Frédérick Lavoie - For Want of a Fir Tree - Ukraine Undone

FOR WANT OF A FIR TREE

UKRAINE UNDONE

FOR WANT OF A FIR TREE

UKRAINE UNDONE

by

Frdrick Lavoie

Translated by Donald Winkler

.ll.

For Want of a Fir Tree: Ukraine Undone was originally published in French in 2015 as Ukraine fragmentation , by La Peuplade of Chicoutimi, Qubec.

Copyright 2015, Frdrick Lavoie

Translation 2018, Donald Winkler

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, for any reason or by any means, without permission in writing from the publisher.

Cover image: Chris G. Collison

Cover design: Debbie Geltner

Book design: Tika eBooks

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Lavoie, Frdrick, 1983-

[Ukraine fragmentation. English]

For want of a fir tree : Ukraine undone / Frdrick Lavoie ; translated by Donald Winkler.

Translation of: Ukraine fragmentation.

Issued in print and electronic formats.

ISBN 978-1-988130-93-4 (softcover).--ISBN 978-1-988130-94-1 (HTML).--ISBN 978-1-988130-95-8 (HTML).--ISBN 978-1-988130-96-5 (PDF)

1. Ukraine Conflict, 2014-. 2. Ukraine--History--21st century. I. Winkler, Donald, translator II. Title. III. Title: Ukraine fragmentation. English.

DK508.852.L3813 2018 947.7086 C2018-901280-3 C2018-901281-1

Printed and bound in Canada.

The publisher gratefully acknowledges the support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Council for the Arts, the Canada Book Fund, and Livres Canada Books, and of the Government of Quebec through the Socit de dveloppement des entreprises culturelles (SODEC).

We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the National Translation Program for Book Publishing, an initiative of the Roadmap for Canadas Official Languages 2013-2018: Education, Immigration, Communities , for our translation activities.

.ll.

Linda Leith Publishing

Montreal

www.lindaleith.com

To Artyom
and to all those who did nothing to deserve this

PROLOGUE

ARTYOM

ANDREA:

Unhappy is the land with no heroes.

[]

GALILEO:

No. Unhappy is the land that needs heroes.

Bertolt Brecht

Now I know. When Grad rockets rain down around you, you have a better chance of escaping unharmed if you find yourself in the direct line of a projectiles impact than if youre behind it or off to the side. When it strikes the ground at an oblique angle, the rocket propels its shrapnel at that same angle. Its logical, but Id never thought about it. Id never had to think about it. I found myself pondering the question for the first time when a salvo of Grads split Mariupols sky open one Saturday afternoon at the end of January. I was standing in front of the still fresh ruins of a computer store in the Kyivsky Market. Its owner was assessing the damage. On the outer road, the ground was still soaked with the blood of an anonymous shopper, killed in one of the mornings explosions. I quickly ducked into a shop to take shelter. The place was empty, with no furniture or merchandise. As before, the firing was coming most probably from the east. Was it better for me to hug the wall on that side? Or on the contrary, to stay near the door facing west? Undecided, I curled myself into a ball in the middle of the room.

What I also didnt know was that once the attacks noise reached my ears, I was already safe. Grad rockets travel twice as fast as sound. The gunners had already made an adjustment, and had hit their target, a military roadblock four hundred metres to the north, rather than the residential neighbourhood where theyd caused thirty deaths four hours earlier.

Artillery firing is not an exact science. Knowing its laws helps you to grasp the dangers it presents, but not to protect yourself. Id just been lucky.

Unlike you.

***

I captured the absurdity of your funeral in a photograph. There you are, your brow circled by a headband and its prayer, lying in your little blue coffin mounted on two stools. Your plush rabbit is sleeping by your side. Your legs are covered in red carnations. The cemetery is wrapped in fog. The ground is covered in snow. Father Mikhail has just interrupted his funeral oration yet again. This time, its not nearby mortar fire that drowns out his voice. Its the infernal din caused by two trucks armed with multiple Grad rocket launchers, passing by just a metre behind his back. Almost everyone has turned to look at them. Only your grandmother cannot bring herself to take her eyes off you.

It will have hounded you right into your tomb, this vile war, Tyomochka. No, but how ironic. You in your coffin. Your grandmothers tears. The priests oration. And the Grads moving about for no obvious reason within the cemetery. The very weapon to which you owe your death is attending your funeral, uninvited. A funeral that would not have happened if on Sunday morning - while you were having breakfast in the sitting room, waiting for your father to return from his night shift at the foundry - a gunner on the other side of the front line had not pressed a button in hopes of destroying his enemys artillery, the same that was claiming to defend you and that had had the bright idea of positioning itself near your house, from where it fired towards the enemy emplacements, and in so doing struck houses just as innocent as your own.

Youre collateral damage, Artyom. Nothing more, nothing less. No one wanted your death, but you died anyway. You must be asking yourself why. You were just the right age for whys. So Im going to explain it to you. Im going to explain why on January 18, 2015, at 8:10 in the morning, on 5 Ilinskaya Street in Donetsk, your life was cut short after four years, four months, and fourteen days, by an error in the trajectory of a Grad rocket, without it altering in the least the course of the war. But Im warning you right away: none of my explanations will be able to silence the tireless outflow of your whys. Nothing that I recount will carry enough meaning to satisfy your simple childhood logic. There is no because, no historical, political, or military argument, no virtuous feeling of moral superiority on the part of this wars protagonists, the protagonists of any war, that can justify, even in part, the usurpation of your right to life. You were innocent and you remain so. They were all guilty and they still are. All those who have reached the age of reason and who continue despite everything to celebrate death, to promote hate, to promulgate what is false, to load weapons and hope for anything but the unconditional termination of combat.

Its to you, Tyoma, that I want to relate what Ive seen, learned, and felt in Ukraine, parading my naive, childlike whys before the annihilation of man by man. You wont understand everything, of course. The absurd is a concept that one can only begin to grasp at the age of eight or nine. But at least you wont try to justify the unjustifiable in the name of an ideal or a flag, to view all the complexities as a simple Machiavellian plan on the part of the enemy. You will perhaps understand that a sequence of events can be logical without being planned by anyone in particular; that your country was able to drift from peace into war in the space of a few months through an absurd set of circumstances that on one side and the other, blinded by a thousand and one petty considerations, no one was able to defuse. You will see that war is a trap into which human nature can easily allow itself to fall.

It goes without saying that you didnt deserve to die. You at least deserve to know what led to your death.