Photo with story by Vira Kuriko: It seems to be about whiteness and painfulness

It's not even about the color (only whether white can be so white), but whether it's decent to walk so clean at noon on July 8, when the Russians had just shelled the Okhmatdyt children's hospital and the area near the Lukyanivska metro station in Kyiv. And we are talking about just a few missiles out of thirty-eight that flew at different Ukrainian cities.

One wonders where the man is coming from and where he is going. Only this one, although there are many in the picture. One is talking on the phone, leaning against a metal fence on the curb, another is walking along the sidewalk, comparing himself to a beaten Mercedes, and to the left, another is standing under a sign that I recognize only as a Euro. A man in pixelated pants walks along the road covered with rubble - a military man. A man in a white cap. A man wearing black glasses. Another leans on a dusty car, probably his. All but the last one seem to be not direct witnesses.

The first one, the one on the phone, I saw him later in the center of other photos, deliberately looking for the man in white to resolve all his questions to him. But my eyes can't seem to catch on to the man with the cell phone. I don't think about anyone else, only about the one almost in the center, who interested the author of the photo, the photographer Viacheslav Ratynskyi.

Instead of thinking about what is left out of the picture (a woman crying, two people on the sidewalk, a policeman in an orange vest, a friend who is taking two kids with backpacks out of the house, showing them not to step on the glass - all the things that are typical of people who have been hit by rockets), I think about the man who was shown to me.

Instead of thinking about what happens next, I think about whiteness. And not only about whether it's decent to be so white and clean at noon when missiles have been dropped on you, but also about whether it's decent to look and think the way I look and think.

He thinks about another man fifteen minutes away, walking through the ruins of the children's hospital ward. He is also wearing white, but his white is bloody. And it commands respect - like the white of a doctor. In such white there is something of a forgiving feeling. Doctors themselves know this, which is probably why a psychiatrist under occupation near Chernihiv went out to Russian soldiers every other day in a white coat to get them to let a car with water, food, and medicine through. She hadn't washed the robe for two weeks (she didn't have how), so it was rather gray, but still a decent white doctor's coat, which seemed to protect her even from a bullet (you can't protect yourself from anything).

One thinks of angels, of course, because how can it be so white in that metallic gray that falls even on sunny streets just after a shelling.

I think about a man and a woman I passed forty minutes after the attack, sitting at a table on the terrace drinking coffee and looking at each other. The tablecloth on the table is white. The woman's shoes with small, wide heels were white. In the evening, I unconsciously measured the distance from them to the conditional place of the man in white-850 meters from the metallic gray that does not descend but falls to the street, but collapses after a bomb or rocket.

I think about their white, and how they feel sitting there, whether the sirens of ambulances, the signals of cars that can't move in the long, tight traffic jam, all these people moving to and from the site of the shelling, and me staring at them so obscenely, make me wonder if they came before the attack or after.

I wonder what I was doing at that moment, but there's no need to strain too much, I know what I was doing - laughing obscenely loudly.I think about two men. About the man in pure white in the picture, and about the man in bloody white in Okhmatdyt in the other pictures. Something so different comes to mind, as if someone is scratching a school blackboard with a long fingernail. Perhaps this is just an assumption that nothing indecent happened to the man in white today, and too much happened to the man in decent white. But there is still tomorrow. And as my friend, the writer Victoria Amelina, wrote in her first and last poems before she was killed by a rocket: “Today is not you. Stand down.”

When I think about whiteness, I think about the closeness of the word to painfulness, and about the fact that it is I who feels indecent today, because nothing indecent has happened to me today.

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Text by Vira Kuriko

Photo by Viacheslav Ratynskyi