The calico gave birth on a Sunday, just after noon, choosing for her maternity ward a cabinet on the second floor of the big house, underneath the window at the end of the hall. Nicholas, a British medic who’d taken it upon himself to monitor the progress of the calico’s swelling belly, had prepared the spot for her with a clean towel.
Of the two dozen cats who frequented the Road to Relief compound in Sloviansk, the calico had been among the more aloof, Nicholas said. But that afternoon, she clung to us like a shadow, nuzzling at our calves, speaking her distress in urgent trills. Because she would not let us walk away without chasing, Nicholas and I sat on the floor beside the cabinet, watched as she contorted her knobby spine into her new den, and waited.
It had been eight days since Emma and Tonko were killed. The Road to Relief house was much as I remembered from the summer, cluttered with animals and paperwork and people, although fewer now than before. After the incident — the word does not feel big enough to contain the truth of it, that two of our friends are gone — most of the volunteers were sent away; only a core organizing group, mostly young, remained. They still cooked together, still slept in bunks wedged in the house’s seven bedrooms, still jostled for shower time in the mornings. But something had changed.
“What does the house feel like?” one friend texted me, then another.
Empty, I said. It felt empty. It felt cavernously empty without her, without Emma. The absence of her was almost palpable, I thought. Before, even when she’d been gone, off to some meeting or another, you could still feel her personality through the house, the way her fire animated everything that happened. Now, it was as if all of that had been sucked out, leaving only a quiet, a greyness, a vacuum that could not be filled, even by all our pleasant conversations around the kitchen table or the fire.
In the cabinet, the calico began her labour, purring furiously to comfort herself as her flanks rippled and squeezed. One of the female Ukrainian translators and I winced in sororal sympathy. Out the window, the thunder of distant artillery boomed — just the training ground, I realized, judging from the location and frequency — but the calico paid it no heed, focused on the journey of life playing out in her body. At any rate, like the rest of us around Sloviansk, she was accustomed to such thunder.
The first kitten was born just a few minutes later, wriggling as it landed on the towel. It looked like its mother, mottled with patches of colour. The calico stared at this tiny doppelgänger for a second, then began to move through the steps of a dance encoded in her genes. She licked the translucent cowl from its head. She gnawed the cord that bound them until it snapped, then chewed at the crimson placenta that had followed the kitten into the world. Eventually, she swallowed it whole. Nothing wasted.
Four more kittens followed, each bearing a different one of the mother’s three colours. There is an orange-and-white-tabby. A black-and-white tabby, who will soon prove to be the strongest and most assertive. A pure white kitten was next, followed by the last, who was clad all over in charcoal black. Their limbs swim against their mother’s belly as they begin their search for a nipple. Their tails make trembling apostrophes as they take their first sips of life.
I held each new kitten in a gloved hand. The calico didn’t seem to mind. Though she’d only known me for two days, she’d already determined that I was safe, that I would not hurt her babies. When I lifted them, they squealed in a protest which continued until I set them back, gently, in the warmth of her fur.
“Good job, mama,” I told her, then left the family to its rest.
On the way down the hall, I passed Emma’s room and, gripped by an impulse I can’t explain, opened the door and walked in. I stood at the foot of her bed, a pair of slim mattresses set on wooden palettes. The blankets were partly folded back, strewn the way she left them when she got out of bed that morning, and never came back.
An accidental museum. I never thought about how it must always be like this. There must always be something that still bears the work of a hand that will never come to touch it again. Or else, if not always, then at least for much longer than we think.
— — —
One of the most harrowing scenes in 20 Days in Mariupol, a new documentary from the last team of journalists who remained last year in the besieged city, is one of the quietest. It takes place in the emergency hospital where, amidst torrents of death as Russians choke off the city, a new life is about to enter the world.
In the scene, doctors and nurses gather around a pregnant woman, lying on a gurney. Her foot had been wounded by shelling, and the medics were worried about her baby. When they first pull it from her body, it is silent. For taut seconds, they rub it all over, urging it to breathe, to live, to speak a wordless cry of life. By this point, the doctors, as now the film’s viewers, have already seen children die. So we feel, as we watch, the tormented desperation with which they will this newborn to survive.
Suddenly, the baby begins to cry, and the doctors’ relief flows from the screen. A nurse wraps it in a blood-spattered blanket — even early in the siege, the hospital is running low on supplies — and cuddles it to her chest, cooing at it with maternal delight. She barely flinches when the blast of a mortar shell exploding nearby cracks through the room; she just ducks around a corner and holds the baby closer.
In a documentary full of visceral scenes, this one lingered in my memory the longest. The surreality of its juxtapositions struck a chord that could not be unheard: joy and fear, life and death, violence and a boundless, integral kindness.
We saw the film on a Tuesday night at the Zhovten cinema in Kyiv’s riverbank Podil neighbourhood. It’s a historic theatre, built in 1930 and named, as many such Soviet theatres were, for the October Revolution. It was destroyed in the Second World War, then rebuilt, then badly damaged in a 2014 fire and rebuilt again, after fans rallied to save it. Today, it shows mostly vintage and arthouse flicks in several cozy theatres of only a few dozen seats; our showing of 20 Days in Mariupol was sold out.
It is a remarkable documentary. One of the the things that most struck me about the film, was the sense of claustrophobia that closed in, which told a story of its own. It’s 20 days not so much in Mariupol, the whole wounded city, but in just one tiny part of the city, mostly centred on the hospital. In other words, it’s immediately apparent by what is shown and not shown just how dangerous the city became, and how quickly; you can tell how limited the crew’s movements became, within days.
And so, as the documentary plunges forward through scene after scene of terror and death, violence and confusion, you find yourself keenly aware that if this is what the Associated Press journalists captured in the small part of Mariupol they were able to access — and for the 20 days they had access, before they were forced to flee — then the nightmares that were never captured on film, and never told, must be beyond all ability to imagine. As I watched, I felt a cold grip of anger seizing my throat.
So did everyone else. When the lights came on in the Zhovten theatre, nobody moved, and nobody spoke. We sat in a heavy silence until, one by one, people rose and strode to the door, saying little, faces contorted in a pensive rictus of grief.
On the way out, I turned to my companion.
“Well, fuck,” I said.
The September night was crisp and forgiving. The park outside the cinema glittered with reflected urban light. It was a quiet night in Podil, with university students now back in school, and outside the patio bars nearby a few patrons sipped the last dregs of their pints, before preparing to wander home before curfew. We had no sirens that night, or the next morning.
And though the anger I’d felt throughout the documentary walked with me, I also felt, in that moment, deeply grateful to have watched it first in the capital of Ukraine, with Ukrainians. In the desperate days of February and March 2022 when the film’s footage was taken, that future was not guaranteed. Two tickets to the Zhovten that night cost 260 hryvnia, or about $9.45 CAD; but its real cost had already been paid by oceans of blood, courage, and grief.
If the documentary ever has a showing in your city, or if it streams online, watch it. What happened in Mariupol has already faded from headlines, but the whole world really needs to see.
— — —
The calico is a good mother. Not all of the cats who birthed kittens at the house were. Nature is not so much cruel as it is indifferent to the challenges of the flesh; there was the black cat whose litter was born too early, too weak, and half of them already dead. She attacked the surviving kittens, then abandoned them. The volunteers tried to save those that remained, but in the end, the entire litter perished.
The calico does not have this problem. Her babies are strong. They wrestle vigorously at her teats, suckling until their bellies are swollen with milk and they drift into sleep. She inspects each kitten as they wriggle around her. She licks at their faces, to slowly work their closed eyes open. She licks under their tails, to stimulate their new bowels to function. If one wriggles too far, she gathers it in her mouth and carries it back to its siblings. Her golden eyes flash open every time an errant one squeaks.
But once in the morning, and then again in the mid-afternoon, she takes a break. She slips out of the cabinet and pads downstairs to the front door, waiting for a human to let her out into the fading green of the autumnal world. She squeezes under the gates of the compound and disappears down the street. The kittens squeal when she leaves, but soon fall asleep in a pile. She’ll be back soon. She’s never gone more than an hour.
I smile to think that this too is universal, that mothers of all species need reprieve.
“You deserve it,” I tell her one morning, on her way out the door. “You need time to yourself to be a cat, not just a milk bar.”
On my last morning at the house, she wedges her paw through a crack in my bedroom door, pushes it open, and makes a beeline to stand on my chest. She nuzzles my hand and then wiggles under the blankets, curling around my feet. I can feel her heart beat against my toes. She naps like this for 20 minutes, safe in our shared private world.
She doesn’t have a name. In my head, I start calling her Emmeline.
A week later, a team from the rescue non-profit UAnimals comes to collect the cats at the compound and take them to Kyiv, where they’ll be fostered and later adopted. The calico and her babies are among them. The rescuer’s name is Petya, and Nicholas gets me her number. I text her to say I’ve bonded with the calico. Maybe I could come visit her, I say, or maybe help find her the right home? Petya is happy to agree.
I’m not allowed to have cats in my apartment, but I’m thinking, okay? I’m thinking.
I thought about making this newsletter about the upcoming Manitoba provincial election. Then, remembering it makes me miserable to write about elections even when I’m actually living in Manitoba, I thought about saving the topic for a short, bonus edition next week. In the end, I decided I simply don’t relish the thought of dedicating more than a few paragraphs to this mess, so here they are.
Perhaps I’m afflicted with recency bias. Yet I cannot remember a provincial election campaign strategy I find as viscerally repulsive as that which Manitoba’s Progressive Conservatives have taken in recent weeks, chiefly the decision to take out front-page Free Press ads and an entire billboard touting the government’s decision not to search the landfill for the bodies of Morgan Harris and Marcedes Myran.
Look, I have zero interest in debating this topic, but in sum: while this is an extremely sensitive issue, I do think there are defensible grounds to decide not to search. But the decision is made in the context of staggering tragedy. Their murders; the time elapsed before those murders were known, complicating a landfill search; the way it ties into a very long history of violence against Indigenous women and girls, and systemic failure to treat their lives with dignity; it’s simply a horrible situation all around.
So in that context, not searching the landfill is not an achievement by the government, nor a virtue. It does not represent “standing firm” for Manitobans, unless one believes that the families and communities of the victims, as well as all their allies in hoping to bring Harris and Myran’s bodies home, are not equally Manitobans. To take out whole ads flaunting the decision as a show of political strength is nakedly divisive, staking a position in which the party pats itself on the back for opposing the grief-stricken cries of murder victims’ families; it’s also, frankly, just ghoulish.
I’m sure the Tories have some kind of internal polling showing most Manitobans are against the search. What I firmly believe is that they misunderstand how most people perceive it. Perhaps there are some amongst their base who will be energized to go to the polls by the idea of sticking it to grieving Indigenous communities; but even most people who agree with the decision not to search will, I think, be disgusted. After all, it takes only an ounce of human decency to see just how very sad this is, with no good result. One ought not be proud of a decision that effectively guarantees the bodies of two murdered Indigenous women will forever remain in the dump; if you think that’s the one that has to be made, fine, but bragging about it is repulsive.
In the last week, I’ve spoken to quite a few longtime Tories who expressed unbridled disgust at the turn their party has taken with this line of messaging, among others. If Heather Stefanson and her crew fall on Tuesday, they’ll deserve it. And they’ll have no-one to blame but themselves.
The end of another summer that both was and wasn’t. Kramatorsk is beautiful. Its many parks are perfect: the bushes, the flowerbeds, all carefully manicured. Yet the parks are empty. Most of the people have left. The bright Ferris wheel stands behind locked gates, a ghost of days when families came here and thronged it with children. Scattered now across Ukraine and Europe, or points further West. I hope they will be able to come home soon, and put the small delights of life once again into motion.
Thank you so much for coming with me on this journey. If you feel inclined to support the newsletter, you can toss whatever you want in my tip jar, either by e-transfer (in Canada) to doubleemmartin@gmail.com or via PayPal. Or, you can sign on as a free or paid subscriber.