Eight Minutes on the Beach

Maria’s City, a city by the sea, Mariupol… A city the whole world is talking about.

Mariupol sits on the Azov coast, and we, locals, never needed to go to Crimea for holidays, since we always had our very own sea. Shallow, salty, grayish-green, and only sometimes transparent — but it was ours. I went to the seaside in summer to eat corn on the cob, pick up jellyfish, and build sandcastles. I went to the seaside in winter, when the sun was setting over the horizon, painting the sky and the frozen surface of the sea into every shade of pink. But I will not go there this summer. And I do not know if I will go there in winter, either.

I have recently learned that my friend’s mother died on that beach. She and her husband were walking along the coast, exhausted, when she suddenly stepped on a landmine. Her legs were blown off in the blast, and her husband was thrown by the blast wind. For eight minutes, she was dying in his hands, begging him for water. She managed to take only one sip. He was kissing her face until the end. For eight minutes…

What do you feel in those eight minutes when you are lying on the beach, the blood running out of your body, mixing with the seawater? Anger? Shock? Hatred? Fear? I do not know because she is no longer here to answer that.

And what do you feel in those eight minutes when you watch a person you love take her last breath right before your eyes? Pain? Helplessness? Rage? Confusion?

He carried his wife all the way back home, having no idea what he should do, as the shelling wouldn’t stop. Rockets, bombs, bullets… A scorching hell! Fearing for their lives, his neighbors hunkered down in the bomb shelter and refused to help him bury her. But he did not want to bury his wife in his yard, so he walked away. He headed to the cemetery.