped on the road. after a series of horrendous thoughts. Tears kicked off its job. As I cried, I opened the door and went to the gate to see if my mum was coming back. If I hadn't seen her coming, I would have trekked back inside. Before she left, she had warned me not to come outside and that I should always stay in bed, but I had to flaunt her order. I was inside, wiping away my tears with a dried cloth, when I heard the gate opening up. I stopped crying and went out of the bedroom and went to the passage to know if it was my mum. Behold, it was my mum. I smiled, and then I cleaned up my tears and went back to bed. The thoughts that ran through my mind disappeared immediately. I became joyful at last. Then I heard the door screeching and making a noise that irritated me. I knew my mum was back. I rolled myself onto the bed happily. "Brinny," my mum called me.

I turned my head in her direction and stared at her face and her hands.

"Mum, why do you take that long time before coming back?" I asked curiously.

She smiled and then spoke out: "Almost all the shops are closed, and the ones that are open said that salt was out of stock, and so I kept on going in search of it."

"Why did you not come back immediately after trying two shops, mum?" I said, "Why were you risking your life?"

"Is that your wish? Do you mean I should die?" my mum answered in a harsh tone, squinting her eyes to suggest that she was provoked by my statement. "

Mum I am not wishing any bad incident to happen to you. We have to be security-conscious with our lives. And that's why you told me to lie on the bed. I wasn't wishing you bad, and neither are you wishing me bad."

"Okay, don't you know that I was going to get the ingredient for the food you will eat?" She spoke out in a harsh tone.

"Mum, I'm sorry." I apologised, "but I almost cried my eyes out after waiting for you for an hour."

"Oh Mila, sorry. I had to look everywhere to see if I could find it," she spoke out, now in a calmer tone.

"Did you later buy it?" I inquired. "I didn't because all the open shops said they didn't have it."

"No problem, mum. The food will be sweeter without salt." I said, sitting down uprightly.

I asked my mum about the encirclement of the invading soldiers and what their plan was. My mum smiled but never spoke a word. She told me to follow her to the kitchen so she could prepare breakfast. I agreed to her solicitation. We could still hear the gunshot and the sound of artillery going on. I had somehow accustomed myself to the sound of the artillery and the flying of missiles above our house. My mum told me to tune in to the radio. So she could hear what was going on the battleground. I went out of the kitchen and went to the bedroom, where my phone was. I punched the radio app screen. Nothing echoed from a channel despite plugging in an earpiece. I tuned to another channel, and still I noticed the same thing. I continued switching to a new channel in case a radio station might work out, but there wasn't. I got frustrated. I minimised the radio app and then turned on my data connection. After turning on the internet, I clicked on the Google app. Despite the bundles of data, I had, I typed in about our country's news on the keyboard and nothing came up. After several failed attempts to gain access to the situation on the ground via the internet. I switched back to the radio app, surprisingly, the channel I had previously put in that didn't work out was somehow working. I heard a voice emanating out of the phone's speaker, though the voice was blurry, but after several turns. I observed that it was a bit clearer when my phone was upside down. I moved patiently and steadily to the kitchen to avoid losing the channel.

When I got to the kitchen, the voice emanating from the speaker of my phone became clearer and sharper. I sat on the kitchen stool in the centre of the room and turned up the speaker volume so that the blender's noise didn't drown out the voice. The voice from the radio channel took on the sound of a male as it spoke out. I heard that there was a serious explosion happening in the capital city. People were dying in a bad war with a mean government that told its army to attack innocent people. Other countries gave us weapons and money. Other nations that had never backed the war's provocation began imposing penalties and taking significant assets from Russian nationals. I was happy and sad at the same time when I heard it from my phone.

Thirty minutes later, my mum had prepared the food. It was borscht. A popular and well-known food in my country, despite the claims that its origins are foreign. My mum had dished it out on two separate plates and dropped it on a tray. She gave me the tray and signalled for me to take it to the sitting room, which I did while she trailed me at the back.

When we were in the sitting room. She took a spoon and munched it. I stared at her. I didn't feel like eating, but after much nagging, I eventually did.

Boom!! Boom!! Boom!! Suddenly, I fidgeted and woke up from my sleep. My heart went into intense palpitation. I unwrapped my hands from my mum, but her reaction when I did it made me observe that she was awake. The light shimmered into my iris. Which made me close my eyes quickly, and then I opened them gradually, allowing the eyes to get used to the rays emanating from the lightbulb. I hadn't recovered from the shock of the previous explosion when I heard another air missile wail in the air. We closed our ears immediately. My mum closed her eyes with her lips moving. Probably she murmured some prayers.

"What's time?" I asked my mum curiously.

"Time?" she asked with a smirk on her face.

"Yes," I replied.

"What are you doing with time?" she asked, squinting her eyes straight at mine.

"It isn't a crime to ask for it, Mum." I responded

"I don't know; you have a phone, and then you bother me with a nasty question," she sighed in response to my request.

I knew these were the days that could make anyone react in such a nasty way as she did. Jenny's death had somehow changed my mum's mood and speech. Jenny's mother was a close friend and best friend of my mother. It got to the point where my mum had to refer to Jenny's mum as a younger sister. So, the death of Jenny had made my mum's spirit low and frustrated. Because of that, she never answered questions. If she answered at all, she talked in a harsh and annoying way to lay out the grief in her mind.

These weren't my mum's characteristics. I knew it. She shouted and I wanted to comfort her, but I was afraid she might hit me.

I didn't respond as I rolled to the left side of the bed, where I kept my phone at the edge of the bed, and took it out. I turned on the screen. It was a quarter past three. I was very shocked. A lot of thought went on in my head: why do they find pleasure afflicting the sleep of beautiful civilians? Why are they brutal to this extent? Why is it that they don't sleep?

I noticed that all my thoughts were in the form of rhetorical questions. And the more I entertained more questions, the heavier my headache.

I felt a vibration in my right palm. I stared at it, and I was surprised to know that I haven't dropped my phone. I quickly turned on my phone by pressing the on button on the right side, and what I saw was a message. The first four letters were all in capital letters. The sender was my dad's immediate elder sister. All of a sudden, I noticed I couldn't control the curiosity sprouting up within me. I had to unlock my phone and punched on the message app.

"Hello, Brianna Konovalov. Your brother's cousin, Oley, was enlisted in the army, and a uniform and gun were given to him. At first, I was scared because he was afraid of guns, but I felt happy when he said he'd fight for our country's freedom, even to our neighbors. On the day he left the house, he kissed us on our cheeks and called everyone to the sitting room to say his final speech. As I am writing these. I am imagining the wistful smile and tears he had when he spoke to us in the sitting room. I nearly cried when he left in a military van with his beloved box collection he always took to the university.

I cried throughout the night because my husband couldn't sleep as he kept on consoling me. He didn't know my cry was to forget him because I was afraid I might never see my only son again. At the deepest hour of the night, I sneaked out of the bedroom and gave him a call. Surprisingly, he picked up the phone and began speaking before I could. I noticed his voice was in a grumpy tone, which I attributed to sleep, but my assumption was wrong. He told me he wasn't himself there, and he had been crying since the time he entered that van. When I asked for his reasons, he said his tears were for me and the injured soldier he saw in the training camp. He told me some of the soldiers who rushed in had their legs amputated due to either a missile or a bullet hitting them there.

I can't tell you what he said because it might hurt you. Our conversation ended with him wanting to revenge and kill many enemy soldiers on the battlefield for his colleague's injuries.

WAS HIS MISSION ACCOMPLISHED? The answer was a blatant NO.

I'm sorry, but you need to be brave because you're a soldier and part of a group that never gives up defending our country. And for you to be able to do this enormous task, you must be brave.

I am happy that Oley had the desire, passion, and courage to do that, but he never carried it out.

Oley's meat has been discovered, and I can still recognise his bloody face and his hairy legs. A missile struck the place where he was, and he has gone to eternity.

May Oley's soul rest in peace.

My husband is still crying, and I am smiling at him. I think he will know the reason why I cried the day Oley left.

I know you love Oley, and vice versa. He told me to tell you all the details about him when he had gone to the camp. That I did justice to.

Greet mum for me and have a blissful day."

I threw my phone away. Tears began pouring out like a rushing tap. This was the last thing I wanted to hear or read. Oley was always my favourite cousin. For him, dying was the last thing that could make me commit suicide. If I could see a knife beside me, I would have pierced it through my stomach. I felt like dying. This was a war that I had imagined when reading the war novels, I had.

So it was real. War is real. It is neither fiction nor a story. So, people really have a brutal mind to kill their fellow humans. God, why did you create me to come to a brutal place like this? This is really unbearable. I want to die now.

"GOD!!!! I WANT TO DIE," I screamed out, unknowingly.

"What is it??" I heard someone's voice echoing into my ears.

I turned my head and noticed my mum's presence in the room. I had imagined myself in my personal room before screaming. Just to realise that I was wrong.