The Withdrawal
Pervomaisk, Ukrainian SSR - February 1989
With my own hands, I disarmed my homeland.
I am an officer of the Rocket Forces, a battery commander. I waited two and a half years for the betrayal to arrive as one blow, one day that decided everything. Then I understood: it looks like work. You show up to it in the morning. You go home from it in the evening. And so on - until there's nothing left to dismantle but yourself.
But that comes later. Back then, in February of '89, I was just a thirty-year-old kid who believed the worst was behind him.
I walked home. That winter the bus came when it felt like it, not when you needed it. Twenty minutes straight through the square, where every other streetlamp was lit and the snow creaked under my boots like someone behind me chewing chalk. The frost wasn't vicious that night - just a reminder: in my toes, under my collar, where it always found its way in no matter how you buttoned up.
I wasn't in a hurry. I liked that walk. Twenty minutes when I owed nothing to anyone - not the service, not home. I was thinking about something stupid. Whether I'd make it to the shop before it closed, I think. I wasn't thinking about Afghanistan at all that evening. I was just walking home through the snow. Thirty years old, with a lightness in my chest.
I heard the door before I saw it. Not the silence you'd expect at that hour - voices. Several at once. Someone laughing. Someone cutting someone else off. I thought we had guests. The frost was still sitting in my chest when suddenly - warmth, noise, the smell of tea. I stood in the doorway a few seconds too long. My eyes adjusting to the light. My ears adjusting to everyone talking at once.
Father sat where he always sat. But not like always. The radio on the windowsill murmured in the announcer's voice - flat, worn, the voice reserved for reading reports. I didn't catch the words right away. I only felt it: everyone in the room leaning slightly toward that sound. "...the last units have crossed the border..." I froze in the doorway. Snow still on my shoulders.
Father wasn’t looking at me. He was looking somewhere past the radio, past the wall - at a place that wasn’t in the room. I knew that look. I’d seen it before, rarely, on the worst evenings. But there was something different in it now. Not just the weight. As if that weight had shifted, just for a second. Father had fought in World War II, as a teenager, in ’43 and ’44. He saw things he never told anyone. Carried it silently, for years - the way you carry a stone in your pocket. Not showing it. But never forgetting it’s there. I don’t know exactly what he heard in the announcer’s words. But I saw something settle in his shoulders. Not collapse. Just stop holding the weight, for one minute.
Ania, my sister, stood in the middle of the room. As if she'd forgotten where she was going. She saw me and turned. There was something in her eyes I hadn't seen in months. Not relief, even. Something running ahead of itself, as if she were already looking where none of us had looked yet. "Andriy, did you hear?" - she grabbed my sleeve. I hadn't even taken my coat off yet. "It's over. All of it. The boys won't..." She laughed, mid-sentence, as if the thought itself was too big for one sentence to hold. "Everything's going to be different now. You'll see."
I didn't argue with her. I wanted to believe it myself - just for one evening. So I did. Easily. Without resistance. The way you believe things at thirty, when nothing has ever really been taken from you.
Father got up. I thought he'd go to the cabinet, like always. But he came back with two glasses, not one - set them both on the table, filled them, and slid one toward me.
He rarely drank with me. More often alone, late, when he thought everyone was asleep. But that night he raised his glass and held it out to me. Waiting. I raised mine to meet it. The clink was quiet. Almost nothing. But I remembered it for the rest of my life - because I wouldn't hear that sound from him again for a very, very long time.
We drank. Ania was laughing about something. The radio kept murmuring - nobody was listening to it anymore. And I stood there in the warm room. The frost still melting off my shoulders. And I thought: maybe she's right. Maybe everything really would be different now.
I didn't know then - none of us at that table knew - that this was only the first crack.
I didn't know that in less than a year I'd feel this same causeless joy, watching ordinary people tear down a wall with their bare hands, in a city I'd never seen, in a country that seemed just as permanent as ours.
I didn't know that in less than three years I'd stand in formation under a flag that didn't exist yet that evening - and feel a pride I wouldn't be able to explain for years to come. We wouldn't wait for the empire that made us to die. We'd go first. And it would collapse behind us, as if we'd taken the last load-bearing wall with us.
Then, with a warm glass in my hand, I only thought one thing: the worst was behind us. I couldn't have known the worst hadn't even started yet. I couldn't have known what I'd really be waiting for was that sound - the light clink of two glasses.
