Photo with a story from Vera Kuryko: It seems that the thing is in the whiteness and painfulness.

I am not even thinking about the color (although white can be so white), but rather whether it is appropriate to go out looking so clean at noon on July 8, when the Russians were about to shell the Okhmatdyt children's hospital and the area near the Lukyanivska metro station in Kyiv. And we're only talking about a few of the thirty-eight missiles that were fired at various Ukrainian cities.

I wonder where this man is going. Only this one, even though there are many of them in the photo. One is talking on the phone, leaning against a metal fence on the curb, another is walking down the sidewalk, comparing himself to a battered Mercedes, and another is standing under a sign on the left, on which I can only make out the word “Euro.” A man in pixelated pants, a soldier, walks down the road littered with debris. A man in a white cap. A man in black glasses. Another leans on a dust-covered car, probably his. All except the last one seem to be indirect witnesses.

I saw the first one, the one who was talking on the phone, later in the center of other photos, deliberately looking for the man in white to ask him all my questions. But my gaze cannot find the man with the cell phone. I am not thinking about anyone else, only about the man in the center, who caught the attention of the photographer, Vyacheslav Ratynsky.

Instead of thinking about what is left out of the frame (a woman crying, two people on the sidewalk, a stern policeman in an orange vest, a friend leading two small children with backpacks out of the house, showing them not to step on the glass — that is, everything that is typical of people who have been hit by rockets), I think about the man they showed me.

Instead of thinking about what happens next, I think about the whiteness. And not just about whether it is appropriate to be so white and clean at noon when rockets have been dropped on you, but also about whether it is appropriate to look and think the way I look and think.

I think about another man fifteen minutes' walk from here, the one who walks through the ruins of a children's hospital ward. He is also in white, but his white is bloody. And it commands respect — like the white of a doctor. There is something forgiving about that white. Doctors know this themselves, which is perhaps why a psychiatrist in occupied Chernihiv went out to Russian soldiers every other day wearing her white coat so that they would let her car through with water, food, and medicine. She hadn't washed her coat for two weeks (she couldn't), so it was more gray than white, but it still looked like a decent doctor's coat, which seemed like it could protect you from a bullet (it couldn't protect you from anything).

I think of angels, of course, because how can anyone be so white in that metallic gray that settles even on sunny streets immediately after shelling?

I think of the man and woman I passed forty minutes after the strike, 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 are white. In the evening, I unconsciously measured the distance from them to the approximate location of the man in white — 850 meters from the metallic gray that does not descend but falls onto the street, collapsing in the wake of a bomb or rocket.

I think about their white, and how they are sitting there, whether the sirens of ambulances and the horns of cars that cannot move in the long, narrow traffic jam are disturbing them, all these people rushing to or from the site of the shelling, and me, staring at them so indecently.

I wonder if they came before or after the strike. I wonder what I was doing at that moment, but there's no need to strain my brain, I know what I was doing — laughing loudly and inappropriately.

I think about two men. About the man in clean white in the photo, and about the man in bloodstained white in Okhmatdyt in other photos. Something so different comes to mind, as if someone were scraping a school blackboard with a long fingernail. Perhaps it's just a guess 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 Viktoria Amelina, wrote in her first and last poems before she was killed by a rocket: “Today it's not you. Hang up.”

Thinking about whiteness, I think about how close the word is to pain, and about how I feel indecent today because nothing indecent happened to me today.

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This material was created with the support of The Fritt Ord Foundation.

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Text by Vira Kuryko

Photo by Vyacheslav Ratynsky