How the cross can bring comfort at a time of great, heartbreaking sacrifice
IT was as if his hand was glued to the railway carriage window. He could not bear to take it away as it was his last contact with her, with them, and he would have to remove it when the train eventually pulled out of the station, taking with it everything he loved and lived and worked for – his family – to a very uncertain but hopefully safe future and leaving him lost, bereft, facing his own future with fear and foreboding.
On the other side of the window, similarly affixed to the glass was the hand of the princess, chubby little fingers for a three year-old and the most beautiful child he had ever seen.
Her golden hair stretching in ringlets almost to her shoulders, she was smiling and crying at the same time, her face wet with the tears. Beside her in the crowded cabin, her eight year-old brother, Andrij, stoic, resolute.
He was the man of the house now. He had a job to do, to look after them and protect them until… who knew. And behind them, he could just see through the crowd, their mother, periodically turning away from her devoted husband, so he couldn’t see her fear and her tears.
They had been childhood sweethearts and were still in love.
She was the most beautiful woman he had ever seen, and now he had to let her go with them and make the sacrifice and give away all he ever cared about and loved in order to protect them and his country in any way he could.
There was no choice. It was like giving away his whole life and it had to be done. He never dreamt that he would have to make this sort of sacrifice.
The train started to move and he had to release his hand and be content with blowing kisses and a wave, he and the hundreds of other men left on the platform doing exactly the same thing. His wife couldn’t look, his son looked inscrutable, but the princess mouthed repeatedly the words, “I love you, Daddy” and broke his heart. He managed to hold it together as they drifted away from him as he gradually lost sight of them, and waited for the train to finally disappear before turning away and letting his own tears come.
They were all doing it, those hard men of the Ukraine, standing on the platform with him, like a dam inside them finally bursting and spilling out all their sadness, anger and frustration.
How had it ever come to this? They all walked along the platform, almost like walking to the gallows, because they knew that was what most probably lay ahead of them. Would they be shot and lie dying outside a ruined building or vaporised in but a second by one of those truly awful bombs that were being sent over to blast them away and erase any trace of the beautiful country of their birth in the process?
He made his way back to the bunker, not to his home. How could it be his home any more without them and anyway, it might soon be obliterated like so many others had been, with all its memories of love and joy.
He had never felt so alone in his whole life. They gave him a gun and showed him how to use it. The whole thing was tragically absurd. He didn’t want to kill anyone. What was the point of that? He was sure too that many of the so-called enemy didn’t want to kill him either, but they were being forced to act against all their judgements and will on the whim of a deranged man with too much hubris and power and no compassion.
The similarities between him and another deranged man over 80 years ago were alarming, but this time, there were more lethal weapons at his disposal. He had always thought that nothing like that would ever happen again, but the spectre of evil had returned in the most dramatic and heartless fashion.
He put his hand inside his shirt and fumbled with the figure on the cross he was now wearing around his neck.
It had been on the neck of his mother and had never left her for 65 years, since the day her husband placed it on her at the end of their marriage ceremony. As she said her tearful goodbye to him, she had taken it off and placed it on him, “for protection”, so that wherever he went he would carry with him the love of the woman who had brought him into the world and the love of him whose figure it was and who gave away his life to free the rest of us from greed, ruthless ambition and sin.
It was his one comfort left. This is what “sacrifice” meant, he thought to himself as he walked away, tracing the figure with his fingers; this is what would give him the strength to endure his own, which had begun so tearfully on that platform, and might, even yet, lead to the ultimate.