Tragedy’s tomb of tears
EARLY ON Thursday evening, I paused in a thicket near this farm village, still trying to wrap my head around the missile strike that shredded Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17 at an altitude of about 10,000 metres, raining broken bodies, crumpled baggage and jagged aircraft debris over kilometres of fields of ripened wheat and sunflowers.
What happened in the air is too horrible to contemplate.
Gone is 10-year-old Miguel Calehr, who seemingly had a premonition of what was in store as he and an older brother packed to go to Bali to visit their grandmother.
As his mother farewelled him at Amsterdam’s Schiphol Airport, Miguel wrapped her in his small arms, asking: ‘‘What’ll happen if the airplane crashes?’’
Gone is the doting and very capable Perth grandfather Nick Norris, who had shepherded his three grandkids – Mo, 12, Evie, 10, and Otis, 8 – to Europe, and through no fault of his own, only a part of the way back. Apparently the 67-year-old had joked about daring to fly Malaysia so soon after the disappearance off the Perth coast of the airline’s MH370 service – with all 239 passenger and crew on board now presumed dead.
Gone is the peripatetic Dutch Aids researcher, 59-year-old Joep Lange. He and his communications director partner, Jacqueline van Tongeren, 64, were travelling to an Aids conference in Melbourne, but the professor was such a frequent traveller that the colleague who received his last text, exclaimed: ‘‘I didn’t even wish him a safe flight.’’
What’s been happening on the ground, here and for kilometres around, moves me part of the way towards comprehension.
Thursday is day seven and I’m in the thicket because this is where a hunk of the Boeing 777’s fuselage crashed to earth, its windows intact and its blue and red Malaysia Airlines livery catching
Killing field: Flowers and mementos left by residents lie on wreckage of the crashed Malaysia Airlines plane strewn over fields in the rebel-held Donetsk region of Ukraine. the evening sun. But it was not discovered till earlier on Thursday, when an investigation team that included the first Australian officials to visit the sprawling crash scene, chanced upon it.
Each piece of wreckage, and its attendant apron of passengers’ personal effects, is wrenching – most of all, the empty seats in which passengers sat and the inflight blankets in which they wrapped themselves.
Not quite 10km away is the cockpit – in which one of the pilots, still in his uniform, was found strapped to his seat.
But accounts by locals, of naked human bodies falling in their field and gardens – and in the case of one woman, through the roof of her home – steer me back to incomprehension.
But all these are bits of a whole that the mind is reluctant to reassemble as the slice of life that was flight MH17.
Children’s stuffed toys and games; the bottles of whisky still in their duty-free sleeves; airport thrillers and sports biographies that were packed to amuse, all say don’t go there.
During a visit to the crash site late on Sunday the wind flapped the blank pages of an exercise book, revealing a cover page on which a young hand’s decorative
First the bodies, later the blame
World, page 14 writing had been washed out by a shower of rain.
It read as ‘‘this book belongs to Marnix’’, but because I’ve never heard the name, I figure that the rain has rendered an original effort to be illegible.
But writing this piece four days later, I pause to do a Google search – and I’m shocked to find that a 12-year-old Marnix was one of a Melbourne migrant family of five who died – his parents, Shaliza Dewa and Hans van den Hende, both 45, a brother Piers, 15, and a sister Margaux, 8.
This tragedy has been an ugly revelation about mankind.
That the bodies of so many people could be left broiling in the sun for no good reason and that none of the power pivots in the world could release them was, well, you choose – despicable, disgusting, depraved et cetera.
It’s not surprising then, that I saw stray dogs running away from, not to the crash site.
And same with the nearby fields that are filled with sunflowers – they’re all facing the other direction, these usually so-happy plants have turned away in disgust.