Seven Lost Stories - A Present Year

By Simone Malacrida

A present year, exemplifying what flows daily in each person's life, becomes the backdrop against which seven characters scattered across a Europe whose identity is vague and abstract, though totally pervasive.
A land steeped in recent doubts and age-old traditions, in rapid innovation and ancient securities, in wills denied and freedoms rediscovered is the canvas for actions, dialogues and thoughts that seem to be lost in the void of contemporaneity.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Simone Malacrida
• Release date: Mar 7, 2024
• ISBN: 9798224501083

Simone Malacrida

Simone Malacrida (1977) Ha lavorato nel settore della ricerca (ottica e nanotecnologie) e, in seguito, in quello industriale-impiantistico, in particolare nel Power, nell'Oil&Gas e nelle infrastrutture. E' interessato a problematiche finanziarie ed energetiche. Ha pubblicato un primo ciclo di 21 libri principali (10 divulgativi e didattici e 11 romanzi) + 91 manuali didattici derivati. Un secondo ciclo, sempre di 21 libri, è in corso di elaborazione e sviluppo.

Book preview

SIMONE MALACRIDA

Seven Lost Stories - A Present Year

Simone Malacrida (1977)

Engineer and writer, has worked on research, finance, energy policy and industrial plants.

ANALYTICAL INDEX

FREEDOM

I

II

III

WILL

IV

V

VI

TRADITION

VII

VIII

IX

INNOVATION

X

XI

XII

SAFETY

XIII

XIV

XV

DOUBT

XVI

XVII

XVIII

EARTH

XIX

XX

XXI

AUTHOR'S NOTE:

In the book there are very specific historical references to facts, events and people. Such events and such characters really happened and existed.

On the other hand, the main protagonists are the result of the author's pure imagination and do not correspond to real individuals, just as their actions did not actually happen. It goes without saying that, for these characters, any reference to people or things is purely coincidental.

A present year, exemplifying what flows daily in each person's life, becomes the backdrop against which seven characters scattered across a Europe whose identity is vague and abstract, though totally pervasive.

A land steeped in recent doubts and age-old traditions, in rapid innovation and ancient securities, in wills denied and freedoms rediscovered is the canvas for actions, dialogues and thoughts that seem to be lost in the void of contemporaneity.

"Long you live and high you fly

But only if you ride the tide

Balanced on the biggest wave

You race towards an early grave"

FREEDOM

"With no lovin' in our souls

And no money in our coats

You can't say we're satisfied"

I

––––––––

Buča, January 2023

––––––––

" The night they drove old Dixie down,

And all the bells were ringin' "

––––––––

In the polar cold that gripped the city of Buča on the first day of the new year, Irina Kovalenko was moving as usual.

Without any difference compared to the previous day and without changing his daily route at all.

It was always a pain to pass through number 144 Jablunska Street.

The invaders had settled there until their retreat.

Invaders, without even an identifier.

The world knew them as Russians, but to Irina that word was now meaningless.

She was born in 1967, when Ukraine and Russia were still part of the Soviet Union.

Growing up under the Brezhnev regime, becoming an adult during Gorbachev's perestroika, Irina and her husband Mikhail Boyko had been part of that youth who had joyfully welcomed the dissolution of the Soviet Empire and the birth of the various independent states, including the 'Ukraine.

His children were born and raised under the yellow-blue flag and it should have been that way forever.

The border wasn't that far away, not even on the Belarusian side and, in that area, everyone had something in common.

The great counteroffensive that had broken the Nazi front had been launched from the Pripyat swamps, eighty years earlier and, during Irina's early youth, the Chernobyl tragedy had affected everyone.

Without exception, Russian, Ukrainian or Belarusian.

In both situations, everyone is on the same side and everyone is united.

So what had happened to arrive at what they had experienced in the last year?

The previous day, Irina had found nothing to celebrate to close a cursed 2022.

He still remembered the events between February and April.

How can we forget all this?

The arrival of Russian tanks and riflemen, assault guards and regiments.

Young boys, commanded by bloodthirsty men and mercenaries.

The 76th Guards Air Assault Division was the most feared, the one that had started the massacre.

Not at the beginning, not in the first weeks, when they thought they would conquer Kiev in a short time.

To take all of Ukraine.

Then came the worst.

When it was now clear that they had remained mired in a house-to-house clash, entangled worse than the phenomenon of rasputiza, the much feared Ukrainian mud of the thaw and autumn, the one that everyone knew well for slipping everywhere and slowing down every step of man and mechanical means.

That black, fertile and soft earth, a blessing for agriculture and crops, became a soggy and sticky dough, an elastic glue that settled on everything that dared to step on it.

It was at that moment that the Russians launched the manhunt.

Five hundred had fallen in Buča, most of them executed.

It had happened to her husband Mikhail, who was taken from the house after a search.

They almost always arrived drunk or eager for revenge.

The smell of vodka was the only thing Irina remembered from that day.

They had stolen a few things, mainly clothes and food, and then destroyed the rest.

Mikhail had been taken to the rear and executed with a shot to the head, after the Russian command learned of the enlistment of his sons, Igor and Vladimir.

The photos in the house left no doubt about their age.

It was clear that they were between twenty-five and thirty years old, exactly the age of those who were fighting almost everywhere.

They wanted to know where they were.

One, Igor, the eldest, certainly in Kiev, for the defense of the city.

The other had been sent further south, to stem the advance towards Kherson.

An invasion that lasted no more than half an hour, but which had completely turned Irina's life upside down.

Was it possible that everything was so fragile?

Was it possible that, in the space of less than two months, entire families had been devastated by the war?

Something that their parents had not experienced, as they were born between the end of the Nazi occupation and the total liberation of Soviet soil.

Someone had been sent to Afghanistan, but not them.

And then it was a distant war, not in the alleys of the cities, which now seemed inviolable.

Igor and Vladimir had grown up with a modern mentality.

Get used to traveling across borders without problems.

To go to Russia, given the short distance, but also to Western Europe.

In Poland and Germany.

In Greece and France.

As much as their economies could, there was hope given by work and improving general conditions.

Young people wanted to have fun, as their peers normally did in Hamburg or Stockholm, Athens or Madrid.

Ten years earlier the European Football Championships had taken place in Ukraine and the continental finals had been hosted in Kiev.

Everything now seemed so clear and obvious.

Nothing that foreshadowed the violent events that would unfold in 2022.

In the tragedy, Irina was luckier.

She managed to bury her husband in the small garden behind the house as soon as the Russians had left and once she called the doctor to confirm his death.

Public funerals could not be held, nor could the body be transported to the cemetery.

At the very least, Mikhail's body would not have been exposed to the elements.

Not like those of many who had accumulated on the sides of the roads.

Shedding tears with every mouthful, the widow had disturbed the soft soil to make a hole.

His children would later find out what had happened that late March morning.

When the Russians would have left and the Ukrainians would have returned, together with the large cloud of international reporters and commentators.

It was a month of interviews and investigations.

The documented massacres.

What purpose would it have served?

Those responsible were gone and would never be caught.

Covered by widespread silence and a dark military hierarchy, at times worse than the Soviet one, a time in which, and Irina remembered it well, the truth had to be kept quiet for the supreme good that is, the victory of real socialism over capitalism.

Crimes committed without logic and without sense.

Socialism had collapsed.

Now Russia had to withdraw.

So why the pain?

He hadn't found an answer.

Neither at the time nor now, with the newfound freedom.

Freedom to move and leave the house.

Freedom not to receive unsolicited visits and have a machine gun pointed at you.

For a year he had had to deal with forgotten problems, such as the lack of food and the difficulty in finding it.

That day he was going, as usual, to collect the ration made available by the international authorities for single people and the elderly.

She didn't feel old, but she was undoubtedly alone.

His sons still at war.

Now communications had been restored and we could talk freely on the telephone, at least with Igor, the major.

His son alternated periods at the front, during which he was not reachable by others in Kiev or in the west.

Having become an expert in anti-aircraft systems, thanks to the training received from the British, he had transposed his skills as a computer programmer for purposes other than those required before 2022.

If previously it was a question of controlling cargo loads arriving and departing from the port of Odessa, through employment in a brokerage company based in Kiev, now all his study had been diverted to the use and operation of that shield which, if effective, would have annihilated the greatest danger after the retreat of the Russian army.

The rain of missiles that fell every night did not leave room for too many thoughts of peace, but if these missiles had been intercepted, they would have caused neither damage nor victims.

A primary task, considered superior to everything else.

Defend your land.

She knew about Igor that, before the invasion, he had a girlfriend, but for almost a year Irina had no longer asked about her.

It was likely that they still lived together or not.

Vladimir, on the other hand, was almost always at the front.

He had no romantic ties and had studied less than his brother.

A laborer for a construction company, his physical size had become essential for the front line.

He could move with a certain ease for several kilometers with military equipment weighing around ten kilograms on him and, therefore, his tasks were part of the front line that was supposed to push the Russians back out of Ukraine.

Little was known about his field operations.

He could have told how the Russian commanders sent their men to die, especially young men and recruits, without any restraint or how they found the villages liberated after the occupation, but he didn't feel like bringing any more negative news to his mother, already tested by Mikhail's death.

The children had accepted their father's passing with opposite feelings.

Igor had come to terms with it and understood how all this was natural in a war, however gruesome and shameful.

Vladimir, on the other hand, had become even more furious and had put more vehemence into the attacks on the front.

If before he fought for a generic sense of patriotism, now he did it mainly to avenge his father.

Irina's gaze lifted towards the town where she had always lived.

Her life and that of her husband had taken place there, with a few exceptions, mainly linked to the capital.

Kiev was Ukraine's main attraction center in terms of business and trade.

Otherwise, they had visited Odessa and Lviv during their honeymoon.

Their economic conditions were not prosperous and did not allow for large movements, unlike what their children had been able to do.

Precisely they, projected to think on an international level, at least continental as far as Europe was concerned, now defended the soil of the homeland, a bit as it would have been done a hundred years earlier, when the fields and the mud had a much more familiar meaning. and daily.

He found that Buča remained similar to the past.

Even though the Russians had devastated it and even though, after the end of the occupation, aid had arrived for reconstruction and refurbishment, the spirit had not changed in such a short time.

Despite the deaths.

Or, perhaps, precisely in honor of the dead.

There was an increasingly entrenched belief that grew over the months.

Stay there.

Being citizens of Buča.

Irina's puff went past the scarf and burst out in a hot cloud of steam.

The air was freezing and the temperature would not rise above freezing even during the day.

Fortunately, the Russian occupation had left in time, long before winter arrived.

Everyone had been able to stock up on supplies during the summer season, thanks above all to aid from Europe and America.

Now that it was the dead of winter, we were trying to survive.

Those who were now fighting or on the front line or under occupation were very different.

How would he have lived that winter not being able to be free and not being able to draw on similar help?

A shiver ran down the woman's back.

Shivers of fear and not of cold.

It was better not to think about it.

Thank you very much.

They were the first words of that day.

Irina always said thanks.

Everyone.

He was grateful for life, despite everything.

Leaving aside the desperation of losing her husband, she knew she had a mission.

Set an example for your children.

Show them what the Ukrainian resistance was all about.

Not weapons, but a proud and determined people who continued to live, despite everything.

A glance met other women and men who had crowded into that place.

The cold and darkness forced everyone to go out only for a few moments, under penalty of almost certain exposure to frostbite.

There were few public transports and even private ones.

Irina owned an old car, but preferred to use it only on very useful occasions.

Petrol had become a scarce and precious commodity and everything should not be thrown away.

The previous year had brought back, in everyone's family economies, the dark times of the last periods of socialism, with goods rationed and unavailable.

Only those who had already experienced something similar and had no pretentions to take everything for granted were able to identify with it.

The others had suffered the situation.

Few words accompanied that small meeting of mature resisters without weapons.

Today I had some milk.

I make bread.

The essential.

Nothing superfluous.

This was followed by some exchanges about where the sons or daughters were and what they were doing.

Many had moved to the West, where Russian missiles would not have reached or where their frequency was certainly lower.

Those who had relatives or friends or ties of any kind had exploited similar connections, especially the younger ones.

Anyone who thought they still had a life ahead of them was gone for now.

Buča remained in their hearts and they would return there once peace was made.

Yes, peace.

A word abused by the powerful, but rarely spoken by the people.

Peace was something taken for granted and indisputable.

Yet, the neighbors themselves, cousins by blood and history, had turned against him.

Few had wondered more about the motivations than the mass media had underlined.

A mixture of desire for domination and omnipotence of oligarchs.

Irina was part of that group of people who, carried away by the spirit of their children, had seen the future in Europe.

Of course she felt she was Ukrainian and Slavic, Orthodox and had similar traditions to the Russians, but that didn't stop her from thinking with her own head.

Since the fall of Soviet centralism, directed from Moscow with statist logic, the world she knew had improved.

Famine only for the first few years, then investments and greater production.

Improvements in life, previously unobtainable goods, job opportunities for young people, including expatriation.

There were many who went to Europe.

Young men and women looking for qualified and well-paid jobs, but also more mature people, especially women who were once nurses or teachers, requested by the West to care for the elderly.

They sent money and goods home.

Food and clothes.

A godsend.

All stopped and put aside after the start of the war.

Since then, the people have been asking for peace.

This obviously meant finding freedom again and this involved the call to arms and resistance.

All logical steps that should have been concluded earlier and without massacres.

Where was Europe if it couldn't stop an aggression of this kind?

Were the weapons of America still needed, of that country for decades considered the enemy and now a lifeline for those who did not want to fall under Putin's yoke?

Irina nodded and started walking home.

The Sun was low, as it usually was in winter.

A yellowish oval-shaped ball that did not heat anything, despite the light.

Better this way than storms.

When the east wind brought tiny icicles that seemed to be sharp glass and which prevented movement outside.

Or when, without wind, the clouds full of humidity dropped a blanket of snow.

It's been a while since he's been down like he used to.

Irina remembered her childhood, in the seventies, with a thick coat even more than a meter high.

Now it was a rarity.

Global warming, that's what everyone, experts and ordinary people, said around the world.

With a confident gait, despite the ice, Irina headed home.

A modest home, but at least privately owned and single.

She had never tolerated living in an apartment and had fled at the first opportunity.

She didn't like the Soviet-style apartment blocks where she grew up.

He preferred the tranquility of a small house, a sort of urban isba, with a piece of land, not much to be honest.

The same piece of land in which she had buried her husband Mikhail, who was dug up a month later and placed in a wooden coffin, buried in the city cemetery.

A fitting way to remember a man who had never hurt anyone and who had done his best all his life.

He didn't deserve an end like this.

When taking the few streets that separated her from home, the woman was always afraid of seeing a Russian appear.

One of those who lurked at crossroads or played shooting games from the windows.

He breathed a sigh of relief when he saw the classic white of his home.

A white that would soon turn gray without someone to refresh the color every three or four years, as Mikhail used to do.

There were two steps that separated the entrance from the garden.

Necessary to prevent mud, water and snow from dirtying the exterior.

A small glass door served as the first obstacle between the inside and the outside.

Once past the barrier, the first warmth could already be felt.

Irina took off her hat and scarf, unbuttoning her coat at the same time.

They were necessary operations in order not to suffer thermal shock.

He placed everything on a hanger and prepared to take off his shoes.

No matter how careful he was not to get dirty, it would have been impossible to keep them clean.

There were warm and comfortable slippers waiting for her.

She put both feet in and took her glasses in her hand, so that once she entered the house they wouldn't fog up and block her vision.

Mechanical gestures, repeated for years and now become habitual, so much so that I didn't even have to detach my mind from the thoughts that were flowing copiously.

The days repeated themselves in a very similar way, with some visits from acquaintances punctuated by the weekly calendar.

Towards evening, he would hear from Igor.

From him he would learn about Vladimir, although news of his younger son was scarce.

A winter spent away from home, in the middle of the trenches or barricaded outside the villages.

Holding the position was a priority in the winter, waiting for a new offensive.

There had been so much enthusiasm during the summer, with the surprise move that had liberated much of the northern and eastern front, leaving only the south as a theater of war.

General enthusiasm dampened by local events.

The loss of someone close and the continuous nuclear threat coming from the Zaporižžja power plant, a colossus compared to the small Chernobyl and, therefore, very dangerous.

The memories of that spring stood out clearly in Irina's mind.

Of delays and errors.

Of the men sent to die and the diseases that had occurred throughout the surrounding area.

For over twenty years, every now and then someone left this world following illnesses contracted by the damned radiation, something that was waning in recent years, but still remained present in the collective memory.

He sat down on his favorite chair, a modest piece of wooden furniture with a finely wickered cushion.

He felt his back benefit from it.

The cell phone screen lit up and the woman could see the time.

It was still early.

Masha would come to her no earlier than forty minutes.

He took the object in his hand and consulted the message that had just been delivered.

It was indeed Masha, his childhood friend.

They had attended the same schooling and were the same age, two elements that had strengthened their bond over the years.

Masha's husband was still alive, but he was not in good shape physically.

He suffered from chronic diabetes, to which high blood pressure had recently been added.

However, worse had happened to Masha.

Her son had died during the recent Russian invasion, hit by a bullet in the face.

Thus the two women found themselves united even in the tragedy and that day they would spend part of the beginning of the new year together, with the same hope.

Seeing your loved ones return home and the end of the war.

The friend informed her of her arrival at the appointed time.

There was time during which Irina could have rested.

He took the book he had started the previous week and opened it where he had left the bookmark.

Of all the possible ways to spend time, only reading interested Irina.

She had never been a good cook nor did she enjoy sewing or embroidery.

He enjoyed, every now and then, finding news on the internet both with his cell phone and with his now obsolete laptop, but for about a year he had limited this habit.

The lack of network and electricity had reduced activities to the essentials.

Thus she found herself almost a prisoner at home, without the possibility of external contact, at least for the months of the Russian occupation.

Mikhail's passion had always been to buy books of all sorts and he had crammed an innumerable quantity of them into every room, creating small closed ravines from the corners in which to stack them.

So Irina had absorbed this interest, little by little, and, since Mikhail's death, she had told herself that she should read whatever came through her door.

She was committed and started systematically.

Especially during the cold season, you had to stay indoors for a long time and so what better way to spend seemingly identical days?

He wasn't in a hurry and wanted to savor every single page.

The book he started was an edition from the early 1980s, later reprinted in Ukrainian after independence.

Brought home from a local market for a few hryvnias, it spoke of a fictionalized story of historical events that occurred between the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century in France, with the backdrop of the Belle Époque and the Dreyfus case.

The characters were clearly characterized and there was no shadow of a doubt which side the obscure and unknown author was on.

In an instant, Irina was transported back more than a century and thousands of kilometers away.

Other environments, other habits, other clothes and other food.

A way to live a second life.

Time took on a new connotation once totally immersed in the writing, as if to dilate and contract without undergoing the normal known physical laws.

At a certain point, and it happened every time Irina picked up a written text, the woman emptied her mind and projected herself elsewhere, flying above the earth and being able to enjoy full freedom.

Freedom understood in a total sense, from the world and the Universe, from God and from men.

Whether this happened after a few lines or after a few pages would have depended solely on the skill of the author and his way of being able to transpose, with words, images, sounds, smells and environments.

In this way, the minutes were lost without any continuity and the woman was surprised to hear the doorbell.

A jolt, every time.

An ancestral fear of still finding the guards of the Russian army at the door.

It was Masha and he confirmed this by seeing the squat shadow of her figure, accentuated by the heavy burden of clothes.

Unlike Irina, her friend had taken on typical Eastern features.

His physique had expanded and he had lost the momentum he once had.

There was little left of that graceful girl with deer ankles.

The facial features had become rounded and denoted the pleasures of cooking, seasoned with massive doses of fat.

Conversely, Irina had retained a certain thinness that had characterized her since she was a child.

Even with the heavy winter clothes, one could glimpse how there was a lean physique supporting the body.

It had never been generously shaped and was much closer to Western aesthetic canons than to what was present in the tradition of the great mother Russia.

Of the Soviet legacy, strongly centralized on what was present in Russian culture, he had absorbed little.

Not even the practice of the samovar had ever entered his home, preferring the infusion of tea as was usual in England.

He let Masha, who had brought her slippers in a plastic bag, into the house, as was normal in those parts.

Come and sit down.

Irina's hospitality had not changed.

Indeed, she liked having people around the house and gave her a sense of fulfillment.

Used to having to share her space with the men in her life, her husband and her children, she had not yet been able to have all the rooms to herself.

The furniture had not changed and still denoted a family legacy and not a single life.

How's Boris?

The first question, of course, was about her husband's condition.

Masha nodded in disconsolate condescension.

As always.

There were no daily news, just a trend to be monitored.

They had an instrument for checking blood pressure, one of those supplied to doctors with the band to be placed on the arm and the pump to be filled by hand.

Twice a day, Boris, with the help of his wife, measured it and recorded the data in a notebook.

Every month, they went to the doctor to show the data and received a summary conclusion from the doctor.

They had become accustomed to a similar process, almost without resistance.

If they had survived the Russian occupation, it would not have been diabetes or blood pressure that took Boris away.

Irina understood and made a gesture of consolation, stretching her hand over her friend's.

She felt the cold still licking Masha's full fingers.

That cold that goes away only after several minutes, overwhelmed by the internal heat.

Fortunately, there were no longer problems with the gas supply, but in any case Irina also had a wood-burning stove and a little spare of it obtained both from the small personal garden and from collecting scattered pieces of various types around.

Have you heard from your children?

Irina hinted that she would call Igor in the evening.

Since the previous day, not much had changed except that the world had celebrated the end of 2022 and the arrival of 2023.

A calendar convention, but a way for everyone to inaugurate a new cycle.

There had been, as always, fireworks and celebrations almost everywhere, even if here in Buča every explosion referred more to the war than to the celebrations.

Futility of the contemporary world, to which Irina and Masha felt they no longer belonged.

I'll make tea soon or would you prefer a herbal tea?

Masha would have accepted anything, as long as it was warm.

I brought you these.

He took a wrapped envelope from his large coat pocket.

Irina unwrapped the package and found her friend's famous biscuits inside.

With ingredients never fully revealed, but always appetizing.

Boris better not eat any...

Masha tried to justify herself.

The landlady got up and took a tray to place them on and then put the water to boil, in the meantime dispensing the classic tea that was drunk in those parts.

As always, their get-togethers ended with reminiscing about times gone by.

When they were young and studying.

Of first loves and their stories.

Where had all those boys or their girlfriends gone.

Some moved to Kiev and some were no longer there.

Some went abroad and some stayed there.

The greatest intrigue concerned those whose traces had been lost.

You could fantasize about them endlessly, thinking of them as happy and still young.

The image of the past shone in contrast to what was in the present.

Wrinkles and years had left indelible marks.

The meeting between the women continued with laughter and mutual sneers.

It was a way to absent oneself from the contingent moment and to bring to the surface emotions that were dormant and buried under the blanket of life.

The first kiss and the first time they made love.

The awkward bodies of men, their lack of knowledge of the female world.

Almost everything does not concern either Mikhail or Boris.

The husbands arrived later, marking the break between youth and the adult world, between the world of possibilities and that of concreteness and reality.

Time flew by lightly,